Earth Science Literacy Labs - Middle - High School

Name Date
Literacy Lab #1 - Supernovas Rate Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
Directions: Take a few minutes to read the article below either online (or on the back of
this page.) Write responses to the statements or questions below. Cut/copy/paste is not
allowed – use your own words and thoughts, based in research if needed.
Read more: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/05/-30-supernovas-per-second-in-

the-observable-universe-creators-of-life-death.html?
utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A
+TheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond+%28The+Daily+Galaxy+--Great+Discoveries
+Channel%3A+Sci%2C+Space%2C+Tech.%29
Fact-finding: List three facts that you learned in this article.
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Vocabulary: List and define three unfamiliar words in the space below.
Implications: What are your feelings about this “discovery”? Express your feelings
(tactfully) about whether this is an advancement of science or a bad idea.
30 Supernovas Per Second in the Observable Universe --Creators of
Life & Death
Supernova 1987A, discovered in 1987, is the closest exploding star to Earth to be detected since
1604 and resides in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy adjacent to our own
Milky Way Galaxy. In addition to ejecting massive amounts of hydrogen, 1987A has spewed
helium, oxygen, nitrogen and rarer heavy elements like sulfur, silicon and iron. Supernovae are
responsible for a large fraction of biologically important elements, including oxygen, carbon and
iron found in plants and animals on Earth today. Since the supernova is roughly 163,000 light-
years away, the explosion occurred in roughly 161,000 B.C. (One light year is about 6 trillion
miles).
While there is, on average, only one supernova per galaxy per century, there is something on the
order of 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe. Taking 10 billion years for the age of
the Universe (it's actually 13.7 billion, but stars didn't form for the first few hundred million), Dr.
Richard Mushotzky of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, derived a figure of 1 billion
supernovae per year, or 30 supernovae per second in the observable Universe.
Many astronomers today believe that one of the most plausible reasons we have yet to detect
intelligent life in the universe is due to the deadly effects of local supernova explosions that wipe
out all life in a given region of a galaxy.
The University of Colorado Cosmic Origins Spectograph team using NASA's newly refurbished
Hubble Space Telescope observed the supernova in optical, ultraviolet and near-infrared light,
charting the interplay between the stellar explosion and the famous "String of Pearls," a glowing
ring 6 trillion miles in diameter encircling the supernova remnant that has been energized by X-
rays. The gas ring likely was shed some 20,000 years before the supernova exploded, and shock
waves rushing out from the remnant have been brightening some 30 to 40 pearl-like "hot spots"
in the ring -- objects that likely will grow and merge together in the coming years to form a
continuous, glowing circle.
"The new observations allow us to accurately measure the velocity and composition of the
ejected 'star guts,' which tell us about the deposition of energy and heavy elements into the host
galaxy," said CU-Boulder Research Associate Kevin France of the Center for Astrophysics and
Space Astronomy and a member of the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph science team since 2007.
"The new observations not only tell us what elements are being recycled into the Large
Magellanic Cloud, but how it changes its environment on human time scales."
Hubble is the only observatory in the world that can observe the brightening of the String of
Pearls in ultraviolet light, said France. Most of the data for the study was gathered by the Space
Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, or STIS, which was installed on Hubble in 1997 and was one
of the workhorse instruments before its power supply failed in 2004. A faulty circuit board on
STIS was replaced by astronauts on the final Hubble repair mission in May 2009.
The team compared STIS observations in January 2010 with Hubble observations made over the
past 15 years on 1987A's evolution. STIS has provided the team with detailed images of the
exploding star, as well as spectrographic data -- essentially wavelengths of light broken down
into colors like a prism that produce unique fingerprints of gaseous matter. The results revealed
temperatures, chemical composition, density and motion of 1987A and its surrounding
environment, said France.
"To see a supernova go off in our backyard and to watch its evolution and interactions with the
environment in human time scales is unprecedented," he said. "The massive stars that produce
explosions like Supernova 1987A are like rock stars -- they live fast, flashy lives and die young."
France said the energy input from supernovae regulates the physical state and the long-term
evolution of galaxies like the Milky Way. Many astronomers believe a supernova explosion near
our forming sun some 4 to 5 billion years ago is responsible for a significant fraction of
radioactive elements in our solar system today, he said.
"In the big picture, we are seeing the effect a supernova can have in the surrounding galaxy,
including how the energy deposited by these stellar explosions changes the dynamics and
chemistry of the environment," said France. "We can use this new data to understand how
supernova processes regulate the evolution of galaxies."
Name Date
Literacy Lab #4 - What”s A Mineral? Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
Read more: http://geology.com/minerals/what-is-a-mineral.shtml
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Secrets About Mining Herkimer Diamond Quartz
Crystals - GEOLOGY.com
Herkimer Diamond Quartz Crystals

"Herkimer Diamonds" is the name given to the doubly terminated quartz crystals found
in Herkimer County, New York and surrounding areas. Examples of these crystals are
shown in the photo at right. Note that these crystals have the typical hexagonal habit of
quartz, however, instead of having a termination on one end they are doubly
terminated. This is a result of the crystals growing with very little or no contact with
their host rock. Such doubly terminated crystals are very rare and this is part of what
makes Herkimer Diamonds so popular with mineral collectors.
The host rock for Herkimer Diamonds is the Cambrian-age, Little Falls Dolostone. The
Little Falls Dolostone was deposited about 500 million years ago and the Herkimer
Diamonds formed in cavities within the dolostone. These cavities are frequently lined
with drusy quartz crystals and often are coated with a tarry hydrocarbon (see image
below).
Although Herkimer County, New York is the location for which these crystals are
named, similar doubly terminated quartz crystals have been found in a few other
locations, including Arizona, Afghanistan, Norway, Ukraine and China. They have the
same appearance but can not rightfully be called "Herkimers".
Who Discovered Herkimer Diamonds?
The Herkimer Diamonds of New York are not a recent discovery. The Mohawk Indians
and early settlers knew about the crystals. They found them in stream sediments and
plowed fields. These people were amazed with the crystals and immediately held them
in high esteem.
Herkimer Diamond Mines
Some of the best places to find Herkimer Diamonds today are located along New York
State Route 28 in Middleville, New York. (When visiting this area it is important to
remember that all land in New York either belongs to the government or is private
property. Collecting minerals from government lands is illegal in New York and
collecting on private property always requires permission in advance.)
There are two commercial mines on New York State Route 28 at Middleville, New York.
These are: Ace of Diamonds Mine and Herkimer Diamond Mine. Both allow collectors
to enter and prospect for a nominal fee. Both locations also rent equipment such as
hammers, wedges and other small tools. They also have small exhibit areas where you
can view and/or purchase specimens.
Mining for Herkimer Diamonds
The key to finding Herkimer Diamonds is a knowledge that they occur in cavities
(vugs) within the Little Falls Dolostone (see photo above). These cavities can be smaller
than a pea or several feet across. At both of the mines listed above the Little Falls
Dolostone is exposed at the surface and a significant amount of broken rock is scattered
across the quarry floor.
"Find and Break" Prospecting
The easy way to prospect is to find pieces of vuggy rock and break them open with a
heavy hammer. If you are lucky the rock will break to reveal one or several Herkimer
Diamonds within a cavity. If your visit to the mine will last just a few hours or even a
single day this is a good way to spend your time.
Dolomite is a very tough rock so expect to work hard. The use of safety glasses is
required and wise collectors wear gloves to protect their hands. We always wear jeans
or heavy long pants and a long sleeve shirt for "find and break" prospecting. Small
pieces of dolomite will sometimes fly when a rock breaks and they can easily cut or
bruise a person wearing short pants. The "find and break" prospecting method
described above is employed by many people who visit these mines and can lead to a
few good finds. The keys to success are selection of good rocks to break and not being
discouraged if you break fifty rocks without finding a crystal. (See image below to know
what "vuggy rock" looks like. Click the image for a closer view.)
Vuggy rock containing a nice Herkimer Diamond. Rock is about six inches across.
"Scavenger" Prospecting
Some visitors to the mines have been successful by simply searching the rock rubble for
exposed crystals or searching the quarry floor for loose crystals. We found several really
nice crystals this way and lots of tiny ones. We have also seen children find many nice
crystals this way.
"Cavity" Prospecting
For finding large quanties of crystals, the most successful mining method is to break
into large cavities in the quarry walls and floors using sledge hammers and wedges
(power equipment is not permitted at the mines listed in this article). This method
requires tools, patience, time and a knowledge of how to break an extremely durable
dolostone.
On a recent visit to the Ace of Diamonds Mine at Middleville, New York we met Bill
McIlquham of Peterborough, Ontario. Bill was mining for Herkimers with his wife
Anne, their friend Laurie Mullett and mascot Duffy the Rockhound. They had located a
large cavity and were carefully opening it. (Photos of their work shown here were
kindly shared with Geology.com by Bill and fellow miners Cheryl Haberman and Alan
Summer.)
The McIlquhams have been mining for Herkimers for about 12 years and have found
many large cavities. A key element in their success is a nice array of hammers, wedges
and pry-bars. Instead of bashing the dolomite repeatedly with a hammer to break it into
tiny pieces, Bill uses a sledge hammer and wedges to very carefully exploit existing
fractures in the rock. He begins by placing one wedge in a fracture and tapping it an
inch or two deep. A second wedge is tapped into the fracture and additional wedges are
used if needed. These wedges exert forces that penetrate into the rock and break large
blocks of dolostone free. Fractures within the large dolostone blocks are then located
and exploited until the large block has been reduced to smaller pieces that can be lifted
from the quarry.
Anne, Bill & Duffy relax after opening a nice cavity.

Photo © Bill McIlquham
If a collector is lucky and determined to prevail over the durable dolostone, the reward
could be breaking into a cavity. These cavities can contain a few to a few thousand nice
Herkimer Diamonds that range in size from a couple of millimeters to over twenty
centimeters in size. Perfect single crystals, doubles and crystal clusters might all be
found in a single cavity.
The cavity shown above was opened by Anne and Bill. It contained over one hundred
quartz crystals in a variety of sizes, ranging from a few millimeters to several
centimeters in length. A very nice prize for a day's work! Two large clusters from the
cavity are shown below
Herkimer Diamond Specimens & Jewelry
Why hunt for Herkimer Diamonds? It's great fun and every time you break open a rock
you will look with anticipation to see if you liberated an unseen quartz crystal. Nice
Herkimer Diamonds are highly prized mineral specimens and are sought by mineral
collectors worldwide. Large numbers of Herkimer crystals are also used in jewelry
because their natural facets are both beautiful and interesting. Some people also seek
Herkimer diamonds because they are thought to have "holistic qualities".
If you like minerals and have an opportinity to visit the Herkimer County area of New
York, consider spending a day looking for Herkimer Diamonds. Be sure to wear clothes
that are suitable for working outdoors. Safety glasses are required and you will be sorry
if you don't wear gloves. If you need a sledge hammer or other tools you can rent them
at the mine for a very small fee. If you want to obtain some nice Herkimer Diamonds
but are unable to visit Herkimer to mine them yourself please visit Bill's site at
HerkimerDiamonds.ca.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #3 - Hurricane Names Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
Read more: http://geology.com/hurricanes/hurricane-names.shtml
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Hurricane Names - How Are Hurricanes Named?
Recent and Future Hurricane Names:
In the Atlantic Ocean, tropical storms that reach a sustained wind speed of 39 miles per hour are
given a name, such as "Tropical Storm Fran". If the storm reaches a sustained wind speed of 74
miles per hour it is called a hurricane - such as "Hurricane Fran". So, hurricanes are not given
names, tropical storms are given names, and they retain their name if they develop into a
hurricane. The names that will be used for recent and future Atlantic storms are listed in the table
below.
History of Atlantic Hurricane Names
Names have been given to Atlantic hurricanes for a few hundred years. People living in the
Caribbean Islands named storms after the saint of the day from the Roman Catholic liturgical
calendar for the day on which the hurricane occurred such as "Hurricane San Felipe". When two
hurricanes struck on the same date in different years the hurricanes would be referred to by
names such as "Hurricane San Felipe the first" and "Hurricane San Felipe the second".
In the early days of meteorology in the United States storms were named with a latitude /
longitude designation representing the location where the storm originated. These names were
difficult to remember, difficult to communicate and subject to errors. During the Second World
War military meteorologists working in the Pacific began to use women's names for storms. That
naming method made communication so easy that in 1953 it was adopted by the National
Hurricane Center for use on storms originating in the Atlantic Ocean. Once this practice started,
hurricane names quickly became part of common language and public awareness of hurricanes
increased dramatically.
In 1978, meteorologists watching storms in the Eastern North Pacific began using men's names
for half of the storms. Meteorologists for the Atlantic ocean began using men's names in 1979.
For each year, a list of 21 names, each starting with a different letter of the alphabet was
developed and arranged in alphabetical order (names beginning with the letters Q, U, X, Y and Z
were not used). The first tropical storm of the year was given the name beginning with the letter
"A", the second with the letter "B" and so on through the alphabet. During even-numbered years,
men's names were given to the odd-numbered storms and during odd-numbered years, women's
names were given to odd-numbered storms (see the table above for recent name lists).
Today, the World Meteorological Organization maintains the lists of Atlantic hurricane names.
They have six lists which are reused every six years.
Retired Hurricane Names
The only change that is made to the list of Atlantic hurricane names is the occasional retirement
of a name. This is done when a hurricane cause so much death and destruction that reuse of the
same name would be insensitive to the people who suffered losses. When that happens the World
Meteorological Organization replaces the name. For example: " Katrina" has been retired from
the name list and will not be used again.
A list of hurricane names that have been retired since the current name list system was
established in 1979 is in the right column of this webpage. In addition to retirements there are a
few names that were simply changed. On the 2007 list the names Dean, Felix and Noel will be
replaced with Dorian, Femand and Nestor on the 2013 list.
When There Are More Than 21 Named Storms
There are normally less than 21 named tropical storms in any calendar year. In the rare years
when more than 21 storms are named the additional storms are given names from the Greek
alphabet: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta are used for their names.
Naming Tropical Storms Outside of the Atlantic
Tropical storms occur in the Pacific Ocean and meteorologists working there have developed
naming systems for them. Separate naming systems are maintained for Eastern North Pacific
storms, Central North Pacific Storms, Western North Pacific Storms, the Australian Region, Fiji
Region, Papua New Guinea Region, Philippine Region, Northern Indian Ocean, and Southwest
Indian Ocean. The National Hurricane Center maintains lists of the names used in these areas
Name Date
Literacy Lab #4 - What”s A Mineral? Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
Read more: http://geology.com/minerals/what-is-a-mineral.shtml
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What are Minerals?
by Hobart King
We Use Minerals Many Times Every Day!
Every person uses products made from minerals every day. The salt that we add to our food is the
mineral halite. Antacid tablets are made from the mineral calcite.
It takes many minerals to make something as simple as a wooden pencil. The "lead" is made
from graphite and clay minerals; the brass band is made of copper and zinc, and the paint that
colors it contains pigments and fillers made from a variety of minerals. A cell phone is made
using dozens of different minerals that are sourced from mines throughout the world.
The cars that we drive, the roads that we travel, the buildings that we live in, and the fertilizers
used to produce our food are all made using minerals. In the United States, about three trillion
tons of mineral commodities are consumed each year to support the standard of living of 300
million citizens. That is about ten tons of mineral materials consumed for every person, every
year.
To meet the definition of "mineral" used by most geologists a substance must meet five
requirements:
• naturally occurring
• inorganic
• solid
• definite chemical composition
• ordered internal structure
"Naturally occurring" means that people did not make it. Steel is not a mineral because it is an
alloy produced by people. "Inorganic" means that the substance is not made by an organism.
Wood and pearls are made by organisms and thus are not minerals. "Solid" means that it is not a
liquid or a gas at standard temperature and pressure.
"Definite chemical composition" means that all occurrences of that mineral have a chemical
composition that varies within a specific limited range. For example: the mineral halite (known
as "rock salt" when it is mined) has a chemical composition of NaCl. It is made up of an equal
number of atoms of sodium and chlorine.
"Ordered internal structure" means that the atoms in a mineral are arranged in a systematic and
repeating pattern. The structure of the mineral halite is shown in the illustration at right. Halite is
composed of an equal ratio of sodium and chlorine atoms arranged in a cubic pattern.
Did You Know? Although liquid water is not a mineral, it is a mineral when it freezes. Ice is a
naturally occurring, inorganic solid with a definite chemical composition and an ordered internal
structure. Learn more.
The Word "Mineral"
The word "mineral" is used in many different ways. The definition given above is a formal
definition preferred by geologists.
The word also has a nutritional meaning. It is used in reference to the many inorganic chemicals
that organisms need to grow, repair tissue, metabolize and carry out other body processes.
Mineral nutrients for the human body include: iron, calcium, copper, sulfur, phosphorus,
magnesium and many others.
An archaic use of the word "mineral" comes from the Linnaean taxonomy in which all things can
be assigned to the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms.
The word "mineral" is also used inconsistently in geology. In mining, anything obtained from the
ground and used by man is considered to be a "mineral commodity" or a "mineral material".
These include: crushed stone, which is a manufactured product made from crushed rocks; lime,
which is a manufactured product made from limestone or marble (both composed of the mineral
calcite; coal which is organic; oil and gas which are organic fluids; rocks such as granite that are
mixtures of minerals; and, rocks such as obsidian which do not have a definite composition and
ordered internal structure.
Mineral Commodities in Industry

The construction industry is the largest consumer of mineral commodities. Crushed stone is used
for foundations, road base, concrete, and drainage. Sand and gravel are used in concrete and
foundations. Clays are used to make cement, bricks and tile. Iron ore is used to make reinforcing
rods, steel beams, nails and wire. Gypsum is used to make drywall. Dimension stone is used for
facing, curbing, flooring, stair treads, and other architectural work. These are just a few of the
many uses for these commodities in construction.
In agriculture, phosphate rock and potash are used to make fertilizer. Lime is used as an acid-
neutralizing soil treatment. Mineral nutrients are added to animal feed.
The chemical industry uses large amounts of salt, lime and soda ash. Large amounts of metals,
clay and mineral fillers/extenders are used in manufacturing.
Physical Properties of Minerals

There are approximately 4000 different minerals and each of those minerals has a unique set of
physical properties. These include: color, streak, hardness, luster, diaphaneity, specific gravity,
cleavage, fracture, magnetism, solubility and many more. These physical properties are useful
for identifying minerals. However, they are much more important in determining the potential
industrial uses of the mineral. Let's consider a few examples.
The mineral talc, when ground into a powder is perfectly suited for use as a foot powder. It is a
soft, slippery powder so it will not cause abrasion. It has the ability to absorb moisture, oils and
odor. It adheres to the skin and produces an astringent effect - yet it washes off easily. No other
mineral has a set of physical properties that are as suitable for this purpose.
The mineral halite, when crushed into small grains is perfectly suited for flavoring food. It has a
salty taste that most people find pleasing. It dissolves quickly and easily, allowing its flavor to
spread through the food. It is soft, so if some does not dissolve it will not damage your teeth. No
other mineral has physical properties that are better suited for this use.
The mineral gold is perfectly suited for use in jewelry. It can be easily shaped into a custom item
of jewelry by a craftsperson. It has a pleasing yellow color that most people enjoy. It has a bright
luster that does not tarnish. Its high specific gravity gives it a nice "heft" that is preferred by most
people over lighter metals. Other metals can be used to make jewelry but these properties make
gold an overwhelming favorite. (Some people might add that gold's rarity and value are two
additional properties that make it desirable for jewelry. However, rarity is not a property and its
value is determined by supply and demand.)
Physical Properties: Determining Factors

