The Watchers team and our contributors bring the latest on extreme weather, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, space weather, and all things science. We're all about making sense of the natural world and keeping you informed on what’s happening. Got a tip or a question? Hit us up using the form at newstips!
The Cassini probe's first results from inside Saturn's rings make scientists question the conventional wisdom on how planets form magnetic fields. As NASA's Cassini spacecraft makes its unprecedented series of weekly dives between Saturn and its rings,…
Standard geology tells us that the Earth and the life that inhabits it has changed incrementally over eons of time for many millions of years. The processes thought to have shaped our planet’s landscape are wind and water erosion, volcanism, earthquakes, and…
A combined analysis of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.), a ground-based observatory in Namibia, suggests the center of our Milky Way contains a "trap" that concentrates some of the…
Comets that take more than 200 years to make one revolution around the Sun are notoriously difficult to study. Because they spend most of their time far from our area of the solar system, many "long-period comets" will never approach the Sun in a…
NASA researchers now can use a combination of satellite observations to re-create multi-dimensional pictures of hurricanes and other major storms in order to study complex atmospheric interactions. In this video, they applied those techniques to Hurricane Matthew….
The latest atmospheric river over New Zealand delivered one town’s wettest day on record, and broke several other long-held rainfall statistics, according to NIWA data. Lower pressure than normal has fuelled several high impact weather events during July….
Dashcam footage captured the moment a violent landslide suddenly struck a busy road in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region on Wednesday, July 12, 2017. The slide left eight vehicles buried in the mud and three injured. In total, sixteen drivers and…
One of the worst droughts in recent decades is devastating southern European crops. Just this year, the damage is estimated to more than 1 billion euros. In Italy, around 30% less rain has fallen this year, compared with last year. Grains have been particularly…
The Sahara is the world's largest desert and dust source with significant impacts on trans-Atlantic terrestrial and large-scale marine ecosystems. Remote Saharan dust influences the Earth's radiation budget and tropical North Atlantic ocean-atmosphere…
More than 9.1 billion tons of plastic have been manufactured since the material was initially mass-produced in the 1950s, according to "the first global analysis of all mass-produced plastics," which reports the majority has ended up in landfills or…
