In The News: Department of Geoscience
Silver Peak, which began mining lithium in the 1960s, won’t remain the only U.S. lithium mine for long.
An investigation from the Howard Center at Arizona State University uncovered the coming electric battery revolution in America will require billions upon billions of gallons of water to mine lithium. Many of the new U.S. mines will be located in the drought-prone American West.
Called the Melanesian Border Plateau, a team of international researchers determined the more than 85,00-square-mile structure was created when dinosaurs ruled the Earth 145 to 66 million years ago and is still growing to this day. Researchers used seismic data, rock samples and computer models to identify four periods of volcanic eruptions deep beneath the surface that started 100 million years ago.
The Melanesian Border Plateau was formed in four separate stages, which is pretty damn unusual.
Scientists pieced together the history of a huge Pacific plateau and found a complicated story.
Mountains here. Mountains there. Mountains everywhere. New Las Vegas residents, especially if they’re from east of the Rockies, may not be used to seeing mountains in their front, side and rear windows. But what are the names of those prominent mountains and mountain ranges?
The Silver State also has “dozens of active faults,” an article about Nevada’s earthquake risks on UNLV’s website states.
Is Las Vegas going to run out of water? It might feel that way if you’ve been paying any attention to the growing bathtub ring around Lake Mead, the shrinking Colorado River and federal actions to try to keep the river’s main reservoirs in working order.
Push to create East Las Vegas National MonumentNearly four million people a year visit Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area on the westside of the Vegas Valley. Now there is a push to permanently protect more than 30,000 acres of land on the eastside of Las Vegas.
Summer monsoons in the Southwest are difficult to forecast with total accuracy, but the future of the temperamental rainstorms under climate change is an even bigger mystery.
Scientists are studying mineral deposits in the caves of the Grand Canyon to understand the impacts of climate change.
They chose an ancient calcium projection, called stalagmite, from the floor of an undisturbed Grand Canyon cave and studied its geochemistry. The research team was led by the ҳ| 鶹ýӳ, and included the University of New Mexico.