Environment

It’s called the Meghalayan: an epic stretch of time that spans from around 4,200 years ago right up until the time you finished reading this sentence. Officially ratified by the International Commission on Stratigraphy in July, this newly recognised period is now considered a distinct age in the geologic time scale – but ever since

We see the surface of the sea: the rock pools, the waves, the horizon. But there is so much more going on underneath, hidden from view. The sea’s surface conceals human impact as well. Today, I am writing a eulogy to the Derwent River Seastar (or starfish), that formerly inhabited the shores near the Tasman

We know that plastic pollution is a major problem for the world’s oceans, but scientists just discovered a new way that discarded microplastics are making their way out of the water and into other food chains – through mosquitoes. What’s happening is mosquito larvae are ingesting microplastics as water-dwelling larvae, and those plastic particles are

For the hundreds of millions of people who live alongside the world’s coasts, the scariest sea-level rise scenario is the idea that ice sheets could collapse. Seas are already rising rapidly, threatening to swamp cities like Miami within the lifetimes of people alive today. If the sheets of ice that sit on top of Antarctica

A new study looking at the San Andreas and San Jacinto fault lines in California has uncovered some strange and unexpected types of movement deep below ground – movement that could make the next big earthquake all that more difficult to predict. The movement has been dubbed “deep creep”, and it could help explain unusual

If you aren’t fond of spiders, this scene will sound like a nightmare. A 300-metre-long (1,000-foot) field of spiderweb has sprung up in western Greece in the town of Aitoliko. As you can see in the video below, its covering everything from trees to shrubs near a lagoon on the shores of the town. The spiders

For hundreds of years, geologists have thought the modern-day British mainland was formed by the collision of two ancient land masses, Avalonia and Laurentia. Now, new research suggests a third continent was involved – Armorica, which today makes up the northwestern region of France. That’s according to some geological detective work that considers, among other

It was called the Storegga Slide: a massive underwater landslide off the coast of Norway, which generated a towering 20-metre-high (66 ft) tsunami sweeping across the UK’s Shetland Islands. Luckily, that ancient wave of destruction – which also struck mainland Scotland, Norway, and Greenland – happened over 8,000 years ago, leading scientists to think such

Weather reports are usually the mildest parts of a TV news broadcast. But earlier today The Weather Channel put out a forecast with an unexpectedly dark twist. It starts as a regular green screen report, with meteorologist Erika Navarro highlighting areas in North Carolina at risk from Hurricane Florence’s storm surge, which could reach above

Hurricane Florence is arriving. Forecasts predict the storm will lash the Carolinas for days, battering homes, inundating businesses, and sending waves of water 11 feet high into the shore. The storm is also predicted to bring record rainfall totals to the region. In some places, 40 inches of water are expected to fall. Although scientific

The Northern Hemisphere is facing an onslaught of hurricanes and typhoons, seemingly overnight. With three storms spinning in the North Atlantic – Hurricane Florence one of them – the tropics have exploded to life at the peak of the annual season. At the same time, in the tropical Pacific, Super Typhoon Mangkhut is the most

Although our planet is covered in water, the freshwater portion humanity can use for its purposes is exceedingly small – and we need to make sure we don’t waste this essential resource. A new study from researchers at the Directorate for Sustainable Resources in Italy has investigated how diet impacts our individual water footprints, and

Hurricane Florence may be the strongest storm ever to make landfall north of Florida if predictions hold. The Category 4 storm is located 905 miles (1456 km) east of Cape Fear, North Carolina and has maximum wind speeds of 130 mph (209 km/h), according to the National Hurricane Center. Only four Category 4 hurricanes have

Hurricane season officially peaks today: September 10. It has been a quieter-than-average hurricane season so far, but things are picking up in a big way: three hurricanes are churning in the Atlantic, with Hurricane Florence rapidly approaching the US East Coast. Hurricane Florence, a Category 4 storm with 140 miles per hour (225 kilometres per

It’s the largest hot desert in the world: the Sahara, a blistering landscape of sand, heat, and deadly dryness that swallows 10 nations and is growing bigger all the time. Because of its searing, sunny conditions, numerous energy projects are already seeking to capitalise on the immense solar potential of the Sahara. But new research

The toxic algae bloom that has carved a trail of dead animals and triggered a putrid stench along western Florida’s coastline has drifted further north, killing hundreds of thousands of fish in the Tampa Bay region. The legions of dead fish were reported in a 20 mile (32 kilometre) stretch of coastline from Clearwater to

