Did a Volcanic Eruption Lead to Napoleon’s Defeat at Waterloo?
A British scientist thinks a volcanic eruption may have led to Napoleon Bonaparte’s crushing defeat at Waterloo, in what is now Belgium, on June 18, 1815. Historians say heavy rains fell on Napoleon’s troops the night before the big battle, causing the ground to become very muddy and soggy. With these miserable conditions, Napoleon’s artillery […]
Space and Earth Weather Align to Make a Bad Situation Worse
A new study suggests that an unfortunate confluence of space weather and Earth weather events in early September 2017, may have made a bad situation worse in the wake of devastation left by a line of hurricanes in the Caribbean. As three tropical storms, including the category 5 hurricane Irma, were making their way across a […]
Possible New Power Source of Yellowstone Supervolcano Found
According to the US Geological Survey, the Yellowstone supervolcano, located in the Western United States, is known to have had three major eruptions between 640,000 and 2.1 million years ago. It’s been long thought that the volcano was powered by heat from the Earth’s core, like most other volcanoes. But, a new study suggests that […]
Plenty of Advanced Warning for Supervolcano Eruption
There have been reports in the media that a couple of supervolcanoes, such as Yellowstone in the US and Taupo in New Zealand, that are saying are on the verge of eruption. The United State Geological Survey (USGS) says, however, that such an eruption at Yellowstone is very unlikely in the next thousand or even 10,000 years. […]
SWARM Tracks the Ocean’s Magnetic Field
Earth’s magnetic fields protect us from deadly radiation from high-energy solar particles and cosmic rays. Most of this protective shield is produced by a vast amount of hot molten iron swirling around in our planet’s outer core. But there’s another little-known contributor to our geomagnetic field. It’s the salty and electrically conductive ocean. When salty ocean […]
Diamonds Provide Evidence of Liquid Water Deep Inside Earth
Take a diamond with impurities to a jeweler, and you will probably be told it is worth little or nothing. But some impure diamonds that pushed up to the surface from the Earth’s interior in China, the Republic of South Africa, and Botswana are priceless to a group of scientists, who studied them. The researchers […]
Cosmic Rays Found to Impact Cloud Formation
A recent study from scientists at the Technical University of Denmark provides new evidence that cosmic rays play a role in cloud formation, thus affecting our climate. Cosmic rays are a form of fast-moving, high-energy radiation that emanates from the sun or from sources light years away from our solar system. According to the study, […]
60 Days in Bed For Science; Asteroid Belt Mystery Solved & Ice on Mercury?
Mystery Asteroid Belt Object Really a Binary Asteroid Back in 2011 a Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System or PanSTARRS survey detected an object in the asteroid belt displaying comet-like activity. So along with being labeled an asteroid, when it was discovered five years earlier, scientists also gave it a comet designation. After analyzing […]
March 2017 Science Images
NASA Prevents Space Wreck; Black Hole Winds; Oldest Fossils Found
NASA Prevents a Wreck at Mars The folks at NASA’s MAVEN program recently had to give their spacecraft a small unscheduled course correction so that it wouldn’t smash into Mars’s moon Phobos. The spacecraft that’s been circling the Red Planet for a little over two years conducted a motor burn that give it a slight […]