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. Ice in Motion

    As frozen lands disintegrate, researchers rush to catch the collapse.

  2. Earth

    Great quake one of the biggest ever in Japan

    BLOG: Magnitude-8.9 tremor will go down in seismology’s record books

  3. Rivers in the sky

    Atmospheric bands of water vapor can cause flooding and extreme weather

  4. Life

    Buried microbes coax energy from rock

    In experiments, microorganisms can stimulate minerals to produce hydrogen, a key fuel for growth in a thriving subterranean world.

  5. Earth

    Chile quake didn’t reduce risk

    During the large 2010 tremor, faults ruptured mainly outside the area due for a big one, leaving the region vulnerable to future events.

  6. Physics

    Quantum pendulum trick explained

    Physicists explain why an object swings faster when immersed in a special ultracold liquid.

  7. Sizing up the Electron

    Measuring the inner shape of the famous particle could help solve a cosmic mystery.

  8. Earth

    2010 ties record for warmest year yet

    El Ni±o heated things up even as global temperatures continue to rise in the hottest decade on record.

  9. Paleontology

    Early meat-eating dinosaur unearthed

    Pint-sized, two-legged runner from Argentina dates back to the dawn of the dinos, 230 million years ago.

  10. Paleontology

    An ammonite’s last supper

    A detailed X-ray image of a fossil reveals an ancient marine creature’s diet.

  11. Paleontology

    Oceans may have poisoned early animals

    High sulfur and low oxygen produced a deadly brew nearly 500 million years ago that apparently stalled a burst of evolutionary change.

  12. Humans

    How to hear above the cocktail party din

    Simply repeating a sound in different acoustic environments may allow listeners to focus in on it, experiments suggest.