Planet Earth, features and articles | Educational Science

Aug 31, 2020

Can diamonds burn?

Diamonds are forever, or so the slogan goes. But with the proper application of heat and enough oxygen, a diamond can go up in smoke. Diamonds are carbon, just like coal. It takes a bit more to get them burning and keep them burning than coal, but they will burn,...

Aug 31, 2020

We may finally know what life on Earth breathed before there was oxygen

Billions of years ago, long before oxygen was readily available, the notorious poison arsenic could have been the compound that breathed new life into our planet. In Chile's Atacama Desert, in a place called Laguna La Brava, scientists have been studying a purple ribbon of photosynthetic microbes living in a...

Jul 31, 2020

Two Canadian ice caps have completely vanished from the Arctic, NASA imagery shows

On frosty Ellesmere Island, where Arctic Canada butts up against the northwestern edge of Greenland, two once-enormous ice caps have completely vanished, new NASA imagery shows. It's no mystery where the caps, known as the St. Patrick Bay ice caps, went. Like many glacial features in the Arctic — which...

Jul 31, 2020

What would happen to Earth if humans went extinct?

Deep within Guatemala's rainforest sits one of the most famous remnants of the Maya civilization: a roughly 2,000-year-old citadel turned to ruins called Tikal. When Alan Weisman hiked through the surrounding region, he discovered something fascinating along the way: You're walking through this really dense rainforest, and you're walking over...

Jul 31, 2020

Texas and Louisiana face a double whammy of tropical cyclones

Tropical storm Marco will hit Louisiana and Texas later today (Aug. 24), and will likely cause significant flooding. Just a day and a half later, another cyclone, Laura, will likely ram itself against the same stretch of coastline — and will pack an even greater punch. Marco never developed into...

Jul 31, 2020

Ancient caiman with 'no parallel in the modern world' left 46 bite marks on sloth leg

About 13 million years ago, a ground sloth wandered too close to the water's edge, where a caiman lay waiting to strike. The attack likely happened in a flash, and ended with the caiman leaving nearly 50 tooth marks in the sloth's hind leg, a new study finds. Most of...

May 31, 2020

What's causing a spooky hum to fill parts of San Francisco?

The Golden Gate Bridge hums now. San Francisco residents shared recordings of the sound on social media last week and over the weekend as high winds swept through the Bay Area. One Twitter user described the sound as a three-tone dissonant soundtrack, and others reported hearing it from as far...

May 31, 2020

Scientists just sampled the most pristine air on Earth. Here's what they found.

The Southern Ocean is a vast band of open water that encircles the entire planet between Antarctica and the Southern Hemisphere landmasses. It is the cloudiest place on Earth, and the amount of sunlight that reflects off or passes through those clouds plays a surprisingly important role in global climate....

May 31, 2020

Siberian town records 100 degree F day — the hottest in Arctic history

Siberia — the land of black snow, blood rain and spontaneous solar eclipses — may have just set a dire new climate record. On Saturday (June 20), temperatures in the far-north town of Verkhoyansk broke 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) for the first time, according to news reports. If...

May 31, 2020

Pentagon should release UFO report, Senate intelligence committee argues

The Pentagon should release a public report on UFOs, argues the U.S. Senate intelligence committee. In addition to requiring a public report, the committee plans to impose new rules on how the Department of Defense (DOD) shares information about UFOs. Unidentified flying objects — a term that refers to objects...

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...