Five years after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the city is better prepared for another storm, but there's still a lot of work to be done.

Debate continues over how much oil remains in the Gulf from last April's spill — but one thing we do know, thanks to a new study, is that in addition to the oil visible at the surface, the leaking well produced a subsurface plume of oil 1,100 meters deep.

When disaster struck Haiti in January, scientists thought they knew the culprit. But new research shows an unknown fault may have been behind the deadly earthquake.

Can the carbon dioxide emitted by volcanoes really be considered "missing science" in the climate change debate, as a 2009 bestselling book claimed? No — the real missing science, geologist Terry Gerlach says, is when popular books don't include the most recent or accurate data to support their claims.

Millions of years ago South American monkeys colonized the islands of the Caribbean. The discovery of well-preserved bones found in the Dominican Republic is shedding new light on the evolution of these now-extinct monkeys.

Now that the oil spill may at last be capped, what will happen to the oil already in the Gulf? With so many variables, much of its fate is uncertain. But a team of scientists at the University of Hawaii is giving it a try, with a simulation of the likely path of the floating part of the spill through next April.

An independent review has cleared the climatologists involved in "Climategate" of any wrongdoing. But it does have some strong advice for all scientists regarding the scientific method and openness.

In a Peruvian desert, scientists discovered the fossils of an extinct whale with a big bite. The whale's teeth and jaws were so powerful that it feasted on other whales.

Do humans cause a so-called weekend effect, where weather varies in seven-day patterns thanks to human activities? The answer is not clear.

Prosecutors in L'Aquila, Italy, are considering criminal charges against seismologists who did not warn residents to leave the city six days before the April 2009 quake.

Last week, the interagency Flow Rate Technical Group led by USGS director Marcia McNutt announced a new estimate of how much oil has been spilled into the Gulf of Mexico: between 54 million to 64 million barrels since the Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20. But where all that oil is going is still unclear.

EARTH/Geotimes has been covering new developments in studies of Afghanistan's vast mineral wealth over the past few years. Click through for a shortcut to our previous coverage of this topic.

Volcanoes explosively erupt in Guatemala and Ecuador; meanwhile, an earthquake rocks Vanuatu, Iceland prepares for another possible eruption, and the U.S. continues to battle the oil spill in the Gulf.

Eight months have passed since Ardi the Ardipithecus stepped into the limelight. Now, anthropologists are arguing over what kind of environment the hominin lived in: forest or savanna. The debate gets at the heart of the question: Why did our ancestors start to walk upright?

Thirty years ago today, Mount St. Helens explosively erupted. Here's hoping it doesn't have an anniversary celebration of its own planned.