Top Environment News

September 11, 2026

Top Headlines

Wasps Are Disappearing This Summer, and Scientists Are Worried

Sep. 11, 2026 Britain’s wasps have become mysteriously scarce this summer, and scientists suspect an unusual combination of temperature swings, heatwaves, and food shortages may be responsible. Even the wasps that remain appear unusually small, potentially ...

UNESCO Warns There’s Close to a 100% Chance of a Mediterranean Tsunami

Sep. 10, 2026 The Mediterranean may seem far removed from the world’s major tsunami zones, but history and modern modeling show that destructive waves can strike the French Riviera with surprisingly little warning. Some tsunamis could reach shore in under 10 ...

“Parachute Science” Is Failing the Tropics, Home to More Than 80% of Insect Species

Sep. 9, 2026 Insects quietly hold much of the natural world together, yet conservation efforts are overlooking the tropical regions where more than 80 percent of insect species live. Monash University researchers ...

Antarctica Gained a Record 695 Billion Tons of Ice. Scientists Found the Surprising Reason

Sep. 6, 2026 East Antarctica gained an astonishing 695 billion tons of ice between 2021 and 2023, temporarily slowing Antarctica’s long-term decline. Researchers found that warming thousands of miles away in ...

Indonesia’s Most Dangerous Fires Are Burning Underground

Sep. 6, 2026 Indonesia’s dangerous peat fires are surging early in the 2026 fire season as a strengthening El Niño and severe drought dry out wetlands that can burn underground for months. These slow smoldering fires are especially destructive because they ...

Extreme Drought Now Covers 44% of Puerto Rico

Sep. 4, 2026 Puerto Rico’s normally rainy season has instead brought a severe and fast-growing drought. By August 25, three-quarters of the territory was in at least moderate drought, with extreme drought covering 44 percent and some areas receiving less than ...

Plants May Be Evolving the Wrong Traits for a Warming World

Sep. 3, 2026 Morning glories may be getting caught in an evolutionary tug-of-war between surviving climate change and attracting increasingly scarce pollinators. Over just nine years, researchers found that the plants’ rate of adaptation plunged by 96%, even ...

Hundreds of Hidden Earthquakes Found at Antarctica’s Doomsday Glacier

Aug. 30, 2026 Hundreds of previously overlooked seismic events have been detected beneath Antarctica, including 245 near the marine edge of the Thwaites Glacier. Many appear to be glacial earthquakes caused when huge icebergs break off, capsize, and collide with ...

Scientists Turn One of the Hardest Plastics to Recycle Into High-performance Engine Lubricant

Aug. 29, 2026 Researchers have discovered a way to turn notoriously difficult-to-recycle PVC plastic into a key ingredient used in high-performance lubricants such as engine oil. The technique could give mountains ...

Australia’s Red Soil May Be Hiding a Massive Clean Energy Source

Aug. 29, 2026 Researchers have discovered that Western Australia’s iron-rich rocks can naturally generate hydrogen and that the process may be boosted to produce much larger amounts. If it can be scaled up, the vast formations beneath the Pilbara could become a ...

Why Scientists Asked 1,000 People to Bury Their Underwear

Aug. 28, 2026 More than 1,000 volunteers buried cotton underwear across Switzerland to help scientists measure how active different soils are. The faster the fabric disappeared, the more biological activity was taking place underground. Gardens showed the fastest ...

Scientists Find a Huge Hidden Ice Reservoir Beneath Utah’s Mountains

Aug. 27, 2026 Beneath the rocky slopes of Mount Timpanogos lies far more ice than anyone walking across the surface might suspect. Researchers used gravity measurements to map the buried glacier in 3D and found it is about 83% ice, with enough frozen water to ...

Latest Headlines

updated 8:26pm EDT

Giant Greenland Iceberg Slams Into Joe Island and Survives

Sep. 4, 2026 A giant iceberg measuring more than 76 square kilometers broke from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier in August 2026, marking the Arctic’s largest glacier calving event since 2020. The berg later ...

