Maelstroms

Maelstroms, hugely powerful whirlpools, have a long history in fiction as being terrible dangers to sailors. In real life there have never ...

Aurora

In my opinion there is no greater natural spectacle than the Aurorae. I first saw them while standing on a frozen lake in the north of Finl...

THE HOLOCENE OPTIMUM

Between c. 7000 and 4000 B.C. the climate in Europe reached its optimal level (the Hypsithermal) in the present interglacial. It was not, ...

EARLY HOLOCENE WARMING

One of the lessons from the present plethora of research into climatic history is that change is not necessarily gradual. In the case of E...

Climate change speeding up water cycle

The evidence comes from changing patterns of salinity in the oceans Anna Salleh ABC The greenhouse effect is accelerating the global water...

Earth’s atmosphere

The atmosphere is a band of gases—mostly nitrogen, oxygen, and argon—held around Earth by gravity. Air masses, each defined by fairly unif...

Asperatus Cloud

Photograph courtesy Merrick Davies An "asperatus" cloud rolls over New Zealand's South Island in an undated pictu...

The Apocalypse, mass kills and the magnetic pole shift

The myriad of reasons given for the mass deaths of various species of animals around the world is almost as baffling as the events themsel...

What is going on?

The bird and fish kills are not, apparently, isolated incidents in the United States of America, nor indeed in the region. In recent days ...

Little Ice Ages

The 500-year-long Little Ice Age prevailed from about 1350 to 1880, throughout the entire Earth, with temperatures averaging 1° lower than t...

Magical and Folk Beliefs

Triple Hecate Stele from Constantinople, second-third century AD. London, British Museum. Hecate is the Great Goddess in her darker and more...

UM digs find 10,000-year-old Native oasis

Elaine Hale, Yellowstone National Park archaeologist, helps Montana-Yellowstone Archaeological Project students Andrew Bowen of Kent State...

The text of the film “The fall of an empire—the Lesson of Byzantium”

Russian winter landscape. A church. A snowstorm. Narrator . Hello . In 1453, the Byzantine Empire fell. Let us now take a look at how ...