Alexandra Witze

Contributing Correspondent

Alexandra Witze is a contributing correspondent based in Boulder, Colorado. Among other exotic locales, her reporting has taken her to Maya ruins in the jungles of Guatemala, among rotting corpses at the University of Tennessee's legendary "Body Farm," and to a floating sea-ice camp at the North Pole. She has a bachelor's degree in geology from MIT and a graduate certification in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Among her honors are the Science-in-Society award from the National Association of Science Writers (shared with Tom Siegfried), and the American Geophysical Union's award for feature journalism. She coauthored the book Island on Fire, about the 18th-century eruption of the Icelandic volcano Laki.

All Stories by Alexandra Witze

  1. Volcanic Rush

    High-speed videos capture rocks flying at unheard-of rates.

  2. Physics

    Order from disorder

    Collective motion emerges spontaneously in wiggling protein strands.

  3. Life

    The farther the better for corals after oil spill

    Deepwater organisms may be slow to recover from Gulf accident.

  4. Earth

    Volcanoes’ message to airplanes: Ash-filled skies are not so friendly

  5. Earth

    Greek volcano reawakens

    Potential eruption wouldn’t be anything like Santorini’s storied Bronze Age blowout, scientists say.

  6. Physics

    Lose a memory, use energy

    Lab experiment confirms link between erasing information and heat flow.

  7. Plants

    Tree rings’ lack of volcanic signature confuses climate calculations

  8. Physics

    Hydrogen takes a new form

    High-pressure studies may reveal a fourth phase for the element.

  9. Particle Physics

    Higgs running out of hiding places

    particle’s mass confirms a final missing piece of physics’ puzzle is right where scientists think it is.

  10. Humans

    Oceans set stage for human evolution

    Temperature changes off the coast dried out East Africa and allowed grasslands to spread starting around 2 million years ago.

  11. Physics

    Crystals may be possible in time as well as space

    A theory proposes that objects in their lowest energy state can loop through the fourth dimension forever, much as atoms arrange themselves periodically in matter.

  12. Earth

    Making Waves

    Japanese quake gave scientists an unprecedented look at a big tsunami.