Environment >>

Antarctica's subglacial lakes, Vostok and Whillans, reveal what life might be like in icy worlds....

A nice sparkly ring with a piece of Antarctic ice on it---you have to admit, it would have a certain appeal. Scientists have confirmed for the first time that Antarctica's crust contains kimberlite, the igneous rock that often harbors diamonds. Antarctica was the last holdout---every continent on Earth contains kimberlites, which in some parts of the world are mined for diamonds. Australian researchers...

Consumption of arsenic-tainted rice is linked to health effects for the first time. ...

Floods reached "biblical" proportions after a year's worth of rain fell during a single week in September....

In May, the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere crossed this long-hyped threshold, setting off a storm of media coverage. But how significant is the milestone?...

Freshwater is fast becoming a scarce resource as our global population swells. Some say World War III will be fought over access to it. But newfound reserves of freshwater under the sea may represent a vast source that has been previously overlooked. Researchers announced this week that they've probed the extent of freshwater reserves under the sea off the coasts of South Africa, China, North America...

s about a food advocacy group's campaign to stop McDonald's from using new strains of a genetically modified potato, which as Gunther writes, are designed to deliver both environmental and health benefits. They reduce black spots from bruising, which cause a portion of each year...

There are certain tropes that linger in the public imagination long after they've been discredited. Such is the case with the "balance of nature."  In 2009, the ecologist John Kricher wrote a book about this "enduring myth," and years before that, another ecologist, Daniel Botkin, published his seminal Discordant Harmonies in 1990, which I think was the first mainstream book "to challenge the then...

Guest post by Candace Sheppard Wind energy production in New York State is expected to double in the next five years. Photo by U.S. Department of Energy. A day after a study was released last week about wind turbines killing more than 600,000 bats in the United States in 2012, the Environment America Research Policy Center released its second report about wind energy’s growing environmental and health...

Guest post by Jess Scanlon Today millions of Americans gather for the traditional Thanksgiving harvest festival. At many of these celebrations the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving dinner is a roasted turkey. From an environmental standpoint, the turkey falls somewhere between chicken and eggs.  A Cornell study shows it takes 14 units of fossil fuel to produce a serving of turkey. In comparison its a...

The tigrina is a housecat-sized wild cat that roams through two different regions of Brazil: the northeast corner and the south. But DNA sequencing has shown that these two separate tigrina populations are actually two entirely different species. A team of Brazilian researchers analyzed the cats' genomes and found no evidence of inbreeding between the more numerous southern tigrinas and the sparse...

A very specific set of weather conditions is required to make a natural ice sculpture like this one. ...

t mean other lifeforms won't grace the lunar surface. NASA is teaming up with students and private space companies to grow the first plants on the moon...

t aware, wind energy has an ecological downside that's hasn't yet been smoothed out. As AP reporter Dina Cappiello wrote earlier this year, "the green industry is allowed to do not so green things": It kills protected species with impunity and conceals the environmental consequences of sprawling wind farms. More than 573,000 birds are killed by the country...

s been 35 million years since a large meteorite slammed into the Earth, cracking bedrock beneath what is now the Chesapeake Bay. The impact left pores that collected groundwater from beneath it. Now researchers have dated that water to between 100 million and 145 million years old, and report that it...

Satellite images and seismic activity provide otherwise unattainable data about these deadly disasters....