For the past several months I’ve been working on a television show for The Weather Channel. Hacking the Planet is the brainchild of my friend John Rennie, former editor in chief of Scientific American, and it features me and Cara Santa Maria, senior science correspondent for The Huffington Post. As host, John flies around the globe, talking [...]

Earthquakes have become more than 10 times more common in normally quiescent parts of the U.S., such as Ohio and Oklahoma, in the past few years. Given the simultaneous uptick in fracking—an oil and gas drilling technique that involves fracturing shale rock deep underground with the use of a high pressure water cocktail—it’s common to [...]

Last year, on March 11, a deadly earthquake and tsunami rocked Japan, killing more than 15,000 people. To make matters worse, the natural disaster triggered a major crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station. The subsequent meltdown and radioactive release is the only event in history other than Chernobyl to rate as a “major [...]

Volcanoes, with their vast outpourings of greenhouse gases and sun-screening ash clouds, can affect climate. But what about the other way around? A special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, dated May 28, rounds up research on the ways that climate change can drive volcanic eruptions as well as other geologic [...]

A new study from the Earth Institute at Columbia University says there’s more seismic activity around the Big Apple than previously thought. Researchers also say they discovered a new active fault line running from Stamford, Conn., 25 miles (40.2 kilometers) west toward the Hudson River. There, this underground fault intersects with another fault line. Sitting [...]