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The flash-flood warning the National Weather Service office in Flagstaff sent at 2:42 p.m. on August 29 was not drawn around a county. It was written for "The Bright Angel Creek Basin below the…
It was just before midnight in Honolulu on Sunday when the forecaster on duty at the National Hurricane Center wrote up his reasoning for Hurricane Karina's next advisory. Most of Discussion Number…
Earthquake prediction has a long record of not working. Decades of hunting for a reliable precursor, a swarm of small shocks, a change in groundwater, a shift in the ground's electrical properties,…
In late July 2022, a fire set deliberately in the sandstone gorges of the Czech Elbe country began to move north. It burned into August, crossed an international border, and left two national park…
A seismometer reports one number for one patch of ground. The house a kilometer down the road has no seismometer of its own, so whatever shook it has to be inferred from the instrument that does…
Zhang Qianggong was chairing a regional cryosphere meeting in Chengdu on the morning of 26 August when messages began going around a work chat group. His first thought was that it looked like an…
The people of Thame heard it before they saw it. The village sits high in Nepal's Everest region, a short walk up the valley from Namche Bazar, the trekking gateway to the Khumbu, and what came down…
A heatwave rarely leaves an obvious body count. There is no single moment, no wreckage to photograph. Most of the people it kills die at home or in hospital wards over a stretch of days, their deaths…
Somewhere in a pension fund's accounts there is a line for property: warehouses, offices, retail parks. It is a large line, and it is the part of the portfolio that cannot be moved when a river comes…
Twelve geologists, six months, a thousand square kilometers of hillside. That was the price of mapping by hand what two rainstorms did to Emilia-Romagna in May 2023. Tens of thousands of slopes gave…
In 1950, a lake called Jancarurish, high in Peru's Cordillera Blanca, broke through the ridge of loose rock holding it back and emptied down the valley. An aerial survey photograph kept by the water…
Somewhere off northern Israel, under a few hundred meters of water, the seabed has a step in it roughly 30 meters high. By rights, it should be gone. Sediment carried up from the Nile settles along…