Detonating the largest nuclear weapon ever tested in the Mariana Trench would create a pulsating energy bubble that would be largely unnoticed on the surface.

Even a 1-kilometer-wide (0.62-mile-wide) asteroid can trigger earthquakes and tsunamis on impact with oceans. The overwhelming majority of asteroids that reach Earth are much smaller and burn up in the atmosphere before reaching the ground.

Such an asteroid would level Central America, trigger tsunamis, spark global fires, and plunge the planet into an artificial winter lasting over a decade. Bunkers would be insufficient for survival without years of provisions.

If all this lightning struck one location at once, the bolt would be the diameter of the center circle of a basketball court, turning the entire court into a crater. Its heat would ignite surfaces for miles around, and its shockwave would demolish buildings.

In 1961, the Soviet Union detonated AN602—known as the Tsar Bomba—the largest nuclear explosion in history. Newly released Russian footage starkly illustrates the unmatched destructive power of this nuclear weapon.

Planned in the early 1950s by US scientists, Project Sundial aimed to create a 10-gigaton thermonuclear bomb—hundreds of times more powerful than any weapon ever built. Had it been tested, it was expected to cause global environmental catastrophe.

Nuclear weapons have devastating effects, but the science of how they work is atomically small. There are two main types of nuclear reaction: fission and fusion. The fission bomb produces immense energy by splitting an atom, the result of firing a...

Supernovas are the biggest explosions in the universe, often obliterating the area surrounding them. So what would happen if one exploded near Earth? If the sun went supernova it'd be like getting hit by a nuclear explosion every second for weeks. Of course, that's not happening anytime soon. This animated video shows how distance is the key factor, and how you shouldn't be worried.

Some scientists argue that the asteroid's impact would have been less severe if it had struck the ocean instead of shallow seas. In this scenario, small dinosaurs might have become urban survivors, living in cities alongside humans, much like pigeons or rats do today.

Although extremely rare, their released material can trigger winters by blocking the sun and cooling the Earth’s surface for years. The Toba supereruption 74,000 years ago disrupted food chains and reduced the human population to a few thousand.

Although the Chicxulub impact caused widespread destruction through earthquakes and tsunamis, the subsequent nuclear winter, acid rain, and eventual greenhouse warming drove mass extinction. Roughly 70% of species, including all non-avian dinosaurs, went extinct.

The tool was built by Alex Wellerstein, a historian of nuclear technology at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. NUKEMAP uses declassified weapons data to calculate blast radius, thermal radiation, fallout patterns, and estimated casualties for any nuclear device dropped on any city. More than 50 million people have used it since its 2012 launch.

Unlike the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima, which relied on nuclear fission, the hydrogen bomb uses fusion to unleash vastly greater destructive power. Developed by both superpowers in the 1950s, it gave each the ability to destroy entire cities in seconds.

Located at Texas A&M University, DRTF is the largest explosions lab in the world as of 2026 and features a steel-and-concrete structure that scientists use to initiate and track explosions with split-second precision. Among the facility's goals are studying the large industrial explosions, hypersonic flight, and supernovae.

Oceanic plates sink when colliding with less dense continental plates, bending the seafloor into steep depressions that can be almost 11 kilometers deep. Many of Earth’s strongest earthquakes occur at these plate boundaries, often featuring volcanic activity.

After World War II, nuclear powers conducted thousands of weapons tests. This video pairs archival footage with interviews of veterans who witnessed Pacific test explosions, capturing the scale, shock, and human experience of being near a nuclear detonation.

The GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator is delivered exclusively by the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, which carries only two at a time. Using GPS-guided fins and a steel alloy casing, it burrows 200 feet underground before detonating.

The star has enough fuel to continue fusing hydrogen into helium for another 5 billion years, but the gradual increase in core temperature from these reactions will brighten the sun by 10% every billion years. Some models predict that the increased radiation will be enough to vaporize all of Earth's surface water about 1 billion years from now, long before the sun becomes a red giant and disintegrates the planet.

The nuclear disaster produced around 200 tons of nuclear fuel that mixed with the surrounding melted reactor core materials. As of 2025, corium has been naturally formed four other times in history: once during the Three Mile Island accident and three times at the Fukushima Daiichi plant disaster.

A 3-inch, 14-pound sphere of nuclear reactive plutonium-gallium was set to be delivered to the Pacific Theater in 1945 to become the third atomic bomb dropped over Japan. When Japan surrendered, it was returned to Los Alamos in New Mexico for experiment, where two scientists would die testing whether the core could reach criticality—where it would release intense energy—via the use of a dense reflector. Watch the story here.

Part of Project Plowshare—a program aimed at finding peaceful uses for nuclear devices—the 1967 experiment sought to extract natural gas trapped within shale in underground New Mexico. Gas radioactivity was found to be excessively high for use without expensive processing, and the project was deemed an economic failure.

There’s no surviving the fireball of a nuclear bomb, but beyond that, there are certain spots indoors where you can try avoid the destructive shockwave.

This five-minute video takes viewers to the depths of the Mariana Trench, emphasizing just how far below the bottom of the trench lies beneath our feet through comparisons to better-known objects and monuments, including the Eiffel Tower. The Statue...

This NPR Throughline episode explains how the 1980 discovery that an asteroid-driven dust cloud killed the dinosaurs inspired Cold War scientists' fears of "nuclear winter"—a sunlight-blocking aftermath of nuclear war that may have discouraged leaders from launching one.

Discovered in 1977 during an exploration of the Galapagos Rift, these seafloor openings spew hot magma and chemicals that heat seawater to hundreds of degrees. Without the sunlight found at depths of less than 1,000 meters (3,281 feet), extremophiles in these environments convert released chemicals into energy to survive, alongside surviving extreme pressures.

Many phenomena requiring air pressure, from the flight of birds and aircraft to the act of breathing, would no longer be possible. Because sound travels through vibrating air molecules, the loss of the planet's atmosphere would also create a silent environment. Even during daytime hours, the sky would resemble a clear night sky.

A team of scientists—with the help of an uncrewed boat remotely controlled from the UK—join forces to produce one of the clearest pictures to date of what took place underneath the water as an enormous volcano erupted near the Tongan mainland.

The animations range from a 4-meter-wide asteroid that would burn up in the atmosphere with the impact of 0.6 Hiroshima nuclear bombs to a 940-kilometer asteroid the size of the dwarf planet Ceres, which would produce a mass extinction event.

An analysis of ocean basins in the Tibetan Plateau helped identify three major periods of volcanism—250-248, 233-231, and 210-208 million years ago—which released significant amounts of greenhouse gases, altering ocean chemistry. The low-oxygen conditions may help explain half of Earth's Triassic extinctions.

In 1859, the world witnessed the most intense solar storm in recorded history. The electromagnetic deluge of dust and gas lit up the night sky and sparked fires, disrupting Earth's magnetic field and putting on a show for the millions. If a storm with a similar intensity today occurred, scientists believe it would be catastrophic for our communications systems. Learn what would happen if the Carrington Event happened again here.