Nearly a mile and a half beneath the waves, the Endeavour Hydrothermal Vents are home to an array of weird deep-sea creatures, and they’re one of the birthplaces of the planet’s crust. Located 155 miles southwest of Canada’s Vancouver Island, the Endeavour Hydrothermal Vents are a site of sea floor spreading, where volcanic activity produces the new rock that will line the expanding Pacific Ocean floor. Now you can see exactly what that looks like, thanks to a live webcam affixed to a submarine. Launched from a port in Seattle last week a research ship equipped with a robotic deep-sea submarine is headed out to the Endeavour vents for the next few weeks. As part of the research cruise, the team is streaming back live footage of their robot’s journeys.

The cruise’s main goal is to repair and install some new cabling at research sites around the northeast Pacific, but the live stream should prove to be far more exciting than the task. The Endeavour site is stuffed with billowing hydrothermal vents, specialized tube worms, and deep-sea spiders.

You can check out the live stream, which includes video and sometimes even audio commentary.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Scientists Pluck Blind Shrimp and Other Strange Life Forms From World’s Deepest Hydrothermal Vent
Mining Company to Start Digging up the Ocean Floor

Mexico’s Popocatépetl volcano—a huge volcano that sits to the southeast of Mexico City—has seen a recent burst of activity. A couple weeks ago the volcano started seeping gas and ash, and yesterday the volcano blew its top in a violent explosion.

The explosion was captured on video, and in this sped up time lapse you can clearly see the shockwave of the explosion fly out from peak—shaking the clouds and racing down the volcano’s slopes. A build-up of pressure from gases seeping out of the volcano’s magma is behind these kinds of explosions. “This is akin to popping the top off a shaken bottle of soda — the dissolved bubbles come out of solution rapidly as the pressure is released and you get an explosion of soda,” says volcanologist Erik Klemmeti. On his his blog, Klemetti describes what we’re seeing:

[T]hese explosions come with a lot of force, and you can see after the initial explosion is how the clouds of water vapor around Popocatepetl shudder as the explosion front moves past. Then quickly, the upper flanks of the volcano turn grey from the rapid raining out of ash and volcanic debris (tephra).

For now, a live stream from the volcano shows that it seems to have died down. Mexico’s National Center for Prevention of Disasters still has Popocatépetl rated at Yellow, Phase 2, meaning that people should avoid the area – the same rating it has had for the past few years.

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The fire near Colorado Spring as of yesterday afternoon. Photo: Phillip Stewart

Wildfires are burning their way through Colorado, a region devastated by a series of potent fires last summer. Three fires, one near Colorado Springs, one in Rocky Mountain National Park, and one near the Royal Gorge Bridge, says the BBC, have so far forced the evacuation of thousands of people, including 905 prisoners.

The Colorado Springs fire, says ABC, has so far burned at least 8,000 acres of the landscape, torching up to 60 homes in the process.

“This fire is far from under under control or extinguished,” said Sheriff Terry Maketa to ABC of the Colorado Springs fire.

On top of homes and forests, says the BBC, the fires are also threatening the Royal Gorge Bridge, the tallest suspension bridge in the world. The bridge hangs 956 feet above the Arkansas river. So far, says the Gazette, the bridge seems to be fine, though the land on both sides have been torched.

The trio of Colorado wildfires are the latest in what is expected to be another bad fire season for the west. Indeed, says UPI, the ongoing Colorado Springs fire is supposed to pick up because of high winds and temperatures.

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Western U.S. Forest Fires Could Double Within 40 Years
Watch Out: This Year’s Fire Season Will Be Another Bad One for the West

Shale gas around the world. U.S. Energy Information Administration

First developed in 1947 by Stanolind Oil, hydraulic fracturing took a long time to come into vogue. But in the past few years, the drilling technique, used to extract shale gas and oil, has transformed the United States’ production of natural gas and oil. Before the rise of fracking, natural gas and oil trapped in shale deposits were pretty much ignored. No one really knew how to get it out and, to the extent that they did, getting it out cost too much to bother.

But that’s changing. A global survey of estimated stores of shale gas by the  U.S. Energy Information Administration has added a whopping 32 percent to the global estimated supply of natural gas, says the AFP. Shale oil boosts global oil reserves by up to 11 percent. In other words, there’s a lot of fossil fuel out there, trapped in shale, and it’s increasingly profitable to get it out.

The U.S. has been leading the charge in the fracking, and now the economic success of the American fracking boom is spurring other countries to see if they can replicate it. In its report, the EIA estimated the availability of shale gas and oil around the world. The top five countries for technologically recoverable shale oil are Russia, the U.S., China, Argentina and Libya. For natural gas, it’s China, Argentina, Algeria, the U.S. and Canada. The report says that it doesn’t necessarily make economic sense to go after all of this oil and gas. But that balance could shift if the prices of oil and gas go up, much as the high price of oil is driving the development of the Canadian oil sands.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Two Companies Want to Frack the Slopes of a Volcano
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The radar signature of the May 31 El Reno tornado. Photo: NWS

In the past two weeks, Oklahoma has seen two massive tornadoes: the Moore tornado and the more recent El Reno tornado, both powerful EF-5 storms that were responsible for many deaths. Saturating the discussion around both storms was a bevy of dramatic close-up footage of the tornadoes as they tore through the landscape. Some of this footage was captured by news agencies and professional storm chasers, but much of it came from amateurs.

During the May 31 El Reno tornado, says National Geographic, when the National Weather Service was calling for people to take shelter, “at least 60 storm chasers stayed on the roads, heading directly toward the tornado itself. Radar imaging posted on Twitter Friday night shows that as the deadly El Reno twister touched down, several cars were precariously close to the tornado core.”

Four storm chasers died during that tornado, three of them experienced veterans, and three others had a close call when their car was tossed 600 feet.

The deaths have sparked a debate over the sensibility and usefulness of what many are describing as a notable increase in recent years of the number of people who are out there chasing storms.

The rise in popularity of storm chasing, said Tim Samaras, who died during the May 31 tornado, to National Geographic, has led to dangerous overcrowding near a big storm.

“We run into [storm chasers] all the time,” he said. “On a big tornado day in Oklahoma, you can have hundreds of storm chasers lined up down the road … We know ahead of time when we chase in Oklahoma, there’s going to be a traffic jam.”

That huge number of people on the roads, says Fox, is making an already dangerous situation even worse:

[T]here are too many people with a cell phone in-hand, simply calling themselves “storm chasers.” They clog roads and endanger legitimate researchers like the three who were killed Friday.

“We’ve known now for four or five years that the congestion has gotten so bad, you don’t have escape routes anymore,” Denzer told FOX 13. “You can’t get away.”

To put the risks of storm chasing in context, you need to think about two things: what a storm chasers’ purpose is and what it takes to achieve that goal. Storm chasers generally fall into two camps: those doing or contributing to scientific research, and those trying to capture video or images for media or news purposes. Well, maybe there’s a third camp: those there to gawk.

“You’ve got the group that are basically thrill seekers. They want to get their videos on YouTube. They want to be tweeted,” Dellegatto said.

Meteorologist and former storm chaser Dan Satterfield writes that the risks people are facing to capture all this footage of a storm are, from a scientific standpoint, unnecessary. Trained storm chasers are extremely useful for helping us understand tornadoes. They capture footage that can help researchers test or confirm their theories over how tornadoes work, and they provide on-the-ground confirmation for what weather forecasters are seeing in radar or satellite views. But to do that kind of work, you don’t need to put yourself in harm’s way.

The news media is overplaying the scientific benefit provided by nearly all of these chasers. Especially the silly ones taking armored vehicles on purpose into a tornado. That may make good TV on The Weather Channel, but it’s of no real scientific benefit. If you want to add to the science, take some calculus and enroll at [Oklahoma University.]

I’m sure Howie Bluestein can still fill a board full of equations to help you understand the real science! Dr. Bluestein measured the highest winds ever recorded on the planet in May 1999 during the first Moore Tornado. He did it from a mile away using a Doppler radar, not a ridiculous looking armored SUV.

There’s also the question of whether the news footage of a tornado is useful, but that’s a different discussion. Here Satterfield wants to point something else out:

I know of NO ONE who makes a real living storm chasing. No one. I do know quite a few meteorologists who make a decent living trying to figure out how these storms develop and how to forecast them better. They had to learn some physics and maths to do that.

