Follow the stories behind clean air, water, land, and the places we live. Understand environmental research and the choices affecting ecosystems and communities.
17 stories & explainers · Newest first
A duck with a sky-blue bill once shrank to barely two dozen birds in Spain — decades later, thousands paddle across its wetlands again thanks to a rare conservation turnaround.
2 min read
Satellites orbiting Earth continuously measure things like sea levels, clouds, and land cover, building long-term records that reveal how the planet is actually changing over decades.
4 min read
Smoke from a wildfire near Blaenavon traveled 30 miles and could be smelled in Cardiff, and new monitoring data now ranks this small Welsh county among the world's biggest carbon emission hotspots this year.
2 min read
Climate change is the long-term shift in global temperature and weather patterns, and it explains why regions like Wales, not known for wildfires, are now burning and releasing stored carbon.
5 min read
Why did Spain and France burn so fiercely this summer? A rapid climate study found the hot, dry, windy conditions fueling the fires were made at least 20 times more likely by global heating.
2 min read
Imagine a city known for clean lakes and maple trees suddenly having the dirtiest air on the planet. That happened to Toronto, Canada this week, as wildfire smoke drifted in and pushed its air quality past even Delhi's and Kinshasa's.
2 min read
A fishing boat overturned in the sea near Visakhapatnam, leaving six fishermen missing — one survivor was rescued by a passing cruise ship, showing how maritime emergencies depend on both luck and organised search systems.
2 min read
The sun constantly fires invisible storms of charged particles toward Earth, and a newly selected NASA mission will study how these space weather events interact with our atmosphere to improve forecasts that protect satellites, power grids, and astronauts.
3 min read
Every drop of water in Earth's oceans has an origin story — and for decades, scientists blamed comets and asteroids for delivering it. Now, a fresh hypothesis suggests Earth may have quietly made its own water from the inside out.
3 min read
Frozen for thousands of years inside mountain ice patches, ancient tools, clothes, and even food scraps are now thawing out — and archaeologists have only days to collect them before they rot away forever.
3 min read
Rocks that breathe — sort of. In a tiny Canadian town called Flower's Cove, you can walk alongside thrombolites: mound-shaped living things that helped create Earth's oxygen billions of years before dinosaurs existed.
2 min read
Long after COVID testing booths closed, Bengaluru's drains kept telling the truth — wastewater data caught hidden virus surges that official case counts completely missed.
2 min read
A city of 22 million people is slowly sinking — and a joint Indian-American space mission just captured the clearest map yet of how fast it's happening. The NISAR satellite, built by ISRO and NASA together, revealed some neighborhoods are dropping by more than 40 centimetres a year.
2 min read
Every time a chips packet crinkles or a shampoo sachet tears open, a tiny piece of India's growing plastic crisis gets worse — and the country generates over 4 million tonnes of plastic waste every year.
2 min read
NASA has released fresh satellite images of the Richat Structure in Mauritania, a massive circular landform about 50 kilometres wide that scientists are still studying.
2 min read
The Ocean Cleanup project has removed over 25,000 kg of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in a single month — its biggest haul yet.
2 min read
Marine biologists in Australia and Indonesia are growing baby corals in underwater nurseries and transplanting them onto damaged reefs, helping some areas recover faster than expected.
2 min read