SCIENCE

Researchers with the Asociación Ecosistemas Andinos and the American Bird Conservancy are keeping eyes and ears on the long-whiskered owlet in Peru. (Associated Press)

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Last month, rangers spotted the owlet three times during daylight hours and recorded its calls. They also took the first pictures of the bird in the wild. More pictures can be seen at http://www.abcbirds.org/whiskeredowlpic.htm.

-- Rick Weiss

In Greenland, the Earth Moved

Greenland is not only a great place for ice, it is also a great place for rocks.

The world's largest island has long been a favorite place for geologists to study rocks that are older and of deeper origin than most of Earth's surface.

Now it appears that Greenland is home to the oldest evidence of tectonic movement, the shifting of plates of Earth's crust that is responsible for most of the planet's surface architecture.

Harald Furnes, of the University of Bergen in Norway, and an international group of collaborators, report in the journal Science on finding a 3.8-billion-year-old ophiolite, a section of oceanic crust that has ended up high and dry in a section of continental crust. Previously, the oldest ophiolite was from northern China and dated to 2.5 billion years ago.

Various lines of evidence suggest the Greenland rock was formed at a mid-oceanic ridge, where molten rock from below rises to the surface. It then moved away from the ridge as part of a newly formed oceanic plate.

-- David Brown

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