During the March 30 webcast of a Falcon 9 launch, video of the ascent was abruptly cut off at the nine minute mark, with SpaceX officials saying it did so to fall in line with government restrictions. Weird, right? What’s even weirder is that an obscure, decades-old law is now suddenly being enforced. So what gives?
On May 25, 1798, the HMS DeBraak was entering Delaware Bay when a squall struck without warning. The British ship that originally belonged to the Dutch capsized and sank, taking 34 sailors and a dozen Spanish prisoners down with it. Rumored to contain a hoard of gold and jewelry, the DeBraak became a popular target…
From floods and rain to droughts and unseasonably warm conditions, here’s the weather that Americans can expect in the coming months.
On August 3, 2016, seven kilometers above Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, a research plane captured something mysterious: an atmospheric aerosol particle enriched with the kind of uranium used in nuclear fuel and bombs.
NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration launched the Joint Polar Satellite System-1, the first in a “series of four highly advanced polar-orbiting satellites,” NASA announced on Saturday, with the agencies touting they expect significant improvements to their weather-forecasting abilities when…
Tornadoes aren’t hurricanes. Hurricanes are long-lasting, low-pressure swirls that follow somewhat predictable paths. But tornadoes can pop up and disappear in just a few minutes. It hasn’t been easy to give people fair warning about tornadoes, especially those folks caught in the crosshairs of violently-rotating…
If there’s anything that just about sums up the desperation of the Great Depression in one filthy package, it’s photos of the Dust Bowl, when over-farming resulted in roving dust storms choking large swathes of the Great Plains region. Now, scientists are projecting that climate change could bring those hardscrabble…
Stock up on your canned beans and galoshes, folks: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2017 Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook dropped this morning, and for the first time in years, the weather monitoring agency is predicting more hurricanes than average.
For the past three weeks, biologists aboard the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer have been investigating marine sanctuaries in the American Samoan region of the Pacific. They’ve found a smattering of weird and dazzling creatures, reminding us just how little we know about life at the bottom of the ocean.
Researchers working in the South Pacific have captured stunning footage of a deep-sea jellyfish that looks like a flying saucer with tentacles.
Your new lock screen photos have arrived, courtesy of NOAA’s heavily hyped GOES-16 Satellite. The orbiter, launched in November 2016, can take high definition photos of Earth every 15 minutes and one of the continental US every five minutes, according to a press release. Its combined speed and resolution will help…
For the third consecutive year, NASA and NOAA have announced record high temperatures. It’s upsetting yet unsurprising, given the dearth of fucks we seem to give about the state of our planet. As Gizmodo previously reported, temperatures were 0.07 degrees F (0.04 degrees C) higher last year than they were in 2015—but…
Over thirteen thousand feet below the surface, hundred-foot hydrothermal vents spew black, 690 degree fluid like chimneys from the ocean floor. Tiny crabs, shrimp and limpets scuttle beneath the smokestacks, and a remotely-operated vehicle named SuBastian went down there recently to join them.
New data presented today by the NOAA and NASA shows that global temperatures hit a record high for the third straight year in 2016. But while the El Niño weather system was cited as a contributing factor, the researchers say an overarching global warming trend is indisputable.
To commemorate the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, NOAA scientists will explore two Japanese mini submarines sunk by the USS Ward just prior to the attack. You can watch it live right here starting at 11:30 am ET/8:30 am PT.
Norm Nelson is interested in what makes the oceans tick. As a biological oceanographer at UC Santa Barbara, his research draws connections between sunlight and phytoplankton, the tiny green microbes that power the marine carbon cycle. There are plenty of outstanding questions Nelson wants to pursue—but after 30…
The Hurricane Hunters from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are perhaps the ballsiest pilots on this terrifying and vengeful planet.
Post-tropical Cyclone Hermine took an unexpected veer east, which means that some of the worst of the rains and winds could happen out to sea if it continues on its trajectory. But even on that path, it could still send us a wave of storm surge floods.
