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Science Corner Articles

Spokane Haystack Rocks

What are Spokane’s Haystack Basalt Mounds? Q – Throughout the Spokane area there are what some call ‘haystacks’, basalt mounds that look like haystacks. There are many such on Spokane’s south hill and I’m including a photo of one that’s...

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Modeling Time: Human, Geologic, Cosmologic

It’s difficult for most people to grasp the immensity of time as it’s viewed by archeologists, much less as it’s viewed by geologist or cosmologists. One way often used by those scientists to model time in terms that others can...

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How Has Your Address Moved Over the Past 750 Million Years?

Some 240 million years ago, an enormous supercontinent known as Pangea encompassed nearly all of Earth’s extant land mass, Pangea bore little resemblance to our contemporary planet, but thanks to a recently released interactive map interested parties can now superimpose...

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DNR Releases Stunning Dry Falls Visualization

DNR’s Daniel Coe collaborating with Joel Gombiner has produced a stunning arial oblique visualization and poster showing incredible detail of the Dry Falls geologic complex. The DNR webpage announcing the release also shows additional materials like sliders illustrating differences in...

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Fueling Yellowstone’s Supervolcano: A New Tectonic Twist

New research suggests that the Yellowstone supervolcano may not be fueled by a deep “mantle plume” as previously believed. Instead, a study published in Science suggests that the volcano’s activity is driven primarily by tectonic shifts within Earth’s crust. The...

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The Oldest Stone Tools Ever Found in the US

Indigenous people have been in the Americas longer than archaeologists once thought. Stone tools unearthed from a rock shelter in Southern Oregon were last used more than 18,000 years ago, radiocarbon dating suggests. That makes the site one of the...

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How do we know how old Earth is?

By measuring radioactive elements in rocks from Earth and other parts of the solar system, scientists can develop a timeline of our planet’s early years. Earth is roughly 4.54 billion years old. In that time, it has seen continents form...

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Ancient British Isles Ice Sheet Time-Lapse Animation

The rapid decline of the British-Irish Ice Sheet thousands of years ago may hold lessons for how melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica will influence sea-level rise in the future. In an animation that spans tens of thousands of years,...

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Rounded Boulders Spokane

Rounded Boulders in Spokane Ice Rafted Erratics? Q – I have noticed places around Spokane where there are large accumulations of similarly-size boulders. They are smooth and generally about a meter in diameter.. The type of stone varies, but none...

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