Ensia

On the thawing tundra, researchers race to understand black carbon’s climate impact

May 17, 2017 — Editor’s note: Reporting for this story was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. On a morning in September 2015, sterile, gray Arctic light filtered through ...
Ensia

Can the Great Lakes continue to fend off an increasingly thirsty world?

August 16, 2018 — On the rocky beach at Little Girls Point County Park in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the heavy wash of Lake Superior seeking the shore rolls stones the size of softballs back and ...
Ensia

Life-saving drinking water disinfectants have a “dark side”

January 15, 2021 — Editor’s note: This story is part of a nine-month investigation of drinking water contamination across the U.S. The series is supported by funding from the Park Foundation and Water ...
Ensia

Crop gene banks are preserving the future of agriculture. But who’s preserving them?

May 21, 2015 — During the past few years of civil war in Syria, rebel fighters have destroyed Shia mosques and Christian graves, and burned and looted Christian churches while the Islamic State group ...
Ensia

OPINION: CRISPR is coming to agriculture — with big implications for food, farmers, consumers and nature

January 28, 2016 — Very few technologies truly merit the epithet “game changer” — but a new genetic engineering tool known as CRISPR-Cas9 is one of them. Since we first developed the ability to alter ...
Ensia

What to do about the antidepressants, antibiotics and other drugs in our water

August 11, 2015 — There’s no way around it, the headlines are disturbing. And they come, not from tabloids or click-bait blogs, but from papers published in scientific journals. They describe fish and ...
Ensia

From Alaska to Florida, harmful PFAS compounds pollute water at multiple sites in every state

December 16, 2020 — Editor’s note: This story is part of a year-long investigation of drinking water contamination across the U.S. The series is supported by funding from the Park Foundation and Water ...
Ensia

We’re pouring millions of tons of salt on roads each winter. Here’s why that’s a problem.

November 6, 2017 — If you live — and drive — in a northern or mountainous climate, you’ve seen highway trucks spreading loads of rock salt on snowy highways to melt the ice. But where does the salt go ...
Ensia

In the depths of the oceans, human activities are beginning to take their toll

June 7, 2017 — Imagine sinking into the deepest parts of the Central Pacific Ocean, somewhere between Mexico and Hawaii. Watch as the water turns from clear to blue to dark blue to black. And then ...
Ensia

These Montana ranchers are helping grizzlies, wolves and cattle coexist

November 28, 2017 — Editor’s note: This story was produced in collaboration with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, a non-profit investigative news organization. In the predawn chill a range ...
Ensia

Why farmers are using glyphosate to kill their crops — and what it might mean for you

December 19, 2017 — It was the spring of 1978 and I was 7 years old when the first scoops of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream were sold in Burlington, Vermont, about an hour from the rural home I shared with ...
Ensia

Of hemp’s many uses, one of the most promising could be in construction

Magic? Not exactly. But Carter came away from his attempted debunking a hemp believer. And one of the most promising of its many uses, he found, is its application as a building material known as ...