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POPSBio-Earth: Are Planets Living Super-Organisms? He believes that expanding the study of life sciences to the core of our world and the depths of outer space will help us find distant relatives of our own Earth -- planets that could also sustain life. To explain why contintental plates drift on the surface of the Earth's molten mantle, Maruyama argues that continents actually have life cycles. Old, cold plates on continental fringes sink to “plate graveyards” deep in the Earth’s mantle, and then rise again, creating volcanoes fueled by three-dimensional convection movements deep below the surface.
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POPSIn Indonesia, life plays out in the shadow of fiery peaks "Death by volcano takes many forms: searing lava, suffocating mud, or the tsunamis that often follow an eruption. In 1883, Mount Krakatau (often misspelled as Krakatoa), located off Java's coast, triggered a tsunami that claimed more than 36,000 lives. The name became a metaphor for a catastrophic natural disaster."
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POPSOur Earth as Art Welcome to the Earth as Art Gallery.Here you can view our planet through the beautiful images taken by the Landsat-7 satellite - and most recently, the Terra Satellite's Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER). This gallery of images uses the visceral avenue of art to convey the thrilling perspective of the Earth that satellites provide to the viewer.
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POPSUnreal Landscapes of the Bolivian Salt Lake The Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni is perhaps one of the most spectacular landscapes in the world. A magnificent area with an impressive Salt Desert (the world's largest), active volcanoes, tall cacti islands and geyser flats, it exists like an alien mirage, something completely out-of-this-world...
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POPSSurprising Activity Discovered at Yellowstone Supervolcano What the researchers think is happening, on a short-term basis at least, is that the bulging Yellowstone hotspot north of the Tetons is pushing against the north edge of Jackson Hole and jamming it against the mountains. (This is also causing the southwest part of the Yellowstone plateau, under the hotspot, to slide downhill at a rate of one-sixth of an inch each year.).
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POPSFive of the World's Hottest Volcanoes check out amgumen's clip: Volcanic Eruptions seen during an Eclipse: http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/12DC35AD-3184-4606-BB4D-9F6F8E41D4F6/ and The hottest spot in Antarctica: http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/12A8EA54-BCBC-436F-AD06-E4D8E563FD78/ and The Largest Lake of Acid on Earth: http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/5A251CDD-80F4-4E55-9633-C25907244C44/ hitchhiker08's clip: Top 33 volcanoes on Earth: http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/CF65A97D-EFE1-499D-9B04-4D0F5D5C2071/ BobbyDelay's clip: Ancient Chaiten Volcano Erupts after 10,000 years: http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/5034DD8B-BE84-400F-B662-5EBC28B3EC4C/
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POPSMass extinctions? Blame it on the ocean In the course of hundreds of millions of years the world's oceans have expanded and contracted in response to the shifting of the Earth's tectonic plates and to changes in climate. There were periods of the planet's history when vast areas of the continents were flooded by shallow seas such as the shark and mosasaur infested seaway that neatly split North America during the age of the dinosaurs. As those epicontinental seas drained, animals like mosasaurs and giant sharks went extinct, and conditions on the marine shelves where life exhibited its greatest diversity in the form of things like clams and snails changed as well.
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POPSNew High Res Images from Mars! Amazing detail to see online. Each photo has a scalebar to zoom and pan. The give you the option to download JPEGs of each photo at 28,000 x 64,000, some nearly 1GB in size! :'On board NASA ’s Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter, the HiRISE camera offers unprecedented image quality, giving us a view of the Red Planet in a way never before seen. It’s the most powerful camera ever to leave Earth’s orbit.'
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POPSSea's Ebb And Flow Drive World's Big Extinction Events Arnold I. Miller, a paleobiologist and professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati, says the new study is striking because it establishes a clear relationship between the tempo of mass extinction events and changes in sea level and sediment: "Over the years, researchers have become fairly dismissive of the idea that marine mass extinctions like the great extinction of the Late Permian might be linked to sea-level declines, even though these declines are known to have occurred many times throughout the history of life. The clear relationship this study documents will motivate many to rethink their previous views."