Scientific examinations of historical accounts suggest that up to 40 percent of Mexico’s population lives along a zone that is more seismically active than suspected. Ash spews from Mexico's Popocatépetl volcano in August 14, 2019 (see above photo). The peak is part of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, a region which seismologists say may present a greater earthquake hazard than anticipated. According to the Anales de Tlatelolco, the earth cracked open in central Mexico on February 19, 1575. The ancient codex, composed around the time the Aztec Empire fell to Spanish conquistadors, features a story of a convulsion that lasted for up to five days, creating landslides and opening up a nearly three-mile-long scar in the ground.
Glaciers in Antarctica are melting faster and across a much wider area than previously thought, a development that threatens to raise sea levels worldwide and force millions of people to flee low-lying areas, scientists said in Geneva during a recentconference. Researchers once believed that the melting was limited to the Antarctic Peninsula, a narrow tongue of land pointing toward South America. But satellite data and automated weather stations now indicate it is more widespread.
Carl Warner is a professional artist, director, author and photographer. Warner blends photography and art to make highly conceptual visual images. Based in London, Warner's 25-year career spans still life, advertising and photography. He is best known for his intricate food landscapes where he uses different types of foods and ingredients.
The “David H. Koch Hall of Fossils — Deep Time” exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History opened June 8, 2019 after a five-year renovation. As a young paleontologist, Kirk Johnson traveled to the Arctic to excavate fossils from 50 million years ago, a time when the air was thick with carbon dioxide and so warm that even the North Pole had no ice. Johnson and his colleagues dug up fossilized crocodiles, turtles, and palm trees. “Palm trees!” Johnson recalled. “In the Arctic! . . . It blew my mind that the Earth could change that much.”
