High on the creaking ice of Antarctica and Greenland, researchers are quietly drilling into what might be the most powerful time machines on Earth. Each meter of ice they pull up is a frozen chapter of the planet’s climate history, written in microscopic bubbles and dust. At a time when climate headlines tilt toward ...
On a moonless night in the Indian Ocean, the sea turned the color of old paper – uniform, ghostly, and bright enough that mariners said they could make out the print on a page. For centuries, such “milky seas” were sailor’s lore, hard to prove and easy to doubt. Then satellites caught the glow ...
Every so often, a place we think of as lifeless flips the script. A bone-dry horizon turns into a living carpet, and the harsh silence is replaced by bees, beetles, and the soft hiss of petals opening. Scientists have long known that these rare desert blooms hinge on unusual rain, but the scale and ...
On winter mornings in Yellowstone, the story looks simple: a distant howl, a nervous elk, a quiet bend in a willow-lined creek. The truth is richer and a little messier, and that’s where the science gets exciting. Since wolves were reintroduced in the mid‑1990s, riparian plants have rebounded in pockets, beavers have built new ponds, ...
At sunrise in Florida Bay, a streak of pink glides low over the water, the bill of a roseate spoonbill slicing the surface like a slow oar. Not long ago, these birds were a bellwether of trouble, their empty nests mirroring years when the marsh ran too deep or too salty. Today, scientists and managers ...
On the fog-cool mornings that once defined California’s coast, a different kind of heat now lurks below the surface. Marine heatwaves have crept into kelp country, and the state’s towering underwater forests are reacting in ways both dramatic and subtle. Scientists are racing to read the signals – thinning canopies, urchin barrens, shifting animal behavior ...
