By Dr. Robert Thorson Let’s stop using the word development to describe the building of homes and businesses in woodland areas or on farms. This use of the word gives unfair advantage to those who would further change New England’s lovely rural countryside. Equating development with commercial-residential construction elevates the seventh definition of the word […]
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Out of the Blue- Peruvian Meteorite Shows Larger Forces at Work
By Dr. Robert Thorson Planet Earth just got a blast from the past. Mounting evidence indicates that a bona fide meteoroid created the new crater west of Lake Titicaca in Peru. Most convincing are the seismic shock, the scatter of iron-rich rock fragments and eyewitness reports of a bright fireball accompanied by a thunderous roar. […]
Deadly Lake Defanged
By Dr. Robert Thorson Too much bubbly can be dangerous. So concluded an international team of scientists in explaining what mysteriously killed 1,800 people in 1986 near Lake Nyos in Cameroon, West Africa. Thanks to the work of many investigators with funding from UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), this unusual natural […]
How Warming Really Turns up the Heat
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 […]
Football’s Footprint – Will UConn Offset Carbon From Far-Flung Football Program?
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 […]
The Roots of Spring – A Planetary Collision
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 […]
‘the Book of Unconformities’ Review- Of the Gaps in Deep Time; Life is Filled With Unconformities, Revealing Holes in Time That Are Also Fissures in Feeling, Knowledge and Understanding
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 […]
At Least it Isn’t Raining Stones
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 […]
Sand Trap Ends Mars Rover’s Stellar Round
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 […]
Wasilla – Outpost Built on a Broken Dream
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? […]