Mountain Biking: Rubber side down- Time for a TurnaroundWell, my friends, things are finally looking up, and good timing, too, since I’m sure you’re all sick of me bitching. Recent bike build, including wheels… fun! In what feels like a fairly short time, I’ve come from sitting around … Continue reading → […]
- This Raised My PulseHey, baby… wanna ride? I may be injured, but I’m not dead yet. I can still have racy thoughts. Here’s more info. In other news, UBI was an awesome success! I had a blast. I highly recommend it. Overhaul day…. … Continue reading → […]
- Time for a Turnaround
- Edgy Veggie
Colorado towns hope for oil boost
An oil rig works in the distance in front of the Rocky Mountains | flickr user rjones0856
Somebody recently told me that she was surprised at the number of oil rigs she saw around Colorado on her first trip through the rest of the state — a loop from Boulder to Mesa Verde and back. But Colorado has always been known for being rich in something under the ground and when you get out into any kind of open space, you’re bound to see some kind of rig.
Out of curiosity, I went poking around the Colorado Oil and Gas Commission’s website and found a couple of nice at-a-glance items. Everybody knows Colorado is rich in natural gas, so here’s a quick look at how much natural gas and oil Colorado produced from 1995-2000 for comparison. Note that the numbers are not directly comparable because the oil is measured in barrels (BBL) and the gas is measured per thousand cubic feed (Mcf) and oil is a liquid and gas is a, er, you know…
Those numbers feel a little dusty, though, so here are Colorado’s oil numbers for 2009 [PDF], again by county.
And finally, to bring it home, here, you can search the Commission’s database by county, well or field to find out local information.
I’m thinking about all of this because the Post has a story today about some Colorado towns hoping for an economic boost from new oil drilling, thanks to a new oil drilling technology: Read more
Ice core drilling gets extreme in Greenland
Terry Topping helps to catalog ice cores at the National Ice Core Lab at the Denver Federal Center in Lakewood in January 2003. Some of the ice cores from the recent drilling project in Greenland will be stored here. Photo by Sammy Dallal.
An international team of scientists — including researchers from the University of Colorado — broke a record this summer out on the frozen, unforgiving landscape in northern Greenland.
They drilled more than a mile deep into the ice sheet this year, breaking the single-season ice core-drilling record. (Seasons in the land of the midnight sun are short.) The scientists extracted 5,767 feet of fragile, layered ice columns that scientists can read like tree rings to determine what the climate was like on Earth thousands of years ago.
But even though they’ve drilled to record depths, scientists still need to make it through another 2,600 feet to reach bedrock and find the sweet stuff – ice made from snow that fell more than 120,000 years in the Eemian Period when the Earth was much, much warmer.
For Jim White, a researcher at CU’s Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research, getting a good chunk of ice from the Eemian Period would be the end of a long, cold quest.
“We’ve been on a long quest to get the Eemian ice,” he said. “We had hints of it back in the ’60s, even, and in the ’70s. … I feel a lot like Captain Ahab. This is my Moby Dick.”
Read more about why scientists like White are interested in the Eemian Period at DailyCamera.com, check out the Web site for the project — called North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling — or watch a video about how scientists read the ice after the jump. Read more
