ksl.com
Intense heat. Drought. Wildly extreme weather accompanied by wildfires.
Those climate factors are enough to keep even the most hardy of creatures from settling in, even the gargantuan, plant-eating dinosaurs that roamed the earth more than 200 million years ago.
deseretnews.com
A Colorado River ferry operator named Arthur Chaffin created quite a stir more than half-a-century ago in 1949 when, armed solely with his camera, he set off from his cabin in Hite to a remote place in the Utah outback he’d known about for years he called Mushroom Valley.
deseretnews.com
Drop, cover and hold on. More than 700,000 Utahns will be participating in a statewide earthquake drill Thursday for the annual Great Utah ShakeOut, an initiative to help people and organizations practice how to protect themselves in the event of a major earthquake.
deseretnews.com
It’s 2 a.m. on an April Thursday. Along the Wasatch Front, most of the more than 2 million Utahns who live here are sleeping, at home in suburban homes or aging apartments, even as thousands of others are working graveyard shifts in hospitals or other businesses.
nationalparkstraveler.com
Baked by time like some multi-layer geologic tort, Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah features a landscape cut by canyons, rumpled by upthrusts, dimpled by grabens, and even pockmarked, some believe, by ancient asteroids.
nationalgeographic.com
Birds are dinosaurs. This fact is easily understood by looking at the scaly feet of a chickadee or by comparing a chicken wing to a Velociraptor arm. But given that birds are the only “terrible lizards” around today, it’s easy to forget that they also thrived alongside their non-avian kin for 84 million years. The first birds evolved in the Late Jurassic, roundabout 150 million years ago, and they became a widespread and successful branch of the dinosaur family tree.
stgeorgeutah.com
Future volcanologists rejoice! You don’t have to hop a flight to Hawaii to witness firsthand the exciting geology of volcanoes and the power they have, and have had in the past, to shape the land we live on.
usgs.gov
A team of scientists from the USGS Geological Hazards Science Center, led by Mendenhall Postdoctoral Fellow Scott Bennett and Research Geologists Ryan Gold, Richard Briggs, Christopher DuRoss, and Stephen Personius are collaborating with scientists at the Utah Geological Survey to gather data from new paleoseismic trenches along the Wasatch fault zone. These new datasets will help researchers to understand if past surface-rupturing earthquakes have spanned fault segment boundaries. They are also analyzing new high-resolution airborne LiDAR topographic data to characterize previously unmapped fault traces and to measure how vertical displacements (vertical offset of the ground surface from faulting) vary, both in space (from north to south) and time (the last 20,000 years).
livescience.com
A continent-sized scan of North America is giving researchers the sharpest view yet of mysterious geological structures underneath the United States.
One of our Utah Geological Survey geologists, Robert Biek, is an author on the newly discovered Markagunt gravity slide. Located in Utah, the slide has come to be found as one of the world’s largest known landslides (tied for largest, alongside the Heart Mountain gravity slide in northwest Wyoming). Read more about it!
arstechnica.com
Some things can be too big to notice, as our flat-Earth-believing ancestors can attest, having failed to work out that the surface of the Earth curves around a sphere. Or, as the saying goes, you can focus on the details of some fascinating trees and miss interesting facts about the forest as a whole.
The Utah Geological Survey (UGS) is a division of the Utah Department of Natural Resources. Several specialized programs comprise the UGS: Data Management, Energy & Minerals, Geologic Hazards, Geologic Information & Outreach, Geologic Mapping, Groundwater & Wetlands, and Paleontology.