The 2011 Nature paper 'Solutions for a Cultivated Planet' argued that halting agricultural expansion, closing yield gaps, using inputs more efficiently, shifting diets and cutting food waste could together roughly double global food production while shrinking farming's environmental footprint.

In 2011, Jonathan Foley's team at the University of Minnesota laid out five levers — halt farmland expansion, close yield gaps, use inputs efficiently, shift diets, cut waste — that together could roughly double food production while shrinking farming's environmental damage. Fifteen years on, the framework still defines the debate.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 14, 2026

Latest

All articles →

Early Earth

Classic Moon-formation simulations typically produced a ring of debris that assembled over months or years after a Mars-sized world struck early Earth. But simulations published in September 2026 that included temperature-dependent rock strength found that, under certain conditions, a coherent Moon-sized satellite could emerge in roughly five hours.

A September 2026 impact study found that strength retained by hot, partly solid rock can redirect Theia’s rebound and capture a coherent satellite within hours.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 13, 2026

Political Economy

The figure quoted as $7.4 trillion in annual fossil fuel subsidies is mostly not money changing hands. About $6.7 trillion of it is damage the IMF says goes uncharged, three-quarters of that from air pollution and climate, on a definition other agencies reject.

Explicit fossil fuel subsidies came to $725 billion in 2024. The figure usually quoted is ten times larger because the IMF counts uncharged environmental damage as a subsidy as well, a definition the OECD and the IEA reject. The damage is not what is in dispute. The total attached to it rests on a contested accounting choice, and the mortality estimates underneath it differ by more than a factor of two.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 12, 2026

Terra Daily

Unsold and secondhand clothing piles up in dumps in Chile's Atacama desert, and a small factory nearby now shreds it and presses it into insulation panels. The boards going up inside the walls of new houses started out as garments nobody ever bought.

A Chilean factory is turning the fashion industry's waste into building material, transforming unworn imports destined for landfills into insulation that keeps homes warm.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 10, 2026

Climate Science

Seismologists already knew big earthquakes send waves down to Earth's core and back, but Japan's 2011 quake was the first time those returning waves were shown to actually slip tectonic plates near the surface — a previously unrecognised source of seismic hazard.

About 13 minutes after Japan's 2011 magnitude 9.0 earthquake, GPS stations across the country registered a uniform 5–6 millimetre eastward shift with no aftershock to explain it. A 2026 University of Chicago study traced it to a seismic wave that bounced off Earth's outer core and slipped four tectonic plates — the first time such a deep-diving wave has been shown to trigger surface fault motion.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 9, 2026

Flora and Fauna

Since 1955, William and Mary's Batten School and VIMS have run a Juvenile Finfish Trawl Survey in the Chesapeake Bay using a five-minute tow of a 20-foot net, and it now samples more than 1,200 sites every year to track how young fish populations shift decade to decade.

Since 1955, William & Mary's Batten School and VIMS have run the Juvenile Finfish Trawl Survey with a five-minute tow of a 20-foot net across the lower Chesapeake Bay — a deliberately unchanged method that now samples more than 1,200 sites a year and has captured seven decades of ecological change, from the blue catfish invasion to the 2026 rebound in juvenile blue crabs.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 9, 2026

What’s up in

Terra Daily

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

Terra Daily

The Zeckendorf brothers bought the Mayflower Hotel for around $400 million in 2004 and cleared its rent-controlled tenants one by one with buyouts starting at $650,000, until a single 350-square-foot apartment held out and ultimately cost them $17 million to empty.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Flora and Fauna

In 1965, a bottlenose dolphin named Peter was taught to mimic English words in a flooded Caribbean house where researcher Margaret Howe Lovatt lived waist-deep in seawater with him for 10 weeks, and the dolphin learned to blow air through his blowhole to shape recognisable versions of 'hello' and 'ball'.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Climate Science

How does a rodent felling saplings across a headwater stream raise a valley's water table by a metre or more and store measurably more carbon in the wet sediment behind its dams than the trees it cut down?

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Flora and Fauna

When crews broke ground on a Mojave solar plant in California’s Ivanpah Valley, the permit allowed 38 adult desert tortoises to be moved — biologists then collected 166, and across the valley Fish and Wildlife would eventually release more than 9,100 into a fenced translocation site.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

What’s up in

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

What’s up in

Water World

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

Water World

Nearly 11,000 acres along the Mimbres River in southwestern New Mexico became a new Wildlife Management Area this month, carrying pre-1907 water rights and critical habitat for the yellow-billed cuckoo and Chiricahua leopard frog after Trust for Public Land closed the ranch with the state.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Iron and Ice

Jupiter is so massive that its shared centre of gravity with the Sun lies just outside the Sun’s surface — making it the only planet whose individual barycentre with the Sun falls beyond the Sun itself, and the largest contributor to the star’s planetary wobble.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Water World

On Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, after two dams came down on the Elwha River, average Chinook returns rose from 2,827 fish a year to 4,734 — and the share taken for hatchery breeding fell from 53 per cent to 31 per cent as more Chinook were left to spawn in the restored channel

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Iron and Ice

Saturn's moon Titan is the only place beyond Earth where a person could stand outside without a pressure suit — its atmosphere is 50 per cent thicker than ours and blocks even the galactic cosmic rays that would make Mars lethal over time

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.

More about us →

The Terra Daily Newsletter

Highlights of the week in Terra Daily, natural hazards, and water systems — delivered to your inbox by email.

Read recent issues on Substack →