By Catherine Arnold

February 25, 2021 at 6:30 am

Look out the window or walk over to a patch of soil near your home. Depending on where you live, it could be reddish brown, black, dark gray or even the color of rich, dark chocolate. If it’s moist enough, run your hands through it. It may separate into thick clumps that can hold water and later release it. With a few exceptions — such as desert sites — this is how good soil behaves. Less obvious to the casual glance, that piece of earth is likely throbbing with life.

In fact, the number of microscopic organisms that live in a shovelful of rich garden soil exceeds the number of plants and animals inhabiting the entire above-ground Amazon rainforest. And the Amazon is known for having more plants and animals than any other land-based habitat.

By Daksha Morjaria

Mount Etna, Europe’s most active volcano, has been erupting regularly since 2011. However, the latest series of explosions, which began on February 16, 2021, has been particularly noteworthy. Emanating from the youngest of the volcano’s four craters — the Southeast Crater— they have spewed spectacular fountains of lava as high as 0.9 miles (1.5 kilometers). To put it in perspective, that is about three times the height of One World Trade Center, the tallest building in the United States.

“The most recent novelty is that the last six eruptive paroxysms were among the most violent in the Southeast Crater’s young history,” says Marco Neri, a volcanologist with Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV).

By Maitreyi Mantha from Dogonews

While the volcanoes on Earth eject fiery lava, ash, and smoke, those on Ceres, a dwarf planet that orbits between Mars and Jupiter, have been spewing ice throughout its history. The chain of events leading to the discovery began in 2015 when NASA’s spacecraft Dawn, sent to explore the asteroid belt where Ceres resides, captured some high-resolution images of its icy, rocky terrain. On the dwarf planet’s crater-covered surface, was a solitary 4-km ( 13,000 feet) tall mountain. Continue reading “Volcanoes on Dwarf Planet Ceres Ooze Ice Instead Of Lava” →

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Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton