Antarctica receives less precipitation than the Sahara, making it a desert by definition — yet its ice sheet, averaging over two kilometres thick, holds about 70 percent of the planet's fresh water. Here's how a place that barely snows became the largest freshwater reservoir on Earth.
The orderly columns of ants crossing a kitchen counter are not following a plan or a leader. They are following a chemical residue laid by the ants ahead of them, refreshed with every successful trip and vanishing within hours when the food runs out.
The end-Permian extinction was not a single volcano exploding on one bad day. It was a long volcanic province, a changing climate system, and a marine biosphere pushed past several limits at once.
The easiest mistake to make about Antarctica is to treat the ice as if it has always been there.
Vantor, the American Earth-observation company formerly known as Maxar, is now rebuilding chosen stretches of the planet as three-dimensional models and…
The Great Green Wall was pitched to the world in 2007 as an 8,000-kilometre living barrier — a corridor of trees running from Senegal on the Atlantic to Djibouti on the Red Sea, 15 kilometres wide, thick enough to hold back the advancing Sahara.
With about 30 minutes left in a submersible dive, geochemist Mengran Du and her crewmates pushed toward one more stretch of the deep trenches between Russia and Alaska.
Geochemists at the University of Göttingen have found chemical evidence that material from Earth's core is mixing into the mantle plume that feeds Hawaii's volcanoes, a boundary long assumed to be effectively sealed.
Costa Rica's forest cover fell to about 21% by the late 1980s. A 1996 law and a 3.5% national fuel tax reversed the collapse by paying more than 18,000 families to keep their trees standing — and forest cover has since climbed back above 50%.
The Arctic tern is a small seabird you could almost hold in one hand: a black cap over a pale body, a forked tail, and a wingspan under a metre.
The potato is the third most important staple crop on Earth. Together with wheat, rice, and maize, it provides approximately 80 per cent of all the calories consumed by the human species.
The Eighteenth Dynasty of Ancient Egypt ruled the country between approximately 1550 and 1292 BCE, a period during which Egypt reached the greatest territorial extent, wealth, and cultural influence in its recorded history.
In Utah's Fishlake National Forest, 47,000 quaking aspen trunks share one root system, weigh roughly 6,000 tons, and belong to a single organism that has been genetically the same individual for at least 9,000 years — and is now being nibbled to death by mule deer.
Singapore is approximately 730 square kilometres in area, smaller than the city of London and substantially smaller than metropolitan New York.
Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, known by its Ohlone name 'Ootchamin 'Ooyakma, sits about 45 miles south of San Francisco in a patch of oak woodland and grassland managed by Stanford University.
A black coral colony measuring approximately 4 metres tall and 4.5 metres wide has been found in the waters of Fiordland, New Zealand, making it one of the largest specimens on record in New Zealand's marine environment.
