It’s difficult to pin the destruction of a tsunami to a tsunami — that is, unless someone was around to witness the devastation. But a new study shows that there are some surprising geological sources that scientists can consult as an archive of ancient tsunami occurrences, many millions of years after they occur. Turning to Hokkaido Island in Japan, the Scientific Reports study suggests that deposits of amber in deep-sea sediments on the island may reveal tsunamis that occurred there betwee ...read more
Solar storms batter Earth every year, creating the occasional aurora and sometimes even paralyzing power grids. But these common phenomena pale in comparison to a monstrous event that inundated the planet with particles from the Sun around 14,300 years ago, identified as the strongest solar storm ever recorded in a recent study.The study, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, has shed light on the extreme solar particle event that Earth experienced in 12,350 B.C.E. Such extreme event ...read more
Horses migrated back and forth repeatedly between North America and Eurasia, during the Late Pleistocene. But when a warming environment flooded a land bridge, it cut off travel between the continents, leading to both the decline of the horses in North America and changes to the land caused by their absence, according to a report in the journal Science by an international team that includes 18 indigenous scientists.The team drew upon both tribal knowledge of environmental events as well as the c ...read more
Geologists turned to tiny bubbles to investigate the dynamics driving magma flow beneath Hawaii’s volcanoes as the country’s islands drift northwest on a tectonic plate. They found that, as the islands slip away from the hotspot that fuels Kiluaea on the “Big Island, magma flow not only slows, but shifts deeper underground," according to a report in the journal Science Advances.“This challenges the old idea that eruptions are fueled by magma stored in the Earth’s crust and suggests a n ...read more
When arsenic is mentioned, many people associate it with a bygone poison. The type of quiet killer used in a murder mystery set on a train somewhere in Victorian England. It seems like a problem of the past.However, arsenic is a naturally occurring substance that can contaminate groundwater and food irrigated with tainted water. And in an alarming new study, researchers have found that climate change is impacting the level of arsenic that people are ingesting. Given that arsenic is a carcinogen, ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine