Robin George Andrews

Contributing Writer

Latest Articles

A Massive Subterranean ‘Tree’ Is Moving Magma to Earth’s Surface

September 15, 2021

Deep in the mantle, a branching plume of intensely hot material appears to be the engine powering vast volcanic activity.

Gas Giants’ Energy Crisis Solved After 50 Years

June 22, 2021

Jupiter and Saturn should be freezing cold. Instead, they’re hot. Researchers now know why.

Astronomers Find Secret Planet-Making Ingredient: Magnetic Fields

June 7, 2021

Scientists have long struggled to understand how common planets form. A new supercomputer simulation shows that the missing ingredient may be magnetism.

A Burp or a Blast? Seismic Signals Reveal the Volcanic Eruption to Come

June 1, 2021

Scientists have begun to decipher the subtle signs that reveal how explosive a volcanic eruption is going to be.

Q&A

The New Historian of the Smash That Made the Himalayas

April 14, 2021

About 60 million years ago, India plowed into Eurasia and pushed up the Himalayas. But when Lucía Pérez-Díaz reconstructed the event in detail, she found that its central mystery depended on a broken geological clock.

Iceland’s Eruptions Reveal the Hot History of Mars

April 6, 2021

The new volcanic fissures are more otherworldly than they first appear.

Rumbles on Mars Raise Hopes of Underground Magma Flows

February 1, 2021

Small and cold, Mars has long been considered a dead planet. But a series of recent discoveries has forced scientists to rethink how recently its insides stopped churning — if they ever stopped at all.

Q&A

The Scientist Leading the World’s Aurora Hunters

July 9, 2020

Liz MacDonald realized that if she wanted to create the world’s best aurora map, she needed a secret ingredient: Twitter.

New Earthquake Math Predicts How Destructive They’ll Be

April 21, 2020

The “pinball” model of a slipping fault line borrows from the mathematics of avalanches.

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