A powerful tornado tore apart homes near Omaha, Neb., on April 26, 2024.
AP Photo/Margery A. Beck
A powerful storm system produced dozens of destructive tornadoes over three days that tore apart homes in Oklahoma, Nebraska and Iowa. A meteorologist explains the conditions that fueled them.
Existing models have over-estimated the role of north Africa as the primary source of global dust emissions for nearly 30 years.
GizemG/Shutterstock
New research reveals our understanding of dust’s role in the environment is far from settled.
Some parts of the U.S. see well over 100 inches (2.5 meters) of snow per year.
Edoardo Frola/Moment Open via Getty Images
There are an infinite number of paths an ice crystal can take before you touch it.
The El Niño pattern stands out in the warm sea surface temperature anomalies in the Pacific in 2023.
NOAA Climate.gov
An atmospheric scientist explains how El Niño works, this year’s oddities and why this phenomenon doesn’t last long.
Extreme rainfall in the Himalayas caused extensive damage in 2022 and 2023.
AP Photo/ Aqil Khan
There’s a rule of thumb that rainfall intensity increases by about 7% per degree Celsius as temperatures rise. But the increase is much higher in the mountains, scientists found.
The exoplanet K2-18b might host a water ocean.
Credits: Illustration: NASA, CSA, ESA, J. Olmsted (STScI), Science: N. Madhusudhan (Cambridge University)
The results are intriguing, but analysing the atmospheres of exoplanets is no easy task.
NASA / CSA / ESA / J. Olmsted (STScI) / Science: N. Madhusudhan (Cambridge University)
The James Webb Space Telescope has detected key carbon-bearing molecules on the potential ocean world K2-18b, including tantalising hints of a substance produced by tiny plankton on Earth.
Soaring wetland emissions of methane mirror those which accompanied previous abrupt changes in Earth’s climate.
I. Noyan Yilmaz/Shutterstock
The last time methane in the air rose so fast, Greenland warmed by 10°C within decades.
Shutterstock
Our activities now affect the entire planet. But there’s a vital debate over when we started disrupting these systems. Was it 1950 – or hundreds and thousands of years earlier?
EMANUELE VALERI/EPA
The predicted El Niño is a worry, but it doesn’t guarantee the record-breaking heat we’re seeing in parts of the Northern Hemisphere.
Soil was key to making the Earth habitable.
EyeEm / Alamy Stock Photo
What fossil records tell us about when the Earth was first covered by plants.
Saad Chaudhry/Unsplash
It can be disruptive or refreshing, and we feel it every single day. But do you ever stop to think what creates wind on our planet?
Dry conditions are likely to resume in northeastern Brazil.
Cacio Murilo/Shutterstock
From bushfires in Australia to insect-borne disease outbreaks in Colombia.
If you catch a snowflake, take a moment to look at it: It’s a formation no one has ever seen before.
(Damian McCoig/Unsplash)
Molecule by molecule, a snowflake grows and eventually begins to fall. A scientific look at the amazing nature of snowflakes and snow.
NASA
The sky looks blue on a sunny day – but at night we can see the faint glow of its true colour.
Rain and fast snowmelt sent the Yellowstone River and nearby streams raging beyond their banks in June 2022.
AP Photo/David Goldman
Millions of people around the world suffered through deadly flooding and long-lasting heat waves in 2022. A climate scientist explains the rising risks.
Philip Myrtorp / Unsplash
When something disrupts the smooth, laminar flow of high-altitude winds, your flight might get a little bumpy.
How to entangle the universe in a spider/web?, 2022, Tomás Saraceno. Courtesy the artist with thanks to Arachnophilia, neugerriemschneider, Berlin and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.
Photo Credit: Mona/Jesse Hunniford Image Courtesy Studio Tomás Saraceno and MONA Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
This new exhibition at Hobart’s Mona captures Tomás Saraceno’s collaborations with research institutes.
NASA
We should not rule out taking a closer look at exoplanets that have a poorly oxygenated atmosphere.
Shutterstock
On Australia’s rainiest days, more than 30 trillion litres can fall from the skies.