Climate change

Why Climate Scientists Depend on Alaska’s Indigenous Communities Now More Than Ever

UTQIAĠVIK, ALASKA—Arnold Brower Jr., a 70-year-old Iñupiat whaling captain, can recall his first encounter with scientists clearly. It was 1977, and the International Whaling Commission (IWC) had just placed a moratorium on bowhead whale hunting, after a US government-led population survey determined the marine mammals’ numbers to be dangerously low. But Brower, who has been…

Climate Change Maddie Stone

This Is What Half a Year For One of Greenland’s Most Imperiled Glaciers Looks Like

Satellites have changed how we see the world. That includes being able to watch climate change overrun everything beautiful in agonizing detail. Behold, the Petermann Glacier, a wending trail of ice that descends from Greenland’s ice sheet down to an icy tongue sticking out over a fjord on the island’s northwest edge. The animation above,…

Earther Brian Kahn

Giving Indigenous People Land Rights is a No-Brainer for Fighting Climate Change

Ever since climate change become a widely-recognized problem, international leaders have been looking at forests as one of the best opportunities for greenhouse gas mitigation. One thing that they overlooked, up until very recently, is that forests aren’t just full of trees. Millions of people live in the world’s remaining forests, and evidence is mounting…

Environmental Justice Lou Del Bello

Scientists Are Planning a Cruise Into the Breach Left by the Larsen C Iceberg

The Larsen C iceberg may have broken away from Antarctica in July, but the sciencing is just commencing. So far, scientists have been limited to checking in on what’s happened to the ice shelf and the 2,240-square-mile iceberg it calved by satellite. Those images have been instructive (and often spectacular), but nothing compares to getting…

Earther Brian Kahn

The Latest Wildfires in a Destructive Season Are Ravaging Northern California [Updating]

A night of wildfire-induced terror in Napa has given way to a morning hellscape. Unchecked fires raged through five northern California counties overnight on Sunday, incinerating an as yet uncounted number of structures, forcing harrowing hospital evacuations and burning tens of thousands of acres. Napa and Sonoma counties were the hardest hit, according to SF…

Earth Science Brian Kahn

Hurricane Nate Sets Record for Most Consecutive Atlantic Hurricanes Since at Least 1893

Tropical Depression Nate, the former hurricane which pummeled the Gulf Coast near Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama at Category 1 status early Sunday, has made the 2017 hurricane season one of the worst on record since 1893 and possibly earlier. As Colorado State University meteorologist Philip Klotzbach noted on Twitter this weekend, the last time nine consecutive…

Climate Change Tom McKay

Need a Reminder That All the Glaciers Are Melting? There’s a Twitter Bot for That

Climate change and ice, they do not mix. I know it. You know it. And now there’s a Twitter bot here to continually remind you of the existential crisis that rising temperatures pose to glaciers. Conceived by Aslak Grinsted, a climate scientist at the Niels Bohr Institute’s Center for Ice and Climate, Daily Glacier Bot…

Earther Brian Kahn

The Trump Administration Considers the Walrus and Decides It’s Fine

On World Animal Day, October 4, the Trump administration declined to list the Pacific walrus as endangered. In its determination, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that while the walruses “will experience a future reduction in availability of sea ice” they are unable to reliably predict the magnitude of the effect, and therefore, unable…

Earther Ari Phillips

More Evidence That Air Travel Will Be Miserable in a Hotter Future

Air travel is awful, and it’s only going to get worse in the future. But it’s not just that airlines are going to keep jacking up fees, canceling your flights at the last minute, and passing out bags of sand-flavored pretzels that exacerbate your dehydration-fueled headache. Rising global temperatures could make future flights more vom-inducing.…

Earther Maddie Stone

Two Looming Volcanic Eruptions Could Slow Climate Change, But They Aren’t Going to Stop It

Following a pattern of everything being terrible in 2017, two volcanoes are primed to erupt along the western edge of the Ring of Fire. Mt. Agung in Bali, Indonesia has forced 144,000 into shelters beyond the 7.5 mile exclusion zone, while the volcano on Ambae Island in Vanuatu has forced all 11,000 residents to evacuate,…

Earther Brian Kahn

New Sunlit Images of Antarctica’s Massive Iceberg Are Breathtakingly Beautiful

When a trillion ton iceberg snapped off the Antarctic Peninsula’s Larsen C ice shelf in July, the entire world spent a few days geeking out over stunning satellite imagery of Earth’s frozen continent. But those who’ve stuck with the Delaware-sized iceberg, now called A68, on its slow journey into the Weddell Sea, know that the…

Earther Maddie Stone

An Enormous Hole in Antarctica’s Sea Ice Could Help Solve a Climate Riddle

An enormous hole in the the wintertime sea ice surrounding Antarctica is attracting considerable scientific attention. Researchers think the so-called Weddell polynya is part of a natural cycle, but its present size—the biggest it’s been since it was first spotted in the 1970s—could help us understand the processes controlling Antarctic circulation, and how the Southern…

Earth Science Maddie Stone

Neil DeGrasse Tyson: What If We Just Turned the Hurricanes Into Electricity

Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson had some seriously weird thoughts on hurricanes in an interview on Sunday, telling Sunday TODAY he believes man should harness the power of hurricanes for good rather than run from them, as one tends to do when 155mph winds and catastrophic storm surge are heading towards one’s beach house. While discussing…

