Higher temperatures caused by anthropogenic climate change made an ordinary drought into an exceptional drought that parched the American West from 2020–2022. 

Scientists have spotted microplastics, tiny pieces of plastic smaller than 5 millimeters, in some of the most pristine environments on Earth, from the depths of the Mariana Trench to the snow on Mt. Everest to the mountaintop clouds of China and Japan.

In early November 2024, a series of explosive, deadly eruptions occurred at Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki—a volcano on the Indonesian island of Flores.

A University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign study is the first to describe an electrochemical strategy to capture, concentrate and destroy mixtures of diverse chemicals known as PFAS — including the increasingly prevalent ultra-short-chain PFAS — from water in a single process.

The 2023 blaze in Lahaina, Hawaii, which claimed more than 100 lives and burned 6,500 acres of land across Maui, is a tragic example of how rapid wildfire spread can make effective response efforts impossible, resulting in the loss of life and property.

Biologists at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered the origin of a curious duplication that gives plants multiple ways to override instructions that are coded into their DNA.

On October 29, 2024, a period of intense rainfall inundated Valencia province in eastern Spain. 

The Amazon region is a global hotspot of biodiversity and plays a key role in the climate system because of its ability to store large amounts of carbon and its influence on the global water cycle.

Sea-level rise caused by climate change poses a serious and often unpredictable threat to coastal forests, and new tools are needed to help mitigate damage and allocate conservation resources.  

Using a sophisticated new modeling approach, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have estimated carbon dioxide emissions from inland waters to 22 million U.S. lakes, rivers and reservoirs.