They look like scars, thin and near-invisible from the surface, yet ocean trenches mark the places where Earth flexes its greatest muscle. In these drowned canyons, continents are nudged, oceans are recycled, and the seeds of tsunamis and volcanoes are set. Scientists chase faint signals rattling through rock and water to read what the ...
The ground is whispering again on the Bay of Naples, and scientists are leaning in. Supervolcanoes don’t erupt often, but when their systems stir, entire regions pay attention. In 2025, one caldera has moved from background noise to front-page vigilance, pulling together new instruments, new models, and a sobering trove of historical lessons. The mystery ...
In the eastern Sahara, a pale gold shimmer hides a mystery written in molten sand. Scattered across the Great Sand Sea are chunks of natural glass born in heat so fierce it erased its own footprints. For more than a century, scientists have hunted the culprit – volcanoes, lightning, or something far more dramatic ...
Every so often in Earth’s deep history, our planet’s magnetic north and south trade places, leaving a barcode of polarity stripes in the seafloor and a trail of mystery for geophysicists. The stakes feel dramatic: this invisible shield deflects much of the solar and cosmic radiation that would otherwise batter our technology and, over ...
The ground looked ordinary until the wind shifted and a thin ribbon of heat shimmered above the leaf litter. That is the unnerving reality of underground coal s across parts of the United States, where seams of buried carbon smolder for years and send up ghostly breath like hidden volcanoes. The science community has ...
The Amazon looks like a world of rivers and rain, but the real surprise is what hums below: a slow, sprawling mass of freshwater quietly moving through sandstones, floodplain sands, and ancient valleys. For years, scientists suspected that groundwater kept trees green long after the last storm, but new basin-scale analyses and field studies ...
They do not roar like hurricanes or crack like thunder, yet ocean currents quietly choreograph the world’s weather, steering heat, moisture, and entire ecosystems as if by an invisible hand. For decades, scientists chased a mystery: why do some regions heat up while others cool, even under the same rising greenhouse blanket? The solution, it ...
