The discovery of a decadal El Niño–like state associated with shifts in the Pacific trade winds could have important implications for predicting sea level in future decades.
Terri Cook
Terri Cook is an award-winning freelance writer whose career has focused on exploring and explaining the 4.5-billion-year-history of the remarkable planet we live on. Cook, who has an M.S. degree in Earth science from the University of California, Santa Cruz, writes about geology, ecology, and the environment—as well as wine, tea, hiking, and biking—for a diverse group of publications, including Eos, Scientific American, NOVA Next, Science News, and EARTH magazine, as well as Avalon Travel and numerous other travel-related publications. Her reporting has taken her to 25 states and 20 countries scattered across 5 continents, from the depths of the Grand Canyon to the sandy Australian Outback to the mist-shrouded summit of Bali’s Mount Batur. As the coauthor of three popular guidebooks, including Hiking the Grand Canyon’s Geology and Geology Underfoot Along Colorado’s Front Range, Cook gives frequent presentations about geology and science communication. She is the recipient of a 2016 European Geosciences Union Science Journalism Fellowship and is based in beautiful Boulder, Colo.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
How Do Main Shocks Affect Subsequent Earthquakes?
The results of a novel analysis of aftershock size distribution have important implications for more realistically assessing the seismic hazard of earthquake sequences.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
A 192,000-Year Record of Northwest African Fire History
Biomarker analyses from an offshore sediment core suggest that increased fire occurrence around 55,000 years ago coincided with increased fuel loads and human settlement in this region.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Resolving a Cordilleran Conundrum
A novel geophysical technique documents the existence of a “missing” fault, along which major displacement could have occurred during the Cretaceous on North America’s northwest margin.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Probing the Origin of a New Celestial Phenomenon
The first statistical study of STEVE events suggests that the appearance of these narrow ribbons of light is closely correlated with violent disturbances in Earth’s magnetosphere.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Local Heat Source Needed to Form Liquid Water Lake on Mars
Thermal modeling suggests that active magmatism in the past few hundred thousand years could account for the presence of a large lake previously hypothesized beneath the Red Planet’s southern ice cap.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Explaining the Genesis of Superdeep Diamonds
Real-time tracking during diamond anvil cell experiments indicates reaction rates may control the unusual depth distribution of the extremely rare diamonds that form deep within Earth’s mantle.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Forecasting Seismicity from Wastewater Disposal in Oklahoma
Mandated wastewater injection reductions in effect since 2016 are inadequate for preventing future, large-magnitude earthquakes in the state, according to a new induced seismicity model.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
What Do People Drink When They Think Their Tap Water Isn’t Safe?
An analysis of nationwide housing data shows that minority households disproportionately bear the multibillion-dollar economic burden that comes from believing their water is unsafe.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Improving Estimates of Long-Term Climate Sensitivity
New modeling casts doubt on the suitability of running experiments with fixed sea surface temperatures to understand the effects of cloud aggregation on Earth’s climate.