Eldorado Park in Scottsdale was build with money from the Land and Water Conservation Fund.
The Biden administration is restoring some federal funding for urban parks. The move reverses a cut made in the waning days of the Trump administration.
The Land and Water Conservation Fund provides critical funding for parks and outdoor recreation, from the inner city to national parks.
One of President Donald Trump’s last acts in office was to remove a program for urban parks from the fund.
President Joe Biden’s action will help restore that funding.
Vianey Olivarria, a spokeswoman for Chispa, a local conservation group, said the funding is an investment in local neighborhoods.
SENATE WANTS TO CURTAIL GOVERNOR POWER
The Arizona state Senate has voted to ask voters to curtail the governor’s authority to assert emergency powers during future pandemics or other crises. Republicans approved the measure in a party-line vote sending it to the House. If approved by voters it would make a governor’s emergency declaration expire after 30 days unless state lawmakers extend it. Some Republicans have been furious with Governor Doug Ducey for closing or restricting businesses to contain the spread of COVID-19, saying it’s too much power for one person to wield indefinitely. Democrats say it’s risky to take away the governor’s power to respond to an emergency.
Important phenomenon could help assess future climate change The colorful banded Tepees are part of the Blue Mesa Member, a geological feature about 220 million to 225 million years old in the Chinle Formation in Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. Photo: NPS
How did rocks rust on Earth and turn red? A Rutgers-led study has shed new light on the important phenomenon and will help address questions about the Late Triassic climate more than 200 million years ago, when greenhouse gas levels were high enough to be a model for what our planet may be like in the future.
“All of the red color we see in New Jersey rocks and in the American Southwest is due to the natural mineral hematite,” said lead author Christopher J. Lepre, an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. “As far as we know, there are only a few places where this red hematite phenomenon is very wi
Large petrified tree known as Onyx Bridge snaps into pieces at Arizona national park Mark Price, The Charlotte Observer
Feb. 4 One of the world s most dramatic examples of a petrified Triassic-era tree has lost its battle against gravity and collapsed, according to the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.
Known as the Onyx Bridge, the fallen but intact tree was iconic as a massive fossil that resembled a natural bridge, the park said in a Wednesday Facebook post.
The bridge was recently discovered snapped apart, and experts believe it happened sometime in December.
Park officials lamented the fallen icon with before and after photos, showing the longest span of the tree had broken into pieces and was lying in the gully it once spanned.
1:57
An ancient dried-up lake at Petrified Forest National Park offers some answers. It’s full of coprolites fossilized feces. Inside the droppings are tiny bones leftover from somebody’s lunch. Scientists can take high-resolution scans of these minuscule fossils to see what they look like from all sides, even if they’re embedded in rock. Then, they blow up the image and print an oversized copy on a 3D printer.
The technique allows them to study never-before-seen details about the Triassic’s smaller residents. It’s changing what we know about the animals that evolved into today’s frogs, lizards, and salamanders. Scientists can trace the pathways of the nervous system or study the shape of tiny teeth to learn about what these animals ate and how they looked and behaved. And they can share fossils with scientists on other continents at the click of a button. The 3D files are available online, so teachers can print them in classrooms. Students can pick up bones that, in re