Planet Earth, features and articles | Educational Science

Jul 27, 2022

Mystery of Mongol Retreat from Hungary Solved

In 1241, the Mongol army marched into Hungary, defeating the Polish and Hungarian armies and forcing the Hungarian king to flee. In 1242, despite meeting no significant military resistance, the Mongols abruptly packed up and left. Now, a new study of the climate in Eastern Europe that year suggests a...

Oct 14, 2022

Scientist Reading the Leaves to Predict Violent Weather

When meteorologist Edward Lorenz set up his computer to model the weather in 1960, he had no idea what a complex problem he was taking on. After a while, he realized that any small change in the starting conditions of his program had a huge impact on the outcome of...

Jan 30, 2023

What is a squall?

If you've ever been warned that a squall is on the way, it may sound ominous. But what, exactly, is a squall? In the early 20th century, a squall was a sudden windy cold front. The term can still refer to a sudden strong wind that increases by 16 knots...

Jan 31, 2023

Ultra-rare 'rainbow clouds' light up the Arctic Circle like auroras in stunning new photos

The dark skies in the Arctic Circle recently shone with ethereal multi-colored light. But this jaw-dropping spectacle was not caused by auroras. Instead, the iridescent rainbows were caused by clouds of tiny ice crystals floating higher in the atmosphere than is normally possible. The clouds, known as polar stratospheric clouds...

Mar 23, 2023

Gigantic 'solar tornado' taller than 14 Earths raged for 3 days. What caused it?

An enormous solar tornado the size of 14 Earths stacked on top of each other recently raged on the sun's surface for three whole days. The enormous plasma twister may be one of the largest ever recorded. The solar tornado emerged near the sun's north pole on March 15 and...

Mar 27, 2023

'Wedge tornado' in Mississippi is the deadliest in more than 50 years

A massive tornado that was nearly a mile (1.2 kilometers) long has killed at least 26 people and injured dozens more after devastating parts of western Mississippi on Friday (March 24) night. The storm is the deadliest in over 50 years in Mississippi, records from the National Weather Service (NWS)...

Apr 4, 2023

Eerie ring of red light flashes like a massive UFO above Italy. What was it?

An enormous, circular halo of eerie red light, which looks like something straight out of a sci-fi movie, recently flashed in the night sky above Italy. The bizarre disk appeared and disappeared within milliseconds, meaning most people likely missed the strange spectacle. But one person, nature photographer Valter Binotto, managed...

Jun 20, 2023

Electrifying time-lapse image captures 100 lightning bolts torching the sky over Turkey

A photographer has captured a striking time-lapse photo of more than 100 individual lightning bolts during a fierce thunderstorm in Turkey. Astrophotographer Uğur İkizler created the electrifying image by combining shots of the sky near his home in the coastal town of Mudanya. The individual images were collected over a...

Jul 5, 2023

Watch thousands of lightning bolts crackle over Europe in stunning new satellite video

Stunning first videos from a new space-borne instrument designed to improve the monitoring of thunderstorms show the crackle of lightning over Europe, Africa and the Atlantic Ocean. The images were taken by the Meteosat-12 satellite operated by the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) from geostationary orbit,...

Jul 13, 2023

Where are the noctilucent clouds we were promised? The sun might be to blame.

A rare type of iridescent, shining cloud that was forecast to become much more common and visible this summer has, so far, failed to live up to the hype — and the increasingly volatile sun may be to blame. Noctilucent clouds (NLCs), or night-shining clouds, are a type of mesospheric...

Aug 15, 2023

Hawaii satellite photo shows devastation wildfires inflicted on Maui

A new satellite photo has captured a somber aerial view of the devastating wildfire that burned through the town of Lahaina on Hawaii's Maui island last week. On Aug. 8, fast-moving flames appeared on Lahaina's border and rapidly spread through the town, burning down buildings, exploding cars and filling the...

Aug 31, 2023

Photographer captures rare 'gigantic jets' of upside-down lightning blasting out of Atlantic hurricane

On Aug. 20, Puerto Rico-based photographer Frankie Lucena was taking pictures of a passing storm system that would soon evolve into the ongoing Hurricane Franklin, when a rare phenomenon of nature flashed before his eyes: several enormous bolts of lightning, blasting straight upward out of a storm cloud and stopping...

Sep 1, 2023

Will El Niño end the Southwest's megadrought?

The U.S. Southwest has been in a drought since 2000 — in fact, it's been the region's driest period in 1,200 years. Many researchers have labeled this exceptionally dry period a megadrought. At the same time, an exceptionally strong El Niño event is now 95% likely to last through at...

Sep 5, 2023

Eerie, ultra-detailed photo of a lightning 'sprite' exposes one of nature's least understood phenomena

An astronomer recently captured one of the most detailed-ever shots of a rare type of upward-shooting red lightning, known as a sprite, which briefly hovered in the air like a gigantic jellyfish during a thunderstorm over central Europe. Stanislav Kaniansky, an astronomer at the Banská Bystrica Observatory in Slovakia, snapped...

Sep 22, 2023

What is El Niño?

El Niño is a climate cycle in the Pacific Ocean which impacts weather patterns around the world. The cycle begins when warm water in the western tropical Pacific Ocean shifts eastward along the equator toward the coast of South America. Normally, this warm water pools near Indonesia and the Philippines....