Oh, Brother!

A wonderful new strip by Bob Weber and Jay Stephens called Oh, Brother! has just started up

Discovered This Day: The La Brea Tar Pits

In 1769, The La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California were first noticed by a Spanish expedition. Juan Crespi, a Franciscan friar with the expedition of Gaspar de Portola (the first Spanish governor of the Californias), in 1769-70, wrote "The 3rd, we proceeded for three hours on a good road; to the right were extensive swamps of bitumen which is called chapapote. We debated whether this substance, which flows melted from underneath the earth, could occasion so many earthquakes."

The name La Brea comes from the Spanish word for "tar." A scientific publication first recorded the fossils found there in 1875, the work of Professor William Denton. Evidence exists that prehistoric native Americans used and traded the asphalt. From Today In Science History

Born This Day: Discoverer of Earth’s Molten Core

Richard Dixon Oldham (July 31, 1858 – July 15, 1936) was an Irish geologist and seismologist who discovered evidence for the existence of the Earth's liquid core in 1906.

In studying seismograms of the great 1897 Indian Earthquake he identified P (primary) and S (secondary) waves. It is interesting that he did not get a clue to the presence of the core from the S waves, which are actually incapable of being transmitted through the liquid of the outer core. (The liquid core does not transmit the shear wave energy released during an earthquake.)

Rather he noted the existence of a shadow zone in which P waves from an earthquake in the opposite hemisphere of the earth failed to appear. From Today in Science History

Japanese poster for At The Earth's Core.


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