When small earthquakes rumbled beneath northern Texas in 2008 and again in 2009, scientists were puzzled. While they expect to see seismic activity in active zones like Haiti, Chile, and Turkey, where disasters have already struck this year, the area around Fort Worth, Texas sees only rare and tiny seismic activity. Now, some Texas seismologists are arguing that techniques used in conjunction with natural gas exploration provide a plausible explanation for what’s going on.

North Texas sits atop the Barnett Shale, one of the several giant layers of shale in the United States believed to hold a truly massive amount of natural gas. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 200 trillion cubic feet of natural gas may reside in shales nationwide [USA Today]. The reason these giant deposits have remained largely untapped, however, is that shale isn’t particularly porous, and so extracting it requires drillers to fracture the rock in multiple places.

However, according to seismologist Brian Stump, it’s not the actual fracturing that may be to blame in this earthquake case. Rather, he points to “injection wells,” which are a way to get rid of the waste water that this gas exploration creates. Each natural gas well produces millions of gallons of wastewater that can be contaminated with salt, chemicals and crude oil. Injection wells dispose of the waste by forcing it deep into the ground under high pressure [Houston Chronicle]. Stump’s team used records of 11 of the tiny earthquakes (which at a magnitude of about 3.0 were too small to cause damage on ground level) to narrow the search for the quakes’ source. Those records pointed them to an area near the Dallas-Fort Worth airport where an injection well sits.

Because that well is close to an old fault, Stump’s team says the heat or pressure that the massive discharge of waste water creates is a plausible explanation for Texas’ quakes. However, they are careful to note that this is simply a plausible answer, and that the link hasn’t been proven. Understandably, Chesapeake Energy, which owns the well, was quick to reiterate that latter point, though the company closed the well last year as a precaution. “A direct, causal relationship between saltwater disposal wells and seismic activity in the DFW area has not been scientifically proven,” spokesman Brian Murnahan wrote in a statement. He declined to elaborate [Houston Chronicle].

Related Content:
Discoblog: Chile Quake Shifted Earth’s Axis, Shortened the Length of a Day
80beats: Why Chile’s Massive Earthquake Could Have Been Much Worse
80beats: Where in the World Will the Next Big Earthquake Strike?
80beats: Satellite Images Show the Extent of Haiti’s Devastation
80beats: The Earth *Really* Moved: Chilean Quake Shifted a City 10 Feet to the West
80beats: Geothermal Energy Project May Have Caused an Earthquake

Image: Energy Information Administration (map of major shale gas deposits)

A wave of reports is coming in from the town of Euclid, Ohio, from folks there who are seeing a mysterious light hovering over Lake Erie and Cleveland. The light, they say, is very bright, lasts for a couple of hours, stays near the horizon, changes colors, and keeps coming back to the same spot night after night.

Here’s an MSNBC report about it:

Could it be an alien visitor from another world?

No, I don’t think so. In fact, I think it is another world. Venus, to be specific.

A Fort Wayne, Indiana website has an interview with one of the witnesses on video, and includes some still shots. Everything in his description, including the photographs, makes me think he and the others are seeing Venus.

Right now, Venus can be seen in the west — the direction to Lake Erie and Cleveland as seen in Euclid — shining brightly just after sunset. It is so bright it can be seen while the sky is still light (I’ve seen Venus in the middle of the day). It appears to hover. Changing atmospheric conditions can affect its color, especially when it’s low to the horizon. It can be seen night after night, in the same spot in the sky.

Sound familiar?

I’m not saying what these people are seeing is in fact Venus, but it sure fits everything I’ve heard in the news reports (sometimes the witnesses describe multiple lights, but when looking to the horizon, especially over a big city, it’s not too unlikely to see planes flying around). In the MSNBC report they talked to the FAA, the military, and others (including a UFO guy from England), but never talked to an astronomer. Hmmph. And note that in these news articles, Venus is never mentioned! That’s mighty peculiar, given how spectacular it is in the west after sunset. It’s really hard to miss. A likely explanation is that it’s not mentioned because it is, in fact, the culprit here.

