Arches National Park is set among the red rocks of Utah’s southern desert making it a great hiking and camping destination. It is home to Delicate Arch, featured on license plates in Utah, and one of the most famous rock arches in the world. There are plenty of activities for the family or outdoor adventurer […]
A number of years ago, when I was an undergraduate student, I had the privilege of going with my adviser on many trips in the field. I learned more on those trips than I think I did in the classroom. On one trip he took me to several hot springs in the Black Rock desert […]
In his song “Sail away,” Randy Newman sings about how good we have it in America. The land is bounteous and its wild inhabitants are peaceful. “Ain’t no lion or tiger, ain’t no mamba snake, just the sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake.” Of course, Newman is known for lyrics that intentionally are outrageous contradictions, […]
While doing a literature search for another story I encountered a classic pitfall in scientific research that one can all too often find. I wanted to know how many venomous snakebites occur each year, and of those, how many are fatal. I dug into the literature to see what was there. My first stop was […]
One of the hardest concepts to get across to people is the immensity of geologic time. Geologists casually toss around numbers in the millions of years, even billions of years, but how do you really get your mind around such huge periods of time? For most people the idea of 100 years is a long […]