Download or read book Life in the Tar Seeps written by Gretchen Ernster Henderson and published by Trinity University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-25 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At Great Salt Lake, near Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork Spiral Jetty, a motley crew of scientists walks the mudflats to study fossils in the making. This reputedly dead sea is home to tar seeps, pools of raw oil (nicknamed ‘death traps’) that act as a preservative, encasing organisms as they were in life. In this spare landscape, an intricate web of life unfurls. Halophiles―salt-hungry microorganisms―tint the brackish water pink and orange; crystals of gypsum stud the ground, glistening underfoot; and pelicans and other migratory birds stop for a crucial rest. Barn owls and seagulls flirt with their prey around the seeping constellations, sometimes falling prey to the oil themselves. Gretchen Henderson came to the tar seeps, a kind of natural asphalt, after recovering from being hit by a car as she walked in a crosswalk―a manmade asphalt. Like the spiraling artwork that made Great Salt Lake’s north shore famous, Henderson’s associations of life and death, degeneration and regeneration, and injury and healing coalesced. As she reexamined pressing issues that this delicate area revealed about the climate crisis, her sense of ecology spiraled into other ways of perceiving the lake’s entangled lives. How do we move beyond narrow concepts of wounded and healed, the beautiful and the ugly, to care for ecosystems that evolve over time? How do we confront our vulnerability to recognize kindred dynamics in our living planet? Through shifting lake levels, bird migrations, microbial studies, environmental arts, and cultural histories shaped by indigenous knowledges and colonial legacies, Life in the Tar Seeps contemplates the ways that others have understood this body of water, enlivening more than this region alone. As Henderson witnesses scientists, arts curators, land managers, and students working collaboratively to steward a challenging place, she grows to see the lake not as dead but as a watershed for shifting perceptions of any overlooked place, offering a meditation on environmental healing across the planet. Henderson interweaves her journey with her own vivid photographs of tar seeps and pelican death assemblages, historic maps and contemporary art, as a wayfinding guide for exploring places of our own.

Download or read book Little Miss History Travels to La Brea Tar Pits Museum written by Barbara Ann Mojica and published by . This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever wonder about life in the Ice Age? Little Miss HISTORY travels back in time to LA BREA TAR PITS & MUSEUM in her eighth adventure of the award winning "Little Miss HISTORY Travels to" children's book series. Springs of liquid petroleum and a great lake of pitch, filled with exploding bubbles, once dotted the landscape of modern Los Angeles. At La Brea scientists discovered fossils of plants and animals like mammoths, sloths, and saber-tooth tigers that lived there thousands of years ago. The George C. Page Museum contains a glass-enclosed laboratory nicknamed the "Fish Bowl" where visitors can see scientists at work cleaning and categorizing current fossil discoveries. Visitors will discover wonders as they meander through the Pleistocene gardens, view an Ice Age film, and gaze down into the pits - but Be careful! Watch out for those tar seeps.

Download or read book Great Salt Lake Biology written by Bonnie K. Baxter and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-03 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Great Salt Lake is an enormous terminal lake in the western United States. It is a highly productive ecosystem, which has global significance for millions of migrating birds who rely on this critical feeding station on their journey through the American west. For the human population in the adjacent metropolitan area, this body of water provides a significant economic resource as industries, such as brine shrimp harvesting and mineral extraction, generate jobs and income for the state of Utah. In addition, the lake provides the local population with ecosystem services, especially the creation of mountain snowpack that generates water supply, and the prevention of dust that may impair air quality. As a result of climate change and water diversions for consumptive uses, terminal lakes are shrinking worldwide, and this edited volume is written in this urgent context. This is the first book ever centered on Great Salt Lake biology. Current and novel data presented here paint a comprehensive picture, building on our past understanding and adding complexity. Together, the authors explore this saline lake from the microbial diversity to the invertebrates and the birds who eat them, along a dynamic salinity gradient with unique geochemistry. Some unusual perspectives are included, including the impact of tar seeps on the lake biology and why Great Salt Lake may help us search for life on Mars. Also, we consider the role of human perceptions and our effect on the biology of the lake. The editors made an effort to involve a diversity of experts on the Great Salt Lake system, but also to include unheard voices such as scientists at state agencies or non-profit advocacy organizations. This book is a timely discussion of a terminal lake that is significant, unique, and threatened.