More from Smithsonian.com:

How to Understand the Scale of the Oklahoma Tornado

Image: msr

Connecticut’s legislature has become the first in the country to pass a law that requires labeling all genetically modified organisms. But Connecticut shoppers won’t be seeing labels on their food just yet. The bill comes with a lot of caveats—most importantly that it will only actually come into effect if it can find company—but if it goes into effect, it will be the most comprehensive GMO labeling law in the nation.

Governor Dannel P. Malloy’s office issued a press release, explaining:

House Bill 6527 – An Act Concerning Genetically-Engineered Food, will require producers to label genetically-engineered food in Connecticut as long as four states from the New England region with an aggregate population of 20 million also adopt a labeling provision.

The fight over GMO labeling (and GMOs in general) has been a heated one for many years. Proponents of Connecticut’s bill says that consumers have a right to know whether the products they’re buying have been genetically modified—a term the bill defined this way:

“…food that is intended for human consumption and seed that is intended to produce food for human consumption, which has been genetically altered by scientists to improve its ability to grow in non-native environments, resist pests, tolerate extreme weather conditions, produce more food (like milk in cows), or show other desired traits.”

Opponents point out that very little, if any, science has proven GMOs to be dangerous for people’s health. Genetics professor Pamela Ronald wrote in Scientific American in 2011, “There is broad scientific consensus that genetically engineered crops currently on the market are safe to eat. After 14 years of cultivation and a cumulative total of 2 billion acres planted, no adverse health or environmental effects have resulted from commercialization of genetically engineered crops.” And one review paper that looked at studies on adverse health effects due to genetically modified crops concluded,  “The review of available literature indicates that the genetically modified crops available in the market that are intended for human consumption are generally safe; their consumption is not associated with serious health problems.”

But many lawmakers and consumers aren’t convinced. Connecticut isn’t the first state to attempt to label GMOs. Last year, Californians voted on Proposition 37, which would have required companies to label GMO foods. New Hampshire, Maine, Massachussetts and Rhode Island are all talking about GMO labeling bills right now. In Alaska, they passed a bill in 2005 that required labeling genetically engineered fish and shellfish.

It remains to be seen whether Connecticut will get enough support from its neighboring states for their bill to go into effect, but the debate over GMO labeling won’t be going away any time soon.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Where Will Japan Get Wheat Now That It’s Rejecting America’s GMO-Tainted Crops?
What Will Convince People That Genetically Modified Foods Are Okay?

Here’s Antarctica as we know it today, a land of vast ice sheets. Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Antarctica hasn’t always been covered by miles-thick ice sheets, a land of hunkered-down penguins and some scraggly grasses. Roughly 35 million years ago, Antarctica was a warmer, more luscious land. Then, the glaciers that now dominate the land were relegated to the high mountaintops, if they existed at all. Instead of miles of frozen water, Antarctica was teeming with trees and flowering plants, a verdant landscape home to ancient marsupials, says Rice University’s John Anderson. And, in research released earlier this year, an international team of scientists have given us our best look yet at what that land may have looked like:

The topography of Antarctica, beneath all the ice, as measured by the Bedmap Consortium. Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

This map came from Bedmap2, headed by the British Antarctic Survey and is an update from a previous, similar map.

An elevation map of Antarctica. Photo: Fretwell et al. / Bedmap Consortium

Here’s NASA explaining how the map was put together:

Who knows what scraps of plant and animal material from the ancient world may have survived the crushing and grinding of flowing glacier ice? Miles of ice still stand between us and the Antarctic terrain, but one day we might find out.

More from Smithsonian.com:

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Last Friday, a powerful EF-5 tornado swept through the suburbs of Oklahoma City killing 18 people, including veteran tornado researchers and storm chasers Tim and Paul Samaras and Carl Young. Originally, the tornado was deemed an EF-3 on the Enhanced Fujita scale based on the damage it had done. But now, says the National Weather Service, the El Reno tornado has been upgraded to an EF-5.

Further, says Fox, the National Weather Service says that the tornado was 2.6 miles wide, making it the largest tornado ever observed. The previous largest tornado was 2.5 miles wide when it hit Hallam, Nebraska in 2004.

The El Reno tornado came just on the heels of the earlier EF-5 Moore tornado that killed 24 people in another Oklahoma City suburb. The El Reno tornado, says Fox, was twice as wide as the Moore tornado.

