Environment

High in Nepal's Shorong region sits a glacier that scientists have been watching longer than almost any other in the Himalayas. It has no famous name, only a code from an old survey: AX010. For…

Rarely does nature set up its own controlled experiment. At Qooqqup Sermia, in the fjord country south of Narsarsuaq, it has done exactly that. A single stream of ice flows down from the interior and…

For a day and a half in February 2022, Storm Eunice tore across the British Isles, the Low Countries and northern Germany, driving a red weather warning, shuttering rail networks and leaving well…

For decades the Aral Sea has stood as a monument to what human engineering can undo. Once the fourth-largest lake on Earth, it began shrinking in the 1960s when Soviet planners diverted the rivers…

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.…

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…

By the end of 29 October 2024, a rain gauge in the small town of Turís, inland from Valencia, had recorded something almost no one in Europe had seen: 771 millimetres of rain in twenty-four hours.…

For two decades, the story of Europe's air has been one of slow, hard-won improvement. Cleaner engines, tighter industrial rules, and the retreat of coal have pulled soot and sulphur down year after…

Most of the wheat that crosses an international border in a given year leaves one of about a dozen countries. Most of the nations that buy it order from several of those exporters at once, which…

Spring in the Altai arrives as a boundary moving down through the soil. The frozen layer that has held since autumn softens from the top, water becomes available to roots, and whatever grows there…