Geology

If you look back at the history of Atlantic hurricanes since the late 1800s, it might seem hurricane frequency is on the rise. The year 2020 had the most tropical cyclones in the Atlantic, with 31, and 2021 had the third-highest, after 2005. The past decade saw five of the six most destructive Atlantic hurricanes in modern history. Then a year like 2022 comes along, with no major hurricane landfalls until Fiona and Ian struck in late September. The Atlantic hurricane season, which ended on Nov. 30, had eight hurricanes and 14 named storms. It’s a reminder that small sample sizes can be misleading when assessing trends in hurricane behavior. There is so much natural variability in hurricane behavior year to year and even decade to decade that we need to look much further back in time for the real trends to come clear. Fortunately, hurricanes leave behind telltale evidence that goes back millennia. Two thousand years of this evidence indicates that the Atlantic has experie...

Around 700 million years ago, the Earth cooled so much that scientists believe massive ice sheets encased the entire planet like a giant snowball. This global deep freeze, known as Snowball Earth, endured for tens of millions of years. Yet, miraculously, early life not only held on, but thrived. When the ice melted and the ground thawed, complex multicellular life emerged, eventually leading to life-forms we recognize today. The Snowball Earth hypothesis has been largely based on evidence from sedimentary rocks exposed in areas that once were along coastlines and shallow seas, as well as climate modeling. Physical evidence that ice sheets covered the interior of continents in warm equatorial regions had eluded scientists – until now. In new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, our team of geologists describes the missing link, found in an unusual pebbly sandstone encapsulated within the granite that forms Colorado’s Pikes Peak....

Around 700 million years ago, the Earth cooled so much that scientists believe massive ice sheets encased the entire planet like a giant snowball. This global deep freeze, known as Snowball Earth, endured for tens of millions of years. Yet, miraculously, early life not only held on, but thrived. When the ice melted and the ground thawed, complex multicellular life emerged, eventually leading to life-forms we recognize today. The Snowball Earth hypothesis has been largely based on evidence from sedimentary rocks exposed in areas that once were along coastlines and shallow seas, as well as climate modeling. Physical evidence that ice sheets covered the interior of continents in warm equatorial regions had eluded scientists – until now. In new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, our team of geologists describes the missing link, found in an unusual pebbly sandstone encapsulated within the granite that forms Colorado’s Pikes Peak....