The fastest-shrinking glacier in Greenland has made an unexpected turn. Although it’s been melting for 20 years, the Jakobshavn Glacier in West Greenland – famous for producing the iceberg that sank the Titanic – has now started growing again. Since the 1980s, waters have been growing warmer around Baffin Bay, where the glacier meets the

When tropical cyclone Idai made landfall near Beira, Mozambique on March 14, a spokesperson for the UN World Meteorological Organization called it possibly the the worst weather-related disaster to hit the southern hemisphere. This massive and horrifying storm caused catastrophic flooding and widespread destruction of buildings and roads in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi. Mozambique’s President

Mount Everest’s glaciers are melting – and the remnants buried for decades below the surface are beginning to reemerge. Most alarming, expedition operators are starting to find the dead bodies of climbers who attempted to scale the mountain. Hundreds of people have died while attempting to climb the mountain since the 1990s, and the majority

It all looked so promising. Ten years ago, a survey of mother humpbacks and their calves showed their numbers were on the up off the coast of Maui, Hawaii. Something has changed, with encounters plummeting by three quarters since 2013.  Of course, there could be a number of reasons behind the apparent decline in whale

Last November, a huge seismic event that shook the planet left experts wondering about its possible source. Researchers now think they know what might have caused it: an offshore volcanic event unlike any other in recorded history. If the hypothesis is right, and there has been a massive movement of magma underneath the sea floor,

By the time marine biologist Darrell Blatchley arrived at the fishing village Saturday, the young Cuvier’s beaked whale was already floating, dead in the water, its eyes sunken and ribs protruding through its skin. The current off the southern Philippine island of Mindanao had washed away the blood it vomited before its death. He already

As the frozen Antarctic landscape at the bottom of the world adjusts to an ever hotter planet, we keep finding more mysterious phenomena beneath and within the ice. Now, there are “ice quakes” to add to that list. It wasn’t all so long ago that earthquakes were thought to not exist on this unforgiving continent.

The phrase “mass extinction” typically conjures images of the asteroid crash that led to the twilight of the dinosaurs. Upon impact, that 6-mile-wide space rock caused a tsunami in the Atlantic Ocean, along with earthquakes and landslides up and down what is now the Americas. A heat pulse baked the Earth, and the Tyrannosaurus rex

The last three ice ages might have been triggered by tectonic collisions between Earth’s continents, according to new research, and it could give us clues as to how the planet’s climate might suddenly shift again in the future. What’s likely to have happened, the new study says, is these massive collisions pushed oceanic rocks up

No matter what we do, the Arctic of the future is going to be poles apart from the one we know today. A new paper from the UN reveals that even if we pull the plug on all carbon emissions tomorrow, our hands are ultimately tied; the Arctic region is still going to warm by

Congratulations Italy! Scientists just discovered a new coral reef in the Adriatic Sea, near the town of Monopoli in Puglia. Not only is it the first coral reef known to be off the Italian coast (at least in modern time), it’s also a rather unusual one. Stretching for at least 2.5 kilometres (about 1.5 miles),

Waterfalls are one of the most majestic things on the planet: a beautiful, thunderous display of water and physics. But where do these cascading creations come from? The conventional wisdom has it that waterfalls are formed by external forces, such as earthquakes, landslides, or changes in sea level that vastly alter and disrupt landscapes and

A team of scientists and designers recently teamed up to create a tool that would show Australians what the climate is expected to be like in their cities in the year 2050 – and it led to a startling discovery. “In 30 years’ time, winter as we know it will be non-existent,” researcher Geoff Hinchliffe

Death Valley, the hottest and driest place in North America, isn’t exactly known for record rainfall or pop-up lakes stretching as far as the eye can see. But after a massive storm lashed the desert with rain and brought chilly temperatures through Southern California, that’s exactly what happened, according to photographer Elliott McGucken. He was trying

For something that’s supposed to help save the planet, solar geoengineering sure has a lot of enemies. Critics warn that artificially reflecting sunlight to cool the planet could unleash drastic, unintended consequences – but a Harvard-led team of scientists insists that such fears are overblown. In a new study, researchers say spraying chemicals into the

Much of the United States could be gripped by significant water shortages in just five decades’ time, according to predictions made in a new study. From the year 2071 on, scientists say the combined effects of climate change and population increases are projected to present “serious challenges” in close to half of the 204 watersheds

