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Science News •

How the Grand Canyon could have lost 1 billion years of geologic history

In the Grand Canyon, rock layers preserve a relatively continuous record of Earth’s geologic history going back about 2 billion years. But between 520 million and 1.8 billion years, the record is noticeably empty. It’s as if someone broke into a museum and made off with almost an entire wing’s worth of rocks, and sorting out “whodunnit” is one of the coldest cases in all geology.


Now, scientists studying the Grand Canyon’s rocks say that a gigantic Earth-spanning cliff  —with a global glaciat...
BBC Sky at Night Magazine •

Scientists have worked out when Earth will run out of oxygen – and it's sooner than we thought | BBC Sky at Night Magazine

For obvious reasons, it's impossible to imagine life on Earth without oxygen. But will it ever run out? And if so, how long will our planet continue to have oxygen?
There are a few scenarios in which we could imagine the end of life on Earth: Climate change, rising CO2, an asteroid impact, the steady brightening of the Sun.
But now there’s another – and scientists say that’s the most likely one to happen.
A group of scientists worked out the most likely cause of Earth becoming uninhabitable, and...

NASA Watches Earth’s Weight, Finds Center of Mass | NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

How accurate are existing methods to measure the size of the swivel? The last two international estimates, made in 2017 and 2023, differ by 0.27 inches (7 millimeters), about the height of three stacked nickels. The difference is almost as large as the motion itself.To reduce uncertainty, JPL geoscientist Donald Argus led the development of a new technique based on ultraprecise satellite tracking.Driven by gravity, satellites naturally orbit Earth’s center of mass, as if bound by invisible tethe...
ScienceDaily •

Global warming is breaking a 400-year climate link between two oceans

A new study suggests that the climate connection between the tropical Indian and Pacific oceans can be disrupted by major volcanic eruptions, while human-caused greenhouse gas emissions may now be driving an even more unusual breakdown in that relationship.Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) combined paleoclimate evidence with climate model simulations to examine how closely the two ocean basins have behaved over the past several centuries.
Their findings indicate that...
ScienceAlert •

Scientists Warn 'Drylands' Could Spread to Over 40% of Earth by 2100

As the world gets hotter, many of its driest regions are expected to get even drier.When this happens, the boundaries of arid regions are expected to creep forward, transforming landscapes and killing off plant life no longer able to cope.Amidst the changes, projections suggest Earth's drylands could grow to cover over 40 percent of the planet's land area by the end of the 21st century, according to a new study in Environmental Research Letters.But in a surprise twist, the most prominent contrib...
Travel + Leisure •

These Are the 10 Most Adventure-friendly States in the U.S.—and No. 1 Has Two Stunning National Parks and Year-round Hiking

For nature-loving travelers who like to climb mountains, embark on rigorous hikes, or bike rocky trails, there’s a whole world of adventurous vacation possibilities in the United States. But some states lend themselves to the great outdoors much more than others. That’s why in April, Kühl, a high-end apparel brand designed for hiking and outdoor activities, released its analysis on outdoor accessibility across all 50 states. The team behind the study concluded the No. 1 adventure-friendly destin...
NPR •

Did climate change cause this heat wave? Most likely, and here's why

More than 80 million people are under an Extreme Heat Warning or Heat Advisory through this week, according to the National Weather Service. Forecasters at the service's Weather Prediction Center called this latest heat dome a "steamy air-mass even by mid-to-late August standards." Dangerous record-breaking heat will continue across the South-Central U.S. and expand into the Southwest by mid-week, bringing daytime temperatures into the triple digits. Much of the desert Southwest, including par...
Inside Climate News •

The Biggest Carbon Polluters Are to Blame for Half of U.S. Western Water Lost to Climate Change, ‘Groundbreaking’ Paper Says - Inside Climate News

Some of the largest fossil fuel companies on Earth are disproportionately responsible for the water crisis in the American West, according to a first-of-its-kind study published Tuesday.


From 2014 to 2024, climate change sapped over a third of the region’s typical annual snowpack and decreased streamflows by about 13 percent, the authors found in the paper, which appeared in Nature’s Communications Earth and Environment journal. About half of those losses are attributable to emissions from “c...
Discover Magazine •

Thunderquakes Could Help Scientists See Beneath Earth's Surface

Thunderstorms cause a lot of commotion in the atmosphere, but their impact actually runs much deeper than expected. That's because they can produce seismic “thunderquakes,” which aren’t nearly as destructive as they sound; in fact, these quakes are helping researchers see how the Earth looks below the surface.

