If there is a magnitude 8 or 9 megathrust earthquake off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, data from ocean bottom seismometers (OBS) could improve earthquake detection times calculated by the ShakeAlert system.

At the 2026 SSA Annual Meeting, Zoe Krauss said ShakeAlert’s earthquake detection time could be improved by 5 to 9 seconds by incorporating data from six cabled OBS deployed offshore Oregon as part of the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Regional Cabled Network and five cabled OBSs deployed offshore Vancouver Island on Ocean Networks Canada’s (ONC) NEPTUNE cable.

There are currently only two cabled OBSs offshore Oregon, but the Cascadia Offshore Subduction Zone Observatory (COSZO) project will add four new OBS to the OOI network this summer, bringing these potential added detection times closer to reality.

Mars may look like a frozen desert today, but new evidence suggests its watery past didn’t simply fade away quietly—it may have been blasted into space by powerful dust storms. Scientists have discovered that even relatively small, localized storms can hurl water vapor high into the atmosphere, where it breaks apart and escapes.

Today, Mars is known as a cold, dry desert, but its surface tells a very different story. Ancient channels, water-altered minerals, and other geological features show that the planet once had abundant water and a far more dynamic environment. Understanding how this wetter world transformed into the barren landscape we see now remains a major question in planetary science. While scientists have identified several processes that contributed to water loss, much of Mars’ missing water is still unaccounted for.

A new international study published in Communications: Earth & Environment brings scientists closer to solving this mystery. Researchers found that an unusually intense but localized dust storm was able to push water vapor high into Mars’ atmosphere during the Northern Hemisphere summer, a season previously thought to play little role in this process.

Students discovered an ultra-ancient star with almost no heavy elements, making it one of the most pristine ever found. Surprisingly, it appears to have formed in another galaxy before drifting into the Milky Way. A team of undergraduate students at the University of Chicago has identified one of

Astronomers have finally identified the source of unusual X-rays from the bright star gamma-Cas, resolving a decades-long mystery.

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is now on its way out of our solar system, never to return. The comet was only the third-ever detected object to originate from outside our solar system. Traveling at high speeds, it looped around the sun within 1.5 AU (one AU, or astronomical unit, is the distance between Earth and the sun) in October 2025; as of April, it is now past the orbit of Jupiter on its way out of the solar system.

3I/ATLAS is over a kilometer wide and is made up of dust and ices from the far-off planetary system where it originated. Using the advanced instrumentation of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Caltech researchers examined the mid-infrared signatures (wavelengths of light 10 times longer than those humans see) that emitted from 3I/ATLAS as it approached the sun in an effort to understand the distant environment in which the comet formed. The paper is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“It’s a very interesting object,” says Caltech graduate student Matthew Belyakov, lead author on the new paper. “It has been traveling through the galaxy for at least a billion years. The high speed at which it flew past us gave just a narrow window to study it.”