the ice sheet’s surface. That summer—a record-breaker—Greenland shed almost six hundred billion tons of ice, producing enough water to fill a pool the size of California to a depth of four feet.

In 2015, a group of scientists at Harvard announced they’d used this self-reflexive trick to create a synthetic gene drive in yeast. (Starting with some cream-colored yeast and some red yeast, they produced colonies that, after a few generations, were all red.) This was followed three months later by an announcement from researchers at UC–San Diego

The very same qualities that have made the “domestic fishes” famous in China have made them infamous in the United States. A well-fed grass carp can weigh more than eighty pounds. In a single day it can eat almost half of its body weight, and it lays hundreds of thousands of eggs at a time. Bigheads can, on occasion, weigh as much as a hundred poun

Of course, the argument against such intervention is also compelling. The reasoning behind “genetic rescue” is the sort responsible…

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“Moving away from the kind of monomania that says, ‘The only thing we can do is cut emissions,’ or the more narrow version, which says, ‘The only thing we can do is renewables,’ I think may actually secure broader political agreement to deal with the problem. People might be more willing to spend the big money to cut emissions as part of a project

The cavern the forty-niners chanced upon is now known as Devils Hole and the “minnows” as Devils Hole pupfish, or, scientifically speaking, Cyprinodon diabolis. Devils Hole pupfish are, as Manly described them, about an inch long. They are sapphire blue, with intense black eyes and heads that are large for their body size. They’re most easily disti

The Great Barrier Reef might be thought of as the ultimate “entangled bank.” Tens of millions of years of evolution have gone into its creation, with the result that even a fist-sized piece of it is unfathomably dense with life, crammed with creatures “dependent on each other in so complex a manner” that biologists will probably never fully master

I was struck, and not for the first time, by how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.

Plaquemines has the distinction—a dubious one, at best—of being among the fastest-disappearing places on earth. Everyone who lives in the parish—and fewer and fewer people do—can point to some stretch of water that used to have a house or a hunting camp on it. This is true even of teenagers. A few years ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adm