Following a summer and autumn of planetary extremes—the hottest September by a wide margin, supercharged hurricanes, self-perpetuating heat domes—scientists have now declared 2023 the warmest year on record. Today the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its 2023 report, finding that last year was 1.35 degrees Celsius above the …

In a roundabout way, coal is solar-powered. Millions of years ago, swamp plants soaked up the sun’s energy, eating carbon dioxide in the process. They died, accumulated, and transformed over geologic time into energy-dense rock. This solar-powered fuel, of course, is far from renewable, unlike solar panels: Burning coal has …

Unless you’re sinking into quicksand, you might assume that the land beneath your feet is solid and unmoving. In actual fact, your part of the world may well be undergoing “subsidence,” which is where the ground collapses as sediments settle or when people over-extract groundwater. New York City is sinking, …

Scientists are running low on words to adequately describe the world’s climate chaos. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration could already say earlier this month that there was more than a 99 percent chance that 2023 was the hottest year on record. That followed September’s sky-high temperatures—an average of 0.5 …

When you drop money in the bank, it looks like it’s just sitting there, ready for you to withdraw. In reality, your institution makes money on your money by lending it elsewhere, including to the fossil fuel companies driving climate change, as well as emissions-heavy industries like manufacturing. So just …

As Hurricane Larry curved north in the Atlantic in 2021, sparing the eastern seaboard of the United States, a special instrument was waiting for it on the coast of Newfoundland. Because hurricanes feed on warm ocean water, scientists wondered whether such a storm could pick up microplastics from the sea …

Depending on whom you ask, the climate agreement that just came out of the COP28 conference is either an upset—having been agreed on in the United Arab Emirates, a petrostate—or a disappointment, or maybe something in between. (Climate change is complicated—and climate politics more so.) Regardless, for the first time …

Fifteen years ago, Richard Davies of Newcastle University got hold of 3D images of the underwater sedimentary strata in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Mauritania. “I'm a geologist, so it's my equivalent of the medic’s CAT scan,” Davies says. “I had this data set, and I've had many, …

One of the world’s most peculiar test beds stretches above Princeton, New Jersey. It’s a fiber optic cable strung between three utility poles that then runs underground before feeding into an “interrogator.” This device fires a laser through the cable and analyzes the light that bounces back. It can pick …

If you had lived some 50 million years ago and taken a trip to the poles, you would have found lush forests and creatures like crocodiles instead of miles-thick ice sheets. That’s because during the Eocene, greenhouse gas concentrations were much higher than they are today, leading to a natural …