A rare and extreme tsunami ripped across an Alaskan fjord three years ago after 180 million tons (163 million tonnes) of mountain rock fell into the water, driving a devastating wave that stripped shorelines of trees and reached heights greater than 600 feet (182 metres), a large team of scientists documented on Thursday. The October

Fighting climate change will be much more difficult and expensive if we do not incorporate nuclear power into our strategy, a new study from MIT suggests. Despite several decades in rapid growth, recent investments in nuclear power have begun to stall amid concerns of cost and safety. Today, the low-carbon energy source makes up a

From rainfall to wildfires, 2017 was a record-breaking year for natural disasters. In August and September, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria left behind a high death toll, drowned homes, and destroyed power lines. Hundreds of people died in earthquakes around the world, from Mexico to the Iran-Iraq border, and nearly 1,400 people were killed during

For a year, not a lot happened. In July 2017, the world’s sixth-largest iceberg on record tore free from its Antarctic moorings after months of dramatic anticipation, in which the world watched a gigantic chasm split the Larsen C ice shelf in two. But then, this colossal broken shard of ice basically hunkered down. Satellite

The aftershocks of a devastating earthquake can often be as horrifying as the main event. Now scientists have developed a system for predicting where such post-quake tremors could take place, and they’ve used an ingenious application of artificial intelligence (AI) to make this happen. Knowing more about what’s coming next can be a matter of

In presentations of global warming, sometimes watching maps morph from blue (cold) to red (hot) grows tiresome. Talented data visualizers are finding new and creative ways to illustrate the warming of the planet. The latest visualization of Earth heating up was built by Antti Lipponen, a research scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, and it

Cigarette butts are among the most abundant types of human-produced garbage in the world’s oceans. Most of the roughly 5.5 trillion cigarettes manufactured globally every year contain a plastic-based filter, made of cellulose acetate, according to the Cigarette Butt Pollution Project. Those filters can take decades to decompose after the cigarette butt has been discarded.

It has its directive: seek and destroy. And the underwater drone RangerBot is ready to put its lethal skills to work on Australia’s horrifically threatened Great Barrier Reef. But it’s not the coral that’s the target of its deadly focus. RangerBot is more like a bodyguard, trying to protect the reef from one of its

First, New Zealand declared war on dirty-clawed predators – stoats, rats, weasels – and there was little to be missed. But as the fight comes to the kitties, some owners are paws-sitively outraged. New Zealand’s efforts to protect its most rarefied creatures are turning to a measure that has rattled many cat owners: banning feline

The Arctic is not in a good way. Its oldest, thickest sea ice is breaking. Strange lakes punctuate its landscape. The very chemistry of its water is changing. Things could be about to get worse. New research has uncovered evidence of a vast reservoir of heated water building up underneath the Arctic Ocean and penetrating

Humans have been regularly traversing the Atlantic Ocean for going on six centuries, establishing the most efficient trade routes to haul people and goods, sharing details of the best places to pick up the speediest winds, occasionally using radar and satellites to thread a plane through a Category 5 hurricane. But for all our knowledge

It was the early 1970s and the future of human civilisation had never looked brighter. There was only one problem. A mathematical model developed by a pioneering computer engineer at MIT had predicted something terrifying. Something so terrifying, in fact, that it basically signalled the end of human civilisation on Earth. The model, based on

As Europe wilts in the sweltering, record-breaking harshness of summer 2018, strange things are happening. Mysterious outlines of ancient societies have revealed themselves across the seared landscape, but it’s not just traces of ghostly architecture resurfacing. So too are grim words of warning. Inscribed boulders known as ‘hunger stones’ are reappearing in Czechia after a

Two years ago, 323 reindeer in southeast Norway were struck by lightning and died. Many of the animals were found on top of each other on a remote mountain plateau. Norwegian officials said they had never seen a case like it before. Authorities flew in to remove the dead reindeer’s heads for a study on diseases

NASA’s Worldview program has some bad news. The Earth is on fire. The red points in the picture above are areas around the world with fires actively burning, accurate as of Thursday. It doesn’t look great. The Worldview website lets you look at current events happening across the planet. One of those events is wildfires,

They’re the vilest, most unthinkable horrors you could ever imagine lurking in the sewers underneath our cities. Even Pennywise is terrified of them. They’re called fatbergs: vast deposits of congealed fat and grease stuck together with soiled diapers, condoms, tampons, wet wipes, you name it. But these stomach-churning accumulations that clog up sewer systems could

