Ride along to the scene of the collapse

On Thanksgiving Day, 47 scientists set off on a two-month voyage to explore uncharted seas. No ship’s hull has ever parted the waters they’re headed to. That’s because until a few years ago the 3,000-square-kilometer region was underneath the Larsen B ice shelf just east of the Antarctic Peninsula. It may have been 2005 and [...]

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Beagle returns to the boundless main?

An English group called the Beagle Project Pembrokeshire is building a replica of the ship that carried Charles Darwin to the Galapagos and beyond. Founders David Lort-Phillips, who counts the Beagle‘s mate as an ancestor, and Peter McGrath intend to dispatch this new Beagle on another circumnavigation beginning in 2009. The ship will return to [...]

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There’s no place like home

Here’s to Kofi Annan for talking about the “frightening lack of leadership” from some of the world’s economic (and emissions) giants at a conference on climate change in Nairobi, Kenya. There’s two sides to every story, of course, and our government’s goes like this: “We think the United States has been leading in its groundbreaking [...]

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Swaddled in clouds

Everything is connected, and in case you’ve been having doubts lately, here’s a cool reminder. It comes in the form of a hypnotic animation from the National Center for Atmospheric Research – a global model of atmospheric water vapor moving around the Earth. Watch as westward-plodding tropical clouds hiccup into the subtropics. From there, raging [...]

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Himalaya: homeopathy for climate change?

Imagine the big picture of climate change on our planet. Start small: picture our species sucking vast reservoirs of carbon out of the ground, vaporizing it, and stuffing it into the atmosphere the way you shove a pillow into a too-small pillowcase. Now remember, the Earth is a closed system, so any such feat of [...]

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