In 1876, Peter Guthrie Tait set out to measure what he called the “beknottedness” of knots. The Scottish mathematician, whose research laid the foundation for modern knot theory, was trying to find a way to […]
Category: quantamagazine
Climate science is the most significant scientific collaboration in history. This series from Quanta Magazine guides you through basic climate science — from quantum effects to ancient hothouses, from the math of tipping points to […]
Nearly 170 years ago, a scientist named Eunice Foote discovered a fundamental truth about the gases that surround us. In her home laboratory in New York, she filled one glass cylinder with carbon dioxide and […]
Far out in the backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Milky Way galaxy, a blue-green planet is doing something rather significant: It is becoming hotter and darker. Earth’s energy balance has never been constant, […]
Venus is arguably the worst place in the solar system. A cloak of carbon dioxide suffocates the planet, subjecting its surface to skull-crushing pressure. Sulfuric acid rains down through the sickly yellow sky but never […]
The Earth’s atmosphere is nothing but freely roaming molecules. Left alone, they would drift and collide, and eventually even out into a mixture that’s dynamic, yet stable and broadly unchanging. The sun’s rays complicate things. […]
There’s a simple story of the greenhouse effect: A blanket of carbon dioxide envelops the planet, letting sunlight in but trapping its heat. As a result, Earth warms. But how does this actually work? Carbon […]
In the 1960s, the Soviet climatologist and mathematician Mikhail Budyko set out to investigate the potential future of a planet on the brink of nuclear Armageddon. He started by looking some 600 million years into […]
A gust of wind strikes the Sahara Desert, launching a speck of dust into the air. For a week, the grain rides atmospheric currents halfway around the globe, reflecting sparkles of sunlight back to space […]
Life has influenced Earth’s atmosphere going back billions of years. But until two centuries ago, when humans started burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale, the most significant living climate controllers were organisms invisible to […]
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