EarthDate

Beavers are amazing rodents. They have long teeth that never stop growing; they control their length by gnawing on wood. They have fat-insulated bodies, webbed feet, and a large flat tail—which make them clumsy and exposed on land but quick and graceful in the water. Most importantly, beavers cut down trees to dam streams and rivers to make their homes. To many humans, these activities seem destru...

Since the peak of the last Ice Age, Earth’s ice has been melting, and sea level has risen nearly 400 feet! But only recently do we have the technology to carefully measure it. For the last 20 years, a network of satellites and nearly 4,000 robotic floats have been measuring temperature and surface elevation of the global oceans. They’ve found that the surface of the ocean has warmed an average of...

The gleaming White Cliffs of Dover have dark seams of flint within them that were the target of some of Britain’s first mines—more than six thousand years ago. The white cliffs are made of nearly pure chalk, the remains of phytoplankton, tiny floating algae. These phytoplankton lived here in warm Cretaceous seas. When they died, their spherical bodies fell apart into the hard plates that covered t...

When you watch waves crash on the beach, you’re seeing the visible end result of many invisible forces. Waves are formed near or very far from shore, usually by wind—the first invisible force. As wind blows over the sea, surface friction transfers its energy to the water. How fast, how far, and for how long the wind blows determines how much waves grow. When the wind stops blowing, the waves stop...

In the 1700’s, there was no standard of measurement. Every village had its own unit. By some estimates, there were 250,000 different units in France alone. This made commerce and mapmaking so difficult that the French government created a special bureau to standardize things. And they decided to create the meter—which they defined as one ten-millionth the distance from the equator to the North Pol...

When dinosaurs were first discovered, scientists thought they must have been cold-blooded like the lizards they resembled. Later, they realized that some dinosaurs are related to modern birds—which have the highest metabolic rate in the animal kingdom. Could dinosaurs, too, have been warm-blooded? New research reveals the answer is: both. So-called “cold-blooded” creatures, or ectotherms, are conf...

Carlsbad Caverns National Park is a very rare place. Its main room is the largest cave chamber in North America, covering more than eight acres. And its cave formations are unsurpassed anywhere. It’s also rare because it was created not by carbonic acid percolating down through the soil but by sulfuric acid coming up from below. Around 20 million years ago, hydrogen sulfide gas began to migrate un...

There’s a place in Siberia that the locals call “The Gateway to Hell.” Technically, it’s a retrogressive thaw megaslump. In plain English, a crater melted into the permafrost. In fact, it’s the largest permafrost melt in the world. It began 60 years ago, when the Russians clear-cut a strip of Siberian forest. This exposed the soil to the summer sun, which began to melt a crater that’s now a half m...

Cacti are native to the Americas and first evolved 30 million years ago—which sounds like a long time—but they’re hundreds of millions of years younger than most other types of plants. They’re specially adapted to dry environments, having transformed their trunks into thick, green, water-storing tissue and their leaves into spines. Cacti grow from half an inch to more than 60 feet in height and ra...

Some paleontologists have recently put forth a controversial idea—that they’ve found a place where the time of year the dinosaurs died is captured precisely in the fossil record. It’s called Tanis, in North Dakota. But it was once the northern end of an inland sea. 66 million years ago, when the Chicxulub asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula, it instantly wiped out all life within 1,000 miles. Bu...

Spring is tornado season, so let’s take a look at a few twister myths and how the truth about them can keep you safe. The first myth is that spring is tornado season! While it’s true more than half of those in the Northern Hemisphere do occur in April and May, they can occur in any month of the year. It’s also a myth that tornadoes never strike the same place twice. Some places have had three in o...

Easter Island has little to do with Easter—but new research shows it did once have a very impressive egg hunt. More than a thousand years ago, Polynesians crossed thousands of miles of ocean to reach one of the most remote islands on the planet. They called it Rapa Nui and built a community there. Three hundred years ago, a Dutch captain arrived on Easter day and gave the island its Western name....

Lobsters used to be considered the “cockroach of the sea,” food fit only for indentured servants and prisoners. My, how times have changed. Could the same change be coming for crickets? Today, nearly 40 percent of habitable land is used to raise livestock and their feed. By 2050, the UN projects global population will increase by two billion people—people who will need protein in their diet. There...

