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In Kubschütz, a village in the Saxon Oberlausitz, the temperature on the night of June 27 never fell below 29.4 °C, the highest night-time minimum ever recorded in Germany. Earlier that day, at…
Once a month, someone walks into a private tunnel bored under the summit ridge of the Zugspitze, sprays salt water onto a line of steel electrodes fixed in the limestone, and sends an electric…
From a satellite's usual vantage, the seam where Alaska's boreal forest gives way to open tundra looks like a smudge, a gradual fade from green to brown across hundreds of miles. Up close it is…
Picture the trail of islands and drowned peaks that runs northwest from Hawaii: the Hawaiian–Emperor chain, a conveyor belt of crust dragged over a fixed plume of hot rock rising from deep in the…
Take a climate model that runs on one supercomputer, move it to another, and you are not guaranteed to get the same climate back. Massonnet and colleagues, writing in Geoscientific Model Development…
A frog collected on the Marojejy massif in northeastern Madagascar has sat in a jar in Paris for half a century, and for most of that time it was a problem. It is the holotype of Rhombophryne…
The ceiling of a rock shelter at Awunbarna, in western Arnhem Land, carries a painted serpent more than six meters long. It has a crocodile-like head, bared teeth and a long extended tongue. Paul…
Point a telescope at a nearby star and, mostly, the star is all you get. The ring of rock, boulders and collision dust around it — the leftover scaffolding of planet building, the same kind of belt…
A rock came off the East Antarctic Ice Sheet in 2008. Cataloged as DOM 08006, for the Dominion Range where it was collected, it is one of the most primitive meteorites ever recovered, a lump that…
A forest does not only take carbon in. On a warm afternoon it hands some straight back, as a thin chemical breath of isoprene, monoterpenes and heavier molecules, the family of compounds that gives a…
For two years, a sealed culture of marine microbes fed itself in a Chinese laboratory: a cyanobacterium and the bacteria that live alongside it, recycling their own nutrients, with nothing added and…
In late July 2022, a fire set deliberately in the sandstone gorges of the Czech Elbe country began to move north. It burned into August, crossed an international border, and left two national park…