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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…
An international team of paleontologists has named a new dinosaur, Musango matusadonaensis, from a partial skeleton excavated in 2018 on the shoreline of Lake Kariba in northern Zimbabwe. 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…
Snakes are a paradox of the fossil record. There are more than 4,000 species alive today, slithering through deserts, rivers, treetops and soil on every continent but Antarctica, one of evolution's…
In a volcanic corner of northeastern Catalonia, a good deal of the local disaster history had never lived in any single place. Some of it sat in government seismic catalogues. Some was buried in a…
The place where most of Earth's surface is made lies kilometres underwater, in near-total darkness, along a seam that winds around the planet like the stitching on a baseball. Mid-ocean ridges are…