ocean

Imagine getting out of your car to toss trash and returning to find it rolling into the ocean. A Toyota bZ4X drove itself off a pier and crashed into the ocean just north of Boston after the driver forgot to put the EV in park Wednesday. Toyota bZ4X plunges off pier and crashes into the ocean It’s all fun and games until your new EV ends up in the ocean. According to local reports, a white Toyota bZ4X began rolling off the pier around 2 PM Wednesday with two passengers inside. The…

While it's the reigning theory now, the road to acceptance was long and bumpy for plate tectonics, which describes how large portions of Earth's crust slide, grind, rise and sink ever so slowly across its sludgy mantle.But even now, more than half a century after it was given the scientific tick of approval, the theory needs some refining.A new study looking at four plateaus in the western Pacific Ocean suggests that these expansive areas aren't rigid slabs but weak spots being yanked apart by distant forces at the…

An odd little moon that orbits closely to Saturn just revealed its biggest mystery: a hidden ocean that lies beneath its heavily cratered surface. 'More People Need to Know About This History': A Black Astronaut Speaks About Race and SpaceMimas is less than 123 miles (198 kilometers) wide, too small to be perfectly round, and its icy shell is covered with deep scarring from objects slamming into it. Its most prominent impact crater, Herschel, stretches across a third of its face, giving it the nickname Death Star in…

Researchers have just revealed that Mimas, one of Saturn's smallest moons, has an ocean of liquid water flowing under its entire surface. What is really making waves though, is how young the body of water is: just 5 to 15 million years old.Mimas' subsurface ocean was revealed after an analysis of data that came from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Cassini was launched in October 1997 to study Saturn, including its rings and its impressive collection of 146 moons. It stayed in the Saturn system for 13 years, returning a series…

Scientists are now inspecting snagged, bagged and tagged bits and pieces from asteroid Bennu, the cosmic mother lode delivered by NASA's Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security — Regolith Explorer mission.Known in acronymic astro-speak as OSIRIS-REx, that seven-year-long voyage brought home the goods via a sample return canister that came to full stop on Sept. 24, 2023, parachuting into a remote stretch of the Department of Defense's Utah Test and Training Range. Those specimens from afar…

Pieces of a meteorite may hold evidence of an alien spacecraft, Harvard scientist Avi Loeb continues to claim. A notorious UFO hunter, Loeb has made several claims in the past about the existence of alien tech, including claims that ‘Oumuamua, an interstellar object that passed through our solar system in 2017, was an alien probe.These newest claims, though, center around the discovery of 10 tiny spheres near the crash site of a meteor known as IM1. This meteor crashed into the ocean off the coast of Papua New…

After months of frustration, NASA finally got the Bennu asteroid sample container open in January, revealing the large amounts of asteroid scooped up by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Now, a top member of the mission says the distant hunk of space rock may be a planetesimal—a planet’s building block—that once belonged to an ocean world.'More People Need to Know About This History': A Black Astronaut Speaks About Race and SpaceDante Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and principal investigator on the…

New measurements of the orbit of Saturn's smallest major moon suggests there's a big secret lurking beneath its icy crust.Mimas, whose cratered surface bears more than a passing resemblance to the Death Star from Star Wars, only makes sense if there's a liquid ocean swirling around 20 to 30 kilometers (12 to 19 miles) below the ice.The new analysis, led by astronomer Valery Lainey of the Paris Observatory, is the latest in a growing body of evidence of a liquid ocean hiding inside the little moon.That means that Mimas…

To planetary scientists, Mimas—one of Saturn’s moons—is best known for its uncanny resemblance to the Death Star in Star Wars. While Mimas most definitely isn’t a planet-destroying superweapon, nobody could say with any certainty whether an abundance of liquid water was hiding beneath its icy shell. But a new paper, published today in Nature, has called it: That’s no moon; that’s an oceanic world. And this newfound ocean, against all expectations, appears to be a proverbial newborn on the timescale of the solar…

The figure shows the most powerful heat wave in the Arctic Ocean to date in 2020, which continued for 103 days. The cumulative heat intensity sums up the daily anomalies in water temperature recorded over the duration of the heat wave in degrees Celsius. Credit: UHH/CLICCS/A. Barkhordarian Marine heat waves will become a regular occurrence in the Arctic in the near future and are a product of higher anthropogenic greenhouse-gas…