Each of the Past 12 Months Broke Temperature Records
June 2023 did not seem like an exceptional month at the time. It was the warmest June in the instrumental temperature record, but monthly records haven’t exactly been unusual in …
earth science
Why the East Coast Earthquake Covered So Much Ground
Friday morning at around 10:30 local time, a magnitude 4.8 earthquake popped three miles below Whitehouse Station, New Jersey. Though nowhere near the magnitude of the West Coast’s monster quakes, …
The Mystery of Iceland’s Non-Erupting Volcano
“Some have thoughts that the systems are linked at depth,” says Edward Marshall, a geochemist at the University of Iceland—either directly, with magma flowing between the two subterranean mazes, or …
Google DeepMind’s AI Weather Forecaster Handily Beats a Global Standard
In September, researchers at Google’s DeepMind AI unit in London were paying unusual attention to the weather across the pond. Hurricane Lee was at least 10 days out from landfall—eons …
A Major Alarm Is Flashing Under Greenland’s Ice
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Climate change would be much worse if it weren’t for the oceans, which have absorbed 90 percent of the excess heat humanity has pumped into the atmosphere. That warming of …
Magnetic Minerals May Have Given Life Its Molecular Asymmetry
Naaman and his team discovered that chiral molecules filter electrons based on the direction of their spin. Electrons with one spin orientation will move more efficiently across a chiral molecule …
A Revelation About Trees Is Messing With Climate Calculations
Every year between September and December, Lubna Dada makes clouds. Dada, an atmospheric scientist, convenes with dozens of her colleagues to run experiments in a 7,000-gallon stainless steel chamber at …
AI Hurricane Predictions Are Storming the World of Weather Forecasting
This did not look guaranteed to work, says Matthew Chantry, machine-learning coordinator at the ECWMF, who is spending this storm season evaluating their performance. The algorithms underpinning ChatGPT were trained …
The Secret of How Cells Make ‘Dark Oxygen’ Without Light
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Scientists have come to realize that in the soil and rocks beneath our feet there lies a vast biosphere with …
In a Fierce Desert, Microbe ‘Crusts’ Show How Life Tamed the Land
At first glance, the grit crust could seem like a routine example of what researchers call a biological soil crust, or “biocrust”—a community of coexisting bacteria, fungi, algae, and other …