The year 2024 was a record-breaking one, and not in a good way. In July, Earth's average temperature was the highest it has been in at least 175 years, with July 22 specifically being the hottest day on record. This past summer was the hottest summer since about the year 1880, this year's hurricane season started with Beryl — the earliest Category 4 hurricane on record — and a report published in June confirmed that human-driven global warming is at an all-time high.
Space programs are often concerned with what's happening "out there" in the universe, a large portion of what space agencies like NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) do is monitor what is happening on the surface of the Earth. This includes keeping track of things like weather, but also human-induced drivers of global warming such as the emissions of greenhouse gasses, deforestation and changes in seasonal ice coverage in Arctic and Antarctic regions. That's important because research has shown human activities are indeed the primary drivers of climate change.
With debate ongoing over water allotments from Western rivers, anticipated water shortages complicate the future outlook for agricultural irrigation. And extreme weather has changed the game for row crop farmers — even those with irrigation systems.
Early on a cool September morning, farmer Josh Payne tends to his flock in Concordia, just east of Kansas City, Missouri. As Payne opens the gate, about a thousand sheep round the corner and bound into fresh grass.
The pasture the flock grazes was once corn and soybeans, along with the rest of the Payne family farm. Josh’s grandfather Charles Payne cultivated nearly a thousand acres of row crops for decades.
Alyssa Carrell, an ecologist with the Plant Systems Biology group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, started her science career studying the tallest inhabitants in the forest, but today she is focused on some of its smallest — the microbial organisms that play an outsized role in plant health.
Switzerland and Italy have redrawn a border that traverses an Alpine peak as melting glaciers shift the historically defined frontier.
The two countries agreed to the modifications beneath the Matterhorn, one of the highest mountains in Europe, which straddles Switzerland’s Zermatt region and Italy’s Aosta valley.
Livestock production is an important component of U.S. agriculture, with global demand for meat and dairy expected to double in the coming decades. This increase will lead to intensified grazing on U.S. grasslands, potentially exacerbating water quality degradation from livestock waste runoff into waterways.
Zillow has announced that its real estate property listings in the US will soon feature details about climate risks, including the potential for wildfires, flooding, extreme temperatures, high winds, and poor air quality. Buyers will also see what types of insurance are required or recommended for a property.
Rivers are nature’s highways, supplying nearby areas with life-sustaining water, nutrients, and biodiversity on their journeys to larger bodies of water. These days, however, they are far from pristine. A harmful substance is making its way down rivers and into oceans around the world: plastic debris.
Barriers that are currently preventing the use of greater percentages of biomass-based diesel fuel blended into petroleum diesel have been identified, along with strategies to overcome them, according to researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).