Rare salt formations have been documented for the first time on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, and they could yield insights about salt structures found on Mars before they disappear for good.

Like a long-distance food delivery app with no apparent highway, fungi that associate with shallow-rooted shrubs in the tundra are accessing deep stores of nitrogen being released by thawing permafrost. The findings by Northern Arizona University researchers, announced this week in New Phytologist, could change scientists' understanding of who accesses nutrients from permafrost, and how.

Aboard the Icebreaker Oden, a Swedish vessel on an Artic expedition, a multidisciplinary group of scientists, filmmakers and students, including three City College of New York undergraduates, made a dismaying discovery in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. "Microplastics, a lot of them," said Krystian Kopka, junior in CCNY's Grove School of Engineering.

Holding particular biological resources, the Tibetan Plateau is a unique geologic-geographic-biotic interactive unit and hence plays an important role in the global biodiversity domain. The Tibetan Plateau has undergone vigorous environmental changes since the Cenozoic, and played roles as switching from "a paradise of tropical animals and plants" to "the cradle of Ice Age mammalian fauna."

Johan Rockstrom, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), is a Big Picture scientist who strives to see how all the pieces of our planet's complex climate system fit together.