Joshua Smith has been diving in kelp forests in Monterey Bay along the central coast of California since 2012. Back then, he says, things looked very different. Being underwater was…
Category: Earth
Earth’s oceans are storing record-breaking amounts of heat
Pandemic-related shutdowns may have spared Earth’s atmosphere some greenhouse gas emissions last year, but the world continued to warm. Water temperature measurements from around the globe indicate that the total…
A new book shows how animals are already coping with climate change
Hurricane Lizards and Plastic SquidThor HansonBasic Books, $28 As a conservation biologist, Thor Hanson has seen firsthand the effects of climate change on plants and animals in the wild: the…
How climate change may shape the world in the centuries to come
It’s hard to imagine what Earth might look like in 2500. But a collaboration between science and art is offering an unsettling window into how ongoing climate change might transform…
A new map shows where carbon needs to stay in nature to avoid climate disaster
Over decades, centuries and millennia, the steady skyward climb of redwoods, the tangled march of mangroves along tropical coasts and the slow submersion of carbon-rich soil in peatlands has locked…
Scientists are racing to save the Last Ice Area, an Arctic Noah’s Ark
It started with polar bears. In 2012, polar bear DNA revealed that the iconic species had faced extinction before, likely during a warm period 130,000 years ago, but had rebounded.…
Climate change may be shrinking tropical birds
In a remote corner of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, researchers have spent decades catching and measuring birds in a large swath of forest unmarred by roads or deforestation. An exemplar of…
