All things geology, climate, oceans, and more
Thanks to global warming, climate disasters are set to impact pretty much every corner of the world, but of course, some places are getting hit first and worst. A new federal report shows which parts of the U.S. are most in danger. The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s latest National Risk Index, released over the weekend,…
The world’s largest free-floating iceberg appears to have lost its northernmost section, a possible result of it slamming into the shallow continental shelf surrounding the ecologically sensitive South Georgia island. A chunk of ice measuring approximately 70 square miles (180 square kilometers) has sheared away from iceberg A68a, according to new photos taken by the…
As if we needed more upsetting right news right now, geologists have reason to suspect that a cluster of Alaskan islands is actually part of an interconnected volcanic system of the same kind seen at Yellowstone National Park. Called the Islands of the Four Mountains (IFM), this volcanic archipelago is located along the Aleutian island…
Iceberg A68a—currently the world’s largest iceberg—is rotating and possibly moving in a westerly direction away from South Georgia Island, according to new satellite photos. This is potentially good news, as the enormous chunk of ice appeared to be on a collision course with the wildlife-filled island. A series of photos captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1…
Last week, I kindly asked then-Tropical Storm Eta to go away because it was clearly drunk. It did not listen. The town drunk of the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico has since regained hurricane status, and its stumbling path now has it aimed squarely at Florida’s Gulf Coast. It will mark the storm’s fourth landfall…
Using radar and other ice-penetrating instruments, scientists have detected a “fossil lakebed” preserved beneath the Greenland ice sheet, in what is the first discovery of its kind. Now a basin smothered by a gigantic sheet of ice, this former lake once measured 2,740 square miles (7,100 square kilometers) in size, which is an area comparable…
Days after being hit by Typhoon Molave, the Philippines braced itself as another storm, Super Typhoon Goni, made landfall on Saturday. Goni is a Category Five storm and is the strongest to make landfall this year so far. The storm, known locally as “Rolly,” prompted the evacuation of almost a million residents in the southern…
A gigantic pool of magma emerged beneath Earth’s surface following the impact event that wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs. New research suggests this hellish subterranean chamber hosted a biological ecosystem, a finding that could give clues as to how life emerged during Earth’s tumultuous early days. When the asteroid struck our unfortunate planet some 66…
There was one brief, beautiful week where Atlantic hurricane season let up after a staggering run of storms, and we could relax. That break is, unfortunately, over. Hurricane Delta is shaping up to be an incredibly dangerous storm as it picks up steam in the Caribbean. At this time 24 hours ago, Delta had just…
A once-in-a-century “climate anomaly” exacerbated the awful conditions along the Western Front in Europe during the First World War, according to new research. This unusual weather may have also amplified—and possibly even initiated—the catastrophic 1918-19 flu pandemic, exposing an underappreciated threat posed by climate change. New research published in GeoHealth describes the impact of a…
Normally, you wouldn’t want your phone to take pictures with an overly orange cast. But, there are times when you might. Like when massive wildfires are turning the West Coast’s normally clear blue skies a violently orange-reddish hue. If you take a gander through social media, you can find several pictures and videos of the…
New research suggests Hranice Abyss—the world’s deepest freshwater cave—is around 0.6 miles (1 km) deep, which is more than twice the depth of previous estimates. Back in 2016, scientists measured the depth of Hranice Abyss at 1,552 feet (473 meters), but they suspected it was deeper because their remotely operated vehicle had reached the end…
An official with U.S. Border Patrol sent out a tweet on Tuesday, claiming the agency had arrested ten “illegal aliens” in El Centro, California after some were allegedly caught with fake Social Security numbers. Strangely, the Border Patrol official said the suspects had claimed to be firefighters who were certified in Oregon. Is Border Patrol…
Lighting usually lasts for a couple seconds at most. Except for when it really, super doesn’t. On March 4, 2019, there was a lightning flash in Argentina that lasted for 16.73 seconds. Again, a lightning flash went on for almost 17 seconds! That’s almost the length of the chorus of “Raspberry Beret!” It’s three times…
A dust cloud began to drift across the Atlantic last week. It’s a development that could stall the formation of dangerous tropical storms in what’s expected to be an active season, at least for the time being. A new NASA animation tracks the movement of an unusually large Saharan dust plume over the Atlantic ocean…
Whoa, here’s something you certainly don’t see everyday: A large chunk of land fell into and temporarily drifted atop a Norwegian fjord earlier this week. Footage taken during the disaster has to be seen to be believed. The landslide happened the morning of Wednesday June 3 in the northern Norwegian town of Alta, reports the…
When the dinosaur-snuffing asteroid hit Earth some 66 million years ago, it produced a subterranean pool of magma roughly nine times larger than the current caldera at Yellowstone National Park, according to new research. The Chicxulub impact event of the Late Cretaceous extinguished 75 percent of life on Earth, including all non-avian dinosaurs, but it…
When the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs hit Earth, it struck at an angle that maximized its destructive potential, according to new computer simulations of the catastrophic event. The findings, published in new paper on Tuesday in Nature Communications, show that the dino-killing asteroid came from the northeast at an angle of between 45…
Satellite images have captured the result of a lake of lava collapsing on Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano, revealing an enormous new lake of water. The new lake formed as a result of the caldera, a crater called Halema’uma’u, collapsing at Kilauea’s peak. Now that the crater has filled with water, it’s possible that it may lead…
Two years ago, a severe storm in Argentina produced hailstones reaching 9 inches wide, prompting meteorologists to propose an entirely new term: “gargantuan hail.” Scientists don’t fully understand how such enormous balls of ice can take shape, but the 2018 storm is providing some tantalizing new clues. New research in the Bulletin of the American…