New Mexico’s Largest Reservoir Plunges to Just 1.4% Full

Sep. 3, 2026 Elephant Butte Reservoir, New Mexico’s largest reservoir, plunged to just 1.4 percent capacity in July 2026 after years of extreme drought and record early snowmelt. The dramatic decline exposed ...

One of Earth’s Driest Places Was Just Covered in Snow

Sep. 1, 2026 Rare storms covered huge stretches of Chile’s Atacama Desert in snow and dumped extraordinary amounts of rain on one of the driest regions on Earth. The extreme weather shut down observatories, ...

190-Year-Old DNA Reveals a Hidden Pangolin Species

Aug. 26, 2026 DNA from a nearly 190-year-old museum specimen has helped scientists confirm a distinct Himalayan pangolin species hiding in plain sight in Nepal and northern India. The discovery could give ...

Manhattan-Sized Ice Island Breaks Off Greenland’s Petermann Glacier

Aug. 26, 2026 A Manhattan-sized ice island has broken away from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier after years of growing fractures weakened its floating ice tongue. Scientists expect two more huge sections could ...

Forces Deep Inside Earth Helped Antarctica Freeze Before the Arctic

Aug. 25, 2026 Scientists may have solved the mystery of why Antarctica froze millions of years before the Arctic. Slow-moving waves deep inside Earth gradually lifted East Antarctica, building mountains and a high ...

A Manhattan-Sized Ice Island Just Broke Free from Greenland

Aug. 25, 2026 A huge section of Greenland’s Petermann Glacier has snapped off, forming an ice island about the size of Manhattan. Satellites watched cracks spread rapidly before the 76-square-kilometer slab ...

Atomic Catalyst Unlocks the Hidden Value of Plant Waste

Aug. 25, 2026 Scientists have created a highly efficient catalyst that breaks down stubborn lignin from plant waste into useful chemicals under relatively mild conditions. By revealing exactly how the catalyst ...

Bird Flu Is Spreading. Your Backyard Feeder Could Make It Worse

Aug. 24, 2026 Backyard bird feeders could become unexpected hotspots for H5N1 as Australia’s bird flu outbreak spreads, bringing species together in ways that rarely occur naturally. Experts say stopping feeding ...

Scientists Left This Farm Field Alone. Thousands of Orchids Appeared

Aug. 23, 2026 An abandoned farm field became a flourishing wildflower meadow within little more than a decade, with plant diversity doubling and thousands of orchids appearing naturally. The discovery suggests ...

66-Million-Year-Old Feather in Dinosaur Poop May Reveal Why Birds Survived the Asteroid

Sep. 11, 2026 A feather discovered inside 66-million-year-old fossilized dinosaur poop may help explain why modern birds survived the asteroid catastrophe. The extinct bird it came from had more primitive ...

Scientists Capture Two DNA Strands Zipping Together for the First Time

Sep. 10, 2026 Scientists have directly observed how two negatively charged DNA molecules can pair up despite normally repelling each other. Positively charged metal ions appear to bridge the gap, helping matching ...

Ancient Teeth Reveal Humans Were Getting High 25,000 Years Ago

Sep. 10, 2026 Ancient human remains from Sulawesi suggest people were habitually using the psychoactive betel nut as far back as 25,000 years ago. Researchers found both unusual tooth wear and traces of arecoline, ...

Devil’s Arrows: Ancient Builders Hauled 55,000-Pound Stones 11 Miles for Britain’s Tallest Stone Row

Sep. 9, 2026 Britain’s towering Devil’s Arrows were built from 25-tonne stones hauled at least 18 kilometers from Brimham Rocks around 4,000 years ago. The discovery reveals an astonishing feat of prehistoric ...

The American “cheetah” Wasn’t a Cheetah at All

Sep. 8, 2026 The extinct “American cheetah” was not really a cheetah at all, but a puma relative with an unexpectedly flexible lifestyle. Fossils from the Yukon suggest northern populations survived partly by ...

