Think Climate Change Is Messy? Wait Until Geoengineering
WIRED: Would we notice this? Visually, would we see anything? KR: Yes, on an absolute scale. It changes the ratio of direct and diffuse radiation. So the…
Browsing Tag
earth science
Meet the Cyberpunk Albatrosses Scanning for Secret Explosions
Recording infrasound on land isn’t particularly tricky; you can place sensors pretty much anywhere. Not so in the oceans of the Southern Hemisphere: Sensors…
Hints of New Life in the Shadows of Venezuela’s Last Glacier
This story originally appeared on Atlas Obscura and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.In 1986, at the age of 21, Alejandra Melfo moved to Mérida,…
Humans Are On Track to Export Our Environmental Problems to Space
To be clear, space is not exactly the Wild West. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty—the Magna Carta of space law—set out a framework and key principles to guide…
As the Arctic Warms, AI Forecasts Scope Out Shifting Sea Ice
For generations, the inhabitants of the Arctic have counted on seasonal sea ice, which grows and retreats during the year. Polar bears and marine mammals…
The Future Is Bleak. Pondering Pangaea Gives Me Hope
The human passion for gouging burnable stuff out of the earth and reducing it to ashes may well be the end of us. But it's not clear who the “us” is. Not you…
This Groundbreaking Simulator Generates a Huge Indoor Ocean
“It's a complex mixture of chemistry, biology, and physics,” says Scripps oceanographer Grant Deane, co-principal investigator of Soars. “That's one of the…
A Cosmic Ray Event Pinpoints the Viking Landing in Canada
The objects Dee and his colleagues studied, recovered from L’Anse aux Meadows decades ago and carefully preserved in a freezer in a Parks Canada storage…
A Huge Subterranean ‘Tree’ Is Moving Magma to Earth’s Surface
Combining the data from the giant array with additional seismic data sets proved instrumental, as it allowed the team to precisely resolve an entire swath of…
The Long-Lost Tale of an 18th-Century Tsunami, as Told by Trees
And trees don’t forget. In the 1990s, researchers identified a “ghost forest” of dead cedars near the Washington coast; tree-ring dating confirmed that…