Seventy-five years ago, on 18–19 September 1941, the Earth experienced a great magnetic storm, one of the most intense ever recorded. It arrived at a poignant moment in history, when radio and ...

The Sun continuously blasts charged, magnetic field–carrying particles, or plasma, in all directions. This solar wind interacts with the magnetic fields and atmospheres of several of our solar ...

Fifty-six million years ago, during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), global temperatures rose by more than 5°C over 100,000 or more years. Between 3,000 and 20,000 petagrams of carbon were ...

Frozen and snow-covered meltwater ponds appear more frequently on the diminishing Arctic sea ice. A new research consortium is searching for the reasons behind unusually rapid warming in the Arctic, ...

Seismic tomography imaging shows a portion of a “blob” that sits at the base of the mantle below Africa. Slow-wave velocity regions above the blob, including the cusp and branches, could indicate ...

An aerial view of the Archipelago Sea, a coastal region of the Baltic. Beneath these seemingly pristine waters lies a coastal ecosystem in crisis due to low oxygen levels. Credit: Kari Mattila, ...

Many important problems related to how Earth’s climate works, as well as how we can produce and use energy more efficiently, require extraordinarily complex calculations to address them. Simulating ...

In carbon storage experiments tied to geothermal power plants in Iceland, 90% of injected carbon dioxide (CO 2) transformed into minerals in just 2 years. Standard carbon storage methods can take ...

Young vegetation greens the landscape near Mount St. Helens in this view from June 2017, 37 years after the volcano’s last major eruption. Credit: Jon Major, U.S. Geological Survey The fortieth ...

If water is the key to life, then oxygen is the key to animal life. All animals breathe oxygen. Despite decades of research, however, scientists still don’t know when Earth’s atmosphere held enough ...

This high-resolution map of magnetic field variations measured over northwestern Minnesota shows many details of the 2.7- to 2.0-billion-year-old geology underlying the cover of glacial deposits. A ...

Antarctica’s icy white facade gives the continent an image as a still and barren landscape. However, a recent study has reinforced an important contrast: The mostly monochrome backdrop hosts a vibrant ...