ecology

Symbiosis is one of the most powerful forces in evolution. From the bacteria in your gut to the fungal partners of nearly every land plant, the living world is a web of intimate partnerships, and not all of them are friendly.

If humanity vanished overnight, Earth would begin a dramatic recovery — from nuclear meltdowns in hours to rainforest regrowth over centuries.

Bees pollinate $235B in crops yearly. If they vanished, almonds, apples, and coffee would collapse — but humanity wouldn't starve. Here's why.

If Earth's rotation halted for good, one side would bake into permanent desert, the other would freeze into an ice sheet, and a thin twilight ring could be the only place left to farm.

How machine learning decodes environmental DNA to monitor biodiversity, predict ecosystem collapse.

Glaciers cover about 10% of Earth's land surface and store roughly 69% of all the world's freshwater. They also hold one of the clearest records of Earth's climate history — and they are disappearing at rates that were considered worst-case scenarios just 20 years ago.

A teaspoon of productive soil can hold hundreds of millions of bacteria. Soil is not dirt: it is a living ecosystem that takes a very long time to build and can be lost within a generation of poor management.

Forests cover about 31% of Earth's land and shelter more than half of its land animal and plant species. But a forest is not just trees: it is a layered, networked system that took millennia to assemble.

The same water molecules that fell as rain on ancient Rome may be in your glass today. The water cycle has run continuously for billions of years — but humans are now reshaping it in measurable ways.

A mature hurricane releases as much energy in a day as 10,000 nuclear bombs. Understanding how these storms form — and intensify — is one of the most critical challenges in atmospheric science.

Every year, roughly 500,000 earthquakes are detectable by instruments. About 100,000 are felt by people. Here's the science of why the ground shakes.

The Amazon holds tens of billions of tonnes of carbon, makes about half of its own rainfall, and shelters roughly one in ten known species. Here is what a total loss would set in motion, and why the forest may not need to be fully cleared to fail.