Open with CtrlK — press Esc to close
Two hundred and fifty-two million years ago, the oceans nearly emptied. The Permian-Triassic extinction (geologists call it the Great Dying, and the name is not hyperbole) erased something like 96…
Spider fangs do not look like they should have a fossil record. They are delicate, hollow and mostly made of the kind of soft tissue that rots long before it can turn to stone. So the question of…
The evidence is a single lower jaw. It is robust, set with unusually large canine and premolar teeth and molars whose chewing surfaces are rounded and heavily textured, the kind of teeth suited to a…
A fire needs three things: heat, oxygen and fuel. Cut off any one and it dies. What made the end-Triassic so catastrophic, a new study argues, is that the landscape kept regrowing its own fuel, fast…
Walk any tide line today and you will find the arrangement everywhere: a hermit crab in a borrowed shell, worms and sponges crusting the inside of an abandoned whelk, a whole small economy built…
The find that matters here was not made in the field. It was made at a table, with a drawer of bones on it, in a collection nobody had worked through properly since the material came out of the…
Give the same aerial imagery to two dozen geologists, ask them all to trace the active faults, and you might expect the answers to converge, especially the ones from decades-hardened professionals.…
Every step you take sends a small pulse of energy into the ground. It is far too weak to feel, and normally far too weak to bother with. But run a fibre-optic cable along the street and watch it…
A volcano does not have to be quiet just because it is underwater. It bubbles, hisses, and occasionally coughs, and all of that makes sound. Sound travels well through water, better in many ways than…
No seismometer has ever recorded a great earthquake on the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The fault runs offshore from northern California to British Columbia, and the last time it broke along most of its…
Haiyan is over. It came ashore in the Philippines in November 2013, and what it did there is a matter of record. But a storm that has finished happening can be made to happen again, which is the…
At 4:51 a.m. on Saturday, some North Islanders got a few seconds of notice that most earthquakes never give. Their phones buzzed loudly, overriding silent mode, a heartbeat before the ground began to…