I’m getting a kick out of just how positive so many people are that this is a flying saucer of some kind. I wonder how many of these folks actually are familiar with the night sky, and would recognize Venus when they see it? That’s why I think very few astronomers (pro or amateur) report UFOs: astronomers tend to know what they’re looking at in the sky.

The next time you hear a report like this, don’t jump to the conclusion that some interplanetary object is making a close encounter… because it may very well be interplanetary, but the encounter may not be terribly close.

Tip o’ the probe to Patrick Kent.

UPDATE:  The riddle remains unsolved and is now open for everyone to try it.  Comments are open.

Here it is!  Finally, the Bonus Riddle.  Real quick, a run-down of “da rules”:  You have until noon CDT Tuesday to submit your guesses.  You submit by email to Tom or Marian.  No comments will be allowed on the post until after noon tomorrow.  Only previous riddle solvers are eligible to compete.  You have three guesses, and only three.  Even if you guess it correctly on the fourth guess, it will be disqualified.  Tom has the final say on any controversial issues.  If not solved by noon CDT Tuesday the 16th, the puzzle will be open for comments and guesses from everybody.

Now, the people eligible to compete are:  Bruce, Adrianus V, Jim, Patricia, Doug, Dwight Decker, Rob, Alejandro, Stuart, Jim Hammill, Nick, Stephen, Jerry Thornton, Roger, Bill, and Curt.  We will be verifying names and “addresses” against your previous blog entries.  It’s not that we don’t trust you, because we do, but we like to be able to prove we gave away the prize to someone other than our cousins or best friends (who are, by the way, ineligible to compete in any of the riddles anyway).

So, without further ado, here are your clues:

The answer is an object.

It was not known to ancient man.

This contains many parts.

Modern studies of this object have only served to deepen its mystery.

While not as big as it appears, it may be more complex than originally thought.

The first of its “kind” found, it has become the most studied.

Has appeared in popular film.

Look at this image:

It is your final clue.

Tom and I wish everyone the best of luck.

One more thing; please put “riddle” in the subject line of your emails so they don’t get lost in the shuffle.

While there was much I liked about my Point of Inquiry interview with Andy Revkin, perhaps nothing was more striking than his direct analogy between the massively deadly 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in China, and what is likely to happen someday in Oregon. I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing from him:

In Oregon…where there’s a known, extraordinary seismic risk, cities and communities are still not doing much to gird the buildings that matter most, like schools, to make them less likely to fall down and kill thousands of kids and teachers….essentially what you saw in Sichuan province, almost unavoidably will be seen in lots of places in Oregon, where there’s that extraordinary fault offshore, the Cascadia fault, that will generate an extraordinary earthquake, most likely in this century, pretty plausibly in the next few decades, if not tomorrow–that will destroy 1,200 schools. The schools are listed, they’ve been studied, we know where they are, the ones that are very likely or certain to fall down when that quake hits. If my kids were in one of those schools, I’d be pretty energized.

Revkin goes on to discuss why we tend to ignore risks like these, even though there is no possible rational justification for it….you can listen here. The section begins around minute 23:30. And don’t forget to subscribe to Point of Inquiry on iTunes!

Meanwhile, to jon a discussion that has begun about the show, zip over here…

Having just signed our lease in Texas, I’m extremely disappointed with my new state’s Board of Ed. In case you missed it, they’ve voted to remove Thomas Jefferson, the Enlightenment, and more from the world history standards. And it gets much worse:

Details at The New York Times, Bad Astronomer and The Loom.

Dave writes, “Following my degree in Zoology, I worked in public aquariums for several years before becoming a lecturer in Animal Science, so I’ve always has a bit of a ‘fishy’ background! I’m also studying stress in marine fish for a research degree. I’ve always been fascinated by evolution, and to reflect this, I decided to get inked with a Haeckel – this is a medusa from ‘Art Forms in Nature’. Haeckel was clearly a proponent of evolution, and although his ideas weren’t 100% correct, the man could draw!

“The tattoo is courtesy of the always-brilliant Jon Nott of Guildford, Surrey (U.K.).”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

[This is an update to my previous post, Texas conservatives screw history, so you should read that first to get your blood to a rapid boil before reading this.]

