Earth & Climate

A new attribution study pinpoints exactly how much climate change shifted the odds — and the answer makes this April's heat feel less like an emergency and more like a schedule.

A Chinese Academy of Sciences expedition into the hadal zone just found the deepest ecosystem ever recorded — and it doesn't care that the sun exists.

The 2025 Global Tipping Points Report didn't warn that coral reefs might cross a threshold — it confirmed they already have, and the cascade of consequences that unlocks is not a future problem.

The gases released by wildfires keep chemically transforming into fine particles for days after a fire ends — which is why smoke crosses continents and poisons air far from any flame.

Mycelium composites work by exploiting a fungus mid-meal — and the moment you stop the digestion is the moment the material begins.

The Trump administration cut hundreds of the people who warn you about killer storms — right as scientists project the hottest, most extreme years in recorded history are almost certainly ahead.

The fourth global bleaching event is officially over — but the pause before the next one may already be too short for survival to matter.

Wildfire and flood losses have quietly crossed into territory that's forcing insurers out of entire states — and most homebuyers are still running the old numbers.

A new study put a number on the ocean's heat surplus that makes annual energy statistics look like pocket change — and the rate is still climbing.

Buried at the base of Earth's mantle, two continent-sized masses of anomalous rock have resisted four billion years of planetary churning — and a new study argues they are fossilized relics of Earth's primordial interior that may have quietly shaped the conditions for life.

NOAA's Billion-Dollar Disasters database was the only continuous public ledger of American climate catastrophe — until it wasn't, and the story of what replaced it reveals something more troubling than its absence.

Research on Southwest US woodlands reveals that trees can lose the hydraulic and carbon reserves that keep them alive long before their canopy shows a single yellow leaf — meaning the forests we think we're watching die may already be past saving.

Ocean dead zones have grown tenfold since the 1950s, and the deoxygenation driving them is quietly rewiring marine life from the seafloor up — long before fish populations crash.

A new study puts a precise number on the Amazon's tipping point — and what happens just past it rewrites what we thought we knew about rainforest resilience.

Dead zones have multiplied tenfold since the 1950s, but the real damage isn't the fish floating at the surface — it's the invisible collapse happening in the layers beneath them.

A study of nearly 2 million California trees found that the largest trees die at twice the rate of small ones during drought — and the hydraulic physics behind that pattern reveal how forests begin to unravel long before they look like they're in trouble.

Restoration science has gotten genuinely good at growing coral — which makes the numbers showing it can't possibly save reefs at scale even harder to look at.

A two-decade study in the Colorado Rockies found insect populations collapsing in pristine wilderness — and the culprit has nothing to do with pesticides, habitat loss, or human footprint.

A new study found that the 2023 marine heatwave flipped most Caribbean reefs from growth to erosion years ahead of schedule — and the reefs with the most coral paid the steepest price.

After the 2023 marine heatwave, staghorn and elkhorn corals crossed a threshold scientists call functional extinction — and the reef kept its shape just long enough to hide the damage.

Researchers have identified a precise soil-moisture threshold below which Amazon trees don't just wilt — they suffer fatal internal embolisms, and climate models suggest those conditions could persist for five months a year by 2100.

The Amazon recycles its own rainfall through vast airborne moisture corridors — and new data shows that eastern deforestation is already strangling the forests furthest downstream.

A warming world is splitting the seasons apart — and migratory birds, flying by an internal clock that no longer matches the land they're flying toward, are paying for the mismatch in empty nests.