Environment >>

In 2014, the Lake Powell reservoir will release less water than any year since it was built....

Outside it is cold, cold — ten degrees below, give or take. I step out with my coat zipped up to my chin and my feet encased in heavy rubber boots. The glittering street is empty; the wool-gray sky is low. Under my scarf and gloves and thermals I can feel my pulse begin to make a racket. I do not care. I observe my breath. I wait. A week before, not even a whole week, the roads showed black tire tracks...

t the best metaphor for ecocide? By all indications, Diamond has not allowed such doubts to enter his mind. But I...

s air pollution makes its way back to the western U.S. Nine scientists spent the last two years combing through economic and emissions data and found that a good fraction of China...

Scientists mimicked the conditions inside our planet and found it to be much hotter than expected....

m sitting at the source: the Arctic — where I am paradoxically actually enjoying the benefits of some tropical heat. You can see evidence of that heat in the mosaic of iPhone images above. But before I explain this particular polar paradox, I should say that as I'm writing this I'm in a darkened lecture hall at the Arctic University of Norway in the lovely, cosmopolitan city of Tromsø. I...

s winning and who’s losing kind of way, who’s up, who’s down," New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson said said last year. The overall tenor of climate change reporting isn...

ll be posting some images and stories from the Arctic in Norway. I'm here to report on climate issues, and to attend the Arctic Frontiers conference in Tromsø. In the meantime, I hope you'll enjoy the image above. It's a mosaic of six iPhone images stitched together with a wonderful app called Autostitch. I have not cropped it, so that's why the shape is somewhat irregular. You...

Ships in the 1960s were often coated in a chemical called TBT to prevent sea critters like snails from clinging to the hull. After researchers found that the toxic chemical caused female sea snails to grow penises (alongside equally frightening effects in other species) the stuff was banned in 2008. Now, six years later, things are starting to look up for the snails. Fed Up With Fouling Ship builders...

Joan Bennett didn’t believe in sick building syndrome. As a specialist in mold toxins, she had even testified in trials in support of insurance companies denying claims to homeowners who claimed that they had been sickened by toxins from their moldy houses. Then Hurricane Katrina struck, Bennett’s home was flooded, and she evacuated. “A month later, as a form of psychological sublimation, I decided...

color change is due to a process called "enzymatic browning." When the fruit...

Frigid temperatures can cause frostbite, but they can also trigger little-known underground explosions called "frost quakes." These quakes are a rare weather phenomenon that has been reported with surprising frequency in the past week. Frost quakes, or cryoseisms, occur in the winter, when a warm spell allows rain or melting snow to seep into cracks and crannies in the ground. When a cold front suddenly...

s geology, many researchers are just scratching the surface. Literally. With drills and picks and axes. But in Germany, a decades-old drilling site lets scientists (and one Dutch artist) go much deeper---nearly 6 miles below the surface. And they...

Thanks in part to fracking, the United States pulls ahead of Russia as the world's largest producer of fossil fuels....

For an easily crushed animal that rests during the day, a highway seems like maybe the worst possible home. Yet some bats pick roosts that are under bridges, or in other spots booming with human noise. Why subject themselves to that? For bats of at least one species, the sound of traffic is easy to doze through. And the more they hear it, the more they ignore it. The greater mouse-eared bat, Myotis...

In a world first, Japan extracted natural gas from frozen undersea deposits this year. ...

The pink bathtub ring that turns up around Lake Shasta in this animation of satellite images tells the tale as well as any numbers can: California is bone dry — drier than it has ever been since record-keeping began. We'll have to wait a couple of weeks for the official year-end precipitation numbers, but there is no question that 2013 will rank as the driest year in the state since recording-keeping...

Wisconsin is known for two things: its cheese and its wicked winters. Now the state is combining the two in a unique feat of recycling genius. After snowstorms like the one that passed through Wisconsin over the weekend, snow plows clear the streets, and trucks spread salt to prevent the roads from icing over. Since this northern state gets a lot of snow, it requires a lot of salt. Now some counties,...

On the floor of the Pacific Ocean lies a giant that has been sleeping for 145 million years....

s downfall. The story, we are told, looks like this. If we continue to ignore the danger signs while exceeding the planet's carrying capacity, the future may get ugly. For the time being, we are on a precipice. Although our thought leaders and scholars have been giving us ample warning, we don...