With its permitting authority over natural gas infrastructure, the little-known Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has sweeping power over individual citizens’ property and our collective climate trajectory. Critics say that reforming its pipeline review process should be high on President Joe Biden’s agenda.
The Svalbard archipelago sits halfway between Norway and the North Pole with strategic access in the Barents Sea to vital sea lanes linking Russia, Western Europe and North America.
Consigned to my bunk all night by gut-wrenching seas, I wistfully thought back to terra firma on mainland Norway a few days earlier. Before boarding the University of Tromsø’s research ship, R/V Helmer Hanssen,
Female reindeer stands protectively beside her calf. Text and photos by Randall Hyman TROMSØ, NORWAY – “When I got married two years ago, we invited 1400 people,” Berit Oskal-Somby told me as we stood in an icy coastal pasture in northern Norway surrounded by 1500
U.S. regulators knew they had to act fast. A train hauling 2 million gallons of crude oil from North Dakota had exploded in the Canadian town of Lac-Megantic, killing 47 people. Now they had to assure Americans a similar disaster wouldn’t happen south of the border, where the U.S. oil boom is sending
“What you are looking at,” lamented marine biologist Haakon Hop of the Norwegian Polar Institute, “is the melting of the Arctic Ocean.”
Nearing 82 degrees north latitude aboard the research ship RV Lance in late July 2013, we were just 500 miles shy of the North Pole.
The flat bone had a bullet hole through it wide enough to fit the tip of a pinky finger, and was caked in a dried mix of Kruger National Park’s rusty clay earth, and blood. Two cracks had propagated outwards from where the bullet entered.
MT. PALOMAR – Visiting the Palomar observatory in the forested mountains northeast of San Diego is a bit like finding oneself at the foot of one of the great pyramids of Egypt. The scale is so intimidating, so outsized compared to its surroundings, that you
Jerry Blanks took careful aim through the powerful scope on his black hunting rifle as the buffalo surrounding the pick-up truck watched him quizzically. His eye was focused on the dark fur just behind the ear of a young bull that stood just slightly apart from the group.
Behind the wheel of his boxy red Ford F-250 truck, L. Scott Mills sipped his watery coffee and headed east. It was 18 degrees out on a dim and wintry Missoula morning. As the sun rose and the sky turned white, Mills followed Montana Route 200 along the lazy Blackfoot River, northeast toward the town of Seeley Lake.
The battered white pickup truck is bouncing across a pasture of sagebrush and alfalfa when Bronc Speak Thunder turns the steering wheel east and points to the far side of a creek bed. Scattered across a grassy slope are what appear to be a field of brown boulders —
The ashy storm-petrel, a tiny, dark-gray seabird, nests on 11 rocky, isolated islands in the Pacific Ocean off the coasts of California and Mexico. Weighing little more than a hefty greeting card and forced to contend with invasive rats, mice and cats, aggressive seagulls, oil spills and sea-level rise, it faces an outsize fight for survival.
Up in the foothills of the Rockies last summer, researchers from Colorado State University in Fort Collins fanned out along the banks of a stream. Some took the water’s temperature and measured its speed and chemistry. Others waded in to catch insects using flat-bottomed nets.
West of Pahrump, Nevada, in a corner of the Mojave Desert a couple thousand feet above Death Valley, a warm aquifer provides a home for one of the world’s rarest animals. It’s a tiny silvery-blue fish, smaller than your pinkie toe, and in the past 50 years it has survived real-estate speculators,
ZHANGJIAGANG, China – An incredible forest lies on its side in this gritty industrial town in southeastern China. On the southern bank of the Yangtze River nine-foot-diameter kevazingo trees from Gabon rub against Cambodian rosewoods and Indonesian teaks. Nearby, rust-colored bark from Malaysian pacific maples
MOUNT BACHELOR, Oregon – At more than 9,000 feet along the crest of Oregon’s Cascade mountain range, the top of this snow-covered peak normally enjoys some of America’s cleanest air. So when sensitive scientific instruments picked up ozone – the chief component of smog –
On the southeastern outskirts of Washington, D.C., inside the Smithsonian Institution’s cavernous Museum Support Center, one can see some frogs that no longer exist. Alcohol-filled glass jars hold preserved specimens of Incilius periglenes, the Monte Verde golden toad;
COCONUT ISLAND, Hawaii — Just before sunset, on the campus of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, Mary Hagedorn waited for her mushroom corals to spawn.
As corals go, Fungia is fairly reliable, usually releasing its sperm and eggs two days after the full moon.
Sri Tirtha Mahanta, spiritual leader of Majuli Island’s Bor Alengi Satra, displays some of the relics he was able to salvage before his satra washed away. Sri Tirtha Mahanta, the 74-year-old spiritual leader of the Bor Alengi Satra, a Hindu monastery on Majuli Island, in
Inside the gaping mouth of Mammoth Cave, hibernating bats sleep in permanent twilight, each huddled in its own limestone crevice. Every fall, these big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) squeeze their furry bodies into nooks in the cave walls.
