Early Eocene forest, Wyoming, U.S. Illustration by Julius Csotonyi, Smithsonian Institution Pollinators play a vital role in fertilising flowers, which grow into seeds and fruits and underpin our ...

What if we could control Earth’s climate like a thermostat? This video explores a wild but serious proposal to combat global warming—geoengineering. Learn how humanity might someday regulate the ...

Tipping points are thresholds within key Earth systems beyond which lasting changes to the environment occur. Breaching a tipping point kicks off a feedback loop that sends systems into a different ...

Scientists have uncovered a missing feedback in Earth’s carbon cycle that could cause global warming to overshoot into an ice age. As the planet warms, nutrient-rich runoff fuels plankton blooms that ...

Somewhere between 97% and 99.9% of actively publishing climate scientists agree that climate change is happening and is primarily caused by human activities. However, while science is based on ...

Around 56 million years ago, Earth suddenly got much hotter. Over about 5,000 years, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere drastically increased and global temperatures shot up by some 6°C. As we ...

Roughly 252 million years ago, Earth experienced its deadliest known extinction. Known as the Permian–Triassic Mass Extinction, or “The Great Dying,” this cataclysm wiped out over 80% of marine ...

Vera Korasidis received funding from the University of Melbourne Elizabeth and Vernon Puzey Fellowship Award. Scott Wing's fieldwork was supported by the Roland W. Brown fund of the Department of ...