On June 5, 2012, a massive dock made landfall on Oregon's Agate Beach, just north of Newport. The dock carried with it a host of castaways, including as many as a hundred species of mollusks, anemones, sponges, oysters, crabs, barnacles, worms, sea stars, mussels and sea urchins. A placard on the side written in Japanese revealed that the dock had been unmoored from the Japanese coastal city of Misawa during the catastrophic tsunami on March 11, 2011, bringing with it an essentially intact subtidal community of Asian species to the Pacific Northwest. Although natural rafts have likely been ferrying organisms around the planet since the very beginning of life of Earth, the geologically recent advent of human settlement, culture and infrastructure is fundamentally changing the rafting game, as EARTH explores in our March issue.

The idea of a moon-forming collision is not new: The Giant Impact Theory put forth in the 1970s suggested that the moon resulted from a collision with a protoplanet approximately half the size of ancient Earth. But the physics underlying such a collision implied that the moon should be made up of debris mostly from the protoplanet. Since then we've discovered the moon is instead very chemically similar to Earth. Now, scientists have come up with two new models that explain how an impact could have resulted in a moon formed from Earth material.

Would you drink water from a toilet? What if that water, once treated, was cleaner than what comes out of the faucet? Although the imagery isn't appealing, as climate change and population growth strain freshwater resources, such strategies are becoming more common around the world and in the United States.

Throughout history, humanity has steadily increased its dependence upon technology. Although technology has vastly improved the quality of life for billions of people, it has also opened us up to new risks and vulnerabilities. Terrorism and natural disasters might be at the forefront of the minds of policymakers and the U.S. population, but a significant threat lurks over our heads: the sun. A massive solar storm, the size last seen a century and a half ago, could easily leave hundreds of millions of people in the dark for days, weeks or even months.

The size and type of earthquakes a given fault system may produce remain poorly understood for most major fault systems. Recent superquakes, such as the March 2011 magnitude-9 off Japan and the December 2004 magnitude-9-plus off Sumatra, have been far larger than what most scientists expected those faults to produce. The problem is that current models rely on short historical records, and even shorter instrumental records. Today, scientists are working to rewrite these models based on new paleoseismic and paleotsunami data to create a more comprehensive picture of earthquake activity through time. What they're finding might alarm you.

The Burgess Shale provides us with a rare glimpse into the softer side of paleontology. Most fossils are preserved hard parts - bones, teeth and shells - but one of the most famous fossil locales in the world, the Burgess Shale, reveals subtle soft body structures like gills and eyes delicately preserved between the layers of dark rock. For more than 100 years, the Burgess Shale has been giving us a unique perspective on what life was like in the Cambrian seas. This month, EARTH Magazine contributor Mary Caperton Morton reminds us that no matter how well we think we know a fossil locality, it can still surprise us.

In 1859, the largest recorded coronal mass ejection from the sun, known as the Carrington Event, disrupted what little electrical technology was used at the time. Back then, that meant the temporary disruption of the telegraph system. Today, without an effective warning mechanism in place, a solar storm of that magnitude could wreak havoc on our technology-dependent world. And with the solar maximum predicted to occur later this year, scientists and policymakers are scrambling to prepare us for when the next big solar storm hits.

For more than 35 years, scientists from the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) program have been scouring glacial landscapes in search of meteorites. Since 1976, teams of physicists, meteorite specialists, and mountaineers have recovered thousands of untouched specimens from meteoroids, the moon and even Mars. Despite subzero temperatures and razor-sharp winds, scientists are lining up for the chance to experience the ultimate hunt for alien objects in the alien environment.

Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," has changed the energy landscape. We can now affordably produce natural gas from previously inaccessible rock formations, which has led to increasing natural gas consumption. Thanks to its low prices and abundant domestic supply, natural gas may have a chance to overtake coal as the primary energy source for electricity in the United States.

Considered individually, 2012's record high temperatures, droughts, wildfires, storms and diminished snowpack are not necessarily alarming. But combined, the fact that the first seven months of 2012 were hotter than the hottest on record, more than half of the U.S. counties were declared disaster areas due to drought, and the snowpacks were at all-time lows, these indicators are much more significant from a climate standpoint. Two questions then remain: Will we see the same thing in 2013? And how do we increase our ability to weather the storms and other disasters coming our way in the future?