Author Archives: gymnosperm

Charybdis and the Oldest Ocean Floor on Earth

Posted on January 6, 2013 by gymnosperm

A few years back there was a much ballyhooed drilling effort to find some 175 million year old sea floor touted as the “oldest”. Incorrecto qui mo sabe. That particular ocean floor is interesting in its own right (see our … Continue reading →

Posted in Anthropology, Geography, Geology, Paleogeography, Plate Tectonics | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Global Warming and Prohibition

Posted on January 3, 2013 by gymnosperm

We like to think we live in an enlightened era, but even modern history keeps reminding us that a rigid and intolerant side of human nature lies just beneath the surface. It is ironic that Prohibition, and a corresponding amendment … Continue reading →

Posted in Anthropology, Carbon Theology, Climate, Climate Change, Global Warming | Tagged | 6 Comments

Great Mysteries of Nature Nobody Seems to be Thinking About

Posted on December 28, 2012 by gymnosperm

This list will be changed from time to time and some mysteries will be developed into posts. In some sense they all speak to our lack of understanding of the magnetic and gravitational forces that bear down on us. 1. … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate, Geography, Geology, Magnetic Reversals, Plate Tectonics | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Creatures of Metaphor

Posted on December 26, 2012 by gymnosperm

We humans are creatures of metaphor. Our signal character, the sole remaining bastion between us and less godly creatures, is language. Language is metaphor, a music we infuse with meaning, infused with thousands of different meanings in as many different … Continue reading →

Posted in Anthropology | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Maybe we’re all Chasing Ice

Posted on December 9, 2012 by gymnosperm

A hopeless task of course. It will melt. Our planet has been ice free more often than not. We are really chasing something far more ephemeral; an ethic, a lost connection to the natural world, even a return to the … Continue reading →

Posted in Carbon Theology, Climate, Climate Change, Geography, Geology, Global Warming | Tagged | Leave a comment

An Argument for the Necessary Existence of Negative Feedback to the Greenhouse Effect of Water Vapor.

Posted on December 8, 2012 by gymnosperm

A crucial component of the hypothesis that the one part in ten thousand in the atmosphere that represents human CO2 caused the atmospheric warming from the late 1970’s to the late 1990’s is the notion that the miniscule warming by … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate, Climate Change, Global Warming, Oceanography | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments

How Old is the Grand Canyon?

Posted on December 4, 2012 by gymnosperm

Controversies over wonders of the world capture the public imagination from time to time. Now some Caltech scientists have dared suggest from a new technique that measures the depth of overburden on apatite crystals that there was an older canyon … Continue reading →

Posted in Geography, Geology, Grand Canyon | Tagged , | Leave a comment

A simple calculation on Ocean Acidification

Posted on November 15, 2012 by gymnosperm

A recent article in Science, “Rising Acidity Brings an Ocean of Trouble” claims that post industrial human CO2 has lowered ocean pH from 8.2 to 8.1. This is an extraordinary claim since there were no preindustrial ARGO floats to establish … Continue reading →

Posted in Carbon Theology, Ocean Acidification, Oceanography | Tagged | 5 Comments

Global UV Increase from 1979-2008 Correlated with Global Warming

Posted on November 8, 2012 by gymnosperm

As we delve into the fractal complexities of nature it is easy to overlook very simple things. The hypothesis of human global warming is based on the correlation of the slopes of global atmospheric temperature increase from the late 1970’s to the … Continue reading →

Posted in Carbon Theology, Climate, Climate Change, Global Warming, Oceanography | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Gravity and Magnetism

Posted on October 30, 2012 by gymnosperm

This post follows the last two which were inspired by discovering that the virtual geomagnetic pole (VGP) wander path during the Laschamp reversal as revealed in Black Sea sediments by the work of Norbert R. Nowaczyk consistently follows lows in … Continue reading →

Posted in Geography, Geoid, Geology, Gravity Anomalies, Gravity Potato, Magnetic Reversals, True Polar Wander, Virtual Geomagnetic Pole (VGP) | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment