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A hailstone measured 16 centimetres across when it fell over northern Italy in 2023, roughly the width of a dinner plate. Eight years earlier, an F4 tornado tore through Mira and Dolo near Venice, at…
Nepal's earthquake record is long by the standards of most countries and far too short by the standards of the fault underneath it. Written accounts of damaging shaking reach back a few centuries.…
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…
Pick up a fist-sized stone from the ash country east of Naples, and you are holding a thermometer. It is not a precise one, and it stopped working around 40,000 years ago. But the magnetic minerals…
Tussock tundra looks, from the air, like a lumpy green carpet. Up close it is something more particular: a dense mat of mosses and lichens with sedge tussocks rising out of it, a community that…
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…
Japan's mapping agency published its first radar picture of the Kumamoto rupture on 29 July, about a day after the ground stopped moving. It is not a photograph. It is the difference between two…
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…
When a kilometer-thick ice sheet retreated from Vancouver Island at the end of the last glaciation, it left behind a scoured, sculpted landscape. That is exactly what makes the island a hard place to…
For years, the shorthand explanation for the earthquakes shaking north-central Texas was simple. Drillers inject enormous volumes of salty wastewater deep underground; the water raises pressure on…
For most of the late summer of 2023, the North Sea sat under stubborn high pressure. Clear skies, weak winds, and a shallow mixed layer let heat pile up in the top few tens of meters of water and…
A little before nine in the morning, the seafloor off southern Mexico lurched. Within minutes the U.S. Geological Survey had a magnitude, a location, and an automated damage forecast on the wire; a…