EarthDate

Today we make stuff in three ways. Plants and animals make our food, wood and fiber. Oil and gas make plastic, fuels, chemicals and clothing.   And rocks, dug out of a mine, become metal, concrete and stone – which make our buildings and roads, planes, trains and automobiles, energy infrastructure and much more.  By weight and value, our most important mined product is coal – which makes about 1/3...

In another EarthDate, we talk about how mining provides the materials to build the modern world.  But new technology is changing that world. We’re building huge new data centers for AI; batteries to power EVs, and stabilize the power grid; and enormous volumes of solar panels and wind turbines.   All these will require a lot more mining. And all mining impacts the environment.   So engineers are w...

On another episode, we talk about how mines have a large environmental footprint. Think of a giant pit, with huge machines digging out ore.  By contrast, think of your old smart phone. In one ton of discarded phones there’s 80 times more gold than in one ton of ore.   Electronic waste, like phones and computers, contains gold, silver, palladium and rare earth elements.  Old batteries contain lithi...

Our modern supplies of water and energy are miraculous – and tightly interlinked.  Only 3% of Earth’s water is fresh. And 99% of that is frozen in glaciers or stuck underground. That means just 1% of fresh water is on the surface where we can easily access it – for agriculture, mining, industry and our consumption.  To get that water to us requires energy. First it’s pumped, sometimes over long di...

Charles Darwin proposed that life on Earth may have started in bodies of highly alkaline water called soda lakes. New research suggests he may have been right.  You might remember from a prior EarthDate that phosphorus is an essential building block for DNA, RNA, and the energy carrier for cells, ATP. Without phosphorus, there is no life.  Soda lakes are some of the few places on Earth where phosp...

In 1858, Queen Victoria sent a telegraph to U.S. President Buchanan, via the first undersea cable.  The cable worked for just a few weeks, but it launched an international cable network that still dominates global communication.  We think we live in a wireless world. But it’s just the short hop from our phones and wifi to a receiving antenna. Nearly everything after that is transmitted by cable, o...

After the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the Russian government declared a thousand square miles around it an exclusion zone.  The hundred thousand people evacuated could never return to their homes. The wildlife, however, could.  European bison, which had vanished from the area, returned and populations grew. So did native deer.  These large herbivores brought large predators, like lynx, bear and es...

The giant bogong moth has a brain one-tenth the size of a grain of rice. And eyes the diameter of a human hair.   Yet it can navigate by sensing the magnetic field of Earth. Or by gazing at the stars, reading a mental map that it was somehow born with.  Each spring in Australia, they leave the lowlands by the millions, and fly at night over terrain they’ve never seen before, following their intern...

During World War 2, an American pilot flying over the Canadian arctic saw something extraordinary. A midnight blue lake, 2 miles across, shaped in a perfect circle.   The Allies kept it a secret, using the lake as a navigation landmark during the war.   But in 1950, photos hit the media, and the lake became a sensation…because it shouldn’t exist.   There were no rivers leading into it, and none le...

Horses changed human history. But first we had to change horses.   The horse evolved in North America 50 million years ago, and migrated across the Bering land bridge into Eurasia. Then, during the last Ice Age, it went extinct in the Americas.  Around 5,000 years ago, humans began taming horses in the Eurasian Steppe, in what is today Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine.  There, archaeologists have fo...

Famous early scientists, like Leonardo da Vinci, would not have called themselves scientists, or practiced science as we do today.   They were then more commonly called ‘natural philosophers,’ and based their work on observing the natural world, then inferring principles.   Until Sir Isaac Newton, and his colleague Sir Francis Bacon, moved to standardize the scientific method.   They wanted proof;...

Two hundred million years ago, the ginkgo tree evolved to be very stinky, because there was a creature that loved it.  The ginkgo is unlike any other tree; not a conifer, not a flowering deciduous.   When pollen from the male ginkgo fertilizes an ovule of the female, it produces a round yellow fruit full of butyric acid, which smells -- especially when it falls and rots on the ground – like, well,...

The Chernobyl nuclear powerplant, in Ukraine, was designed and operated so badly, it was practically destined for disaster.   First, the Soviet plant design was fatally flawed. It didn’t include a containment vessel, the massive concrete structure that encloses other nuclear reactors. Adding one, of course, would have been very expensive. But, it would have contained the accident.   It occurred wh...

