Planet Earth, features and articles | Educational Science

Feb 3, 2021

Arctic Ocean was once a tub of fresh water covered with a half-mile of ice

The Arctic Ocean was once a pool of fresh water capped with an ice shelf half as thick as the Grand Canyon is deep. If that's hard to envision, don't despair. Scientists were surprised at the discovery, published Wednesday (Feb. 3) in the journal Nature, as well. The trick to...

Feb 4, 2021

'Pile of rope' on a Texas beach is a weird, real-life sea creature

A tangled mass of what looked like discarded yellow rope recently washed up on a beach in Texas. But this peculiar knotty pile wasn't garbage. It was a colorful sea whip — a type of soft, flexible coral. Rebekah Claussen, a National Park Service (NPS) guide at the Padre Island...

Feb 26, 2021

Pirate attacks linked to destructive fishing

Pirates attack more often in waters where illegal and destructive techniques are being used to catch fish, a new study finds. Destructive fishing practices carried out by industrial fleets and illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing can wreck local ecosystems and reduce the catches of small-scale fishers. As a result,...

Mar 12, 2021

Traces of ancient magma ocean found in Greenland

Rocks collected in Greenland may hold traces of an ancient magma ocean that bubbled over much of Earth's surface soon after the planet's birth, a new study finds. Scientists gathered the rocks from the Isua supracrustal belt, a region in southwest Greenland where the exposed rocks are between 3.7 billion...

Mar 26, 2021

Scientists find deep-sea bacteria that are invisible to the human immune system

Bacteria collected from more than a mile below the surface of the Pacific Ocean may have just blown one of immunology's longest-held assumptions clean out of the water. The bacteria are so alien to humans that our immune cells do not even register that they exist, making them completely invisible...

May 19, 2021

Iconic 'Darwin's Arch' in the Galapagos has crashed into the sea

The top of Darwin's Arch, the famous natural stone archway in the northern Galapagos Islands, has crashed into the waves, according to news reports. The arch, located less than 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) off the steep and rocky coast of Darwin Island, collapsed as a consequence of natural erosion, on...

May 21, 2021

Scientists just dug the deepest ocean hole in history

A team of researchers working off the coast of Japan just drilled a hole in the Pacific seabed deeper than any hole in any ocean before it. On May 14, scientists aboard the research vessel Kaimei lowered a long, thin drill called a giant piston corer nearly 5 miles (8,000...

Jun 1, 2021

Sunken cities: Discover real-life 'Atlantis' settlements hidden beneath the waves

Humans need water to survive, and so access to this precious natural resource has been an important factor in deciding where we have made our homes throughout history. Building near rivers, lakes and springs gave early settlers access to clean water for domestic and agricultural use, and the availability of...

Jun 9, 2021

Hunks of oceanic crust are wedged inside Earth's mantle

In Geology 101, Earth's interior is divided into neat layers, like a sugar-coated jawbreaker. But it turns out that parts of the planet's middle layer might be more like peanuts in a sea of caramel. Seismic data reveal that there may be hunks of oceanic crust stuck deep within the...

Jun 23, 2021

Project to map entire ocean floor by 2030 passes 20% mark

About 70% of Earth's surface is covered in water, and researchers are trying to map every last inch of it. On June 21 (that's World Hydrography Day, in case you forgot to update your Calendar of Very Nerdy Events), a group of international researchers announced that they are about one-fifth...

Sep 10, 2021

Spectacular valleys and cliffs hidden beneath the North Sea

Like a bowl of spaghetti noodles spilled across the floor of the North Sea, a vast array of hidden tunnel valleys wind and meander across what was once an ice-covered landscape. These valleys are remnants of ancient rivers that once drained water from melting ice sheets. Now, scientists have achieved...

Nov 9, 2021

28,000 tons of COVID-19 waste now swirling around in our oceans

During the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 28,000 tons (25,000 metric tons) of pandemic-related plastic waste, such as masks and gloves, have ended up in the ocean, according to a new study. That's more than 2,000 double-decker buses worth of waste, The Guardian reported. And within a few years, a portion...

Dec 27, 2021

11 strange things that washed ashore in 2021

Beaches across the globe saw their share of weird blobs wash ashore. Sometimes this shoreline debris was small and weird, like a tangled rope coral that found its way onto a beach in Texas, or the tar balls that dotted Israel's Mediterranean coastline in February. Other times, the organisms numbered...

Feb 5, 2022

The deep seafloor is filled with entire branches of life yet to be discovered

The deep-ocean floor is teeming with undiscovered life-forms that help to regulate Earth's climate, a new study finds. Researchers sequenced DNA from deep-sea sediments around the world and found that there is at least three times more life on the seafloor than there is higher up in the ocean. What's...

Feb 15, 2022

4-story rogue wave that randomly appeared in the Pacific Ocean is the 'most extreme' ever detected

A four-story-tall rogue wave that briefly reared up in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Canada in 2020 was the most extreme version of the freaky phenomenon ever recorded, scientists now say. Rogue waves, also known as freak or killer waves, are massive waves that appear in the open...