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After California quakes, attention turns to New Madrid zoneATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Recent earthquake activity in California has prompted fresh speculation about "the big one" -- an enormous quake along California's West Coast. A few have been large enough to shake the faith of skeptics -- a magnitude 7.2 quake on June 15, followed two days later by a magnitude 6.7, both off the coast near the California-Oregon border. Doomsayers have warned about the Pacific Coast for years. But only a few have raised concerns about an area with the potential to be more dangerous than California -- the New...

The Pacific Northwest Seismic Network says Wednesday the 3.9-magnitude and 2.1-magnitude temblors struck shortly after midnight near the volcanic peak.   ...   Residents reported feeling the largest earthquake as far away as Portland, Oregon -- about 70 miles to the south -- and in a large area of southwest Washington.   ... The seismic network outreach director, Bill Steele, says it's fairly typical to see earthquake swarms in this area, though somewhat unusual to have one with a 3.9 magnitude.   ...   He says even though the quakes have been located near Mount St. Helens, it's not caused...

Residents of southeast Michigan were left a bit shaken Tuesday night after a big bright flash lit up the sky and the ground beneath them shook. A flying saucer? No. A shooting star? Not quite. The National Weather Service eventually solved the mystery, tweeting "USGS confirms meteor occurred around 810 pm, causing a magnitude 2.0 earthquake."

AN ASTEROID will hurtle towards Earth today – just one week after another dangerously close encounter. The newly-discovered space rock – named Asteroid 2017 TD6 – is expected to zoom past our planet at around at around 7.53pm. It will be travelling at a distance of 191,000km away from civilisation. According to NASA the chunk of rock is a whopping 22m wide. Last week another asteroid made a close shave with Earth, as it soared past at a distance of just 27,000 miles above the surface. And experts have warned a second bus-sized asteroid will zoom past our planet again...

The scientists now find the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs happened to hit an unlucky spot — had it landed in about 87 percent of anywhere else on Earth, the mass extinction might not have occurred. "The probability of the mass extinction occurring was only 13 percent," said study lead author Kunio Kaiho, a geochemist at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. The scientists ran computer models simulating the amount of soot that asteroid impacts would have generated depending on the amount of hydrocarbons in the ground. They next estimated the climate effects caused by these different impact scenarios. The...

After several months of downtime after Hurricane Maria blew through, the Arecibo Observatory Planetary Radar has returned to normal operation, providing the highest-resolution images to date of near-Earth asteroid 3200 Phaethon during its Dec. 16 flyby of Earth. The radar images, which are subtle at the available resolution, reveal the asteroid is spheroidal in shape and has a large concavity at least several hundred meters in extent near the leading edge, and a conspicuous dark, circular feature near one of the poles. Arecibo's radar images of Phaethon have resolutions as fine as about 250 feet (75 meters) per pixel.

At about 8:20 pm Tuesday January 16, 2018 Did any of you Detroit freepers see that flash of light followed about two minutes later with a window rattling shockwave?

The search for meteorites continues all over metro Detroit.  NASA experts point toward Livingston County to find them. Bill Cooke is the Meteoroid Environment Program Manager with NASA and he said the Doppler radar images show the meteorites from the meteor spotted on January 16 in Livingston County. “The meteorites should be just south of M-36 between Hamburg and Lakeland,” said Cooke. Cooke said Doppler is best way to track where they might be found. "Doppler weather radar is a very good indicator because, when it picks up meteorites, the meteorites are fairly close to the ground, they're only a couple...

On February 4, an asteroid called 2002 AJ129 is due to slip past Earth. It is between 1600 and 4000 feet across, according to NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies, but there's no chance it will make impact—NASA has calculated it will remain 2.6 million miles away. That still makes it what astronomers call a "potentially hazardous asteroid," thanks to its size being more than about 500 feet across and an orbital path that carries it within about 4,650,000 miles of Earth. But while they're confident we won't all go the way of the dinosaurs, scientists do want to keep an eye on the...

A huge void discovered inside the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt late last year may hold an iron throne carved from meteorites, according to new analysis of ancient religious texts. Giulio Magli, Director of the Department of Mathematics and Professor of Archaeoastronomy at the Politecnico di Milano, studied the Pyramid Texts, religious writings carved into pyramid walls around 2400 BC. Based on his studies, Magli proposes that it’s possible the throne of Pharaoh Khufu – or ‘Cheops’ – lies inside the chamber. ================================================================================================================================ “Of course it would not be melted iron but meteoritic iron, that is, fallen from the...

Scientists have detected electromagnetic anomalies before major earthquakes, like the magnitude 9.0 event that struck Japan in 2011, triggering a massive tsunami that wiped out coastal communities like Ōfunato, shown above. Can electric signals in Earth’s atmosphere predict earthquakes? By Julia RosenDec. 21, 2015 , 1:45 PM SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA—Ask seismologists when they’ll be able to predict earthquakes, and the answer is generally: sometime between the distant future and never. Although there have been some promising leads over the years, the history of earthquake forecasting is littered with false starts and pseudoscience. However, some scientists think that Earth’s crust may give hints...