The Texas State Board of Education member Don McLeroy — creationist, antireality promoter, and stander-upper to experts — was interviewed on ABC TV’s Nightline program. Give this a listen, just in case you were thinking of cutting him a break… for whatever reasons I cannot fathom.

Yes, how magnanimous of the rich white men to allow women the vote, or to give the blacks equal rights!

[If the video doesn't load for you, go to the Nightline web page and click on Thursday's listing of Texas Textbook controversy, which should be up for a few more days.]

I have been active on Twitter today mocking the new textbook standards, and a handful of people have taken me to task thinking I was mocking all Texans. That’s ridiculous; I am clearly ridiculing the ten people on the Board who rammed this revisionist nonsense through… though you may feel free to expand that to the people who support them.

And to the commenters on my original post and elsewhere defending McCarthy because there were in fact communists in America: shame on you. Seriously, shame on you. What McCarthy did — and yes, it was a witch hunt — was directly opposed to all the ideals of this nation: free speech, liberty, presumed innocence until proven guilty, and many more. He was only able to ferret out a handful of so-called communists, but even if he had been 100% successful in his efforts what he did was an abomination for anyone in this country, let alone a seated Senator in the United States Congress. He engendered fear and suspicion, a paranoia and chilling climate from which it took years to recover. He betrayed precisely what he claimed to be trying to protect, and will stand as an object lesson for future generations on what happens when our system fails so utterly.

That is, he’ll stand as that lesson for those who will listen. Clearly, some people didn’t. It’s a crying shame that this includes a majority of the Texas State Board of Education, because now it’s entirely likely the lesson will be missed by a decade’s worth of schoolchildren, too.

Tip o’ the ten gallon hat to Robert Luhn of the wonderful National Center for Science Education for the link to the ABC interview.

Today is the much celebrated pi-day . Ok, perhaps it’s not that big a holiday – I don’t think Hallmark is selling any pi-day cards yet – but anyone who uses google today knows that something mathematical and geeky is being honored. I promise not to go into diatribes about calculations of the first few million digits of pi, or how many digits one needs to keep in order to calculate the radius of the universe to atomic accuracy. Instead, I merely want to relay a simple short story a colleague of mine recounted to me years ago.

Several years ago, before pi-day was famous, a student called the phone number associated with the digits in pi that appear after the decimal point, i.e., 1-415-926-5358. Apparently this is rather common now, and in fact, appears to be promoted as a mnemonic for the first 10 decimal places for those folks we need to have those numbers handy at all times. But this story happened in earlier times, back before the Bay Area split into several area codes. And, as the clever reader has already guessed, that student reached the SLAC main gate. How cool to phone pi and reach the main gate of a major national scientific research laboratory!

Alas, time and phone numbers march on, and nowadays phoning pi yields a “your call cannot be completed as dialed” message. (And I’m told that I cannot publish this post without noting that 3-14-15 will be a more accurate pi day.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

When the ESO cleans and reconditions a mirror, they don’t fool around.

Video

I recently posted that Don McLeroy, a Texas conservative creationist buffoon on the State School Board of Education, lost his re-election bid. That was good news, but I also warned that in his last months on the BoE, lots of damage could still be done.

Sometimes I hate being right.

In a 10-5 party line vote last week, the BoE rammed through a vast number of changes to the Texas state history standards, all of which conform to the über-far-right’s twisted view of reality. In these new standards, Hispanics are ignored, Black Panthers are added to provide balance to the kids learning about Martin Luther King, Jr., and get this, Thomas Jefferson was removed^*.

It’s insanity, pure and simple. The absolute and utter denial of reality generally is.

In typical McLeroy nutball fashion, he said:

"We are adding balance," said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. "History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left."

"Balance". Feh. As Colbert once said, reality has a well-known liberal bias.

The problem here isn’t one of balance, it’s of revisionism. As one of the more reality-based members of the BoE said, "They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world." As another example, the new history standards downplays and questions the separation of Church and State. And this was no accident by the religious zealots on the Board; when a more moderate Democrat tried to insert language about why the Establishment Clause was put in the Constitution, it was voted down by the Republicans.

