Water Under the Desert

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From my colleague Sean Olson, on the discovery of brackish water 3,770 feet (1,150 meters) beneath the New Mexico desert:

The county started drilling an exploratory well in the Rio Puerco about a month ago on the educated hunch there was a large supply of brackish salt water deep within the surface.


It was a gamble with more than $2 million in taxpayer funding attached to it— but the county has come out on top.


Last week the county hit the jackpot: the potential for up to 50,000 acre feet of water per year for 100 years discovered at about 3,770 feet, county development director Michael Springfield said.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

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On dinosaurs and power politics metaphors:

Some scientists have argued that dinosaurs came on with a bang during the period of Earth history called the Triassic, sweeping into power in what amounted to a geologic instant.


But the new fossils, found at Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, upend that story. As dinosaurs were beginning their rise to power, other dinosaurlike creatures lived with them side-by-side for 15 million to 20 million years, the newfound fossils suggest.

Did Dinosaurs and Man Coexist?

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HoaxMany years ago, some friends of mine did one of the all-time great April Fool’s jokes. (Note to readers. It was a joke. A hoax.) They buried a cast of a fossil dinosaur and a fossil human, and staged and documented an elaborate excavation. (Note to readers: the fossils were fake.) The “scientists” doing the excavation found, amazingly, that the dinosaur had been eating the human! (Note to readers. This was all faked. Dinosaurs and humans did not live at the same time.)

The original page still exists, and periodically resurfaces as some credulous reader stumbles across it. I blogged about one such occasion a couple of years ago. And now, by the powers of the Google, that blog entry is one of the top hits when you search on dinosaur man coexist. The result is a steady trickle of traffic. Most readers apparently are savvy enough about the Internet technology to click through on the link that explains the hoax. But some, not so savvy on the clicky thing:

wow what a find well this adds on to the list of things that evolutionists cant explain or there probably going to say this is a hoax because it would totaly ruin there theory o yea and the earth is not that old its probably only at the most 10000 years old and throughout history there have been evidence supporting that humans lived with dinosaurs like the inca stones for example the funny thing is there is more evidence of this than the whole theory of evolution…lol man will do anything to explain away that there is a God who created us

Not so savvy on that whole shift-key-capitalization thing either, except for that once.

Modeling Famine

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A NASA group has come up with a new model that incorporates both remote sensing data and food prices to try to help anticipate food shortages:

Brown, the lead author of a study to be published early next year in the journal Land Economics, said that until now officials have primarily studied the after effects of occurrences like floods or droughts that might affect crop production as their best means of warning of a coming food security crisis. “With this new study, for the first time we can leverage satellite observations of crop production to create a more accurate price model that will help humanitarian aid organizations and other decision makers predict how much food will be available and what its cost will be as a result. This is a unique opportunity for an economic model to take climate variables into account in a way that can aid populations large and small,” she said.

The Hurricanes We Missed

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Cool paper out today in GRL by Edmund Chang and Yanjuan Guo about the hurricane record. To try to estimate the number we might have missed when we had to depend on ship-board observations rather than satellites, Chang and Guo fed storm tracks from the satellite era into a simulation that included old-timey ship tracks to see how many would have been spotted and how many would have been missed:

It is estimated that the number of tropical cyclones not making landfall over any continent or the Caribbeans may have been underestimated by up to 2.1 per year during 1904–1913, with this number decreasing to 1.0 per year or less during the 1920s and later decades.

I’ll leave it to the smart people who have been following the hurricane global warming wars to explain the impact this might have on that debate. I just think it’s a really clever methodological trick.

Paseo del Nordeste Bike Trail

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It’s not exactly Albuquerque’s most scenic bike trail, but I’d have to say this is really my favorite.


Continue reading ‘Paseo del Nordeste Bike Trail’ »

The Albuquerque Journal on the Bingaman Climate Bill

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Others at my work (I had nothing to do with this) offer their take on the Bingaman climate bill:

What does it take to ratchet back an energy-hungry nation’s contributions to global warming? In the Senate, at least 60 votes.


Among proposals now on the table, the one with the best chance of clearing that speed hump is sponsored by Sens. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa.


Other approaches take a more aggressive approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. But Bingaman’s bill plots the most realistic course to enactment and toward sustaining the effort over the long haul.

Australian Drought Easing

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Continuing our down-under theme, word that despite the Aussies’ astonishingly bad day in the Tour de France Sunday, things in the south are looking up:

Families could pay less for their Christmas dinner this year as the drought eases throughout NSW, state Primary Industries Minister Ian Macdonald says.

Announcing the best drought figures since May last year, Mr Macdonald on Sunday said a bumper winter crop had been planted and if harvested food prices should fall “by Christmas”.

“Farmers have planted a record crop … the highest since 1983,” Mr Macdonald told reporters in Sydney.

“If this crop can be harvested later in the year following follow-up rain … we could see an easing in the prices of foodstuff in NSW.

The Secondary Story

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Sometimes it’s not the main story but the sidebars that really deliver the goods:

Telstra says it may have to install temporary mobile phone towers in Sydney’s west to replace ones which were damaged overnight when a man went on a rampage in a restored army tank.

(Via Malcolm)