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Bolivia has officially declared that their second-largest lake, Lake Poopó, has disappeared. While long-term water diversion for mining and agricultural use has been cited as a partial culprit, an El Niño-driven drought, along with the disappearance of the Andean glaciers that fed the lake, are being blamed for the lake’s disappearance.

While Lake Poopó’s size historically sees large fluctuations due to it’s relative shallowness, this is the first time it has essentially disappeared, now being at only 2% of it’s former maximum water level of 5 meters (16.4 feet). A recent study showed that the water the lake received in 2013 wasn’t enough to maintain it’s equilibrium, short by 161 billion liters (42.5 billion gallons).
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The formation of the Earth-Moon system has long been theorized to have been heavily influenced by the impact of a Mars-sized celestial body, commonly called "Theia" by scientists. The Moon’s formation is theorized to have occurred when this object struck the primordial Earth, spinning off a portion of it’s mass, that formed into the Moon as we know it today. However, a common question has dogged the issue since it’s conception: did Theia just strike a glancing blow to the primordial Earth, or did it strike it head-on?
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A international group of scientists have proposed that humankind’s impact on the planet has been profound enough, with enough manmade materials deposited in the geological record, to re-define our current era as one shaped by humanity. The proposed name for this new epoch is "the Anthropocene".
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Scientists have discovered the oldest mineral ever found on Earth, provingthat the Earth had oceans and continents just 50 million years after a giantimpact melted the entire planet. An asteroid the size of Mars broke off apiece of the Earth that became the Moon over 4 ? billion years ago. The Moonmade higher forms of life possible on Earth, since its counter-rotationslows down the high-speed winds that would normally sweep along the surface.

Analysis of a tiny zircon crystal found in the ancient and remote hills ofWestern Australia shows that it is a little less than 4 ? billion years old,over 100 million years older than the next-oldest known fragment of Earth,and that it formed only about 50 million years after the asteroid hit.
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