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Mud worth more than gold
Whillans Ice Stream, Antarctica — Reed Scherer and Ross Powell have studied mud from all over the world. It is different in each place. Mud from the Sulu Sea near Borneo is as smooth as cream cheese....
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Mystery microbes of the sea
When Alyson Santoro moved from California to Massachusetts in 2008, she shipped most of her things by truck. But Santoro kept one important item close as she drove across the country. It was a plastic...
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Surprise! Fossils in a flash
Deep in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil, a broad, flat tableland rises above the jungle. The earth here is cut by deep muddy gullies, overhung by twisted tree roots. Walk through a gully after a...
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Dust creates deserts in the sky
The first of two parts on the impacts of intercontinental plumes of dust. A line of four trucks meandered left and right as they steered around sand dunes in a remote part of North Africa. Their...
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How ancient African fish feed today’s Amazon
The second of two parts on the impacts of intercontinental plumes of dust. Find part 1 here. It begins with a darkening sky, then a distant roar. Leaves rustle as monkeys scamper through the trees...
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A trail of cosmic dust may lead to alien life
Outer space may look like an empty void. But that is not completely true. The vast space between the planets, moons and stars hold trillions of specks of dust. These grains are few and far between....
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Living Mysteries: Meet Earth’s simplest animal
Living Mysteries launches as an occasional series on organisms that represent evolutionary curiosities. Franz Eilhard Schulze had a laboratory full of beautiful sea creatures. In the 1880s, he was one...
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Living Mysteries: This complex beast lurks on lobster whiskers
One of the world’s weirdest beasts was discovered hiding on the whiskers of a lobster. It’s called Symbion pandora. And a single lobster can host thousands of pandoras. If you’ve ever eaten lobster,...
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Climate change cripples planet’s glaciers and ice caps
Martin Sharp vividly recalls his first slush flow. He spent that June, in 2007, camping on the Devon Ice Cap. This gently curving dome of ice is 140 kilometers (87 miles) across and rises to a height...
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Why Antarctica and the Arctic are polar opposites
The Arctic and Antarctic are the two coldest regions on Earth. Sitting at opposite poles, they might seem like mirror images of each other. But their environments are shaped by very different forces....
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The big melt: Earth’s ice sheets are under attack
This is the sixth in a 10-part series about the ongoing global impacts of climate change. These stories will look at the current effects of a changing planet, what the emerging science suggests is...
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Strange lake belches flammable gas in the high Arctic
September 8, 2017, was an exciting date for Katey Walter Anthony. On this cool, windless evening she first visited Alaska’s Lake Esieh. Few people visit this remote stretch of wilderness. It is...
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Living mysteries: Why teeny-weeny tardigrades are tough as nails
One of the weirdest mysteries of modern science began nearly 60 years ago. It started near a small village on the south coast of France. Scientists discovered that itty-bitty animals there could...
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A bold plan to save the planet turns carbon dioxide into stone
The tired, crumbling peaks of the Al Hajar Mountains are slowly decomposing like a slab of rotten meat. Subtle signs of decay are all around. Flammable hydrogen gas sometimes bubbles from groundwater....
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Uplifting Antarctic shores point to accelerating loss of glaciers
Ice is disappearing more quickly on Antarctica’s Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers than at any time in the last few thousand years. Scientists came to this conclusion after reviewing ancient penguin...
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Living mysteries: This critter has 38 times more DNA than you do
The Neuse River waterdog may live more than 50 years. But it never grows up. This brown-and-black salamander lurks in rivers and creeks of North Carolina. Like its close cousins, frogs and toads, it...
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A natural ‘cathedral’ lurks deep under Antarctic ice
The coastal plain of the Kamb Ice Stream hardly seems like a coast at all. Some 800 kilometers (500 miles) from the South Pole, this glacier is oozing slowly off the coast of West Antarctica. From...
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Under the ice, a hidden lake hints at its origin — and coming end
Antarctica is a land of hidden lakes. More than 600 have been mapped beneath the continent’s ice sheets. An estimated 140 are “active.” That means they’re constantly filling, then draining their water...
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Warmer seas trigger skyrocketing ice loss in 3 Antarctic glaciers
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — Several glaciers in Antarctica are undergoing dramatic ice loss as they accelerate into the sea. Hektoria Glacier is retreating fastest. Its sliding speed has quadrupled in...
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A weird upside-down world lurks beneath Antarctica’s ice
One of the least-explored places on Earth lies just off the coast of Antarctica. Some 1.5 million square kilometers (580,000 square miles) of ocean there — a vast area the size of Alaska — sits in...
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