Car and Driver Magazine

Did you know I was featured in an article in Car and Driver magazine? It was actually my second time in the magazine with writer Patrick Bedard using geology themes as a backdrop to the testing of SUV's. You can read the article here.  The "interview" was set near Kingman, Arizona where the middle Miocene (18.5 million year) Peach Springs Tuff makes for a great background for cars.

Russian Meteorite Size Update

New estimates on the size and power of the meteorite blast that occured over Siberia on February 15 are now in. See the story here.

Meteorite HIts Earth in Siberia

Wow - it really happened. A meteorite fell from the sky (if traveling at 33,000 miles an hour is falling) and injured 1,000 people. Read it here.

Explaining The Complex Simply

I recently took a shot at a suggestion given to me by Anne Jefferson over at Highly Allochthonous. It is an exercise where you can only use the most common 1,000 words to describe complex topics. You can access the site here. Take a crack at it. Note that the program will prompt you when you type an illegal word! Here was my attempt:

“My job is to make hard to understand ideas easier to approach for those who have no training in them. I write stories about things that are studied by the few, in ways that can be understood by the many. I write about the land and how it came to look the way it does today. This deals with what happened here on our home a long, long time ago. Most people never think about such things so it is a real big job to try to make it interesting. I keep trying and that is why I love my job.”

Good luck!

Burning the Bluff Mammoth

***Utah's Canyon Country Blog used some of these photo's to advertise the 2014 burning! See the link here.***

**FINAL UPDATE**: The YouTube video of the final act in this rousing, moving, historic adventure can be seen here. Read the lead-up to this below. 

A mammoth Mammoth has been assembled by locals in Bluff, Utah, a small historical hamlet beside the San Juan River. This in honor of the Mammoth petroglyph found in the Navajo Sandstone nearby. The plan is to burn it on December 21, if we are still around after the end of the Long Count Mayan calendar. (Yeah, right).

I visited the Bluff Mammoth 10 days ago and file this photographic report.

Artfully and scientifically constructed

Bill, Wayne and George aside it for scale

Framed by the Bluff Sandstone

Legs of fine cottonwood bark

And  beautifully painted toes

Awesome tusks but not of ivory

A work of art! Thank you Bluff!

You can read another article about this spectacle in the Arizona Republic newspaper here.

At Last! Verification That My Life Choices Have Been Spot On!

I guess one always wonders if they've made the right choices in life. This recent study suggests that maybe I have! See it here.

Go take a hike!

Chasing Greenland Ice

Videographers were set up near the Ilulissat Glacier in Greenland to record 7.4 cubic kilometers of ice calving into the North Atlantic. Watch it here.