My geomorphology professor once told me never to date bottom feeders. It wasn’t until much later that I realized he was talking about radiocarbon dating and not giving me advice on my love life.
Some sound advice just in time for valentine’s day.
Ancient microbes, unusual ice structures, mammoth bones - there’s a lot happening below the surface in the Fairbanks Permafrost Tunnel Research Facility. The underground laboratory, operated by the Army Corps of Engineers, is kept at a constant 27 degrees Fahrenheit. Environmental science researcher Dr. Andrew Balser leads a tour of the facility and discusses the research taking place there.
Got to see this from outside the tunnel, but I sadly did not get to go inside. It’s the stuff of legends!
Archaeology perks: encountering feral rhesus macaques while at work. They’re MEAN, and this one was drawn to us both curiosity and a desire to get in our lunch cooler. Can you spot him to the left of our dive flag?
This is Finke River which is a dry riverbed most of the time just like many other rivers in the Central Australia. Such rivers flow on the surface during powerful rainfalls, which can turn this dry sand patch into raging torrent. Water does not last long on the surface in the desert areas, and so it either evaporates or soaks into the soil where it then slowly makes its way into the artesian basin (underground water pool, the groundwater system). Actually, the groundwater is a major water source for people living in the dry centre of Australia.
Fun fact!
The upper section of the Finke River was deduced to be around 350 million years old, what makes it one of the oldest rivers in the world. It means it has flown across the continent long before the proto-dinosaurs have even evolved.
River basins - commonly dominated by plant life today, but very different in Earth’s Precambrian when there was no plant life at the surface to anchor rivers in place. This scientist is working on how the shape of river basins and floodplains in the plantless Precambrian differ from those seen today.
