As we bask in the heat of the late Los Angeles summer, it seems most appropriate to discuss those curious times in Earth’s geologic past when cold and ice dominated the landscape. Icecaps and ice sheets have waxed and waned across the earth’s oceans and continents for millennia — billions of years, to be more precise. The cryosphere even left...

Liberal arts colleges are elite. They are beautiful, tony, progressive, expensive — seemingly inaccessible. For many students, spending a sum equivalent to the price of a small home on college tuition and fees is a rite of passage. For others, it is an unimaginable feat reserved for the privileged few — an education for the wealthy, endowing useless degrees upon...

Like much of the geology around Los Angeles and Southern California, the geologic systems underneath Occidental College and Eagle Rock have been widely studied. As discussed in a previous column, the majority of the Los Angeles basin consists primarily of consolidated sedimentary units. In the Eagle Rock and Highland Park areas, these sedimentary rocks consist of the Topanga, Puente and...

North America’s mountain ranges constitute a rather homogeneous crowd. Outside of Alaska and a sprinkling of mountains in Utah and the Desert Southwest, most of the ranges (think: Coast Mountains, Appalachians, Rockies, Sierra Nevadas, Adirondacks) stretch from north to south. They reflect main tectonic forces that once acted on the continent. Tension and compression from the east and west cause...

If Teen Vogue covers something, it must be big. So it is no surprise that the newest study on fast-rising sea levels made it between the glossy covers of the teeny-bopper magazine. The study, led by Rutgers University scientist Robert Kopp and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found with 95 percent confidence that sea levels...

The Athletics department's burglary saga continues after thieves struck Spencer Fieldhouse during the Tiger baseball games against Willamette University Feb. 13. This theft, which came after the women's basketball team was burgled Jan. 12, marks the latest in a developing trend of break-ins of campus locker rooms. According to the Campus Safety daily crime log, the theft occurred around 11...

The Occidental women’s softball team (1-1) split a pair of knock-down drag-out games at Bell Field in their season opener against the Lewis and Clark Pioneers, taking game one 7-6 and falling 10-1 in the second. Game One started out a bit unsteadily for the Tigers, with a series of errors that cost a Pioneer run early in the first....

Thank God for gravity. Without it, Matthew McConaughey would still be lost in the fabric of space-time, Matt Damon screaming expletives on Mars and George Clooney — well, there was nothing it could do for him. Recent films like “Interstellar” and “Gravity,” chock-full of A-list celebrities and stunning visual effects, have explored the relationship between humanity and space and attempted...

Sustainability can mean many things to many people, but limiting waste product and fostering reuse are at the core of sustainable best practices. Should it have avoided the vocabulary and mantra of Occidental students before this semester, sustainability now seeps into many conversations and curricula across campus as the college’s annual theme. The Cultural Studies Program (CSP) lecture series brought...

Occidental’s men’s and women’s swimming and diving teams have a new coaching staff, led by interim Head Coach Tom Iannone and assisted by Juliet Suess '14. Iannone, formerly an assistant coach for the Tigers, was named interim head coach following the sudden departure of Shea Manning several weeks before the start of the season. “It was a surprising development, but...