On 29 April 2020, a single cloud-to-cloud lightning bolt stretched 768 kilometres across Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi in 7.39 seconds — a flash longer than the drive from Boston to Cleveland, certified by the WMO as the longest ever measured at the time.
Oil palms grow in a near-perfect planted lattice, so satellites 700 kilometres up can tell plantations from rainforest by how their fronds reflect sunlight.
The bald eagle had not always been a rare bird. When the United States adopted Haliaeetus leucocephalus as its national symbol on 20 June 1782, the species may…
On 13 January 2025, an iceberg named A-84 broke away from Antarctica's George VI Ice Shelf, opening a section of seafloor that had been sealed beneath floating ice.
By 1987, Costa Rica's forest cover had collapsed to roughly 21%. A 1996 law funded by a tax on gasoline began paying landowners to protect and regrow forest — and within a generation, tree cover nearly tripled.
The Ocean Discovery League compiled records of approximately 44,000 deep-sea dives for a study published in Science Advances conducted between 1958 and the early 2020s.
There is a difference between looking like something dangerous and looking like something diseased.
Somewhere deep beneath the limestone hills of Slovenia, in caves that no sunlight has ever touched, lives an animal that has, in nearly every way, given up on the version of being alive that the rest of us would recognise.
Mimicry in the animal kingdom follows a fairly predictable grammar. An organism resembles something dangerous, something inedible, or something it wants to eat.
Approximately 24 kilometres south of Vangunu Island in the western Solomon Islands, in a part of the Pacific Ocean that lies just north of an active tectonic subduction zone, there is a submarine volcano called Kavachi.
Pando, a single quaking aspen in Utah, covers 106 acres, weighs about 6,000 tons, and has been cloning itself from one seed for an estimated 14,000 years — possibly far longer.
In October 1946, a camera in a captured V-2 rocket reached 105 km over White Sands. Its film survived the crash and held the first photos of Earth from space.
On the evening of 5 April 1815, the residents of Java and surrounding Indonesian islands heard what they believed were cannon shots in the distance.
One whale skeleton on the deep seafloor can host an entire neighbourhood of animals.
A modelling study published in Communications Earth & Environment in June 2025 found that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could begin an irreversible collapse…
Point Nemo, the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, lies more than 2,688 km from the nearest (uninhabited) land. When the ISS passes overhead at about 400 km, its crew is often the closest humans. The same emptiness makes it the chosen graveyard for deorbited spacecraft.
