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Time just flies by, and that was especially true during the first half of November 2009, when the Earth's daily spin around its axis became 0.1 milliseconds shorter. You can blame that lost time on the waters around Antarctica. More »
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The United States hasn't always had the closest relationship with China or Russia. But give us a few hundred million years, and we could be a lot more unified: A new prediction for the motion of the continents suggests that the Americas and Asia will smoosh together at the north to form the supercontinent dubbed Amasia. More »
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13,000 feet beneath the surface of Antarctica's vast ice sheet rests the otherworldly Lake Vostok. Home to some of the most extreme conditions on Earth, Vostok has remained isolated from the rest of the world for 20 million years, and completely inaccessible to mankind. Until now. More »
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Buried over two miles beneath the East Antarctic Ice sheet lurks Lake Vostok — an isolated body of subglacial water, removed from the rest of the world for more than twenty million years. Now, Russian researchers are just a few meters of ice away from entering an environment unlike any we've ever seen... at least, not here on Earth. More »
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From 1550 to 1850, Earth mysteriously got colder. Communities from Greenland to the Alps were swallowed up by glaciers, and bodies of water like the Baltic Sea and Manhattan Harbor froze over. But what caused this Little Ice Age? More »
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NASA's on a mission to uncover the secrets of the Moon's formation, and they'll have to journey to its core to do it. But there wont be any drilling on this expedition. Instead, the agency will employ two identical, orbiting spacecraft — dubbed GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B — to take precise measurements of the Moon's gravitational field, providing NASA scientists with data that will reveal the craggy body's internal structure in unprecedented detail. More »
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Research scientists, especially environmental scientists, are always looking for funding. A recent project, studying how debris move and decay in the ocean, has come up with a controversial way to bankroll their project. They'll take tourists on a cruise of the March tsunami debris. More »
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On August 15th, this 200-foot-tall hunk of ice fell from the face of the gargantuan Hubbard Glacier in a process known as "calving," crashing into Yakutat Alaska's Disenchantment bay with an ear-splitting crack and a borderline unbelievable degree of force. More »
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Here's your first look at a ginormous crack in Western Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier, which is a staggering 18 miles long, 240 feet wide and up to 190 feet deep. The crack appears to be widening, and will send off a 300 square mile iceberg in the next few months, according to NASA. Once that happens, the ice shelf that forms the sea-facing side of the glacier will have retreated to its furthest point since researchers started measuring in the 1940s. More »
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This map shows areas on the globe where there are disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field. Here, red indicates a stronger magnetic tug, and blue a weaker one (white lines are the edges of tectonic plates). As you can see, disturbances are fairly regularly distributed, but that doesn't stop UFO enthusiasts from saying aliens have a hand in these magnetic fluctuations. Science, however, has a slightly different explanation for why certain objects (including submarines) create a shift in the magnetic field. More »
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It sounds like a Syfy movie or the next Michael Bay summer blockbuster. An oil spill covers the Gulf of Mexico at the same time that a tropical gathers strength in the Bahamas. As the tropical storms gathers strength, it takes up oil, which is ignited and leads to a blazing storm of fury pointed toward the mainland United States. Many worried about this before Hurricane Katrina and again after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill. But could it really happen? (And can you imagine the premiums for firecane insurance?) Let's take a look at the likelihood of this firestorm.

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Billions of years ago, Mercury was choked in unimaginable amounts of lava. About six percent of the entire planet was covered in the lava of a single volcanic maelstrom. Not bad considering we weren't even sure Mercury had volcanoes. More »
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Surface temperatures on Pluto are around -230C, making the likelihood of a liquid ocean on the dwarf planet's surface more than a little unlikely. In fact, scientists have long assumed that Pluto's surface is covered mostly with ice. What goes on beneath that ice, however, is something of a mystery. More »
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When hurricane Irene failed to flood Manhattan as predicted over the weekend, many called the evacuation an overreaction to media hype - one local told the New York Times he was "embarrassed." But scientists and civil engineers say the city's response made good sense. More »
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Piltdown Man, a fossil that supposedly proved early humans originated in England, was discovered in 1912, and wasn't proven a hoax until 1953. This fraud was one of the earliest fossil hoaxes out there — but it was actually two centuries too late to claim that distinction. More »
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According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the small town of Mineral, Virginia was was the epicenter of a 5.9 magnitude earthquake earlier this afternoon, making today's quake at least equal in intensity to Virginia's largest earthquake on record, which the USGS says occurred in Giles County, Virginia in 1897. More »
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NASA has released a map charting the movement of massive ice sheets on the continent of Antarctica. By compiling these maps into animations like the one shown above, researchers can, for the very first time, examine how the outward flow of the continent's ice sheets could help us predict future rises in sea level. More »
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For years, radiometric dating of lunar rock samples has suggested that the formation of the Moon occurred roughly 4.57 billion years ago — around the same time as the birth of the solar system itself. More »
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Over the past century, we've witnessed a rise in the greenhouse gas methane in our atmosphere. But for a few years at the turn of the millennium, methane levels tapered off and reached a stable state before starting to climb again. If we could just figure out what caused this slowdown, and replicate it, we might be able to alter the course of climate change. More »