There’s tons more. And there’s one that totally blows me away. I hope you’re ready for this — they added apologetics for the McCarthy hearings.

Yes, you read that right. They added to the standards that America was being infiltrated by Communists, and therefore McCarthy was right.

Holy crap.

So, is Texas doomed? Well, I can hope that teachers across the state will see through this sort of revisionist garbage, but I also know that bucking the standards is very difficult for educators, especially when those standards guide how tests are made, both in the schools and in statewide standardized testing.

And even worse, Texas has such a huge school system that textbook publishers will base their books in large part on the Texas standards, and these books will then be sold in other states. So these handful of ultra-conservative rabid far-right lunatics will actually be affecting the way children are taught all over the country. That means my kid. Your kids. All of them.

Congratulations, Texas State Board of Education. And thanks for dragging the rest of us down with your insanity.

My thank to everyone who sent me links about this.

[^* Update: It was Jefferson's contribution to the Enlightenment that was removed, not Jefferson himself. Sorry for any confusion there.]

This week the federal government released its 2010 report, “The State of the Birds,” examining the health of the United States’ native fowl. According to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the state of our union’s birds is precarious.

The 2010 report focused on climate in particular. In it, scientists reviewed data for 800 species nationwide, and ranked their sensitivity to climate change based on factors including how many young they produce each year, how able they are to move to new habitats, and how unique their food and nesting needs are [San Jose Mercury News]. Each of the 800 then received a designation of low, medium, or high vulnerability. You can see the methods for scoring here.

Birds that rely on coastal areas are in the most threatened position, Salazar says. Seabirds tend to have low reproductive potential and often nest on islands that can be inundated by rising sea levels, changes in water chemistry and other disruptions to the marine ecosystem [AP]. Hawaii birds are especially troubled, as they many are already under the gun by invasive species and disease, the report says. All 67 species of ocean-reliant seabirds ranked with a medium or high level of vulnerability. Birds native to forests or to arid regions, however, showed less climate vulnerability.

Kenneth Rosenberg of Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology, a contributor to the report, says, “Birds are excellent indicators of the health of our environment, and right now they are telling us an important story about climate change. Many species of conservation concern will face heightened threats, giving us an increased sense of urgency to protect and conserve vital bird habitat” [AFP]. Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, Forest Service, and other organizations compiled the 2010 report (the full list at the bottom of the press release).

Meanwhile, a separate study published in the journal Oikos found a different but interesting effect on American birds. In biology, there is a general rule of thumb that animals tend to become smaller in warmer climates: an idea known as Bergmann’s Rule [BBC News]. Biologists aren’t totally settled on why Bergmann’s Rule should be so, but Josh Van Buskirk and colleagues wanted to see if that was happening in the United States over the past decades, as global warming has gradually increased temperatures. Luckily, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Rector, Pennsylvania, has kept measurements of hundreds of thousands of birds, coming from more than 100 different species, that migrated through the area since 1961.

Van Buskirk found birds getting slightly smaller no matter their migratory season: 60 of 83 spring migrating species, 66 of 75 for autumn, 51 of 65 for summer, and 20 of 26 for winter. In a spot of good news, though, the study says that the populations of these birds aren’t in decline, and are perhaps adapting to their changing world. “So many of these species are apparently doing just fine, but the individual birds are becoming gradually smaller nonetheless,” says Dr Buskirk [BBC News].

Related Content:
80beats: Tiny Tern Makes World-Record 44,000-Mile Migration
80beats: The Birds’ Sixth Sense: How They See Magnetic Fields
80beats: Like a Wool Sweater, Scottish Sheep Shrink As Climate Heats Up
80beats: Will All Animals Shrink Under a Warmer Climate
DISCOVER: Works in Progress: How do migrating birds know where to go?

