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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

Tom Rivett-Carnac describes stubborn optimism as grit in the face of an unavoidable challenge, not cheerfulness, and the research supports the distinction: Maria Ojala found hope based on denial predicted less pro-environmental behaviour among Swedish teenagers, while constructive hope predicted more

The phrase has a stricter meaning than everyday optimism, and the stricter meaning is the one the evidence supports. In a later two-country study worry predicted climate-friendly behaviour better than hope did, and hope contributed mainly where worry was already present.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 10, 2026

Every year Australia slides seven centimeters toward the north-northeast, almost twice the pace of a growing fingernail and quicker than any other continent. Southeast Asia is already in the way, and some models fold the plate into a new supercontinent inside 300 million years.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 10, 2026

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.

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.

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.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 9, 2026

A 91-year-old hiker known as Grey Beard has walked the entire Appalachian Trail end to end, reported as the oldest person to do it, PBS NewsHour reports — the full length rather than sections, at an age when most thru-hikers have long stopped

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 8, 2026

Virginia held three rounds of public input between March 2025 and January 2026 before publishing its South Van Dorn Street safety recommendations in July 2026.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 7, 2026

Flora and Fauna

Sea lamprey control has quietly become an integrated pest-management system: lampricides, physical barriers, pheromone-baited traps and sterile-male releases, refined over decades of adaptive trials against a parasite that filter-feeds for years as larvae before turning on native fish.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 7, 2026

Grid operators in the Netherlands can now slow or stop North Sea wind turbines for 4 hours when mass bird migration is forecast; on May 13, 2023, turbines at Borssele and a wind farm near Egmond aan Zee were shut down for four hours in an international first.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 4, 2026

In 1963, Britain proposed closing 5,000 route miles of railway; by the late 2010s, about 1,200 miles of the National Cycle Network used old railway track beds, while more than 1,000 cast-iron Millennium Mileposts installed in 2000 marked routes across the network.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Sep 3, 2026

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 · Sep 1, 2026

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 · Aug 28, 2026

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 · Aug 26, 2026

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