Earth & Life
Earth’s inner core may have quietly reversed course
More than 5,000 kilometres beneath your feet, Earth's solid inner core has spent the past few decades turning slightly faster than the planet wrapped around it.
Earth & Life
On 29 April 2020, a single bolt of lightning stretched 768 kilometres across Texas…
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.
Earth & Life
Satellites can now tell a palm oil plantation from native rainforest by the precise…
{"content":"From 700 kilometres up, an oil palm plantation looks almost nothing like the rainforest it replaced — and the difference is not just colour or texture, but the precise angle at which su
Earth & Life
In the early 1960s, mother bald eagles across the United States were crushing their…
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…
Earth & Life
When an iceberg roughly the size of Chicago broke away from Antarctica’s George VI…
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.
Earth & Life
In 1987, Costa Rica's forest cover had collapsed to roughly 21% of the country, and…
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.
Earth & Life
Scientists have directly observed less than 0.001 percent of the deep ocean floor
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.
Earth & Life
The spider hides by pretending to be the fungus that kills its neighbors, and it…
There is a difference between looking like something dangerous and looking like something diseased.
Earth & Life
A blind, pale salamander in the caves of Slovenia can survive a decade without…
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.
Earth & Life
In the Amazon canopy a newly named spider called Taczanowskia waska was found…
Mimicry in the animal kingdom follows a fairly predictable grammar. An organism resembles something dangerous, something inedible, or something it wants to eat.
Earth & Life
Two species of sharks, including hammerheads, live inside the active crater of an…
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.
Earth & Life
For as much as 14,000 years, the aspen clone called Pando has spread across 106…
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.
Earth & Life
In 1946, a captured Nazi V-2 rocket launched from White Sands carried a 35mm motion…
{"content":"On October 24, 1946, a 35mm DeVry motion picture camera bolted into the nose of a captured German V-2 rocket clicked through a single frame every second-and-a-half as the missile arced
Earth & Life
The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, the largest documented volcanic…
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.
Earth & Life
When a dead whale sinks to the seafloor, its 'whale fall' becomes an oasis feeding…
One whale skeleton on the deep seafloor can host an entire neighbourhood of animals.
Earth & Life
Scientists say the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could collapse with very little…
A modelling study published in Communications Earth & Environment in June 2025 found that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could begin an irreversible collapse…