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Seismic activity is slowly moving towards the southern part of La Palma. This is where a giant landslide could trigger a devastating tsunami. Within the last 2 days, more than 115 earthquakes have been located in the southern area of ​​the island of La Palma. Twelve of them were felt by the population and even four reaching an intensity III-IV in the epicentral zones. The largest earthquake, a M3.7, occurred at 19:14 UTC yesterday evening. Something big is brewing! This guy even suggests a new volcano could soon start erupting on the southern part of the island… Terrifying, no? As...

Wildfires in Oregon, California and Washington State this previous summer made spectacular headlines. The media took their leads from press releases issued by officials in the respective state capitals. They blamed drought, allegedly induced by man-caused climate change, that affected habitually dry terrain where the fires broke out. But is it appropriate to label changing climate as the primary cause with precedents recorded much earlier? Peshtigo today is a small, peaceful city in northeastern Wisconsin that once was the site of the largest (areal) and deadliest single wildfire in North American history. On October 8, 1871, a great wildfire destroyed...

For thousands of years, the most consistent, spectacular meteor shower has been the Perseids, created by Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. At its incredibly large size (26 kilometers across) and speed, it contains nearly 30 times the energy of the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs... If Jupiter — which it also passes by — gives it just the slightest gravitational kick, it could be flung into the Sun, ejected from the Solar System, or hurtled directly into our world. If this were to happen, and it's a real possibility some 2400 years from now, it would mark the largest mass extinction...

Artist's impression of C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein). (NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva/Spaceengine) ====================================================================================== A comet so huge it was initially mistaken for a dwarf planet is on an inward-bound trajectory from the outer Solar System. There's no reason to worry – C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein), as the comet is called, will approach no closer to the Sun than just outside the orbit of Saturn. But its large size and relative closeness will afford a rare opportunity to study a pristine object from the Oort Cloud, and find new information about the formation of the Solar System. "We have the privilege of having discovered perhaps...

Artist’s evidence-based depiction of the blast, which had the power of 1,000 Hiroshimas. Credit: Allen West and Jennifer Rice A giant space rock demolished an ancient Middle Eastern city and everyone in it – possibly inspiring the Biblical story of Sodom. As the inhabitants of an ancient Middle Eastern city now called Tall el-Hammam went about their daily business one day about 3,600 years ago, they had no idea an unseen icy space rock was speeding toward them at about 38,000 mph (61,000 kph). Flashing through the atmosphere, the rock exploded in a massive fireball about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers)...

2021 SG passed us safely on Sept. 16, but at a relatively close distance -- astronomically speaking -- of around 153,000 miles (246,000 km). If it had entered Earth's atmosphere, it likely would have caused destruction, especially if it hit near a populated area. The Chelyabinsk meteor and asteroid 2021 SG point out a literal blind spot when it comes to watching for so-called near-Earth objects: the sun. As NASA solar system ambassador Eddie Irizarry and EarthSky editor-in-chief Deborah Byrd explain, both space rocks went undetected as they approached us because they came from the direction of the sun. NASA...

The “black swan” event of a solar superstorm directed at earth could prompt an “internet apocalypse” across the entire globe that could last for several months, new research (pdf) has warned. University of California Irvine assistant professor Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi presented the new research, titled “Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse,” last month during the Association for Computing Machinery’s annual conference for their Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM). “One of the greatest dangers facing the internet with the potential for global impact is a powerful solar superstorm,” Jyothi wrote in the new research paper. “Although humans are...

Archeologists: Sodom and Gomorrah literally destroyed by fire and brimstone falling from the sky December 11, 2018 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A group of archeologists and other scientists say they have discovered strong evidence that the region of the “Middle Ghor,” where the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are believed to have existed, were in fact destroyed by a meteor that exploded in the sky above, raining down superheated matter and raising temperatures to thousands of degrees, a theory that matches the account of the cities’ destruction contained in the Old Testament Book of Genesis. According to the theory, the meteor...

An Ancient DisasterIn the Middle Bronze Age (about 3,600 years ago or roughly 1650 BCE), the city of Tall el-Hammam was ascendant. Located on high ground in the southern Jordan Valley, northeast of the Dead Sea, the settlement in its time had become the largest continuously occupied Bronze Age city in the southern Levant, having hosted early civilization for a few thousand years. At that time, it was 10 times larger than Jerusalem and 5 times larger than Jericho. “It’s an incredibly culturally important area,” said James Kennett, emeritus professor of earth science at UC Santa Barbara. “Much of where...

NASA scientists have found evidence that thousands of massive ancient volcanoes erupted on Mars. The so-called "super eruptions" occurred in a region of northern Mars called Arabia Terra over a period of 500 million years dating back approximately 4 billion years.... ...Using images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer, they studied the walls of canyons and craters from hundreds to thousands of miles away from the calderas, identifying volcanic minerals turned into clay by water. They made three-dimensional topographic maps of Arabia Terra and compared mineral data to the maps in order to see that the layers...

