Is every snowflake truly unique? Physicist Kenneth Libbrecht has made a career out of photographing the variety of snowflake shapes, from familiar six-sided forms to more exotic "bullet rosettes" and "capped columns." EARTH's latest slideshow takes you on a visual tour of these delicate ice crystals.

As you would expect, there's been tons of coverage of the earthquake off the coast of Chile and the resulting tsunami in the mainstream media. And yes, some of it has been notoriously poor.

A growing number of industries turning their eyes to the vast real estate in the U.S.' deep offshore waters — a region that may soon become a busy, crowded place. But balancing commercial and environmental interests in those waters may require regulatory oversight that does not yet exist.

As the climate changes, warmer conditions are creeping northward — and termites, among other creatures, are likely to expand their territories into higher latitudes. Those areas, however, are currently ill-equipped to handle termites, which could cause billions of dollars in property damages.

We recommend: One of EARTH's regular contributors, Callan Bentley, has a thoughtful post up on his blog about what makes a natural disaster. Click through for the link.

Inexpensive, abundant and relatively clean: EARTH commenter and Stanford geophysicist Mark Zoback makes the case for natural gas to become a key part of U.S. energy policy.

The U.K. is set to have its own space agency, which officials hope will raise the profile of the country's space program.

The people of Xuan Wei, China, suffer the world's highest incidence of lung cancer among non-smokers. Burning coal from the Permian-Triassic boundary may be to blame.

Whether storing water for the future or conserving it in the present, cities across the United States are beginning to reconsider their water management practices.

Climatologist Michael Mann met the press today at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting to answer questions about "Climategate" and what those hacked emails really said about climate science.

Love it or hate it, Twitter has its uses. USGS is taking advantage of the social networking site's real-time information transfer, turning barrages of tweets posted during an earthquake event into citizen science.

Is the developed world outsourcing its carbon dioxide emissions? And if so — should we help pay for them?

Energy, climate change mitigation and healthcare reform grabbed most of the U.S. policy headlines in 2009. But a few other policy gems  — for example, human spaceflight, renewable energy projects on public lands, mining reform and natural hazards — have started coalescing in Congress. EARTH contributor Corina Cerovski-Darriau outlines some of the less high-profile topics we can expect to see debated in 2010.

When it comes to natural hazards, the big issue is not in their prediction, but in mitigation — in preventing an ensuing catastrophe, such as the devastation that followed 2005's Hurricane Katrina or the 2004 Sumatra earthquake and tsunami. That's where geoscientists can truly help society reduce risk, argues EARTH contributor Mary Lou Zoback in this comment.

The biggest change in tomorrow's agriculture will be one of mindset: It must become an industry closely connected to energy, environment, health, global security and economic prosperity, says EARTH regular contributor George A. Seielstad in this comment.