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Full Title: "The mystery of the 'rumble in the Indian Ocean': Strange seismic waves that shook the world on November 11 baffle researchers" Mysterious seismic waves in the Indian Ocean that were picked up by monitoring stations from Madagascar to Canada three weeks ago have baffled scientists. Researchers and earthquake enthusiasts who spotted the signals have narrowed down the origin to a region just off the coast of the island Mayotte. The slow waves detected on November 11 rumbled for more than 20 minutes, unbeknownst to most people. They are similar to those typically seen after large earthquakes, which are...

For most of 2016, astronomers have been viewing a ball of hot gas billions of light years away that is radiating the energy of hundreds of billions of suns. At its heart is an object a little larger than 10 miles across. And astronomers are not entirely sure what it is. If, as they suspect, the gas ball is the result of a supernova, then it’s the most powerful supernova ever seen. Most astronomers today believe that one of the plausible reasons we have yet to detect intelligent life in the universe is due to the deadly effects of local...

4.4 billion years ago, the Earth was in what is called the ‘Hadean Eon’. This time period is poorly understood, because there is no rock record dating from that time. This is where the zircon mineral grains come in. ... In a sense, these zircon grains are the missing pages. Zircon’s chemical name is zirconium silicate, and it’s found almost everywhere in the Earth’s crust. This study focuses on what’s called detrital zircon, which is formed in igneous rocks, but then survives over time until deposited in sedimentary rocks. Zircon grains are typically very small, about 0.1 to 0.3 mm...

NASA sources revealing that the space rock could end up engaged in not one, but a staggering 62 different potential impact trajectories with our planet — each of them waiting to sling the asteroid toward Earth over the next 100 years. Known as asteroid 2018 LF16... The first of these unnerving opportunities arises just five years from now — occurring on August 8, 2023. Other potential impact dates in the near future fall on August 3, 2024, and on August 1, 2025.

An explorer's adage says to "take only photos, leave only footprints." But it seems the footprints of NASA's Apollo astronauts had unintended consequences for the surface of the moon after they landed there nearly 50 years ago. Newly discovered temperature data from the 1970s moon landings, released in the Journal of Geophysical Research in April, reveals that NASA astronauts probably warmed up the moon's surface temperature by as much as 6 degrees Fahrenheit by walking around and poking into the lunar surface. The data comes from so-called heat-flow experiments that were installed on the moon in 1971 and 1972 during...

At around 12.14 in the afternoon, it will come as close as 15 lunar distances, which is 15-times the distance from the Earth to the Moon (or about 3.7 million miles). TWO asteroids are set to drift uncomfortably close to the Earth on Sunday, with the pair of objects passing the planet within five hours of each other. The largest of the asteroids is estimated to have a diameter as long as 120 metres, making it bigger than most football pitches. What's exciting this time around, however, is that the largest (sexily named "2009 WB105") has an estimated diameter of...

The...wave is thought to form as the lower atmosphere flows over mountains on Venus' surface. ... Just after entering orbit around Venus in 2015, the Akatsuki orbiter observed a bow-shaped feature in the upper atmosphere over several days. Curiously, the bright structure - which stretched for 10,000km - remained stationary at the altitude of Venus' cloud tops. This is difficult to reconcile with what we know about Venus' thick upper atmosphere, in which clouds streak by at 100 metres per second (m/s). The clouds travel much faster than the slowly rotating planet below, where a Venusian day lasts longer than...

The Solar storm of August 28 to September 2, 1859—known as the Carrington Event—was a powerful geomagnetic solar storm during solar cycle 10 (1855–1867). A solar coronal mass ejection(CME) hit Earth's magnetosphere and induced one of the largest geomagnetic storms on record. The flare traveled directly toward Earth, taking 17.6 hours to make the 150 million kilometer (93 million mile) journey. It is believed that the relatively high speed of this CME (typical CMEs take several days to arrive at Earth) was made possible by a prior CME, perhaps the cause of the large aurora event on August 29, that...

Researchers have pinpointed the date of what could be the oldest solar eclipse yet recorded. The event, which occurred on 30 October 1207 BC, is mentioned in the Bible, and could have consequences for the chronology of the ancient world. Using a combination of the biblical text and an ancient Egyptian text, the researchers were then able to refine the dates of the Egyptian pharaohs, in particular the dates of the reign of Ramesses the Great. The results are published in the Royal Astronomical Society journal Astronomy & Geophysics. The biblical text in question comes from the Old Testament book...

A multi-disciplinary team of scientists has a new theory for why all human civilization abruptly ended on the banks of the Dead Sea some 3,700 years ago. According to analyzed archaeological evidence, the disaster of biblical proportions can be explained by a massive explosion, similar to one recorded over 100 years ago in Russia. […] As reported in Science News, at the recently concluded Denver-based ASOR Annual Meeting, director of scientific analysis at Jordan’s Tall el-Hammam Excavation Project Phillip J. Silvia presented a paper, “The 3.7kaBP Middle Ghor Event: Catastrophic Termination of a Bronze Age Civilization” during a session on...

