EarthDate

In 1858, the first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid. It worked slowly—taking 2 minutes to transmit each character of a message. But that was a lot faster than the old way: ships, which took at least 10 days to make the journey. That first cable failed after 3 weeks, but it showed it could be done. By 1900, there were a dozen cables connecting North America and Europe. This ground to a halt i...

Over the past 2.5 million years, glaciers have descended from the arctic to the Central United States 17 times—before receding again in warmer periods, like we’re in today. This repeated glacial coverage has flattened the land, producing the rolling prairies of the American Midwest. But there’s one place along the Wisconsin–Iowa border that the glaciers missed. As they move, glaciers grind beneath...

You may have seen meteor showers and wondered what they are. Well, most are actually the icy tails of comets. As comets travel, they shed particles of dust and ice, then pull them behind in their wake to form a long tail. Each year, Earth’s orbital path passes through the tails of several comets that also orbit within our solar system. When that happens, the particles burn up in our atmosphere. We...

Here’s a trivia question for you: How many countries today measure temperature in Fahrenheit? We’ll get to the answer through a story. By the 1600s, scientists had invented early thermometers. Using air, then alcohol, then mercury—all things that expand with rising temperature—they could tell you … if it was hotter or colder. But they couldn’t tell you by how much, because no one had standardized...

In March 2021, a huge container ship was blown sideways by a sandstorm and jammed diagonally in a narrow stretch of the Suez Canal, blocking it entirely. Because 12% of all global trade moves through the canal, experts calculated its closure was costing the global economy $400 million per hour! The Suez Canal is really just an extension of the Red Sea, a narrow, 1,200-mile-long strip of water that...

Many birds fly long distances during their annual migrations. But there’s one species that tops them all. Some of the farthest flyers are cuckoos, who travel 7,500 miles over 2 months, from Africa to Mongolia, stopping along the way for food and water. This includes one nonstop stretch over the Indian Ocean for 1,600 miles! That sounds impressive, but it’s a walk in the park for the bar-tailed god...

It would be hard to imagine a world without paper. The Egyptians invented it three thousand years ago, using rushes that grew along the Nile River. A thousand years later, the Chinese ground up mulberry bark and cotton to make paper for the emperor. In another thousand years, the Moors used linen and hemp. They brought paper to Spain, where it spread to the rest of Europe. It wasn’t until Gutenber...

The Amazon rain forest. Scientists believe it holds thousands of species of plants, animals and insects we have yet to identify. And at least 50 tribes who have still not had contact with the outside world. But before it could become the marvel it is today, the rain forest had to burn to the ground. That big burn was caused by the same asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Scientists have studied...

It may surprise you to know there are 1,400 species of bats—they make up 20% of all mammal species. They have wingspans ranging from 6 in to 5 ft and occupy dozens of environmental niches. Some are specialized to eat fish. Tiny vampire bats drink blood (usually from sleeping livestock, without harming them). But the most important bats, to humans anyway, are those that eat insects, providing up to...

In 1891, Manya Skłodowska moved from Warsaw to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. In just three years, she earned two degrees, in physics and mathematics—then took a job with a promising young scientist. They fell in love and were married. She changed her Polish first name to the French version: Marie. And took his last name: Curie. Marie and Pierre Curie became the first to understand and measure ra...

If, like me, you think dogs are amazing, you’ll be even more amazed to learn they experience life in four dimensions—through their noses. Dogs have an olfactory bulb 40 times larger than ours, with hundreds of millions more receptors. They use that super-sniffer to build a three-dimensional smell map of their surroundings. Sort of like an interactive 3D computer model. To that, they add a fourth d...

This story is bananas. But it begins with potatoes. In the mid-1800s, Ireland depended largely on potatoes. The crop was all one species, called the Irish Lumper, grown easily by propagating new plants from old potatoes. It was monoculture in its strictest form: the new plants were genetically identical to the old ones … Which allowed a potato fungus to sweep across the country, devastating Irelan...

Phosphorus is one of the five elements essential for life. It’s represented on the periodic table by the letter P. Phosphorus is key to building bones and teeth and as the building block for the fuel that powers our growth and movement. You might remember adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, from high school biology class. Each day the human body makes, uses and recycles its entire weight in ATP to dri...

