SciShow
The Gems That Solved a Himalayan Mystery
January babies, rejoice! This month's SciShow Rocks Box video is the story of garnets, and how these fabulous gemstones help us solve geological mysteries, from the Italian Alps to the Himalayas.
SciShow
Why Volcanologists Hate the Dark
You might have heard of the ongoing volcanic eruptions near Grindavík, Iceland. You might not have heard that it's hard to monitor a volcano in the dark. We'll talk about why an Icelandic winter is the worst time for monitoring equipment...
SciShow
How to Move a Mountain
Almost 50 million years ago, the biggest landslide in Earth's history occurred in Wyoming. An entire mountain slid 45 kilometers at one-third the speed of sound. But how could this happen when the slope was only 2 degrees?
SciShow
These Rocks Are ALIVE
This month, our SciShow Rocks Box subscribers are getting a really special treat -- a real, living, pet rock! These critters have been beloved companions for decades, and we're bringing you pet rocks from the original wild vein, meaning...
SciShow
Why the Hardest Rocks Can Be Easy to Break
So, rocks are hard. But the scale we use to rank them, the Mohs scale, is only really good at quantifying that for one kind of hardness, and topaz is a perfect stone to talk about to explain that. And you can check it out in our SciShow...
SciShow
Why Isn't Mount Denali a Volcano?
Alaska has the most volcanoes out of all the US states, but researchers think they don't have enough. Here's the weird science behind looking for Alaska's volcanoes, and what we've learned about volcanism along the way.
SciShow
Something's Been Making Weird Pits in the Seafloor
For years, scientists couldn't solve the mystery of strange pits on the floor of the North Sea. Initially they blamed methane seeps, but it seems like the pits were actually made on porpoise.
SciShow
The Rock That's Helping Us Find the Origin of Life
Epidote might just look like a pretty little crystal, but it has a secret. thanks to the high-pressure circumstances where it forms, we can use it to help us uncover the origins of life on our planet, and maybe even find signs of life on...
SciShow
Inside the Nepal Earthquake
SciShow News explains the forces at work behind the earthquake in Nepal, introduces you to a new species of dinosaur, and reveals a discovery in Antarctica.
Be Smart
How Was the Grand Canyon Formed?
I was in Arizona recently for Phoenix Comic-Con, and had the amazing pleasure of seeing one of Earth's greatest natural wonders… the Grand Canyon. More than a mile deep, and several miles across, it just defies belief. But I couldn't...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: What really killed the dinosaurs? (It wasn’t just the asteroid) | Sean P. S. Gulick
Sixty-six million years ago, near what’s now the Yucatán Peninsula, a juvenile sauropod feasted on horsetail plants on a riverbank. Earth was a tropical planet. Behemoth and tiny dinosaurs alike soared its skies and roamed its lands...
SciShow
How Do Volcanoes Make Smoke Rings?
Occasionally, a volcano coughs up a ring of fog. How does it create that whimsical shape, and how similar is it to the smoke rings humans can make?
SciShow
Early Earth Microbes May Have Eaten Raw Meteorites
Is it possible that life on earth began with an out of this world rock buffet?
SciShow
The Rocky Mountains Are in the Wrong Place
Mountain ranges usually don't form in the middle of continents. Except for the Rocky Mountains. We'll go into the baffling Laramide Orogeny and a few possible reasons why the Rockies might be in the wrong place.
SciShow
No One Knows Where These Gems Came From
Montana sapphires come in a beautiful array of colors found in a few other places in the world. But geologists have no idea where they originated.
PBS
How 7,000 Years of Epic Floods Changed the World (w/ SciShow!)
Strange geologic landmarks in the Pacific Northwest are the lingering remains of a mystery that took nearly half a century to solve. These features turned out to be a result one of the most powerful and bizarre episodes in geologic...
PBS
That Time the American West Blew Up
How is it possible to have cataclysmic eruptions without any real cataclysm?
PBS
The Missing Link That Wasn’t
The myth of the Missing Link--the idea that there must be a specimen that partly resembles an ape but also partly resembles a modern human--is persistent. But the reality is that there is no missing link in our lineage, because that’s...
PBS
That Time the Mediterranean Sea Disappeared
How could a body of water as big as the Mediterranean just...disappear? It would take decades and more than 1,000 research studies to even start to figure out the cause -- or causes -- of one of the greatest vanishing acts in Earth’s...
PBS
How the Andes Mountains Might Have Killed a Bunch of Whales
At a site known as Cerro Ballena or Whale Hill, there are more than 40 skeletons of marine mammals -- a graveyard of ocean life dating back 6.5 million to 9 million years ago, in the Late Miocene Epoch. But the identity of the killer...
PBS
How Earth's First, Unkillable Animals Saved the World
They have survived every catastrophe and every mass extinction event that nature has thrown at them. And by being the little, filter-feeding, water-cleaning creatures that they are, sponges may have saved the world.
PBS
When the Sahara Was Green
The climate of the Sahara was completely different thousands of years ago. And we’re not talking about just a few years of extra rain. We’re talking about a climate that was so wet for so long that animals and humans alike made...
PBS
Where Did Water Come From?
Mercury, Venus, and Mars are all super low on water – so where did ours come from and why do we have so much of it? We think our water came from a few unlikely sources: meteorites, space dust, and even the sun.
PBS
The Invisible Barrier Keeping Two Worlds Apart
In between two of the islands of Indonesia, there’s an ancient line that is both real and…not real.