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. Planetary Science

    Mars rover deploys final instrument

    Soil analysis finds organic compounds of uncertain origin.

  2. Earth

    Grand Canyon could be much older than thought

    Disputed dating of rock erosion pegs the ancient chasm as 70 million years old.

  3. Particle Physics

    The Particle at the End of the Universe

    How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World, by Sean Carroll.

  4. Earth

    Mexican silver made it into English coins

    Chemical tests of currency help reveal where New World riches flowed.

  5. Physics

    Underwater avalanches go with the flow

    Lubricating fluid changes how grains collapse.

  6. Earth

    Pandas’ home range may move as climate changes

    Warming might force animals’ food source, bamboo, to higher elevations.

  7. Earth

    Poles apart, the Arctic and Antarctic exhibit very different records for sea ice

  8. Earth

    How the Frankenstorm came to life

    Hurricane Sandy’s humble birth and growth into a monster storm hold lessons for forecasters.

  9. Earth

    Low central pressure among Hurricane Sandy’s unusual features

    After slamming the Caribbean, storm approaches landfall in mid-Atlantic states.

  10. Earth

    Spanish quake linked to groundwater pumping

    Draining aquifers likely triggered 2011 tremor that killed nine people.

  11. Earth

    Years after big quake, Turkish fault still slip-sliding

    Creeping movement underscores the seismic danger threatening Istanbul.

  12. Physics

    Supersolidity loses its luster

    Bizarre quantum state may not exist after all, new experiments suggest.