When it comes to recycling plastic waste, Norway is ahead the pack. In fact, the Scandinavian nation has virtually lapped the rest of the world. Through an organisation called Infinitum, Norway has created one of the most efficient and environmentally friendly ways of recycling plastic bottles, and the results are so impressive that many nations

Air pollution is a major problem no matter where you live, but it can get particularly bad in Seoul, the capital of South Korea – and so the government authorities are taking drastic action to try and deal with the smog that settles over the city. The latest plan from President Moon Jae-in is to

The town is called Bella Vista, but for thousands of residents living in this quiet, northwest corner of Arkansas, the outlook in recent times has been anything but. For a staggering seven straight months, Bella Vista has harboured a toxic open secret: an endless smouldering fire at a former illegal dumping site, burning deep underground

Yesterday, over the course of a single afternoon, Lee County, Alabama, was ravaged by back-to-back tornadoes. The one-two punch brought winds of 170 miles per hour (270 kilometres per hour), which ripped homes off their foundations, destroyed property, injured dozens, and killed at least 23 people. But these twisters were only two of some three

Some icebergs look white. Others look blue. But perhaps the most precious of all appear emerald green. Ever since the 1900s, sailors and explorers have occasionally seen these strange green icebergs, or jade bergs, floating around in the grey Antarctic landscape. Their curious colour has been puzzling scientists for decades; now, we might finally have

Rare earth elements are essential for building everything from smartphones to solar power plants, but extracting them from the ground comes with a high cost in terms of expense, effort, and environmental impact. That could be about to change. Researchers have discovered a new way to get some of these elements out of phosphate rock waste (or

Species come and go, but never quite like this. Our biosphere’s diversity is thinning at a shocking rate, with fingers pointed at everything from global warming to hunting to habitat clearing as agents of destruction.  Now, it turns out one offender stands head and shoulders above the rest. Alien invaders of the Earthly variety –

Fish populations in the world’s oceans are depleting at an alarming rate, new research has found, with worrying consequences for those higher up the food chain – which includes humans. If we don’t act fast, the situation is going to get worse. Data collected from 1930 to 2010 has shown that sustainable fish stock declined

The world is getting dangerously hot. Storms have been ferocious. Whole land masses are disappearing. Have you noticed this incredibly bad weather of late? Not fully, scientists say. New research demonstrates a terrifying adaptability of 21st century human beings: in the face of unprecedented climate change, we are normalising the weather temperatures, and not realising

The deepest parts of the ocean aren’t easy to get to. They’re found in fissures in the seafloor, and the creatures there are strange – adapted to the dark, the cold, and the crushing pressure. But in those trenches, at hadopelagic depths greater than 7,000 metres (20,000 feet), our impact on this world has still

For years, scientists have warned of the “next big one,” an earthquake so powerful that it could topple buildings, slash power, and take lives across California. As far as natural disasters go, the quake represented the worst-case-scenario for cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, which are both located along the San Andreas Fault. Now

As far as environmental supervillains go, atmospheric carbon is the kingpin of crime. And just like in the comic books, every time we think we have a way to lock it up for good, it gets away from us. What we need is something cheap. Scalable. Something that can have a hope of ripping enough

New analysis of 40 years’ worth of satellite data shows that it’s a near-certainty that humanity is actively causing global climate change. Climate deniers often claim, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that the planet is heating up and natural disasters are becoming more intense and common just because that’s the way it is –

Stratocumulus clouds are rather boring. They’re not as elegant as cirrus clouds (those horsetail wisps high in the sky) or as majestic as cumulonimbus clouds (big, scary thunderheads). But stratocumulus clouds, which hover low in the sky and create vast decks of cloud cover, have a supreme value in our warming world: Their white tops

Winter weather in the United Kingdom is known to be raw and bleak but, on Monday, the Sun shined in all its glory and temperatures surged to levels not seen before during the cold, dark season. Temperatures in the community of Trawsgoed in Wales shot up to 69.1 degrees (20.6 Celsius), the warmest temperature ever

Around 252 million years ago, Earth experienced catastrophic devastation – an extinction event so severe that it wiped out almost all of the life on Earth. Up to 70 percent of all land vertebrate species were killed off, and a massive 96 percent of all marine species, including the famous trilobite that had previously survived

