Earth Science
Is the Tsunami Warning System Broken?
Survivors of the Mentawai Tsunami say they had no warning that a giant wall of water was headed their way
October 28, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Ocean More Diverse than Expected, Census Finds
Ten years ago a group of marine scientists founded the Census of Marine Life and set out to answer three questions: What did live in the oceans? What does live in the oceans? What will live in the oceans? More than 2,700 scientists would participate in the Census on more than 540 expeditions around...
October 08, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Why Climate Change Brings Both More and Less Water
Among the more perplexing bits of climate change research are the predictions for both more droughts and more floods. How could that be? Well, when I was reporting the recently published story on the Colorado River, geoscientist Bradley Udall, director of the University of Colorado's Western Water ...
October 05, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Origins of Life
A mineralogist believes he's discovered how life's early building blocks connected four billion years ago
October 2010 |
By Helen Fields
Colorado River One of Many Imperiled Waterways
First, check out my story on the Colorado River in the October issue of Smithsonian:From its source high in the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado River channels water south nearly 1,500 miles, over falls, through deserts and canyons, to the lush wetlands of a vast delta in Mexico and into the Gulf of C...
September 30, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The World's Oldest Living Organisms
Just how long has the world's oldest living thing been on this planet? That would be Siberian actinobacteria, and they've been here for some 400,000 to 600,000 years, longer than our species has existed.Photographer Rachel Sussman is keeping track of these ancient specimens. She's been photographin...
September 15, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Water Conservation at the Smithsonian Institution
In 2007, the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) was preparing to open the interactive Sant Ocean Hall exhibit when its Greening Task Force decided to investigate how the museum could care for the bodies of water closest to home.Washington, D.C. is flanked by the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers,...
September 08, 2010 |
By Jess Righthand
Hurricanes' Dangerous Rip Currents
The U.S. East Coast is likely to miss out on most of the destructive forces of Hurricanes Danielle and Earl this week, with both just skimming by off the coast. But a miss on land doesn't mean that the storms have no effect. In fact, they've both brought powerful waves and, more worrisome, rip curr...
September 02, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
A Jellyfish Summer
Last week, Bruckner Chase of Santa Cruz set out to become the second person ever to swim across Monterey Bay. He intended to use the publicity surrounding the 14-hour slog to raise awareness about ocean issues.But then the ocean did a little awareness raising of its own. Thirty minutes into the swi...
August 30, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Mimic Octopus
The mimic octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus) has some interesting ways to keep from being eaten. The brown-and-white stripes on its arms resemble the patterning on venomous sea snakes and the coloring of spiny lionfish. And it can vary its shape and positioning to look like a variety of different under...
August 27, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Tornado That Saved Washington
On the night of August 24, 1814, British troops led by Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn marched on Washington, D.C. and set fire to most of the city. Dolley Madison famously saved the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington and a copy of the Declaration of Independence before she fled to nearb...
August 25, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Hurricanes and the Color of the Oceans
Little kids draw the ocean as blue, but the seas are more complex in color than that. They can be a rich turquoise, like the shallow waters of the Bahamas, or a dark greeny blue, nearly black, out in the middle of the deep oceans. Depth and life, specifically phytoplankton, both influence the ocean...
August 16, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Searching for Bad Poetry About Geology
Some days my job takes me in strange directions. Last Friday afternoon it found me in the grand Main Reading Room in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress, paging through a slim volume, The Poetry of Geology, searching for the worst couplets I could find. (It links tangentially t...
August 10, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Problem with Space Junk
There's a lot of space junk—or, as NASA calls it, "orbital debris"—circling high above our heads: around 19,000 objects larger than 10 centimeters, 500,000 between 1 and 10 cm in size, and tens of millions of pieces smaller than 1 cm. Generally, all that junk isn't much of a problem. If it falls to...
August 05, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Jellyfish: The Next King of the Sea
As the world's oceans are degraded, will they be dominated by jellyfish?
August 2010 |
By Abigail Tucker
A Coral Reef Constructed From Yarn
This fall, a different kind of coral reef will be on display in the National Museum of Natural History's Ocean Hall. It's not made out of the calcium carbonate skeletons of living coral. It's made out of wool. And acrylic, and cotton, and whatever other fibers local yarn artists get their hands on....
July 29, 2010 |
By admin
More Heat Waves on the Horizon
You know you're in a heat wave when a high of 92 degrees comes as a relief. But at least heat waves this hot—temperatures reached an official high of 102 degrees last week here in Washington—don't happen every year. Right?Well, that break between years of extremely high-temperature summers may get ...
July 12, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
A Wealth of New Species
An alien world lies just beyond the seashore. Only in the last century or so have technologies like SCUBA and submersibles allowed us to explore the oceans far below the surface. Until then, exploring underwater sea life was like trying to study a forest by dipping a bucket from a helicopter. The C...
July 09, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Oceans of Plastic
One of my best memories from college is the time I spent on a SEA Semester, sailing around the Caribbean and conducting research from on board a magnificent 134-foot brigantine, the SSV Corwith Cramer (even though I was seasick much of the time and sleep deprived all of the time—there are good reas...
July 08, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Italian Scientists May Face Trial for Not Predicting 2009 Earthquake
Earthquakes are scary for many reasons. They can be devastating, leveling whole cities and killing millions. They can cause massive tsunamis. And though scientists can make predictions of where earthquakes are likely to occur, we never know when the Big One will happen.That last bit, however, hasn'...
July 06, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
