GEOCHEMISTRY: Fire and Ice

Fire and ice.

hanks to the release of Al Gore's latest effort on global warming – this time in book and movie form – climate change is the hot topic in press rooms around the globe. It isn't the first time. The media have warned about impending climate doom four different times in the last 100 years. Only they can't decide if mankind will die from warming or cooling. As the noise from the controversy has inc...

Mercury: Planet of Fire and Ice

Mercury’s Exosphere: Mercury’s atmosphere, really an exosphere, is tenuous: The total mass of all known constituents is approximately 15 orders of magnitude less than Earth’s. An exosphere is an atmosphere that has such a low density that collisions between constituents are negligible. Thus, according to Smyth and Marconi, “Mercury has multiatmospheres, with each separate atmosphere forming ind...

Mercury: Planet of Fire and Ice

Fire and Ice: Cultural Influences on Complex Problem Solving

Previous research on complex problem solving (CPS) has been conducted mostly in western-industrialized countries and has often focused on individual differences such as intelligence to explain performance. We tested a model postulating that cultural values influence CPS strategies and CPS strategies in turn influence performance when controlling for individual difference variables. Participants...

Sedimentology and geochemistry of a perennially ice-covered epishelf lake in Bunger Hills Oasis, East Antarctica.

A process-oriented study was carried out in White Smoke lake, Bunger Hills, East Antarctica, a perennially ice-covered (1.8 to 2.8 m thick) epishelf (tidally-forced) lake. The lake water has a low conductivity and is relatively well mixed. Sediments are transferred from the adjacent glacier to the lake when glacier ice surrounding the sediment is sublimated at the surface and replaced by accumu...