Scientists have discovered 20 new species of plants and animals that have not seen in decades near the Bolivian capital of La Paz, Zongo Valley, which is known as the "heart" of the region.

Do you ever get a sinking feeling that something is terribly wrong? It could be because something is. A new study is revealing that land is literally sinking in all around the world right under our feet.

A living member of species of tortoise not seen in more than 110 years and feared to be extinct has been found in a remote part of the Galápagos island of Fernandina. An adult female Chelonoidis phantasticus, also known as the Fernandina giant tortoise, was spotted on Sunday by a joint expedition of the Galápagos National Park and the US-based Galapagos Conservancy, Ecuador’s environment ministry said.

2020 was a year of unremitting extreme climate events, from heat waves to wildfires to hurricanes, many of which scientists have directly linked to human-caused climate change (SN: 8/27/20). Each event has taken a huge toll in lives lost and damages incurred. As of early October, the United States alone had weathered at least 16 climate- or weather-related disasters each costing more than $1 billion.

We may have our own opinions as to what is important in life but when it comes to important creatures, it seems as if bees have that title sewn up. At the last meeting of the Royal Geographical Society of London, the EarthWatch Institute came to a startling conclusion. They declared that bees are the most important living being on the planet, and for good reason.

The promise of negative emissions is baked into most “net zero” pledges. But putting that into practice is easier said than done.

Just as the United States has needed a unified, national response to COVID-19, it needs one for dealing with climate change, President-elect Joe Biden said Saturday as he rolled out key members of his environmental team.

A mysterious, previously undiscovered supervolcano may be lurking beneath Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. A new study suggests a wide crater, created when the supervolcano exploded, connects at least four existing volcanoes. It’s so big that if the supervolcano erupted during the last few thousand years, it could have disrupted civilizations around the world, says John Power, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Alaska Volcano Observatory. Power presents the findings at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union on December 7.

An oil tanker which has been abandoned since 2015 is deteriorating, seeping oil and could cause an environmental catastrophe if the 1 million barrels of crude it contains becomes a more serious spillage. The vessel, called the Safer, is decaying in the Red Sea north of the Yemeni city of Al Hudaydah, where access is controlled by the Houthi faction.

World leaders pledged to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 at a virtual UN climate meeting on Saturday.

Jennifer Jones spent most of her summer at home, as so many of us did, trying to avoid the plague. Jones, 45, lives in Tavernier, a community in the Florida Keys just south of Key Largo, and passed a lot of time in her yard, puttering around with plants. At some point, a mosquito landed on her. That’s not unusual in Florida, and Jones doesn’t remember this mosquito bite in particular.

When Hurricane Delta hit Puerto Morelos, Mexico, in October, a team known as the Brigade waited anxiously for the sea to quiet. The group, an assortment of tour guides, diving instructors, park rangers, fishermen and researchers, needed to get in the water as soon as possible. The coral reef that protects their town — an undersea forest of living limestone branches that blunted the storm’s destructive power — had taken a beating.

You're probably thinking the same thing I was when I first heard of a global sand shortage: "I've seen massive deserts. How are we possibly running out of sand?" It's not a stretch to say that sand is the foundation of our cities. It's a key ingredient in the concrete we use to construct highways and buildings. We use it to make glass. It's even in the chips that power our phones and computers. We use 50 billion tons of sand every year. And it turns out that not all sand is created equal.

The outlook for five Australian world heritage sites including the Great Barrier Reef, the Blue Mountains and the Gondwana rainforests, has deteriorated, according to a global report that finds climate change is now the number one threat to the planet’s natural world heritage.

As an extreme year for hurricanes, wildfires and heat waves comes to an end, the head of the United Nations challenged world leaders to make 2021 the year that humanity ends its “war on nature” and commits to a future free of planet-warming carbon pollution.

Plate tectonics may have begun 4 billion years ago, almost a billion years earlier than we thought, according to a new analysis of ancient rocks. The claim has earned a mixed response from geologists. Many argue that Earth was too hot at the time for plate tectonics in its modern form.

Paddling in a canoe through the flood waters left by Hurricane Eta in his rural village near the north coast of Honduras, Adán Herrera took stock of the damage. “Compared with Hurricane Mitch, this caused more damage because the water rose so fast,” said Herrera, 33, a subsistence farmer who is living on top of a nearby levee with his wife and child while they wait for the water to recede. “We’re afraid we might not have anything to eat.”

Green spaces – trees, shrubs and grasses – can improve air quality and may lower heart disease deaths, according to preliminary research to be presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2020. The meeting will be held virtually, Friday, November 13 - Tuesday, November 17, 2020, and is a premier global exchange of the latest scientific advancements, research and evidence-based clinical practice updates in cardiovascular science for health care worldwide.

North Atlantic hurricanes are retaining far more of their strength when they hit land because of global warming, say scientists. Previously, experts believed these storms died down quickly once they made landfall. But over the past 50 years, the time it takes for hurricanes to dissipate on the coast has almost doubled. Researchers says that climate change gives the storms more energy, which continues to power them over land.

Every morning, I wake up to the sound of a new nail thudding into the coffin of yet another institution of U.S. democracy. From the craven and brazen police violence this summer to the sitting president’s encouragement of white supremacist militias, to protesters disappearing and being held without charge, to the president’s outright refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, it’s clear that American democracy is on life support.