Sascha Pare

Every year, record-seeking surfers and spectators descend on the small Portuguese town of Nazaré for the "big wave" season, when water can surge up to 100 feet (30 meters) tall.

While exploring the Tonga Trench in the Southwestern Pacific Ocean, researchers captured extremely rare footage of a Magnapinna squid with arms several times the length of its body.

A boom in vegetation at the end of the last ice age may have created so much pollen, it blocked mammoths' sense of smell. A new study suggests this drove the beasts to extinction, but not everyone agrees.

The Antarctic ozone hole usually starts forming in early August, but rare warming events and a strangely elongated polar vortex this year may have delayed its arrival.

NASA's Perseverance rover has sent home pictures of a mysterious black-and-white striped rock, the likes of which scientists have never seen before on Mars.

Scientists have grown an ancient seed from a cave in the Judaean Desert into a tree — and it could belong to a locally-extinct species with medicinal properties mentioned several times in the Bible.

Researchers have identified 12 ancestral plant species from an early Eocene fossil assemblage in Tasmania that once formed part of a giant, circumpolar forest.

Every winter, when sunlight hits at the right angle, visitors to Virginia's First Landing State Park are treated to a mesmerizing rainbow light show courtesy of the park's bald cypress swamp.

Satellite data suggest a volcano in Tanzania that expels extremely runny lava could be creeping toward an eruption.

The growing "gateway to the underworld," officially known as the Batagay megaslump, is the largest megaslump in the world and exposes permafrost layers that are 650,000 years old.

A composite image of an annular solar eclipse showing Baily's Beads won top prize at the 2024 Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest.

Researchers exploring the seafloor off the coast of Chile recently captured mesmerizing footage of a flying spaghetti monster — a carnivorous, colonial creature with countless milky-white arms.

If Atlantic Ocean currents collapse due to melting ice sheets, researchers predict there will be huge shifts in tropical monsoon systems — and the effects could be irreversible for at least 100 years.

Every winter and spring, great white sharks that usually dwell off the coast of California gather in a remote section of ocean the size of Colorado — and scientists are slowly piecing together why.

A helium reservoir with the highest concentrations ever seen could hold enough of the gas to address critical shortages in the U.S. affecting tech, medicine and space exploration.

For the first time, researchers have linked the amount of silver being buried in marine sediments to human-made climate change.

Geologists have known for decades that gold forms in quartz with the help of earthquakes, but now they have worked out exactly how the setting and seismic waves combine to form large nuggets.

Researchers have mapped the path of a giant submarine avalanche that tore through the Agadir Canyon — a deep trench in the Atlantic seafloor off the coast of Morocco — 60,000 years ago.

Al Naslaa is a rock formation in Saudi Arabia's northwestern desert consisting of two huge, symmetrical stone blocks that are separated by a mysterious gap and sit on small pedestals.

Ancient hunters may have mounted Clovis points on sophisticated pikes that fractured inside large mammals like woolly mammoths to inflict fatal injuries, archaeologists say.

In Racetrack Playa, a dry lakebed in Death Valley National Park, meteorological conditions can push rocks weighing up to 700 pounds along the flat ground.

The sea walnut, a type of comb jelly that has become invasive in parts of Europe and Asia, can transform from a sexually mature adult back into its larval form when times are tough.

A team of archaeologists recently excavated the first well-preserved mastodon bones ever found in Iowa, including the prehistoric animal's skull.