One of the world’s richest biodiversity hot spots is Peru’s Madre de Dios, a region of the Amazon nestled at the base of the Andes mountains. When biogeochemist Jacqueline Gerson first traveled there in 2017, she found herself on a boat headed downstream through the forest. As the riverbanks passed by, she observed a scenic … Read more
Over the last 485 million years, Earth has been both a lot colder and a lot hotter than once thought. A new temperature timeline that combines geologic data with computational simulations reveals a rich, detailed and dramatic picture of the ebb and flow of icehouse and greenhouse conditions on Earth throughout this span of time, … Read more
A flurry of intense and wild swings in climate conditions may have fueled the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history. A recreation of how ancient sea surface temperatures, ocean and atmosphere circulation, and land masses interacted revealed an Earth plagued by nearly a decade of drought, fires and floods. Researchers knew that a rise in … Read more
A perfect storm of climate, geologic and geographic conditions have combined to make Hurricane Helene one of the most devastating storms to ever hit the United States. Days after it slammed into Florida’s Big Bend region on September 26 and traveled hundreds of kilometers inland, Helene’s destructive impact has continued to grow. Fueled by warm … Read more
One of the widest hurricanes on record slammed into Florida’s Gulf Coast on September 26 as a powerful Category 4 storm, inundating Florida’s coast with meters-high storm surge and sending tropical storm–force winds as far as 500 kilometers from its eye. Helene — like so many hurricanes in recent years — seemed to spin up … Read more
Above the cloud tops, thunderstorms throb with a complex, frenetic light show of high-energy radiation. A view from a retrofitted spy plane soaring at 20 kilometers up revealed storms glowing and flickering in gamma rays, high-energy light invisible to the eye. Ten flights with the plane, NASA’s ER-2 aircraft, captured the shimmer of gamma-ray outbursts … Read more
For billions of years, the continents have moved across the Earth’s surface like tectonic vessels, but they have not survived unscathed. Waves in the lower layer known as the mantle could sweep away the keels of continents, pushing their surfaces upward to form visible landforms away from any active plate boundaries, researchers proposed on Aug. … Read more
Extreme Climate Survey Scientific news is collecting questions from readers about how to navigate our planet’s changing climate. What do you want to know about extreme heat and how it can lead to extreme weather events? These are some of the most extreme figures in a month of extremes for the land down under, which … Read more
This video was supported by funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. TRANSCRIPT David Johnson: So, in 2014, we were on a mud bank in the marsh here in Massachusetts, and I saw this little crab that came crashing through the mud bank and into a hole. And so I dug up the crab and … Read more
When strained by earthquakes, underground networks of quartz veins can generate enough tension to leach gold from passing fluids, researchers report Sept. 2. Nature Geoscience. The findings explain how fluids carrying small amounts of gold can fabricate large pieces, even in chemically inert environments. “You find a quartz vein 2 meters wide, and there’s a … Read more