“If the Lord won’t send us water, oh, we’ll get it from the devil.”—Banjo Paterson, “Song of the Artesian Water” (1896) It’s April in the outback of New South Wales,…

One day last May, a muddy truck bound down a dirt road through the backwoods of Gainesville, Florida. It pulled up in a cloud of dust to a sprawling green farmhouse with a wide front…

In February 1987, Neil Gehrels, a young researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, boarded a military plane bound for the Australian Outback. Gehrels carried some peculiar…

The San Gabriel Mountains are waging war on Los Angeles and Ed Heinlein’s chainsaw is screaming in the late afternoon sun. It’s January 2015 and Heinlein, who has a friendly paunch…

It was nearly midnight aboard the research vessel Atlantis. The ship was about a thousand miles west of Costa Rica, where she’d sailed from, hovering over a hydrothermal vent field…

I first met James Lovelock in 1988 at a conference on his controversial Gaia Hypothesis that was sponsored by the American Geophysical Union. Gaia, to remind you, was the mythical…

The novelist William Golding suggested to James Lovelock that he name his now-famous hypothesis after the Greek goddess of the Earth, Gaia. It was a good fit: Lovelock believed that…

An earthquake shook the central Italian city of L’Aquila in the early morning of April 6, 2009. In the months that followed, scientists collected dozens of accounts from people who…

For longer than recorded history, gemstones have been used to tell stories. Passed down through generations, they carry the legends of our ancestral past. They also carry with them…

If you look around during any random moment in your day, there’s a good chance that you’ll see a busy, fast-moving human world laid on top of a placid, mostly still natural world.…