Valley Fever — a sometimes-fatal infection with no known cure and no vaccine — is caused by a soilborne fungus that thrives in the hot, dry soils of the southwestern U.S., Mexico and Central and South America. However, recent reports of infections far outside the endemic area indicate the fungus is either spreading or becoming active in new areas. The disease is contracted through inhalation of fungal spores, which can be aerosolized by soil disturbances from construction, excavation, gardening and landscaping, as well as natural events like dust storms, earthquakes, landslides and wildfires. [Read More]

Is a natural gas-dominant economy achievable in North America? Would it be desirable? These are the questions that the American Geosciences Institute (AGI) aims to address in its inaugural Critical Issues Forum: “America’s Increasing Reliance on Natural Gas: Benefits and Risks of a Methane Economy.” The event will take place in Fort Worth, Texas from November 19-20, 2014. Registration is now open and can be found here. To encourage participation from experts at AGI Member organizations, a $25 registration discount will be applied to members of the organizations that make up the AGI federation. [Read More]

Although Mauna Loa often takes a back seat to the more famous Kilauea, which has been erupting nearly continuously since 1983, history warns us that Mauna Loa’s current silence is anomalous. Meanwhile, more people and more buildings pack into potentially hazardous areas: locations where Mauna Loa’s lava has reached in the past and likely will reach again. Read more about the steps geologists are already taking — such as upgrading their monitoring tools and talking with the public — to prepare for another eruption of Mauna Loa in the September issue of EARTH Magazine. [Read More]

Alexandria, Va. — The rapid proliferation of 3-D printing technology in the early 2000s sent ripples of excitement through the tech world and beyond, but the high price of printers put them out of reach for most academic researchers and hobbyists. Now, more affordable printers have broken this barrier, and geoscientists have started testing the waters. From the delicate geometry of a crystal lattice to the sweeping strata of an anticline, geology is an inherently 3-D discipline. [Read More]

Alexandria, VA - The American Geosciences Institute (AGI) is pleased to announce two city-specific celebrations of its annual geoscience awareness campaign, Earth Science Week, taking place October 12-18, 2014. Earth Science Week Houston and Earth Science Week Denver will serve as major centers of public awareness activities. In both Houston and Denver, AGI is collaborating with geoscience organizations to extend and deepen the reach of the successful Earth Science Week campaign with special events, educational materials, online resources, and activities in schools and other settings. [Read More]

Alexandria, Va.— The La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles are a famous predator trap. For every herbivore, a dozen or more carnivores — saber-toothed cats and dire wolves chief among them — are pulled from the prolific Pleistocene fossil site. In fact, the remains of more than 4,000 dire wolves have been excavated, along with more than 2,000 saber-toothed cats. The sheer number of fossils allows researchers to ask population-level questions about the climate and environment as well as how these animals evolved. [Read More]

Science teachers and students can go online today to use a new educational resource of the Earth Science Week website, the “Be a Citizen Scientist” page, which features information and links for recommended “citizen science” programs focusing on Earth science. Citizen science initiatives invite ordinary citizens to participate in scientific research by making observations and contributing to large data sets. Such projects offer great ways for young people, amateur enthusiasts, and other nonprofessional scientists to become actively involved in the scientific research of Earth science phenomena. [Read More]

Alexandria, Va. — Tokyo, a city of more than 13 million people, has been devastated by earthquakes in the past and likely will be again. But when? And what role do ongoing slow-slip earthquakes — the kind that generally can’t be felt at the surface — play in relieving or building up stress? New research examining plate movements under Tokyo has found that since the massive magnitude-9 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, recurrence intervals for nondamaging slow-slip quakes beneath Japan’s capital have shortened. [Read More]

Alexandria, Va. — The Cascadia Subduction Zone is a 1,000-kilometer-long subduction zone stretching from Mendocino, Calif., to north of Vancouver Island off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. Those living along this stretch are occasionally treated to some shaky moments by the subduction of the Juan de Fuca Plate beneath the massive North American Plate. But the real threat is a potentially devastating magnitude-9 earthquake and the potentially ensuing tsunami — which has happened before and will happen again. [Read More]

Celebrate the Amazing World of Geoscience in the Latest Issue of GeoSpectrum from AGI Stories in this issue highlight how geoscience gives back: The new “Miners Give Back” humanitarian program from Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration (SME) Growth of the “Geoscientists without Borders” program to help communities in Haiti, Sweden and Benin from the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) Association of Environmental and Engineering Geologists’ (AEG) efforts to help provide the Shisasari community in western Kenya clean drinking water Soil Science Society of America (SSSA) contributed a story about mapping the impact Hurricane Sandy had on coastal soils Geoscience is also giving back to its own professional community by supporting the Geological Society of America’s (GSA) GeoRef database. [Read More]