Around the world, billions of people still lack reliable access to safe drinking water. The United Nations estimates that 2.2 billion people do not have safely managed drinking water, while regions from California to the Middle East increasingly rely on desalination plants to turn ocean water into fresh water. Desalination can provide a critical water […]

Geologists studying some of Earth’s oldest volcanic rocks have found evidence that water was already influencing the planet’s interior and helping drive volcanic activity more than three billion years ago. The international team, led by Adelaide University geochemist Dr. Eric Vandenburg, examined ancient rocks from Western Australia’s Pilbara Craton. Their analysis suggests that water had […]

A major Atlantic Ocean circulation system that plays a central role in regulating Earth’s climate has been weakening across a broad region for nearly two decades, according to new research. The trend could have important consequences for weather, rainfall, storms, and sea level in regions around the Atlantic and beyond. The study, led by researchers […]

Earth’s center of mass does not stay perfectly still. As water, ice, and air move around the planet with the seasons, they redistribute enough weight to push the center of mass back and forth by fractions of an inch relative to Earth’s geometric center. NASA scientists carefully track this subtle motion because Earth’s center of […]

What’s the best way to manage a forest? Australians have argued about this for decades. The debate is often framed as binary: do we protect forests entirely, or harvest trees to support local economies and communities? The reality is more interesting, as our new research on a long-forgotten experiment in Victoria’s mountain ash forests reveals. […]