Accelerators like RHIC and LHC routinely turn energy into matter by accelerating pieces of atoms near the speed of light and smashing them into one another. The 2012 discovery of the Higgs particle at the LHC is a notable example. At the time, the Higgs was the final unobserved particle in the Standard Model, a theory that describes the fundamental forces and building blocks of atoms. Impressive as it is, physicists know the Standard Model explains only about 4% of the matter and energy in the universe. The ions are nuclei of massive elements like gold or lead, and ion...

Poor old Jupiter. It's just hanging out there, being a gas giant, shepherding trojans, minding its own business, and boom. Smacked upside by a stray space rock. That's not necessarily unusual for Jupiter, actually. What is unusual is that someone happens to be looking and filming at just the right time - and this month, that happened, with sky-watchers around the globe catching an explosion in the planet's upper atmosphere. On 13 September 2021, at 22:39 UT, amateur astronomers recorded the bright flash of what appeared to be a Jupiter impact - namely Harald Paleske from Germany, who was recording...

Researchers believe that mushy blobs on Uranus are hiding lots of gas. More specifically, scientists have discovered that “mushballs,” large slushy hailstones made of ammonia and water, might be causing an odd atmospheric phenomenon on Uranus, according to a press release about the research. The mushballs, which are also present on Neptune, might be carrying ammonia into the two planets’ atmosphere and hiding the gas from detection. The balls might actually be the secret behind why scientists can’t detect ammonia in the atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune — which is odd because it’s abundant with other gasses like methane.

The study, led by scientists at the University of Bath and including collaborators from Bristol, Cambridge and Germany, used fossils and analysed genetic differences between modern snakes to reconstruct snake evolution. The analyses helped to pinpoint the time that modern snakes evolved.Their results show that all living snakes trace back to just a handful of species that survived the asteroid impact 66 million years ago, the same extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.The authors argue that the ability of snakes to shelter underground and go for long periods without food helped them survive the destructive effects of the impact. In...

In the year 1181 AD, a new bright point of light as luminous as the planet Saturn appeared to Chinese and Japanese skygazers for a little more than six months before disappearing. Hundreds of years later, researchers believe they have finally found the source of this mysterious appearance. The event, like the famous Crab Nebula-forming stellar explosion of 1054, is one of just a handful of bright nearby flashes noted in historical records, but unlike the Crab Nebula, the 1181 spectacle was tricky to pin down. The historical record leaves a few clues that have been useful to modern astronomers....

Explanation: There has been a flash on Jupiter. A few days ago, several groups monitoring our Solar System's largest planet noticed a two-second long burst of light. Such flashes have been seen before, with the most famous being a series of impactor strikes in 1994. Then, fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 struck Jupiter leaving dark patches that lasted for months. Since then, at least seven impacts have been recorded on Jupiter -- usually discovered by amateur astronomers. In the featured video, variations in the Earth's atmosphere cause Jupiter's image to shimmer when, suddenly, a bright flash appears just left of...

The hole in the ozone layer is larger than it usually is at this time of the year, according to a team of EU scientists. The European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service said Thursday the ozone hole is larger than the size of Antarctica. “Forecasts show that this year’s hole has evolved into a rather larger than usual one,” said the head of the EU satellite monitoring service, Vincent-Henri Peuch. The hole makes an appearance each spring season in the Southern Hemisphere. […] Experts believe the world will only be free of harmful ozone-depleting substances in 2060, when it’s hoped...

The first two rock samples examined by NASA's Mars rover Perseverance give scientists a firm belief that water inundated Jezero Crater for a sustained period of time, the agency announced Friday. "We determined salt granules in the rock indicate it was exposed to water," Julia Goreva, a NASA scientist for the rover program, said in a news conference from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The rocks, drilled Monday and Wednesday, came from an igneous or volcanic rock. The agency previously knew that water once filled the crater, but not for how long. The salt deposits mean NASA can...

Phobos survived a giant impact early in its history, but damage from the crash left the moon weak, say Benjamin Black and Tushar Mittal, planetary scientists with University of California at Berkeley. Their study shows that in 20 million to 40 million years, Phobos will break apart, leaving a cloud of debris that will relatively quickly assembly into a ring around Mars. Initially, the ring will be as dense as Saturn's rings today, and it will last for up to 100 million years, the study shows.

One of the tunnel valleys revealed by the seismic data. (James Kirkham) The hidden scars left on the landscape during ice ages thousands to millions of years ago have now been imaged in spectacular detail. Using a technique called reflection seismology, a team of scientists has imaged enormous gouges carved by subglacial rivers, buried hundreds of meters below the floor of the North Sea. Called 'tunnel valleys', these features can help us understand how frozen landscapes change in response to a warming climate. "The origin of these channels was unresolved for over a century. This discovery will help us better...