Climate Change Tom McKay

We’ve Grossly Underestimated How Much Cow Farts Are Contributing to Global Warming

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. We’ve known for quite some time that greenhouse gases…

Climate Change George Dvorsky

‘There Are No Words’: Tourists Spot Hundreds of Polar Bears Swarming Whale Carcass in Siberia

There are around 26,000 polar bears on the planet out there doing their best as the ice caps melt. We’ve all seen the infamous starving polar bear picture, which has become a symbol (rightfully or not) of the impact of climate change on vulnerable species. But last week, instead of starvation came a story of…

Tech News Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Tropical Forests Now Have a Serious Carbon Footprint Problem

Full-on deforestation is a major environmental problem, but what about seemingly less impactful changes, like forest degradation and disturbance? A new study published today in the journal Science finds that these less eye-catching human impacts are more harmful than has been assumed, and are actually causing tropical forests to now emit more carbon than they…

Earther Ari Phillips

Politics Is Making Puerto Rico’s Problems Harder

Nearly a week after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, President Trump finally waived the Jones Act for the island, allowing more emergency supplies reach the battered territory’s shores. The World War I-era law prevented foreign-owned ships from delivering their goods for days, leaving Puerto Rico without enough food, water, and fuel. And that’s…

Tech News Adam Clark Estes

Thermometers Have Continued Bad News for Us

Thermometers have been around in their modern conception since roughly the 17th century. But they are absolutely screaming evidence at us right now that something continues to be deeply wrong, just as they have been for a while now to anyone paying attention. The first week of autumn has shattered century-old heat records in multiple…

Climate Change Tom McKay

The Next Generation of the World’s Longest-Living Trees Might Die Young

As the oldest individual organisms on the planet, Great Basin bristlecone pine trees are nothing if not resilient. But rising temperatures due to climate change are putting these trees, which can live to be over 5,000 years old, under a new and worrisome kind of pressure, according to a new study. Bristlecones grow just below…

Earther Katie Valentine

Welcome to Earther

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…

Earther Maddie Stone

Why Climate Scientists Depend on Alaska’s Indigenous Communities Now More Than Ever

This Is What Half a Year For One of Greenland’s Most Imperiled Glaciers Looks Like

Giving Indigenous People Land Rights is a No-Brainer for Fighting Climate Change

Scientists Are Planning a Cruise Into the Breach Left by the Larsen C Iceberg

The Latest Wildfires in a Destructive Season Are Ravaging Northern California [Updating]

Hurricane Nate Sets Record for Most Consecutive Atlantic Hurricanes Since at Least 1893

Need a Reminder That All the Glaciers Are Melting? There’s a Twitter Bot for That

The Trump Administration Considers the Walrus and Decides It’s Fine

More Evidence That Air Travel Will Be Miserable in a Hotter Future

Two Looming Volcanic Eruptions Could Slow Climate Change, But They Aren’t Going to Stop It

New Sunlit Images of Antarctica’s Massive Iceberg Are Breathtakingly Beautiful

An Enormous Hole in Antarctica’s Sea Ice Could Help Solve a Climate Riddle

Neil DeGrasse Tyson: What If We Just Turned the Hurricanes Into Electricity

We’ve Grossly Underestimated How Much Cow Farts Are Contributing to Global Warming

‘There Are No Words’: Tourists Spot Hundreds of Polar Bears Swarming Whale Carcass in Siberia

Tropical Forests Now Have a Serious Carbon Footprint Problem

Politics Is Making Puerto Rico’s Problems Harder

Thermometers Have Continued Bad News for Us

The Next Generation of the World’s Longest-Living Trees Might Die Young

Welcome to Earther

Apple’s Siri Isn’t Just Going to Use One Chatbot. It’s Going to Use All of Them

Why ‘For All Mankind’ Season 5 Is the Key to the Rest of the Series

ASUS ZenScreen 15.6-Inch Portable Monitor Is Now Cheaper Than Black Friday in Amazon’s Big Spring Sale

Early Wildfires Are Surging Across the US—and Trump’s New Fire Agency Isn’t Ready

INIU Brings Another Power Bank to the Spring Sale as SnapGo Keychain Portable Charger Drops to Its Lowest Price

Attorney Hit With Historic Fine for Citing AI-Generated Cases

Travelers Experiencing the Longest Security Lines in TSA History

Could There Be a ‘Project Hail Mary’ Sequel?

Sonos Play Review: Call It a Comeback

Sonos Era 100 SL Review: The Cheapest Way Into Wired Sonos Sound

Asus ROG’s Massive Swift OLED Gaming Monitor Epitomizes Excess in the Best Way

The Ikea Varmblixt Smart Lamp Fills a Donut Hole in My Life

Nothing Headphone A vs. Headphone 1: Which Pair of ANC Wireless Headphones Wins?

Asus ROG’s Cetra Open Wireless Gaming Earbuds Might Be Better Than Wearing a Headset

Nintendo’s Talking Flower Is Annoying as Hell. I Love It

Level Lock Pro Review: As Good as a Secret Smart Lock Gets

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