Uncertainty in climate models could mean Earth systems are perilously close to their tipping points, scientists warn.

Wildfires dot Russia’s Siberian Arctic, imaged by the Terra satellite in June 2020. Such fires are becoming significantly more common in the region. Credit: Pierre Markuse via Flickr, CC BY 2.0 ...

The planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system, several of which appear in this illustration, may all be tidally locked to their host star. Credit: European Southern Observatory/M. Kornmesser In the past 20 ...

Ten years have passed since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished after departing from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with 239 people aboard. Military and scientific personnel spent months combing unexplored ...

Fair peer review is a necessity for research across all scientific disciplines. Thousands of experts volunteer their time each year to advance scientific understanding and provide feedback to their ...

Humans have remodeled the Earth so profoundly that in 2000, atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer proposed that the Holocene epoch had ended and the “Anthropocene,” or human ...

Thunderstorms, produced when air rises through the depth of the troposphere, are notoriously difficult to represent in global climate models. Whether air parcels have the energy to rise or not does ...

Sea ice that has persisted for at least 15 days and is held fast to the shoreline is called “fast ice.” Around Antarctica, fast ice protects continental ice from ocean waves, creates unique ecological ...

Rainfall can wash topsoil from farm fields, a process that more extreme rainfall events will accelerate. Credit: John/Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 Good topsoil does not accumulate quickly. Less than a tenth ...

Equatorial plasma bubbles (EPBs) are a crucial space weather phenomenon, originating in the post-sunset hours, which adversely affect satellite-based communication and navigation systems, and high ...

Geothermal activity near Hveragerði, Iceland, has created a natural laboratory where researchers can study how ecosystems, including microbes and plans, respond to long-term warming. Credit: Sara ...

Researchers collected sediment cores near the Ebro delta to trace decades of microplastics trapped on the seafloor. Credit: Lena Heins The world produces about 380 million metric tons of plastic ...