For 41 years, nothing out of the ordinary has occurred at Dawn Scarpulla’s split-level home, until now. She recently heard a big boom, she says. “I found ice — yellow ice — on my roof,” she tells CBS 2’s Vince Gerasole. The yellow ice broke apart and cracked her ceiling. “When we put the pieces together it was like a five- to six-foot piece of ice, so it was big,” Scarpulla says. She is keeping a sample of the mysterious yellow ice in her garage freezer, for analysis. Planes that land at O’Hare International Airport fly over her home, making...

...in a new study, published in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers from the University of Chicago... suggest that our solar system formed billions of years ago in a vast "bubble" of gas and dust around a giant, long-dead star, contradicting the commonly held view which suggests a nearby supernova was responsible... The dead star in question is what scientists call a Wolf-Rayet star. These are more than 40 to 50 times the size of our own Sun and burn hotter than any other stars, producing vast quantities of material -- much of which is blown off the surface by intense stellar...

NASA’s AIM spacecraft is monitoring a vast ring of electric-blue clouds circling high above Antarctica. These are noctilucent clouds (NLCs), made of ice crystals frosting specks of “meteor smoke” in the mesosphere 83 km above the frozen continent. Here is an animation from the past week: This is the season for southern noctilucent clouds. Every year around this time, summertime water vapor billows up into the high atmosphere over Antarctica, providing moisture needed to form icy clouds at the edge of space. Sunlight shining through the high clouds produces an electric-blue glow, which AIM can observe from Earth orbit. “The...

Scientists in the Netherlands have found a new excuse as to why sea levels are stubbornly refusing to rise in line with Al Gore’s doomsday predictions: “ocean bottom deformation.” Apparently, they claim in a study by Thomas Frederikse et al, the weight of the extra water caused by all those melting glaciers and icecaps is so great that it is causing the sea bed to sink. Their paper – titled ‘Ocean Bottom Deformation Due To Present-Day Mass Redistribution and Its Impact on Sea Level Observations’ – is published in Geophysical Research Letters.Here is the abstract:

Worship of phoenix may start 7,400 years ago in central China New archaeological discoveries show that the worship of the phoenix by ancient Chinese can be dated back as early as 7,400 years ago in central China. A large amount of pottery, decorated with the patterns of beasts, the sun and birds have been excavated at the Gaomiao relics site in Hongjiang, Huaihua City of central China's Hunan Province, according to a report by the Guangming Daily. "The patterns of birds should be the phoenix worshipped by ancient Chinese," said He Gang, a researcher with the Hunan Institute of Archaeology....

The first line of evidence comes from the mass of the rings. For years, many scientists leaned toward a large mass, greater than that of Saturn's moon Mimas, because of the opaque, dense appearance of Saturn's primary ring, the B ring. Enough grist to form a massive ring could have only been supplied billions of years ago, when the early solar system was chock full of planetesimals... [Second] Iess leads Cassini's radio experiment team, which used tiny Doppler shifts in the spacecraft's radio signal to determine the mass of objects it orbited. When Cassini began threading the gap between Saturn...

Explanation: How old are Saturn's rings? No one is quite sure. One possibility is that the rings formed relatively recently in our Solar System's history, perhaps only about 100 million years ago when a moon-sized object broke up near Saturn. Evidence for a young ring age includes a basic stability analysis for rings, and the fact that the rings are so bright and relatively unaffected by numerous small dark meteor impacts. More recent evidence, however, raises the possibility that some of Saturn's rings may be billions of years old and so almost as old as Saturn itself. Inspection of images...

================================================================================================================ Researchers have re-examined data captured by the Voyager 2 spacecraft back in 1986, and think they've found evidence of two never-before-seen moons hidden in the rings of Uranus. Uranus, the third largest planet in our Solar System, already has 27 moons that we know of - but these two new ones appear to orbit the planet more closely than any of its other natural satellites, and are causing wavy patterns in its closest rings. Although Saturn is the most famous ringed planet orbiting our Sun, it's not the only one, with the three other gas giants - Jupiter, Uranus,...

Astronomers will soon get another look at the big, ghoulishly weird space rock that buzzed Earth on Halloween three years ago. The roughly 2,100-foot-wide (640 meters) Halloween asteroid 2015 TB145 gave Earth a close shave on Oct. 31, 2015, coming within just 300,000 miles (480,000 kilometers) of our planet. (For perspective, the moon orbits at an average distance of about 239,000 miles, or 384,600 km.) A Halloween flyby was quite appropriate, it turned out: Observations made at the time by a variety of instruments revealed that 2015 TB145 looks like an enormous skull, at least from some angles. ... The asteroid may...