In Malaysia huge mounds of plastic waste, dumped in the open, piled up as recyclers struggled to cope with the influx of packaging from everyday goods, such as foods and laundry detergents, from as far afield as Germany, America, and Brazil From grubby packaging engulfing small Southeast Asian communities to […]
Investment in oil and gas exploration is set to soar 85 percent over the next decade, reaching $1 trillion annually by 2029 Plans by oil and gas majors to spend $4.9 trillion on fuel exploration are “poles apart” from the goal of the Paris climate deal to limit the global […]
Methane bubbles up from below a lake. (Credit: Strelyuk/Shutterstock) Turkey’s Mount Chimaera is on fire, and has been for millennia. Dozens of campfire-sized flames burst straight of the mountain’s rocky, sea-facing slope. These eternal flames are fueled by methane, the odorless, colorless substance that provides much of our natural gas […]
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio arrives at a press conference about the city’s strategy to respond to climate change on April 22, 2019 Mayor Bill de Blasio marked Earth Day by outlining measures to make New York greener Monday, including dramatically cutting the carbon footprint of the city’s signature […]
A representation of the timeline of the universe. Credit: WMAP Collaboration Most everybody is familiar with the Big Bang — the notion that an impossibly hot, dense universe exploded into the one we know today. But what do we know about what came before? In the quest to resolve several puzzles discovered […]
Five years of observations from NASA satellites reveal the steady disappearance of Peruvian forests. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory Years of deforestation in Peru are visible from space, tracked in a new animation created from NASA satellite views. And the forest loss is escalating at an alarming rate. The image series […]
JIE ZHAO/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES Most plastics have a chemical history that makes starting a new life a challenge. The dyes and flame retardants that make them perfect for say, a couch cushion or a bottle of detergent, make them tough to transform into a desirable end product—one of the […]
SCI impactor on way to Ryugu asteroid . Credit: JAXA/The University of Tokyo/Kochi University/Rikkyo University/Nagoya University/Chiba Institute of Technology/Meiji University/The University of Aizu/AIST Incoming asteroids have been scarring our home planet for billions of years. This month humankind left our own mark on an asteroid for the first time: Japan’s […]
Threatened: Lemurs in Madagascar’s Vohibola forest are in danger of being wiped out by poaching and logging Under a leaden sky, six rangers walk silently in single file through Vohibola, one of the last primary forests in eastern Madagascar. Alert to the slightest movement and sound, Michael Tovolahy’s patrol is […]
Millions of tonnes of plastic end up in the oceans every, affecting marine wildlife all along the food chain Knee-deep in water on a picture-postcard Lesbos island beach, a team of Greek university students gently deposits a wall-sized PVC frame on the surface before divers moor it at sea. Holding […]