Just a few weeks ago, the Trump administration said it was going to pull hundreds of scientific instruments out of ocean waters near the Pacific Northwest, North Carolina, and the Irminger Sea, south of Greenland. It was part of the administration’s plan to roll back funding from a multimillion dollar...
The Colorado River is vanishing — and the fixes are getting weird
The crisis on the Colorado River is simple: The seven Western states that border the essential waterway use more water than it contains. Chronic overuse has drained its two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and a two-decade drought cycle has pushed them to the point of collapse. The...
The hidden toll of wood pellet power
After the world’s largest producer of wood pellets built what it called a state-of-the-art biomass facility near Ruby Bell’s home in Faison, North Carolina, she started organizing. Bell told her residents about the potential impacts, and tried to prevent the company from adding to the area’s environmental burden. It has...
Nearly 1.5M people in Louisiana depend on this strip of marsh. But it needs saving.
There’s an increasingly narrow strip of marshland in New Orleans that hardly anyone lives on, but without it, hundreds of thousands of people in Louisiana will face far greater risks from storms and floods. The area, commonly called the New Orleans Land Bridge, separates Lake Pontchartrain from the Gulf of...
America’s data center backlash is bipartisan — can it stay that way?
This month, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, unveiled a set of sweeping recommendations to rein in rampant data center development, urging Texas lawmakers to aggressively regulate the tech industry in a state that has a reputation for welcoming new development with open arms. At...
As the world warms, the risk of snakebites is rising
On a humid Thursday morning, the Ramathibodi Poison Center in Bangkok thrums with activity. Four staff members field roughly 130 emergency hotline calls every day. By 11 a.m., they have already answered 42. Some callers are worried they’ve consumed something toxic. Others are medical students seeking advice on treating overdose...
Efforts to save kelp forests from ocean warming are ramping up
In the coastal waters off British Columbia, tribal volunteers from the Haida Nation dive for purple sea urchins amid a dense forest of rippling golden-brown kelp fronds. Sunlight filters through the canopy, creating a mesmerizing dance of light and shadow, as rays and sea lions wend through the kelp maze,...
Trump wants to unleash ‘America First’ fishing. What’s he really doing?
When Kekuewa Kikiloi boarded a research vessel to visit the northwestern Hawaiian islands in 2002, he didn’t know what to expect. Kikiloi grew up on Oʻahu, but like a lot of Native Hawaiians, he had never had the opportunity to visit the uninhabited islands and atolls scattered to the west...
Is New England’s new hydropower transmission line paying off?
When the New England Clean Energy Connect transmission line started carrying electricity from Canada into Maine in January, supporters hailed the project as a triumph for renewable power. Now, after nearly six months of operations, the early numbers raise questions about whether the project will be able to advance the region’s...
How FIFA’s climate solution has turned into ‘water-gate’
When the United States takes the pitch against Australia this afternoon, millions of soccer fans will tune in. Anyone who hasn’t watched a match since the last World Cup will notice something new: players stopping midway through each half to drink some water. Introduced in the name of player safety,...