Planet Earth used to be something like a cross between a deep freeze and a car crusher. During vast stretches of the planet’s history, everything from pole to pole was squashed beneath a blanket of ...

Our boat noses into the craggy, primordial shore of Hecate Island. The first two off the deck have their hand lenses out before the rest of us touch land. They are Randal Mindell and Dan Tucker, both ...

The ocean has a way of upending expectations. Four-story-high rogue waves peak and collapse without warning. Light bends across the surface to conjure chimeric cities that hover at the horizon. And ...

Walking the icy flanks of Mount Baker—an active volcano in Washington State and one of the highest peaks in the Cascade Range—is probably one of the most untainted wilderness experiences. And yet, it ...

In the spring of 1995, Danish-Greenlandic artist Pia Arke was digging through the archives of New York City’s Explorers Club. She was searching for maps, ethnographic images, and scientific miscellany ...

Congratulations to Nick Rahaim for winning the second place award in the Outstanding Feature Story, Small category at the 22nd Annual SEJ Awards for Reporting on the Environment. As I coiled rope on ...

In the summer of 2000, Mi’kmaw fishers from Esgenoôpetitj, or Burnt Church First Nation, took to the waters of Miramichi Bay, in New Brunswick, each small boat carrying a cache of lobster traps. The ...

Even in flip-flops, Teiki Ah-scha walks with precision and confidence between the gaping holes on either side of us. He has told me to step exactly where he does, so I watch his feet and block out ...

The North Sea is a hard place to love. It’s not the cold, or the silty gray-brown waters that seem to suck the brightness out of the sky that make it unappealing, it’s what people have done to it over ...

Plenty of families avoid certain topics of conversation. For Eduardo and his brother, work is off limits. “He has his job, and I have mine,” Eduardo says from the kitchen table of his mother’s house ...

When I was small, my ǧáǧṃ́p (grandfather) would set about the serious business of food gathering with my cousins and me in the late spring. Everyone in the family had a role in our food harvests and ...

Disoriented little fish caught the attention of staff members at the Coleman National Fish Hatchery in Red Bluff, California, in early January 2020. Looking down into the outdoor tanks, called ...