Several times in the distant past, our home planet has been cleansed of its residents, with the exception of a few plucky survivors. Perhaps the best known and most spectacular extinction was that of the dinosaurs, caused when a meteorite six miles in diameter crashed into Earth about 65 million years ago. There was another […]
For more than 30 million years after dinosaurs first appeared, they remained inexplicably rare near the equator, where only a few small-bodied meat-eating dinosaurs made a living. The long absence at low latitudes has been one of the great, unanswered questions about the rise of the dinosaurs. Now the mystery has a solution, according to […]
When Carl Roland was hiking the high country in an Alaska national park not long ago, he thought the landscape looked different than any park in the Lower 48. The alpine zone seemed to be carpeted with more plant species than the much-larger forests and wetlands in the valleys below. When Roland looked at plant […]
Last week, I wrote about a thought experiment proposed by Fairbanks scientist Jim Beget. He suggests raining down crystals of a compound that captures carbon dioxide onto a frigid plateau in Antarctica. There, the greenhouse gas might remain locked for a few hundred thousand years. Beget will present his idea at the fall meeting of […]