In January 2016 in Kenya, the conditions were just right for an outbreak of Rift Valley fever. A strong El Niño on the other side of the world had brought higher temperatures and a wetter-than-normal ...

Carbon is the backbone of life on Earth. We are made of carbon, we eat carbon, and our civilizations—our economies, our homes, our means of transport—are built on carbon. We need carbon, but that need ...

In the black dome of night, the stars seem fixed in their patterns. They rotate through the sky over the seasons so unchangingly that most cultures have used the presence of one or another ...

Each summer, monsoon rains sweep across southwestern Asia, soaking India and Bangladesh. In nearby Pakistan, the rains are usually less intense, more intermittent, and centered in the northeast. The ...

At least as far back as King David’s psalms and Isaiah’s prophecies, snow has been characterized as a symbol of purity. “Lawn [linen] as white as driven snow” was how Shakespeare once described it.

All of this extra carbon needs to go somewhere. So far, land plants and the ocean have taken up about 55 percent of the extra carbon people have put into the atmosphere while about 45 percent has ...

The average temperature in winter ranges from -40°C (-40°F) to 20°C (68°F). The average summer temperatures are usually around 10°C (50°F). The coniferous forest is sandwiched in between the tundra to ...

Before widespread human settlement began to encroach on the borders of South America’s Amazon forests, there was no such thing as an Amazon fire season. Now, fire may pose the biggest threat to the ...

Say NASA, and many images may come to mind: a white-clad man leaping awkwardly, joyfully across the surface of the moon; probes gliding into the depths of the solar system, sending back pictures of ...

The Antarctic is in some ways the opposite of the Arctic. The Arctic is an ocean basin surrounded by land, with the sea ice corralled in the coldest, darkest part of the Northern Hemisphere. The ...

Most people will never see Pine Island Glacier in person. Located near the base of the Antarctic Peninsula—the “thumb” of the continent—the glacier lies more than 2,600 kilometers (1,600 miles) from ...

The year is 2065. Nearly two-thirds of Earth’s ozone is gone—not just over the poles, but everywhere. The infamous ozone hole over Antarctica, first discovered in the 1980s, is a year-round fixture, ...