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The stratosphere is a powerful place. Perhaps the most influential guitar ever devised is even named after this lofty layer in the atmosphere, which exists between some 10 to 30 miles up in the sky. And during each dark winter, the Arctic's polar vortex — strong winds that circle westward around the pole — comes to life in the stratosphere. It's a normal, reoccurring winter phenomenon. "Every year we get […]

Crack. Crack. Crack. Last week, iceberg A-68a was larger than Rhode Island. By Dec. 23, satellite footage showed the berg had broken apart into several (though still massive) chunks of ice. Earth scientists have followed this enormous iceberg since July 2017, when it snapped off an ice shelf (the end of a glacier that floats over the ocean) in Antarctica. But over the last month, the berg stirred fresh intrigue. […]

This spring, over 2,000 feet down in the Indian Ocean, a robot exploring a canyon happened upon a fantastical, loosely coiled creature. The siphonophore, found suspended in the water, might be the longest animal ever discovered. It's well over 150 feet in length. The discovery, made by scientists aboard the R/V Falkor, a vessel operated by the marine research organization the Schmidt Ocean Institute, was one of many unique sightings […]

The gas giants Saturn and Jupiter are drawing ever closer together. Well, from our Earthling perspective anyhow. The "great conjunction" of these planets in the night sky is imminent. They will be closest on Dec. 21, appearing as a "double planet." The celestial event, also known as the "Christmas Star," hasn't occurred at night for almost 800 years. "You can imagine the solar system to be a racetrack, with each […]

Meet the most suspenseful berg on Earth. Enormous iceberg A-68a, which at some 1,500 square miles is currently larger than Rhode Island, has captured the attention of Antarctic and earth science researchers. For over a month, it's gradually approached South Georgia Island in the remote Southern Atlantic Ocean. Now, the berg is flirting with grounding, and potentially getting stuck, off the island. The event is a big curiosity: It's unknown […]

November 2020 had something in common with January 2020, May 2020, and September 2020. Globally, they were all the warmest respective months in the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service records, which maintains a data set going back to 1979. (In fact, all the months so far this year were some of the warmest such months ever recorded). The Copernicus data is one of many global temperature records, which are […]

Snap. The legendary 1,000-foot-wide Arecibo Observatory's telescope, a giant dish embedded in the verdant Puerto Rico forest, experienced a major collapse on Dec. 1. A 900-ton platform suspended over the observatory fell, destroying much of the already crumbling dish. On Thursday, the U.S. National Science Foundation released footage of the collapse from two different angles: At 10 seconds into the video below, a camera affixed to a control tower captures […]

Until late Sept. 2020, no one had asked a candidate at a presidential debate about climate change for 12 years. Fox News journalist Chris Wallace ended the streak last week with surprise climate questions during the first debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. But the often-ignored topic returned in the vice-presidential debate, too. On Wednesday night, USA Today journalist Susan Page allotted some 10 minutes […]

The ozone hole grew pretty large this year — but that's expected. Researchers from the European Union's Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service announced Tuesday that the ozone hole — a big zone of depleted ozone over the Antarctic region — reached its maximum extent for the year. It swelled to some 23 million square kilometers in size, or 8.9 million square miles, one of the largest and deepest holes of the […]