Mesozoic coastlines and modern politics

Virgil once wrote, "Felix qui potuit rerum cognóscere causas"-- "Happy is the one who knows the causes of things," and I am certainly happy to know the cause of a band of Democratic-voting counties in the otherwise mostly Republican Deep South, namely that this geographical region used to be the coastline of an ocean that split North America during Cretaceous times. Intermediate links in the causal chain are plankton, chalk, cotton, and slavery:

During the Cretaceous, 139-65 million years ago, shallow seas covered much of the southern United States.   These tropical waters were productive–giving rise to tiny marine plankton with carbonate skeletons which overtime accumulated into massive chalk formations.  The chalk, both alkaline and porous, lead to fertile and well-drained soils in a band, mirroring that ancient coastline and stretching across the now much drier South....
Over time this rich soil produced an amazingly productive agricultural region, especially for cotton.  In 1859 alone a harvest of over 4,000 cotton bales was not uncommon within the belt. And yet, just tens of miles north or south this harvest was rare.  Of course this level of cotton production required extensive labor...
As Washington notes further in his autobiography, “The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers."

Storms and tremors

The University of Hawaii has a collection of infrasound recordings, collected from various natural phenomena and converted into audible sounds:

One of the techniques we use to grasp these inaudible sounds is to make them audible through time compression (speeding up), pitch shifting (frequency transposition), or other methods...
Signal processing algorithms were used to make them audible and occasionally pleasant. Many of the sound files are complex, and superpose breaking waves, distant storms, aircraft, and volcanoes.

My favorites are this one from a hurricane, and this one from the Icelandic volcano Hekla.

Link via Bouphonia.

Springtime on Mars

From NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day, which provides this explanation:

What is causing these dark streaks on Mars? A leading hypothesis is flowing -- but quickly evaporating -- water. The streaks, visible in dark brown near the image center, appear in the Martian spring and summer but fade in the winter months, only to reappear again the next summer. These are not the first markings on Mars that have been interpreted as showing the effects of running water, but they are the first to add the clue of a seasonal dependence... The streaks bolster evidence that water exists just below the Martian surface in several locations, and therefore fuels speculation that Mars might harbor some sort of water-dependent life. Future observations with robotic spacecraft orbiting Mars, such as MRO, Mars Express, and Mars Odyssey will continue to monitor the situation and possibly confirm -- or refute -- the exciting flowing water hypothesis.

Millions of years ago, Mars may have had an ocean, which might have supported microbial life. Perhaps Martian microbes still thrive today in regions where floods occur, rising from dessicated dormancy when spring rolls around.

The unmoving Earth

The Earth has an equatorial bulge because it rotates. If it were to suddenly cease rotating, its surface would be transformed as the oceans migrated to opposite poles:

 ...eventually creating an equatorial megacontinent that would ring the earth and thus separate both polar oceans.
What a strange new world this would be. As the earth would stop rotating (but presumably still circle the sun), one night-and-day cycle would last an entire year. The new continent ringing the globe (2) would include a large part of current Mid-Atlantic, Indian and Mid-Pacific seabeds, perhaps re-emerging legendary continents like Mu, Atlantis and other lands lost beneath the waves...
(2) What would it be called? Pangaea – again? Ringland? Equatoria?