Heavy farm equipment is now as heavy as the heaviest dinosaurs—and, surprisingly, there may be some similarities. Today, a fully loaded combine weighs 60,000 pounds—or more! Engineers have worked to distribute their increasing weight across the soil, widening the tires, sometimes putting three tires on each hub. But research has shown these heavier machines compact not just the tilled topsoil but...

For more than 20,000 years, humans have used poison—in hunting, in pest and plant control, and even to kill other humans. Castor bean residue is the source for ricin, which causes multiple organ failure. But it’s used by some indigenous tribes on their hunting arrows. But the deadliest synthetic poison is VX, a nerve agent that stops victims' breathing. Originally developed as an insecticide, it p...

In the early 1800’s, Napoleon’s emissaries in Egypt discovered an ancient map. Records from the time showed it came from a tomb, in the village of Deir el-Medina, the traditional home of craftsmen who had worked on the temples of the pharaohs in ancient Egypt. Later studies revealed this particular map was drawn around 1150 BC, in the characteristic handwriting of Amennakhte, the official “Scribe-...

Dung beetles. Scientists think they evolved 150 million years ago, along with flowering plants, which had become the main food of herbivorous dinosaurs. Much of the plant matter passed through the dinosaurs’ guts, producing huge volumes of poop with some nutritive value—for a new kind of beetle to capitalize on. Today, there are 8,000 species completely dependent on dung. They eat it, make homes o...

You may have seen, years ago, commercials for cubic zirconia—a synthetic diamond substitute —and been unimpressed. But naturally occurring zircon crystals, made from zirconium silicate, are another story. Zircon crystals are extremely durable, resistant to melting, cracking, dissolving, or crushing, and able to withstand repeated cycles of metamorphism and erosion. This makes them the longest last...

Yellowstone was the first national park in the world, designated by the U.S. government in 1872. Before then, it was travelled by explorers and fur trappers. And for 11,000 years before that was a hunting and camping ground for indigenous tribes. But perhaps the most fascinating part of its history occurred when it was formed. When you visit Yellowstone, you’re standing above a geologic hot spot i...

In the remote desert town of Coober Pedy, in South Australia, summer temperatures can reach 127 degrees—so hot that many residents live below ground, where the temperature is a constant 75 degrees. This tradition began 100 years ago when the first opals were discovered, and so was born an underground cottage mining industry that endures today. Only 5 percent of opals found worldwide are designated...

Fjords are deep valleys with steep sides, formed by glaciers. They’re usually on the coasts of continents and filled with water. Over the past five million years, glaciers have migrated over continents then melted back, nearly 50 times. Modern fjords formed during the last glacial advance, from around 100,000 to 20,000 years ago, when glaciers covered a quarter of all land on Earth. Since so much...

In January 2022, the largest volcanic eruption since Mount Pinatubo happened. And few people noticed. That’s because it occurred in the remote kingdom of Tonga, made up of tiny, sparsely inhabited islands in the South Pacific. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t important. It produced the highest eruption cloud in modern times, and changed the way scientists view the interaction between volcanoes and...

Octopuses are incredible, almost otherworldly creatures.  They can change their color, shape and texture in less than a tenth of a second—making them masters of camouflage. With no bones, they can squeeze their entire bodies through tiny openings—making them great escape artists. They’re highly intelligent and demonstrate short- and long-term memory. They learn to recognize people and have even be...

The oldest individual trees are conifers—but they’re not the famous sequoias. Some of those exceed 3,000 years. But bristlecone pines are centuries, even millennia, older. They’ve adapted to small, high and dry ranges in eastern California, Nevada and Utah, just below the tree line. The oldest trees live in the harshest conditions, where few other plants can grow, so they’re less likely to be expo...

A thousand years before the Inca, in the deserts of Peru where rainfall is almost nonexistent, lived a civilization so advanced they’d figured out how to use wind to pump water. The Nazca people were fantastic artists, famous among anthropologists and ancient art collectors for their textiles and ceramics. But they were also brilliant engineers. Over generations, they constructed a sophisticated w...