The primary characteristics of a mineral that determine its physical properties are its composition
and the strength of the bonds in its ordered internal structure. Here are some examples:
Galena, a lead sulfide, has a much higher specific gravity than bauxite, an aluminum hydroxide.
This difference is because of their composition. Lead is much heavier than aluminum.
Diamond and graphite both consist of pure carbon. Diamond is the hardest natural mineral and
graphite is one of the softest. This difference occurs because of the types of bonds connecting the
carbon atoms in their mineral structures. Each carbon atom in diamond is bonded to four other
carbon atoms with strong covalent bonds. Graphite has a sheet structure in which atoms within
the sheets are bonded to one another with strong covalent bonds but the bonds between the sheets
are weak electrical bonds. When graphite is scratched the weak bonds fail easily, making it a soft
mineral.
The gemstones ruby and sapphire are color variations of the mineral corundum. These color
differences are caused by composition. When corundum contains trace amounts of chromium it
exhibits the red color of a ruby. However, when it contains trace amounts of iron or titanium it
exhibits the blue color of sapphire. If, at the time of crystallization, enough titanium is present to
form tiny crystals of the mineral rutile a star sapphire may form. This occurs when tiny crystals
of rutile align systematically within the crystalline structure of the corundum to give it a silky
luster that might produce a "star" that aligns with the primary crystallographic axis.
Specimen of rhodochrosite from the Sunnyside Mine, San Juan County, Colorado. Rhodochrosite
is a manganese carbonate mineral (MnCO3) that is used as an ore of manganese and is also cut as
a gemstone. USGS image.
Most of the things that we use in our daily life are either made from minerals or produced using
mineral products. Antacid tablets are made from calcite, table salt is crushed halite, several
minerals are used to make a wood pencil and dozens of minerals from many different countries
are used to make a cell phone.
The mineral "halite" has a chemical composition of NaCl. That means it contains equal numbers
of sodium and chloride atoms. In this case they are electrically charged atoms, known as ions.
Those ions are arranged in a cubic pattern that repeats in all directions. The small sodium ions
are positioned between the larger chloride ions.
Most rocks are aggregates of minerals. This rock, a granite pegmatite, is a mixture of mineral
grains. It contains pink orthoclase, milky quartz, black hornblende and black biotite.
Did You Know? The white "m" on a piece of M&M's candy is a titanium oxide pigment, most
likely produce from the mineral rutile.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #5 - Moon Earthquakes Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
Read more: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/on-earthquakes-eruptions-and-the-

moon-eruptions-revisited/utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed
%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29
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On Earthquakes, Eruptions and the Moon
(Eruptions Revisited)
I’ve had a number of questions lately about a couple of events coming up this month
astronomically and how they might effect geologic events – namely earthquakes and volcanoes –
on Earth. I can tell you right now, without much doubt, that the answer, even before I tell you the
question, is very, very little.
Now, the questions: (1) How will the close passage of Comet Elenin!and Earth cause geologic
catastrophes on March 15 and (2) How will the so-called “Supermoon“, a full moon when the
moon is closest to Earth in its orbit, cause geologic catastrophes?
I know there has long been a desire to show about the gravitational resonance of planets/comets/
asteroids/the sun might play a role in Earth’s geologic activity – and with some logic. We see the
interaction of the Earth’s surface with the Moon’s gravity (and to some extent the Sun’s) with the
tides in the oceans. Water has low viscosity so the tidal tugging of the moon as it rotates around
the Earth sloshes the oceans back and forth to create our tides. One could imagine that the
Earth’s crust/mantle/core might feel some of that gravitational interaction as well – and they
do.!John Vidale, a seismologist at the University of Washington, mentions that during full and
new moons – when the moon is oriented between or opposite the Earth and the sun – there is
potentially as much as a 1% increase in earthquake activity worldwide (and a slightly higher
effect on volcanic activity). Let me repeat that: 1%. In any natural, geologic process that is
mostly distributed randomly through time like earthquakes, 1% or there about is well within the
“noise” of processes, so would these alignments produce much of a discernable increase?
Probably not and this is with the two bodies that play the largest role in tidal forcing on Earth.
There are other studies that suggest that this tidal tugging and pulling can cause small shifts in
fault systems like the San Andreas, but one might argue that the moon is, in fact, “passively”
releasing seismic energy on the fault, thus preventing or delaying large earthquakes! Trying to
say that any other astronomical body might, even in some specific alignment, might cause more
than a 1% increase in the chance of activity is remote at best.
Some of the so-called evidence for this moon-earthquake relationship is specious at best. From a
National Geographic article on the “lunar connection” back in 2005: “At least two major quakes
may support [James A.] Berkland’s theory. The December 26, 2004, magnitude 9.1 in Sumatra,
Indonesia, occurred on the day of a full moon. Likewise, the March 27, 1964, magnitude 9.2
earthquake in Alaska occurred on the day of maximum high tide. According to Berkland, such
correlations are more than coincidences. They demonstrate a true connection between the moon
and earthquake activity.” First off, two earthquakes coinciding with full moons is hardly
scientific, statistically-sound evidence. How many “large” earthquakes (and who defines that
anyway?) occur when it isn’t a full moon? And how many full moons have we had when there
wasn’t a “large” earthquake? I’ve said this before, but it is an easy trap – correlation does not
mean causation. Full moons happen 12 (maybe 13) times a year, so if you randomly sprinkle
earthquakes through time, many large ones are bound to coincide with the full moon. USGS
seismologist Dr. John Bellini followed up on Berkland’s theories: “Bellini questioned the
scientific validity of Berkland’s predictions. He said they appear to be “self-selected statistical
analysis of historical seismicity rates and are so vague in time and location that they are certain
to be correct.“
Now, as for the Moon’s relative position to Earth and its effect, the Moon when it is at least
closest is 356,401 km from the Earth’s surface and at its furthest, it is 406,700 km (with an
average distance of 384,401 km. That is a difference of ~50,300 km ~ in other words, when the
Moon is closest to Earth, it is ~12% closer than it is at its furthest. Newtonian physics tells us
that the attraction between the Earth and the Moon is dictated by F = GM1M2/R2, where M1 and
M2 are the masses of the Earth and Moon, G is the gravitational constant and R is the distance
between the two bodies. Even a ~12% change in that value means that the force of gravity, in
Newtons, only changes by ~30% at maximum (and only ~11% difference from average), a
change that happens gradually as the Moon moves around its orbit. We see this fairly small
change with different sized tides, but even those changes are not “disastrous”. When you
consider the energy needed to move tectonic plates (or even the oceans), this change in
gravitational energy from the Earth-Moon system is small. Remember, that the Moon is at its
closest once a month, so just because it happens during a full moon doesn’t mean that the
gravitational pull from the Moon is any stronger than it would be at any other perigee.
Remember, the Moon reaches perigee every month!and you don’t see massive earthquakes and
eruptions every time this happens.
Some planetary bodies do see a profound effect of!tidal forces. The moons of Jupiter
areconstantly being tugged by the high gravity!of Jupiter as the whiz around the gas giant. You
can see that constant, frictional energy being imparted on the rocks of the moons in the relative
geologic activity on the!Galilean satellites!-!closest to Jupiter!lies Io!(at ~420,000 km), the most
volcanically active body in the solar system. It gets tugged by a force 300% more than the Moon
pulls on Earth. Next comes!Europa!(at ~664,000 km), where there are suggestions that liquid or
slushy subsurface water exists due to tidal heating.!Ganymede!and Callisto, even further from
Jupiter, show much fewer signs of liquid water or extensive tidal heating. The gravity of Jupiter
is the direct cause for the geologic activity on these small planetary bodies.
The lava flow from the Kamoamoa Fissure snaking around an old crater on Kilauea, as seen on
March 10, 2011. This eruption did not start during a full/new moon. Image courtesy of HVO/
USGS.
As I mentioned before, this sort of “correlation” of astronomical alignments and geologic

disasters have been predicted before – with results that were coincidental at best. Back in 2006,
there was rampant speculation about how a full moon was going to trigger an eruption of Mayon
in the Philippines … and it didn’t. In a USGS article about volcanoes and the moon, they make
the point that it does appear that activity at some volcanoes, like Kilauea, are effected by lunar
cycles – however, this does not mean that an eruption at any specific volcano worldwide can be
predicted using lunar cycles. There are just too many other variables, so unless the volcano is
already erupting, such as Kilauea!(see above from an eruption that didn’t start on a new/full
moon), don’t expect the Moon to bring volcanoes to life. Even if the volcano is predisposed to be
close to eruption (and even defining that is difficult), there is no data to support this (to borrow a
quote from a paper that Chris Rowan’s uses in a post on the subject): “We found no conclusive
evidence for a general correlation between volcanic activity and lunar tidal phase. This result is
consistent with recent work which indicates that diurnal and fortnightly tidal stresses may be too
short-lived and strain rates too high to effect a significant viscous response in partially molten
regions of the Earth’s subsurface.” (Mason et al., 2004). During this Mayon hype in 2006, Phil
Plait also took on these predictions and points out the biggest flaw with many of these
“correlations”: “It’s small number statistics, like flipping a coin three times and having it come
up heads each time. It’s rare, but it does happen on average one out of every eight times. You
need bigger samples to get good statistics.” Science requires data that can show a valid
correlation, not picking what fits best to your ideas. UPDATE: Phil takes on the “Supermoon” as
well.
If anything, we should be concentrating on terrestrial forcing for “predicting” earthquakes. It

could be that changes in the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field, due to the thickness and
composition of the Earth, but might help find earthquake-prone locations. A study in Science by
Song and Simons from 2003 examined the gravity anomaly (how much the gravitational field
from the Earth varies from the norm) along a subduction and then compared it to a long
historical record of seismicity. It found that “within a given subduction zone, areas with negative
gravity anomalies correlated with increased large earthquake activity. Areas with relatively high
gravity anomalies experienced fewer large earthquakes.” However, how we can use the changes
in gravity anomaly to predict earthquakes is still very unclear.
So, what can we take away from all this?
• The Moon plays a very small role in increasing seismicity and volcanic activity on Earth
– potentially increasing activity ~1% during full/new moons.
• The change in the gravitational pull from the Moon during apogee and perigee is small.
• Beyond this, there is no statistically-sound evidence that geologic disasters can be
predicted based on lunar alignments or distance (or any other astronomical phenomena).
• The keys to understanding how to predict earthquakes or eruptions (if at all possible) lie
within the Earth, not deep in space.
• From Chris Rowan: “The moon does not magically load up plate boundary faults or fill
magma chambers …!The most the moon can do is slightly alter the timing of an
earthquake or eruption that was on the verge of happening anyway.”
Name Date
Literacy Lab #6 - What Is Earth Science? Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
Read more: http://geology.com/articles/what-is-earth-science.shtml
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What Is Earth Science?
Introduction
Earth Science is the study of the Earth and its neighbors in space. It is an exciting science with
many interesting and practical applications. Some Earth scientists use their knowledge of the
Earth to locate and develop energy and mineral resources. Others study the impact of human
activity on Earth's environment and design methods to protect the planet. Some use their
knowledge about Earth processes such as volcanoes, earthquakes and hurricanes to plan
communities that will not expose people to these dangerous events.
The Four Earth Sciences

Many different sciences are used to learn about the earth, however, the four basic areas of Earth
science study are: geology, meteorology, oceanography and astronomy. A brief explanation of
these sciences is provided below.
Geology: Science of the Earth
Geology is the primary Earth science. The word means "study of the Earth". Geology deals with
the composition of Earth materials, Earth structures, and Earth processes. It is also concerned
with the organisms of the planet and how the planet has changed over time. Geologists search for
fuels and minerals, study natural hazards, and work to protect Earth's environment.
Meteorology: Science of the Atmosphere

Meteorology is the study of the atmosphere and how processes in the atmosphere determine
Earth's weather and climate. Meteorology is a very practical science because everyone is
concerned about the weather. How climate changes over time in response to the actions of people
is a topic of urgent worldwide concern. The study of meteorology is of critical concern for
protecting Earth's environment.
Oceanography: Science of the Oceans

Oceanography is the study of Earth's oceans - their composition, movement, organisms and
processes. The oceans cover most of our planet and are important resources for food and other
commodities. They are increasingly being used as an energy source. The oceans also have a
major influence on the weather and changes in the oceans can drive or moderate climate change.
Oceanographers work to develop the ocean as a resource and protect it from human impact. The
goal is to utilize the oceans while minimizing the effects of our actions.
Astronomy: Science of the Universe
Astronomy is the study of the universe. Here are some examples of why studying space beyond
Earth is important: the moon drives the ocean's tidal system, asteroid impacts have repeatedly
devastated Earth's inhabitants and energy from the sun drives our weather and climates. A
knowledge of astronomy is essential to understanding the Earth. Astronomers can also use a
knowledge of Earth materials, processes and history to understand other planets - even those
outside of our own solar system.
The Importance of Earth Science

Today we live in a time when the Earth and its inhabitants face many challenges. Our climate is
changing and that change is being caused by human activity. Earth scientists recognized this
problem and will play a key role in efforts to resolve it. We are also challenged to: develop new
sources of energy that will have minimal impact on climate; locate new sources of metals and
other mineral resources as known sources are depleted; and, determine how Earth's increasing
population can live and avoid serious threats such as volcanic activity, earthquakes, landslides,
floods and more. These are just a few of the problems where solutions depend upon a deep
understanding of Earth science.
Earth Science Careers

If you are a pre-college student you can start preparing for a career in Earth science by enrolling
in the college preparation program and doing well in all of your courses. Science courses are
especially important but math, writing, and other disciplines are also used by Earth scientists
during every working day.
Some universities have Earth Science programs but most offer more specific training in programs
such as geology, meteorology, oceanography or astronomy. In these programs you will be
required to take some challenging courses such as chemistry, physics, biology and math. Earth
science is an integrated science and professionals in that field must solve problems that require a
knowledge of several fields of science.
If you already have a degree in another discipline such as biology, chemistry, geography or
physics, you might be able to go to graduate school and obtain a Master's degree in one of the
Earth sciences. That will most likely require taking some undergraduate courses to meet program
entry requirements. However, if you have a strong interest in Earth science it is probably worth
doing.
At present, job opportunities in many areas of the Earth sciences are better than average - even
with the down economy. Opportunities in geology are especially good.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #23 - Volcanic Plumbing Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
Read more: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120330111023.htm
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Volcanic 'Plumbing Systems' Exposed:
Step Closer to Predicting Large Eruptions
With Study of Mid-Ocean Ridge Magma
Chambers
ScienceDaily (Mar. 30, 2012) — Two new studies into the "plumbing systems" that lie
under volcanoes could bring scientists closer to predicting large eruptions.
International teams of researchers, led by the University of Leeds, studied the location
and behaviour of magma chambers on Earth's mid-ocean ridge system -- a vast chain of
volcanoes along which Earth forms new crust.
They worked in Afar (Ethiopia) and Iceland -- the only places where mid-ocean ridges
appear above sea level. Volcanic ridges (or "spreading centres") occur when tectonic
plates "rift" or pull apart. Magma (hot molten rock) injects itself into weaknesses in the
brittle upper crust, erupting as lava and forming new crust upon cooling.
Magma chambers work like plumbing systems, channelling pressurised magma

through networks of underground "pipes."
The studies, published in Nature Geoscience, reveal new information about where
magma is stored and how it moves through the geological plumbing network. Finding
out where magma chambers lie and how they behave can help identify early warning
signs of impending eruptions.
Scientists used images taken by the European Space Agency satellite Envisat to measure
how the ground moved before, during and after eruptions. Using this data, they built
and tested computer models to find out how rifting occurs.
Data in one study showed magma chambers that fed an eruption in November 2008 in
the Afar rift of Northern Ethiopia were only about 1 km below the ground. The
standard model had predicted a depth of more than 3 km.
It is highly unusual for magma chambers to lie in shallow depths on slow spreading
centres such as the Afar rift, where tectonic plates pull apart at about the same speed as
human fingernails grow.
Dr Carolina Pagli from the University of Leeds' School of Earth and Environment, who
led the study, says: "It was a complete surprise to see that a magma chamber could exist
so close to the Earth's surface in an area where the tectonic plates move apart so slowly.
The results have changed the way we think about volcanoes."
Dr Pagli also noticed that the ground started "uplifting" (elevating) four months before
the eruption, due to new magma increasing pressure in one of the underground
chambers. Understanding these precursory signals is fundamental to predicting
eruptions.
A wider study of eruptions in Afar and Iceland, two vastly different environments,
found remarkable similarities. Many events occurred within a short space of time.
Researchers identified multiple magma chambers positioned horizontally and vertically,
allowing magma to shoot in several directions. Moving magma triggered earthquakes,
and separate magma chambers fed single eruptions.
The 2008 eruption is part of an unusual period of recent volcanic unrest in Ethiopia, and
is enabling scientists to learn more about volcanoes at spreading centres. Most
spreading centres are under 2 km of water at the bottom of the ocean, making detailed
observations extremely challenging. The new knowledge derived from Ethiopian
volcanoes will help scientists understand volcanoes in Iceland, where eruptions can
have a bigger impact on the UK.
Dr Tim Wright from the School of Earth and Environment, who leads the international
Afar Rift Consortium, said: "The dramatic events we have been witnessing in Afar in
the past six years are transforming our understanding of how the crust grows when
tectonic plates pull apart. Our work in one of the hottest place on Earth is having a
direct impact on our understanding of eruptions from the frozen volcanoes of Iceland."
Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:
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Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Leeds.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the
source cited above.
Journal References:
1. Tim J. Wright, Freysteinn Sigmundsson, Carolina Pagli, Manahloh Belachew, Ian

J. Hamling, Bryndís Brandsdóttir, Derek Keir, Rikke Pedersen, Atalay Ayele,
Cindy Ebinger, Páll Einarsson, Elias Lewi, Eric Calais. Geophysical constraints
on the dynamics of spreading centres from rifting episodes on land. Nature
Geoscience, 2012; 5 (4): 242 DOI: 10.1038/NGEO1428
2. Carolina Pagli, Tim J. Wright, Cynthia J. Ebinger, Sang-Ho Yun, Johnson R. Cann,
Talfan Barnie, Atalay Ayele. Shallow axial magma chamber at the slow-
spreading Erta Ale Ridge. Nature Geoscience, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/NGEO1414
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its
staff.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #8 - Sumatra Volcanoes Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
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Sumatra Faces Yet Another Risk: Major
Volcanic Eruptions
ScienceDaily (May 16, 2012) — The early April earthquake of magnitude 8.6 that shook
Sumatra was a grim reminder of the devastating earthquakes and tsunami that killed
tens of thousands of people in 2004 and 2005.
Now a new study, funded by the National Science Foundation, shows that the residents
of that region are at risk from yet another potentially deadly natural phenomenon --
major volcanic eruptions.
Researchers from Oregon State University working with colleagues in Indonesia have
documented six major volcanic eruptions in Sumatra over the past 35,000 years -- most
equaling or surpassing in explosive intensity the eruption of Washington's Mount St.
Helens in 1980.
Results of the research have just been published in the Journal of Volcanology and
Geothermal Research.
"Sumatra has a number of active and potentially explosive volcanoes and many show
evidence of recent activity," said Morgan Salisbury, lead author on the study, who
recently completed his doctoral studies in OSU's College of Earth, Ocean, and
Atmospheric Sciences. "Most of the eruptions are small, so little attention has been paid
to the potential for a catastrophic eruption.
"But our study found some of the first evidence that the region has a much more
explosive history than perhaps has been appreciated," he added.
Until this study, little was known about Sumatra's volcanic history -- in part because
few western scientists have been allowed access to the region. The most visible evidence
of recent volcanic activity among the estimated 33-35 potentially active volcanoes are
their steep-sided cones and lack of vegetation, indicating at least some minor eruptive
processes.
But in 2007, an expedition led by OSU's Chris Goldfinger was permitted into the region
and the Oregon State researchers and their Indonesian colleagues set out to explore the
earthquake history of the region by studying sediment cores from the Indian Ocean.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, it was the first research ship from the
United States allowed into Indonesia/Sumatran waters in nearly 30 years.
While searching the deep-sea sediment cores for "turbidites" -- coarse gravel deposits
that can act as a signature for earthquakes -- they noticed unmistakable evidence of
volcanic ash and began conducting a parallel investigation into the region's volcanic
history.
"The ash was located only in certain cores, so the activity was localized," said Adam
Kent, a professor of geosciences at OSU and an author on the study. "Yet the eruptions
still were capable of spreading the ash for 300 kilometers or more, which gave us an
indication of how powerful the explosive activity might have been."
Salisbury and his colleagues found evidence of six major eruptions and estimated them
to be at least from 3.0 to 5.0 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. Mount St. Helens, by
comparison, was 5.0.
The Indian Ocean region is certainly known to have a violent volcanic history. The 1883
eruption of Krakatoa between Sumatra and Java is perhaps the most violent volcanic
explosion in recorded history, measuring 6.0 on the VEI and generating what many
scientists believe to have been one of the loudest noises ever heard on Earth.
Sumatra's own Toba volcano exploded about 74,000 years ago, generating a major lake
-- not unlike Oregon's own Crater Lake, but much larger. "It looks like a giant doughnut
in the middle of Sumatra," said Jason "Jay" Patton, another OSU doctoral student and
author on the study.
Sumatra's volcanoes occasionally belch some ash and smoke, and provide
comparatively minor eruptions, but residents there may not be fully aware of the
potential catastrophic nature of some of its resident volcanoes, Goldfinger said.
"Prior to 2004, the risk from a major earthquake were not widely appreciated except,
perhaps, in some of the more rural areas," Goldfinger said. "And earthquakes happen
more frequently than major volcanic eruptions. If it hasn't happened in recent
memory…"
Kent said the next step in the research is to work with scientists from the region to
collect ash and volcanic rock from the island's volcanoes, and then match their chemical
signature to the ash they discovered in the sediment cores.
"Each volcano has a subtly different fingerprint," Kent said, "so if we can get the
terrestrial data, we should be able to link the six major eruptions to individual
volcanoes to determine the ones that provide the greatest risk factors."
In addition to the Oregon State University scientists, two Indonesian researchers were
authors on the journal article: Yusuf Djadjadihardja and Udrekh Hanif, of the Agency
for the Assessment and Application of Technology in Jakarta.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Oregon State University.
source cited above.
Journal Reference:
1. Morgan J. Salisbury, Jason R. Patton, Adam J.R. Kent, Chris Goldfinger, Yusuf
Djadjadihardja, Udrekh Hanifa. Deep-sea ash layers reveal evidence for large,
late Pleistocene and Holocene explosive activity from Sumatra, Indonesia.
Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, 2012; 231-232: 61 DOI: 10.1016/
j.jvolgeores.2012.03.007
staff.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #9 - Chocolate & Diamonds Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
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Chocolate and Diamonds: Why Volcanoes
Could Be 'a Girl's Best Friend'
ScienceDaily (May 16, 2012) — Scientists from the University of Southampton have
discovered a previously unrecognised volcanic process, similar to one that is used in
chocolate manufacturing, which gives important new insights into the dynamics of
volcanic eruptions.
The scientists investigated how a process called 'fluidised spray granulation' can occur
during kimberlite eruptions to produce well-rounded particles containing fragments
from Earth's mantle, most notably diamonds. This physical process is similar to the gas
injection and spraying process used to form smooth coatings on confectionary, and
layered and delayed-release coatings in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals and
fertilisers.
Kimberlite volcanoes are the primary source of diamonds on Earth, and are formed by
gas-rich magmas from mantle depths of over 150 km. Kimberlite volcanism involves
high-intensity explosive eruptions, forming diverging pipes or 'diatremes', which can be
several hundred metres wide and several kilometres deep. A conspicuous and
previously mysterious feature of these pipes are 'pelletal lapilli ' -- well-rounded magma
coated fragments of rock consisting of an inner 'seed' particle with a complex rim,
thought to represent quenched magma.
These pelletal lapilli form by spray granulation when kimberlite magma intrudes into
earlier volcaniclastic infill close to the diatreme root zone. Intensive degassing produces
a gas jet in which the seed particles are simultaneously fluidised and coated by a spray
of low-viscosity melt.
In kimberlites, the occurrence of pelletal lapilli is linked to diamond grade (carats per
tonne), size and quality, and therefore has economic as well as academic significance.
Dr Thomas Gernon, Lecturer in Earth Science at the University of Southampton, says:

