Tagged: winter

A History of Earth’s Climate

Earth had a climate long before we showed up and started noticing it and it’s influenced by a whole series of cycles that have been churning along for hundreds of millions of years. In most cases those cycles will continue long after we’re gone. A look at the history of climate change on Earth can give us some much needed perspective on our current climate dilemma because the surprising truth is, what we’re experiencing now is different than anything this planet has encountered before. So, let’s take a stroll down Climate History Lane and see if we can find some answers to a question that’s been bugging Hank a lot lately – just how much hot water are we in?

Reasons for the seasons

Why do some regions experience full-time heat while others are reckoning with frigid temperatures and snow? And why are the seasons reversed in the two hemispheres? Rebecca Kaplan explains how the shape of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun and the Earth’s tilt on its axis affect the amount of sunlight each region receives.

Destructive wall of ice (12 pictures)

The 30 ft (9 m) high wall of ice was pushed out of a lake by a strong wind. It crashed into properties near the shoreline of Dauphin Lake in Canada, destroyed 12 homes and damaged 15.

Rock Slab Growing at Mt. St. Helens Volcano

A new rock slab is growing at more than one meter a day on the Mt. St. Helens volcano in Washington, USA. The rock slab, growing since last November, now extends about 100 meters out from one of the volcano’s craters. A recently made time lapse movie shows the rock slab growing. Pictured above, a helicopter examines the steaming hot rock slab late last month. Mt. St. Helens underwent aspectacular eruption in 1980 but has been undergoing a comparatively serene eruption since 2004 September. A new volcanic dome has been building which is now about 100 meters above the 1980s dome. The rock slab is visible from the Johnston Ridge Observatory on the erupting volcano.