NEED TO KNOW The Northern Lights may be visible tonight due to solar wind and geomagnetic storm activity. Visibility is best in northern states such as Alaska, Minnesota and Maine, but could extend further south if conditions strengthen. For the best view, find a dark spot away from city lights and check real-time aurora forecasts. … Read more
Antarctic krill, a shrimp-like crustacean that supports the food web at the South Pole, was found in a hydrothermal vent off the Antarctic Peninsula during the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Southern Ocean Expedition in collaboration with the Schmidt Ocean Institute. hide caption toggle caption Antarctic krill is the soul of the South Pole. … Read more
Tiny feathers encased in fossilized droppings are helping scientists understand why some birds survived the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs and others did not. Unearthed in Montana, the feathery find belonged to a bird that had once been eaten and excreted by a predatory dinosaur (possibly a Tyrannosaurus rex or a smaller cousin) … Read more
Researchers writing in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology this week said they found the first skeletal evidence of the Diplodocus dinosaur outside North America, discovering several chevron-shaped vertebrae and bones dating back to about 150 million years at a site in eastern Spain. The team from the Dinópolis Foundation of Teruel, which studies the rich … Read more
Forty thousand years in cold storage and the animal still seemed upset. That was more or less the scene on the bank of the Tirekhtyakh River in northeastern Siberia in the summer of 2018, when a man hunting for mammoth ivory pulled something furry out of the melting ground. Not a fang. The head of … Read more
A new study has confirmed what researchers feared since the breakup of the Milne Ice Shelf in 2020: Canada’s last epishelf lake, a freshwater lake dammed by an ice shelf, has disappeared. Based on a decade of ocean measurements, satellite images and field observations collected before and after the breakup, scientists have reconstructed the lake’s … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: Call to Earth is a CNN editorial series committed to reporting on the environmental challenges facing our planet, together with the solutions. Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative has partnered with CNN to drive awareness and education around key sustainability issues and to inspire positive action. The story of the giant tortoises of the Galapagos … Read more
Something spooky has been detected at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. In the cascade of debris from high-energy collisions at the world’s most powerful particle collider, physicists have found compelling evidence of a phenomenon Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” It’s not the first time quantum entanglement has been detected at the LHC, but … Read more
The phrase “water is life” is true: water makes all known life on Earth possible. It’s also a key component in lubricating the super-slow motion of Earth’s mantle layer, hydrating those layers of rock enough for them to ooze and slide over each other. This is important for the tectonic cycle, which in turn helps … Read more
Since detecting gullies on Mars, scientists really hoped they meant our neighboring planet once hosted liquid water. Then, in 2014, NASA put the brakes on that theory; the ravines were much younger than we thought. Instead of water, the seasonal freezing of carbon dioxide (dry ice) was responsible for these familiar plots. But now the … Read more