From EARTH Magazine  --  The Cascadia Subduction Zone is a 1,000-kilometer-long subduction zone stretching from Mendocino, Calif., to north of Vancouver Island off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. Those living along this stretch are occasionally treated to some shaky moments by the subduction of the Juan de Fuca Plate beneath the massive North American Plate. But the real threat is a

From EARTH Magazine  --  The last several decades have seen Arctic sea-ice minimums drop by more than half in area and more than three-quarters in volume. With current models predicting further reductions, scientists are calling it the "new normal" and are trying to grasp its implications - one of which is the occurrence of pathogens never before seen in the Arctic.

From EARTH Magazine  --  Tucked high in the Andes Mountains of northern Peru is a remarkable fossil locality: a 39-million-year-old petrified forest preserved in nearly pristine condition: stumps, full trees, leaves and all. With its existence unknown to scientists until the early 1990s - and its significance unbeknownst to villagers - this ancient forest hosts the remains of more than 40 types of trees, some still rooted, that flourished in a lowland tropical forest until they were suddenly buried by a volcanic eruption during the Eocene.

From EARTH Magazine  --  The existence of seafloor sediments containing valuable minerals and metals has been known since the late 19th century, but it wasn't until the 1960s that the earliest attempts to recover mineral wealth from the deep sea were made. Technical challenges, as well as discoveries in the 1970s of more economical and previously unknown terrestrial mineral deposits, shelved the idea until the 1990s.