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Somewhere off the coast of Fogo, in the dark under two kilometres of Atlantic water, lies the wreckage of a mountain. Tens of thousands of years ago a whole flank of the volcano let go and slid onto…
When a fissure eruption begins on the Reykjanes Peninsula, it does not announce itself with a single mountain-top vent. The ground simply tears: a bright seam of fire opening across the lava field,…
Ask two neuroscientists to point to the same spot in the human brain and you may get two different answers. One is looking at a stained tissue slice under a microscope, counting cell layers a…
Picture the planet at the instant the last tonne of carbon dioxide is neutralized. The furnace has been switched off. The obvious question is whether the room now stays warm, keeps heating, or begins…
Through the autumn of 2022, Ruapehu did everything a volcano does before it erupts — except erupt. Its summit crater lake, Te Wai a-moe, warmed through the year. Volcanic tremor climbed. Monitoring…
There is a frustrating gap in what climate science can and cannot tell you. Ask whether Europe's summers will keep warming over the coming decades, and the models answer with confidence. Ask what the…
The Fire Weather Index has a quiet dependency that trips up almost everyone who tries to use it in a climate model. To do the arithmetic the way it was designed, you need the temperature, humidity,…
For most of the year the far North does its climate work in the dark. Long after the growing season ends and the last flux of summer photosynthesis fades, the soil beneath the snow keeps breathing:…
Every 34 hours, a giant planet slips across the face of a dead star. The star is WD 1856+534, a white dwarf no bigger than Earth. It is the smoldering core left behind after a Sun-like star exhausted…
Ask how long it takes a rainforest to grow back and the honest answer has always been slippery. You can count the trees. You can weigh the carbon. But a mature tropical forest is not just a stand of…
Beta Pictoris has been the poster child of exoplanet astronomy since before most exoplanets could be seen at all. In 1984 it gave astronomers their first image of a dusty disk around another star,…
For the family of the older child, the milestone was not measured in laboratory readouts. It was watching a 14-year-old, after years of severe seizures and developmental delay, get up and walk across…