Published by admin January 8th, 2010
in Resources and Climbing.
For your club posters, instructor session handouts, presentations, personal websites or any other (personal) use you can dream up, here’s the Climbing Games dingbat font. It’s an OpenType font file for capital letters A to R (see the ‘readme’ text in the zip). If you’d like to use this for commercial purposes just get in touch (contact in the readme file). Climbing Games is becoming really popular at climbing walls all over the land, if you don’t have a copy yet, you can check out a sample here.
Published by admin January 2nd, 2010
in Innovation.
Harry Thaler has a good idea with his Stopp It drain bung replacement … change your drain bung fitting once and thereafter you can use any PET plastic bottle top (found all over the world) to keep water out of your boat. I can’t help feeling that he’s missed something by putting a video of whitewater open boaters on his homepage though (or am I missing something?)
Published by admin December 23rd, 2009
in Office hours.
Nadolig llawen a Blwyddyn Newydd dda. Our office will be closed from the end of today and will reopen on the 4th January. Website orders received after 11:00 today will be processed in the New Year.
Published by admin December 20th, 2009
in Environment.
So you may have heard that the Alps are growing? You may not have heard that the African tectonic plate is no longer subducting under the Eurasian plate, but still the European Alps (created by the collision of those plates) are growing by about over 1cm per year. How can this be? It’s all about erosion. As the mountains are weathered away, the mass they displace below the Earth’s crust decreases, and they rise like a melting iceberg (more accurate models of their erosion have confirmed this) – (from the Knight Science Journalism Tracker via Boingboing.)
The Alps grow because they swim in the Earths mantle. Mountains like the Matterhorn or the Zugspitze lose one meter of stone every 1000-2000 years, Sauer reports. Like a melting iceberg slowly rises out of the water to adjust to the loss of weight, the alps rise according to their weight loss due to erosion. Sauer explains, that this was a hypothesis for years, but that it is proven now, because German scientists from the Research Center for Geoscience in Potsdam developed a new method to measure the erosion. Sauer doesn’t forget to mention in the end, that there is still some uncertainty and that the slight rising of the Alps might be due to the “recent” (in geological terms) melting of the ice of the last ice age, which plunged the Alps into the earths mantle.