A thunderquake occurs when lightning strikes the ground, generating acoustic shock waves — in other words, thunder — that then spread beneath the surface. This phenomenon has been observe...
Earth.com •

Global sea surface temperatures hit a record high as El Niño returns

Global sea surface temperatures reached a record high for the time of year on June 21. The reading edged past the previous highs set in 2023 and 2024. Two European climate services confirmed the reading through separate methods, an unusual double-check on a single day’s measurement.The record comes as a new El Niño takes hold in the Pacific. This pattern feeds extra heat into the atmosphere and pushes global temperatures higher.A warmer ocean also powers stronger storms and lifts sea levels whil...
Smithsonian Magazine •

As the Ocean Warms, a 'Cold Blob' in the Atlantic Has Puzzled Scientists. It Might Be a Warning Sign About a Key Current System

The ocean has been heating up over the past century, largely due to human activity that produces heat-trapping greenhouse gases. But strangely, a patch of the Atlantic Ocean south of Greenland and Iceland has been trending in the opposite direction.

While this may sound like good news for our warming planet, the “cold blob” could be a sign of a more concerning pattern with far-reaching effects.

In a study published on May 28 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a team of scientists use...
BBC Science Focus Magazine •

Chance of mega earthquake hitting California now at a 'historic high', experts warn | BBC Science Focus Magazine

Scientists are warning that an earthquake could be heading to California, as recent research suggests that seismic pressure in two big fault​ lines is the highest at any point over the last 1,000 years.
The new paper, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, does not predict when a quake will strike. But it finds the southern San Andreas and San Jacinto faults are now carrying more pent-up stress than at any point in the past millennium – a state the authors call "critically loaded".
Ca...
Reuters •

Powerful Philippine quake leaves at least 32 feared dead, survivors recount fear

GENERAL SANTOS, Philippines, June 8 (Reuters) - The death toll in a powerful 7.8‑magnitude earthquake off the southern Philippine island of Mindanao on Monday ​has risen to at least 32, with dozens of people injured, disaster officials said, as Manila stepped up search and rescue operations.
The quake, which triggered tsunami warnings across several ‌countries, hit early in the morning about 20 km (12.4 miles) off the coast of Sarangani province, with tremors felt strongly across Mindanao and 420 km away in the city of Manado on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
Live Science •

Trump administration to remove 900 deep sea monitoring instruments that would have studied the collapsing Atlantic current

The Trump administration is targeting one of the world's most trusted sources of climate and oceanic data — the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). According to the New York Times, ships will be dispatched this month to remove the more than 900 deep-sea instruments that comprise the network, which, for the past decade, has collected crucial data on physical, chemical, geological and biological conditions from all layers of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans on a continuous basis.In a statement da...
Earth.com •

Giant volcano eruption cleaned methane from the atmosphere

When an explosion occurred from the underwater Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai volcano on 1/15/2022, the eruption created a tremor within the Earth’s atmosphere that was highly powerful. In addition to launching ash, gas, and water vapor high into the sky, scientists determined that the eruption represented one of the largest volcanic explosions in recent times.But the volcano did something nobody expected.Rather than only emitting climate-warming emissions into the atmosphere, the eruption seemingly...
dw.com •

The sea that is vanishing in real time

The world's largest inland body of water is retreating at an alarming speed. From stranded buildings to vanishing habitats, scientists warn the Caspian Sea may be approaching a tipping point.As a child, Iranian environmental journalist Maryam spent much of her time by the Caspian Sea. From her coastal home in the northern city of Rudsar, she witnessed how the water levels would fluctuate, so much so that in the 1990s, flooding along parts of Iran's northern shoreline left some of her relatives h...
Phys.org •

Relamination: A mechanism that has been shaping continents for billions of years

An international team led by researchers from the National Museum of Natural Sciences (MNCN-CSIC) has identified a key mechanism that has shaped Earth's continents over billions of years. This mechanism is the deep re-lamination of subducted continental crust, a process that explains the origin of certain magmas and offers a new perspective on continental evolution from the Archean (between 3.8 and 2.5 billion years ago) to recent times.

The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, combines numerical geodynamic modeling and high-pressure experiments to unravel how fragments of continental crust can give rise to hybrid magmas that fuel major magmatic events following continental collisions, generating new...
Bill McKibben - The Crucial Years •

A Hinge Moment on Planet Earth (And some politicians are just standing in the door)

Many of the people who’ve been working for years on climate issues assembled this week in Santa Marta, Colombia for a conference on how to get off fossil fuels. Sponsored by the Colombians and the Dutch, it was an outgrowth of December’s unhappy COP negotiations in Brazil: the fifty or so nations that actually wanted to move decisively past coal, gas and oil scheduled a meeting of their own. By all accounts it was a kinder, gentler version of the regular climate talks, in part because fossil fue...
Stephanie Pappas - Live Science •

Mount Etna is like no other volcano on Earth, representing 'a new type of volcanism,' new research reveals

Mount Etna is like no other volcano on Earth, new research finds. In fact, the volcano may have formed in a bizarre way, reminiscent of how some seamounts, called petit-spot volcanoes, grow on the ocean floor, researchers reported April 7 in the journal JGR Solid Earth. Although these seamounts are tiny —‬ just a few hundred feet tall — Mount Etna towers 11,165 feet (3,403 meters) above sea level."This actually represents a new type of volcanism," Sarah Lambart, a petrologist at the University o...
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