Covering earthquakes is getting to be a tiring, depressing business lately. From the horrific ongoing tragedy in Haiti that started with a magnitude 7.0 tremor in January to strong quakes in Japan, Taiwan, Chile, and just this morning, a magnitude ...
Giant, extinction-sized asteroids hurtling into Earth may grab headlines and star in Hollywood blockbusters, but airbursts from smaller asteroids and comets are thought to occur once every 500-1,000 years, making them one of the most pressing threats to humanity from ...
The internet is abuzz today with the news that Saturday's massive magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile shortened Earth's day by about 1.26 microseconds (one microsecond is a millionth of a second) and nudged the planet's axis of balanced mass a ...
For the people of the Juan Fernandez Islands and the coastal town of Talcahuano in Chile, Saturday morning's tsunami certainly didn't feel small. On the heels of a titanic magnitude 8.8 earthquake, surges of ocean water over 7 feet high ...
An epoch of ancient time known as the early Pliocene 3-5 million years ago holds special fascination for climate scientists, because levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were about as high as they are in modern climate. What puzzles ...
Meteorologists would like nothing better than to be able to tell you in no uncertain terms about the causes and effects of major weather events, but the truth is, day in and day out, the system they are trying to ...
Earth can do strange things to continents. Like eat them, for example. Previously, the planet's hot interior was only known to have an appetite for ocean crust, consuming it in subduction zones around the world. Continental crust was thought to ...
This is normal. Most of the 1,600 or so quakes since January 17 have been very mellow. Yeah, it sounds like a lot of qukes to have happen in a couple of weeks, but the vast majority of these have ...
One of the biggest, meanest El Niño episodes of the 20th Century came and went and almost nobody noticed. It was 1918, a year when many people had their hands full just staying alive. The first World War was ravaging ...
For all of the hell that Indonesia's been though in the past five years, its people sure could use some good news. Unfortunately, the latest round of reports are a mixed bag, and a fairly ominous one at that. First, ...
