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Men on horses and with swords exploring the a canyon.

Scratching the Surface

How geology shaped American culture.
by Jacob Mikanowski via The Chronicle of Higher Education on November 20, 2024
Old stone walls and trees in a New England meadow

How Stone Walls Became a Signature Landform of New England

Originally built as barriers between fields and farms, the region’s abandoned farmstead walls have since become the binding threads of its cultural fabric.
by Robert Thorson via Smithsonian on November 14, 2023
<p>Earth rising over the Moon, captured by Lunar Orbiter 1, 1966. Courtesy NASA/<a href="https://www.planetary.org/articles/1238" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Planetary Society</a></p>

How the Scientists of the 1960s Turned the Moon into a Place

For most of history, the Moon was regarded as a mysterious and powerful object. Then scientists made it into a destination.
by Danny Robb via Aeon on February 13, 2025
A view of a pool of lava on a snowy day in Yellowstone National Park.

A Geological Time Bomb: Remembering the Night That Yellowstone Exploded

Considering the impact of the 1959 earthquake that shook our most famous national park.
by Randall K. Wilson via Literary Hub on October 24, 2024
Map of Central Park.

How Central Park Holds the Answers to Big NYC Secrets

From ancient Native American trails to billion-year-old rocks, take an in-depth look at the thousands of years of history housed inside this iconic park.
via Architectural Digest on September 19, 2024
Horseshoe crab remains on the beach on Parsons Island.

Ancient Chesapeake Site Challenges Timeline of Humans in the Americas

An island eroding into the bay offers tantalizing clues about when and how humans first made their way into North America.
by Carolyn Y. Johnson via Washington Post on May 19, 2024
Fossilized footprints

North America's Oldest Known Footprints Point to Earlier Human Arrival to the Continent

New dating methods have added more evidence that these fossils date to 23,000 years ago, pushing back migration to the Americas by thousands of years.
by Brian Handwerk via Smithsonian on October 5, 2023

‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ Tell the Same Terrifying Story

The “Barbenheimer” double feature captures the dawn of our imperiled era.
by Tyler Austin Harper, Amanda Shendruk via Washington Post on July 19, 2023
Diagram with three mollusks

Edgar Allan Poe: Pioneering Mollusk Scientist

Poe’s work reminds us that the separation of “Arts” and “Sciences” into discrete discourses of knowledge is itself a quite recent invention.
by James D. Lilley via Commonplace on November 1, 2022
At American Fossil Quarry, on privately owned land near Kemmerer, Wyoming, hammer- and chisel-wielding visitors pay $69 to $89 to spend up to four hours hunting for fossils. Finders, keepers.

The 50 Million-Year-Old Treasures of Fossil Lake

In a forbidding Wyoming desert, scientists and fortune hunters search for the surprisingly intact remains of horses and other creatures that lived long ago.
by Richard Conniff via Smithsonian on August 23, 2022
People walking around and looking for rocks in front of the entrance to a cavernous mine in the bedrock.

Could This Be The End of a Historic New Hampshire Rockhound Paradise?

When Ruggles Mine went up for auction, mineral collectors feared it would never reopen to the public. After a last-minute reprieve, its future is still uncertain.
by Sarah Durn via Atlas Obscura on July 1, 2022
A pumpkin salt gourd

Salt and Deep History in the Ohio Country

Early American salt makers exploited productive precedents established by generations of people who had engaged with salt resources for thousands of years.
by Annabel LaBrecque via Commonplace on January 1, 2022
Collage of photo of geologist Ellen Sewall Osgood and rock crystals.

In 19th-Century New England, This Amateur Geologist Created Her Own Cabinet of Curiosities

A friend of Henry David Thoreau, Ellen Sewall Osgood's pursuit of her scientific passion illuminates the limits and possibilities placed on the era's women.
by Reed Gochberg via Smithsonian on November 19, 2021
Drawing of the oil industry within a crystal ball.
partner

The Mediums Who Helped Kick-Start the Oil Industry

Apparently some people communed with spirits to locate the first underground oil reserves.
by Paul H. Giddens, Jess Romeo, Rochelle Ranieri Zuck via JSTOR Daily on June 18, 2021
Geological map of winding river paths creating an intricate swirling pattern

Harold Fisk’s Meander Maps of the Mississippi River

A geologist and cartographer dreamed up a captivating, colorful, visually succinct way of representing the river's fluctuations through space and time.
via The Public Domain Review on August 30, 2020

The Planet is Burning Around us: Is it Time to Declare the Pyrocene?

Wild, feral and fossil-fuelled, fire lights up the globe. Is it time to declare that humans have created a Pyrocene?
by Stephen Pyne via Aeon on November 20, 2019

Letters of the Damned: Exorcising the Curse of the Petrified Forest

Letters come in each year with pilfered stones from the national park, hoping to break the senders' curse.
by Hunter Oatman-Stanford via Collectors Weekly on July 29, 2019
Texas oil wells.

Anointed with Oil: Evangelicals and the Petroleum Industry

On the outsized role that Christians have played in the oil business.
by Darren Dochuk, Thomas S. Kidd via The Gospel Coalition on July 16, 2019

On America’s Wild West of Dinosaur Fossil Hunting

In 19th-century America, rare old bones were a resource like any other.
by Lukas Rieppel via Literary Hub on June 24, 2019

Plug in Your Address to See How It's Changed Over the Past 750 Million Years

You can hone in on a specific location and visualize how it has evolved between the Cryogenian Period and the present.
by Meilan Solly via Smithsonian on February 15, 2019
Bottles of powdered pigments.

Treasures from the Color Archive

The historic pigments in the Forbes Collection include the esoteric, the expensive, and the toxic.
by Simon Schama via The New Yorker on August 27, 2018

Colonialism Did Not Just Create Slavery: It Changed Geology

Researchers suggest effects of the Colonial Era can be detected in rocks or even air.
by Robin McKie via The Guardian on June 10, 2018

How George S. Patton Took on the Lava with Bombs

In 1935, as lava from Mauna Loa advanced on Hilo, the not-yet-famous Army general was called to the rescue.
by Allyson Chiu via Washington Post on May 17, 2018

Fossilized Human Footprint Found Nestled in a Giant Sloth Footprint

An incredibly preserved set of tracks tell the story of an ancient hunt.
by Ed Yong via The Atlantic on April 25, 2018
Photo of Lake Oroville with low water levels, California, 2014.

The West Without Water

What can past droughts tell us about tomorrow?
by B. Lynn Ingram via Origins on November 8, 2017

The Strange Secret History of Operation Goldfinger

In the sixties, the U.S. government ran a secret project to look for gold in the oddest places: seawater, meteorites, plants, even deer antlers.
by James Ledbetter via The New Yorker on June 10, 2017
An illustration of Weyer’s Cave from 1858.

The 19th Century ‘Show Caves’ That Became America’s First Tourist Traps

Novelists concocted elaborate fake histories for mysterious caves in Virginia.
by Alicia Puglionesi via Atlas Obscura on March 2, 2016
Visitors pose atop Arch Rock, a geological formation on Mackinac Island.

How America’s Second National Park Lost Its Federal Status—and Gained a New Life as a State Park

Much of Mackinac Island was designated as a national park, but was too expensive for the government to maintain, so it was transferred to the State of Michigan.
by Sarah Kuta via Smithsonian on June 9, 2025
A monument to fallen Civil War soldiers with the New York City skyline in the background.

Green-Wood Cemetery’s Living Dead

How the “forever business” is changing at New York City’s biggest graveyard.
by Paige Williams via The New Yorker on June 2, 2025
The Geologic Time Spiral showing different periods over millions of years.

Deep Time and the Civil War Dead

The Civil War's vast death toll joined Earth's deep time story, magnifying its meaning as part of God's creative acts across eons.
by Caroline Winterer via Princeton University Press on October 15, 2024
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