All things geology, climate, oceans, and more
Forget catching rays on the beach. If you’re near San Diego, do yourself a favor and go check out the surf at night. A rare bioluminescent red tide has created ghostly scenes on the shores of Southern California, from La Jolla to Encinitas. The last one was five years ago and only lasted a week…
Jabba the Hutt—the iconic slug-like mobster from the Star Wars franchise—finally has a real world namesake befitting his ugliness. Osedax jabba is one of 14 newly-named zombie worms, tiny, mouthless, eyeless creatures that devour animal bones in the ocean’s depths. Jabba’s earthly brethren were found chewing their way through the head of a dead baleen…
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is playing no games. The federal department wants everyone to know that human-caused climate change is so real that 2016 Arctic heat waves would not have happened without it. This is according to new research NOAA published in the journal Weather and Climate Extremes this month. Climate models the…
The Kilauea eruption that began last week shows no signs of slowing down. The lava lake on the summit of the volcano on the Big Island was overflowing last week before dropping more than 700 feet. Now, all that lava is coming up through fissures in the lower East Rift zone, slowly turning the region…
The Kilauea volcano on Hawaii’s big island has been acting up for weeks. But on Thursday, all hell seemed to break loose when new fissures began to open in the volcano’s East Rift zone, sending lava shooting into the air and causing molten rock to carve a path through the thickly forested Leilani estates residential…
Sometimes, reality bites. Our political system is in shambles, our infrastructure is collapsing, and now, you can’t even enjoy Kanye’s new album (were you ever really going to, though?). Game of Thrones isn’t coming back until 2019, and colonizing Mars remains a pipe dream. We do have a bunch of ridiculously cool footage of the…
Tired: the age old fight of Fahrenheit vs. Celsius. Wired: a new scale of temperature ranging from ‘colder than Mars’ to ‘hot as dick’. Just in time for summer, computer scientist Jim Webb has blessed us with a curse word-based temperature scale using science. From here on out, 84 degrees Fahrenheit will be known as…
High temperatures are forecast to reach the mid-80s this week in New York, and I’m dreading it. But I have a plan to stay cool: just thinking of how much hotter it is in Pakistan, which is in the middle of a blistering heat wave. Temperatures reported to have cracked 50.2 degrees Celsius (122.3 degrees…
In August 2012, a monster cyclone roared to life over Siberia before moving out over the Arctic Ocean. Meteorologists watched, agog as the beast continued to gather strength for days, before finally dying out over the Canadian Archipelago. Cyclones are common in the Arctic, but they tend to be most powerful in the winter, which…
I expected Avengers: Infinity War to be very fun. I did not expect Thanos, the film’s central villain, to be a nuanced character driven by a cold, Malthusian logic any environmentalist will be uncomfortably familiar with. Mild spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War ahead. For the uninitiated, Infinity War is the audacious culmination of a decade’s…
Our planet is a cool and good planet. To prove this point, I would simply point you to the map above. The ethereal black and white image shows the thickness of all of Antarctica’s ice. It speaks to both the grandeur of the seventh continent and human ingenuity. Why humanity is on a course to…
Though it didn’t garner as much attention as the never-ending string of nor’easters, the biggest weather story of 2018 so far was Kauai’s epic deluge earlier this month. According to a preliminary analysis, the storm could’ve set an all-time record for the U.S. In the span of just 24 hours between April 15-16, 49.69 inches…
Few of us will ever visit the deep ocean, but thanks to the wonders of online streaming, there are more opportunities to experience this alien environment than ever before. Robots are live-streaming underwater volcanoes, undersea canyons, and shipwrecks. Now, scientists are streaming a spooky-ass audio feed from the deep, too. Since 2015, Monterey Bay Aquarium…
Birds-of-paradise like to show off, but it’s all right. I would, too, if I had teal feathers and stunning eyespots. One specific bird-of-paradise, found only in the western region of New Guinea, Indonesia, has a particular way of showing off that’s recently helped scientists confirm it is actually a new species. Meet the Vogelkop Superb…
It’s been a rough start to wildfire season on the Southern Plains. Oklahoma’s third megafire in three years is currently raging across the state, fueled by a spate of hot, dry weather. Neighboring states have been on high alert as hot, dry conditions and strong winds lock in serious fire danger across the region. On…
Spring baseball is always a bit of a crapshoot weather-wise, but this year has been especially shitty. And we can thank the freaking polar vortex. Frigid weather and repeated bouts of snow have caused games to be postponed from Chicago to Boston. Other games have been played in the cold and even while the flakes…
Humanity’s run as the dominant force on the Earth nearly came to an end on Tuesday, when a tumbleweed uprising gave the 120,000 residents of Victorville, California quite a scare. Stirred by swift winds and a desire to unleash great vengeance and furious anger, tumbleweed poured into the city for a battle royale. The dead,…
For years, shrimp and their other tiny, uncharismatic brethren collectively known as zooplankton were deemed too inconsequential to alter the oceans. Sure, they’re important food sources but it’s not like they could actually churn the high seas, right? Wrong, according to the new research published in Nature on Wednesday. To see if tiny creatures—which the…
Scientists have made a truly bizarre discovery on an expanse of cooled lava 150 miles west of Costa Rica and nearly two miles underwater. There, they laid eyes on more than a hundred female octopuses, tending to eggs that didn’t seem to be growing in water that seemed too warm for their liking. Deep sea…
Hurricane Irma may be a fading memory for those who didn’t experience its heavy rains or ferocious winds. But in the Everglades, the damage is still visible—and its ripple effects could last for years. Aerial surveys led by NASA in December have revealed Hurricane Irma’s striking impact on remote swaths of Florida’s river of grass,…
