A magnitude-6.0 earthquake struck eastern Turkey Monday morning, causing severe damage and killing more than 50 people.

Since 1939, a progression of deadly earthquakes has been marching westward across Turkey's North Anatolian Fault. All signs point to Istanbul as the next likely target — but Turkey's largest city may be struck by a series of moderate earthquakes, rather than one big event.

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.

Scientists have upgraded the potential earthquake threat to cities including Portland, Ore., Seattle, Wash., and Vancouver, British Columbia in the Pacific Northwest. Although it was once thought that large earthquakes in this region, called the Cascadia Subduction Zone, would more likely happen offshore, they could occur much closer to the coast.

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 magnitude-8.8 earthquake struck offshore Maule, Chile, on Feb. 27, killing at least 711 people and displacing 2 million people. Why was the magnitude-7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti in January more deadly? Geological differences as well as social factors are both part of the explanation.

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.

When natural disasters strike major cities, such as the Haiti earthquake and 2005's Hurricane Katrina, scientists debate whether to rebuild or relocate the city. Relocating may be the best bet for Port-au-Prince, says EARTH commenter and Columbia Earth Institute geophysicist John Mutter. But in other cases, such as New Orleans, we should rebuild.

In 1983, the erstwhile surface mine Gateway Hill, part of Canada's Athabasca Oil Sands Deposit, resembled a pockmarked, barren moonscape. Today, after years of reclamation effort, Gateway Hill is thickly forested and filled with wildlife — and as the first oil sands mine site to be certified by the government to be at pre-mine condition, it is a model for new and ongoing reclamation projects.

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.

Washington, D.C., has been buried in snow over the last week, prompting many people to ask what that means about global warming. The answer? Nothing: It’s weather, not climate.

Unlike other natural disasters, snowstorms have no categorization system. But NOAA now has a snowstorm ranking system that includes snowfall inches, societal impact and population density — to show where the storm hit hardest.

Today NASA released new Hubble images of dwarf planet Pluto — and far from being just an icy colorless rock, the images show a mottled, orangey-black world.