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. Chemistry

    Depths hold clues to dearth of xenon in air

    The gas doesn’t dissolve well in minerals deep inside Earth, a discovery that may explain why it’s also scarce in the atmosphere.

  2. Physics

    2012 physics Nobel recognizes experiments probing quantum world

    Serge Haroche and David Wineland win for investigating single particles of light and matter.

  3. Chemistry

    Chemical bond shields extreme microbes from poison

    Molecular structure explains how ‘arsenic life’ bacteria instead survive by fishing out phosphate from their surroundings.

  4. Earth

    Bad days for dinosaurs began long before the last of them died

  5. Earth

    Intraplate quakes signal tectonic breakup

    The unusual April temblors are the latest in a massive energy release that is cleaving the Indo-Australian crustal plate in two.

  6. Oceans

    Soundings

    The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor by Hali Felt.

  7. Physics

    Uncertainty not so certain after all

    Lab experiments undermine the first formulation of Heisenberg’s famous physics principle, but leave its broader implications intact.

  8. Earth

    Arctic sea ice hits record low, and keeps going

    A summer storm and thinner ice probably contributed to this year’s massive melt.

  9. Humans

    Neil Armstrong, first man on moon, dies at 82

    Apollo 11 commander held true to his engineering roots.

  10. Earth

    When studying a monster volcano, poke softly with a sensitive stick

  11. Physics

    Molecules get a big chill

    A new cooling method takes big groups of atoms closer to long-sought temperatures for exploring the nature of matter.

  12. Earth

    Greenland enters melt mode

    This year’s record-breaking island-wide thaw punctuates an ongoing warming trend.