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Lake Michigan Water Levels Up 

Lake Michigan water levels are up more than four feet since January 2013, according to experts with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The levels are nearing their highest in[...] The post Lake Michigan Water Levels Up appeared first on Lake

More Beast Profiles 

Species: Carnoferox atronyxLength: 8.5 meters (28 feet)Height: 2.5 meters (8 feet)Weight: 2 tonnes (2.2 tons)Genome:Allosaurus fragilis (body, arms, tail)Carnotaurus sastrei (head, legs)Species: Phoboraptor horridusLength: 5.4 meters (18 feet)Height: 2.5 meters (8 feet)Weight: 250 kilograms (550 pounds)Genome:Titanis walleri (head, body)Utahraptor ostrommaysorum (arms, legs, tail)Psittacus erithacus (intelligence, animal call/voice mimicking)Species: Titanax superiorLength: 24+ meters (80+ [...]

Pele is a Capricious Goddess...Today She Dispensed a Gift 

Halemaumau, on the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii, is a crater within a caldera that has been simmering away for most of the last seven years. The pit is around 600 feet across, and a few hundred feet down (on most days) there is a roiling lake of molten basalt. On the rarest of occasions the level of the lava lake will rise, and some basalt will flow across the flats, but most of the time

Gotthard tunnel, world's longest, opens in Switzerland 

The Swiss and many other European dignitaries celebrated the opening of the World's longest and deepest tunnel last week, the Gotthard Base Tunnel, after 17 years of construction. The tunnel beneath the Swiss Alps is 57-kilometers long (35-miles long) reaching a depth of 2,300 meters (7,545 feet, almost 1.5 miles). The tunnel will create a high-speed rail link between northern and southern Europe. Trains will travel the tunnel, which runs between the towns of Erstfeld in the north and Bodio in [...]

Nicholson Begins Chemical Grouting Work on Wilson Classical High School in Long Beach 

GeoPrac sponsor Nicholson Construction has started a chemical grouting project in Los Angeles at the Woodrow Wilson Classical High School to treat potentially liquefiable soils beneath the building. This $2 million project is part of a larger $21.1 million project to upgrade the infrastructure in the auditorium and adjacent areas. Nicholson will drill vertical, horizontal and inclined holes at depths of 14 to 24 feet beneath the structure and inject the chemical grout using a Tube-a-Manchette [...]

When You Say "He's Older Than the Hills" and You're Right....Pu'u Pua'i in Kilauea Iki 

It's true! I am two years older than the mountain behind me. This is Pu'u Pua'i, a cinder cone that grew during the Kilauea Iki eruptions of 1959 in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island of Hawaii. It must have been a sight to see. At times during the eruption, basalt was fountaining to a height of 1,900 feet. The prevailing winds blew the cinders and lapilli to the

Mirror Mirror On The Wall, Which Theropod Is The Strongest Of Them All? 

what theropod family is the strongest(at parity)? Is it:  all theropods are represented by the “best” of there group at 32 feet long Abd how ever much they’d weigh at that size the early tyrannosaurids? these vicious t.rex predecessors relied in speed agility and arm power to kill there prey abd fight rivals. They had long narrow

Airliner Chronicles: Stuck on a Plane with a Proselytizer... 

And really, I felt sorry for the poor guy who was stuck sitting with me on the plane flight from St. Louis to LAX. Oh, I wasn't trying to convert the poor guy into some religion. No, he got the full-court press from me about the importance of understanding what was going on 35,000 feet below us on the ground. He was being proselytized into the world of geology. People who fly a lot

Macraster sp. echinoid from the Duck Creek formation of Texas 

Not only does the Duck Creek formation have ammonites, it has some echinoids as well. I found a couple of nicely inflated specimens of the irregular echinoid Macraster. I sent pictures of my find to a friend in Texas, who is familiar with the Duck Creek formation, and he said they could be either M. elegans or M. washitae. Macraster has a suboval shaped test with a sub rectangular cross section. The adapical surface has the typical five arm imprint of the ambulacra which is where the feet of [...]

Walking in the Shadow of a Great Volcano 

On a ledge just inside the lip of Chile's Quizapu volcanic crater, Philipp Ruprecht was furiously digging a trench. Here at an elevation of 10,000 feet, a 1,000-foot plunge loomed just yards away, and wind was whipping dust off his shovel. But the volcanologist was excited. Ruprecht had just found this spot, topped with undisturbed wedding-cake layers of fine, black material that the crater had vomited from the deep earth some 84 years ago. Samples from the currently inactive site might shed [...]

