Kevin Krajick

Kevin Krajick's articles

  1. Environmental Science

Unexplained Heat-Wave ‘Hotspots’ Are Popping Up Across the Globe – State of the Planet

Earth’s hottest recorded year was 2023, at 2.12 degrees F above the 20th-century average. This surpassed the previous record set in 2016. So far, the 10 hottest yearly average temperatures have occurred in the past decade. And, with the hottest summer and hottest single day, 2024 is on track to set yet another record. All […]
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  1. Environmental Science

Key Research From the Columbia Climate School – State of the Planet

Here is a guide to notable research presentations from the Columbia Climate School and its centers and affiliates at the Dec. 9-13 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, the world’s largest gathering of earth and space scientists. The meeting takes place at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., and online across the globe. Talks here are in […]
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  1. Environmental Science

Dinosaurs Thrived After Ice, Not Fire, Says a New Study of Ancient Volcanism – State of the Planet

201.6 million years ago, one of the Earth’s five great mass extinctions took place, when three-quarters of all living species suddenly disappeared. The wipeout coincided with massive volcanic eruptions that split apart Pangaea, a giant continent then comprising almost all the planet’s land. Millions of cubic miles of lava erupted over some 600,000 years, separating […]
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  1. Environmental Science

Ancient Ocean Sediments Reveal Analog to Human-Influenced Warming – State of the Planet

Between 59 million and 51 million years ago, Earth experienced dramatic warming periods—both a gradual one stretching millions of years, and more sudden spikes known as hyperthermals, measured in thousands to tens of thousands of years. Scientists agree that higher temperatures were driven in large part by increases in the amount of carbon dioxide in […]
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  1. Environmental Science

Ancient Plant, Insect Bits Confirm Greenland Melted in Recent Geologic Past – State of the Planet

The story of Greenland keeps getting greener—and scarier. A new study provides the first direct evidence that the center—not just the edges—of Greenland’s ice sheet melted away in the recent geologic past, and that the now ice-covered island became home to a living tundra landscape. A team of scientists reexamined a few inches of sediment from the […]
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  1. Environmental Science

Study Challenges Popular Idea That Easter Islanders Committed ‘Ecocide’ – State of the Planet

Some 1,000 years ago, a small band of Polynesians sailed thousands of miles across the Pacific to settle one of the world’s most isolated places—a small, previously uninhabited island they named Rapa Nui. There, they erected hundreds of “moai,” or gigantic stone statues that now famously stand as emblems of a vanished civilization. Eventually, their […]
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  1. Environmental Science

Cascadia Subduction Zone, One of Earth’s Top Hazards, Comes Into Sharper Focus – State of the Planet

Off the coasts of southern British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and northern California lies a 600 mile-long strip where the Pacific Ocean floor is slowly diving eastward under North America. This area, called the Cascadia Subduction Zone, hosts a megathrust fault, a place where tectonic plates move against each other in a highly dangerous way. The […]
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  1. Environmental Science

Was It an Alien Spacecraft—Or a Supply Truck? – State of the Planet

On Jan. 8, 2014, a meteor raced by means of Earth’s environment off Papua New Guinea, exploded right into a fireball over the ocean, and disappeared. That will have been the top of it. Apart from Harvard astronomer Abraham “Avi” Loeb, who in 2019 analyzed information from low-frequency sound sensors run by the U.S. Division […]
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