Image: flickr / Wili_hybrid

Hot on the heels of the post the other day about the winds on Mars blowing the sand dunes and visibly moving them across the planet’s surface comes this new satellite image of a huge sandstorm raging across the planet:

Of course, I’d forgive you if you interpret my saying "the planet" as meaning Mars. However, this picture is of Earth! Specifically, the Middle East. This March 4^th image from the Terra satellite shows a plume of sand 100 km (60 miles!) across sweeping from Saudi Arabia over Kuwait and into Iran.

In some ways, Mars and Earth are very similar. Sometimes, it’s even hard to tell them apart…

Oh dear. Sometimes it’s so hard to let go.

And most importantly, don’t forget to join us MARCH 13, at 1pm for the PLUTO IS A PLANET PROTEST MARCH AND RALLY. The march starts at the Greenwood Space Travel Supply store (8414 Greenwood Ave N) and will end at Neptune Coffee (8415 Greenwood Ave N).

But really, Greenwood Space Travel Supply is all kinds of awesome, even if they’re weirdly co-dependent with small rocks in the outer solar system. They’re the Seattle branch of the 826 network, which is a non-profit writing center for kids.

They also have cool t-shirts.

UPDATE:  SOLVED at 1221 CDT by Curt!

Today is the last chance to solve a riddle and be eligible to compete in the bonus riddle, Monday the 15th.  Today’s riddle is pretty tame, so get your guesses in quick.

Image: Frank Kulasek

Today’s riddle subject is an event.

It occurred in recent history.

While the event was occurring, it was not known what was happening.

What actually did happen is still debated in some circles.

Image: slemkeatpb on PhotoBucket

This event has happened before.

It will happen again.

This event is well-represented in modern literature, TV shows, and songs.

Although there is significant scientific interest in modern times, at the time it occurred there was very little.

Okay, that should get it.  Today’s winner will be the last one eligible for the bonus riddle, so give it a SWAG even if you’re not sure of the answer.  Today’s winner will still pick the subject of my next post, but it will be up Tuesday instead of Monday.

Good luck!

Lurking... lurking

A few weeks ago, International Space Station astronaut Soichi Noguchi took an amazing picture of Endeavour re-entering Earth’s atmosphere.

He has been busily snapping away at the Earth and posting the pictures on his Twitter feed. You really should be following him!

Recently, he unknowingly did me a big favor by posting this incredible shot of Egypt:

Yes, those are actual pyramids in the picture! Amazing. And by doing that, he made it very easy for me to answer the question I still get about once a month from people: "Is the Great Wall of China the only man-made object you can see from space?".

I already knew the answer is no; you can see cities easily, as well as agricultural formations, big roads, and more. But this one shot makes it very plain and simple: yes, humans have made quite an impact on the planet, and you can easily see it from space.

“INTRODUCTION: Erotic film clips are used in sex research, including studies of female sexual dysfunction and arousal. However, little is known about which clips optimize female sexual response. Furthermore, their use is not well standardized. AIMS: To identify the types of film clips that are most mentally appealing and physically arousing to women for use in future sexual function and dysfunction studies; to explore the relationship between mental appeal and reported physical arousal; to characterize the content of the films that were found to be the most and least appealing and arousing. METHODS: Twenty-one women viewed 90 segments of erotic film clips. They rated how (i) mentally appealing and (ii) how physically aroused they were by each clip… RESULTS: The most appealing and physically arousing films tended to exhibit heterosexual behavior with vaginal intercourse. The least appealing and least physically arousing films tended to depict male homosexual behavior, fellatio, and anal intercourse. CONCLUSIONS: Erotic film clips reliably produced a state of self-reported arousal in women. The most appealing and arousing films tended to depict heterosexual vaginal intercourse. Film clips with these attributes should be used in future research of sexual function and response of women.”

Photo: flickr/thebittenword.com

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: The pressing question this Penis Friday: how hard is hard enough?
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: The logic of Ménage à Trois.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Boys and girls, please open your textbooks to page 69…

A year and a half ago, the team led by Alexander Kashlinsky of NASA proposed the controversial and ominously named “dark flow,” a massive gravitational force that is tugging at galaxy clusters, and that Kashlinsky says could be coming from beyond the limits of our own visible universe. Now the team is back with a follow-up study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and Kashlinsky says the team has tracked the dark flow out twice as far as before.

