Tag Archives: earth-science

This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian. For more than 10 years, Andrew Sweetman and his colleagues have been studying the ocean floor and its ecosystems, particularly in the Pacific’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone, an area littered with polymetallic nodules. As big as potatoes, these rocks …

June 2023 did not seem like an exceptional month at the time. It was the warmest June in the instrumental temperature record, but monthly records haven't exactly been unusual in a period where the top 10 warmest years on record all occurred in the past 15 years. And monthly records …

Friday morning at around 10:30 local time, a magnitude 4.8 earthquake popped three miles below Whitehouse Station, New Jersey. Though nowhere near the magnitude of the West Coast’s monster quakes, the seismic waves traveled hundreds of miles, jostling not just nearby New York City, but Philadelphia and Boston and Washington, …

Late last week, on Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula, a concerning sequence of earthquakes suddenly turned into a full-blown volcanic crisis. A burst of intense and frequent seismic shaking, accompanied by a convulsing crust, suggested that a huge volume of magma was rapidly burrowing its way toward Svartsengi, the site of a …

In September, researchers at Google’s DeepMind AI unit in London were paying unusual attention to the weather across the pond. Hurricane Lee was at least 10 days out from landfall—eons in forecasting terms—and official forecasts were still waffling between the storm landing on major Northeast cities or missing them entirely. …

Climate change would be much worse if it weren’t for the oceans, which have absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat humanity has pumped into the atmosphere. That warming of the oceans has already been devastating for the organisms that live there, but it’s also come back to bite us …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1848, when Louis Pasteur was a young chemist still years away from discovering how to sterilize milk, he discovered something peculiar about crystals that accidentally formed when an industrial chemist boiled wine for too long. Half of the crystals …

Every year between September and December, Lubna Dada makes clouds. Dada, an atmospheric scientist, convenes with dozens of her colleagues to run experiments in a 7,000-gallon stainless steel chamber at CERN in Switzerland. “It's like science camp,” says Dada, who studies how natural emissions react with ozone to create aerosols …

Hurricane Lee wasn’t bothering anyone in early September, churning far out at sea somewhere between Africa and North America. A wall of high pressure stood in its westward path, poised to deflect the storm away from Florida and in a grand arc northeast. Heading where, exactly? It was 10 days …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Scientists have come to realize that in the soil and rocks beneath our feet there lies a vast biosphere with a global volume nearly twice that of all the world’s oceans. Little is known about these underground organisms, who represent …