Intense forest fires have been raging across the western United States this summer. So far this year, nearly 43,000 wildfires have torched almost 7 million acres of land. As NPR Science correspondent Christopher Joyce and photographer David Gilkey report from Arizona and New Mexico this week, the forests of the American Southwest have become so…

Over the last 50 million years, tectonic shifts in the Earth’s crust caused by forces deep within the mantle have caused the Caribbean island chain to be pushed Eastward. Staring at a map will reveal the bulging shape of the lesser Antilles way out into the Atlantic. A new study by researchers from the University…

A $425 million lander that would drill a few meters into Mars in order to probe its crust, mantle, and core will be NASA’s next major planetary science mission. In a teleconference late Monday, NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, John Grunsfeld, announced that he has selected the InSight mission to Mars as…

Cape Wind cleared its last bureaucratic hurdle Wednesday when the Federal Aviation Administration released its finding that the project poses no hazard to planes. The finding came after a court-mandated re-evaluation of possible safety hazards the 130-turbine project poses to planes and a GOP inquiry into whether the FAA’s initial approval in 2010 was the…

“Fortune favors the bold” might as well be the motto of the Philippines regarding their energy policy and their efforts to achieve their goals. However, a bold plan is only the first step to achieving the colossal task of weaning an entire country off its dependance on foreign-sources fossil fuels. The logistics of the effort…

The National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska is an area of land on the Alaska North Slope owned by the United States federal government and managed by the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management. It lies to the west of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service managed…

The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields. The sun rotates every 28 days, and because it doesn’t have a solid surface, it should be slightly flattened. This tiny flattening has been studied with many instruments for…

A new study has revealed the under-appreciation that exists for the role dams play in climate change; how the reservoirs behind them can cause surges of greenhouse gases as the water levels go up and down. In a study of the water column at such a reservoir, marine scientists found an astonishing 20-fold increase in…

A new report confirms the critical importance of offshore wind in replacing aging power plants, saving up to £89bn from the UK’s energy bill, and has the potential to take a large share of a global £1 trillion market by 2050. As well as reducing reliance on imported gas and meeting GHG emissions and renewable…

A high federal court in Brazil has ruled that work on the Belo Monte dam in the Brazilian Amazon be immediately suspended. Finding that the government failed to properly consult indigenous people on the dam, the ruling is the latest in innumerable twists and turns regarding the massive dam, which was first conceived in the…