A Mystery That Took 13,200 Years to Crack
Hidden in the tusk of a 34-year-old mastodon was a record of time and space that helped explain his violent death.
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Eric Bronson / Michigan Photography / University of Michigan Museum of Natural History The Terrifying Warning Lurking in the Earth’s Ancient Rock Record
Our climate models could be missing something big.
Brendan Pattengale What Made Me Reconsider the Anthropocene
Whether our civilization is transient or not, its effects on the living world will last forever.
Joe & Clair Carnegie / Libyan Soup / Getty The Amazon Is Not Earth’s Lungs
Humans could burn every living thing on the planet and still not dent its oxygen supply.
Marizilda Cruppe / Amnesty International / Reuters The Anthropocene Is a Joke
On geological timescales, human civilization is an event, not an epoch.
Stuart Gleave / Getty When a Killer Climate Catastrophe Struck the World's Oceans
The worst extinction in Earth’s history offers chilling predictions for the planet’s future—and for humanity’s efforts to keep climate doom at bay.
John Schults / Reuters A Climate Catastrophe Paved the Way for the Dinosaurs’ Reign
“The need to understand strange events like the Carnian Pluvial Episode has taken on new urgency."
Bob Strong / Reuters Scientists Have Uncovered a Disturbing Climate Change Precedent
During the rise of mammals, Earth's temperatures spiked in a scary way that the planet may experience again soon.
Mike Hutchings / Reuters Why Earth’s History Appears So Miraculous
The strange, cosmic reason our evolutionary path will look ever luckier the longer we survive.
A Foreboding Similarity in Today’s Oceans and a 94-Million-Year-Old Catastrophe
The ocean is suffocating—but not for the first time.
NASA / AP