More from Smithsonian.com:

How to Understand the Scale of the Oklahoma Tornado
Here’s How the Enhanced Fujita Scale Works, and This Is What It Looks Like

Cleaning up damage from the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. Photo: Geof Wilson

Straddling the boundary between the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates, New Zealand is a land of earthquakes. In just the past few years, a series of devastating ones have hit near Christchurch, the country’s second-largest city, leveling large parts and killing hundreds of people. But for the past five* months an earthquake of a different kind, centered near Wellington, New Zealand’s capital city, has been slowly rocking the country.

It’s a magnitude 7 earthquake, and it’s been going on all year.

It’s the strongest earthquake to hit the region in 150 years says The New Zealand Herald, “but none of the locals are diving under desks or sheltering in doorways.”

In a normal earthquake, the Earth lurches, releasing in some cases multiple atomic bombs-worth of energy in seconds. The shaking and rolling felt at the surface makes buildings tumble and gas lines rupture—an unpredictable disaster that seems to strike out of nowhere.

But the Wellington earthquake is different. What’s happening near Wellington is that that same amount of energy, and the same amount of movement of the Earth’s surface, is being spread out over months and months. It’s still a magnitude 7 earthquake, it’s just a gradual one.

Wellington’s residents aren’t in a panic, says GeoNet, because the Wellington quake is a strange type of earthquake known as a “slow slip earthquake,” a style of tremblor that scientists only really discovered over the past decade.

Unlike earthquakes, which seem to occur almost at random, slow slip earthquakes can be recurrent. They come and go, sometimes happening annually. In New Zealand, the Wellington quake is actually the third of a set: similar earthquakes were detected in 2003 and 2008, says GeoNet.

Since we’ve been studying them for only a short while, scientists don’t know much about slow slip earthquakes. We know they happen in the same fault lines as big earthquakes, though usually much deeper in the Earth. We know they can be recurrent. And we’re starting to figure out what might be behind them. What we don’t really know, unfortunately, is how they’re related to the faster, more dangerous breed of earthquakes. But by studying them scientists hope we might be able to get a better grasp on the forces behind the killer quakes, and maybe one day let us predict the next Christchurch.

*Story corrected to reflect how many months we’ve actually had in 2013 so far

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The Clovis people were known for their distinctive stone arrowheads. Photo: Bureau of Land Management

On a site near Buck Lake, a small community southwest of the Canadian city of Edmonton, a retired Czechoslovakian couple, Anton and Maria Chobot, worked for decades to unveil the history of one of North America’s first human civilizations. The Chobots left their home during the ongoing Hungarian Revolution and settled half way across the world. From there, says Randy Boswell for Postmedia News, the couple started excavating the land near their cottage along Buck Lake.

The couple had some experience with archaeology, Anton told Richard Firestone, Allen West and Simon Warwick-Smith, the authors of a 2006 book on ancient extinctions and the end of the Ice Age:

The Soviet Bloc was keenly interested in the Middle East, so I traveled there a lot, especially to Syria. While there, I became interested in archaeology, taught myself how to excavate correctly, and did some excavations at the ancient site of Ugarit, north of Beirut on the Mediterranean, which was good training for what I would unexpectedly come across here in Canada.

What they came across was astounding. According to the 2006 book: “In the Chobots’ basement were a great many boxes, maybe more than a hundred, filled with flint tools and flakes,” relics of one of North America’s first humans—the Clovis people. The Chobots had found arrowheads, knives and even simple tools thought to be from humans that had preceded the Clovis.

As one of the best preserved sites of Clovis artifacts, the Chobots’ archaeological dig is now at the center of a scientific controversy, says Boswell. Research teams across the world are trying to figure out what killed off the Clovis, and ongoing research at the Chobot site could help them answer that question.

Roughly 14,500 years ago the world started to warm, throwing off the shackles of the Ice Age and creeping into the temperate conditions that have supported much of human history. The warming encouraged the entry of some of the first humans into North America roughly 13,000 years ago, including the Clovis people.

A few thousand years into this climatic change the warming suddenly stopped. The conditions across much of the Northern Hemisphere shot back to glacial conditions in just a thousand years. In Venezuela, says NOAA, the temperature dropped 5.5 degrees. Across the Northern Hemisphere, dry conditions set in.

Scientists aren’t really sure what caused the dramatic cooling, an event known as the Younger Dryas. Most blame the cooling on a change in ocean circulation patterns and the melting of the Arctic, but some favor another trigger—an asteroid. Whatever the cause, the effects of the Younger Dryas were deadly: The Clovis people, along with the mammoths and giant bisons with which they shared the land, were wiped out.

In a new study, scientists report that tiny spherules, thought to have been produced when a massive asteroid exploded over the Canadian sky, have been dug up at the Chobot site. The find is reinvigorating the debate over the cause of the Younger Dryas, says Boswell for Postmedia News.

“Sadly,” says Boswell, the new study “was published just three days before Anton Chobot died Friday at age 92.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Clovis Weren’t the First Americans
New Research Disproves Prehistoric Killer-Comet Theory (Again)

Photo: State Farm

On Monday, we tried to put the tornado that ripped through central Oklahoma, killing 24 people, in historical context. The tornado stayed on the ground for 40 minutes, and the path of destruction was estimated to be 1.3 miles across at its widest. Winds blew at more than 200 miles per hour. We wrote how this monster storm fit in with what we know about tornadoes:

There are a lot of parameters by which a tornado can be deemed the worst, and by pretty much all counts today’s Moore tornado is up there. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration keeps a list of historical tornadoes—devastating twisters known for their size, their duration and their destruction. Though the Moore tornado doesn’t trump any of them, its combination of size, strength and duration made it an incredibly dangerous storm.

The aftermath of the storm has seen the clean-up and damage assessment begin. So far, the damage caused by the storm is estimated to have been in the range of $2 billion, a sum that would make this the 3rd most expensive U.S. tornado of all time.

At first, the storm was rated an EF-4 on the Enhanced Fujita scale. Since then, it has been upgraded to an EF-5, the highest ranking on the scale. The is the the 59th level 5 storm in the past 63 years. Though many people think of the Enhanced Fujita scale as a scale of wind speed, it is actually a scale for damage. By looking at the amount of damage caused to different types of structures, scientists assign the storm an Enhanced Fujita scale classification. From the amount of damage they see, they then try to reverse engineer the storm’s wind speeds.

As it tracks along the ground, a tornado’s power can change. By looking at the damage, you can see how the storm evolved. The National Weather Service put out this map showing how the Moore tornado grew from an EF-0 when it first touched down to an EF-4 in the heart of the city. It also briefly spiked up to EF-5 based on the damage seen at the Briarwood Elementary school.

Photo: National Weather Service

On Google’s Crisis Map, you can see the scar cut into the city by the tornado. Dotting the map are little triangles, each color-coded by the EF scale rating, with light blue being EF-0 and purple EF-5. Clicking on each of these triangles shows a description of the damage at the site and in many cases a photograph, a clear, if depressing, visualization of the Enhanced Fujita scale.

EF-1 to EF-4 rated damage in Moore, Oklahoma. Photo: Google Crisis Response

More from Smithsonian.com:

How to Understand the Scale of the Oklahoma Tornado

A timelapse video from wmctv shows the progress of the destructive Oklahoma tornado. 

Update, 10:05 am, May 21, 2013: The Oklahoma City medical examiner said that at least 91 people had died as a result of the tornado but later revised that count, saying that only 24 deaths had been confirmed. Emergency workers were still working early this morning to make their way through debris at Plaza Towers Elementary School, where seven children have been found dead.

Originally posted on May 20: In Moore, Oklahoma, a suburb of Oklahoma City, an incredibly powerful tornado just came and went, a nearly hour-long ordeal that, as of the time of this writing, has trapped 75 school children in their school, injured hundreds of people and left a city in ruins.

A meteorologist for the local news station KFOR called the tornado “the worst tornado in the history of the world.” That assessment is quite apt.

There are a lot of parameters by which a tornado can be deemed the worst, and by pretty much all counts today’s Moore tornado is up there. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration keeps a list of historical tornadoes—devastating twisters known for their size, their duration and their destruction. Though the Moore tornado doesn’t trump any of them, its combination of size, strength and duration made it an incredibly dangerous storm.

A map of tornado activity in the U.S., 1950 to 2011. Photo: John Nelson / IDV Solutions

One factor that really set today’s Moore tornado apart was its staggering size. According to The New York Times, today’s tornado was “perhaps a mile wide.” Other reports put it closer to two miles in width. According to NOAA, the largest tornado on record hit Hallam, Nebraska in 2004. That twister was two-and-a-half miles wide. “This is probably close to the maximum size for tornadoes; but it is possible that larger, unrecorded ones have occurred,” writes NOAA of the 2004 tornado.

On top of its massive girth, today’s tornado was also incredibly strong. The Associated Press reports that wind speeds in the twister hit upwards of 199 miles per hour (320 kilometers per hour). The record holder, says NOAA, saw winds peaking at 302 miles per hour (486 kilometers per hour.) That storm, unfortunately, hit pretty much the exact same place as this one. It swept just north of Moore on May 3, 1999.

The track of the May 1999 tornado and the preliminary path for today’s tornado. Photo: National Weather Service

But while the wind speed of today’s twister falls below that of the May 1999 storm, the damage caused by a tornado isn’t all due to wind speed. The amount of time that the storm stays on the ground is also incredibly important.

Today’s Moore tornado was on the ground for 40 minutes. Most tornadoes last just a few minutes. But they can sit around for up to an hour. One of the most deadly tornadoes in history, the 1925 Tri-State Tornado, sat on the ground for a terrifying three-and-a-half hours.

A screencapture from KFOR’s coverage shows the massive damage caused by the tornado. Photo: KFOR

Of course, while all of these parameters are a window into the destructive potential of nature, what matters most to many is the toll on human life. Though casualties are at this point still uncertain, FOX’s KDVR reports that “more than 171,000 people were in the path of the storm.” Several casualties have already been reported, but it will take time for the full destructive power of the storm to become known.

Fortunately, at least, casualties will likely be below the record set by the the March 1925 tornado that swept through Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, the one that stayed down for 3.5 hours. That storm killed 695 people. Advances in early detection and warning systems have brought the deaths caused by tornadoes down over time, and one can only hope that people were able to seek shelter from the dark side of nature.

More from Smithsonian.com:

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A Satellite View of Tornado Scars
This Might Be Why People Don’t Move Away From Tornado Zones

For the first time in human history the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has reached 400 parts per million. Photo: Mauna Loa Observatory

There’s an interesting relationship, borne out in polling numbers, between the “general public’s” belief in global climate change and the weather. When it’s hot out, people believe in climate change. When it’s cold, they don’t.  When summer heat and drought and wildfires tore through the U.S. last summer, 74 percent of Americans believed that climate change was affecting the weather. Only 46 percent of Americans think that this climate change is caused by human activities – most directly the burning of fossil fuels.

The numbers are a little different when it is climate scientists, and the scientific research conducted on climate change, that are polled.

Writing in the Guardian, Dana Nuccitelli and John Abraham describe a new study that polled the recent research to see what scientists thought of climate change. (Nuccitelli is one of the voices behind the website Skeptical Science and one of the authors of the new scientific study.) They found that the vast, overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree that humans are causing climate change.

The team searched a database of scientific studies for the words “global climate change” or “global warming.” They found 11,944 relevant studies published between 1991 and 2012. Then, they read through the study’s summaries to figure out whether the study supported, rejected, was uncertain about or said nothing at all about our role in causing climate change. They also asked the scientists behind the papers whether their research supported or refuted the idea of man-made global warming.

Of the studies that expressed some sort of position on global warming, of which there were 4,000, the team write in their paper, “97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” When the climate scientists themselves said whether or not their work supported the idea of anthropogenic climate change, “97.2% endorsed the consensus.”

For the papers that didn’t seem to have an opinion on whether humans were causing climate change, the reason, they write, is not that the scientists don’t know. Rather, it’s that the debate is so fully and completely settled within the scientific community that they aren’t going to use space re-hashing old fights.

Some people may mention that the scientific community is conflicted over the cause of climate change. This new survey would like to remind that that is not true.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Three Quarters of Americans Now Believe Climate Change Is Affecting the Weather
We’re About to Pass a Disheartening New Climate Change Milestone

Timmins, Ontario, has a long history as a mining town. Photo: Michael Jacobs

In the small city of Timmins, Ontario, a town nestled half way between Michigan and Hudson Bay, there is a mine. Actually, there are many mines—it’s a mining town. But this story is about just one, a mile and a half deep, where there is water bubbling up from below that has been cut off from the rest of the world for at least a billion years—maybe as much as 2.6 billion years.

The longer end of that timeline, Ivan Semeniuk points out in the Globe and Mail, is about half the age of the Earth. This water hasn’t been in contact with the rest of the planet since before the rise of multicellular life.

But like the water trapped in frozen lakes below Antarctica’s massive ice sheets, researchers suspect there might be life in these flows.

“It’s been called the Galapagos of the subsurface,” says Barbara Sherwood Lollar to New Scientist. The water, “is packed with hydrogen and methane – chemicals that microbes love to eat.”

“What we have here,” says Sherwood Lollar, a microbiologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, “is a plate of jelly donuts.” While she has yet to confirm whether the water is inhabited, she says the conditions are perfect for life.

The scientists don’t know whether there is any life in the ancient, isolated water. But they’re working on it. The water is young enough that it would have been locked away after life arose on Earth. But it’s been trapped for so long that any life that does exist would likely be unique—a relic of an ancient world. The CBC:

Some Canadian members of the team are currently testing the water to see if it contains microbial life — if they exist, those microbes may have been isolated from the sun and the Earth’s surface for billions of years and may reveal how microbes evolve in isolation.

One can’t help but be reminded of the Balrog: “Moria! Moria! Wonder of the Northern world. Too deep we delved there, and woke the nameless fear.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

First Signs of Life Found in Antarctica’s Subglacial Lakes

Photo: wanderflechten

In 1700, a massive earthquake struck the west and northwest coast of the United Sates. Modern scientists first caught wind of the natural disaster through the scars it left on the land—massive, toppled red cedar trees and sand deposits washed far inland. Written records weren’t being kept in that region when the earthquake happened, but several years ago, scientists managed to pinpoint the date of that mysterious earthquake. In 2005, Smithsonian explained how they unraveled the mystery:

In Japan, officials had recorded an “orphan” tsunami—unconnected with any felt earthquake— with waves up to ten feet high along 600 miles of the Honshu coast at midnight, January 27, 1700. Several years ago, Japanese researchers, by estimating the tsunami’s speed, path and other properties, concluded that it was triggered by a magnitude 9 earthquake that warped the seafloor off the Washington coast at 9 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on January 26, 1700. To confirm it, U.S. researchers found a few old trees of known age that had survived the earthquake and compared their tree rings with the rings of the ghost forest cedars. The trees had indeed died just before the growing season of 1700.

The earthquake occurred along the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a major fault line running from the Pacific Northwest to Vancouver. In recent decades, scientists have determined that this fault line may produce mega-earthquakes of 9.0 or higher on the Richter scale.

Considering all the geologic evidence, scientists now say a major earthquake strikes the Pacific Northwest every few hundred years—give or take a few hundred years. That means the next one could strike tomorrow.

This is why researchers hope to learn as much as they can, as quickly as they can about the devastating quake that rocked the land back in 1700. Earthquake prediction remains notoriously sketchy (just look at the recent example of researchers in Italy who failed to predict an earthquake in L’Aquila), so the more scientists can learn about what happened in the past, the better prepared they can be for the next disaster. And that next one could be coming soon, according to new research:

The Cascadia subduction zone is of particular interest to geologists and coastal managers because geological evidence points to recurring seismic activity along the fault line, with intervals between 300 and 500 years. With the last major event occurring in 1700, another earthquake could be on the horizon. A better understanding of how such an event might unfold has the potential to save lives.

The University of Pennsylvania team turned to a fossil-based technique for studying the Cascadia Subduction Zone. They took core samples throughout the region and then picked through the samples to find microscopic foraminifera fossils, a  type of single-celled aquatic protist. They used radiocarbon dating to estimate the age of these ancient creatures and to recreate past changes in land and sea level along the coastline. Through their analyses, they saw that the coastline ruptured in a heterogenous manner, or that the earthquake struck in different locations with different severity.

The earthquakes that occurred in this part of North America, they report, behaved similarly to recent major earthquakes in Japan and Chile, which arrived with very little warning. While the results are useful for modeling and understanding the next West Coast mega-earthquake, the researchers warn that some areas in Oregon will likely have just 20 minutes to evacuate before the tsunami waves arrive.

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