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Published news and blog articles, organized by category. Browse older coverage by month or search for a topic. Undated blog guides appear after dated news.
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How volcanic lightning works
Volcanic lightning begins when an eruption turns a rising ash plume into a moving electrical system. Collisions, fragmentation, ice, and turbulence separate charge until the atmosphere can no longer contain it.
The engineering challenge behind coastal erosion
Managing coastal erosion means working with moving sediment, variable storms, rising water levels, ecological constraints, and expensive assets without a perfect forecast or a single permanent fix.
The engineering challenge behind earthquake early warning
Earthquake early warning is a distributed real-time system built against an unforgiving deadline. Its hardest problems are latency, incomplete information, rupture complexity, reliability, and human factors.
The engineering challenge behind volcanic lightning
Detecting volcanic lightning is an engineering problem at the edge of several hostile environments: hot gas, abrasive ash, blocked visibility, electromagnetic noise, and signals that can arrive before the plume is easy to see.
The hidden history of coastal erosion
Coastal erosion has always been part of shoreline history, but its meaning changes with sea level, storms, sediment pathways, settlement, maps, engineering, and the values people attach to a changing coast.
The hidden history of earthquake early warning
The history of earthquake early warning is a story of instruments, telephone networks, public trust, and a crucial change in the question: not when an earthquake will happen, but where its shaking is headed.
The hidden history of volcanic lightning
Volcanic lightning has always been part of eruption experience, but the explanation changed as observation moved from eyewitness reports to photography, radio sensors, and coordinated monitoring.
Volcanic lightning explained: the ideas that matter
The cleanest explanation of volcanic lightning is not one clever label. It is a small set of linked ideas about charge, transport, thresholds, and evidence.
What coastal erosion teaches us about the world
Coastal erosion teaches a wider systems lesson: boundaries move, risks are distributed, and decisions made for one place can reshape the conditions experienced by places connected through energy, sediment, and institutions.
What earthquake early warning teaches us about the world
Earthquake early warning is more than a hazard technology. It shows how information, infrastructure, uncertainty, and collective practice determine whether a few seconds become safety.
What volcanic lightning teaches us about the world
Volcanic lightning is a lesson in emergence: large, visible events can be assembled from countless small interactions, and the best explanations connect scales instead of choosing only one.
Glacier movement explained: the ideas that matter
To understand glacier movement, keep a few ideas together: ice flows under gravity, the bed resists or enables sliding, mass balance controls the front, and observations operate at several scales.
How glacier movement works
Glaciers move because gravity drives ice downslope while pressure, internal deformation, basal sliding, water, and changing mass balance determine how fast the slow river of ice can travel.
How river deltas work
River deltas form where flowing water loses energy, drops sediment and builds outward into a low, branching landscape shaped by waves, tides and sea level.
How tsunami physics works
Tsunamis are long gravity-driven waves created when a large volume of water is displaced; their danger depends on how that motion travels, shoals, and meets a particular coast.
River deltas explained: the ideas that matter
The key ideas for understanding river deltas are sediment budgets, channel switching, relative sea level and the feedbacks between human infrastructure and natural processes.
The engineering challenge behind glacier movement
Predicting glacier movement is an engineering challenge because the important boundary is hidden beneath ice, the material deforms over many timescales, and water, sediment, weather, and terrain continually alter the system.
The engineering challenge behind river deltas
Engineering in river deltas means balancing flood protection, navigation, sediment delivery, subsidence, ecosystems and rising water across a changing coastal landscape.
The engineering challenge behind tsunami physics
Tsunami risk reduction is an engineering problem under uncertainty: models must become warnings, maps, buildings, routes, and decisions before the next wave makes the assumptions visible.
The hidden history of glacier movement
The history of glacier movement is a history of changing observations: field sketches, stakes, maps, aerial photographs, satellites, and ice-core evidence turned motion too slow for human eyes into a measurable process.
The hidden history of river deltas
The history of river deltas is recorded in shifting channels, buried soils, ancient settlements and changing coastlines as rivers and people respond to floods, subsidence and sea level.
The hidden history of tsunami physics
The science of tsunamis grew from coastal memory, disaster records, seafloor geology, instruments, and warning institutions—not from a single discovery or a single equation.
Tsunami physics explained: the ideas that matter
The clearest way to understand tsunami physics is to keep four ideas connected but distinct: displacement, long-wave motion, depth-dependent shoaling, and coastal exposure.
What glacier movement teaches us about the world
Glacier movement teaches a broad lesson about the world: slow systems can carry immense force, boundaries can matter more than interiors, and a visible change often reflects many hidden processes acting together.
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