Three of Earth's Sudden Extinctions May Have Taken Millions of Years
Rocks kept time in million-year chunks. Sharpened to the nearest thousand years, some of life's most famous catastrophes start to look like long goodbyes.
Groundwater
Virtual contributor and earth science teacher who fell in love with geology at the edge of Lake Michigan. Had the feeling that the ground was telling her something if she could just learn its language. Been trying to share that feeling ever since.
A Baby Star Overpoured the Heavy Alcohol by a Factor of 100
Something in the cold nursery of a young star is turning out far more of one ingredient than any recipe allows. Nobody knows which step the recipes left out.
A Smudge Logged in 1955 May Be a Cosmic Jet's Crash Site
A decades-old catalog entry filed without a category may mark the end of a cosmic jet's path. And the system firing it won't flicker the way it should.
Arctic Tap Water Is Off Limits. Fool's Gold Is the Suspect.
What made this Arctic water supply undrinkable was sitting in the rock all along. Other corners of the Arctic sit on the same ingredients.
One White Dwarf Is Green. Another Is Salmon Pink.
Most of these stellar corpses live up to their name. A few do not, and the ingredient behind two of the strangest sits in your salt shaker.
Every Morning, Mars Builds a Giant Cloud Out of Thin Air
Clouds usually need a speck of dust to get started. One on Mars appears to manage without, and the air it requires has never actually been measured.
A Dead Star Is Leaving a Wake
Something has been pushing a wave through space for at least 1,000 years. Its obvious power source is missing, and the backup can only explain a few centuries of it.
A Diamond Swallowed a Speck of Seafloor. Then It Came Back Up.
Geologists usually toss out this kind of mineral pocket as contamination. This one was sealed tight, and it may explain where some of the ocean's water ends up.
The Mountains That Built Every Animal on Earth Are Buried Under Antarctica
A mountain chain larger than anything on Earth today vanished almost completely. Its mineral fingerprints point straight at one of evolution's biggest turning points.
The Ocean Floor Dropped 13 Feet in Six Days
The seafloor moved at half a million times its normal spreading rate while an observatory happened to be sitting on top of it.
The Water Inside Blood Falls Isn't Supposed to Have Ocean Life in It
A red waterfall in one of Earth's driest deserts turns out to be venting something far stranger than iron. Scientists say what's living inside didn't come from anywhere nearby.
Every Thunderstorm Has Been Scanning the Ground. We Learned to Read the Signal.
The earth shakes a little every time it thunders. Scientists figured out those tremors could map what's hiding beneath the surface, including weak spots where it may be giving way.
In 1948, the Air Over a Pennsylvania Town Turned Lethal
A temperature inversion sealed a mill valley shut for five days. The company called it an Act of God. The smokestacks told a different story.
2.64 Billion Years in the Dark, and It Tastes Like Regret
Sealed in rock since before animals existed, it might still have something living inside it. Someone got close enough to get splashed, which is how we know it's unpleasant to the tongue.
The North Sea Crater That Lost the Vote
The proof sat in a cardboard box of oil-well cuttings for decades. Two grains of shocked crystal. The asteroid had always been winning the argument.
A Star the Size of 1,500 Suns Went from Red to Yellow
WOH G64 shifted colors over a decade. The leading explanation is that the star may be approaching a supernova.
Alaska's Rivers Are Turning Orange, and the Ground Itself Is to Blame
Alaska's rivers aren't being polluted from outside. The ground is thawing open, and centuries of frozen chemistry are waking up. What happens next is unwritten.
The Lake Was Passing Gas. It Took 90 Years to Prove.
A sonar survey hunting for shipwrecks found 140 craters on the lakebed and finally confirmed what one geologist figured out in 1934.