Polonium Halos

The term “polonium halo” refers to a ring of damaged material where the emitted particles from a piece of radioactive material has basically messed up the surrounding rock. Since the size of the ring is related to the energy of the radiation it should be possible to determine what the radioactive material was that formed […]

Formation of the Hawaiin Islands

The Hawaiin islands are made up of 107 volcanoes stretched across 1500 miles of the Pacific Ocean. They were formed over about 70 million years by the movement of the Pacific plate to the Northwest over a stationary hotspot where magma wells up from the earths mantle. This means that the further away from the […]

Lake Suigetsu

Every year we can observe algal blooms in Japan’s Lake Suigetsu that subsequently die and sink to the bottom of the lake forming a white layer. If you dig down deep enough into the lake bed you’ll run into thousands of these layers, in fact you’ll run into 100,000+ of them that look like this: […]

Radiometric Dating (the basics)

Radiometric dating measures ages based on the amount of radioactive decay that has taken place. There are over forty different techniques of radiometric dating including carbon dating, Potassium-Argon dating, and Argon-Argon dating to name a few.  To understand any of these dating methods you need to understand some of the basic properties of matter. All […]