The warm, shallow ocean waters of the tropics have talkative “forests” of their own. Brightly colored mounds of coral grow in the warm ocean waters, quickly when nutrients are plentiful and more ...

Michael Carlowicz was managing editor of NASA’s Earth Observatory from 2010 to 2022. He has written about Earth science and geophysics since 1991 for several NASA divisions, the Woods Hole ...

Science suggests that to mitigate the human contribution to global warming, we should reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. Because some additional warming is inevitable—even if we ...

“There’s a debate about how cities affect rainfall,” Shepherd answers. “There are several hypotheses about what is going on, but they primarily involve the urban land use and urban aerosols.” The ...

Dating back to A.D. 870, intermittent records assembled by the Vikings record the number of weeks per year that ice occurred along the north coast of Iceland. Other, scattered records of Arctic sea ...

When scientists started to analyze the paleoclimate evidence in the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores, they found that the record also supported Milankovitch’s theory of when ice ages should occur.

Pine trees (genus Pinus) are evergreen, conifers (they produce cones that encase reproduction seeds) and can be found throughout the world, but they are native to northern temperate regions. There are ...

Less than two years after dissecting the head of the great white shark, Steno completed a manuscript on the geology of Tuscany. The locale was a shrewd choice; it celebrated the homeland of his ...

Among the mysteries of the South American Monsoon, explains Fu, is how the first thunderstorms of the wet season get started. A monsoon is an atmospheric see-saw in which the large-scale circulation ...

The cost and benefits of global warming will vary greatly from area to area. For moderate climate change, the balance can be difficult to assess. But the larger the change in climate, the more ...

Between 1950 and 2003, the world’s population grew from an estimated 2.5 billion to 6.3 billion, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. More people are affected by natural disasters today because there ...

Among the most serious Earth science and environmental policy issues confronting society are the potential changes in the Earth’s water cycle due to climate change. The science community now generally ...