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. Earth

    Simulation tracks ocean’s missing heat

    Climate scientists suggest energy is buried deep undersea or released to space.

  2. Earth

    Surviving tornadoes mostly depends on a lot of luck and the right attitude

  3. Space

    Spacecraft goes from crash landing to mission accomplished

    The wreckage of the Genesis probe yields a bonanza of discoveries about conditions in the early solar system.

  4. Paleontology

    Big dinosaurs kept their cool

    Body temperature of long-gone beasts resembled that of mammals, study of fossil teeth suggests.

  5. Earth

    Death of a Continent, Birth of an Ocean

    Africa’s Afar region gives glimpses of geology in action.

  6. Earth

    Tsunami lit up the heavens

    Camera captures glowing atmospheric ripples triggered by Japan’s deadly quake as they pass over Hawaii.

  7. Space

    Good-bye Shuttle

    Looking back at the space plane’s scientific legacy

  8. Life

    Go deep, small worm

    A discovery in a South African mine suggests life can thrive far below the surface.

  9. Earth

    Ozone hole on the mend

    Researchers claim to see atmospheric healing more than a decade earlier than a detectable uptick was expected.

  10. Life

    Animals quickly colonized freshwater

    Fossilized worm burrows show that life had moved beyond the oceans by 530 million years ago.

  11. Dawn of the Dinosaurs

    Paleontologists probe the majestic reptiles’ origin and rise.

  12. Earth

    Grand Canyon born by continental lift

    A "drip" deep within the Earth may have raised the Colorado plateau to create the spectacular landscape of the U.S. Southwest.