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Balance a boulder on a narrow pedestal and leave it alone for ten thousand years, and it becomes a strange kind of instrument. Every big earthquake that shook the ground beneath it was a test the…
The intuitive story about landslides is simple: more rain, more slides. A century of Calabrian records tells a more unsettling one. Working in the mountainous toe of the Italian peninsula, Stefano…
Stand at the edge of a fresh earthquake rupture, and the ground tells you exactly what happened. Cracks fan across the desert floor. The surface is offset, sometimes by metres, along a ragged seam…
Almost everyone who has bought a house near water has met the 100-year flood line. It shows up on insurance forms and zoning maps, a single crisp boundary that seems to promise certainty: inside, you…
For as long as anyone had bothered to record it, Hayli Gubbi did nothing. It sat at the southern end of the Erta Ale volcanic range in the Afar depression, a low basaltic shield with no eruption in…
A volcano is never truly silent. Even when nothing erupts, the ground beneath a place like Askja hums with a faint, ceaseless vibration: ocean waves pounding a distant coast, wind dragging over rock,…
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.…
Ask a hydrologist what a "hundred-year" downpour looks like for a given town, and the honest answer is that they are guessing from thin evidence. A rain gauge that has been running for thirty years…
The plan for the Norwegian North Sea is to take carbon dioxide captured from industry, pipe it out under the seabed, and leave it there for good. Several storage licenses have already been awarded on…
On 23 November 1980, an earthquake struck the Irpinia district of southern Italy and did not stop at one fault. The rupture broke three fault segments in sequence, reaching magnitude 6.9 and killing…
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 jet crossing the sound barrier does not gently speed up past its own noise. It compresses the pressure waves it is making into a single sharp front, and the boom arrives all at once. Some…