"The origin of pelletal lapilli is important for understanding how magmatic pyroclasts
are transported to the surface during explosive eruptions, offering fundamental new
insights into eruption dynamics and constraints on vent conditions, notably gas
velocity."
"The ability to tightly constrain gas velocities is significant, as it enables estimation of
the maximum diamond size transported in the flow. Gas fluidisation and magma-
coating processes are also likely to affect the diamond surface properties."
Dr Gernon and colleagues studied two of the world's largest diamond mines in South
Africa and Lesotho. In the Letseng pipe in Lesotho, pelletal lapilli have been found in
association with concentrations of large diamonds (up to 215 carat), which individually
can fetch up to tens of millions of pounds. Knowledge of flow dynamics will inform
models of mineral transport, and ultimately could improve resource assessments.
Dr Gernon, who is based at the National Oceanography Centre at Southampton's

waterfront campus, says: "This multidisciplinary research, incorporating Earth sciences,
chemical and mechanical engineering, provides evidence for fluidised granulation in
natural systems which will be of considerable interest to engineers and chemical,
pharmaceutical and food scientists who use this process routinely. The scale and
complexity of this granulation process is unique, as it has not previously been
recognised in natural systems."
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Southampton,

via AlphaGalileo.
source cited above.
Journal Reference:
1. T.M. Gernon, R.J. Brown, M.A. Tait, T.K. Hincks. The origin of pelletal lapilli in
explosive kimberlite eruptions. Nature Communications, 2012; 3: 832 DOI:
10.1038/ncomms1842

Name Date
Literacy Lab #10 - Gaia Theory Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
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Sulfur Finding May Hold Key to Gaia
Theory of Earth as Living Organism
ScienceDaily (May 15, 2012) — Is Earth really a sort of giant living organism as the Gaia
hypothesis predicts? A new discovery made at the University of Maryland may provide
a key to answering this question. This key of sulfur could allow scientists to unlock
heretofore hidden interactions between ocean organisms, atmosphere, and land --
interactions that might provide evidence supporting this famous theory.
The Gaia hypothesis -- first articulated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the
1970s -- holds that Earth's physical and biological processes are inextricably connected
to form a self-regulating, essentially sentient, system.
One of the early predictions of this hypothesis was that there should be a sulfur
compound made by organisms in the oceans that was stable enough against oxidation
in water to allow its transfer to the air. Either the sulfur compound itself, or its
atmospheric oxidation product, would have to return sulfur from the sea to the land
surfaces. The most likely candidate for this role was deemed to be dimethylsulfide.
Newly published work done at the University of Maryland by first author Harry
Oduro, together with UMD geochemist James Farquhar and marine biologist Kathryn
Van Alstyne of Western Washington University, provides a tool for tracing and
measuring the movement of sulfur through ocean organisms, the atmosphere and the
land in ways that may help prove or disprove the controversial Gaia theory. Their study
appears in this week's Online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences (PNAS).
According to Oduro and his colleagues, this work presents the first direct
measurements of the isotopic composition of dimethylsulfide and of its precursor
dimethylsulfoniopropionate. These measurements reveal differences in the isotope
ratios of these two sulfur compounds that are produced by macroalga and
phytoplankton. These measurements (1) are linked to the compounds' metabolism by
these ocean organisms and (2) carry implications for tracking dimethylsulfide emissions
from the ocean to the atmosphere.
Sulfur, the tenth most abundant element in the universe, is part of many inorganic and
organic compounds. Sulfur cycles sulfur through the land, atmosphere and living things
and plays critical roles in both climate and in the health of organisms and ecosystems.
"Dimethylsulfide emissions play a role in climate regulation through transformation to

aerosols that are thought to influence the Earth's radiation balance," says Oduro, who
conducted the research while completing a Ph.D. in geology & earth system sciences at
Maryland and now is a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. "We show that differences in isotopic composition of dimethylsulfide may
vary in ways that will help us to refine estimates of its emission into the atmosphere
and of its cycling in the oceans."
As with many other chemical elements, sulfur consists of different isotopes. All isotopes
of an element are characterized by having the same number of electrons and protons
but different numbers of neutrons. Therefore, isotopes of an element are characterized
by identical chemical properties, but different mass and nuclear properties. As a result,
it can be possible for scientists to use unique combinations of an element's radioactive
isotopes as isotopic signatures through which compounds with that element can be
traced.
"What Harry did in this research was to devise a way to isolate and measure the sulfur
isotopic composition of these two sulfur compounds," says Farquhar, a professor in the
University of Maryland's department of geology. "This was a very difficult
measurement to do right, and his measurements revealed an unexpected variability in
an isotopic signal that appears to be related to the way the sulfur is metabolized.
"Harry's work establishes that we should expect to see variability in the sulfur isotope
signatures of these compounds in the oceans under different environmental conditions
and for different organisms. I think this will ultimately be very important for using
isotopes to trace the cycling of these compounds in the surface oceans as well as the flux
of dimethylsulfide to the atmosphere. The ability to do this could help us answer
important climate questions, and ultimately better predict climate changes. And it may
even help us to better trace connections between dimethylsulfide emissions and sulfate
aerosols, ultimately testing a coupling in the Gaia hypothesis," Farquhar says.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Maryland.

source cited above.
Journal Reference:
1. H. Oduro, K. L. Van Alstyne, J. Farquhar. Sulfur isotope variability of oceanic

DMSP generation and its contributions to marine biogenic sulfur emissions.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.
1117691109
staff.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #11 - Earthquake Cycles Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
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Greater Insight Into Earthquake Cycles
ScienceDaily (May 10, 2012) — For those who study earthquakes, one major challenge
has been trying to understand all the physics of a fault -- both during an earthquake and
at times of "rest" -- in order to know more about how a particular region may behave in
the future. Now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have
developed the first computer model of an earthquake-producing fault segment that
reproduces, in a single physical framework, the available observations of both the fault's
seismic (fast) and aseismic (slow) behavior.
"Our study describes a methodology to assimilate geologic, seismologic, and geodetic

data surrounding a seismic fault to form a physical model of the cycle of earthquakes
that has predictive power," says Sylvain Barbot, a postdoctoral scholar in geology at
Caltech and lead author of the study.
A paper describing their model -- the result of a Caltech Tectonics Observatory (TO)
collaborative study by geologists and geophysicists from the Institute's Division of
Geological and Planetary Sciences and engineers from the Division of Engineering and
Applied Science -- appears in the May 11 edition of the journal Science.
"Previous research has mostly either concentrated on the dynamic rupture that
produces ground shaking or on the long periods between earthquakes, which are
characterized by slow tectonic loading and associated slow motions -- but not on both at
the same time," explains study coauthor Nadia Lapusta, professor of mechanical
engineering and geophysics at Caltech. Her research group developed the numerical
methods used in making the new model. "In our study, we model the entire history of
an earthquake-producing fault and the interaction between the fast and slow
deformation phases."
Using previous observations and laboratory findings, the team -- which also included
coauthor Jean-Philippe Avouac, director of the TO -- modeled an active region of the
San Andreas Fault called the Parkfield segment. Located in central California, Parkfield
produces magnitude-6 earthquakes every 20 years on average. They successfully
created a series of earthquakes (ranging from magnitude 2 to 6) within the computer
model, producing fault slip before, during, and after the earthquakes that closely
matched the behavior observed in the past fifty years.
"Our model explains some aspects of the seismic cycle at Parkfield that had eluded us,
such as what causes changes in the amount of time between significant earthquakes and
the jump in location where earthquakes nucleate, or begin," says Barbot.
The paper also demonstrates that a physical model of fault-slip evolution, based on
laboratory experiments that measure how rock materials deform in the fault core, can
explain many aspects of the earthquake cycle -- and does so on a range of time scales.
"Earthquake science is on the verge of building models that are based on the actual
response of the rock materials as measured in the lab -- models that can be tailored to
reproduce a broad range of available observations for a given region," says Lapusta.
"This implies we are getting closer to understanding the physical laws that govern how
earthquakes nucleate, propagate, and arrest."
She says that they may be able to use models much like the one described in the Science
paper to forecast the range of potential earthquakes on a fault segment, which could be
used to further assess seismic hazard and improve building designs.
Avouac agrees. "Currently, seismic hazard studies rely on what is known about past
earthquakes," he says. "However, the relatively short recorded history may not be
representative of all possibilities, especially rare extreme events. This gap can be filled
with physical models that can be continuously improved as we learn more about
earthquakes and laws that govern them."
"As computational resources and methods improve, dynamic simulations of even more
realistic earthquake scenarios, with full account for dynamic interactions among faults,
will be possible," adds Barbot.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by California Institute of

Technology. The original article was written by Katie Neith.
source cited above.
Journal Reference:
1. S. Barbot, N. Lapusta, J.-P. Avouac. Under the Hood of the Earthquake Machine:
Toward Predictive Modeling of the Seismic Cycle. Science, 2012; 336 (6082): 707
DOI: 10.1126/science.1218796
staff.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #12 - Hawaiian Beach Erosion Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
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70 Percent of Beaches Eroding On
Hawaiian Islands Kauai, Oahu, and Maui
ScienceDaily (May 7, 2012) — An assessment of coastal change over the past century has
found 70 percent of beaches on the islands of Kauaʻi, Oʻahu, and Maui are undergoing
long-term erosion, according to a U.S. Geological Survey and University of Hawaiʻi
report.
Scientists from the USGS and the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at
UH studied more than 150 miles of island coastline (essentially every beach) and found
the average rate of coastal change -- taking into account beaches that are both eroding
and accreting -- was 0.4 feet of erosion per year from the early 1900s to 2000s. Of those
beaches eroding, the most extreme case was nearly 6 feet per year near Kualoa Point,
East Oʻahu.
"The inevitable fate of the Hawaiian Islands millions of years into the future is seen to
the northwest in the spires of French Frigate Shoals and the remnants of other once
mighty islands, ancestors of today's Hawaii, but now sunken beneath the sea through
the forces of waves, rivers, and the slow subsidence of the seafloor," explained USGS
Director Marcia McNutt.
"These data have allowed State and County agencies in Hawaii to account for shoreline
change as early as possible in the planning and development process so that coastal
communities and public infrastructure can be sited safely away from erosion hazards
areas," said William J. Aila Jr., Chairperson, Department of Land and Natural Resources,
State of Hawaii. "This will vastly improve upon public safety and will ensure that
Hawaii's beautiful beaches will be protected from inappropriate shoreline
development."
Of the three islands, Maui beaches experienced the highest rates and greatest extent of
beach erosion with 85% of beaches eroding. Erosion is the dominant trend of coastal
change on all three islands with 71% of beaches eroding on Kauai and 60% of beaches
eroding on Oʻahu.
The researchers found that, although Hawaii beaches are dominated by erosion as a
whole, coastal change is highly variable along the shore -- with 'cells' of erosion and
accretion typically separated by 100s of feet on continuous beaches or by rocky
headlands that divide the coast into many small embayments. Most Hawaii beaches are
composed of a mix of sediment derived from adjacent reefs and from the volcanic rock
of the islands. Sediment availability and transport are important factors in shoreline
change, and human interference in natural processes appears to have impacted the rates
of change. For example, more than 13 miles of beaches in the study were completely lost
to erosion -- nearly all previously in front of seawalls.
"Over a century of building along the Hawaiian shoreline, without this sort of detailed
knowledge about shoreline change, has led to some development that is located too
close to the ocean," said Dr. Charles Fletcher, UH Geology and Geophysics Professor
and lead author. "A better understanding of historical shoreline change and human
responses to erosion may improve our ability to avoid erosion hazards in the future."
The researchers used historical data sources such as maps and aerial photographs to
measure shoreline change at more than 12,000 locations. Shoreline changes are
measured in specialized Geographic Information System software.
This analysis of past and present trends of shoreline movement is designed to allow for
future repeatable analyses of shoreline movement, coastal erosion, and land loss. "The
results of this research provide critical coastal change information that can be used to
inform a wide variety of coastal management decisions," said Dr. Rob Thieler, sponsor
of the study with the USGS.
The report, titled "National Assessment of Shoreline Change: Historical Shoreline

Change in the Hawaiian Islands," is the sixth report produced as part of the USGS's
National Assessment of Shoreline Change project, which already includes the U.S. Gulf
of Mexico and Atlantic coasts, as well as California.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by US Geological Survey.

Name Date
Literacy Lab #13 - Dinosaur Emissions Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
1.
2.
3.
Gaseous Emissions from Dinosaurs May
Have Warmed Prehistoric Earth
ScienceDaily (May 7, 2012) — Sauropod dinosaurs could in principle have produced
enough of the greenhouse gas methane to warm the climate many millions of years ago,
at a time when Earth was warm and wet. That's according to calculations reported in
the May 8th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.
The hulking sauropods, distinctive for their enormous size and unusually long necks,
were widespread about 150 million years ago. As in cows, methane-producing microbes
aided the sauropods' digestion by fermenting their plant food.
"A simple mathematical model suggests that the microbes living in sauropod dinosaurs
may have produced enough methane to have an important effect on the Mesozoic
climate," said Dave Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University. "Indeed, our
calculations suggest that these dinosaurs could have produced more methane than all
modern sources -- both natural and man-made -- put together."
Wilkinson and study coauthor Graeme Ruxton from the University of St Andrews were
studying sauropod ecology when a question dawned on them: If modern cows produce
enough methane gas to be of interest to climate scientists, what about sauropods? They
teamed up with methane expert Euan Nisbet at the University of London to work out
the numbers.
"Clearly, trying to estimate this for animals that are unlike anything living has to be a bit
of an educated guess," Wilkinson said.
Animal physiologists have studied methane production from a range of modern

animals to derive equations that predict methane production from animals of different
sizes. It turns out that those calculations depend only on the total mass of the animals in
question. A medium-sized sauropod weighed something like 20,000 kilograms, and
sauropods lived in densities ranging from a few large adults to a few tens of individuals
per square kilometer.
Wilkinson, Ruxton, and Nisbet therefore calculate global methane emissions from
sauropods to have been 520 million tons (520 Tg) per year, comparable to total modern
methane emissions. Before industry took off on modern Earth about 150 years ago,
methane emissions were roughly 200 Tg per year. By comparison, modern ruminant
animals, including cows, goats, giraffes, and others, produce methane emission of 50 to
100 Tg per year.
The study's conclusions not only show "just how strange and wonderful the workings
of the planet are" but also serve as a useful reminder for the importance of microbes and
methane for global climate, the researchers say.
Journal reference: Wilkinson et al.: "Could methane produced by sauropod dinosaurs

have helped drive Mesozoic climate warmth?"
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Cell Press, via EurekAlert!, a
service of AAAS.
source cited above.
staff.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #14 - Giant Beasts in NA Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
1.
2.
3.
Early North Americans Lived With Extinct
Giant Beasts, Study Shows
ScienceDaily (May 3, 2012) — A new University of Florida study that determined the age
of skeletal remains provides evidence humans reached the Western Hemisphere during
the last ice age and lived alongside giant extinct mammals.
The study published online May 3 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology addresses the
century-long debate among scientists about whether human and mammal remains
found at Vero Beach in the early 1900s date to the same time period. Using rare earth
element analysis to measure the concentration of naturally occurring metals absorbed
during fossilization, researchers show modern humans in North America co-existed
with large extinct mammals about 13,000 years ago, including mammoths, mastodons
and giant ground sloths.
"The Vero site is still the only site where there was an abundance of actual human
bones, not just artifacts, associated with the animals," said co-author Barbara Purdy, UF
anthropology professor emeritus and archaeology curator emeritus at the Florida
Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. "Scientists who disputed the age of the
human remains in the early 20th century just did not want to believe that people were
in the Western Hemisphere that early. And 100 years later, every single book written
about the prehistory of North America includes this site and the controversy that still
exists."
Following discovery of the fossils in South Florida between 1913 and 1916, some
prominent scientists convinced researchers the human skeletons were from more recent
burials and not as old as the animals, a question that remained unanswered because no
dating methods existed.
"The uptake of rare earth elements is time-dependent, so an old fossil is going to have
very different concentrations of rare earth elements than bones from a more recent
human burial," said lead author Bruce MacFadden, Florida Museum vertebrate
paleontology curator. "We found the human remains have statistically the same
concentrations of rare earth elements as the fossils."
The little information known about the first humans to appear in North America is
primarily based on bone fragments and artifacts, such as stone points used for hunting.
Other sites in California, Montana and Texas show human presence around the same
time period based on artifacts, but two nearly complete human skeletons were
discovered at the Vero Beach site.
As bones begin to fossilize they absorb elements from the surrounding sediment, and
analysis is effective in distinguishing different-aged fossils deposited in the same
locality. Instead of radiocarbon dating, which requires the presence of collagen in bones,
researchers used mass spectrometry to compare rare earth elements in the specimens
because a lack of collagen in the Vero Beach specimens made radiocarbon dating
impossible, Purdy said.
Researchers analyzed samples from 24 human bones and 48 animal fossils in the Florida
Museum's collections and determined the specimens were all from the late Pleistocene
epoch about 13,000 years ago. While rare earth element analysis method is not as
precise as radiocarbon dating, Purdy said the significance of human skeletons found in
Vero Beach is unquestionable in terms of their presence in the Western Hemisphere.
"It is important to note that they [the authors] did not provide an absolute or
chronometric date, rather the geochemistry shows that the trace elemental geochemistry
is the same, thus the bones must be of the same age," said Kenneth Tankersley, an
assistant professor in the University of Cincinnati anthropology and geology
departments.
Native fauna during the last ice age ranged from extinct jaguars and saber-toothed cats
to shrews, mice and squirrels still present in Florida. Researchers speculate humans
would have been wanderers much like the animals because there was less fresh water
than in later years, Purdy said.
"Humans would have been following the animals for a food supply, but that's about all
we know," Purdy said. "We know what some of their tools looked like and we know
they were hunting the extinct animals but we know practically nothing about their
family life, such as how these ancient people raised their children and grieved for their
dead."
Study co-authors include Krista Church of UF and the University of Texas, and Thomas
Stafford Jr., of Stafford Research in Colorado and the University of Copenhagen.
"Vero is a historical context for the development of archaeology -- these are the
beginnings of the people of America," MacFadden said. "The site is well-known in the
literature but has been discounted, so we're sort of reviving an understanding of this
important locality and using newer techniques to revive the question about the
antiquity of the humans."
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Florida, via
Newswise. The original article was written by Danielle Torrent.
source cited above.
Journal Reference:
1. Bruce J. Macfadden, Barbara A. Purdy, Krista Church, Thomas W. Stafford.

