By Dr. Robert Thorson Through positive feedback, global meltdown is heating up the world. This sounds wrong because, in physics, it takes heat to melt ice. But in geography, a loss of ice helps warms the world because solar radiation is more effectively absorbed by land than reflective ice, and by an enlarged ocean than […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Is UConn football part of UConn? One might wonder, given that the Husky home stadium is more than 20 miles from campus. One might wonder even more now that Husky “home” games will soon be played out of state. Ironically, a recent climate change commitment by university and college presidents might […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Last week I read the poem “Spring” by Gerald Manley Hopkins to a large audience. Midway through it, I quoted: “What is all this juice and all this joy?” This was not a rhetorical question, for the poet’s reply occurs in the next line: “A strain of the Earth’s sweet being […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Our lives, our histories and our prehistories are defined less by the seamless accumulation of everyday events than by jarring dislocations that seem to come out of nowhere. Cataclysms—think 9/11, or Covid-19—rupture time, leaving permanent scars that may be deeply personal or felt across entire communities. A quarter-century ago, the life […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Optimism. Pointless optimism, even on a cold day in January. That’s what we need to whack our psychic ball out of the rough and reach the green of spring. I know it sounds stupid, but one tiny bit of planetary trivia has been making me happier than I should be, given […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Surely, a golfer’s worst nightmare would be to spend eternity in a sand trap. This cruel fate is now being experienced by NASA’s Spirit Rover, which was sent to Mars seven years ago and given up for dead in May. Aside from what might strike you as robotic cruelty, I ask […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson The media attention on Alaska’s governor has been torrential. Not wanting to give her any more attention, I’ll focus on the geography that shaped her character. Frommer’s Travel Guide to Alaska describes Wasilla as “the worst kind of suburban sprawl of highway-fronting shopping malls and gravel lots.” How did this happen? […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Charles Dickens opened his Victorian-era novel “A Tale of Two Cities” with these famous lines: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness . . .” I found Dickens’ contradictions particularly helpful for understanding the […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Sometimes, it’s comforting to know that none of us is really in charge. There but for the grace of the great roulette wheel in the sky go I. I refer to the planetary stray bullets called asteroids, one of which streaked into the Russian atmosphere last week to produce a meteor […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson I wish the editors of a Rhode Island newspaper I recently was reading had learned about olivine before declaring that quartz is the world’s most common mineral. Ouch! Quartz is definitely not the most common mineral. Not for the whole Earth. Not for the Earth’s crust. Not even for the quartz-rich […]