Belém, Brazil — The Amazon rainforest is a poster child for the perils of climate change. Deforestation and warming temperatures threaten to push the iconic forest past its limits. So Belém, in the heart of the Amazon, was a momentous place for global climate leaders to meet on the 10th anniversary of an international pledge…
On August 16, 2012, residents of the tiny Dutch village of Huizinge were rattled by an inexplicably large 3.6 magnitude earthquake. Gas extraction in the nearby Groningen gas field, one of the largest onshore gas fields in the world, was the trigger. The area typically does not experience natural earthquakes, and this was the worst…
An erupting volcano may have kicked off a chain of events that led to the swift dance of the Black Plague across Europe in the 14th century, in a pandemic that killed tens of millions of people. New analyses of tree ring data, ice cores and historical accounts suggest that a powerful volcanic eruption somewhere…
A new climate record suggests that Homo floresiensis — pint-size human relatives nicknamed “hobbits” — endured thousands of years of intensifying drought before disappearing from their Indonesian island home of Flores. The prolonged drying may have stressed both the hobbits and the miniature elephant-like animals they hunted for food, researchers report December 8 in Communications…
An intense swarm of earthquakes around Greece’s Santorini Island in January has revealed a fiery underground link between two neighboring and historically explosive volcanoes. Analyses of seismic activity from June 2024 through February 2025, along with changes in the island’s surface elevation, suggest that the same well of magma feeding the Santorini volcano may also…
