On March 17, 2002, NASA launched the GRACE twins, two Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites. They flew about 220 km ( 137 mi ) apart in a polar orbit at 485 km (300 mi) above Earth, measuring regional areas of its gravity field,…
On December 6, 1901, American landscape photographer Eliot Furness Porter was born. A chemical engineering graduate from Harvard and a medical graduate from its School of Medicine, he taught biochemistry at the university. As a boy on family camping trips, Porter had been attracted…
On November 10, 2003, Congaree was designated a National Park, a South Carolina wilderness area, that was formerly the Congaree Swamp National Monument. It is an alluvial or flood plain, part of a river system where sediment deposits build up on one side and…
On October 31, 1994, Death Valley became a National Park. Located in eastern California’s Mojave Desert, Death Valley is in the lowest, driest place in North America, and the hottest in the world. Its valley floor is 86 m (282 ft) below sea level…
On December 18, 1971, Capitol Reef National Park in the south-central Utah desert was signed into law. It is the home of several unusual geologic formations such as the Waterpocket Fold. In the Late Cretaceous approximately 70 to 50 million years ago, a monocline…
On November 14, 1792, geologist Charles Lyell was born. Although he trained as a lawyer, he had always been more interested in geology. Extensively travelled and a keen observer, he came to realize the marks of great prehistoric time were all around him. He…
On February 20, 1902, American photographer and environmentalist Ansel Adams was born. As a youngster, he loved the outdoors and hiking through his home state, California. Adams joined the Sierra Club, spending summers in the glacial Yosemite Valley in Yosemite National Park in the…
On February 6, 1913, Mary Douglas Leakey was born. Interested in art and archaeology from an early age, she was deeply impressed by the prehistoric cave paintings she visited at several sites in France. Leakey distinguished herself as a scientific illustrator of ancient and…
On December 22, 1912, conservationist Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Taylor Johnson was born. First Lady of the United States [1963-1969], Johnson led many initiatives over her lifetime involving environmentalism, conservation, and anti-pollution. Canoeing along tree-lined lakeshores, hiking nature trails, or nurturing wildflower meadows, Johnson…
On December 9, 1962, Petrified Forest National Park was established in Arizona. Erosion- and weather-sculpted badlands, buttes, and mesas add their own surprising layers of colour from sedimentary iron and sulfate minerals in painting the desert biomes at the north end of this national…