It may be the last place you'd expect to find corals -- up to 6,000 m (20,000 ft) below the ocean's surface, where the water is icy cold and the light dim or absent. Yet believe it or not, lush coral gardens thrive here. In fact, scientists have discovered nearly as many species of deep-sea corals (also known as cold-water corals) as shallow-water species... deep-sea corals don't need sunlight. They obtain the energy and nutrients they need to survive by trapping tiny organisms in passing currents... living even in waters as cold as -1ºC (30.2ºF)... occur in the waters of...

Like any spinning object, Earth is subject to centrifugal force, which tugs on the planet's fluid interior. At the equator, where this force is strongest, Earth is more than 26 miles larger in diameter than at the poles. Gordon said true polar wander may occur when dense, highly viscous bumps of mantle build up at latitudes away from the equator. If the mantle anomalies are massive enough, they can unbalance the planet, and the equator will gradually shift to bring the excess mass closer to the equator. The planet still spins once every 24 hours and true polar wander does...

Full title: Star spinning so ‘extremely fast’ it risks causing ‘one of the most powerful explosions in the universe’ It's one of a pair of stars that could be involved in one of the universe's biggest explosions, experts suggest. Scientists say the previously unknown star system is wrapped in an "elegant spiral dust cloud", making it look "spectacular".At its heart is a pair of massive Wolf-Rayet stars, according to an international team of researchers who published the findings in the Nature Astronomy journal. Wolf-Rayet stars are special in that they're among the hottest in the universe.They blast out powerful winds...

Are the Laws of the Universe Fine-Tuned for Life? By Korey Haynes | November 12, 2018 Humans have often looked at the night sky and wondered if there’s anyone else out there. But stare into that darkness long enough, and many wonder instead: how did we get here? What were the odds, in a universe so enormous and chaotic, that humans should have come to exist at all? Is life, let alone intelligent life, such a wildly improbable occurrence that we’re the only ones here? Or are we an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics?Life exists on Earth (assuming...

Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he's got an answer: "536." Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, "It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year," says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.

Rising global sea levels may actually be beneficial to the long-term future of coral reef islands, such as the Maldives, according to new research published in Geophysical Research Letters. Low-lying coral reef islands are typically less than three metres above sea level, making them highly vulnerable to rising sea levels associated with climate change. However, research has found new evidence that the Maldives - the world's lowest country - formed when sea levels were higher than they are today... They found that large waves caused by distant storms off the coast of South Africa led to the formation of the...

As Earth's tectonic plates dive beneath one another, they drag three times as much water into the planet's interior as previously thought. Those are the results of a new paper published today (Nov. 14) in the journal Nature. Using the natural seismic rumblings of the earthquake-prone subduction zone at the Marianas trench, where the Pacific plate is sliding beneath the Philippine plate, researchers were able to estimate how much water gets incorporated into the rocks that dive deep below the surface. The find has major ramifications for understanding Earth's deep water cycle, wrote  marine geology and geophysics researcher Donna Shillington...

An international team of geoscientists from the United States, Canada and Europe has discovered a large impact crater beneath the Hiawatha Glacier in remote northwest Greenland. A paper on the discovery was published in the journal Science Advances. The Hiawatha impact crater is approximately 19.2 miles (31 km) wide and lies under an ice sheet that is 0.6 miles (1 km) thick.The scientists believe this crater was formed by a 0.6-mile wide iron asteroid that slammed into the Earth at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, perhaps as recently as 12,000 years ago. ..." “Researchers were looking at the map...

On a bright July day 2 years ago, Kurt Kjær was in a helicopter flying over northwest Greenland—an expanse of ice, sheer white and sparkling. Soon, his target came into view: Hiawatha Glacier, a slow-moving sheet of ice more than a kilometer thick. It advances on the Arctic Ocean not in a straight wall, but in a conspicuous semicircle, as though spilling out of a basin. Kjær, a geologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, suspected the glacier was hiding an explosive secret. The helicopter landed near the surging river that drains the glacier, sweeping out rocks...

A new map reveals the remnants of ancient continents that lurk beneath Antarctica's ice. The map shows that East Antarctica is made up of multiple cratons, which are the cores of continents that came before, according to study leader Jörg Ebbing, a geoscientist at Kiel University in Germany. "This observation leads back to the break-up of the supercontinent Gondwana and the link of Antarctica to the surrounding continents," Ebbing told Live Science. The findings help reveal fundamental facts about Earth's tectonics and how Antarctica's land and ice sheets interact, he wrote in an email. Because the continent is so remote...