As the Colorado River winds through the Colorado Plateau's soft sedimentary strata, it picks up a tremendous amount of sediment. This sediment - which once left the river's waters so muddy that Spanish explorers christened it El Rio Colorado "the reddish river" - is a vital component to the unique ecosystems of the river. However, with the construction of the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams, which trap the sediment, the once-turbid waters have become a dazzling blue-green, signaling major changes with serious implications for the health of the river's native ecosystems.

The American Geosciences Institute (AGI) is proud to support National Groundwater Awareness Week, March 10-16, 2013. National Groundwater Awareness Week - sponsored by AGI member society, the National Ground Water Association (NGWA) - promotes the responsible stewardship of groundwater through education and outreach initiatives that help make society aware of this life-sustaining resource.

Beginning March 1, 2013, the Federal Government's discretionary spending accounts will be cut by $85 billion through the rest of the fiscal year. These across-the-board spending reductions, known as the sequester, were first proposed in 2011 as a penalty so severe they would force Congress to work together to solve the nation's deficit woes. Unfortunately, no agreement on a package of replacement cuts or additional revenue in time to avoid the sequester has been made. We now face substantial cuts to critical programs, and want to know how the sequester is affecting geoscientists.

The American Geosciences Institute (AGI) and American Geophysical Union (AGU) have released a recording of the latest AGU/AGI Heads and Chairs webinar. This month's session focuses on legal issues related to field trips and field courses. The webinar, led by panelists David Mogk from Montana State University and Steven Whitmeyer from James Madison University, serves as a guide for reducing risk and liability for geoscience departments, and reviews tips for properly planning a safe and enjoyable field trip.

On June 5, 2012, a massive dock made landfall on Oregon's Agate Beach, just north of Newport. The dock carried with it a host of castaways, including as many as a hundred species of mollusks, anemones, sponges, oysters, crabs, barnacles, worms, sea stars, mussels and sea urchins. A placard on the side written in Japanese revealed that the dock had been unmoored from the Japanese coastal city of Misawa during the catastrophic tsunami on March 11, 2011, bringing with it an essentially intact subtidal community of Asian species to the Pacific Northwest. Although natural rafts have likely been ferrying organisms around the planet since the very beginning of life of Earth, the geologically recent advent of human settlement, culture and infrastructure is fundamentally changing the rafting game, as EARTH explores in our March issue.

The American Geosciences Institute is pleased to announce that it has released its award-winning Faces of Earth series on YouTube in full High Definition. Delve into the Faces of Earth and rediscover the wonders behind our dynamic planet. From the resounding cacophony that bore Earth 4.6 billion years ago, to the steady and resolute changes that affect our surroundings even today, the Faces of Earth series explores the vibrant, forceful, and ever-changing facets of planet Earth.

Congratulations to Kelly M. Deuerling, the first recipient of AGI's new Harriet Evelyn Wallace Scholarship for women in geoscience. Given annually in honor of Harriet Evelyn Wallace, a founding member of the Geoscience Information Society (GSIS), a national organization and AGI member society that facilitates the exchange of information in the geosciences, the new Harriet Evelyn Wallace Scholarship is awarded to a female student pursuing a thesis-based Master's or Doctoral degree in the Earth sciences.

Nathan Shotwell, a teacher at Holman Middle School in Glen Allen, Virginia, has been named the 2013 recipient of the Edward C. Roy Jr. Award for Excellence in K-8 Earth Science Teaching. Shotwell, who earned his Master's degree in Education from Virginia Commonwealth University, has spent his career challenging middle- and junior-high school students with what he calls "authentic problems" and inquiry-based learning in the Earth sciences.

Geoscience Currents #69 explores how female geoscience enrollments and degrees changed in the 2011-2012 academic year. New data collected shows that female geoscience enrollments and degrees in the U.S. dropped sharply at both the Bachelor's and Master's levels, but increased slightly at the Doctoral level.

The idea of a moon-forming collision is not new: The Giant Impact Theory put forth in the 1970s suggested that the moon resulted from a collision with a protoplanet approximately half the size of ancient Earth. But the physics underlying such a collision implied that the moon should be made up of debris mostly from the protoplanet. Since then we've discovered the moon is instead very chemically similar to Earth. Now, scientists have come up with two new models that explain how an impact could have resulted in a moon formed from Earth material.