Library branch

Earth Science

Continents, climate, and deep time.

6 pieces

Tool The History of the Earth Tap a syllable of the Korean mnemonic for the geological periods and the continents of that age appear. Five mass extinctions and the drifting latitude of the Korean peninsula. (Korean only) Tool The Forking Sky — Why Forecasts Blur After Three Days Run today's sky twice under almost identical conditions. Two lines that start on top of each other become different weather a few days on. See where a speck of difference forks, and why a forecast blurs past three days. (Korean only)

How Much Do You Know About Light? Why the Sky Is Blue and the Sunset Red The sky is blue at noon and red at dusk. Same sky, same Sun. Exactly one thing changed: how much air the light had to cross. 1 questions
Wrong, and Useful Anyway Wegener — Right, and Refused The previous five articles asked how wrong theories were useful. This one reverses the direction. He was right, he was refused, and he died without seeing it accepted. The hard part here is not taking his side. It is seeing why refusing him was not entirely unreasonable. 5 questions
Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here Reading the Ground — Why Earthquakes Cannot Be Forecast Nobody has seen inside the Earth. The deepest hole ever drilled reaches about a five-hundredth of the way to the centre. And yet we know how the inside is layered. How? And why can weather be forecast while earthquakes cannot? 3 questions
Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here Antarctica — Old Air Is Trapped in the Ice How can we know the temperature of a time with no thermometers and no people? The ice wrote it down. Drill deep into Antarctica and air from eight hundred thousand years ago comes up in bubbles. Korea's polar institute in Incheon goes to the end of the Earth to fetch it. 2 questions
Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here Weather — Why Tomorrow Can Be Told and Next Week Cannot It rains on the day you left the umbrella at home. Not because the forecast is careless: weather has a wall no computer can climb, and the man who found the wall was himself computing weather. 2 questions
In the Making — Things Not Yet Settled Fusion Will Make Electricity Free — What Abundant Energy Can and Cannot Do Asked what they would do with unlimited energy, people answer: make gold, create matter, restore the ruined natural world. One of the three is real, one is possible but pointless, and one is not something energy does directly. And the promise of free electricity was made once before, in 1954 — and turned out to be wrong. 2 questions

Routes through this branch

How Much Do You Know About Light? →Wrong, and Useful Anyway →Science in Korea — What Is Being Built Here →In the Making — Things Not Yet Settled →