Almost nothing about a reef is the animals. It is a structure they built, shaped by light, waves and water depth, and every part of its form is a record…
Two facts explain most of this: freezing requires a starting point, and water vapour can turn directly to ice without becoming liquid first. Here are twelve consequences.
1. Freezing Needs…
There is a recurring result in materials science that is worth stating as a general principle: arrangement frequently matters more than composition.
The lining of certain shells is the standard…
Wet ground forms where water arrives faster than it leaves. What happens afterwards - what grows, what was cut, what sank and what is buried - is all legible from…
Ice does two things to a landscape: it removes material from where it flows and deposits it where it stops. Almost every feature below is one of those two, and…
The film is not a solid thing. It is a layer of water held between two surfaces, and everything a bubble does - its shape, its colours, its lifespan and…