Terrestrial Planet

The world must seize a shrinking window to reverse the steep decline of wildlife and nature by triggering positive tipping points in food and finance, following the path of the one already underway in energy, according to a major new report from WWF featuring contributions from the University of Exeter's academic experts.

The world is changing. As humans, we tend to focus on what happens on land, but the planet's food systems depend on both terrestrial and marine ecosystems.

In the early history of our solar system, scientists theorize that a Mars-sized object called Theia smashed into the infant Earth, vaporizing massive amounts of rock and blasting it into space. Some of that material coalesced into the moon, where NASA's Artemis program is returning humans, preparing for Mars and shaping the future of space exploration.

Lakes may cover only a small fraction of Earth's surface, but new research suggests they play a bigger role in regulating the planet's climate than previously recognized. By reflecting sunlight back into space when covered in snow and ice, lakes in the Northern Hemisphere have a stronger cooling effect than the surrounding land.

In the search for extraterrestrial life, it makes sense to first look for rocky planets with an atmosphere, like Earth. Without an atmosphere, a planet can't have surface water. But of the more than 6,300 exoplanets cataloged thus far, the vast majority are not rocky, and only a handful of the rocky worlds appear to have an atmosphere.