Monkeys make tools. Birds build houses. And ants grow agriculture. Bees live in complex societies, and many creatures use basic language to communicate. It could be argued that the biggest differentiator of humans from other animals is that we have harnessed energy—first and still foremost in the form of fire. Fire kept us warm, allowing early humans and our ancestors to spread into harsher climat...

In a few rare places in the world, there are salt lakes that are flamingo pink. To understand what gives them their bright color, we should first understand what makes flamingos pink. The birds spend much of their lives wading and feeding in shallow lakes that aren’t pink but are salty and hold the flamingo’s favorite food: brine shrimp. These shrimp are pink, colored by high concentrations of bet...

Throughout the Apollo missions, NASA believed there was no water on the Moon. In the nearly one thousand pounds of rock and soil samples that these missions brought back, they did find traces of water. But they assumed these were contamination from gathering and transport. Then in 2008, the Indian space agency launched a Moon orbiter carrying NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper—or M3—which was designed...

Some of the loudest sounds in the ocean are air guns, fired by ships doing seismic studies of the seafloor. The blasts can interfere with the communication of whales for a thousand miles around. So, scientists thought, what if they could use whales to do the studies instead? In a seismic study, sound waves from a ship travel down through the water, through the ocean floor and into the geologic lay...

Here’s a fun experiment you can try at home to make miniature cold lightning using rocks from your yard, or candy. First, look for some quartz pebbles. Preferably milky white ones. Next, find some wintergreen Life Savers—or white sugar candies will do. Then grab some safety glasses, because you’ll be smashing things. Now go to a darkened room, let your eyes adjust, and rub the pebbles together. Tr...

For billions of years, there was no fire on Earth. There was heat to ignite it, like volcanic eruptions and lighting strikes. But fire lacked two very crucial ingredients: fuel to burn, and oxygen to feed the flames. Ironically, plants would provide both. Fire is a chemical reaction where fuel oxidizes to produce heat and light energy, carbon dioxide, water vapor and other gases. Fire can start wh...

In another EarthDate, we talked about Earth’s magnetic polarity reversing. But sometimes the poles don’t flip, they just go on an excursion—with potentially drastic consequences. A polar excursion happens when the pole moves more than 45 degrees from Earth’s rotational axis. This happened 12 times in the last million years. Forty-two thousand years ago, there was a particularly wayward North Pole....

If your birthday is in August, your birthstone is peridot. And if you have one, you can be sure it came from deep within the Earth—or deep in outer space! Peridot is the gem name for a gem-quality example of olivine. Olivine is very common inside the Earth, where it makes up an astonishing 50 percent of Earth’s upper mantle. But it’s much less common on the surface. It’s found where tectonic force...

For decades, Death Valley held a mystery that scientists could not solve. Large rocks were slithering across the valley floor, traveling hundreds of meters, leaving long tracks behind them. But no one had seen them do it or could figure out how it happened. So, scientists fitted rocks with GPS trackers and set up remote cameras to try to capture the rocks in motion. Because the movements could be...

In the Stone Age, the most important tool was, yes, the stone. But what was second? Well, we’ll spin a yarn about that on this EarthDate, because it was … yarn, or string. String is just plant fibers like cotton or hemp, or animal hair like sheep or llama wool, twisted together. This simple invention allowed early humans to turn short fibers into long cords with many uses. String tied stone points...

How would medical researchers build the perfect needle, for sensitive injections or brain-tissue sampling? Of course, they’d look to nature. And where in nature would they find the perfect needle? On the sharp end of a mosquito! Mosquitoes are the most dangerous creatures on Earth, carrying diseases that infect 700 million people a year and kill 2 million. This is because, for millions of years, t...

Compasses point north. Until one day, they’ll all point south—as they have before. In 1905, a French geologist discovered a lava field with some very strange properties. Iron within it was magnetized in reverse. What should have been north was south. After much pondering, he realized this could only be possible if Earth’s magnetic poles were reversed at the time the lava was flowing. When it solid...