Greenland Is Not For Sale. But It Has The Rare Earth Minerals America Wants : NPR
Common Earth
Images of America in Crisis in the 1970s — In Focus — The Atlantic
As the 1960s came to an end, the rapid development of the American postwar decades began to take a noticeable toll on the environment, and the public called for action. In November 1971, the newly created Environmental Protection Agency announced a massive photo documentary project, called DOCUMERICA, to record the adverse effects of modern life on the environment. More than 100 photographers were hired not only to document specific issues, but to capture images showing how we interacted with the environment. By 1974, more than 80,000 photographs had been produced. The National Archives recently made 15,000 of these images available, and I've spent much of the past week combing through those to bring you these 46 glimpses of America in the early 1970s, with an eye toward our then-ailing environmen
We Are Exceeding Earth’s Capacity for Humans
The thing about over populated species is that populations often go crashing down when they get over populated. Maybe it will be climate change, maybe it will be a flu or a zoonic disease like rabies.
A Giant Blob of Hot Rock Is Building Up Under America’s Northeast
"A Huge Blob of Hot Rock Has Been Rising Under Vermont for Tens of Millions of Years. A vast mass of hot rock is welling up underneath Vermont and extending into other subterranean regions below New England, new research shows."
USGS Warns to Not Roast Marshmallows Over Hot Lava – Thrillist
A new video explains the physics of flow — Quartz
If we weren’t the first industrial civilization on Earth, would we ever know?
"In any case, say Schmidt and Frank, the fraction of life that gets fossilized is tiny. Dinosaurs roamed Earth for some 180 million years, and yet only a few thousand near-complete specimens exist. Modern humans have existed for just a few tens of thousands of years. “Species as short-lived as homo sapiens (so far) might not be represented in the existing fossil record at all,” say Schmidt and Frank. What of human artifacts—roads, buildings, baked-bean tins, and silicon chips? These, too, are unlikely to survive long, or to be found even if they do. “The current area of urbanization is less than 1% of the Earth’s surface,” point out the researchers. “We conclude that for potential civilizations older than about 4 million years, the chances of finding direct evidence of their existence via objects or fossilized examples of their population is small,” they say."