earth science

Few people on Earth have reached closer to its center than Buzz Speyrer, a drilling engineer with a long career in oil and gas. It’s about 1,800 miles down to the core, smoldering from…

Leaving the cultivated hillsides of the village, we crossed the park border and soon entered tropical forest, where jewel-like flowers peered out from under giant ferns and monkeys…

OK, a couple of quick points. This is just the surface temperature of the Earth. Since the light from the sun just hits the surface and the Earth radiates from the surface, this ignores any…

It’s clear that Hunga involved an unusually explosive recipe that may not be easily replicated. For about a month, the eruption had progressed as expected—moderately violent, with gas and…

Invasive species introduced by humans to new regions can also be markers, the scientists said. The inadvertent import of alien species in the ballast water of ships arriving in San Francisco…

In 2023, the relentless increase in global heating will continue, bringing ever more disruptive weather that is the signature calling card of accelerating climate breakdown. According to…

SWOT could turn out to be a major improvement over measurements by previous satellites. “Instead of a ‘pencil beam’ moving along the Earth’s surface from a satellite, it’s a wide swath.…

“These things are hard to tip over,” geologist Wilson Bonner assures me as the four-wheeled all-terrain vehicle he’s piloting tilts suddenly sideways, pitching me toward the churned up mud…

The scientists used the device to record the snow’s albedo, a measure of what fraction of the sunlight beaming down is reflected back up. Red snow means lower albedo, which means more…

Leaf waxes also predate climate records from Antarctic ice cores, which go back only about a million years and require a climate that can support ice. One study used leaf waxes to glimpse…