NASA image: Rim Fire update Sept. 02, 2013

Slowly but surely, the Rim Fire in California is being contained. Currently it is 30% contained. The fire has burned over 192,000 acres. The use of aircraft and water/chemical dumping on the fire has been instrumental in ...

Update for August 30, 2013 - The fire is over 201,00 acres as of 6 am this morning, Aug. 30, 2013 with containment at 32%. More than 40,000 acres of that fire have burned within Yosemite National Park. At least 111 structures ...

Fires that started in July continue on in late August in Idaho and Montana. Actively burning areas, detected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer's (MODIS) thermal bands, are outlined in red.

The Rim Fire began in California on August 17, 2013. The cause of the fire is still under investigation. This fire is treacherous and has tripled in size in the last few days to now over 106,000 acres. The fire had been 5% ...

A trio of fires continues to plague Northern California. In this MODIS image from the Terra satellite, all three fires can be detected.

Several fires are currently raging in central and northern California. These fires can be seen in this natural-color Terra satellite image taken by the MODIS instrument on August 18, 2013.

A new MIT study reports that, if China follows through with its international pledge to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, every one of its provinces will experience benefits to air quality and human health, with associated ...

Global warming will exacerbate soil droughts in Europe—droughts will last longer, affect greater areas, and have an impact on more people. If the Earth warms by three degrees Celsius, extreme events could become the normal ...

Growing global food demand, climate change, and climate policies favoring bioenergy production are expected to increase pressures on water resources around the world. Many analysts predict that water shortages will constrain ...

Nitrogen is essential to marine life and cycles throughout the ocean in a delicately balanced system. Living organisms—especially marine plants called phytoplankton—require nitrogen in processes such as photosynthesis. ...

China's croplands have experienced drastic changes in management practices related to fertilization, tillage and residue treatment since the 1980s. The impact of these changes on soil organic carbon (SOC) has drawn major ...

Swarms of tiny oceanic organisms known collectively as zooplankton may have an outsize influence on their environment. New research at Stanford shows that clusters of centimeter-long individuals, each beating tiny feathered ...