Tag Archives: environment

Late last week, on Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula, a concerning sequence of earthquakes suddenly turned into a full-blown volcanic crisis. A burst of intense and frequent seismic shaking, accompanied by a convulsing crust, suggested that a huge volume of magma was rapidly burrowing its way toward Svartsengi, the site of a …

The Paris Agreement is one of the most celebrated moments of climate action—but the event turned me into something of a COP skeptic. COPs—or Conferences of the Parties—are annual events convened by the United Nations where world leaders try to hash out a deal to limit climate change. In 2015, …

Hot off a summer of record heat, a savage wildfire that destroyed Lahaina, and hurricanes that rapidly intensified into monsters, the United States today released its Fifth National Climate Assessment. The report—done with input from over 750 experts from every US state—exhaustively lays out the already severe effects climate change …

For the world to hit net zero, carbon removal is going to be essential—there’s simply no way to reverse humanity’s impact on the climate without extracting carbon from the air. The world currently has the capacity to extract hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon from the air each year. …

India’s capital, New Delhi, is preparing a new weapon in the fight against deadly air pollution: cloud seeding. The experiment, which could take place as early as next week, would introduce chemicals like silver iodide into a cloudy sky to create rain and, it’s hoped, wash away the fine particulate …

As Olivier Gardet piloted the drone around the mountain, his colleague, who was looking through goggles connected to its infrared camera, could see the avalanche clearly: a long tongue of debris, visible from 2 kilometers away. Then he noticed the heat signature of a person moving across it, digging frantically …

This story originally appeared in Hakai and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Arah Narida leans over a microscope to gaze into a plastic petri dish containing a hood coral. The animal—a pebbled blue-white disk roughly half the size of a pencil eraser—is a marvel. Just three weeks ago, …

The plan for the first small-scale US nuclear reactor was exciting, ambitious, and unusual from the get-go. In 2015, a group of city- and county-run utilities across the Mountain West region announced that they were betting on a new frontier of nuclear technology: a mini version of a conventional plant …

Boom and bust don’t hit much harder than in the Bering Sea. After reaching historically high numbers, the population of snow crabs there cratered by 90 percent following a heat wave in 2018 and 2019. Some 10 billion disappeared. Water temperatures had risen 3 degrees Celsius, but that probably didn’t …

Here’s the inconvenient truth about your electric vehicle: Making its battery has a big impact on the environment. Producing an EV often generates more emissions than building a conventional car, with the benefits of going electric realized only after a good amount of driving. “Building batteries is creating a very …