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In the first week of April 2025, moorland in western and northern Britain was burning, weeks before the start of the fire season in southern Europe. By August, Galicia had suffered the largest…
The night of 20–21 June 2024 left the French Alpine village of La Bérarde half buried. The Étançons river, swollen and carrying rock, came through the Écrins massif hamlet and filled it with debris;…
Think of the jet stream as a motorway for weather. Most days the traffic moves briskly west to east, and one system gives way to the next before either can do much damage. But every so often the flow…
The physics of climate change runs on decades and centuries. Politics runs on the last hot summer. A new modeling study asks what happens when you wire the two together and let the short clock start…
Over roughly 34 hours in July 2019, the desert northeast of the town of Ridgecrest, California, tore open twice. A magnitude 6.4 shock struck on the Fourth of July; the next evening a magnitude 7.1…
A volcano rarely gives you six days' notice. Ruang, a 725-metre cone rising straight out of the sea in North Sulawesi, gave Indonesia's monitors almost exactly that in April 2024. This time, the…
On 28 May 2025, a mountainside above the Lötschental valley in southern Switzerland gave way. Rock had been loading onto the Birchgletscher for years; when the glacier finally failed, roughly 9.57…
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,…
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…
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,…
Balance a boulder on a narrow pedestal and leave it alone for ten thousand years, and it becomes a strange kind of instrument. Every big earthquake that shook the ground beneath it was a test the…