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The fourth in my ongoing “Volcano Profile” turns our attention to the southernmost (known) active volcano, Mt. Erebus in Antarctica.

Almost 200 years later, you still have to just be awestruck by the magnitude of the “Great Eruption” of Tambora that produced the “Years without a Summer”.

Genetically speaking, Finns and Italians are the most atypical Europeans. There is a large degree of overlap between other European ethnicities, but not up to the point where they would […]

James Randi has shunned faith since he was a kid spending collection plate money on ice cream. “If my dad and mom are up there someplace… I ask them to […]

“Our thesis is that the sun people, the African family of warm communal hope, meets an antithesis, the vision of ice people, Europeans, colonizers, oppressors, the cold, rigid element in […]

“Intuition can help us make good decisions without expending the time and effort needed to calculate the optimal decision, but shortcuts sometimes lead to dead ends,” says The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“Arctic amplification” refers to the fact that the region is warming twice as quickly as the rest of the planet—and as ice warms, exposing more ocean water, the process naturally speeds up.

Scientists have discovered the reason why the earth wasn’t covered with a layer of ice four billion years ago, when the Sun’s radiation was much less than it is today.

Jill Tarter, Director of the Center for SETI Research, is searching for signs of extraterrestrial life. But what kinds of signals is she hoping to find? Tarter explains that her […]

Tuesday marks the 30th anniversary of the historic eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington – and Eruptions readers share their memories on the blast that captivated the world.

Astronomer Jill Tarter, director of the SETI Institute, stopped by Big Think today to talk about the question she’s spent her career trying to answer: Is there intelligent life on […]

Melting ice caps in the Arctic are creating new trade routes and exposing untouched natural resources, but just who is filling the legal and political vacuum of the North?

There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done. Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung. Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game. […]

Wall Street II features a hedge fund manager. What will he be like? N+1 editor Keith Gessen has published a book,Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous […]

The second part of Eruptions readers’ recollections of the historic May 18, 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.

Readers in Washington, DC will find this event, open to the public, of strong interest: The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Meteorological Society (AMS), and […]

Friday’s IPCC report represents history’s most definitive statement of scientific consensus on climate change, yet despite the best efforts of scientists, advocates, and several media organizations to magnify wider attention […]

April 8th is the date when a satellite made from a converted Russian-Ukrainian nuclear missile will be sent into space to map the world’s ice fields in an effort to better understand global warming.

Back in February, I traveled to Rome, Italy to present at a conference sponsored by Columbia University’s Earth Institute and the Adriano Olivetti Foundation. The focus was on climate change […]

By the time you read this, I will be laying out my arsenal for the world’s biggest water gun fight. A few years ago, I happened to be on Tybee […]

In the end, the Dutch went for the less ambitious drainage scheme of Cornelis Lely

All the volcano eruptions, news, gossips, controversies of 2009 … it was quite a year for the study of volcanoes!

The remnants of a vast sheet of ice lies hidden under Martian rubble, revealed by a new and wonderfully detailed radar map of Mars’ mid-latitudes.

A team of researchers are hoping to find 30,000 years of climate records in the rings of preserved kauri trees in the peat bogs of New Zealand.

Because of the climate crisis created by wealthy countries, developing countries could be pushed to slow their development. Would that be fair? Charles Ebinger, Director of the Energy Security Initiative […]

Big Think blogger Michio Kaku writes that a “perfect storm” of wind and ice conditions turned the Icelandic volcano eruption into a crisis. He gives three scenarios for what we can now expect.

This week’s NY Times magazine runs a cover story by Nicholas Dawidoff on Freeman Dyson and his doubts about the urgency of climate change. Many critics have decried the article […]

Eli Kintisch suggests scientists may have to attempt some radical fixes to address the shift in global temperature. Should we build an umbrella in space? Reflective panels covering the polar ice?

Water has been found on the moon after scientists detected ice deposits near the Moon’s North Pole, confirming decades of speculation about Moon rivers and oceans.

Of Earth’s ice-free land, we have about 130 million square kilometers to work with, about 8% of which goes to creating foods that go directly to humans while another 30% […]