All things geology, climate, oceans, and more
Plastic’s everywhere these days: in seal bellies, dead whale bellies, our bottled water, and now our freaking beer, man. You heard that right: Not even our sacred beer is safe from plastic anymore. That’s according to a new study published in the Public Library of Science’s open access journal this week. The three-person team specializes…
Modern technology wouldn’t work without trace amounts of bizarrely-named metals that occupy obscure positions on the periodic table. They’re called rare earths, but there’s a near-limitless supply on the ocean floor—if only we could access it. This week, Japanese scientists are reigniting hopes that we’ll be able to soon, but major hurdles remain. In 2013, deep…
The world’s largest hunk of ice, the Antarctic ice sheet, holds enough frozen water to put cities like Miami several hundred feet under. How much Antarctica shrinks in the future will depend on the balance between what’s melting away, and what’s being added when it snows. A new study published in the journal Climate of…
Hey, there’s another reason to shake our collective heads at everyone’s favorite generational punching bag. A recently-published YouGov poll that surveyed 8,215 adults online found that a only two-thirds of young millennials, aged 18-24, are totally sure the Earth is round. Look, I love shitting on millennials to compensate for my fear of growing old…
The eastern U.S. is now living in a state of permanent Smarch while the West has fast-forwarded through spring. Temperatures are expected to plunge on Friday to well below normal, and cold weather records could fall in the Midwest. The cold air will also reach the East Coast, trailing a storm, which could create the…
Following a bone-dry start to the water year, California saw some much-needed rainfall in the form of an atmospheric river last month. Now, even though the wet season should be winding down, the Golden State’s getting another. The moisture will boost the state’s rainfall totals but could actually shrink snowpack, setting the still-too-dry region up…
The two most important words you need to know to understand the fate of our coastlines are “grounding line.” Those words describe where Antarctica’s voluminous ice shelves begin to float, holding back a wall of ice on land. A study published on Monday in Nature Geoscience is among the first to create a detailed snapshot…
Stretching 3.5 million square miles across northern Africa, the vast sand dunes and rocky plateaus of the Sahara cover more ground than the continental United States. Now, a pair of scientists is making a provocative claim that the world’s largest desert has expanded 10 percent since the early 20th century, effectively adding another Texas-sized chunk.…
When I traveled home from California in the midst of the for’easter last week, buoyed by confidence that, by some miracle, my flight to Philly hadn’t been canceled, I was sure that this was the end of the wintry hell-storm that had engulfed my corner of the planet for the last month. Little did I…
The fact that snow is white seems like a pretty basic truth. But over the weekend in parts of eastern Europe, the snow turned orange. According to the BBC, the apocalyptic tint is the result of Saharan sand mixing with snow, rain, dust, and pollen. While these colorful snowfalls typically occur every five years or…
In the forest-flanked waters of the Eleven Point River in southern Missouri’s Ozarks, scientists are on the hunt for one of the rarest crayfishes in the United States. To evaluate the status of their populations, researchers are using two very different methods—one of which is an emerging high-tech tool that may change how conservation biologists…
Turns out the East Coast doesn’t have a lock on butt weather. A Pineapple Express storm will mainline tropical moisture into Southern California starting on Tuesday. Up to ten inches of rain could fall this week, but this is no regular March Miracle. The deluge could trigger mudslides on the parched and charred slopes left…
I want to be writing this as little as you want to be reading it: We’re in for another nor’easter this week. If you live in the Northeast, you’re surely sick of the snow. If live anywhere else, you’re surely sick of hearing about it. And yet here we are, with a fourth nor’easter lining…
The Land Down Under was just a plague of locusts short of going full biblical this weekend. Unusual heat, destructive fires, a raging tropical cyclone, and powerful winds all swept across Australia in the span of 48 hours. Oh, and it snowed in Tasmania. The weird weather was the result of an active trough of…
As global temperatures rise, coral reefs are struggling—visibly. But while the link between overheated ocean water and reef death is well-documented, a new experiment is reminding scientists that the effects of ocean acidification could prove as catastrophic over the long run. Writing Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers have, for the first time, altered the…
In news that we hope will inspire many future death metal albums, scientists are reporting that they’ve recorded “volcanic thunder” for the very first time. The literally epic-sounding phenomenon was recorded near Bogoslof volcano, a remote volcano in Alaska’s Aleutian islands that erupted dozens of times from December 2016 through the summer of 2017. During…
For the third time in two weeks, a powerful nor’easter is bearing down on the the Boston area. For the third time this winter, we’re using the term bomb cyclone to describe the storm. But neither of those facts are what’s got meteorologists glued to their radar maps today. They’re watching the snow. There’s…
The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as the rest of the planet, but major questions remain, including how quickly sea ice will retreat, and how much of Greenland’s ice will slide into the sea, over the decades to come. A new NASA-led experiment could help deliver answers, by measuring a key component of…
If you think the housing crunch is bad in the Bay Area now, just wait. New findings show that more land is sinking into San Francisco Bay than previously thought. Factoring that along with sea level rise projections means even more real estate in harm’s way. The research, published in Science Advances on Wednesday, uses…
Thundersnow, folks. It’s happening. As Wednesday’s nor’easter cranked up and pushed into the Mid-Atlantic and the Northeast, rumbles of thunder rang out as flakes flew. It’s one of the most wonderful meteorological phenomena out there, and you should count yourself lucky if you got to experience it Wednesday afternoon (I know I did). Meteorologists have…
