All things geology, climate, oceans, and more
I’ve never seen a tornado, and I don’t have much interest. Those things are terrifying. The Midwest saw some 25 tornadoes Tuesday as storms broke out in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas, reports AccuWeather. One tornado, in particular, that formed near Sulphur, Oklahoma, was caught on camera—and the footage is unbelievable. Storm chaser Brandon…
Downtown Davenport, Iowa flooded after HESCO barriers in the region failed sometime around 3:30 p.m. local time as the Mississippi River rose to nearly 22 feet, with no injuries reported but authorities and volunteers having to rescue some people by boat, the Quad-City Times reported on Tuesday. KWWL Storm Track 7 tweeted that after flood…
Across the U.S., industrial machinery creates a constant underground hum that sends vibrations through the surface of the Earth. Scientists are now mapping that subterranean humming. In any experiment, it’s crucial to understand what’s going on in the background—what noise already exists—in or to fully characterize any signals you’re seeing. Scientists have realized that Earth…
Our world is getting wavier—and not in a good way. New findings published in Science this week suggest that in the Southern Ocean, the world’s tallest waves are now nearly a foot taller than they were in 1985. Towering walls of water have seen similar height increases in parts of other oceans as well, riding on…
A year and a half ago, in the middle of the Antarctic winter, satellite images of the frozen continent revealed something wild: a gaping hole in the middle of Antartica’s sea ice that spanned thousands of square miles. Scientists were fascinated and puzzled by feature, which hadn’t appeared at this scale since the 1970s. Now,…
For the second time in a month, Mozambique is dealing with a catastrophic cyclone. On Thursday night local time, Cyclone Kenneth roared ashore on the country’s north coast with the strength of a major hurricane. Like its predecessor Cyclone Idai, the storm is expected to linger inland and dump feet of rain. The combination of…
Air pollution is taking over cities around the world. As the State of the Air report released Wednesday reminds us, nearly half of the people living in the U.S. deal with unhealthy air. In countries like South Korea and Thailand, however, that air pollution is on a whole other level. That’s why these governments are…
Mozambique is still reeling from Cyclone Idai, which struck the country hard last month, claiming over 1,000 lives across the region. Now a new cyclone is on the horizon, threatening to stretch already thin resources even thinner. Cyclone Kenneth is chugging from the Pacific toward Mozambique. Currently the equivalent of a tropical storm with sustained…
Every several years, magnetic field observatories record quick changes to the position or strength of the planet’s magnetic field, so-called geomagnetic jerks. The cause of these shifts has remained a mystery. Improvements to ground-based observatories and more magnetic field measurements from satellites have given scientists new insights into the planet’s magnetic behavior. Though we can’t…
Another month, another wild heat record. Vietnam set its all-time national high temperature over the weekend with the mercury cracking 110 degrees Fahrenheit. So yeah, global warming. It’s still happening. Etienne Kapikian, a forecaster with France’s meteorological service who tracks global heat records, shined a light on the new record. The Vietnam national weather service…
Weather is weird. There’s been polluted black snow, a snow-covered Sahara, and now snow with a hint of dust. The monster storm that tore across the Midwest this week got our atmosphere all types of wild. So wild, in fact, that winds picked up dust from deserts in New Mexico and Texas and wound up…
Green screens work wonders. Just ask the Weather Channel. It’s able to put viewers smack dab in the middle of wildfires, flooding, and, now, dramatic sea level rise. The network released a new video—the first focusing entirely on climate change—using its immersive mixed reality technology Wednesday. The segment aired during the channel’s morning show with…
Beneath the waves some 130 miles southeast of Cape Cod, there’s a hidden world of giant canyons and extinct volcanos home to a stunning array of life forms, from sharks to sea turtles to sperm whales. Now, scientists have discovered what appear to be two new species of deep-sea corals thriving in this undersea jungle.…
By trapping bubbles of atmosphere as it freezes, ice imprisons the climate secrets of Earth’s past. The trick is knowing how to find, and then recover, this buried treasure beneath miles of thick ice sheets in the first place. Having made stunning gains in the last few decades, ice core hunters are now poised to…
Well, that escalated quickly. Less than a day after calling for a half foot of snow and gusty winds to hit a portion of the Midwest this week, the National Weather Service has vastly upped its forecast. A sprawling complex of winter weather, storm, blizzard, and flood warnings now blanket an area from Colorado to…
Scientists think they’ve figured out how pyroclastic flows, fast-moving bringers of death during volcanic events, can travel such incredible distances and speeds despite the friction between the volcanic material and the ground. Pyroclastic flows are searing-hot mixtures of volcanic material and gas that travel explosively down the slopes of volcanoes, sometimes traversing tens of miles…
I regret to inform you that winter is not, in fact, over. A powerful storm is set to spin up in the Midwest this week. And if you’re getting deja vu looking at the weather map up top, you’re not alone. The swirling mass of air forecast to blast the region with blustery winds, snow,…
The U.S. drought map hasn’t looked this boring in a while. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, the Lower 48 appears to be experiencing less severe drought than any time in the past 19 years of record keeping. A wet wrap to 2018 and continued rain and snow to start 2019 mean that just 5.73…
At one of the most important ancient graveyards on Earth in North Dakota, paleontologists unearthed the fossilized remains of fish seemingly killed by the effects of the asteroid that ended the Cretaceous. We know that a large asteroid struck the Earth 66 million years ago, and around the same time, the dinosaurs went extinct. We’re…
The byzantine networks of rivers and streams that drain the Midwest is facing a flooding crisis of historic proportions. The multibillion disaster centered in Nebraska will spread this spring, with above average rainfall expected to cause floods to impact some 200 million Americans living near rivers. And it won’t necessarily end once it reaches the…
