Environment

When heat waves hit, people start looking for anything that might lower the temperature. One solution is right beneath our feet: pavement. Think about how hot the soles of your shoes can get when you’re walking on dark pavement or asphalt. A hot street isn’t just hot to touch – it also raises the surrounding

Deep below the ocean’s waves, ancient tracks left by a long-hidden migration are etched into the submerged landscape of the seafloor. These mysterious imprints were not made by deep-sea creatures moving from one place to the next, but rather by a flotilla of ancient icebergs drifting aimlessly for thousands of miles across the ocean. As

One of the key steps to mitigating climate change is to better understand the multitude of factors that affect our planet’s temperature – and a new study reveals the important role that ocean microbes play in the process. Microbes are responsible for most of Earth’s naturally produced methane, a key greenhouse gas that contributes to

Thousands of years of history tell us drought is nothing new. Sometimes we prevail. Often we don’t. A bleak look into the future tells us we’ve seen nothing yet, with a mix of shifting climates, poor water management practices, and growing population densities promising a ‘pandemic‘ of catastrophic droughts awaits. The UN’s Special Report on Drought

Insects are the most numerous group of animals on the planet. There are an estimated 5.5 million species, 80 percent of which remain to be discovered. Yet insects are experiencing steep, widespread declines across the world: a “death by a thousand cuts” because of human activity. Insects perform almost every role imaginable in an ecosystem,

It’s not just seeds that are being stashed away at the poles – scientists are also preserving stacks of ancient ice for future research, and the oldest ice in the Alps region has now been successfully extracted, ready for storage in Antarctica. What makes saving and storing this ice so important is the climate history

If we’re going to tackle our microplastic pollution problem, then we need a better understanding of where these fragments and particles are – and a new study suggests that adapting satellite measurements could be one way of doing just that. At the moment, estimates of microplastics in the ocean rely on trawling specific areas with

Despite slim hopes that global shutdowns during the pandemic might bring respite from the climate crisis, yet more evidence confirms that no such silver lining exists. Newly released measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in fact show that concentrations of the heat-trapping chemical have surged to record levels not seen by scientists in the

The United Nations is urging governments around the world to rewild a billion hectares of degraded land in the next ten years. That’s a slice of the environment roughly the size of China – the sum of what numerous countries have already pledged to restore. But while humans are really good at making commitments to

The biggest natural disasters are by no means just a local issue, as new research shows: smoke from the devastating California wildfires of 2020 eventually reached as far as Europe, and was still dense enough after its travels to block out the Sun. Scientists tracked wildfire smoke originating from the US west coast in September

Earth’s oceans are full of life, with multitudes of creatures making their home beneath the waves. But not everywhere in the deep blue sea is receptive to life’s presence. In recent years, scientists have become increasingly concerned about ‘dead zones’: areas of hypoxic waters in the ocean where oxygen levels are so low, marine animals

For most life forms on Earth, oxygen is a necessity, not an optional extra – and because of our warming planet, oxygen is quickly disappearing from our freshwater lakes, putting aquatic life and ecosystems under threat. Researchers looked at samples and measurements taken from 393 lakes in temperate areas of the globe across a period

A heavily used group of pesticides, designed to kill insects upon contact, is also poisoning bee colonies. Scientists have discovered a way to deliver an antidote using pollen-like microparticles. The medicine is composed of a special enzyme that can break down certain groups of insecticides called organophosphates. These insecticides pose a deadly threat, but if the

While the rest of the world continues to tackle the global pandemic, in eastern Australia, waves of mice are flooding farms and towns. For months now, this plague has been wreaking havoc on crops, damaging electrical wires in buildings, and even biting hospital patients, leaving a stench of rodent urine and feces in its wake.

