USGS

The quickest way to learn where a volcano's lava came from is to walk up to it with a bucket of water. Geologists at the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory did that in the middle of September 2026, at…

From an airplane over the Rocky Mountain West, a glacier does not look much like a glacier. It looks like a small patch of white tucked into a fold in the landscape, with a band of gray-blue bare ice…

The southern coast of Panama's Azuero Peninsula has the shape of a place where one slab of ocean floor dives beneath another. The faults that cut across the peninsula itself mostly do something else.…

The U.S. Geological Survey's Hawaiian Volcano Observatory reported on Oct. 8, 2026, in Science that the amount Kīlauea's summit swells between bursts of lava tracks when the next burst begins, a…

For most of two years, Kīlauea kept appointments. Pressure gathered in the shallow magma reservoir beneath Halemaʻumaʻu, the ground around the crater tilted, and within days or weeks lava rose from…

Four severe droughts between 1998 and 2022 cut annual river flow across the Upper Colorado River Basin by about 15% and left the water warmer and saltier at the same time, a team at Lawrence Berkeley…

Heating a patch of desert soil for two decades made the living crust on its surface paler, drier and warmer, and the team that ran the experiment calls the result evidence of a feedback that adds to…

Midway up the southeastern flank of Mauna Loa, about where the forest gives out, a gulch called Hiʻonamoa cuts a two-meter face into the mountainside. None of it is lava. It is ash, bed on bed, some…

Trace the water in a Denver or Sacramento tap back far enough and the pipe becomes a mountainside: a patch of conifer forest holding snow through the spring and letting it go into a creek. Most of…

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…