All things geology, climate, oceans, and more
Volcanic eruptions are typically associated with death and destruction, but the recent eruptions on Hawaii’s Big Island resulted in an unexpected biological boom—a gigantic plume of algae extending for hundreds of miles into the Pacific Ocean. From May to August 2018, an ongoing eruption at Hawaii’s Kilauea Volcano resulted in the pouring of millions of…
Hurricane Dorian is the storm that just won’t go away. After leaving a horrific trail of destruction in the Bahamas over the weekend, the storm has meandered to the northwest where it’s starting to cause rapidly deteriorating conditions in the Carolinas and Georgia where “life-threatening” storm surge and “increasingly likely” flash floods are possible into…
In the digital age, hoaxes and disinformation pop up whenever there’s severe weather. But in the dark hellscape of 2019, the president is now a prime purveyor of weather disinformation. Over the weekend, Trump tweeted that Hurricane Dorian posed a threat to Alabama. It did not. And the National Weather Service was quick to subtweet…
Even before landfall, it was pretty clear Grand Bahama and the Abaco Islands would never be the same after Hurricane Dorian. Now, after 36 hours of pummeling winds and waves from the Category 5 hurricane, the world is getting its first glimpse at what that devastating transformation looks like. Aerial footage has revealed shipping containers…
Hurricane Dorian landed in the Bahamas with unprecedented ferocity this weekend. At its peak, the storm lashed the Abacos Islands and Grand Bahama with sustained winds of 185 mph, making it the strongest storm to ever hit the island nation and one of the strongest to ever form in the Atlantic. All of that would…
Hurricane Dorian is the strongest storm on the planet and it’s bearing down on the Bahamas. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) sent out an advisory early Sunday morning that the storm had been upgraded to a Category 5 hurricane. “Catastrophic conditions” are already occuring on the Abacos Islands, per the NHC. The agency reported sustained…
Hurricane Dorian grazed Puerto Rico as a tropical storm and has since spent the past two days feeding on warm Atlantic waters. That’s allowed the storm to pick up steam with winds over the past 48 hours, increasing from 50 mph to 110 mph as of Friday morning. The winds will keep build over the…
On Tuesday morning, Tropical Storm Dorian looked like it would thread the needle between western Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. But as the sun rose on the still-organizing storm on Wednesday, Dorian’s forecast track has shifted. It could now strafe or even hit the heavily populated eastern side of Puerto Rico and parts of…
On Tuesday morning, the National Hurricane Center issued a forecast with words nobody on Puerto Rico wants to see: hurricane watch. Tropical Storm Dorian ripped across Barbados and the Eastern Antilles islands on Monday night and emerged on the other side with winds around 50 mph. The storm is expected to strengthen as it churns…
In early August, sailors in the southwest Pacific Ocean began to see their environment transmogrify. As far as the eye could see, the ocean turned from an azure delight into a colossal gathering of clinking, floating rocks. And then came the foul, sulfurous odors. These rocks, some as big as a human head, were easy to…
New satellite imagery shows gigantic plumes of noxious carbon monoxide wafting over Brazil’s Amazon rainforest and surrounding areas—the result of massive forest fires currently raging in the region. The new timelapse video was produced by NASA, and it shows the movement of carbon monoxide in the upper atmosphere above South America from August 8-22. Data…
Death Valley is no stranger to scorching temperatures, but the heat gripping the park and surrounding area still stands out for its intensity and scope. The park is expected to see temperatures climb as high as 120 degrees Fahrenheit this week thanks to a heat wave that’s toppling records from coast-to-coast. The U.S. has had…
After a quarter-century of continuous operation, the San Francisco FogCam is set to go offline on August 30. Jeff Schwartz and Dan Wong, who go by Webdog and Danno, set up the cam on the San Francisco State University campus in 1994. Schwartz told SF Gate he decided to try the FogCam as an experiment…
As necessary as the monsoon rains may be for farmers in India, the season can be fraught with death and destruction. This year’s monsoon rains have been falling seemingly nonstop in parts of India since June, and now more than 1 million people are displaced in southern and western states with more than 200 dead.…
In the scheme of things, a freak lightning storm near the North Pole probably isn’t the biggest concern about the rapidly warming Arctic. But it’s yet another sign that the Arctic continues to have an abnormal one this summer. Earth is struck by lightning roughly 8 million times per day. That’s 100 strikes per minute.…
At least 22 deaths have been reported, and more than a million have been forced to leave their homes after Typhoon Lekima smashed into China near Wenling in southeastern Zhejiang province, between Taiwan and Shanghai, the BBC reported on Saturday. According to the BBC, a barrier lake (a natural dam) formed during the heavy rains…
The Northwest Pacific had been calm so far this season, but that peace and quiet has come to an end. Two twin typhoons are now roaring—and Super Typhoon Lekima has already made landfall in the southern Japanese islands. Taiwan and eastern China are next. Super Typhoon Lekima is the scary one here, but both storms…
Powerful storms are roaring into the Northeast on Wednesday afternoon, bringing with them the threat of lightning, flash floods, and winds up to 70 mph or more. The National Weather Service (NWS) has issued severe thunderstorm warnings and watches from Boston to Washington, D.C., until 9 p.m. ET. Logan Airport in Boston has already recorded…
If last year was the year of firenado, it’s only fitting that this is the year of the coalnado. Video surfaced on Tuesday of a huge vortex of coal bits being sucked into the sky in Elkhorn, West Virginia, in what is surely the second swirl of the apocalypse. What I’m saying is we’re a…
Europe is burning. A heat wave—the second in roughly a month—is taking over the continent, and it’s already breaking records. Again. And these are some of the world’s oldest temperature records. The heat’s gotten so bad that zookeepers in Belgium fed their tigers chickens frozen in giant ice cubes and gave their bears frozen watermelons,…
