Discover, March 1, 1992
For ten years University of Hawaii physicist John Learned has been leading a team of researchers who are designing a telescope to be stationed at the bottom of the ocean. That in itself is enough to raise eyebrows, but there’s an even stranger wrinkle: new research shows that the device may someday be able to map not only the outer reaches of the firmament but also the inner depths of Earth’s core.
Discover, January 31, 1992
Over the past decade geologists have been marshaling scattered evidence that the dinosaurs were done in by an asteroid hitting Earth some 65 million years ago. But in 1991 hey really got down to specifics. The fatal asteroid, they said, hit not far off the coast of the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico–in June.
The impact theory got its start 11 years ago when a team led by Luis and Walter Alvarez examined the thin layer of clay that appears at the geologic dividing line marking the transition from the Cretaceous Period to the Tertiary Period–a point known as the K-T boundary. Inside the clay were high levels of the metal iridium, uncommon in Earth’s crust but plentiful in extraterrestrial objects.
Discover, January 31, 1992
New Jersey was a very different place a couple of hundred million years ago. Instead of having gentle hills, it was covered by mountains as high as the Rockies, and rather than lying on the eastern edge of North America, it lay snuggled inside the supercontinent known as Pangaea. By that time the giant landmass had begun to pull apart, and rifts had been created among the mountains. Monsoons dumped water on these rifts, and as they filled they formed a series of narrow crescent-shaped lakes, much like today’s Lake Tanganyika. The largest of them all, cutting across New Jersey, is formally known among geologists as Lake Newark. Informally, they call it the Big Blue Banana.
Discover, January 31, 1992
Even before the Kuwaiti oil fields began burning, researchers warned that we humans, busy with war, were about to play dice with the biosphere. Rising smoke from a devastated Kuwait, they said, might cause drastic changes in the planet’s weather.
On January 22, when the first oil wells were actually set on fire, Carl Sagan appeared on ABC’s Nightline. “We think the net effects will be very similar to the explosion of the Indonesian volcano Tambora in 1815, which resulted in the year 1816 being known as the year without a summer,” he said.