News about planet Earth.

What's up in

Terra Daily

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

Climate Science

In 1962, a single missing hyphen in the guidance code of Mariner 1 sent the Venus-bound probe veering off course 293 seconds after launch, forcing range safety to destroy a $18.5 million spacecraft over a punctuation mark.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 29, 2026

Climate Science

What happened when a New England river had a 162-year-old dam removed in 1999 and alewives, shad, and sturgeon returned to spawning grounds their ancestors had not reached since before the Civil War?

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 29, 2026

Climate Science

In 2025, taxonomists examining 32 tongue-dwelling isopods from Mexican fish markets discovered that Cymothoa exigua was not the eastern Pacific’s only “tongue-eater”: a second species hiding inside the mouths of two snapper species in a region long thought to have just one

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 29, 2026

Climate Science

Mount Everest is the highest point above sea level, but Ecuador's Chimborazo sits so close to the equator, where Earth bulges outward by 21 kilometres, that its summit is actually the farthest point on the planet's surface from the centre of the Earth.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 28, 2026

Climate Science

How did a hilltop complex in the Fertile Crescent get built roughly 6,000 years before Stonehenge by people who had no metal tools, no wheel, and no pottery?

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 28, 2026

Climate Science

In 1856, an 18-year-old chemistry student named William Perkin was trying to synthesise quinine in his parents' attic in London when he ended up with a black sludge that dyed silk a brilliant purple, launching the entire synthetic dye industry from a failed malaria experiment

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 28, 2026

Climate Science

In 1986, Lake Nyos in Cameroon belched a cloud of carbon dioxide so dense it hugged the ground as it rolled down the valley, suffocating 1,746 people and thousands of livestock in a single night without a single flame or explosion.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Jul 28, 2026

A park ranger abseiling into a hidden canyon near Sydney in 1994 stumbled onto a grove that should not have existed the Wollemi pine, known only from 90-million-year-old fossils, with fewer than 100 left, in a spot Australia keeps secret

By Mal James · Jul 26, 2026

Between five and six million years ago o the Mediterranean nearly dried up, then the Atlantic refilled it in a flood that may have raised sea levels by more than ten metres a day

By Mal James · Jul 26, 2026

One of the most desert-covered nations on Earth has to buy its sand from abroad, and the reason is grain-deep wind has polished Arabian sand too smooth to bind in concrete, so Saudi Arabia imports construction sand from as far as Australia

By Mal James · Jul 26, 2026

The plain cotton T-shirt in your drawer carries a hidden price tag measured not in money but in water around 2,700 litres went into making it, as much drinking water as one person gets through in two and a half years

By Mal James · Jul 26, 2026

In a corner of Death Valley, heavy stones leave long trails across the mud, yet no one ever saw them move until time-lapse cameras caught them sliding on wafer-thin rafts of overnight ice, nudged along by the lightest breeze

By Mal James · Jul 25, 2026

Browse terra daily by topic

Climate Science 4,816 articles Flora and Fauna 6,074 articles Farm News 6,113 articles Wood Pile 2,475 articles