Under a White Sky

As power stations go, geothermal plants are “clean.” Instead of burning fossil fuels, they rely on steam or superheated water pumped from underground, which is why they tend to be sited in volcanically active areas. Still, as Aradóttir explained to me, they, too, produce emissions. With the superheated water inevitably come unwanted gases, like hyd

Pister collected all the Owens pupfish left at Fish Slough, with the intention of moving them to a nearby spring. They fit into two buckets. “I distinctly remember being scared to death,” he would later write. “I had walked perhaps fifty yards when I realized that I literally held within my hands the existence of an entire vertebrate species.” Pist

There is no exact tally of how many species, like the pupfish, are now conservation-reliant. At a minimum, they number in the thousands.

The history of biological interventions designed to correct for previous biological interventions reads like Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, in which the Cat, after eating cake in the bathtub, is asked to clean up after himself: Do you know how he did it? WITH…

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Directly next door to the Center for River Studies sits the headquarters of Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. CPRA was founded in 2005, a few months after Hurricane Katrina hit, inundating New Orleans and leaving more than eighteen hundred people dead. The authority’s official mission is to implement “projects relative to th

“The melting of the Antarctic ice cap would raise sea level by four hundred feet,” the report noted. Even if the process took a thousand years to play out, the oceans would “rise about four feet every ten years,” or “forty feet per century.”

The first mammal to be fitted out with a CRISPR-assisted gene drive will, almost certainly, be a mouse. Mice are what’s known as a “model organism.” They breed quickly, are easy to raise, and their genome has been intensively studied.

“I do not see how settlers can be placed on this river,” Iberville’s brother, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, wrote to the authorities in Paris, explaining the retreat. Bienville went on to found New Orleans in 1718, in spite of his cold, wet feet. The new city was called, in honor of its watery surroundings, L’Isle de la Nouvelle Orléans. Not

To get to zero, everyone would have to stop emitting—not only Americans and Europeans and Chinese, but also Indians and Africans and South Americans. But asking countries that have contributed almost nothing to the problem to swear off carbon because other countries have already produced way, way too much of it is grossly unfair. It’s also geopolit

The Great Barrier Reef isn’t a reef so much as a collection of reefs—some three thousand in all—that stretches over one hundred thirty-five thousand square miles, an area larger than Italy. If there’s a more spectacular place on earth—or collection of places—I’m unaware of it.