A quick note on dark flow: The reason Kashlinsky noticed it thanks to the cosmic microwave background, a signature left over from 380,000 years after the Big Bang that permeates the universe. “The hot X-ray-emitting gas within a galaxy cluster scatters photons from the cosmic microwave background (CMB),” the NASA press release says. “Because galaxy clusters don’t precisely follow the expansion of space, the wavelengths of scattered photons change in a way that reflects each cluster’s individual motion.” Using data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which mapped the microwave background, the team managed to find this tiny effect when they looked at huge clusters of galaxies, and found something totally unexpected.

What the 2008 find showed was that these galaxies were moving in a way that the distribution of matter in our visible universe couldn’t explain, traveling a million miles per hour in a particular direction. Says Kashlinsky: “This is not something we set out to find, but we cannot make it go away” [US News & World Report]. The new study confirms this weird effect, and finds that it extends farther out, to at least 2.5 billion light years away. Where Kashlinsky’s first study relied upon three years of WMAP data and 700 galactic clusters, the new study grows those numbers to five years of data and double the number galactic clusters. The clusters appear to be zooming along on one particular line aimed at Hydra, Kashlinsky said, but “right now our data cannot state as strongly as we’d like whether the clusters are coming or going,” to or from Earth [USA Today].

While the universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding in all of the directions it can whiz, no one direction should be preferred, which is why the dark flow is to damned interesting. According to our best understanding of how the matter in the Universe was distributed, there’s no way of accounting for this flow. The obvious alternate explanation is a little unnerving: something outside of our visible universe is pulling on the matter that we can see [Ars Technica].

For another explanation of dark flow, check out Phil Plait’s at Bad Astronomy, written after the initial 2008 study.

Related Content:
80beats: Mysterious “Dark Flow” Is Tugging Galaxies Beyond the Universe’s Horizon
Bad Astronomy: Trans-Cosmic Flow Broadens Our Horizon

Image: NASA, the Coma Galaxy Cluster

Today the Enlightenment and Thomas Jefferson were disappeared from Texas.

Here’s a live blog from this morning’s hearings at the Texas State Board of Education. (Emphasis mine.)

9:30 – Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with “the writings of”) and to Thomas Jefferson. She adds Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson’s ideas, she argues, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. We don’t buy her argument at all. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted to students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar’s problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards.

9:40 – We’re just picking ourselves up off the floor. The board’s far-right faction has spent months now proclaiming the importance of emphasizing America’s exceptionalism in social studies classrooms. But today they voted to remove one of the greatest of America’s Founders, Thomas Jefferson, from a standard about the influence of great political philosophers on political revolutions from 1750 to today.

9:45 – Here’s the amendment Dunbar changed: “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.” Here’s Dunbar’s replacement standard, which passed: “explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.” Not only does Dunbar’s amendment completely change the thrust of the standard. It also appalling drops one of the most influential political philosophers in American history — Thomas Jefferson.

Incidentally, Thomas Jefferson was arguably America’s first paleontologist. Which certainly didn’t help his case in Texas.

Here’s a message from Radiolab to my tattoo’d readers (you know who you are):

Hi, all, I’m with the National Public Radio-syndicated science show ‘Radiolab,’ that has a large national and international following (http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/). Mr. Zimmer appeared on our show last season, in the ‘Parasites’ episode.

I’m in search of people who have tattoos of extinct species of plant or animal, ideally people in the greater New York City area. We’re trying to gauge the feasibility of doing a video piece on this subject for Radiolab. Please let us know via radiolab@wnyc.org if you are itching to share your extinct species tattoo story with our funky radio show!

Perhaps we’ll be calling it VideoLab soon?

Update: Be sure to send a copy to me, too, for the Tattoo Emporium.

Via Emily at the Planetary Society blog comes this amazing animation, a three-dimensional flyover of Candor Chasma on Mars generated using HiRISE data.

Holy cow. And the timing of this video… will some kid in middle school watch this video, wonder what it would be like to really do this, and then, in 25 more years, be sitting at the stick of a Martian flyer?