Download or read book Asphalt written by Kenneth O'Reilly and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-07 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: La Brea Tar Pits once trapped prehistoric mammals. Today that killer has a chemical cousin in the Athabasca oil sands of Alberta, Canada—immense deposits of natural asphalt destined for upgrading to synthetic crude oil. If the harvesting of this natural asphalt continues unabated, we might find ourselves stuck in a muck of a different kind. Humanity has used asphalt for thousands of years. This humble hydrocarbon may have glued the first arrowhead to the first shaft, but the changes wrought by this material are most dramatic since its emergence as pavement. Since the 1920s the automobile and blacktop have allowed unprecedented numbers of Americans to experience the beauty of their continent from the Adirondacks to the Rockies and beyond, to Big Sur and the Pacific Coast Highway. Blacktop roads, runways, and parking lots constitute the central arteries of our environment, creating a distinct “political territory” and a “political economy of velocity.” In Asphalt: A History Kenneth O’Reilly provides a history of this everyday substance. By tracing the history of asphalt—in both its natural and processed forms—from ancient times to the present, O’Reilly sets out to identify its importance within various contexts of human society and culture. Although O’Reilly argues that asphalt creates our environment, he believes it also eventually threatens it. Looking at its role in economics, politics, and global warming, O’Reilly explores asphalt’s contribution to the history, and future, of America and the world.

Download or read book Storied Deserts written by Celina Osuna and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-28 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Storied Deserts makes a crucial and critical intervention in the field of environmental humanities by showcasing an emerging body of research on desert places from around the world. Deserts, despite dominant stereotypes of wasteland and barrenness, are culturally and ecologically abundant places. This edited volume sets out to reimagine the world’s desert places and the very concept of "the desert" itself, taking a boldly interdisciplinary and multicultural approach. Authors engage in literary ecocriticism and ecopoetics, film and visual studies, critical theory, personal and transdisciplinary reflection, creative practices, and historical scholarship. Through their diverse range of perspectives, contributors show how arid lands have been and can be understood as sites of narrative production, places where signs and imaginaries are born from the materialities of space and entanglement. In this way, this volume highlights how the storied matter of the Earth’s deserts informs lived realities, environmental histories, cinematic and literary imaginaries, political conflicts, and even intellectual categories such as "the human" and "the elemental". Ultimately, this book shows that reimagining desert places can help us to grapple with the epochal challenges of the Anthropocene. It is an important and engaging collection for scholars and students across disciplines that helps establish the value of desert humanities.

Download or read book Offshore Oil and Gas Oversight written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries. Subcommittee on Panama Canal/Outer Continental Shelf and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 646 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Non passerine Pleistocene Avifauna of the Talara Tar Seeps Northwestern Peru written by Kenneth E. Campbell and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Time written by H. James Birx and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2009-01-07 with total page 2569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With a strong interdisciplinary approach to a subject that does not lend itself easily to the reference format, this work may not seem to support directly academic programs beyond general research, but it is a more thorough and up-to-date treatment than Taylor and Francis′s 1994 Encyclopedia of Time. Highly recommended." —Library Journal STARRED Review Surveying the major facts, concepts, theories, and speculations that infuse our present comprehension of time, the Encyclopedia of Time: Science, Philosophy, Theology, & Culture explores the contributions of scientists, philosophers, theologians, and creative artists from ancient times to the present. By drawing together into one collection ideas from scholars around the globe and in a wide range of disciplines, this Encyclopedia will provide readers with a greater understanding of and appreciation for the elusive phenomenon experienced as time. Features Surveys historical thought about time, including those ideas that emerged in ancient Greece, early Christianity, the Italian Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, and other periods Covers the original and lasting insights of evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin, physicist Albert Einstein, philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Discusses the significance of time in the writings of Isaac Asimov, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, Francesco Petrarch, H. G. Wells, and numerous other authors Contains the contributions of naturalists and religionists, including astronomers, cosmologists, physicists, chemists, geologists, paleontologists, anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers, and theologians Includes artists′ portrayals of the fluidity of time, including painter Salvador Dali′s The Persistence of Memory and The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, and writers Gustave Flaubert′s The Temptation of Saint Anthony and Henryk Sienkiewicz′s Quo Vadis Provides a truly interdisciplinary approach, with discussions of Aztec, Buddhist, Christian, Egyptian, Ethiopian, Hindu, Islamic, Navajo, and many other cultures′ conceptions of time Key Themes Biography Biology/Evolution Culture/History Geology/Paleontology Philosophy Physics/Chemistry Psychology/Literature Religion/Theology Theories/Concepts

Download or read book Relics written by Jamie Grove and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four billion years in the palm of your hand, Relics: A History of the World Told in 133 Objects is the story of our planet as you’ve never seen it before. The Mini Museum is a collection of treasures gathered from across space and time shared by tens of thousands of people in more than 120 countries. Each item in the collection is a story connected to a childhood dream of sharing all the wonders the universe has to offer while bringing all of us closer together. In this book, the Mini Museum team shares the stories of real objects that have shaped our very existence across billions of years of history. Beginning with the birth of our solar system and the very building blocks of life, you’ll explore our dynamic planet, from the constant shifting of continents to dramatic and violent upheavals, which have changed the course of all life again and again. You'll visit mighty civilizations with cultures spanning millennia, as well as modern symbols of creativity and innovation, and the march of humanity as we reach toward the stars. Every item is photographed and presented in detail. There are also wild tales of adventure as the crew travels the world and prepares one of the most complex collections ever assembled.

