Are you old enough to remember hearing those words spoken by President John F. Kennedy? I’m not, but I have a distinct memory of the night of July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon—the first humans to set foot on a celestial body other than planet Earth.
I was seven […]

Did it sneak up on you again this year? Kidding aside, Richter Scale Day is April 26, the birthday of Charles Richter (1900-1985), inventor of the Richter scale. Most middle school science curricula include earth science studies in plate tectonics and its related phenomena, including earthquakes. Catastrophic events, such as the recent Italian earthquake, provide […]

It is estimated that 5 percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide comes from the manufacture of cement. Some clever manufacturers are finding ways to not only reduce the carbon footprint of the industry but possibly reverse it! That is to say, it seems possible to capture CO2 and store it in concrete, i.e. sequester […]

A massive ice bridge, 40 km long and more than 500 m wide, that once connected two islands is no longer. See http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36060 for a great visual: a labeled photograph of the area. The ice bridge had been in place for hundreds, probably thousands, of years and held back the Wilkins Ice Shelf. Now scientists […]

If you saw a newspaper or the news on TV at all last week, you must have heard about the catastrophic bushfires in southern Australia. Most were clustered 50 - 100 km northeast of Melbourne, capital city of the state of Victoria; yet there were other fires scattered across a wider area as well. The […]

Wind power is recognized as a clean, quiet, feasible alternative electricity source around the world. When you think of wind power, what image comes to mind? A wide expanse of undeveloped land dotted with sleek, rotating turbines? What about rooftop turbines right in the city, similar in arrangement to solar rooftop panels?
The NYTimes.com published a […]

Well, it’s the holiday movie season again. And once again, there’s a sci-fi thriller sure to attract students, The Day the Earth Stood Still. This is a remake of a 1951 movie. That plot involved an alien coming to Earth to warn of nuclear war. The remake has climate change as the demise of the […]

What is the International Space Station? How long has it been up there? Who goes up there and for how long? What do astronauts do on the space station? These are intriguing, valid questions you can pose to your students, or perhaps your students have already posed them to you. The NASA space exploration program […]

For us humans, especially in urban settings, the seasons come and go with regularity and cause relatively painless changes in our lives — longer days, shorter days, setting clocks forward or backward as we just did. But for most other animal species seasonal changes do not go unnoticed.  Further, when climate change impacts patterns of […]

If you fear taking your students outside might be misinterpreted by observers as an undeserved recess, think again. With the slogan, No Child Left Inside–actually an official act of Congress–the American Geological Institute (AGI) is once again promoting Earth Science Week.  Need a little more motivation? Read this excerpt from Last Child in the Woods, […]