earth science – Quanta Magazine

Simple Equation Predicts the Shapes of Carbon-Capturing Wetlands

Gabriel Popkin — Tue, 28 May 2024 14:09:01 +0000

A visit to a peat bog will make you rethink everything you know about the surface of our planet. A bog is land, sort of, but not in the solid-ground sense you’re used to. If you try walking across one’s surface, you may feel the soft organic muck known as peat undulate beneath you — or you may sink into it yourself. From the surface, it’s hard to know whether the waterlogged peat extends 3 feet...

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Deep Beneath Earth’s Surface, Clues to Life’s Origins

Maya Wei-Haas — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 15:28:32 +0000

Near midnight on March 26, 1961, dark waters lapped at the hull of a converted naval barge as it queasily rocked in the Pacific Ocean. The ship had just arrived at this spot, some 240 kilometers off the Baja peninsula, after three days of fighting seas so rough the crew had lashed gear to the deck with heavy chains, “like a rogue elephant,” the novelist John Steinbeck, who was aboard the vessel...

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The Scientist Who Decodes the Songs of Undersea Volcanoes

Robin George Andrews — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 15:17:27 +0000

We often think of volcanoes as skyscraping marvels, but these portals to the geologic underworld also reside underwater. Unfortunately, submarine volcanoes are trickier to study than their terrestrial siblings. But you would be hard-pressed to find anyone more enchanted by them — and more stubbornly determined to study them — than Jackie Caplan-Auerbach. A volcanologist at Western Washington...

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Fossilized Molecules Reveal a Lost World of Ancient Life

Yasemin Saplakoglu — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 14:11:26 +0000

A tree has something in common with the weeds and mushrooms growing around its roots, the squirrels scurrying up its trunk, the birds perched on its branches, and the photographer taking pictures of the scene. They all have genomes and cellular machinery neatly packed into membrane-bound compartments, an organizational system that places them in an immensely successful group of life forms called...

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How Quantum Physicists Explained Earth’s Oscillating Weather Patterns

Katie McCormick — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 14:29:27 +0000

While much of our planet’s air and seas are stirred at a tempest’s whim, some features are far more regular. At the equator, thousand-kilometer-long waves persist amid the chaos. In both the ocean and the atmosphere, these gargantuan waves, called Kelvin waves, always travel eastward. And they fuel oscillating weather patterns such as El Niño, a periodic warming of ocean temperatures that returns...

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