Humans were contemporaneous with late Pleistocene mammals in Florida:
evidence from rare earth elemental analyses. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology,
2012; 32 (3): 708 DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2012.655639
staff.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #15 - Solar Water Purification Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
1.
2.
3.
Simple Way to Remove Mud from
Drinking Water
ScienceDaily (May 1, 2012) — Nearly 80 percent of disease in developing countries is
linked to bad water and sanitation. Now a scientist at Michigan Technological
University has developed a simple, cheap way to make water safe to drink, even if it's
muddy.
It's easy enough to purify clear water. The solar water disinfection method, or SODIS,
calls for leaving a transparent plastic bottle of clear water out in the sun for six hours.
That allows heat and ultraviolet radiation to wipe out most pathogens that cause
diarrhea, a malady that kills 4,000 children a day in Africa.
It's a different story if the water is murky, as it often is where people must fetch water
from rivers, streams and boreholes. "In the developing world, many people don't have
access to clear water, and it's very hard to get rid of the suspended clay particles," says
Joshua Pearce, an associate professor of materials science and engineering. "But if you
don't, SODIS doesn't work. The microorganisms hide under the clay and avoid the UV."
Thus, to purify your water, you first have to get the clay to settle out, a process called
flocculation. Working with student Brittney Dawney of Queen's University in Ontario,
Pearce discovered that one of the most abundant minerals on Earth does this job very
well: sodium chloride, or simple table salt.
Salt is inexpensive and available almost everywhere. And it doesn't take very much to
make muddy water clear again.
"The water has a lower sodium concentration than Gatorade," Pearce says. This would
still be too much salt to pass muster as American tap water, but American tap water is
not the alternative.
"I've drunk this water myself. If I were somewhere with no clean water and had kids
with diarrhea, and this could save their lives, I'd use this, no question," he says.
Salt works best when the suspended particles are a type of clay called bentonite. The
technique doesn't work as well with other kinds of clay. However, by adding a little
bentonite with the salt to water containing these different clays, most of the particles
glom together and settle out, creating water clear enough for SODIS treatment.
Pearce and Dawney are running more tests on water containing various types of clays,
and they are also investigating different soil types across Africa to see where their
methods might work the best.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Michigan Technological

University.
source cited above.
Journal Reference:
1. Brittney Dawney and Joshua M. Pearce. Optimizing the solar water disinfection
(SODIS) method by decreasing turbidity with NaCl. Journal of Water, Sanitation,
and Hygiene for Development, June 2012 DOI: 10.2166/washdev.2012.043
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views
expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #16 - Dinosaur Decline Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
1.
2.
3.
Were Dinosaurs Undergoing Long-Term
Decline Before Mass Extinction?
ScienceDaily (May 1, 2012) — Despite years of intensive research about the extinction of
non-avian dinosaurs about 65.5 million years ago, a fundamental question remains:
were dinosaurs already undergoing a long-term decline before an asteroid hit at the end
of the Cretaceous? A study led by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History
gives a multifaceted answer.
The findings, published online May 1 in Nature Communications, suggest that in general,
large-bodied, "bulk-feeding" herbivores were declining during the last 12 million years
of the Cretaceous. But carnivorous dinosaurs and mid-sized herbivores were not. In
some cases, geographic location might have been a factor in the animals' biological
success.
"Few issues in the history of paleontology have fueled as much research and popular
fascination as the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs," said lead author Steve Brusatte, a
Columbia University graduate student affiliated with the Museum's Division of
Paleontology. "Did sudden volcanic eruptions or an asteroid impact strike down
dinosaurs during their prime? We found that it was probably much more complex than
that, and maybe not the sudden catastrophe that is often portrayed."
The research team, which includes Brusatte; Mark Norell, chair of the Museum's
Division of Paleontology; and scientists Richard Butler of Ludwig Maximilian
University of Munich and Albert Prieto-M‡rquez from the Bavarian State Collection for
Palaeontology, both in Germany, is the first to look at dinosaur extinction based on
"morphological disparity"-the variability of body structure within particular groups of
dinosaurs. Previous research was based almost exclusively on estimates of changes in
the number of dinosaur species over time. However, it can be very difficult to do this
accurately.
"By looking just at trends in taxonomic diversity, you get conflicting answers about the
state of dinosaurs prior to extinction," Brusatte said. "This is because the results can be
biased by uneven sampling of the fossil record. In places where more rock and fossils
were formed, like in America's Great Plains, you'll find more species. We wanted to go
beyond a simple species count for this study."
By looking at the change in biodiversity within a given dinosaur group over time,
researchers can create a rough snapshot of the animals' overall well-being. This is
because groups that show an increase in variability might have been evolving into more
species, giving them an ecological edge. On the other hand, decreasing variability might
be a warning sign of extinction in the long term.
The researchers calculated morphological disparity for seven major dinosaur groups
using databases that include wide-ranging characteristics about the intricate skeletal
structure of nearly 150 different species.
"People often think of dinosaurs as being monolithic-we say 'The dinosaurs did this,
and the dinosaurs did that,'" Butler said. "But dinosaurs were hugely diverse. There
were hundreds of species living in the Late Cretaceous, and these differed enormously
in diet, shape, and size. Different groups were probably evolving in different ways and
the results of our study show that very clearly."
The researchers found that hadrosaurs and ceratopsids, two groups of large-bodied,
bulk-feeding herbivores-animals that did not feed selectively-may have experienced a
decline in biodiversity in the 12 million years before the dinosaurs ultimately went
extinct. In contrast, small herbivores (ankylosaurs and pachycephalosaurs), carnivorous
dinosaurs (tyrannosaurs and coelurosaurs), and enormous herbivores without
advanced chewing abilities (sauropods) remained relatively stable or even slightly
increased in biodiversity.
As a complication, hadrosaurs showed different levels of disparity in different locations.

While declining in North America, the disparity of this dinosaur group seems to have
been increasing in Asia during the latest Cretaceous.
"These disparity calculations paint a more nuanced picture of the final 12 million years
of dinosaur history," Brusatte said. "Contrary to how things are often perceived, the Late
Cretaceous wasn't a static 'lost world' that was violently interrupted by an asteroid
impact. Some dinosaurs were undergoing dramatic changes during this time, and the
large herbivores seem to have been mired in a long-term decline, at least in North
America."
In North America, extreme fluctuations of the inland Western Interior Sea and mountain
building might have affected the evolution of dinosaurs in distinct ways from species
on other continents. Therefore, the authors say, the North American record might not be
representative of a global pattern, if one exists. They also note that there is no way to tell
whether a declining dinosaur group would have survived if the asteroid had not struck
Earth.
"Even if the disparity of some dinosaur clades or regional faunas were in decline, this
does not automatically mean that dinosaurs were doomed to extinction," Norell said.
"Dinosaur diversity fluctuated throughout the Mesozoic, and small increases or
decreases between two or three time intervals may not be noteworthy within the
context of the entire 150-million-year history of the group."
Funding for this study was provided by the National Science Foundation through the
Division of Earth Sciences, the Division of Biological Infrastructure, a Graduate
Research Fellowship, and a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant; the German
Research Foundation's Emmy Noether Programme; the Alexander von Humboldt
Foundation; the Charlotte and Walter Kohler Charitable Trust; the American Museum of
Natural History; and Columbia University.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by American Museum of Natural
History.
source cited above.
Journal Reference:
1. Stephen L. Brusatte, Richard J. Butler, Albert Prieto-Márquez, Mark A. Norell.

Dinosaur morphological diversity and the end-Cretaceous extinction. Nature
Communications, 2012; 3: 804 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms1815
Name Date
Literacy Lab #17 - Yellowstone Supervolcano Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
1.
2.
3.
Yellowstone 'Super-Eruption' Less Super,
More Frequent Than Thought
ScienceDaily (Apr. 30, 2012) — The Yellowstone "super-volcano" is a little less super --
but more active -- than previously thought.
Researchers at Washington State University and the Scottish Universities Environmental

Research Centre say the biggest Yellowstone eruption, which created the 2 million year
old Huckleberry Ridge deposit, was actually two different eruptions at least 6,000 years
apart.
Their results paint a new picture of a more active volcano than previously thought and
can help recalibrate the likelihood of another big eruption in the future. Before the
researchers split the one eruption into two, it was the fourth largest known to science.
"The Yellowstone volcano's previous behavior is the best guide of what it will do in the
future," says Ben Ellis, co-author and post-doctoral researcher at Washington State
University's School of the Environment. "This research suggests explosive volcanism
from Yellowstone is more frequent than previously thought."
The new ages for each Huckleberry Ridge eruption reduce the volume of the first event
to 2,200 cubic kilometers, roughly 12 percent less than previously thought. A second
eruption of 290 cubic kilometers took place more than 6,000 years later.
That first eruption still deserves to be called "super," as it is one of the largest known to
have occurred on Earth and darkened the skies with ash from southern California to the
Mississippi River. By comparison, the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens produced 1
cubic kilometer of ash. The larger blast of Oregon's Mount Mazama 6,850 years ago
produced 116 cubic kilometers of ash.
The study, funded by the National Science Foundation and published in the June issue
of the Quaternary Geochronology, used high-precision argon isotope dating to make the
new calculations. The radioactive decay rate from potassium 40 to argon 40 serves as a
"rock clock" for dating samples and has a precision of .2 percent. Darren Mark, co-
author and a post-doctoral research fellow at the SUERC, recently helped fine tune the
technique and improve it by 1.2 percent -- a small-sounding difference that can become
huge across geologic time.
"Improved precision for greater temporal resolution is not just about adding another
decimal place to a number, says Mark. "It's far more exciting. It's like getting a sharper
lens on a camera. It allows us to see the world more clearly."
The project asks the question: Might super-eruptions actually be products of multiple,
closely spaced eruptions through time? With improved temporal resolution, in times to
come, maybe super-eruptions will be not quite so super.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Washington State University.
source cited above.
Journal Reference:
1. Ben S. Ellis, Darren F. Mark, Chad J. Pritchard, John A. Wolff. Temporal

dissection of the Huckleberry Ridge Tuff using the 40Ar/39Ar dating
technique. Quaternary Geochronology, 2012; 9: 34 DOI: 10.1016/j.quageo.
2012.01.006
staff.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #18 - Archean Asteroids Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
1.
2.
3.
Splatters of Molten Rock Signal Period of
Intense Asteroid Impacts On Earth
ScienceDaily (Apr. 25, 2012) — New research reveals that the Archean era -- a formative
time for early life from 3.8 billion years ago to 2.5 billion years ago -- experienced far
more major asteroid impacts than had been previously thought, with a few impacts
perhaps even rivaling those that produced the largest craters on the Moon, according to
a paper recently published online in Nature.
The fingerprints of these gigantic blasts are millimeter- to centimeter-thick rock layers
on Earth that contain impact debris: sand-sized droplets, or spherules, of molten rock
that rained down from the huge molten plumes thrown up by mega-impacts. This
barrage of asteroids appears to have originated in an extended portion of the inner
asteroid belt that is now mostly extinct. Computer models suggest the zone was likely
destabilized about 4 billion years ago by the late migration of the giant planets from the
orbits they formed on to where we find them today.
The team conducting this study includes members or associates of the NASA Lunar
Science Institute's Center of Lunar Origin and Evolution (CLOE), based at the
Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colo.
Archean rocks are scarcer than rocks of any other age, and impact spherule beds have
been found only in terrains where conditions were ideal for capture and preservation,
such as in shales deposited on the seafloor below the reach of waves. At least 12
spherule beds deposited between 3.47 and 1.7 billion years ago (Ga) have been found,
with most in the Archean; 7 between 3.23-3.47 Ga, 4 between 2.49-2.63 Ga and 1
between 1.7-2.1 Ga.
"The beds speak to an intense period of late bombardment of the Earth, but their source
has long been a mystery," says CLOE Principal Investigator and SwRI Researcher Dr.
William Bottke.
By comparison, the Chicxulub impact that is believed to have killed the dinosaurs 65
million years ago was the only known collision over the past half-billion years that
made a spherule layer as thick as those of the Archean period.
"The Archean beds contain enough extraterrestrial material to rule out alternative
sources for the spherules, such as volcanoes," says Bruce Simonson, a geologist from the
Oberlin College and Conservatory who has studied these ancient layers for decades.
The timing of these major events is curious because they occur well after the presumed
end of the so-called Late Heavy Bombardment, or LHB, of the Moon. This period
occurred about 4 billion years ago and produced the largest lunar craters, or basins. The
precise nature of the LHB continues to be debated, and testing what happened and for
how long was the top science priority for future exploration of the Moon, according to a
previously published report by the National Research Council.
The best available model of the LHB, often referred to as the Nice model after the
observatory where it was developed in Nice, France, invokes a large-scale repositioning
of the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune as a trigger for a solar system-
wide bombardment of asteroids and comets. The extensive pummeling of the Earth and
Moon identified in the Nice model, however, lasted 100- to 200-million years, not nearly
long enough to explain the Archean spherule beds.
Following up on the implications of the Nice model, the team examined a possible
missing source of impactors, one that would have come from the inner edge of the main
asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. While most of this region is now
unstable, researchers believe this may not have been the case 4 billion years ago. The
difference was that the giant planets, whose gravitational forces control the orbital
stability of solar system worlds, were likely in a more compact configuration than they
are now. By creating a hypothetical extension to the primordial asteroid belt and
tracking what would have happened to these bodies when the giant planets
reorganized themselves, team members found the bodies could have delivered
numerous big impactors to the Earth and Moon over a much longer time. As additional
validation of the model, team members found it could reproduce a tiny population of
asteroids called the Hungarias, a reservoir of relatively stable but fairly small asteroids
located between the orbits of Mars and the inner edge of the main asteroid belt.
They found that approximately 70 (and 4) dinosaur killer-sized or larger impacts hit the
Earth (and Moon) over a span that lasted between 3.8 and 1.8 billion years ago. The
frequency of these impacts was enough to reproduce the known impact spherule beds.
It also hints at the possibility that the enormous 180-300-kilometer (112-186-mile)
diameter Vredefort crater in South Africa, which is 2 billion years old, and the nearly
250-kilometer (155-mile) Sudbury crater in Canada, which is 1.85 billion years old,
might be literally the last gasp of the LHB on Earth.
Team members predict that the largest Archean-era impacts should be similar to the 15
or so youngest and largest lunar basins, which range in diameter from about 300-1,200
kilometers (186-746-miles). The implication of such enormous impacts over the Archean
era is unknown, but some are believed to have released nearly 500 times the blast
energy of the Chicxulub impact.
"It will be interesting to see whether these mammoth events affected the evolution of
early life on our planet or our biosphere in important ways," says Bottke.
In a companion paper also published online April 25 in Nature, another team of

researchers, led by Brandon Johnson and Jay Melosh of Purdue University, used
computer models to estimate the gargantuan projectile sizes needed to explain the
nature and distribution of the Archean spherule layers. Their work provides
experimental data to correlate with this study.
Funding for this study was provided by the NASA Lunar Science Institute, the Grant
Agency of the Czech Republic and Germany's Helmholtz Alliance.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Southwest Research Institute.
source cited above.
Journal Reference:
1. William F. Bottke, David Vokrouhlický, David Minton, David Nesvorný,

Alessandro Morbidelli, Ramon Brasser, Bruce Simonson, Harold F. Levison. An
Archaean heavy bombardment from a destabilized extension of the asteroid
belt. Nature, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/nature10967
Name Date
Literacy Lab #19 - Cambrian Explosion Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
1.
2.
3.
Evidence for a Geologic Trigger of the
Cambrian Explosion
ScienceDaily (Apr. 18, 2012) — The oceans teemed with life 600 million years ago, but the
simple, soft-bodied creatures would have been hardly recognizable as the ancestors of
nearly all animals on Earth today.
Then something happened. Over several tens of millions of years -- a relative blink of an
eye in geologic terms -- a burst of evolution led to a flurry of diversification and
increasing complexity, including the expansion of multicellular organisms and the
appearance of the first shells and skeletons.
The results of this Cambrian explosion are well documented in the fossil record, but its
cause -- why and when it happened, and perhaps why nothing similar has happened
since -- has been a mystery.
New research shows that the answer may lie in a second geological curiosity -- a
dramatic boundary, known as the Great Unconformity, between ancient igneous and
metamorphic rocks and younger sediments.
"The Great Unconformity is a very prominent geomorphic surface and there's nothing
else like it in the entire rock record," says Shanan Peters, a geoscience professor at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison who led the new work. Occurring worldwide, the
Great Unconformity juxtaposes old rocks, formed billions of years ago deep within
Earth's crust, with relatively young Cambrian sedimentary rock formed from deposits
left by shallow ancient seas that covered the continents just a half billion years ago.
Named in 1869 by explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell during the first
documented trip through the Grand Canyon, the Great Unconformity has posed a
longstanding puzzle and has been viewed -- by Charles Darwin, among others -- as a
huge gap in the rock record and in our understanding of Earth's history.
But Peters says the gap itself -- the missing time in the geologic record -- may hold the
key to understanding what happened.
In the April 19 issue of the journal Nature, he and colleague Robert Gaines of Pomona
College report that the same geological forces that formed the Great Unconformity may
have also provided the impetus for the burst of biodiversity during the early Cambrian.
"The magnitude of the unconformity is without rival in the rock record," Gaines says.
"When we pieced that together, we realized that its formation must have had profound
implications for ocean chemistry at the time when complex life was just proliferating."
"We're proposing a triggering mechanism for the Cambrian explosion," says Peters.
"Our hypothesis is that biomineralization evolved as a biogeochemical response to an
increased influx of continental weathering products during the last stages in the
formation of the Great Unconformity."
Peters and Gaines looked at data from more than 20,000 rock samples from across North
America and found multiple clues, such as unusual mineral deposits with distinct
geochemistry, that point to a link between the physical, chemical, and biological effects.
During the early Cambrian, shallow seas repeatedly advanced and retreated across the
North American continent, gradually eroding away surface rock to uncover fresh
basement rock from within the crust. Exposed to the surface environment for the first
time, those crustal rocks reacted with air and water in a chemical weathering process
that released ions such as calcium, iron, potassium, and silica into the oceans, changing
the seawater chemistry.
The basement rocks were later covered with sedimentary deposits from those Cambrian
seas, creating the boundary now recognized as the Great Unconformity.
Evidence of changes in the seawater chemistry is captured in the rock record by high
rates of carbonate mineral formation early in the Cambrian, as well as the occurrence of
extensive beds of glauconite, a potassium-, silica-, and iron-rich mineral that is much
rarer today.
The influx of ions to the oceans also likely posed a challenge to the organisms living
there. "Your body has to keep a balance of these ions in order to function properly,"
Peters explains. "If you have too much of one you have to get rid of it, and one way to
get rid of it is to make a mineral."
The fossil record shows that the three major biominerals -- calcium phosphate, now
found in bones and teeth; calcium carbonate, in invertebrate shells; and silicon dioxide,
in radiolarians -- appeared more or less simultaneously around this time and in a
diverse array of distantly related organisms.
The time lag between the first appearance of animals and their subsequent acquisition
of biominerals in the Cambrian is notable, Peters says. "It's likely biomineralization
didn't evolve for something, it evolved in response to something -- in this case,
changing seawater chemistry during the formation of the Great Unconformity. Then
once that happened, evolution took it in another direction." Today those biominerals
play essential roles as varied as protection (shells and spines), stability (bones), and
predation (teeth and claws).
Together, the results suggest that the formation of the Great Unconformity may have
triggered the Cambrian explosion.
"This feature explains a lot of lingering questions in different arenas, including the odd
occurrences of many types of sedimentary rocks and a very remarkable style of fossil
preservation. And we can't help but think this was very influential for early developing
life at the time," Gaines says.
Far from being a lack of information, as Darwin thought, the gaps in the rock record
may actually record the mechanism as to why the Cambrian explosion occurred in the
first place, Peters says.
"The French composer Claude Debussy said, 'Music is the space between the notes.' I
think that is the case here," he says. "The gaps can have more information, in some
ways, about the processes driving Earth system change, than the rocks do. It's both
together that give the whole picture."
The work was supported by the National Science Foundation.
Journal Reference:
1. Shanan E. Peters, Robert R. Gaines. Formation of the ‘Great Unconformity’ as a

trigger for the Cambrian explosion. Nature, 2012; 484 (7394): 363 DOI: 10.1038/
nature10969
Name Date
Literacy Lab #20 - Duck-Billed Dinosaurs Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
1.
2.
3.
Duck-Billed Dinosaurs Endured Long,
Dark Polar Winters
ScienceDaily (Apr. 11, 2012) — Duck-billed dinosaurs that lived within Arctic latitudes
approximately 70 million years ago likely endured long, dark polar winters instead of
migrating to more southern latitudes, a recent study by researchers from the University
of Cape Town, Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas and Temple University has
found.
The researchers published their findings, "Hadrosaurs Were Perennial Polar Residents,"
in the April issue of the journal The Anatomical Record: Advances in Integrative Anatomy
and Evolutionary Biology.
Anthony Fiorillo, a paleontologist at the Museum of Nature and Science, excavated

