March of the Beaver

For centuries, the Northwest Passage, the long-sought sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through northern Canada, was a holy grail of Arctic exploration. Even now, sailing through it isn’t guaranteed. Mark Synnott, a National Geographic Explorer, writer, and adv ...  Show more

There’s a lost continent waiting to be explored, and it’s right below our feet. We’ll dig into the deep human relationship to the underground—and why we understand it from an instinctive point of view, but not so much from a physical one. (Hint: We’re afraid of the dark.) In an e ...  Show more

Kenneth Steven considers the introduction of wild animals back into the Highlands of Scotland and the impact on rural life, reflecting in poetry at the end of each Essay.

There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that at one time beavers were distributed widely throughout ma ...

As floods, wildfires, and heatwaves hit many parts of the world, signs of climate change seem to be all around us. Scientists have been warning us for years about the looming threat of a warming planet. And yet it’s really hard for many of us to wrap our minds around this exis ...

As we confront the realities of a changing climate, a group of scientists says we're living in a world of our very own making - a world altered by the burning of fossil fuels, the explosion of nuclear weapons, plastic pollution and environmental degradation. The scientists call i ...  Show more

For much of history, tree canopies were pretty much completely ignored by science. It was as if researchers said collectively, "It's just going to be empty up there, and we've got our hands full studying the trees down here! So why bother?!"

But then, around the mid-198 ...