Planet Earth, features and articles | Educational Science

May 31, 2020

Dust plume bigger than Texas crashes into the US

A huge plume of Sahara Desert dust that drifted across the Atlantic Ocean has reached the southeastern United States. These events have happened before, according to Marshall Shepherd, director of the University of Georgia's Atmospheric Sciences Program. Hundreds of millions of tons of dust from the giant North African desert...

Apr 30, 2020

The north magnetic pole is leaving Canada for Siberia. These 'blobs' may be the reason why.

The north magnetic pole is lurching away from its traditional home in the Canadian Arctic and toward Siberia because of a fierce tug-of-war battle being waged by two giant blobs hiding deep underground, at the core–mantle boundary, a new study finds. These blobs, areas of negative magnetic flow under Canada...

Feb 29, 2020

1.5 billion-year-old Earth had water everywhere, but not one continent, study suggests

What did Earth look like 3.2 billion years ago? New evidence suggests the planet was covered by a vast ocean and had no continents at all. Continents appeared later, as plate tectonics thrust enormous, rocky land masses upward to breach the sea surfaces, scientists recently reported. They found clues about...

Feb 29, 2020

How a tornado outbreak left 22 dead across central Tennessee

Twenty-two people died and more went missing after a series of tornadoes hit central Tennessee early Tuesday morning (March 3), including one that ripped through the urban core of Nashville. Many more people were injured, according to the state's governor, Bill Lee. He said a statewide search and rescue effort...

Feb 29, 2020

How do we tell the difference between geologic ages?

From the emergence of life to mass extinctions, Earth has gone through incredible changes in its 4.6 billion years. With so much history, how can researchers keep track of what happened when? The system many scientists have settled on is the International Geologic Time Scale (laid out here in the...

Jan 31, 2020

What if Earth were a super-Earth?

For nearly four years, NASA's Kepler spacecraft whisked through space, surveying our corner of the galaxy. It monitored more than 150,000 stars, looking for planets about the size of Earth that belonged to other solar systems. The mission didn't disappoint; Kepler found countless examples of a type of planet known...

Jan 31, 2020

World's richest person, Jeff Bezos gives $10 billion to fight climate change

The fight against climate change is getting a big infusion of cash. The world's richest person, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, announced on Monday (Feb. 17) that he's starting an organization devoted to that pressing cause — and he's putting in $10 billion of his own money to get it off...

Dec 31, 2019

Hawaiian Islands Won't Drown in the Sea for Millions of Years. Here's Why.

Just like zits, volcanic islands don't last forever. Some are oldtimers, like the more than 20-million-year-old Canary Islands in the Atlantic, while others have already drowned, like some of the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific. Why do some islands hit the longevity jackpot? The answer has to do with two...

Dec 31, 2019

Iran Plane Crash Wreckage Spotted from Space (Satellite Photos)

Sharp-eyed satellites have spotted debris from the Ukrainian airliner that went down in Iran early Wednesday morning (Jan. 8). The photos were snapped yesterday (Jan. 9) by the WorldView-1 and WorldView-2 satellites, which are operated by DigitalGlobe, a subsidiary of Colorado-based Maxar Technologies. Both of these spacecraft can capture imagery...

Dec 31, 2019

Extreme heat of Vesuvius eruption turned a man's brain to 'glass'

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in the year 79, the volcano unleashed an avalanche of gas and rock hot enough to boil blood, vaporize flesh and even transform bits of brain tissue into glass, according to a new study. Archaeologists rarely uncover human brains during their digs, and if they do,...

Dec 31, 2019

Bubbling carbon dioxide vent discovered on the seafloor off the Philippines

Diving hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean off the coast of the Philippines, scientists came across a bubbling hotspot of carbon dioxide. And this newly discovered vent might help us predict how coral reefs will deal with climate change, according to a new study. Bayani Cardenas, a...

Nov 30, 2021

UN confirms hottest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic

The highest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic has been officially confirmed by the United Nations' World Meteorological Organization (WMO), sounding ''alarm bells'' about climate change. The temperature, a ''Mediterranean'' 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) — which was recorded in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk in June 2020 —...

Nov 30, 2021

'Wind' from Earth's middle layer blows through a secret passage beneath Panama

A geological secret passage beneath Panama may explain why rocks from Earth's mantle are found more than 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) from where they originated. This opening, located some 62 miles (100 km) below Earth's surface, may allow a flow of mantle materials to travel all the way from beneath...

Nov 30, 2021

Famed naturalist E.O. Wilson, 'Darwin's natural heir,' dies at 92

Famed naturalist Edward O. Wilson, or E.O. Wilson, has died at the age of 92. The biologist, author and teacher was the world's top authority on the study of ants and called Charles Darwin’s natural heir. Wilson died Dec. 26 in Burlington, Massachusetts, according to a statement released by the...

Nov 30, 2021

England museum scientists discover more than 550 new species in 2021

A roly-poly monochromatic beetle. A fan-throated lizard. A rice rat that may be an example of island gigantism. And two crocodile-faced dinosaurs. These are some of the more than 550 species that researchers at the Natural History Museum in London discovered in 2021, despite COVID-19 restrictions. The museum's largest discoveries...