EarthDate

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...

Besides a few very committed scientists, there’s only one organism that can live on the continent of Antarctica year-round. It’s not a penguin or a seal; they live mostly at sea. No, it’s the tiny Antarctic midge, just a quarter inch long and extremely adapted to the extreme environment. Midges are small insects that usually fly and bite hosts to feed on blood. The Antarctic midge does neither. Li...

On November 1, across Latin America but especially in Mexico, the cemeteries come alive—with a celebration. It’s Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Legend has it the gates of heaven open for a day to allow the souls of the dead to reunite with loved ones. It’s considered disrespectful to mourn the dead, so families bring food and drink, clean and decorate gravestones, sing, and dance, fly br...

Here are two trivia questions for you: What’s the strongest metal on Earth? And why is it called “wolf cream”? It was discovered in the 1400’s when miners found a hairy black mineral with tin ore. When they smelted the two together, the surface of the melted ore foamed and a heavy slag consumed much of the tin. They named the mineral “wolf” for its furry appearance and appetite for tin and “rahm”...

Mesopotamia, in the Middle East, is known as the birthplace of civilization. Two of its early civilizations mysteriously collapsed, which baffled researchers until they found the reason—in stalagmites. Around 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers there developed agriculture and domesticated animals. Abundant food and animal labor allowed them time to invent: the wheel, glassmaking, and eventually wri...

As we know, birds descended from dinosaurs. And with 18,000 species of bird now living, there may be more “dinosaur” species today than ever before. The birds that share the most DNA with their dinosaur ancestors are, surprisingly, the chicken and the turkey. The turkey, like the tyrannosaur, has a wishbone and a similar hip structure. And it has meaty drumsticks and thighs like a Velociraptor. Yu...

We’ve talked before about how lightning breaks nitrogen molecules into nitric oxide—which falls to Earth in rainwater and nourishes plants. But we now know that lightning storms have another essential function. After forming nitric oxide, a secondary reaction makes oxidants, which clean the atmosphere. Oxidants are essentially water molecules that lost a hydrogen atom. To replace it, they react wi...

Whakaari/White Island is New Zealand’s largest active volcano. Its crater forms a huge natural amphitheater that opens to a bay. In December 2019, a large group of tourists arrived for a day trip. They donned gas masks to watch fumaroles spew clouds of yellow steam. Then, disaster struck. The volcano erupted suddenly, belching vapor and ash two miles into the sky. The cloud collapsed into the amph...

We’ve talked a lot about fossils on EarthDate, but we’ve never talked about how they form. Normally, when a plant or animal dies, it decays or is consumed. But occasionally its remains are preserved as a fossil. This usually happens when the organism is buried quickly in sediment. The sediment layer protects it from the elements, scavengers, even oxygen. Often soft parts decompose, leaving bones,...

Until Marie Tharp came along, no one knew what the seafloor really looked like. It was long thought to be a featureless plain of mud. Then sonar, invented in World War II, began to give us a glimpse. But it could only “read” the bottom of the ocean right below the ship’s path. Marie Tharp earned master’s degrees in geology and mathematics in the 1940’s and joined the navy to study the seafloor—but...

Bloodletting with leeches seems a very primitive practice. So, it may surprise you to know it’s still very much in use today. There are 700 species of leech. Most dwell in water and drink blood from fish, turtles, ducks, frogs and other creatures. Scientists can even track which animals are living in swamps and rainforests by capturing leeches and DNA testing the blood in their stomachs. Leeches w...

DNA is like a fingerprint. Each species’ DNA signature is distinctive. And it can be found on the scene long after the individual has gone. For some time, scientists have gathered the DNA that organisms leave behind—in saliva, urine, feces, fur, and flakes of dry skin—to detect their presence and study them. They’ve found this so-called environmental DNA, or eDNA, in water, soil, even snow. But sc...

When the explorer Ferdinand Magellan finally made it ‘round the treacherous horn of South America in 1521, the ocean beyond seemed especially calm—so he named it the peaceful sea: Mare pacificum, the Pacific Ocean. Little did he know the Pacific is anything but. It’s surrounded by more than 1,000 volcanoes that make up what’s now called the Pacific Ring of Fire—a geologically active strip 25,000 m...

Think about this: a tree could be 100, 200, more than 300 feet tall, yet can lift water from deep underground all the way to the leaves of its highest branches. Each day it could move hundreds of gallons, several tons of water this way. This gravity-defying feat is made possible not so much by the tree but by the properties of water itself. Trees perform photosynthesis in their leaves, which requi...

There’s a common houseplant that in the wild can do what no other plant can. It’s the staghorn fern. It’s an epiphyte, meaning it doesn’t need soil but instead grows on a larger host plant and draws its nutrients from water and air. But that’s not what makes it unique. Normally a staghorn has two types of fronds. One is green, antler shaped and produces spores. The other is brown, strap-like and s...

You’ve probably heard that black cars get hotter than white cars. Scientists set out to measure the difference. They parked two otherwise identical cars in a sunny parking lot, and, sure enough, the white car’s interior stayed 17 degrees Fahrenheit cooler. Urban planners hope to use the same principle to cool cites, where miles of black asphalt and dark colored roofs absorb the sun’s heat, amplify...