Climate

Bright flecks of burning wood stream through the smoky air and toward a hapless house. Before the one-story structure, the glowing specks, each merely centimeters in size, seem insignificant. But each lofted ember is a seed of destruction. Researchers estimate that embers cause somewhere between 60 to 90 percent of home ignitions.

Next to the house stands a trash bin, its lid propped open with sheets of cardboard inside. The fiery spores enter and in seconds flames sprout inside. Within minutes, a column of fire rises and licks the house’s sidewall. Black flaps of vinyl siding begin to peel and writhe. Burning chunks fall to the ground, and a crackling, smoldering fissure grows up the wall. Orange, blue and purple flames roar as they ascend toward the roof. More

Earth has entered a grim new climate reality.

The planet has officially passed its first climate tipping point. Relentlessly rising heat in the oceans has now pushed corals around the world past their limit, causing an unprecedented die-off of global reefs and threatening the livelihoods of nearly a billion people, scientists say in a new report published October 13.

Even under the most optimistic future warming scenario — one in which global warming does not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times — all warm-water coral reefs are virtually certain to pass a point of no return. That makes this “one of the most pressing ecological losses humanity confronts,” the researchers say in Global Tipping Points Report 2025. More

Antarctic krill keep revealing new superpowers.

Euphausia superba, the Southern Ocean’s ubiquitous krill species, sequester large amounts of carbon via their profuse poop. Now, scientists have identified another way in which the swimming crustaceans may modulate Earth’s climate: by sending their leftovers down to the bottom of the sea.

Laboratory observations of krills’ filter feeding behavior suggest that when food is plentiful — such as during a phytoplankton bloom — ejected “boluses” of leftover food also sequester carbon, researchers report October 7 in Biology Letters. More

A massive bolt of lightning that lit up the sky from Dallas to Kansas City, Mo., in October 2017 is officially the longest single flash ever recorded.

A reanalysis of satellite data collected during the storm revealed that this megaflash spanned 829 kilometers and lasted 7.39 seconds, says Michael Peterson, an applied physicist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. A study describing the event was published online July 31 in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.   More

July has washed across the United States with unusually destructive, deadly torrents of rain.

In the first half of the month alone, historically heavy downpours sent rivers in Central Texas spilling far beyond their banks, causing at least 130 deaths. Rains prompted flash flooding across wildfire-scarred landscapes in New Mexico and flooded subway stations in New York City. Roadways in New Jersey turned into rivers, sweeping two people to their deaths as the floodwaters carried away their car. A tropical depression dumped up to 30 centimeters of rain in one day on parts of North Carolina, leading to at least six more deaths. More

An army of treelike creatures called Ents marches to war in the second The Lord of the Rings movie, The Two Towers, walking for miles through dark forests. Once they arrive at the fortress of the evil wizard Saruman, the Ents hurl giant boulders, climb over walls and even rip open a dam to wipe out their enemy.

Mobile trees like the Ents are found throughout science fiction and fantasy worlds. The treelike alien Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy uses twiggy wings to fly. Trees called Evermean fight the main character Link in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom video game. And Harry Potter’s Whomping Willow — well, it whomps anyone who gets too close. More

Vanilla plants could have a future that’s not so sweet.

Wild relatives of the vanilla plant — which could be essential if the original cash crop disappears — may someday live in different places than their usual pollinators, according to two climate change predictions. The result could be a major mismatch, with habitat overlap between one vanilla species and its pollinator decreasing by up to 90 percent, researchers report July 3 in Frontiers in Plant Science. More

In recent weeks, extreme heat waves have broiled the United States, China and Europe. But scientists are warning of another hazardous form of heat: chronic heat. In places like Miami and Phoenix, temperatures can soar for months at a time without reaching heat wave levels, potentially contributing to health issues such as kidney disfunction, sleep apnea and depression. But too little research has focused on how these impacts may compound over months of exposure, University of Miami climate and health researcher Mayra Cruz and colleagues report in the June Environmental Research Climate.

“It’s the family that lives with conditions that are just a little bit too hot all the time and no air conditioning,” says Victoria Turner, an urban planner at UCLA who was not involved in the study. “The mother is pregnant in hot conditions, their children go to bed without air conditioning and go to schools without air conditioning, and then that’s changing their developmental physiology.” More