Tag: Christmas
Where Does Santa Get His Coal?
A version of this post first appeared on the Scientific American blog network.
Were you naughty (or lucky) enough to get some coal in your stocking this Christmas? Congratulations! Coal is actually a fascinating rock, and tells us a lot about the geology of ages past in the locations where it’s found. And I mean, how often are you gifted rocks that burn? (Please don’t burn them, though.)
You probably wouldn’t expect Santa to be able to locally source his coal – after all, it’s a rock that requires swampy or marshy areas with lots of lush plants as raw ingredients for its formation. That’s not really what you find around the North Pole! But a mere 650 miles away, halfway to Norway, you’ll find an island chain that provides all the coal Santa would ever need. It’s the glacier-capped archipelago of Svalbard, and Santa wouldn’t even have had to go digging when he first went looking for coal. It was right in plain sight: (more…)
Dana’s Pandemic Holiday Shopping Guide
Ah, yes, it’s that time of year again, where the holidays bunch up like they’ve put off celebrating til the last minute and suddenly it’s time to give All The Gifts. Of course, this being 2020, and many of us being in America where the ostensible leader can’t see reality past his artificially inflated ego, this is a complicated holiday season. Many of us will be socially distancing still. Viruses don’t take holidays, even when we wish they would.
Thanks to eCommerce, though, we can still give our loved ones some nice little gifts if we don’t want to skip that part, many of which will help while away a long pandemic winter. Let’s explore!