Category Planet Earth

Egypt’s Wadi el-Hitan, also known as the Valley of the Whales, was once underwater and is now home to many ancient fossils of primitive whales. (Photo credit: Mohamed Elshahed/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images) The Valley of the Whales is an…

ALMA’s base camp was covered in a rare layer of snow this week. (Photo credit: M. Aguirre, S. Donaire, ALMA (ESO/NOAJ/NRAO)) An unusual snowfall in the driest place on the planet has suspended operations at one of the world’s leading…

The inscriptions, recently published in Liber Annuus, include 30 texts and nine images on the walls of the Last Supper room. Researchers have discovered ancient inscriptions dating back hundreds of years at the site of Jesus Christ’s Last Supper with…

The Leboboti Laki-laki volcano emitted a massive ash plume that rose more than 6 miles into the atmosphere. (Photo credit: STR/AFP via Getty Images) A volcano in Indonesia produced large plumes of ash in two eruptions on Tuesday (June 17)…

The large Saharan dust plume began moving across the Atlantic Ocean on May 28. By June 4, the hazy cloud had reached the shores of Florida. (Photo credit: NOAA/CIRA) Satellites recently recorded a massive cloud of “Sahara dust” blowing out…

A reactor at a dairy farm in Marshall, California. The reactor is capable of reducing methane emissions from farms by about 80%. (Image credit: Scott Strazzante/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images) Dairy farms are significant emitters of potent greenhouse…

The largest ocean basin is the Pacific, followed by the Atlantic, Indian, Southern and Arctic. (Image credit: FrankRamspott via Getty Images) The Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean on the planet, and is more than five times wider than our…

Slag is a by-product of steel plants. (Photo by CHUNYIP WONG/Getty Images) Industrial waste can turn into rock in just 35 years, rather than thousands or millions of years as previously thought, according to new research. The discovery challenges scientists’…

Humanity has extracted a significant proportion of the gold that can be economically obtained from the earth’s crust. (Image credit: bodnarchuk via Getty Images) Gold is a heavy metal and one of the rarest elements on the planet, formed in…

The Andes were created when the Nazca Plate collided with the South American Plate. Mount Arakar, seen in this satellite image from February 20, 2000, is one of many volcanoes located in the Andes. (Image credit: Universal History Archive via…