Cretaceous Period fossils along Alaska's North Slope. Most of the bones belonged to
Edmontosaurus, a duck-billed herbivore, but some others such as the horned dinosaur
Pachyrhinosaurus were also found.
Fiorillo hypothesized that the microscopic structures of the dinosaurs' bones could
show how they lived in polar regions. He enlisted the help of Allison Tumarkin-
Deratzian, an assistant professor of earth and environmental science, who had both
expertise and the facilities to create and analyze thin layers of the dinosaurs' bone
microstructure.
Another researcher, Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan, a professor of zoology at the University

of Cape Town, was independently pursuing the same analysis of Alaskan
Edmontosaurus fossils. When the research groups discovered the similarities of their
studies, they decided to collaborate and combine their data sets to provide a larger
sampling. Half of the samples were tested and analyzed at Temple; the rest were done
in South Africa.
"The bone microstructure of these dinosaurs is actually a record of how these animals
were growing throughout their lives," said Tumarkin-Deratzian. "It is almost similar to
looking at tree rings."
What the researchers found was bands of fast growth and slower growth that seemed to
indicate a pattern.
"What we found was that periodically, throughout their life, these dinosaurs were
switching how fast they were growing," said Tumarkin-Deratzian. "We interpreted this
as potentially a seasonal pattern because we know in modern animals these types of
shifts can be induced by changes in nutrition. But that shift is often driven by changes in
seasonality."
The researchers questioned what was causing the dinosaurs to be under stress at certain
times during the year: staying up in the polar region and dealing with reduced nutrition
during the winter or migrating to and from lower latitudes during the winter.
They did bone microstructure analysis on similar duck-billed dinosaur fossils found in
southern Alberta, Canada, but didn't see similar stress patterns, implying that those
dinosaurs did not experience regular periodic seasonal stresses. "We had two sets of
animals that were growing differently," said Tumarkin-Deratzian.
Since the Alaska fossils had all been preserved in the same sedimentary horizon, Fiorillo
examined the geology of the bonebeds in Alaska where the samples were excavated and
discovered that these dinosaurs had been preserved in flood deposits.
"They are very similar to modern flood deposits that happen in Alaska in the spring
when you get spring melt water coming off the Brooks Mountain Range," said Fiorillo.
"The rivers flood down the Northern Slope and animals get caught in these floods,
particularly younger animals, which appear to be what happened to these dinosaurs.
"So we know they were there at the end of the dark winter period, because if they were
migrating up from the lower latitudes, they wouldn't have been there during these
floods," he said.
"It is fascinating to realize how much of information is locked in the bone

microstructure of fossil bones," said Chinsamy-Turan. "It's incredible to realize that we
can also tell from these 70 million-year-old bones that the majority of the polar
hadrosaurs died just after the winter season."
The study was funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Temple University, via
Newswise. The original article was written by Preston Moretz.
source cited above.
Journal Reference:
1. Anusuya Chinsamy, Daniel B. Thomas, Allison R. Tumarkin-Deratzian, Anthony

R. Fiorillo. Hadrosaurs Were Perennial Polar Residents. The Anatomical Record:
Advances in Integrative Anatomy and Evolutionary Biology, 2012; 295 (4): 610 DOI:
10.1002/ar.22428
staff.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #21 - Mass Extinction Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
1.
2.
3.
What Triggers a Mass Extinction? Habitat
Loss and Tropical Cooling Were Once to
Blame
ScienceDaily (Apr. 10, 2012) — The second-largest mass extinction in Earth's history
coincided with a short but intense ice age during which enormous glaciers grew and sea
levels dropped. Although it has long been agreed that the so-called Late Ordovician
mass extinction -- which occurred about 450 million years ago -- was related to climate
change, exactly how the climate change produced the extinction has not been known.
Now, a team led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has
created a framework for weighing the factors that might have led to mass extinction and
has used that framework to determine that the majority of extinctions were caused by
habitat loss due to falling sea levels and cooling of the tropical oceans.
The work -- performed by scientists at Caltech and the University of Wisconsin,

Madison -- is described in a paper currently online in the early edition of the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers combined information from two separate databases to overlay fossil
occurrences on the sedimentary rock record of North America around the time of the
extinction, an event that wiped out about 75 percent of marine species alive then. At
that time, North America was an island continent geologists call Laurentia, located in
the tropics.
Comparing the groups of species, or genera, that went extinct during the event with
those that survived, the researchers were able to figure out the relative importance of
several variables in dictating whether a genus went extinct during a 50-million-year
interval around the mass extinction.
"What we did was essentially the same thing you'd do if confronted with a disease
epidemic," says Seth Finnegan, postdoctoral scholar at Caltech and lead author of the
study. "You ask who is affected and who is unaffected, and that can tell you a lot about
what's causing the epidemic."
As it turns out, the strongest predictive factors of extinction on Laurentia were both the
percentage of a genus's habitat that was lost when the sea level dropped and a genus's
ability to tolerate broader ranges of temperatures. Groups that lost large portions of
their habitat as ice sheets grew and sea levels fell, and those that had always been
confined to warm tropical waters, were most likely to go extinct as a result of the rapid
climate change.
"This is the first really attractive demonstration of how you can use multivariate
approaches to try to understand extinctions, which reflect amazingly complex suites of
processes," says Woodward Fischer, an assistant professor of geobiology at Caltech and
principal investigator on the study. "As earth scientists, we love to debate different
environmental and ecological factors in extinctions, but the truth is that all of these
factors interact with one another in complicated ways, and you need a way of teasing
these interactions apart. I'm sure this framework will be profitably applied to extinction
events in other geologic intervals."
The analysis enabled the researchers to largely rule out a hypothesis, known as the
record-bias hypothesis, which says that the extinction might be explained by a
significant gap in the fossil record, also related to glaciation. After all, if sea levels fell
and continents were no longer flooded, sedimentary rocks with fossils would not
accumulate. Therefore, the last record of any species that went extinct during the gap
would show up immediately before the gap, creating the appearance of a mass
extinction.
Finnegan reasoned that this record-bias hypothesis would predict that the duration of a
gap in the record should correlate with higher numbers of extinctions -- if a gap
persisted longer, more groups should have gone extinct during that time, so it should
appear that more species went extinct all at once than for shorter gaps. But in the case of
the Late Ordovician, the researchers found that the duration of the gap did not matter,
indicating that a mass extinction very likely did occur.
"We have found that the Late Ordovician mass extinction most likely represents a real
pulse of extinction -- that many living things genuinely went extinct then," says
Finnegan. "It's not that the record went bad and we just don't recover them after that."

Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by California Institute of

Technology. The original article was written by Kimm Fesenmaier.
source cited above.
staff.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #22 - Copper Chains Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
1.
2.
3.
Copper Chains: Earth's Deep-Seated Hold
On Copper Revealed
ScienceDaily (Apr. 5, 2012) — Earth is clingy when it comes to copper. A new Rice
University study recently published in the journal Science finds that nature conspires at
scales both large and small -- from the realms of tectonic plates down to molecular
bonds -- to keep most of Earth's copper buried dozens of miles below ground.
"Everything throughout history shows us that Earth does not want to give up its copper
to the continental crust," said Rice geochemist Cin-Ty Lee, the lead author of the study.
"Both the building blocks for continents and the continental crust itself, dating back as
much as 3 billion years, are highly depleted in copper."
Finding copper is more than an academic exercise. With global demand for electronics
growing rapidly, some studies have estimated the world's demand for copper could
exceed supply in as little as six years. The new study could help, because it suggests
where undiscovered caches of copper might lie.
But the copper clues were just a happy accident.
"We didn't go into this looking for copper," Lee said. "We were originally interested in
how continents form and more specifically in the oxidation state of volcanoes."
Earth scientists have long debated whether an oxygen-rich atmosphere might be

required for continent formation. The idea stems from the fact that Earth may not have
had many continents for at least the first billion years of its existence and that Earth's
continents may have begun forming around the time that oxygen became a significant
component of the atmosphere.
In their search for answers, Lee and colleagues set out to examine Earth's arc magmas --
the molten building blocks for continents. Arc magmas get their start deep in the planet
in areas called subduction zones, where one of Earth's tectonic plates slides beneath
another. When plates subduct, two things happen. First, they bring oxidized crust and
sediments from Earth's surface into the mantle. Second, the subducting plate drives a
return flow of hot mantle upwards from Earth's deep interior. During this return flow,
the hot mantle not only melts itself but may also cause melting of the recycled
sediments. Arc magmas are thought to form under these conditions, so if oxygen were
required for continental crust formation, it would mostly likely come from these
recycled segments.
"If oxidized materials are necessary for generating such melts, we should see evidence
of it all the way from where the arc magmas form to the point where the new continent-
building material is released from arc volcanoes," Lee said.
Lee and colleagues examined xenoliths, rocks that formed deep inside Earth and were
carried up to the surface in volcanic eruptions. Specifically, they studied garnet
pyroxenite xenoliths thought to represent the first crystallized products of arc magmas
from the deep roots of an arc some 50 kilometers below Earth's surface. Rather than
finding evidence of oxidation, they found sulfides -- minerals that contain reduced
forms of sulfur bonded to metals like copper, nickel and iron. If conditions were highly
oxidizing, Lee said, these sulfide minerals would be destabilized and allow these
elements, particularly copper, to bond with oxygen.
Because sulfides are also heavy and dense, they tend to sink and get left behind in the
deep parts of arc systems, like a blob of dense material that stays at the bottom of a lava
lamp while less dense material rises to the top.
"This explains why copper deposits, in general, are so rare," Lee said. "The Earth wants
to hold it deep and not give it up."
Lee said deciding where to look for undiscovered copper deposits requires an
understanding of the conditions needed to overcome the forces that conspire to keep it
deep inside the planet.
"As a continental arc matures, the copper-rich sulfides are trapped deep and
accumulate," he said. "But if the continental arc grows thicker over time, the
accumulated copper-bearing sulfides are driven to deeper depths where the higher
temperatures can re-melt these copper-rich dregs, releasing them to rejoin arc magmas."
These conditions were met in the Andes Mountains and in western North America. He
said other potential sources of undiscovered copper include Siberia, northern China,
Mongolia and parts of Australia.
Lee noted that a high school intern played a role in the research paper. Daphne Jin, now
a freshman at the University of Chicago, made her contribution to the research as a high
school intern from Clements High School in the Houston suburb of Sugarland.
"The paper really wouldn't have been as broad without Daphne's contribution," Lee
said. "I originally struggled with an assignment for her because I didn't and still don't
have large projects where a student can just fit in. I try to make sure every student has a
chance to do something new, but often I just run out of ideas."
Lee eventually asked Jin to compile information from published studies about the
average concentration of all the first-row of transition elements in the periodic table in
various samples of continental crust and mantle collected the world over.
"She came back and showed me the results, and we could see that the average
continental crust itself, which has been built over 3 billion years of Earth's history in
Africa, Siberia, North America, South America, etc., was all depleted in copper," Lee
said. "Up to that point we'd been looking at the building blocks of continents, but this
showed us that the continents themselves followed the same pattern. It was all
internally consistent."
In addition to Jin, Lee's co-authors on the report include Rajdeep Dasgupta, assistant
professor of Earth science at Rice; Rice postdoctoral researchers Peter Luffi and
Veronique Roux; Rice graduate student Emily Chin; visiting graduate student Romain
Bouchet of the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France; Douglas Morton, professor of
geology at the University of California, Riverside; and Qing-zhu Yin, professor of
geology at the University of California, Davis.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Rice University.
source cited above.
Journal Reference:
1. C.-T. A. Lee, P. Luffi, E. J. Chin, R. Bouchet, R. Dasgupta, D. M. Morton, V. Le

Roux, Q.-z. Yin, D. Jin. Copper Systematics in Arc Magmas and Implications for
Crust-Mantle Differentiation. Science, 2012; 336 (6077): 64 DOI: 10.1126/science.
1217313
staff.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #28 - Listening to Earthquakes Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
1.
2.
3.
Listening to the 9. 0-Magnitude Japanese
Earthquake: Seismic Waves Converted to
Audio to Study Quake's Traits
ScienceDaily (Mar. 6, 2012) — Last year's 9.0-magnitude Tohoku-Oki, Japan, earthquake
was the fourth largest since 1900. However, because of thousands of seismometers in
the region and Japan's willingness to share their measurements with the rest of the
world, the Tohoku-Oki quake is the best-recorded earthquake of all-time.
This plethora of information is allowing scientists to share their findings in unique

ways. Zhigang Peng, associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Earth and
Atmospheric Sciences, has converted the earthquake's seismic waves into audio files.
The results allow experts and general audiences to "hear" what the quake sounded like
as it moved through the earth and around the globe.
"We're able to bring earthquake data to life by combining seismic auditory and visual
information," said Peng, whose research appears in the March/April edition of
Seismological Research Letters. "People are able to hear pitch and amplitude changes
while watching seismic frequency changes. Audiences can relate the earthquake signals
to familiar sounds such as thunder, popcorn popping and fireworks."
The different sounds can help explain various aspects of the earthquake sequence,
including the mainshock and nearby aftershocks. For example, this measurement was
taken near the coastline of Japan between Fukushima (the nuclear reactor site) and
Tokyo. The initial blast of sound is the 9.0 mainshock. As Earth's plates slipped dozens
of meters into new positions, aftershocks occured. They are indicated by "pop" noises
immediately following the mainshock sound. These plate adjustments will likely
continue for years.
As the waves from the earthquake moved through the earth, they also triggered new
earthquakes thousands of miles away. In this example, taken from measurements in
California, the quake created subtle movements deep in the San Andreas Fault. The
initial noise, which sounds like distant thunder, corresponds with the Japanese
mainshock. Afterwards, a continuous high-pitch sound, similar to rainfall that turns on
and off, represents induced tremor activity at the fault. This animation not only help
scientists explain the concept of distant triggering to general audiences, but also
provides a useful tool for researchers to better identify and understand such seismic
signals in other regions.
The human ear is able to hear sounds for frequencies between 20 Hz and 20 kHz, a
range on the high end for earthquake signals recorded by seismometers. Peng, graduate
student Chastity Aiken and other collaborators in the U.S. and Japan simply played the
data faster than true speed to increase the frequency to audible levels. The process also
allows audiences to hear data recorded over minutes or hours in a matter of seconds.
The research is published in the March/April edition of Seismological Research Letters.
Audio clip: This recording of the 2011 Japanese earthquake was taken near the coastline
of Japan between Fukushima Daiichi (the nuclear reactor site) and Tokyo. The initial
blast of sound is the 9.0 mainshock. As the earth's plates slipped dozens of meters into
new positions, aftershocks occurred. They are indicated by "pop" noises immediately
following the mainshock sound. These plate adjustments will likely continue for years.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Georgia Institute of

Technology, via Newswise.
source cited above.
Journal Reference:
1. zhigang Peng, Chastity Aiken, Debi Kilb, David R. Shelly, and Bogdan Enescu.
Listening to the 2011 Magnitude 9.0 Tohoku-Oki, Japan, Earthquake.
EduQuakes, 2012 [link]
Name Date
Literacy Lab #24 - Mariana Trench Dive Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
1.
2.
3.
James Cameron Makes First Ever
Successful Solo Dive to Mariana Trench --
Ocean's Deepest Point
ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2012) — Filmmaker and National Geographic Explorer-in-
Residence James Cameron descended 35,756 feet (6.77 miles/10.89 km) to reach the
"Challenger Deep," the ocean's deepest point located in the Mariana Trench, in his
specially designed submersible DEEPSEA CHALLENGER. The attempt was part of
DEEPSEA CHALLENGE, a joint scientific expedition by Cameron, National Geographic
and Rolex to conduct deep-ocean research and exploration. Cameron is the only
individual ever to complete the dive in a solo vehicle and the first person since 1960 to
reach the very bottom of the world in a manned submersible. During the dive, he
conducted the first manned scientific exploration of the "Challenger Deep."
The submersible was launched into the Pacific Ocean some 200 miles (322 km)
southwest of Guam on Monday, March 26, at 5:15 a.m., local Guam time (Sunday, March
25, at 3:15 p.m., Eastern Time). The voyage down to the "Challenger Deep" took two
hours and 36 minutes. Cameron resurfaced at 12 noon local Guam time on Monday,
March 26 (10 p.m. Eastern Time on Sunday, March 25). The submersible -- the result of a
more-than-seven-year engineering effort -- stayed on the bottom for about three hours
as Cameron collected samples for research in marine biology, microbiology,
astrobiology, marine geology and geophysics. Cameron also captured still photographs
and moving images to visually document the Mariana Trench.
"This journey is the culmination of more than seven years of planning for me and the
amazing DEEPSEA CHALLENGE expedition team," said Cameron. "Most importantly,
though, is the significance of pushing the boundaries of where humans can go, what
they can see and how they can interpret it. Without the support of National Geographic
and Rolex, and their unwavering belief that we could successfully make it to the
deepest point in the ocean -- and back -- this would not have happened."
"We join the rest of the world in celebrating the exhilarating achievement of Jim
Cameron and the DEEPSEA CHALLENGE expedition team," said Terry Garcia,
National Geographic's executive vice president of Mission Programs. "In 2012 we are
still exploring largely unknown places -- as National Geographic has been doing for
nearly 125 years. I'm delighted to say that the golden age of exploration and discovery
continues."
Details on the expedition can be found at www.DEEPSEACHALLENGE.com; on
Twitter by following @DeepChallenge or using #deepseachallenge; or on Facebook at
https://www.facebook.com/deepseachallenge.
The "Challenger Deep" has only been reached once before in a manned descent, on Jan.
23, 1960, by then U.S. Navy Lt. Don Walsh -- who is a consultant on the DEEPSEA
CHALLENGE expedition and was aboard the expedition ship Mermaid Sapphire
during Cameron's successful attempt -- and Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard in the
bathyscaphe Trieste. Walsh and Piccard spent about 20 minutes on the ocean floor
before returning to the surface.
With breakthroughs in materials and science, unique approaches to structural

engineering and new ways of imaging through an ultra-small, full ocean depth-rated
stereoscopic camera, Cameron was able to launch the DEEPSEA CHALLENGE
expedition, which he hopes will shed light on other virtually unknown deep-water
habitats, such as the New Britain Trench and the Sirena Deep.
Cameron's CAMERON | PACE Group, which supplies 3-D technologies /and

production support services, provided the capability to document today's historic dive
in high-resolution 3-D.
In 1960, an experimental Rolex Deep Sea Special watch was strapped to the hull of the
Trieste and emerged in perfect working order after withstanding the huge pressure
exerted nearly 7 miles (nearly 11 km) below the surface. The DEEPSEA CHALLENGER
submersible today carried a new, experimental wristwatch, the Rolex Deepsea
Challenge, attached to the manipulator arm, renewing the pioneering engineering
challenge the Swiss watchmaker took up 52 years ago.
"Rolex warmly congratulates James Cameron and the DEEPSEA CHALLENGE

expedition team for their successful dive into history, in the vanguard of a new and
exciting era of marine exploration," said Gian Riccardo Marini, Chief Executive Officer
of Rolex SA. "The achievement is a product of their passion, courage, skill and the
highest standards of excellence and innovation in advancing human knowledge. We are
delighted to be part of DEEPSEA CHALLENGE, perpetuating half a century of tradition
in deep-sea diving."
Two of Cameron's passions -- filmmaking and diving -- blend in his feature and
documentary films. While working on "Titanic," he took 12 submersible dives to the
famed shipwreck two-and-a-half miles down in the North Atlantic. The technical
success of that expedition led Cameron to form Earthship Productions, which develops
films about ocean exploration and conservation. Since then he has led six expeditions,
authored a forensic study of the Bismarck wreck site and done extensive 3-D imaging of
deep hydrothermal vent sites along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the East Pacific Rise and the
Sea of Cortez. Cameron has made more than 70 deep submersible dives, including a
total of 33 to Titanic. Fifty-one of these dives were in Russian Mir submersibles to
depths of up to 3.03 miles (4.87 km).
The DEEPSEA CHALLENGE expedition is being chronicled for a 3-D feature film for
theatrical release on the intensive technological and scientific efforts behind this historic
dive -- which will subsequently be broadcast on the National Geographic Channel --
and is being documented for National Geographic magazine. Cameron also will
collaborate with National Geographic to create broad-based educational outreach
materials.
Additional major funding for the 3-D feature film, education and digital outreach has
been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which supports original research and
public understanding of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, is the DEEPSEA CHALLENGE's

primary science collaborator. For nearly a decade, Scripps has been involved with
Cameron in developing new ways to explore and study the deepest parts of the oceans.
With its decades-long history of deep-sea exploration, Scripps is recognized as a world
leader in investigating the science of the deep ocean, from exploring the deep's
geological features to researching its exotic marine life inhabitants.
The expedition also is collaborating with the University of Hawaii, Jet Propulsion
Laboratory and the University of Guam.
Permits for the "Challenger Deep" research were secured from the Federated States of
Micronesia. The majority of the Mariana Trench is now a U.S. protected zone under a
2009 proclamation by President George W. Bush that established the Marianas Trench
Marine National Monument and gave management responsibility to the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service in consultation with the National Marine Fisheries Service. The U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service issued permits for dives in the U.S. areas of the trench.

Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by National Geographic Society.
source cited above.
staff.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #25 - Wandering Continents Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
1.
2.
3.
New Light Shed On Wandering
Continents
ScienceDaily (Mar. 22, 2012) — A layer of partially molten rock about 22 to 75 miles
underground can't be the only mechanism that allows continents to gradually shift their
position over millions of years, according to a NASA-sponsored researcher. The result
gives insight into what allows plate tectonics -- the movement of Earth's crustal plates --
to occur.
"This melt-rich layer is actually quite spotty under the Pacific Ocean basin and
surrounding areas, as revealed by my analysis of seismometer data," says Dr. Nicholas
Schmerr, a NASA Postdoctoral Program fellow. "Since it only exists in certain places, it
can't be the only reason why rigid crustal plates carrying the continents can slide over
softer rock below." Schmerr, who is stationed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Md., is author of a paper on this research appearing in Science March 23.
The slow slide of Earth's continents results from plate tectonics. Our planet is more than
four billion years old, and over this time, the forces of plate tectonics have carried
continents many thousands of miles, forging mountain ranges when they collided and
valleys that sometimes filled with oceans when they were torn apart. This continental
drift could also have changed the climate by redirecting currents in the ocean and
atmosphere.
The outermost layer of Earth, the lithosphere, is broken into numerous tectonic plates.
The lithosphere consists of the crust and an underlying layer of cool and rigid mantle.
Beneath the oceans, the lithosphere is relatively thin (about 65 miles), though beneath
continents, it can be as thick as 200 miles. Lying beneath the lithosphere is the
asthenosphere, a layer of rock that is slowly deforming and gradually flowing like taffy.
Heat in Earth's core produced by the radioactive decay of elements escapes and warms
mantle rocks above, making them softer and less viscous, and also causes them to
convect. Like the circulating blobs in a lava lamp, rock in the mantle rises where it is
warmer than its surroundings, and sinks where it's cooler. This churn moves the
continental plates above, similar to the way a raft of froth gets pushed around the
surface of a simmering pot of soup.
Although the basic process that drives plate tectonics is understood, many details
remain a mystery. "Something has to decouple the crustal plates from the asthenosphere
so they can slide over it," says Schmerr. "Numerous theories have been proposed, and
one of those was that a melt-rich layer lubricates the boundary between the lithosphere
and the asthenosphere, allowing the crustal plates to slide. However, since this layer is
only present in certain regions under the Pacific plate, it can't be the only mechanism
that allows plate tectonics to happen there. Something else must be letting the plate
slide in areas where the melt doesn't exist."
Other possible mechanisms that would make the boundary between the lithosphere and
the asthenosphere flow more easily include the addition of volatile material like water
to the rock and differences in composition, temperature, or the grain size of minerals in
this region. However, current data lacks the resolution to distinguish among them.
Schmerr made the discovery by analyzing the arrival times of earthquake waves at
seismometers around the globe. Earthquakes generate various kinds of waves; one type
has a back-and-forth motion and is called a shear wave, or S-wave. S-waves traveling
through Earth will bounce or reflect off material interfaces inside Earth, arriving at
different times depending on where they interact with these interfaces.
One type of S-wave reflects from Earth's surface halfway between an earthquake and a
seismometer. An S-wave encountering a deeper melt layer at the lithosphere-
asthenosphere boundary at this location will take a slightly shorter path to the
seismometer and therefore arrive several tens of seconds earlier. By comparing the
arrival times, heights, and shapes of the primary and the melt-layer-reflected waves at
various locations, Schmerr could estimate the depth and seismic properties of melt
layers under the Pacific Ocean basin.
"Most of the melt layers are where you would expect to find them, like under volcanic
regions like Hawaii and various active undersea volcanoes, or around subduction zones
-- areas at the edge of a continental plate where the oceanic plate is sinking into the deep
interior and producing melt," said Schmerr. "However, the interesting result is that this
layer does not exist everywhere, suggesting something other than melt is needed to
explain the properties of the asthenosphere."
Understanding how plate tectonics works on Earth could help us figure out how other
rocky planets evolved, according to Schmerr. For example, Venus has no oceans, and no
evidence of plate tectonics, either. This might be a clue that water is needed for plate
tectonics to work. One theory proposes that without water, the asthenosphere of Venus
will be more rigid and unable to sustain plates, suggesting internal heat is released in
some other way, maybe through periodic eruptions of global volcanism.
Schmerr plans to analyze data from other seismometer networks to see if the same
patchy pattern of melt layers exists under other oceans and the continents as well. The
research was supported by the NASA Postdoctoral Program and the Carnegie
Institution of Washington Department of Terrestrial Magnetism Postdoctoral
Fellowship.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by NASA/Goddard Space Flight
Center.
source cited above.
Journal Reference:
1. Nicholas Schmerr. The Gutenberg Discontinuity: Melt at the Lithosphere-

Asthenosphere Boundary. Science, 23 March 2012: 1480-1483 DOI: 10.1126/
science.1215433
staff.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #26 - Mantle Water Monitoring Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
1.
2.
3.
Seismic Survey at the Mariana Trench Will
Follow Water Dragged Down Into the
Earth's Mantle
ScienceDaily (Mar. 22, 2012) — Last month, Doug Wiens, PhD, professor of earth and
planetary science at Washington University in St. Louis, and two WUSTL students were
cruising the tropical waters of the western Pacific above the Mariana trench aboard the
research vessel Thomas G. Thompson.
The trench is a subduction zone, where the ancient, cold and dense Pacific plate slides
beneath the younger, lighter high-riding Mariana Plate, the leading edge of the Pacific
Plate sinking deep into Earth's mantle as the plates slowly converge.
Taking turns with his shipmates, Wiens swung bright-yellow ocean bottom
seismometers and hydrophones off the fantail, and lowered them gently to the water's
surface, as the ship laid out a matrix of instruments for a seismic survey on the trench.
The survey, which Wiens leads together with Daniel Lizarralde, PhD, of the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution, will follow the water chemically bound to the down-diving
Pacific Plate or trapped in deep faults that open in the plate as it bends. The work is
funded by the National Science Foundation.
Scientists have only recently begun to study the subsurface water cycle, which promises
to be as important as the more familiar surface water cycle to the character of the planet.
Hydration reactions along the subducting plate are thought to carry water deep into
Earth, and dehydration reactions at greater depths release fluids into the overlying
mantle that promote melting and volcanism.
The water also plays a role in the strong earthquakes characteristic of subduction zones.
Hydrated rock and water under high pressure are thought to lubricate the boundary
between the plates and to permit sudden slippage.
Dropping the instruments

Between Jan. 26 and Feb. 9, working day and night, watch-on and watch-off, the
Thompson laid down 80 ocean bottom seismometers and five hydrophones.
The hydrophones, which detect pressure waves and convert them into electrical signals,
provide less information than the seismometers, which register ground motion, but they
can be tethered four miles deep in the water column where the bottom is so far down
seismometers would implode as they sank.
The Thompson sailed over some of the most famous real estate in the world, the Mariana
trench, which includes the bathtub-shaped depression called the Challenger Deep, to
which Avatar director James Cameron plans to plunge in a purpose-built one-man
submersible called the Deep Challenger.
Seven miles down, the pressure in the Deep is 1,000 atmospheres (1,000 times the
pressure at sea level on dry land) or roughly 8 tons per square inch. Seismometers, says
Wiens, only go down four miles.
The trench is created by the subduction of some of the world's oldest oceanic crust,
which plunges underneath the Mariana Isalnds so steeply at places that it is going
almost straight down.
The active survey
After the Thompson returned to Guam and Wiens flew back to St. Louis to resume his
less romantic duties as chair of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, the
research vessel Marcus G. Langseth began to sail transects above the matrix of
seismometers, firing the 36-airgun array on its back deck.
The sound blasts reflected from the boundaries between rock layers a few miles beneath
the ocean floor were picked up by an five-mile-long "streamer," or hose containing
many hydrophones, towed just beneath the surface behind the ship.
This was the "active" stage of a seismic survey with a "passive" stage yet to come.
After the seismic survey, the Langseth returned to pick up 60 seismometers, leaving
behind 20 broadband seismometers and the hydrophones that will listen for a year to
the reverberations from distant earthquakes, allowing the seismologists to map
structures as deep as 60 miles beneath the surface.
In the meantime Patrick Shore, a research scientist in earth and planetary science, and
two Washington University students had set sail across the ocean in a tiny vessel, the
Kaiyu III, to install seismometers on the Mariana islands that will also supply data for
the "passive" stage of the survey.
Water, water everywhere
Water plays a completely different role at depth than it does on the surface of Earth.
Water infiltrating the mantle through faults hydrates the mantle rock on either side of
the fault.
In a low temperature process called serpentinization, it transforms mantle rock such as

the green periodotite into serpentinite, a rock with a dark scaly surface like a serpent's
skin.
As the slab plunges yet deeper, dehydration reactions release water, which at such great
pressure and temperature exists as a supercritical fluid that can drift through materials
like a gas and dissolve them like a fluid. The fluid rises into the overlying mantle where
it lowers the melting point of rock and triggers the violent eruptions of magma that
created the Mariana Islands, to which Shore was sailing.
"We think that much of the water that goes down at the Mariana trench actually comes
back out of the Earth into the atmosphere as water vapor when the volcanos erupt
hundreds of miles away," Wiens says.
The scientists will map the distribution of serpentinite in the subducting plate and
overlying mantle, by looking for regions where certain seismicwaves travel more slowly
than usual.
Tracing the water cycle within subduction zones will allow the scientists to better
understand island-arc volcanism and subduction-zone earthquakes, which are among
the most powerful in the world But the role of subsurface water is not limited to these
zones. Scientists don't know how subduction got started in the first place, but water
may be a necessary ingredient. Venus, which is in many ways similar to Earth, has
volcanism but no plate tectonics, probably because it is bone dry.

Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Washington University in St.
Louis.
source cited above.
staff.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #27 - Thawing Permafrost Signs Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
1.
2.
3.
Signs of Thawing Permafrost Revealed
from Space
ScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2012) — Satellite are seeing changes in land surfaces in high detail
at northern latitudes, indicating thawing permafrost. This releases greenhouse gases
into parts of the Arctic, exacerbating the effects of climate change.

Permafrost is ground that remains at or below 0°C for at least two consecutive years
and usually appears in areas at high latitudes such as Alaska, Siberia and Northern
Scandinavia, or at high altitudes like the Andes, Himalayas and the Alps.
About half of the world’s underground organic carbon is found in northern permafrost
regions. This is more than double the amount of carbon in the atmosphere in the form of
the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane.
The effects of climate change are most severe and rapid in the Arctic, causing the
permafrost to thaw. When it does, it releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,
exacerbating the effects of climate change.
Although permafrost cannot be directly measured from space, factors such as surface
temperature, land cover and snow parameters, soil moisture and terrain changes can be
captured by satellites.
The use of satellite data like from ESA’s Envisat, along with other Earth-observing
satellites and intensive field measurements, allows the permafrost research community
to get a panoptic view of permafrost phenomena from a local to a Circum-Arctic
dimension.
“Combining field measurements with remote sensing and climate models can advance
our understanding of the complex processes in the permafrost region and improve
projections of the future climate,” said Dr Hans-Wolfgang Hubberten, head of the
Alfred Wegner Institute Research Unit (Germany) and President of the International
Permafrost Association.
Last month, more than 60 permafrost scientists and Earth observation specialists came
together for the Third Permafrost User Workshop at the Alfred Wegener Institute in
Potsdam, Germany, to discuss their latest findings.
“The already available Permafrost products provide researchers with valuable datasets
which can be used in addition to other observational data for climate and hydrological
modelling,” said Dr Leonid Bobylev, the director of the Nansen Centre in St. Petersburg.
“However, for climate change studies – and in particular for evaluation of the climate
models’ performance – it is essential to get a longer time series of satellite observational
data.
“Therefore, the Permafrost related measurements should be continued in the future and
extended consistently in the past.”
ESA will continue to monitor the permafrost region with its Envisat satellite and the
upcoming Sentinel satellite series for Europe’s Global Monitoring for Environment and
Security (GMES) programme.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by European Space Agency
(ESA), via AlphaGalileo.
source cited above.
staff.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #40 - Extreme Weather Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
Directions: Take a few minutes to read the article below either online (or on the back
of this page.) Write responses to the statements or questions below. Cut/copy/paste is
not allowed – use your own words and thoughts, based in research if needed.
1.
2.
3.
Extreme Weather of Last Decade Part of
Larger Pattern Linked to Global Warming
ScienceDaily (Mar. 25, 2012) — The past decade has been one of unprecedented weather
extremes. Scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in
Germany argue that the high incidence of extremes is not merely accidental. From the
many single events a pattern emerges. At least for extreme rainfall and heat waves the
link with human-caused global warming is clear, the scientists show in a new analysis of
scientific evidence in the journal Nature Climate Change. Less clear is the link between
warming and storms, despite the observed increase in the intensity of hurricanes.
In 2011 alone, the US was hit by 14 extreme weather events which caused damages
exceeding one billion dollars each -- in several states the months of January to October
were the wettest ever recorded. Japan also registered record rainfalls, while the
Yangtze river basin in China suffered a record drought. Similar record-breaking events
occurred also in previous years. In 2010, Western Russia experienced the hottest
summer in centuries, while in Pakistan and Australia record-breaking amounts of rain
fell. 2003 saw Europe´s hottest summer in at least half a millennium. And in 2002, the
weather station of Zinnwald-Georgenfeld measured more rain in one day than ever
before recorded anywhere in Germany -- what followed was the worst flooding of the
Elbe river for centuries.
A question of probabilities
"The question is whether these weather extremes are coincidental or a result of climate
change," says Dim Coumou, lead author of the article. "Global warming can generally
not be proven to cause individual extreme events -- but in the sum of events the link to
climate change becomes clear." This is what his analysis of data and published studies
shows. "It is not a question of yes or no, but a question of probabilities," Coumou
explains. The recent high incidence of weather records is no longer normal, he says.
"It´s like a game with loaded dice," says Coumou. "A six can appear every now and
then, and you never know when it happens. But now it appears much more often,
because we have changed the dice." The past week illustrates this: between March 13th
and 19th alone, historical heat records were exceeded in more than a thousand places in
North America.
Three pillars: basic physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations
The scientists base their analysis on three pillars: basic physics, statistical analysis and
computer simulations. Elementary physical principles already suggest that a warming
of the atmosphere leads to more extremes. For example, warm air can hold more
moisture until it rains out. Secondly, clear statistical trends can be found in temperature
and precipitation data, the scientists explain. And thirdly, detailed computer simulations
also confirm the relation between warming and records in both temperature and
precipitation.
With warmer ocean temperatures, tropical storms -- called typhoons or hurricanes,

depending on the region -- should increase in intensity but not in number, according to
the current state of knowledge. In the past decade, several record-breaking storms
occurred, for example hurricane Wilma in 2004. But the dependencies are complex and
not yet fully understood. The observed strong increase in the intensity of tropical
storms in the North Atlantic between 1980 and 2005, for example, could be caused not
just by surface warming but by a cooling of the upper atmosphere. Furthermore, there
are questions about the precision and reliability of historic storm data.
Overall, cold extremes decrease with global warming, the scientists found. But this does
not compensate for the increase in heat extremes.
Climatic warming can turn an extreme event into a record-breaking event
"Single weather extremes are often related to regional processes, like a blocking high
pressure system or natural phenomena like El Niño," says Stefan Rahmstorf, co-author
of the article and chair of the Earth System Analysis department at PIK. "These are
complex processes that we are investigating further. But now these processes unfold
against the background of climatic warming. That can turn an extreme event into a
record-breaking event."
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Potsdam Institute for Climate
Impact Research (PIK).
source cited above.
Journal Reference:
1. Dim Coumou, Stefan Rahmstorf. A decade of weather extremes. Nature Climate

Change, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1452
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or
its staff.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #29 - Dinosaur Skeletons Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
1.
2.
3.
Why Do Dinosaur Skeletons Look So
Weird?
ScienceDaily (Feb. 16, 2012) — Many fossilized dinosaurs have been found in a twisted
posture. Scientists have long interpreted this as a sign of death spasms. Two researchers
from Basel and Mainz now come to the conclusion that this bizarre deformations
occurred only during the decomposition of dead dinosaurs.
More or less complete and articulated skeletons of dinosaurs with a long neck and tail
often exhibit a body posture in which the head and neck are recurved over the back of
the animal. This posture, also known from Archaeopteryx, has been fascinating
paleontologists for more than 150 years. It was called "bicycle pose" when talking with a
wink, or "opisthotonic posture" in a more oppressive way of speaking.
The latter alludes to an accessory symptom of tetanus, well known in human and
veterinarian medicine. Usually, an "opisthotonic posture" like that is the result of
vitamin deficiency, poisoning or damage to the cerebellum.
Basically, the cerebellum is a brain region that controls fine muscle movement, which
includes the body's antigravity muscles that keep the head and tail upright. If the
cerebellum ceases to function, the antigravity muscles will clench at full force, tipping
the head and tail back, and contracting the limbs.
A syndrome like that as a petrified expression of death throes was discussed for the first
time about 100 years ago for some vertebrate fossils, but the acceptance of this
interpretation declined during the following decades. In 2007, this "opisthotonus
hypothesis" was newly posted by a veterinarian and a palaeontologist. This study,
generously planned, received much attention in the public and the scientific community.
Now, five years later, two scientists from Switzerland and Germany have re-evaluated
the revitalized "opisthotonus hypothesis" and examined one of its icons, the famous
bipedal dinosaur Compsognathus longipes from the "Solnhofen
Archipelago" (Germany). It is widely acknowledged that this 150-millions-years-old
land-living dinosaur was embedded in a watery grave of a tropical lagoon.
"In our opinion, the most critical point in the newly discussed scenario of the
preservation of an opisthotonic posture in a fossil is the requirement that terrestrial
vertebrates must have been embedded immediately after death without substantial
transport. But consigning a carcass from land to sea and the following need of sinking
through the water column for only a few decimetres or meters is nothing else" says
sedimentologist Achim Reisdorf from University of Basel's Institute of Geology and
Paleontology.
Biomechanics in Watery Graves Convinced that the back arching was generated, not by
death throes, but by postmortem alterations of a decaying carcass, the researchers made
experiments with plucked chicken necks and thoraxes, immersed in water. Submersed
in water, the necks spontaneously arched backwards for more than 90°. Ongoing decay
for some months even increased the degree of the pose. Thorough preparation and
dissection combined with testing revealed that a special ligament connecting the
vertebrae at their upper side was responsible for the recurved necks in the chickens.
This ligament, the so-called Ligamentum elasticum, is pre-stressed in living chickens,
but also in dead ones.
"Veterinarians may often have to do with sick and dying animals, where they see the
opisthotonic posture in many cases. Vertebrate palaeontologists, however, who want to
infer the environment in which the animals perished and finally were embedded have
to elucidate postmortem processes and biomechanical constraints too" says
palaeontologist Michael Wuttke from the Section of Earth History in the General
Department for the Conservation of Cultural History Rhineland Palatinate in Mainz
(Germany).
"A strong Ligamentum elasticum was essential for all long necked dinosaurs with a
long tail. The preloaded ligament helped them saving energy in their terrestrial mode of
life. Following their death, at which they were immersed in water, the stored energy
along the vertebra was strong enough to arch back the spine, increasingly so as more
and more muscles and other soft parts were decaying" conclude the researchers. "It is a
special highlight that, in the Compsognathus specimen, these gradual steps of
recurvature can be substantiated, too. Therefore, biomechanics is ruling the postmortem
weird posture of a carcass in a watery grave, not death throes."

Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Universität Basel, via
AlphaGalileo.
source cited above.
Journal Reference:
1. Achim G. Reisdorf, Michael Wuttke. Re-evaluating Moodie’s Opisthotonic-

Posture Hypothesis in Fossil Vertebrates Part I: Reptiles—the taphonomy of
the bipedal dinosaurs Compsognathus longipes and Juravenator starki from
the Solnhofen Archipelago (Jurassic, Germany). Palaeobiodiversity and
Palaeoenvironments, 2012; DOI: 10.1007/s12549-011-0068-y
staff.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #30 - Double Tsunami Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
1.
2.
3.
'Double Tsunami' Doubled Japan
Destruction
ScienceDaily (Dec. 5, 2011) — Researchers have discovered that the destructive tsunami
generated by the March 2011 Tōhoku-Oki earthquake was a long-hypothesized
"merging tsunami" that doubled in intensity over rugged ocean ridges, amplifying its
destructive power before reaching shore.
Satellites captured not just one wave front that day, but at least two, which merged to
form a single double-high wave far out at sea -- one capable of traveling long distances
without losing its power. Ocean ridges and undersea mountain chains pushed the
waves together, but only along certain directions from the tsunami's origin.
The discovery helps explain how tsunamis can cross ocean basins to cause massive
destruction at some locations while leaving others unscathed, and raises hope that
scientists may be able to improve tsunami forecasts.
At a news conference Dec. 5 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San

Francisco, Y. Tony Song, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL);
and C.K. Shum, professor and Distinguished University Scholar in the Division of
Geodetic Science, School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University, discussed the
satellite data and simulations that enabled them to piece the story together.
"It was a one-in-ten-million chance that we were able to observe this double wave with
satellites," said Song, the study's principal investigator. "Researchers have suspected for
decades that such 'merging tsunamis' might have been responsible for the 1960 Chilean
tsunami that killed many in Japan and Hawaii, but nobody had definitively observed a
merging tsunami until now."
"It was like looking for a ghost," he continued. "A NASA/French Space Agency satellite
altimeter happened to be in the right place at the right time to capture the double wave
and verify its existence."
Shum agreed. "We were very lucky, not only in the timing of the satellite, but also to
have access to such detailed GPS-observed ground motion data from Japan to initiate
Tony's tsunami model, and to validate the model results using the satellite data. Now
we can use what we learned to make better forecasts of tsunami danger in specific
coastal regions anywhere in the world, depending on the location and the mechanism of
an undersea quake."
The NASA/Centre National d'Etudes Spaciales Jason-1 satellite passed over the
tsunami on March 11, as did two other satellites: the NASA/European Jason-2 and the
European Space Agency's EnviSAT. All three carry a radar altimeter, which measures
sea level changes to an accuracy of a few centimeters.
Each satellite crossed the tsunami at a different location. Jason-2 and EnviSAT measured
wave heights of 20 cm (8 inches) and 30 cm (12 inches), respectively. But as Jason-1
passed over the undersea Mid-Pacific Mountains to the east, it captured a wave front
measuring 70 cm (28 inches).
The researchers conjectured ridges and undersea mountain chains on the ocean floor
deflected parts of the initial tsunami wave away from each other to form independent
jets shooting off in different directions, each with its own wave front.
The sea floor topography nudges tsunami waves in varying directions and can make a
tsunami's destruction appear random. For that reason, hazard maps that try to predict
where tsunamis will strike rely on sub-sea topography. Previously, these maps only
considered topography near a particular shoreline. This study suggests scientists may
be able to create maps that take into account all undersea topography, even sub-sea
ridges and mountains far from shore.
Song and his team were able to verify the satellite data through model simulations
based on independent data, including the GPS data from Japan and buoy data from the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Deep-ocean Assessment and
Reporting of Tsunamis program.
"Tools based on this research could help officials forecast the potential for tsunami jets
to merge," said Song. "This, in turn, could lead to more accurate coastal tsunami hazard
maps to protect communities and critical infrastructure."
Song and Shum's collaborators include Ichiro Fukumori, an oceanographer and

supervisor in JPL's Ocean Circulation Group; and Yuchan Yi, a research scientist in the
Division of Geodetic Science, School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State.
This research was supported by NASA.

Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Ohio State University. The
original article was written by Pam Frost Gorder.
source cited above.
staff.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #31 - Asteroid Is A Runt Planet Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/science/space/asteroid-vesta-proves-

to-be-dwarf-planet.html?_r=1&ref=space
1.
2.
3.
Observations of an Asteroid Provide Hints
of How the Earth Came Together
Confirmed: Vesta, the second largest of the asteroids, is a runt planet.
Observations by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft show that Vesta formed within the first few
million years of the solar system, that its surface is in places as bright as snow and in
others as dark as coal, and that it contains an iron core that may have even briefly
generated a magnetic field — all very planetlike features.
Both Vesta and Ceres, the largest asteroid and the Dawn’s next destination, are also
heavy enough that gravity has made them round.
“The Dawn team finds itself calling these things planets all the time,” Christopher T.
Russell, the mission’s principal investigator, said in an interview.
In the current parlance of astronomers, however, Vesta and Ceres, like Pluto, are dwarf
planets, not planets. The definition of planet, set by the International Astronomical
Union in 2006, not only takes into account size and appearance, but also requires that a
planet be the gravitational bully in its orbit. While Vesta and Ceres are round, they have
not vacuumed up or pushed away thousands of other rocks in similar orbits.
But that is in large part what makes Vesta intriguing. The asteroid belt between Mars
and Jupiter seems to be the remnants of a planet that never came together, and a closer
look at Vesta could reveal much about the planet-building process. Dust coalesced into
larger chunks like Vesta, which is 330 miles wide, and these then combined to form the
rocky planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.
So far, what scientists have learned from the Dawn fits with what they thought. “Science
doesn’t have to go back to the drawing board right now,” Dr. Russell said.
The scientists report their Vesta findings in six articles in Friday’s issue of the journal
Science.
One of the surprises is that two giant craters near the south pole of Vesta formed
relatively recently: one of them a billion years ago, the other at least two billion years
ago. On other solar system bodies like the Moon, such giant impacts occurred very early
in the history of the solar system, about four billion years ago. The mineralogical
measurements also confirm that a class of meteorites that have been found on Earth
came from Vesta, very likely ejected by the impact that created the giant craters.
Vesta’s pockmarked surface could also help tell why the pieces of the asteroid belt never
became a planet.
After Vesta formed, the gravity of newly formed Jupiter stopped further growth. The
traditional view is that Jupiter’s pull accelerated the Vesta-size asteroids so that they
smashed themselves apart instead of gently coming together. Jupiter would have
scattered away many of the original asteroids, but slowly.
An alternate idea, however, is that Jupiter, nudged by leftover gas and dust in the early
solar system, migrated inward to where Mars orbits today, scattering away the
asteroids, and later was pulled outward again by the gravity of Saturn, and in its wake
pulled back some asteroids.
“Vesta is definitely super interesting for the work that we did,” said Kelvin Walsh, a
research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., whose computer
simulations indicated that this could explain the current asteroid belt and why Mars is
small compared with Earth and Venus. He is not a member of the Dawn team.
The 2,000 craters on Vesta cataloged by the Dawn scientists could tell the history of
impacts, and if Dr. Walsh is right, there might be fewer than would be predicted by the
traditional picture.
The Dawn spacecraft has been orbiting Vesta since last July. This August, it will propel
itself away from Vesta and head toward Ceres, which is slightly farther out from the
Sun, but of a much different makeup. While Vesta is all dense rock and metal, Ceres
appears to contain large amounts of ice. That could help solve another open question of
the solar system: Where did Earth’s water come from?
It might have come from Ceres-like bodies that formed farther out in the solar system
and then were pulled in by a migrating Jupiter, Dr. Walsh said.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #32 - Waterless Fracking Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
Read more: http://www.midwestenergynews.com/2012/05/15/waterless-fracking-

technique-makes-its-debut-in-ohio/
1.
2.
3.
Waterless fracking technique makes its
debut in Ohio
>> By Anthony Brino • 5/15/2012 • 5 Comments
A GasFrac operation in Alberta (PR photo)
Some 8,000 feet deep and 450 million years old, the Utica Shale has a lot of petroleum —
crude oil, natural gas and byproducts like ethane.
Although no one really knows how much there is, oil and gas companies are flocking to
eastern Ohio, home to some of the shale’s most amenable portions.
“Right now we’re still in an exploratory phase,” said Brian Hickman, a spokesperson
for the Ohio Oil and Gas Association.
It’s also an experimental phase for the technology that makes shale extraction possible,
Hickman said. Companies that have used horizontal hydraulic fracturing successfully
in the Marcellus, Barnett and other shales are still trying to figure out how to best use it
in the Utica.
In Ohio, 65 Utica Shale wells have been drilled so far, each requiring 5 to 6 million
gallons of water, said Heidi Hetzel-Evans, a spokesperson for the Ohio Department of
Natural Resources.
But as Utica drillers analyze early results, at least one company thinks water might be
unnecessary — or even a hindrance — and that using a waterless, propane-based form
of fracking called LPG might be more efficient and profitable.
That currently unnamed company has asked GasFrac Energy Services to frack two Utica
trial wells in Ohio using LPG, short for liquid petroleum gas. Founded in 2006 and
based in Calgary, GasFrac is apparently the world’s only provider of LPG fracking and
has used it about 1,200 times, mostly in western Canada and also in Texas and
Colorado.
LPG uses a mixture of propane (and occasionally some butane) that’s pressurized to the
consistency of a gel. Then, like water-based fracking, it’s injected through pipes at high
pressure underground to release oil and gas by cracking open rocks using sand (or
another proppant).
Unlike water, though, LPG naturally mixes with petroleum, so it returns to the surface
with the oil or gas being extracted. And since LPG is electrically neutral and lacks much
friction, it doesn’t dissolve any salts, heavy metals or radioactive compounds —
compared to water, in which these things return to the surface and make a typically
toxic mixture even more so.
Fracking, of course, is enormously controversial, mostly because of concerns of

potential risks to water supplies. LPG fracking eliminates an entire wastestream — the
copious amounts of toxic “flowback” water that has to be reused, treated and
discharged into waterways, or disposed of in deep injection wells, which have been
linked to earthquakes in Ohio.
But why would companies using hydro-fracking — which has proven to be pretty
profitable — be interested in using a niche technology like LPG?
“I think the results they’re getting [in the Utica] are sub-par, and they’re looking for an
alternative,” said Kyle Ward, GasFrac’s spokesperson.
GasFrac argues that LPG, compared to hydro-fracking, is both more environmentally

sustainable and economically efficient in the the long run — a claim that has drawn
some skepticism.
Terry Engelder, the Penn State University geologist who’s been dubbed the “Godfather”
of the Marcellus Shale for his calculations of the rock layer’s natural gas potential, says
water is the “mechanically most efficient fluid for breaking apart rock.”
Anthony Ingraffea, a Cornell University engineer who spent 20 years researching

fracking for Schlumberger, one of the largest fracking companies, said: “I’ll give
[GasFrac] credit that geochemically, it’s much better to use a hydrocarbon [propane and
butane] to stimulate a reservoir…But I’m not sure how well this technique will work in
a high volume long lateral shale formation [like the Utica or Marcellus shales] because
they haven’t released proprietary data. That’s still unknown.”
Petroleum engineers in the 1960s and 1970s tried using propane fracking, but the
potential for explosion — which is still a risk today, if better managed — left the
technology uneconomical.
Last year, the petroleum giant Chevron used LPG to frack several natural gas wells in
the Piceance Basin, home to several lucrative coal, oil and natural gas deposits in
Colorado. The company’s annual report, while not mentioning GasFrac, noted that LPG
“significantly increases production while minimizing water usage.”
The company BlackBrush recently announced a two-year contract with GasFrac in

Texas’ oil-rich Eagle Ford Shale.
Offering an explanation for the dearth of public data on GasFrac’s work for other
companies, Robert Lestz, the company’s chief tech officer, said, “Because our results our
so superior to what people have done before, they’re not interested in sharing those
results.”
In Ohio, GasFrac’s spokesman said the company hopes to start the Utica wells by the
end of the month.
It could be a proving ground for the technology. “It’s no secret we’re going to the
Utica,” Zeke Zeringue, GasFrac’s CEO, said in a May conference call. “Obviously we
hope that leads to an establishment of some sort of base of operations.”
While GasFrac has been keen to note in its recent marketing efforts that LPG uses no
water, the technology’s profitability will ultimately determine its potential, said Michael
Mazar, a financial analyst who follows the company for BMO Capital Markets.
“The environmental benefits are secondary.”
CORRECTION: Because of an editor’s error, Robert Lestz was incorrectly identified as

GasFrac’s founder in an earlier version of this story.
Portions of this story were originally reported for InsideClimateNews.
Anthony Brino is a Springfield, Illinois-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in The
Allegheny Front, InsideClimate News and Illinois Statehouse News.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #33 - GPS Earthquake Monitors Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
Read more: http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2012/apr/

HQ_12-108_GPS_Earthquake_Monitoring.html
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NASA Tests GPS Monitoring System for Big U.S.
Earthquakes

WASHINGTON -- The space-based technology that lets GPS-equipped motorists
constantly update their precise location will undergo a major test of its ability to rapidly
pinpoint the location and magnitude of strong earthquakes across the western United
States. Results from the new Real-time Earthquake Analysis for Disaster (READI)
Mitigation Network soon could be used to assist prompt disaster response and more
accurate tsunami warnings.
The new research network builds on decades of technology development supported by

the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, NASA, and the U.S.
Geological Survey (USGS). The network uses real-time GPS measurements from nearly
500 stations throughout California, Oregon and Washington. When a large earthquake
is detected, GPS data are used to automatically calculate its vital characteristics
including location, magnitude and details about the fault rupture.
"With the READI network we are enabling continued development of real-time GPS
technologies to advance national and international early warning disaster systems," said
Craig Dobson, natural hazards program manager in the Earth Science Division at
NASA Headquarters in Washington. "This prototype system is a significant step
towards realizing the goal of providing Pacific basin-wide natural hazards capability
around the Pacific 'Ring of Fire.'"
Accurate and rapid identification of earthquakes of magnitude 6.0 and stronger is

critical for disaster response and mitigation efforts, especially for tsunamis. Calculating
the strength of a tsunami requires detailed knowledge of the size of the earthquake and
associated ground movements. Acquiring this type of data for very large earthquakes is
a challenge for traditional seismological instruments that measure ground shaking.
High-precision, second-by-second measurements of ground displacements using GPS

have been shown to reduce the time needed to characterize large earthquakes and to
increase the accuracy of subsequent tsunami predictions. After the capabilities of the
network have been fully demonstrated, it is intended to be used by appropriate natural
hazard monitoring agencies. USGS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration are responsible for detecting and issuing warnings on earthquakes and
tsunamis, respectively.
"By using GPS to measure ground deformation from large earthquakes, we can reduce
the time needed to locate and characterize the damage from large seismic events to
several minutes," said Yehuda Bock, director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography's
Orbit and Permanent Array Center in La Jolla, Calif. "We now are poised to fully test the
prototype system this year."
The READI network is a collaboration of many institutions including Scripps at the

University of California in San Diego; Central Washington University in Ellensburg; the
University of Nevada in Reno; California Institute of Technology/Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena; UNAVCO in Boulder, Colo.; and the University of
California at Berkeley.
NASA, NSF, USGS, and other federal, state, and local partners support the GPS stations
in the network, including the EarthScope Plate Boundary Observatory, the Pacific
Northwest Geodetic Array, the Bay Area Regional Deformation Array and the California
Real-Time Network.
"The relatively small investments in GPS-based natural hazards systems have

revolutionized the way we view the Earth and allowed us to develop this prototype
system with great potential benefits for the infrastructure and population in
earthquake-prone states in the western United States," said Frank Webb, Earth Science
Advanced Mission Concepts program manager at JPL.
The READI network is the outgrowth of nearly 25 years of U.S. government research
efforts to develop the capabilities and applications of GPS technology. The GPS satellite
system was created by the Department of Defense for military and ultimately civil
positioning needs. NASA leveraged this investment by supporting development of a
global GPS signal receiving network to improve the accuracy and utility of GPS
positioning information. Today that capability provides real-time, pinpoint positioning
and timing for a wide variety of uses from agriculture to Earth exploration.
"Conventional seismic networks have consistently struggled to rapidly identify the true
size of great earthquakes during the last decade," said Timothy Melbourne, director of
the Central Washington University's Pacific Northwest Geodetic Array. "This GPS
system is more likely to provide accurate and rapid estimates of the location and
amount of fault slip to fire, utility, medical and other first-response teams."
The GPS earthquake detection capability was first demonstrated by NASA-supported
research on a major 2004 Sumatra quake conducted by Geoffrey Blewitt and colleagues
at the University of Nevada in Reno.
For more information about NASA programs, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov
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Name Date
Literacy Lab #34 - Earlier Springtime? Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
Read more: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/early-bloom.html
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NASA - Decades of Data Show Spring
Advancing Faster Than Experiments
Suggest
Decades of Data Show Spring Advancing Faster Than Experiments Suggest
Plants are leafing out and flowering sooner each year than predicted by results from
controlled environmental warming experiments, according to data from a major new
archive of historical observations assembled with the help of a NASA researcher.
Researchers use experiments that manipulate the temperature of the environment

surrounding small plots of plants to gauge how specific plants will react to higher
temperatures. The observed plant responses can then be incorporated into models that
predict future ecosystem changes as temperatures around the globe continue to rise. But
when a group of scientists compared these results to a massive new archive of historical
observations, they found that the warming experiments are dramatically
underestimating how plants respond to climate change.
The results were published online in the journal Nature on May 2. In addition to
quantifying how a broad collection of plant species have responded to date to rising
temperatures, the study suggests that the way warming experiments are conducted
needs to be re-evaluated.
Cherry blossoms in Washington, DC have been blooming earlier in recent decades,
including a very early bloom this spring in March (pictured). (Credit: Elizabeth
Wolkovich, Biodiversity Research Centre, University of British Columbia-Vancouver)
› Larger image
"This suggests that predicted ecosystem changes -- including continuing advances in the
start of spring across much of the globe -- may be far greater than current estimates
based on data from warming experiments," said Elizabeth Wolkovich, who led the
interdisciplinary team of scientists behind the new research while she was a
postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego. "The long-term records
show that phenology is changing much faster than estimated based on the results of the
warming experiments. This suggests we need to reassess how we design and use results
from these experiments."
Benjamin Cook, of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia
University, New York, worked with Wolkovich to create the massive new archive of
long-term, natural phenology observations to gauge the accuracy of the phenological
predictions based on these plant warming experiments. The archive includes data from
1,558 species of wild plants on four continents. The historical records showed that
leafing and flowering will advance, on average, five to six days per degree Celsius -- a
finding that was consistent across species and datasets. These data show that estimates
based on data from warming experiments are underpredicting advances in flowering by
eight and a half times and advances in leafing by four times. The authors expect the
data archive to be an important benchmark in future phenology studies.
"These results are important because we rely heavily on warming experiments to

predict what will happen to ecosystems in the future," said Cook, who helped bring
together a research team including support from the National Center on Ecological
Analysis and Synthesis to build the archive of real-world observations. "With these
long-term observational records you may be able to pick up a shift in a plant
community over a few years that you wouldn't be able to observe in an experiment."
Researchers with the Boston-Area Climate Experiment are using techniques in their
plant-warming experiments designed to better reflect natural daily and seasonal
temperature cycles. This experiment is too new to have been in included in this study,
but its design addresses some of the concerns raised by the study. (Credit: Jeff Dukes,
Purdue University)
The study of phenology, the timing of annual plant events such as the first flowering
and leafing out of spring, provides one of the most consistent and visible responses to
climate change. Long-term historical records, some stretching back decades and even
centuries, show many species are now flowering and leafing out earlier, in step with
rising temperatures. Because these records aren't available everywhere and predicted
future warming is often outside the range of historical records, ecologists often use
controlled experiments that create warmer conditions in small plots to estimate how
different species will respond to expected temperature increases.
The timing of plants' flowering and leafing out in spring is not only a basic, natural
indicator of the state of the climate. Predicting plant responses to climate change has
important consequences for human water supply, pollination of crops and overall
ecosystem health.
Wolkovich, Cook and colleagues suggest a number of potential reasons the estimates
based on experimental data have underpredicted the plant response to higher
temperatures. There could be additional effects of climate change not mirrored in the
controlled experiments, or from the fact that the methods used to create warmth in the
studies could be creating counteracting effects such as drying out soils or reducing the
amount of sunlight reaching the plants.
"Continuing efforts to improve the design of warming experiments while maintaining

and extending long-term historical monitoring will be critical to pinpointing the reasons
for the differences, and will yield a more accurate picture of future plant communities
and ecosystems with continuing climate change," Wolkovich said.