Top 10 Unknown Theropods Under 1 Ton 

This is just a list of Theropods (non avian) that were around 1000 pounds.  Image by Shallowell (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons 1. Szechuanosaurus (Szechuan lizard) This was a 20 to 23 foot long 6 to 7 feet and 1000 to 1300 pounds. It’s teeth were 2 to 3 inches long and were thin, serrated and

Lake Tahoe Clarity Down In 2015 

Data collected last year by scientists at the University of California, Davis, have shown that Lake Tahoe clarity is down 4.8 feet since 2014. Though there was a decline, the[...] The post Lake Tahoe Clarity Down In 2015 appeared first on Lake

World's Heaviest Monopile for Offshore Wind Turbine Foundation 

Check out this massive pile foundation for a wind turbine at the 402MW Veja Mate offshore wind farm. It weighs over 1,300 tons (2,866 kips) and is 7.8 meters in diameter (25.5 ft) and 82.2 meters long (270 feet). The wind farm will consist of a total of 67 6MW turbines founded on giant monopiles like this. According to Offshore Wind, the Veja Mate OWF is located 95 km northwest from the island of Borkum in the German North Sea. When fully operational in 2018, the farm will produce over 1.6 TWh [...]

The pheasant comes apart 

A couple of weeks ago, I was given a pheasant, which I reduced to science and food. When we last saw it, it was down to a skinned and partially defleshed head/neck and feet. It’s been through a couple of defleshing rounds since then, and today I was able to take it fully apart: At the

The Urubamba River, Machu Picchu and Cusco Peru 

The rainy season is in full swing in the Peruvian Highlands but our visit to Machu Picchu only saw scattered precipitation. Take a look at the rails, the river and the ruins.Peru Rail is one of the most efficient rail systems in the world and the trains depart the stations with Swiss precision. It is only a 26 mile trip in 90 minutes from Ollantaytambo to the foot of Machu Picchu at Aguas Calientes. But it is an exciting ride.A resistant granite pluton forces the previously tranquil Urubamba [...]

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Yesterday we arrived back at Palmer Station. We'll be taking on some cargo and people that need to get back to Punta Arenas with us. While we are here, we had hoped to sample on some nearby islands called the Stepping Stones. The weather has been awful! As soon as we got here, the barometric pressure dropped, the temperatures dipped below freezing, the wind picked up, and it started to snow a bit. So, of course we asked our MT's to go out in the zodiacs to sample! MT Tom was the only one [...]

Bertha Demo Period Done, Resumes Mining 

The Bertha tunnel boring machine has resumed chewing away beneath Seattle after a 'suspension for cause' order from WSDOT shut it down in January following two safety incidents. The BTM began tunneling with some conditions in place late in February, and those conditions were lifted when the demonstration period ended on March 7. Bertha has now reached her next scheduled maintenance stop, having tunneled a total of 1,560 feet. [Source: WSDOT Alaskan Way Viaduct Replacement Project Page. [...]

It’s About To Rain In Southern California 

So far this super El Nino has not been the drought saving weather pattern that residents hoped for, but this weekend will bring heavy snows to the Sierra and a good soaking of rain all the way south to LA. They will measure the snow in feet in the central Sierra, and it is here that the drought can be broken. That heavy snow will melt in spring, and fill

Under Way 

We are at sea!Yesterday, we stowed all of our gear on board our ship, the Laurence M. Gould (or LMG for short). This will be our home for the next month! Here is the LMG in port at Punta Arenas. You can see the crane towards the back working hard, unloading the gear from the previous research project and loading gear for ours:The LMG is named after Laurence McKinley Gould, an early polar scientist and geologist. He came to Antarctica on Admiral Byrd’s famous first expedition. He died in 1995 [...]

Ginger Nuts 

When stocking a pond, it is usual to consider inches of fish. The inches can be in many little tiddlers or a smaller number of bigger fish. It turns out that the same applies to cats, only you measure it in feet rather than inches. Spice and Pepper didn't find their new home yet and were a bit lost in our large pond of a house. So we asked the cat rescue for some more feet of cat. His name