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!
For the first time, a NASA satellite has quantified in three dimensions how much dust makes the trans-Atlantic journey from the Sahara Desert to the Amazon rainforest. Among this dust is phosphorus, an essential nutrient that acts like a fertilizer, which the Amazon dep
New observation techniques increase galactic field mapping accuracy.The LOw-Frequency ARray, (LOFAR) is a radio interferometer, or radio telescope, made up of several observing stations in Europe. Signals received at the various observing stations are digitally
More than 34 million gallons of raw sewage is pumped off the shores of Victoria, British Columbia, into the Strait of Juan de Fuca daily, polluting the ocean and its ecosystem in ways that are poorly understood by researchers.A report by The Tyee titled, "Victoria&
Sensors at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant have detected a fresh leak of highly radioactive water to the sea, the plant’s operator, Tepco, announced Sunday, February 22 highlighting continued difficulties in decommissioning the crippled atomic station, The Japan
In addition to snow cover, Arctic and Siberian air masses have settled in over the eastern US triggering many record low temperatures in many states last week.On the morning of February 20, NOAA's Weather Prediction Center (WPC) noted, "There were widespread su
As the sun skims through the galaxy, it flings out charged particles in a stream of plasma called the solar wind, and the solar wind creates a bubble extending far outside the solar system known as the heliosphere. For decades, scientists have visualized the heliosphere
Exactly 85 years after Clyde Tombaugh’s historic discovery of Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft set to encounter the icy dwarf planet this summer is providing its first views of the small moons orbiting Pluto. The moons Nix and Hydra are visible in a series of im
A very bright fireball was seen and recorded by NASA's cameras over Pennsylvania, US at 09:45 UTC (04:45 EST) on February 17, 2015.NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office (MEO) said the space rock was about 60 cm (2 feet) in diameter, weighing roughly 226 kg (500 po
Enormous cloud-like plumes reaching 260km above the surface of Mars have left scientists baffled. This is way beyond Mars’s normal weather, reaching into the exosphere where the atmosphere merges with interplanetary space. None of the conventional explanations
The “dusty snowball” theory of comets needs attention, since there are crystals that need high temperatures to form in the matrix of at least two.Recently, the composition of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P/C-G) was discussed in the scientific press. It