Download or read book Oil in the Sea III written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2003-03-14 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early 1970s, experts have recognized that petroleum pollutants were being discharged in marine waters worldwide, from oil spills, vessel operations, and land-based sources. Public attention to oil spills has forced improvements. Still, a considerable amount of oil is discharged yearly into sensitive coastal environments. Oil in the Sea provides the best available estimate of oil pollutant discharge into marine waters, including an evaluation of the methods for assessing petroleum load and a discussion about the concerns these loads represent. Featuring close-up looks at the Exxon Valdez spill and other notable events, the book identifies important research questions and makes recommendations for better analysis ofâ€"and more effective measures againstâ€"pollutant discharge. The book discusses: Inputâ€"where the discharges come from, including the role of two-stroke engines used on recreational craft. Behavior or fateâ€"how oil is affected by processes such as evaporation as it moves through the marine environment. Effectsâ€"what we know about the effects of petroleum hydrocarbons on marine organisms and ecosystems. Providing a needed update on a problem of international importance, this book will be of interest to energy policy makers, industry officials and managers, engineers and researchers, and advocates for the marine environment.

Download or read book Quaternary Evolution and Biogeography of the Large South American Canidae Mammalia Carnivora written by Annalisa Berta and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Origin and Evolution of Birds written by Alan Feduccia and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of all that is known about the origin of birds and of avian flight. It draws on fossil evidence and studies of the structure and biochemistry of living birds to present knowledge and data on avian evolution and to propose a new model of this evolutionary process.

Download or read book Asphalt written by Kenneth O'Reilly and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-07 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Asphalt: A History" provides a narrative history of asphalt and its effects from ancient times to the modern day. Although asphalt creates our environment, it also threatens it"--

Download or read book Applied and Environmental Microbiology written by and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Smilodon written by Lars Werdelin and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The consummate guide to the ultimate sabertooth. Few animals spark the imagination as much as the sabertooth cat Smilodon. With their incredibly long canines, which hung like fangs past their jaws, these ferocious predators were first encountered by humans when our species entered the Americas. We can only imagine what ice age humans felt when they were confronted by a wild cat larger than a Siberian tiger. Because Smilodon skeletons are perennial favorites with museum visitors, researchers have devoted themselves to learning as much as possible about the lives of these massive cats. This volume, edited by celebrated academics, brings together a team of experts to provide a comprehensive and contemporary view of all that is known about Smilodon. The result is a detailed scientific work that will be invaluable to paleontologists, mammalogists, and serious amateur sabertooth devotees. The book • covers all major aspects of the animal's natural history, evolution, phylogenetic relationships, anatomy, biomechanics, and ecology • traces all three Smilodon species across both North and South America • brings together original, unpublished research with historical accounts of Smilodon's discovery in nineteenth-century Brazil The definitive reference on these iconic Pleistocene mammals, Smilodon will be cited by researchers for decades to come. Contributors: John P. Babiarz, Wendy J. Binder, Charles S. Churcher, Larisa R. G. DeSantis, Robert S. Feranec, Therese Flink, James L. Knight , Margaret E. Lewis, Larry D. Martin, H. Gregory McDonald, Julie A. Meachen, William C. H. Parr, Ashley R. Reynolds. Kevin L. Seymour, Christopher A. Shaw, C. S. Ware, Lars Werdelin, H. Todd Wheeler, Stephen Wroe, M. Aleksander Wysocki

Download or read book Roadmap to 4th Grade English Language Arts New York Edition written by Diane Perullo and published by The Princeton Review. This book was released on 2003-11-11 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If Students Need to Know It, It’s in This Book This book develops the English skills of fourth graders. It builds skills that will help them succeed in school and on the New York State test. Why The Princeton Review? We have more than 20 years of experience helping students master the skills needed to excel on standardized tests. Each year, we help more than 2 million students score higher and earn better grades. We Know the New York State Testing Program Our experts at The Princeton Review have analyzed the New York State test, and this book provides the most up-to-date, thoroughly researched practice possible for the Grade 4 English Language Arts test. We break down the test into individual skills to familiarize students with the test’s structure, while increasing their overall skill level. We Get Results We know what it takes to succeed in the classroom and on tests. This book includes strategies that are proven to improve student performance. We provide • content review, detailed lessons, and practice exercises modeled on the skills tested by the New York State Grade 4 English Language Arts test • proven test-taking skills and techniques, such as getting rid of wrong answer choices and outlining drafts • 2 complete practice New York State English Language Arts tests

Download or read book Science Digest written by and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 1220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: