The most dangerous type of natural disaster, and also the most unpredictable, is the earthquake. In the first week of November 2011, people in central Oklahoma experienced more than two dozen earthquakes. The largest, a magnitude 5.6 quake, shook thousands of fans in a college football stadium, caused cracks in a few buildings and rattled the nerves of many people who had never felt a quake before. Oklahoma is not an area of the country famous for its quakes. Although less expected than quakes in California and Alaska, these “mid-plate” tremors can do substantial damage. Some of the ...

A dusky shroud hung high over Alaska and western Canada in early August, a plume of smoke, soot and other tiny particles tainting the lower stratosphere and thick enough for satellites to detect. But the particles suspended in the Alaskan and Canadian pall, called aerosols, didn’t emanate from one of the wildfires that often strike the region’s boreal forests during the long days of summer. Instead, space-based images traced the smoke to massive blazes that erupted in late July in central Russia, more than 9,000 kilometers to the west. While it has been known for decades that large wi... (p. 28)

A decade of droughts has stifled the increasing growth of terrestrial vegetation.

When Hurricane Ike struck the Gulf Coast in the early hours of September 13, 2008, Texas’ Bolivar Peninsula was ground zero. Before the category 2 storm made landfall, large stretches of beachfront on this narrow, low-lying spit of land were chockablock with homes standing on stilts behind dunes up to 2 meters tall. But those stilts — and the dunes — were too short: Most of the homes that didn’t get blown away by Ike’s 175-kilometer-per-hour winds were battered by waves and then swept off pilings by a 5-meter-deep, debris-filled storm surge. Terrain was swept clean, and dunes were ... (p. 14)

Whirlwinds leave dark paths behind by sucking sand grains clean.

Jumping preceded mastery of the touchdown in amphibian evolution, a new study suggests.