Greenland’s melting ice sheet is unleashing an astonishing amount of mercury into the nation’s rivers and fjords. Downstream of three glaciers in the southwest, researchers have found coastal ecosystems are swimming in high concentrations of the heavy metal, which can build up in the food web to toxic levels. The quantity of mercury observed in

Almost 60 years after British nuclear tests ended, radioactive particles containing plutonium and uranium still contaminate the landscape around Maralinga in outback South Australia. These “hot particles” are not as stable as we once assumed. Our research shows they are likely releasing tiny chunks of plutonium and uranium which can be easily transported in dust

Humanity’s vast problem with single-use plastics doesn’t come out of nowhere. Before this avalanche of transient, throwaway waste is disposed of in landfill or by burning – unless it finds its way into the natural environment – somebody gets paid to produce it, making money by bringing this inevitable pollution into existence. Now, we know

When Naomi Oreskes lectures about climate change, she gets the same question over and over again. “A member of the audience will say: ‘Well, what can I personally do? What can I do as an individual to fix this problem?'” Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard University, told Insider. “Much less frequently do they say:

Ghost forests could be an invisible source of greenhouse gas emissions, researchers warn. As rising seas poison trees along the Atlantic coast of the United States, a new study suggests that these ghost trees are beginning to ‘fart’ carbon dioxide and methane. Technically, all trees do a little bit of farting. Live trees are known

Modeling the future consequences of climate change requires a huge number of calculations based on a vast amount of factors, including how well microbes in soil might hold onto carbon – something that’s much more complicated than originally thought. In new research, scientists combined field measurements with computer modeling to show significant seasonal shifts in

Whether it’s turning forests into cropland or savannah into pastures, humanity has repurposed land over the last 60 years equivalent in area to Africa and Europe combined, researchers said Tuesday. If you count all such transitions since 1960, it adds up to about 43 million square kilometers (16.5 square miles), four times more than previous

It might seem odd to find supporters of climate action debating the merits of a concept that science shows to be essential for halting climate change, and which is accordingly embedded at the heart of the defining global agreement. Yet that is where we find ourselves with the concept of “net zero” – the point

Mexico City, the most populous metropolis in North America, has sunk too low for us to save it, according to new research.  After centuries of water drainage from underground aquifers, the lake bed on which this city sits has grown increasingly dry, causing the clay sheets to compress and crack at a largely unstoppable rate.

River piracy, also known as stream capture, happens when melting glaciers divert the path of a river. Due to our warming planet, a major Alaskan river is under threat of being redirected in this way – stealing an essential source of water away from the ecosystems and people that rely on it. The threatened waterway is

Lightning could be a much more important atmospheric cleanser than previously thought, according to a new analysis of historical measurements gathered from a storm-chasing airplane back in 2012 – data which were originally thought to be inaccurate. While some of the air-scrubbing qualities of lightning bolts are already well understood – in particular the creation

The Antarctic ice sheet contains a global disaster waiting to happen. As global temperatures continue to rise due to anthropogenic climate breakdown, water currently locked in the form of Antarctic ice will melt into the oceans, raising sea levels to a point that will have a significant impact on coastal communities, even in the next

The Brazilian Amazon released nearly 20 percent more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the last decade than it absorbed, according to a stunning report that shows humanity can no longer depend on the world’s largest tropical forest to help absorb human-made carbon pollution. From 2010 through 2019, Brazil’s Amazon basin gave off 16.6 billion

For decades, warmer waters seeping into the Arctic Ocean have increasingly threatened Arctic sea ice, with scientists predicting the ice pack could disappear entirely in summers from the middle of the next decade. Researchers have now uncovered one of the mechanisms driving this catastrophe, identifying how ‘heat bombs’ of warm, salty water from the Pacific

Seaspiracy, the Netflix documentary premiered in March 2021 which exposes the darker side to the fishing industry, has caused much controversy since its release. One of the more dramatic claims made in the film was that, due to fishing, all of the fish in the sea will have disappeared by 2048. To check this fact,

The legacy of abandoned oil wells in the US isn’t hard to see, even leaving gaping holes in the landscape that are frightening to look at. But their invisible aftermath is more alarming still. Across the US and Canada, there are millions of abandoned or inactive oil and gas wells left behind by their former

Earth’s glaciers are shrinking, and in the past 20 years, the rate of shrinkage has steadily sped up, according to a new study of nearly every glacier on the planet. Glaciers mostly lose mass through ice melt, but they also shrink due to other processes, such as sublimation, where water evaporates directly from the ice, and calving,

Ambitious climate policies could reduce extreme poverty in developing countries if governments opted for robust taxes on emitters that were then fairly distributed to help the poor, new research showed Tuesday. Authors of the study said the results showed that policymakers were facing a false choice between climate change mitigation and poverty reduction. Since fossil

