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Earth has almost no memory of its own violent childhood. Plate tectonics keeps recycling the crust, erasing the scars of the asteroid barrage that battered every young world in the inner Solar…
Almost everyone who has bought a house near water has met the 100-year flood line. It shows up on insurance forms and zoning maps, a single crisp boundary that seems to promise certainty: inside, you…
Watch a group of apes just before the food arrives, and you can feel the room tighten. Bananas or sugarcane are about to land in the middle of a hierarchy, and everyone knows it. In those loaded…
A fire needs three things: heat, oxygen and fuel. Cut off any one and it dies. What made the end-Triassic so catastrophic, a new study argues, is that the landscape kept regrowing its own fuel, fast…
For as long as anyone had bothered to record it, Hayli Gubbi did nothing. It sat at the southern end of the Erta Ale volcanic range in the Afar depression, a low basaltic shield with no eruption in…
Walk any tide line today and you will find the arrangement everywhere: a hermit crab in a borrowed shell, worms and sponges crusting the inside of an abandoned whelk, a whole small economy built…
A volcano is never truly silent. Even when nothing erupts, the ground beneath a place like Askja hums with a faint, ceaseless vibration: ocean waves pounding a distant coast, wind dragging over rock,…
A soil-protection law is easy to pass and hard to grade. A parliament can require crop rotation, subsidize farmers who leave wildflower strips at the edges of their fields, or mandate ground cover to…
Farmers know the feeling before they can name it. A field that once filled the bins now comes up a little short, and then a little shorter, and the reason is not the weather this season or the seed.…
Picture an ant trying to walk a trail while a herd of elephants stampedes down the same path. That is roughly the problem Prem Kumar and his group at Northwestern set themselves, and the ant,…
Ask how often a river floods catastrophically and the standard answer comes wrapped in a number: the 100-year flood, an event so severe it strikes, on average, once a century. It is the figure…
A bobolink that summers in a North American hayfield winters in the grasslands of Argentina, a round trip of roughly 12,000 miles. A spoon-billed sandpiper hatched on the Arctic coast of Russia will…