Tilicho Lake, situated at an altitude of 4,917 meters (16,132 feet) in the Nepalese Himalayas, may appear pristine, but new research shows it contains a significant amount of microplastic pollution. Credit: Mark Horrell/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Eastern oysters (_Crassostrea virginica_) cement their shells together to form reefs along Atlantic coasts. Credit: Johnny Andrews/UNC-Chapel Hill

The dry bed of the Great Salt Lake in Utah is one stop in this month’s fieldwork-focused expedition. Credit: Michael Thorne

Seagrasses grow in the waters of Lake Macquarie, a saltwater lake near the eastern Australian coast where researchers recently performed an experiment to see how seagrasses and sediment microbial communities respond to warming waters. Credit: Renske Jongen

During several field expeditions to the Hangay Mountains, scientists collected evidence that showed how the dome-shaped mountain range rose up. Credit: Pengfei Li

The Turkana Rift Zone is home to large deposits of fossils, including the Lothagam site, above, which sits amid sedimentary and volcanic rocks. Credit: Christian Rowan

Fuego volcano in Guatemala, here photographed by a drone, erupts explosively on 4 February 2024. Credit: Jerry C. Mock

High school students in Alabama share some favorite slang terms. If someone tells you to touch grass, they’re telling you to get a reality check — but the last thing you’d actually want to touch is dog water! Also, the history of the word hangover, and the many names, in several languages, for the effects […]

Researchers used electrical resistivity tomography to better measure the fresh and salty water beneath dry beds of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Credit: Michael Thorne

Titan as seen by the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) instrument on the Cassini spacecraft. These false-color images of different sides of the moon were composited from over 13 years of observations and show dark dune fields, bright icy highlands and several large circular impact craters Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Nantes/University of Arizona

Archaeological evidence uncovered at the Birds of Paradise wetlands complex in Belize indicates that the community there survived the Maya collapse thanks to sophisticated knowledge of wetland farming. Credit: Tim Beach

Drilling takes place in 2014 at Lake Magadi, a playa lake in southern Kenya along the East African Rift, during the Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project. The project collected cores to help scientists understand the environmental conditions in which humans evolved. Evaporating water leaves behind trona crystals (foreground) on the lake bed. Credit: Robin Renaut

The accumulation of plastic debris along the shoreline of Cozumel Island is continually shaped by coastal and marine processes. Credit: Salvador Reynoso-Cruces

When researcher Peter Convey first visited Antarctica’s McCloud Glacier, the remnants of which are seen here, in 1989, the nunatak seen at middle right of the glacier barely poked through the ice surface, and could be skied up to. Credit: Peter Convey

Luigi Germinario and two technical divers install samples of carbonate rocks at the base of a tidal island near the Italian island of Ischia. Credit: Germinario et al., 2026, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03184-w, CC BY 4.0

Nick Bouskill (left) and Mark Conrad helped conduct winter field research in Colorado to study the seasonal cycles of the soil microbiome. Credit: Patrick Sorensen

Dust storms like this one deliver mineral dust to the Greenland Ice Sheet—and the dark-colored algae that are contributing to its melting. Credit: European Union, Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery

From left to right: Amarjeet Kumar, Andrew Goh, Hanxiao Wu, Robert Anthony, Jason Chan, John Savoie, and Ken Miller await a plane to travel to the South Pole from McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Anthony and Chan were part of the team that deployed two specially engineered seismometers in the ice sheet. Credit: USGS/Christopher Ng, Public Domain

A moat of snow and ice meltwater formed around Jackfish Lake during the spring thaw transition period in May 2022. The purple-red color of the water comes from the presence of a cyanobacteria called _Planktothrix_. Credit: Amanda Little