What happened when a Pacific archipelago cleared rats and stoats from 117 offshore islands and let seabirds, flightless parrots, and giant crickets return to ground they had not touched in 150 years?

New Zealand has spent six decades clearing rats, stoats, and cats from its offshore islands so that flightless parrots, giant crickets, tuatara, and seabird colonies can rebuild. The recovery is now reshaping the reefs offshore too.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 13, 2026

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Space Travel

Friction normally slows things down. But atmospheric drag makes a satellite lose orbital energy and fall into a lower orbit — and lower orbits are faster. So although drag initially slows the spacecraft, the resulting orbital decay can leave it moving faster around Earth. Scientists were analysing this effect as early as 1958.

Atmospheric drag always removes orbital energy, but gravity can leave a decaying satellite moving faster after it falls into a lower orbit.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 15, 2026

Uncategorized

A single cotton T-shirt requires approximately 2,700 litres of water to produce, the equivalent of one person's drinking water for two and a half years, and the global fashion industry now consumes approximately 79 billion cubic metres of fresh water annually, much of it drawn from regions already facing severe drought

The fashion industry's water crisis is worse than you think—and cotton isn't even the main culprit.

By Brendan Brown · Aug 14, 2026

Space Travel

NASA's Psyche spacecraft used Mars as a gravitational slingshot on 15 May 2026, skimming within 2,864 miles of the surface and walking away 1,000 miles per hour faster — burning no fuel in the process — on its way to an asteroid that may be the exposed metal core of a dead planet

NASA's Psyche probe gained 1,000 mph from Mars without using propellant during the flyby. The physics is exact, while the asteroid's core identity remains a hypothesis.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 13, 2026

Space Travel

The Voyager Golden Record carries a small sample of uranium on its cover, placed there so that whoever finds it can measure the decay and work out how long it has been drifting — a built-in clock for a message engineered to last around a billion years.

Voyager’s Golden Record cover carries a tiny uranium-238 reference whose decay can reveal elapsed time, independently checking its pulsar-map date.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 12, 2026

Marsdaily

At the equator on a Martian summer afternoon, temperatures can reach a tolerable 20°C — but the moment the sun sets, the near-absent atmosphere bleeds the heat away and the surface drops to −84°C by morning, a daily swing no unprotected human body could survive.

Mars can briefly produce Earthlike ground temperatures in equatorial sunlight, then plunge toward −84°C before dawn. The physics behind that swing exposes just how alien the planet remains.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 7, 2026

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Terra Daily

Earth science, climate impacts, ecosystems, agriculture, forests, and the broad environmental changes shaping life on a changing planet.

Climate Science

How did a dust-built plateau larger than France cut the sediment pouring into a river from 1.6 billion tonnes a year by more than 80 percent over four decades?

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Climate Science

Why does concrete poured beneath an emperor’s latrine 1,900 years ago keep sealing its own cracks while modern reinforced structures can begin failing within decades?

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Climate Science

In 1869, 24-year-old Swiss researcher Friedrich Miescher washed white blood cells out of pus-soaked surgical bandages, separated their nuclei, and isolated a phosphorus-rich substance unlike protein or fat, the first isolation of the molecule the world would later call DNA

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Climate Science

How does a hectare of coastal trees rooted in tidal mud store three to five times more carbon than the same area of tropical rainforest, while also blunting cyclone storm surges for the villages behind them?

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

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Shake and Blow

Earthquakes, volcanoes, severe weather, fire, tectonics, disaster response, and the natural hazards reshaping communities and landscapes.

Disaster Management

Zaporizhzhia accident would impact neighbouring countries: Ukraine

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Weather Report

Year so far the hottest in US history

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Disaster Management

'Worse than war': trauma of Libya flood haunts survivors

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Weather Report

World sees record August heat for second year running

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

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Water World

Oceans, rivers, polar ice, water systems, marine life, and the environmental changes affecting the planet's blue and frozen regions.

Water World

We tend to think of AI as a software problem, weightless and waterless, but even a 100-word email written with ChatGPT has been estimated to require roughly a bottle’s worth of water once data-centre cooling and electricity generation are counted — and scaled to global demand, researchers project AI could withdraw 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic metres of water a year by 2027, roughly half the United Kingdom’s annual freshwater withdrawals.

By Lachlan Brown

Iron and Ice

Titan is the only moon among the 150-plus in the solar system with a thick atmosphere — its air presses on the surface about 1.5 times harder than Earth's at sea level, roughly what you'd feel at the bottom of a swimming pool

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Water World

Zimbabwean capital grapples with water shortage

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Water World

Zimbabwe city orders 'big flush' amid water rationing

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

About Terra Daily

News about planet Earth.

Terra Daily is an independent publication covering planet Earth, natural hazards, water systems, ecosystems, climate impacts, and the science behind life on a changing planet. The site pairs a deep archive with current reporting on the research, communities, policy shifts, and environmental events shaping Earth's living and physical systems. We employ modern AI technologies to support our editorial workflows; every published piece is editorially directed and reviewed.

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