As photos of charred forest remains emerge from California’s latest round of explosive wildfires, it’s becoming clear that a worsening wildfire season will have ecological consequences. And not just for the trees: Understory plants and fungi, and the food webs that depend on them, are also feeling the burn.
For the first time, scientists have mapped how much oceanic wilderness remains. Only 13.2 percent of the oceans are unspoiled, a shocking finding that shows the extent to which humans have reshaped the planet above and below the waves.
It’s no secret that modern humans, with our fuel-burning cars, massive ranching and agriculture practices, and penchant for disposable goods, have had a huge impact on nearly every environment across the globe. But new research shows that even our ancestors in the Bronze Age changed the chemistry of the soils they…
Fifty million years after humanity’s extinction, the world has once more grown wild. In the forests of North America, the deer-like descendants of rabbits flee attacks by large predatory rats. Giant antelope and striding baboons more reminiscent of dinosaurs roam Africa’s savannas.
It’s hard to talk to ecologists these days without drowning in doom. But a new review paper from members of the Wildlife Conservation Society suggests that amidst all the bad news, there’s still an opportunity to avert a sixth mass extinction and allow huge swaths of degraded land to recover.
Annihilation isn’t a perfect movie. But it deserves credit for striving to tackle a subject few mainstream films ever take more than a glancing interest in: the inherent weirdness, and fragility, of ecological systems. And given the harsh realities of our rapidly deteriorating biosphere, that’s something we could use…
A team of scientists have a new contender for determining the precise date that we entered the so-called Anthropocene: A lonely spruce tree on an island 400 miles south of New Zealand.
Think of the heaviest living organism on Earth, and an image of a blue whale might come to mind. In fact, the honor goes to a single massive cluster of quaking aspen stems in Utah—but maybe not for long.
More than 15,000 scientists from 184 nations have penned an open letter to humanity, politely asking their fellow bipedal primates to maybe stop destroying the planet, if that’s chill. What a curious thought.
It’s standard news to hear about the rapid decline of wildlife these days: As humanity’s environmental impact has surged since the Industrial Revolution, animals have suffered the brunt of the consequences. But megafauna—i.e. very large animals—have been the target of human activity for much longer, and many of them…
A new NASA-sponsored study shows that global methane emissions produced by livestock are 11 percent higher than estimates made last decade. Because methane is a particularly nasty greenhouse gas, the new finding means it’s going to be even tougher to combat climate change than we realized.
As we plunge deeper into the 21st century and the digital worlds we’ve built, a group of scientists is weighing a decision that could rewrite the very history of the physical world we inhabit. These researchers are trying to discern whether humanity has become a literal force of nature, one so powerful its traces will…
Sea snakes are a striking sight on the sun-dappled Pacific and Indian Ocean coral reefs they call home. They swim with deliberate, yet graceful winding movements above the reef, and they are often conspicuously-colored, with many species sporting patterns flush with yellows, oranges, and blues, broken up by stripes,…
It should be obvious to everyone at this point that humans are having an enormous impact on the planet. But how much, exactly, does our collective footprint weigh? It may sound odd, but a new scientific paper is offering an answer to that very question: a staggering 30 trillion tons.
The sixth mass extinction—the one that seven billion humans are doing their darnedest to trigger at this very moment—is shaping up to be like nothing our planet has ever seen. That’s the conclusion of a sweeping new analysis, which compared marine fossil records from Earth’s five previous mass extinction events to…
For the record, planet Earth is still in the Holocene.
We’ve heard a lot of buzz recently about the Anthropocene, the geologic epoch of man and machine. Does it exist? Are we in it right now? Later this summer, the International Stratigraphic Union will convene and attempt to answer these weighty questions.
Something strange is happening to the oceans. As coral reefs wither and fisheries collapse, octopuses are multiplying like mad. As soon as they perceive weakness, they will amass an army and invade the land, too.
How the dinosaurs went extinct is a contentious topic of endless scientific debate. Were they killed by a giant asteroid, a rash of volcanic eruptions, or some deadly combination of the two? Or, perhaps, we’ve been thinking about the problem all wrong.
Africa is one of the last great holdouts for charismatic megafauna. But as the human population continues to grow and industrialize, lions, zebras, and elephants are being edged out of existence. A harrowing new series by photographer Nick Brandt makes this transformation visceral.