Goddard Release No. 12-042
Leslie McCarthy
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, N.Y.
212-678-5507
leslie.m.mccarthy@nass.gov
Patrick Lynch
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-3854 / 757-897-2047
patrick.lynch@nasa.gov
Name Date
Literacy Lab #35 - Asteroid YU55 Flyby Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
Read more: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/asteroids/overview/yu55.html
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Asteroid and Comet Watch
Animation of the trajectory for asteroid 2005 YU55 - November 8-9, 2011. Image credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech
› Larger image
Asteroid 2005 YU55 is one of about 8,500 near-Earth objects to be catalogued to date.
What makes this space rock special is that its orbital path carries it safely past Earth
within the moon's orbit in early November 2011. The trajectory of 2005 YU55 is well
understood. At the point of closest approach, it will be no closer than 201,700 miles
(324,600 kilometers), or 0.85 the distance from the moon to Earth. The last time a space
rock as big as 2005 YU55 came as close to Earth was in 1976, although astronomers did
not know about the flyby at the time. The next known approach of an asteroid this large
will be in 2028.
NASA scientist plan to take full advantage of this cosmic opportunity. During tracking
of 2005 YU55, scientists will use antennas at NASA’s Deep Space Network in Goldstone,
Calif., and at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to bounce radio waves off the space
rock. Radar echoes returned from the asteroid will be collected and analyzed. NASA
scientists hope to obtain radar images of the asteroid from Goldstone as fine as about 7
feet (2 meters) per pixel. This should reveal a wealth of detail about the asteroid's
surface features, shape, dimensions and other physical properties.
This is not the first time 2005 YU55 has been in NASA's crosshairs. The asteroid was
"imaged" by the Arecibo Observatory on April 19, 2010. The space rock was about 2.3
million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Earth at the time. A ghostly image with
resolution of 7.5 meters (25 feet) per pixel was generated. It reveals 2005 YU55 as a
roughly spherical object about 400 meters (1,300 feet) in size. It also revealed the
asteroid is spinning slowly, with a rotation period of about 18 hours, and its surface is
darker than charcoal at optical wavelengths.
Data collected during Arecibo's observation of 2005 YU55 allowed the Near-Earth
Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., to
accurately refine the space rock's orbit. The gravitational influence of the asteroid will
have no detectable effect on anything here on Earth, including our planet's tides or
tectonic plates. Although 2005 YU55 is in an orbit that regularly brings it to the vicinity
of Earth (and Venus and Mars), the 2011 encounter with Earth is the closest this space
rock has come for at least the last 200 years.

D.C. Agle
818-393-9011
agle@jpl.nasa.gov
Name Date
Literacy Lab #36 - 102 At Midnight! Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
Read more: http://www.meteorologynews.com/2011/06/09/rare-heat-burst-strikes-

wichita-102-degrees-at-midnight/
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Rare Heat Burst Strikes Wichita: 102
Degrees at Midnight
(METEOROLOGYNEWS.COM) A rare heat burst struck Wichita, Kansas overnight,
resulting in temperatures spiking to over 100 degrees long after the sun had set for the
evening.
The automated weather station at the Wichita airport registered a jump from 85 degrees
to 102 degrees in a span of just 20 minutes, according to Stephanie Dunten, a
meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Wichita.
The surge in temperatures began at 11:22 p.m. CST (12:22am CDT) when a pocket of air
in the upper atmosphere collapsed to the surface, Dunten said. That sent winds of more
than 50 miles an hour through portions of the city as the air hit the ground and spread
out.Â According to KAKE-TV, Sedgwick County 911 dispatchers received calls of trees
and power lines down. The wind gust set off several alarm systems in the city.Â
Additionally, a middle school in the city lost most of the roof over its auditorium.
At one point, Westar reported more than 4,000 customers in the Wichita area without
power.
The dynamics of a heat burst are surprisingly basic, though they aren’t observed very
frequently – perhaps in part because their impacts are not widely felt: they traditionally
strike a relatively small area. Heat bursts generally originate from a collapsing
thunderstorm. As rain falls through the atmosphere at high elevations, it cools the air
beneath it as it evaporates into the air. When this air cools dramatically, it becomes
much more dense than the surrounding air, losing its buoyancy. This air then begins
plummeting to the surface. As the air descends through the atmosphere, it encounters
greater atmospheric pressure. This increase in pressure compresses the air molecules
quickly, resulting in a spike in the temperature.
The crashing of the air to the surface also results in a dramatic increase in observed
wind speeds as the air spreads out in all directions from the point at which it hit the
ground.
As a result, the automated station at the airport registered a high temperature of 102
degrees at 11:42 p.m. CST.
Two years ago, a similarly dramatic heat burst struck Oklahoma City, resulting in
temperatures spiking to 90 degrees after midnight on May 13, 2009.Â Wind speeds
topped 55 mph, resulting in widespread damage was widespread with small trees and
limbs reported down throughout the city.
Heat bursts have been observed in other Plains states in recent years. Â Kearney,
Nebraska was impacted by a heat burst in on June 20, 2006 when the temperature went
from 70 to 93 in minutes overnight and wind speeds topped 60 miles per hour.
More recently, on August 3rd, 2008, a heat burst in Sioux Falls, SD forced air downward
in such a dramatic fasion that the wind speeds over 50 miles per hour and the
temperature jumped from 70 to 101 in less than 20 minutes.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #37 - Undulus Asperatus Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
Read more: http://www.meteorologynews.com/2009/06/06/new-cloud-type-discovered-

undulus-asperatus/
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New Cloud Type Discovered: ‘Undulus
Asperatus’
(METEOROLOGYNEWS.com) In the first new cloud type to be officially designated in
over 50 years, members of the Cloud Appreciation Society are pushing for official
recognition of the undulating, ominous-appearing clouds.
Turbulent motions between differing air masses create undulating clouds as seen over
rural Kansas in the early morning hours of April 28, 2006. Meteorologists are proposing
these clouds be designated as the first new cloud type to be named in over 50 years:
Undulus Asperatus.
The Cloud Appreciation Society has designated the clouds as “Undulus Asperatus” or
alternatively, “Undulatus Asperatus.”Â The Latin term translates loosely as “turbulent
undulation.”Â Such clouds are relatively rare, but have been photographed in several
areas around the world.
Turbulent motions between differing air masses create undulating clouds as seen over
rural Kansas in the early morning hours of April 28, 2006. Meteorologists are proposing
these clouds be designated as the first new cloud type to be named in over 50 years:
Undulus Asperatus.
The ominous-looking clouds have been particularly common in the Plains states of the
United States, often during the morning or midday hours following convective
thunderstorm activity.Â These clouds are not considered a precursor to severe weather,
rather appear to form following rain or thunderstorm activity.
Jane Wiggins of Cedar Rapids, Iowa recently captured several spectacular images of the
new cloud type as viewed from a downtown office building.Â Several of her images
have recently been published by National Geographic Magazine – an honor which
Wiggins does not take lightly.
This turbulently undulating cloud photographed over Cedar Rapids Iowa may soon be
designated as the first new cloud type named in over 50 years: Undulus Asperatus.
Source: Jane Wiggins
“It is a bit like looking at the surface of a choppy sea from below,” said Gavin Pretor-
Pinney, founder of the Cloud Appreciation Society, who first identified the asperatus
cloud from photographs that were being sent in by members of the society.
“We try to identify and classify all of the images of clouds we get in, but there were
some that just didn’t seem to fit in any of the other categories, so I began to think it
might be a unique type of cloud.
“The underside of the clouds are quite rough and choppy. It looks very stormy, but
some of the reports we have been getting suggest that they tend to break up without
actually turning into a storm.”
The Royal Meteorological Society is now gathering detailed weather data for the days
and locations where the asperatus clouds have been seen in an attempt to understand
exactly what is causing them.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #38 - Urban Heat Islands Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
Read more: http://www.meteorologynews.com/2009/03/19/study-links-tornadoes-to-

urban-heat-island-effect/
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Study Links Tornadoes to Urban Heat
Island Effect | Meteorology News
Damage to the CNN building in downtown Atlanta, GA following a tornado on the

evening of March 14, 2008.
A recent study by experts on land-atmosphere interactions suggests a connection may
exist between large urban population centers and the intensity of tornadoes that impact
these areas.
The urban heat island effect is the term given to the hot, dry conditions generated by large
expanses of buildings, asphalt, and other human-made conditions that alter the
landscape otherwise covered by fields, forests, and bodies of water.Â Decades of
research have indicated that large urban areas reach higher temperatures during the
day, stay warmer at night, and tend to have drier air surrounding them, as there is little
open water or moist soil to provide atmospheric moisture.
Atlanta Tornado of 2008
The study indicates a connection between the intensity of the 2008 urban Atlanta
tornado and the heat island effect suggests that the hot, dry urban conditions may have
led to a larger discrepancy with the surrounding atmospheric conditions, enhancing
stability and thus intensifying the storm as it approached the city.
This map published by the Atlanta National Weather Service office describes the track
and intensity of the tornado that struck Atlanta, GA on 03/14/2008.Â Click for a high
resolution image (Credit:Â NOAA / NWS)
The recent research has taken our understanding of the urban heat island one step
further by connecting its impact to severe weather.Â “Urban regions create their own
weather,” said Dev Niyogi, a climatology professor at Purdue University in Indiana and
the lead author of the study, which was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration. “As we are becoming bigger and bigger in terms of our urban
footprint, there’s a distinct probability we are going to see cities have their own weather
patterns.”
However, not all meteorologists and climatologists agree.Â Harold Brooks, a research
meteorologist at the federal government’s National Severe Storms Laboratory, in
Norman, Okla., said it is already widely accepted that wet ground breeds tornadoes,
and noted that strikes on urban areas aren’t rare. There is no evidence suggesting
downtown areas are hit “any less or more than any other area of the same size,” Mr.
Brooks said. In the past decade, tornadoes have hit Nashville, Tenn.; Fort Worth, Texas;
and Miami, as well as Atlanta, he said.
Urban Tornadoes
A tornado strikes downtown Salt Lake City, UT in 1999.

The myth that tornadoes are less likely to strike urban areas continues to remain
pervasive, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.
It is a common – and definitely false myth that tornadoes do not strike downtown areas.
The odds are much lower due to the small areas covered, but paths can go anywhere –
including over downtown areas.Â St. Louis, MO, for instance, has been struck 4 times
in the last century.
It may seem tornadoes impact urban areas less frequently than rural areas simply
because urban population centers cover a much smaller fraction of land area than rural
areas.Â As such, any given tornado is more likely to impact a rural wheat field in
Kansas rather than the urban core of a city such as Wichita or Kansas City.
However, tornadoes impacting large urban areas are far from rare.Â Beyond the 2008
Atlanta tornado, violent tornadoes have also impacted other large urban centers:
• Omaha, NE (F5, 03/23/1913)

• Topeka, KS (F5, 06/08/1966)
• Lubbock, TX (F5, 05/11/1970)
• Nashville, TN (F3, 04/16/1998)
• Little Rock, AR (F3, 01/21/1999)
• Salt Lake City (F2, 08/11/1999)
• Fort Worth, TX (F3, 03/28/2000)
For a more exhaustive list and details, see the table compiled by Roger Edwards and Joe
Schaefer of the Storm Prediction Center on downtown tornadoes.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #39 - Wind Farm Heat Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
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Night-Warming Effect Found Over Large
Wind Farms in Texas
ScienceDaily (Apr. 30, 2012) — Large wind farms in certain areas in the United States
appear to affect local land surface temperatures, according to a paper published April
30 in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The study, led by Liming Zhou, an atmospheric scientist at the State University of New
York- (SUNY) Albany, provides insights about the possible effects of wind farms.
The results could be important for developing efficient adaptation and management
strategies to ensure long-term sustainability of wind power.
"This study indicates that land surface temperatures have warmed in the vicinity of
large wind farms in west-central Texas, especially at night," says Anjuli Bamzai,
program director in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Atmospheric
and Geospace Sciences, which funded the research.
"The observations and analyses are for a relatively short period, but raise important
issues that deserve attention as we move toward an era of rapid growth in wind farms
in our quest for alternate energy sources."
Considerable research has linked the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels
with rising global temperatures.
Consequently, many nations are moving toward cleaner sources of renewable energy
such as wind turbines. Generating wind power creates no emissions, uses no water and
is likely "green."
"We need to better understand the system with observations, and better describe and
model the complex processes involved, to predict how wind farms may affect future
weather and climate," said Zhou.
There have been a growing number of studies of wind farm effects on weather and
climate, primarily using numerical models due to the lack of observations over wind
farms.
As numerical models are computationally intensive and have uncertainties in
simulating regional and local weather and climate, said Zhou, remote sensing is likely
the most efficient and effective way to study wind farm effects over larger spatial and
longer temporal scales.
To understand the potential impact of wind farms on local weather and climate, Zhou's
team analyzed satellite-derived land surface temperatures from regions around large
wind farms in Texas for the period 2003-2011.
The researchers found a night-time warming effect over wind farms of up to 0.72
degrees Celsius per decade over the nine-year-period in which data were collected.
Because the spatial pattern of warming mirrors the geographic distribution of wind
turbines, the scientists attribute the warming primarily to wind farms.
The year-to-year land surface temperature over wind farms shows a persistent upward
trend from 2003 to 2011, consistent with the increasing number of operational wind
turbines with time.
"This warming effect is most likely caused by the turbulence in turbine wakes acting
like fans to pull down warmer near-surface air from higher altitudes at night," said
Somnath Baidya Roy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a co-author of
the paper.
While the warming effect reported is local and small compared to the strong
background year-to-year land surface temperature variation, the authors believe that
this work draws attention to an important scientific issue that requires further
investigation.
"The estimated warming trends only apply to the study region and to the study period,
and thus should not be interpolated into other regions, globally or over longer periods,"
Zhou said. "For a given wind farm, once there are no new wind turbines added, the
warming effect may reach a stable level."
The study represents a first step in exploring the potential of using satellite data to
quantify the possible effects of the development of big wind farms on weather and
climate, said Chris Thorncroft of SUNY-Albany, a co-author of the paper.
"We're expanding this approach to other wind farms," said Thorncroft, "and building
models to understand the physical processes and mechanisms driving the interactions
of wind turbines and the atmosphere boundary layer near the surface."
Other authors of the paper include Lance Bosart at SUNY-Albany, Yuhong Tian of
NOAA, and Yuanlong Hu at Terra-Gen Power LLC in San Diego, Calif.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by National Science Foundation.
source cited above.
Journal Reference:
1. Liming Zhou, Yuhong Tian, Somnath Baidya Roy, Chris Thorncroft, Lance F.
Bosart, Yuanlong Hu. Impacts of wind farms on land surface temperature.
Nature Climate Change, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/nclimate1505
staff.
Name Date
Literacy Lab #40 - Extreme Weather Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013
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Extreme Weather of Last Decade Part of
Larger Pattern Linked to Global Warming
ScienceDaily (Mar. 25, 2012) — The past decade has been one of unprecedented weather
extremes. Scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in
Germany argue that the high incidence of extremes is not merely accidental. From the
many single events a pattern emerges. At least for extreme rainfall and heat waves the
link with human-caused global warming is clear, the scientists show in a new analysis
of scientific evidence in the journal Nature Climate Change. Less clear is the link between
warming and storms, despite the observed increase in the intensity of hurricanes.
In 2011 alone, the US was hit by 14 extreme weather events which caused damages
exceeding one billion dollars each -- in several states the months of January to October
were the wettest ever recorded. Japan also registered record rainfalls, while the Yangtze
river basin in China suffered a record drought. Similar record-breaking events occurred
also in previous years. In 2010, Western Russia experienced the hottest summer in
centuries, while in Pakistan and Australia record-breaking amounts of rain fell. 2003
saw Europe´s hottest summer in at least half a millennium. And in 2002, the weather
station of Zinnwald-Georgenfeld measured more rain in one day than ever before
recorded anywhere in Germany -- what followed was the worst flooding of the Elbe
river for centuries.
A question of probabilities
"The question is whether these weather extremes are coincidental or a result of climate
change," says Dim Coumou, lead author of the article. "Global warming can generally
not be proven to cause individual extreme events -- but in the sum of events the link to
climate change becomes clear." This is what his analysis of data and published studies
shows. "It is not a question of yes or no, but a question of probabilities," Coumou
explains. The recent high incidence of weather records is no longer normal, he says.
"It´s like a game with loaded dice," says Coumou. "A six can appear every now and
then, and you never know when it happens. But now it appears much more often,
because we have changed the dice." The past week illustrates this: between March 13th
and 19th alone, historical heat records were exceeded in more than a thousand places in
North America.
Three pillars: basic physics, statistical analysis and computer simulations
The scientists base their analysis on three pillars: basic physics, statistical analysis and
computer simulations. Elementary physical principles already suggest that a warming
of the atmosphere leads to more extremes. For example, warm air can hold more
moisture until it rains out. Secondly, clear statistical trends can be found in temperature
and precipitation data, the scientists explain. And thirdly, detailed computer
simulations also confirm the relation between warming and records in both temperature
and precipitation.
With warmer ocean temperatures, tropical storms -- called typhoons or hurricanes,

depending on the region -- should increase in intensity but not in number, according to
the current state of knowledge. In the past decade, several record-breaking storms
occurred, for example hurricane Wilma in 2004. But the dependencies are complex and
not yet fully understood. The observed strong increase in the intensity of tropical storms
in the North Atlantic between 1980 and 2005, for example, could be caused not just by
surface warming but by a cooling of the upper atmosphere. Furthermore, there are
questions about the precision and reliability of historic storm data.
Overall, cold extremes decrease with global warming, the scientists found. But this does
not compensate for the increase in heat extremes.
Climatic warming can turn an extreme event into a record-breaking event
"Single weather extremes are often related to regional processes, like a blocking high
pressure system or natural phenomena like El Niño," says Stefan Rahmstorf, co-author
of the article and chair of the Earth System Analysis department at PIK. "These are
complex processes that we are investigating further. But now these processes unfold
against the background of climatic warming. That can turn an extreme event into a
record-breaking event."
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Potsdam Institute for Climate
Impact Research (PIK).
source cited above.
Journal Reference:
1. Dim Coumou, Stefan Rahmstorf. A decade of weather extremes. Nature Climate

Change, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1452
staff.
! ! ! ! ! “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't
! ! ! ! ! used to an environment where excellence is
! ! ! ! ! expected.”
! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ~ Steve Jobs

Earth Science Literacy Labs - Middle - High School

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Literacy Lab #1 - Supernovas Rate Earth Science - Breed - 2012/2013

Read more: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/05/-30-supernovas-per-second-in-

Fact-finding: List three facts that you learned in this article.

Read more: http://geology.com/minerals/what-is-a-mineral.shtml

Fact-finding: List three facts that you learned in this article.

Herkimer Diamond Quartz Crystals

Herkimer Diamond Mines

Mining for Herkimer Diamonds

"Find and Break" Prospecting

Anne, Bill & Duffy relax after opening a nice cavity.

Herkimer Diamond Specimens & Jewelry

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Fact-finding: List three facts that you learned in this article.

Recent and Future Hurricane Names:

Retired Hurricane Names

Naming Tropical Storms Outside of the Atlantic

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Fact-finding: List three facts that you learned in this article.

We Use Minerals Many Times Every Day!

Mineral Commodities in Industry

Physical Properties of Minerals

Physical Properties: Determining Factors

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Fact-finding: List three facts that you learned in this article.

As I mentioned before, this sort of “correlation” of astronomical alignments and geologic

If anything, we should be concentrating on terrestrial forcing for “predicting” earthquakes. It

So, what can we take away from all this?

Read more: http://geology.com/articles/what-is-earth-science.shtml

Fact-finding: List three facts that you learned in this article.

The Four Earth Sciences

Geology: Science of the Earth

Meteorology: Science of the Atmosphere

Oceanography: Science of the Oceans

The Importance of Earth Science

Earth Science Careers

Read more: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120330111023.htm

Fact-finding: List three facts that you learned in this article.

Magma chambers work like plumbing systems, channelling pressurised magma

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Leeds.

1. Tim J. Wright, Freysteinn Sigmundsson, Carolina Pagli, Manahloh Belachew, Ian

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Read more: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120516140105.htm

Fact-finding: List three facts that you learned in this article.

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Read more: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120516093202.htm

Fact-finding: List three facts that you learned in this article.

Dr Thomas Gernon, Lecturer in Earth Science at the University of Southampton, says:

Dr Gernon, who is based at the National Oceanography Centre at Southampton's

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Southampton,

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Read more: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120515203100.htm

Fact-finding: List three facts that you learned in this article.

"Dimethylsulfide emissions play a role in climate regulation through transformation to

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Maryland.

1. H. Oduro, K. L. Van Alstyne, J. Farquhar. Sulfur isotope variability of oceanic

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