Just eight percent of Earth’s surface is covered in topsoil -- but that grows 95 percent of our crops. And healthy plant growth depends on healthy soil. Which depends on a healthy population of soil life. As noted in an earlier EarthDate, a single handful of healthy soil contains more microbes than the human population of Earth.  And more biodiversity than the entire Amazon. One handful. Along wit...

In 2024, Spanish oceanographers studying the deep seafloor west of the Canary Islands discovered an enormous seamount --  A mile-high, 70-mile long mountain on the bottom of the ocean, formed of three inter-linked ancient volcanoes. At its summit, just 200 feet beneath the water’s surface, they found sand dunes and cliff faces that could only have been formed if it had once been above water. Durin...

There are many kinds of floods. River floods develop slowly, water gradually rising over days, providing ample time to evacuate. Coastal floods come mostly from storm surges, when a hurricane or tsunami makes landfall.  Coastal communities also have evacuation warnings. But when not, these can be catastrophic. Urban flooding happens increasingly as paved areas expand, preventing the land from abso...

Greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere and keep Earth warm. Without them it would be a frozen iceball – as it once was before. There are many greenhouse gases. Water vapor is by far the largest by volume, and does most of the warming. Carbon dioxide is the weakest greenhouse gas in warming potential, but the second most abundant. Carbon is always moving between Earth and sky in what’s called...

Billions of years ago, the globe spun twice as fast as today; a complete rotation took just 6 hours.  Then Earth’s rotation slowed, and that’s why you’re here listening to this episode. Let me explain. The atmosphere of early Earth was made up of methane, CO2 and sulfur gases. But no oxygen. Eventually, as noted on a prior EarthDate, cyanobacteria, blue-green algae, began to produce oxygen through...

Each year, U.S. drivers collide with 1 to 2 million large animals, often killing them and endangering the drivers. Add in smaller creatures, and studies estimate up to 300 million animals die on U.S. roads annually. An astounding number. This is because wildlife must roam, and always has -- to find food and water, breed and raise young, and migrate seasonally. They often follow ecological corridor...

Sand dunes are dynamic, always changing. They occur wherever there’s sand, even thousands of miles from the sea. Even on the shores of freshwater lakes. And the largest freshwater dunes in the world, more than 400 feet high, are in Michigan, on the shores of the Great Lakes. They’re made of sand formed during the last Ice Age.  Continental glaciers ground up rock as they moved, and deposited sand...

Around the world, a small group of secluded libraries contain some of the rarest and most fragile objects on Earth.  They’re staffed by scientists, equipped with redundant power supplies… and kept very, very cold. That’s because the ‘books’ in these libraries are ice cores.  They’re collected in some of Earth’s harshest environments, like Antarctica and Greenland, at great cost, then transported f...

In 1984, an engineer walked into a nuclear power plant under construction and set off radiation alarms.  But there was no nuclear material yet on site. Where was the radiation coming from? Testing revealed the man was carrying it, on his clothes.  Where did he become so contaminated? Turns out, at home. Scientists visited his house and found levels of radon gas 600 times higher than normal – the h...

We often think of rivers as mostly straight or gently bending waterways.  If they are, it’s because we’ve made them that way, guiding them with levees or dredging them for navigation. When viewed from the air, natural rivers, especially across nearly flat landscapes, bend dramatically, sometimes folding back on themselves.  Rivers meander, constantly changing their paths. Rivers have several sourc...

Five centuries ago, the last emperor of the Aztecs drank a full gallon each day of a coveted beverage, rich in vitamins and caffeine.  The Aztec word for it: xocolatl Chocolate. Just like today’s chocolate drinks, his was made from the ground seeds of the cacao fruit.  The Olmecs and Mayans before him domesticated the cacao, an understory tree from Ecuador. There and in Mexico, it thrived – under...

Volcanoes often form where tectonic plates collide or pull apart. But sometimes they’ll form in the middle of plates, due to geologic hotspots. A hotspot is a plume of hot mantle that rises from within Earth, and heats, expands and deforms the crust above it, to create mountains, volcanoes or volcanic islands. The classic example is the chain of Hawaiian Islands, which formed as the Pacific plate...