Humans around the world are consuming far more natural resources than our planet can continue to sustain, condemning the majority of people to ecological poverty, according to new research. When researchers tried to put a number on our natural resource deficit for the year 2017, they found our global population of over 7.5 billion people

Scientists already know the oceans are rapidly warming and sea levels are rising. But that’s not all. Now, thanks to satellite observations, we have three decades’ worth of data on how the speeds of ocean surface currents are also changing over time. In research published on 23 April in the journal Nature Climate Change we detail

Humanity’s impacts on our planet’s climate are so profound, we have for decades been unwittingly shifting the very axis upon which Earth spins around, scientists say. In a new study, researchers examined the phenomenon of polar wandering, in which Earth’s magnetic north and south poles drift around the surface of the planet, restlessly roaming from

The way humans manage the environment doesn’t have to be destructive. In the western corner of Canada, ecologists have shown forests once tended by First Nations people are healthier and more resilient – even now, 150 years after these ancient custodians were forcibly displaced by colonial settlers.  The study is among the first to compare

Scientists have identified another major incoming shift in weather patterns caused by the pressures of climate change, predicting more rainfall along the coast of Antarctica, currently the driest continent on the planet. Between now and 2100, the rain in Antarctica is projected to become more frequent and more intense, according to the new research. In

In the last two decades, the Anthropocene has become an informal buzzword to describe the numerous and unprecedented ways humans have come to modify the planet.  As the concept has become more widely adopted, however, definitions have begun to blur. Today, the very meaning of the Anthropocene and its timeline differs considerably depending on who

If you didn’t know already, we have bad news – the plastic recycling industry is severely under-performing. Only 9 percent of plastic waste ever produced has been recycled. Around 12 percent has been burnt, leaving 79 percent of all plastic ever produced still out there in the world. While we work out how to be less

Global warming thresholds that could tip massive ice sheets into irreversible melting or see the Amazon rainforest shrivel into savannah have “grace periods”, giving humanity more time to draw down planet-warming carbon emissions, researchers have calculated. More than a dozen tipping points triggered mainly by rising temperatures could unleash catastrophic changes in Earth’s climate system.

There’s a pervasive notion in our society that nature is something outside, over there, other, from what we are as humans. From religious texts teaching that God provided humans with dominion over Earth, to futuristic literature pitching nature as our past and human ingenuity and technology as our future, the narrative that humans are beyond

An enormous Antarctic iceberg whose journeys were probably the most well-documented in history has now melted away to nothing in the Atlantic ocean.  A68 cracked off the Larsen C ice sheet on the Antarctic Peninsula in 2017 as one of the biggest icebergs ever. At the time, it measured 2,240 square miles (5,800 square kilometers), about the

Google Earth gives you a fascinating 3D tour of the planet in your web browser, and the app’s newest feature lets you look back from the current day all the way to 1984 – so you can see how climate change has changed the face of Earth over the last 37 years. Google itself has

Our plastic pollution problem has become so bad that microplastics are now embedded in the regular cycles of the atmosphere, circulating around the planet like oxygen or water, according to a new study. Plastic particles sent up into the air from ocean spray and road surfaces travel across continents and reaching the most remote spots

Early into the pandemic it became clear that something was wrong: the first signs of a tangential and potentially deadly threat emerging in the wake of COVID-19. It was an old problem, in truth, but one given fresh potency as humans scrambled to protect themselves from the coronavirus. As production of single-use face masks and

Few things excite biologists more than contemplating the parts of the world still relatively free of human damage. For the last 30 years, scientists intent on protecting Earth’s biodiversity have sought to enshrine targets for preserving and expanding these remaining areas of wilderness. But what actually is wilderness, and how do we know when we’ve

New Zealand will force banks to reveal the impact their investments have on climate change under world-first legislation intended to make the financial sector’s environmental record transparent, officials said. Commerce Minister David Clark said the law would make climate reporting mandatory for banks, insurance companies and investment firms. “Becoming the first country in the world

Japan’s decision to release more than one million tonnes of treated radioactive water from the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea has stirred fierce controversy. Here are some questions and answers about the plan, expected to take decades to complete. What is the processed water? Since the 2011 nuclear disaster, radioactive water has accumulated