The breakdown of some of the oldest and thickest sea ice in the Arctic has occurred for the first time in recorded history. Not once, but twice this year, the breaking ice has opened waters north of Greenland that are usually frozen even in summer. It’s partially the result of climate change-driven heatwaves and warm

Before its mysterious collapse more than 1,000 years ago, the Maya civilisation in Mesoamerica was home to one of the densest populations in human history. But as the ancient and burgeoning civilisation spread across the Yucatan peninsula, it left a pernicious mark on the environment that can still be observed today. A new study shows

The Arctic permafrost really should stay frozen. In many places it’s been frozen for tens of thousands of years, locking away greenhouse gasses and ancient diseases. Unfortunately, our planet’s changing climate is denting permafrosts around the world. And now NASA-funded research has confirmed that the expected gradual thawing of the Arctic permafrost is being dramatically

A new report reveals that a shocking amount of contact lens users – nearly 20 percent – dispose of those little plastic circles in a terribly irresponsible way, by flushing them down the toilet or the drain of the sink. Of an estimated 45 million US contact lens wearers, that’s around 9 million right there.

At the time of writing, more than 430 people have died following an earthquake in the Indonesian island of Lombok. A further 2,500 people have been hospitalised with serious injuries and over 270,000 people have been displaced. Earthquakes are one of the deadliest natural disasters, accounting for just 7.5 percent of such events between 1994 and

The headlines of record-crushing heat in the Northern Hemisphere began in June and haven’t stopped midway through August. Scores of locations on every continent north of the equator have witnessed their hottest weather in recorded history. The swelter has intensified raging wildfires in western North America, Scandinavia and Siberia, while leading to heat-related deaths in Japan and eastern

During this week 106 years ago, New Zealand was talking about the future of our planet. The predictions weren’t uplifting. On August 14, 1912, a newspaper called the Rodney and Otamatea Times, Waitemata and Kaipara Gazette printed a prescient paragraph in its “science notes and news” section. The brief note warned that Earth’s atmosphere was

Scientists just worked out a way of rapidly producing a mineral capable of storing carbon dioxide (CO2) – giving us a potentially exciting option for dealing with our increasingly overcooked planet. Magnesite, which is a type of magnesium carbonate, forms when magnesium combines with carbonic acid – CO2 dissolved in water. If we can produce

The shredded carcasses of microscopic marine algae could play an important role in the formation of clouds over the world’s oceans, a new study has found. We all know clouds form as microscopic water droplets in the air condense on the surface of microscopic particles. These particles can be soluble – such as where salt crystals

The past four years have been the four warmest ever recorded – and now, according to a new scientific forecast, the next five will also probably be “anomalously warm,” even beyond what the steady increase in global warming would produce on its own. That could include another record warmest year, even warmer than the current

Earth is a pretty big place, but it’s not as big as our appetite. That’s the conclusion of a new study by researchers in Canada, who calculated that if the entire world population tried to eat what the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) actually recommends, we wouldn’t have enough farms to feed everybody. “The

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that corvids (crows, rooks and ravens) are remarkably intelligent birds. Now these feathered geniuses have been given a job: six rooks have been trained to pick up rubbish in the Puy du Fou historical theme park in western France. Whenever Boubou, Bamboo, Bill, Black, Bricole and Baco deposit

A fire in Glacier National Park, in Montana’s Rocky Mountains, has sparked evacuations over the weekend as record heat and high winds caused the fire to spread. The Howe Ridge Fire first ignited over the weekend after lightning struck on Saturday. The wildfire spread rapidly as triple-digit temperatures and high winds fed the flames. Over

The saying goes that the Taj Mahal is pinkish in the morning, milky white in the evening, and golden when the moon shines. Though this may once have been true for the famously pristine marble monument, a mixture of pollution and poor management has now burdened the Taj with a 24-hour layer of yellowy-brown. Condemning

The heat wave that has swept Europe over the summer may not be very pleasant for the human population, but rare pink tropical birds at a nature reserve in southwest England sure seem excited. Officials at Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT) Slimbridge, a wetland wildlife reserve in Gloucestershire, said in a statement Thursday that six Andean flamingos laid

Scientists are pondering what might be called the volcanic solution to global warming. It would be the ultimate desperate measure, a climatological Hail Mary and, possibly, a very bad idea. The only reason it’s an actual subject of research is that human civilization has failed to take steps to stave off dangerous levels of climate