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. Space

    Science on the penultimate space shuttle

    Endeavour carries $2-billion experiment to hunt for exotic physics.

  2. Earth

    Volcanic ash gets its close-up

    Last year’s eruption in Iceland spit out supersharp and potentially harmful particles, nanoscale images show.

  3. Earth

    Ozone loss made tropics rainier

    Hole over Antarctica changes weather patterns all the way to the equator, simulations suggest.

  4. Earth

    Seismologists rumble over quake clusters

    Japan tremor may be part of a second grouping of great quakes since 1900, some scientists say.

  5. Life

    Antarctic lake hides bizarre ecosystem

    Bacterial colonies form cones similar to fossilized examples of Earth’s early life.

  6. In the dark

    What is the universe made of?

  7. Earth

    A matter of gravity

    A new map of Earth’s gravitational field is the sharpest ever acquired.

  8. Humans

    Climate meddling dates back 8,000 years

    Cutting down trees put lots of carbon into the atmosphere long before the industrial revolution began.

  9. Science & Society

    An update on scientific integrity

    New administration rules are a step in the right direction, but much work remains, says a watchdog group.

  10. Humans

    Japan struggles to control earthquake-damaged nuke plant

    With the failure of multiple backup systems, desperate measures are employed to keep at least three reactors from melting down.

  11. Earth

    How continents do the splits

    East African seismic study reveals how land gives way to ocean crust.

  12. Earth

    Understanding storm spin-offs

    Meteorologists seeking to better predict tornadoes probe the differences between tempests that spawn twisters and those that don't.