Diving to the bottom of the ocean is arguably harder than rocketing into space. Hundreds of astronauts have left Earth, but you can count the people who’ve visited the very bottom of the ocean on one hand: James Cameron, Jacques Piccard, and Don Walsh. Because of that, we don’t know much about what goes on

An ice shelf in Antarctica is about to give birth to a baby. This baby is a giant, spawned by growing cracks in the Brunt Ice Shelf. It’s not clear what this’ll mean to the scientific infrastructure in the area, and to the human presence, which were both established in the 1950s. The Brunt Ice

There are an awful lot of insects. It’s hard to say exactly how many because 80 percent haven’t yet been described by taxonomists, but there are probably about 5.5 million species. Put that number together with other kinds of animals with exoskeletons and jointed legs, known collectively as arthropods – this includes mites, spiders and

Sixty-six million years ago, something changed the world catastrophically. Around 75 percent of the world’s plant and animal species died, wiping out the dinosaurs. This marked the end of the Cretaceous period, and started a new dawn on Earth – the Cenozoic, the age of mammals. But we don’t entirely know what caused it. Fossil

Years ago, the small, ratlike rodents could be seen scurrying across the sand and coral rubble on the Australian island of Bramble Cay. Fishermen would sometimes see them while visiting the island, which is dotted with a few grass clumps, shorebirds and nesting sea turtles in the Great Barrier Reef. As mackerel fisherman Egon Stewart

By about the time our great-grandchildren have children of their own, we humans will likely have broken a climate record that has stood unchallenged for 56 million years. New research has found that humans are pumping nearly 10 times more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than what was emitted during Earth’s last major warming event, called

Airplanes often receive a speed increase from air currents high in the skies, but very few get an insane boost like this: helped by a tailwind of more than 322 km (200 miles) per hour, a Boeing 787-9 jet reached a ground speed of 1,289 km (801 miles) per hour on Monday night. The top

It’s been snowing in Siberia. But instead of waking to a white winter wonderland, residents in Russia’s coal basin are living through a dark, industrial nightmare. Three separate cities within the coal-mining region of Kemerovo in southwest Siberia have been blanketed in a thick, black deluge of toxic snow, polluted by ever-present coal dust that

Soft, squishy, ancient spiders are hard to investigate – they don’t fossilise as easily as bones or exoskeletons. So you can imagine how excited researchers were to find 10 brand new spider fossils in a relatively unexplored area called the Jinju Formation. The Jinju Formation is a geological area of South Korea from the Mesozoic era,

An ambitious new analysis of the world’s forests found that there’s space to plant 1.2 trillion new trees – a number that would absorb more carbon than human emissions. According to the new data, ETH Zurich researcher Thomas Crowther told The Independent, trees are “our most powerful weapon in the fight against climate change.” Crowther

The Great Barrier Reef just can’t catch a break. Year after year, this global treasure has been battered by cyclones and beaten by bleaching events. Now, with little time to recover, a part of the reef is being kicked while its down. An exceptional year of rainfall in Queensland, Australia has caused a huge flood

Most of us have been caught out by weather forecasts that didn’t quite turn out as predicted, but today’s sophisticated models can make reasonably decent guesses up to 10 days in advance. Now a newly developed computing technique promises to push that limit out even further. If the system fulfils its initial promise, we could

“Nurdles” may sound cute but they pose a huge risk to the marine environment. Also known as “mermaid tears”, these small plastic pellets are a feedstock in the plastic industry. Instead of being converted into household items, many end up in the ocean, collecting toxins on their surfaces and being eaten by marine wildlife. Not

The seabed is not flat and smooth like the shimmering ocean above it. It’s a jagged, uneven landscape of submerged mountains and valleys, all hidden from sight – but not from science. By analysing the isotopic composition of the rocks that make up these underwater mountains networks – called mid-ocean ridges – scientists can identify

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. It’s not enough. When it comes to the crisis of mounting plastic waste, we’re still coming up short on ways to plug the flow. Soon, we might be able to add ‘rewind’ to that list – thanks to a new technique for turning the polypropylene that makes up a proportion of plastic

Greenland is covered in one of the largest ice sheets on the planet, but underneath its frozen exterior, the landscape is more pockmarked than we once thought. Buried underneath two kilometres of ice, researchers think they have found a second huge impact crater, hiding in the northwest corner of the world’s largest island. As scientists