Life Uses 4 DNA Letters. Scientists Just Made 8 Work

Sep. 5, 2026 Researchers at UC San Diego have demonstrated that a key cellular enzyme can accurately read an eight-letter genetic alphabet, doubling the four letters used by all known life on Earth. Detailed ...

Scientists Discover a Bizarre “devil Flower” Hidden in Thailand

Sep. 3, 2026 Scientists have discovered a strange black “devil flower” in Thailand that lives mostly underground, steals nutrients from fungi, and looks strikingly unlike a typical plant. The newly named ...

Scientists Discover Why Snake Embryos Twist Into Spirals

Sep. 1, 2026 Snake embryos begin life curled into a distinctive right-handed spiral, and scientists may finally know why. Their bodies grow faster than their guts, creating a tether that forces the lengthening ...

The Secret to Longer Life May Be Hidden in Bat DNA

Sep. 11, 2026 Long-lived bats appear to combine powerful immune defenses with unusual strategies for eliminating damaged cells, potentially helping them avoid cancer and disease for decades. Researchers hope these ...

324-Million-Year-Old Fossil Reveals How Insects Conquered Land

Aug. 27, 2026 Ancient fossils suggest insects conquered land through a long amphibious phase rather than making an abrupt jump from water to dry ground. A newly identified 324-million-year-old species still ...

Earth May Have Lost the Sun’s Protective Shield Millions of Years Ago

Sep. 2, 2026 NASA-funded studies suggest Earth’s climate has been influenced by both the Sun’s travels through dense regions of the Milky Way and the violent superflares of its youth. Those events may help ...

A Hidden “on Switch” in Human DNA Has Finally Been Decoded

Aug. 23, 2026 Researchers have used AI to uncover the DNA signature of a key genetic “switch” involved in turning genes on. After analyzing about 500,000 DNA sequences, the model identified the initiator in ...

Scientists Find Hidden “highways” Guiding Animal Evolution

Aug. 25, 2026 A sweeping analysis of thousands of animal genomes suggests that chromosomes do not evolve randomly but instead follow a limited number of irreversible “evolutionary highways.” These one-way ...

NASA Finds Earth Microbes Could Survive on the Moon

Aug. 25, 2026 NASA scientists found that microbes brought by astronauts could survive in cold, shadowed niches around the Moon’s South Pole, potentially complicating future searches for pristine lunar chemistry. ...

MIT Turns Bacteria Into Living Transistors

Sep. 4, 2026 MIT researchers have created bacterial “transistors” that can be wired together into living circuits capable of performing calculations and directing chemical signals. One day, these biological ...

A Lost Mega-Cliff May Explain the Grand Canyon’s Missing Billion Years

Aug. 20, 2026 A colossal cliff system created as the supercontinent Rodinia broke apart may have exposed the heart of the Grand Canyon nearly a billion years before the Colorado River carved it. The ancient ...

Scientists Say the Human Family Tree May Need a Major Rewrite

Aug. 20, 2026 The human family tree may be due for a major rewrite. Researchers argue that Australopithecus and Paranthropus should be folded into the genus Homo because new fossils have blurred many of the traits ...

16 Mummies and a Dog Reveal a Hidden Order Inside an Ancient Egyptian Tomb

Aug. 19, 2026 A tomb in Egypt’s Theban Necropolis reveals a surprisingly organized story of burial, reuse, and changing beliefs spanning hundreds of years. Researchers found 16 mummified people, the remains of ...

Fossil Feet May Be Misleading Scientists About Human Evolution

Aug. 31, 2026 Wild monkeys in West Africa can climb vertical tree trunks using foot flexibility scientists did not realize they possessed. The discovery challenges a key assumption about what the last common ...

This Total Solar Eclipse Looked Strangely Golden — Here’s Why

Aug. 20, 2026 Spain’s total solar eclipse delivered an unexpected sight: a corona glowing gold instead of its usual pearly white. Because the Sun was setting, its light passed through more atmosphere, while ...