It’s a little bit less certain that the inner planets— Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars—will still be around to die that way. “There is a one percent chance the inner solar system will go dramatically unstable during the next five billion years,” says Laughlin. The problem is a weird long-distance connection between Jupiter and Mercury. When Jupiter’s closest approach to […]
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According to National Geographic, the coldest place on Earth is the East Antarctic Ice Sheet with temperatures as low as minus 144 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature reading was taken during the polar winter and is the lowest temperature ever recorded on the Earth. Russia’s Vostok Weather Station previously held the record for the lowest recorded temperature. However, that record has […]
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People always wonder how the moon was made. The birth of the planets 4.5 billion years ago was extremely violent. They grew to full size by absorbing rival planet embryos in a series of titanic collisions—one of which probably gave Earth its moon (below). The moon’s large size, low density, and other features suggest that it emerged from an explosion […]
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Earthquakes are the result shifting plates in the crust of Earth. When there is frictional stress building of the plates it causes failure at a fault line an earthquake happens. The shaking of the ground happens when the energy is released, and waves radiate. Research has found that they predict where major seismic activity may happen, but they cannot forecast […]
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“It has happened,” said Philip Bump. For the first time in human history, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels hit a daily average of 400 parts per million (ppm) last week. “There is now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than at any point since 3 million years ago.” Back then, global temperatures were about 7 degrees higher, the Arctic was ice-free, […]
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Earth’s magnetic field is weakening, and could all but disappear within the next 500 years—exposing our planet to intense solar radiation that would scour its surface of life, Reuters.com reports. Researchers say I the geological record indicates that Earth’s * magnetic field tends to switch polarity f every 250,000 years—and that it’s about 550,000 years overdue for a swap, which […]
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“Knowing what a chicken looks like and what all the chickens before it looked like doesn’t help us to understand the egg,” says Taras Gerya. The ETH Professor of Geophysics uses this metaphor to address plate tectonics and the early history of the Earth. The Earth’s lithosphere is divided into several plates that are in constant motion, and today’s geologists […]
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Earth got off relatively easy last week after being hit by the biggest blast of solar radiation since 2005—but we may not be so lucky next time. Last week’s coronal mass ejection, in which a solar flare whipped an arc of magnetic particles toward Earth at 4 million mph, led some airlines to reroute flights away from the poles, where […]
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The two most Earth-like planets ever found have been spotted in a single solar system 1,200 light-years away. Astronomers monitoring data from the Kepler spacecraft said the two worlds, dubbed Kepler 62e and Kepler 62f, were the two outermost planets circling a star about a third dimmer and smaller than the sun. Both orbit within the habitable zone within which […]
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