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19 February 2013
Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver
I finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel Flight Behavior over the weekend. It’s certainly cut from the same cloth as Kingsolver’s other work. If you liked Prodigal Summer and her many Arizona novels, you’ll probably like this one, too. Similarities include: beautiful writing, a focus on the relationships women have to their families, friends, and strangers, and the powerful insights we can gain by associating with nature. What sets it …
18 January 2013
Friday fold: “Chasing Ice”
Callan watches the new documentary “Chasing Ice” about James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey project, and spots a lovely Z-fold during the largest glacial calving event ever recorded.
11 December 2012
Why Geology Matters, by Doug MacDougall
Callan reviews a new book by Doug Macdougall: “Why Geology Matters.”
16 May 2012
Contemplating the IARC-JAXA graph
One of the ~350 or so blogs I subscribe to is Arctic Sea Ice by Neven. Today, he put up a post highlighting new daily data from IARC-JAXA, a collaboration between the International Arctic Research Center (IARC) at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Check it out. Here’s a couple of things I was struck by: The annual variation between summer and winter ice cover …
12 April 2012
Climate change books: fact & fiction
Callan reviews two books about climate change: the nonfiction account by Michael Mann, and a fictional thriller set in the warmed Arctic of the future.
5 March 2012
Scott Mandia, climate communicator
Callan has a conversation with Scott Mandia, a community college professor working on the national level to improve the public’s understanding of climate science.
6 December 2011
AGU 2011, day 2
In the interest of conveying a sense of the sort of stuff that goes on a large science conference like the AGU Fall Meeting, I’ll resume my narrative where I left off with yesterday’s description. I began by swinging by the press room where I grabbed a complimentary breakfast, then headed down to the “early earth” session where I got a review on zircons of Hadean and Archean age. Then …
5 December 2011
AGU 2011, day 1
I got to San Francisco on Saturday afternoon, flying in on the same flight from DC as Rob Simmon and Maria-José Viñas. MJ and I took the BART downtown, and then met up with Jess Ball for Thai dinner and a yummy dessert of banana wrapped in roti with Nutella and coconut ice cream. Then, jet lag informing me it was time for rest, I went to bed. I had …
2 December 2011
ACM
From “Volcanic Versus Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide” by Terry Gerlach in the June 14, 2011 issue of EOS: Human activities emit ~135 times as much carbon dioxide as the world’s volcanoes? Holy cow.
17 October 2011
Words matter
A table from the article “Communicating the Science of Climate Change,” by Richard C. J. Somerville and Susan Joy Hassol, from the October 2011 issue of Physics Today, page 48: There’s a lot to ponder in this table. It strikes me as an important document – a compilation of one of humanity’s most tragic miscommunications. You can click on it to make it bigger – large enough that you could …
Callan Bentley is an assistant professor of geology at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, Virginia. He is particularly interested in structural geology and the evolution of the Appalachian mountain belt. Callan draws cartoons and writes for EARTH magazine. He lives in the Fort Valley of Virginia.
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