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The Axial Seamount is an undersea volcano located 250 miles off the Oregon coast. It's one of the most active underwater volcanoes in the world, and it's just started erupting. For the first time ever, scientists saw that eruption coming. More »
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The US has entered the 34th day of a crippling heat wave, with no sign of relief in sight. According to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), July's broiling temperatures affected close to 200 million Americans, and set 2,755 daily-high records across the country — including at least one record in every state. More »
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The two sides of the Moon look nothing like each other: the near side is flat and low, while the far side is incredibly mountainous. We may now be able to solve this topographical mystery...and it involves a second moon. More »
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A little over 200 million years ago, when Earth had only one mega-continent called Pangaea, fifty percent of life in the oceans died abruptly. What happened? Researchers long believed that this event, called the End-Triassic mass extinction, might have been caused by intense volcanic activity as Pangaea broke into two smaller continents. More »
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In mysterious sinkholes beneath the waters of Lake Huron, scientists have been exploring strange pockets of life that shouldn't exist on present-day Earth. The microbes researchers have found would have been perfectly comfortable on the Earth of 3 billion years ago, before we had oxygen in the atmosphere. More »
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This week, a group of geologists report that they've found a lost continent off the coast of Scotland. 55 million years ago, about 10 million years after dinosaurs died out, a chunk of the seafloor erupted from beneath the water. It created a small continent that existed for at least a million years, covered in dramatic mountains and valleys, and irrigated with streaming rivers. Eventually the landscape sank back beneath the waves, its once-sunny mountains buried beneath 2 kilometers of seabed. More »
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This amazing video reveals how easy it is for a storm to wipe out Phoenix, Arizona, one of the fastest-growing urban areas in the United States. According to Russia Today: More »
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Get out the tinfoil hats, folks, because this one is for your inner contrail conspiracy theorist. It turns out that airplanes can change the weather by punching holes in the clouds. More »
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When you hear predictions about climate change, scientists often refer to simple models of gradual transformation. But new evidence suggests that climate change is likely to be abrupt, with the temperature of the planet rising quickly over only a few decades. More »
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In the small, freshwater streams of South Dakota, a horrible menace is creeping along the rockbeds. Known as rock snot, it's a form of algae that clings to rocks and spreads rapidly until it takes over the entire ecosystem of the stream, often killing off local plants and microbes. The stuff has spread from North America all the way to New Zealand. But what's really weird is that rock snot can grow even in rivers that appear to have almost no nutrients in them at all. What is helping this algae grow so fast? Is it feeding on our fear? More »
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Today, a group of scientists announced that beneath the surface of the Moon there may be as much water as we have on Earth. This revelation could change everything we know about the Moon — and pave the way for lunar colonies in the next twenty years. More »
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As recently as 600 million years ago, oxygen levels were extremely low on Earth, only about a tenth of what they are today. So how did ancient animals move around and avoid mass asphyxiation? More »
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Off the Canadian Arctic coast, an archipelago of islands is rapidly losing the sheets of ice that once blanketed them. A group of scientists today published a long-range study of what this means, and documented the changing landscape. More »
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Antarctica is the only continent on Earth where humans haven't set up permanent homes. It's an icy desert that was once a subtropical forest, teeming with life. But scientists believe that the cold land could bloom again. More »
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The Gulf oil spill was an ecological disaster of unmitigated proportions — but some scientific good may come from it. As a side effect of this horrific incident, for the first time scientists have been able to observe how the oil becomes an aerosol, transferring from the sea to the air in an unspoiled environment. More »
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The Rockies are a geological mystery, a massive mountain range located far away from the nearest continental plate boundary. So without crashing plates to push the Rockies out of the ground, how did they form? The answer might be suction. More »
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In 2006 the ground near Sidoarjo, Indonesia started spitting up mud. The mud volcano, Lusi, has been continuously erupting ever since, displacing 40,000 people and killing fifteen. How long it keeps going depends on the cause, which remains unknown. Some scientists believe Lusi will keep erupting for at least another twenty years. Others believe the volcano may just scratch out an entire century before it stops. What's the truth? More »
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A new look at data from seismic experiments left on the Moon by astronauts has given researchers a better understanding of the lunar interior. More »
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It's landslide season. Just in time for the mud rampages, a group of geophysicists have released a series of videos showing how to create the worst mudslides imaginable. The key? Water pressure. More »
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Many have mourned the plight of polar bears, whose habitat is literally melting away as the ice caps shrink. But several new predictions from geophysicists show that the bears may be frolicking on huge regions of ice for centuries. More »
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Currently, we're only able to predict the next year in hurricanes with any accuracy. But a new system that incorporates 35 years worth of hurricane data has found patterns that could predict hurricanes a decade in advance. More »
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