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Tucked between treatises on algae and prehistoric turquoise beads, the study on page 460 of a long-ago issue of the U.S. journal Science drew little attention.
Two American explorers, one white, one black, made a historic assault on the North Pole a century ago and then headed home, leaving behind a legacy of daring and discovery, and of two little boys in sealskins — their half-Inuit sons.
Sometime next month, on the steaming fringes of an Icelandic volcano, an international team of scientists will begin pumping "seltzer water" into a deep hole, producing a brew that will lock away carbon dioxide forever.
The old hunter was troubled by the foreigners encroaching on his Inuit people's frozen lands.
The pilot eased his five-ton helicopter toward the glacier's rumpled surface, aiming for the lightest of setdowns atop one of the fastest-flowing ice streams on Earth.
Friends sometimes catch her gazing, entranced, at the wind ripples forming in the snow, or at the "diamond dust" glint of crystals delicately drifting down the Arctic air.
In the gritty gusts of a sandstorm, men in turbans and women in veils stood uncomplaining for hours outside a ramshackle kiosk, lined up for their daily loaves of "life."
The cry first rang out from the fed-up people of Lisbon and Madrid: "Basta!"
Hosni Mubarak's woes could be traced back to Egypt's 2005 election, when an army of tech-savvy poll watchers, with a little help from foreign friends, exposed the president's customary "landslide" vote as an autocrat's fraud.
The latest international deal on climate, reached early Saturday after hard days of bargaining, was described by exhausted delegates as a "step forward" in grappling with global warming. If they step too far, however, they're going to bump into an elephant in the room.
Walmart is going green in its Chinese factories. George Soros is exploring investments in the restoration of drained peatlands in Indonesia. Denmark is joining South Korea in a new fund to transform developing economies.
Encroaching seas in the far Pacific are raising the salt level in the wells of the Marshall Islands. Waves threaten to cut one sliver of an island in two. "It's getting worse," says Kaminaga Kaminaga, the tiny nation's climate change coordinator.
Like the warming atmosphere above, a once-taboo idea hangs over the slow, frustrating U.N. talks to curb climate change: the idea to tinker with the atmosphere or the planet itself, pollute the skies to ward off the sun, fill the oceans with gas-eating plankton, do whatever it takes.
Clambering over garbage heaps, rummaging through trash cans, Supriya Bhadakwad didn't set out to save the planet when she was 13 years old, just her family. But two decades later, in the global arena of climate negotiations, the sari-clad Indian woman and other scavengers are making their voices heard, tilting with big corporate players in a tug-of-war over the world's dumpsites.
Even if we stopped spewing global warming gases today, the world would face a steady rise in food prices this century. But on our current emissions path, climate change becomes the "threat multiplier" that could double grain prices by 2050 and leave millions more children malnourished, global food experts reported Wednesday.
Once more, as they've done each year for two decades, parties to the 193-nation U.N. climate treaty assembled Monday to debate what to do about global warming, after a year in which its impact came into sharper focus in many realms and regions.
The United States and China appeared close to agreement Wednesday on a key issue that has troubled climate change negotiations, boosting prospects that talks on global warming will score their first success in years.
The last time the world warmed, 120,000 years ago, the Cancun coastline was swamped by a 7-foot (2.1-meter) rise in sea level in a few decades. A week from now at that Mexican resort, frustrated negotiators will try again to head off a new global deluge.
In these volcanic valleys of central Mexico, on the Canadian prairie, across India's northern plain, they sow and they reap the golden grain that has fed us since the distant dawn of farming. But along with the wheat these days comes a harvest of worry.
From the 1950s Pentagon to today's Obama administration, the United States has repeatedly pondered, planned and threatened use of nuclear weapons against North Korea, according to declassified and other U.S. government documents released in this 60th-anniversary year of the Korean War.
The U.S. and others warned Friday of a possible ultimatum in Geneva: Either the Conference on Disarmament gets moving on a treaty to ban production of atomic bomb material, or big players will take their bargaining chips elsewhere.
Two dozen foreign ministers from around the world on Thursday urged a handful of remaining nations to ratify the nuclear test-ban treaty, allowing it to take effect.
"Advocate tolerance, and disregard the ignorant," one book counsels. Advises the other, "Be gentle towards all, ... forbearing."
Floods, fires, melting ice and feverish heat: From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Iowa and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It's not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way.
In this place where a fearful age was born one fiery instant 65 years ago, the Flame of Peace still flickers on, awaiting the day when the world is rid of nuclear weapons.
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