Latest news with #geoscience
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Something is ‘pulsing' beneath the Earth, scientists say – and could tear a continent apart
Scientists have detected deep pulses in the Earth beneath Africa – and it could tear the continent apart. The pulses are made up of molten mantle rock surging in rhythm, the researchers say. The plume of hot mantle is surging upwards in pulses that are like a heartbeat, they say. Eventually, the continent will be torn apart and a new ocean will be formed. That will take place over millions of years, as the tectonic plates are ripped apart at rift zones like those in the Afar region in Ethiopia. That is where scientists found the evidence of the unexpected behaviour. 'We found that the mantle beneath Afar is not uniform or stationary – it pulses, and these pulses carry distinct chemical signatures,' said Emma Watson, the scientist who led the study. 'These ascending pulses of partially molten mantle are channelled by the rifting plates above. That's important for how we think about the interaction between Earth's interior and its surface.' In the research, scientists gathered samples from the Afar region, where three tectonic rifts meet. Scientists have long thought that mantle was being pushed up making the crust extend, eventually giving birth to a new ocean basin, but did not know how it was happening. To better understand that process, they took those samples and combined them with existing data and models to understand the plume beneath the surface of the Earth. They showed that there is one asymmetric plume beneath the surface. 'We have found that the evolution of deep mantle upwellings is intimately tied to the motion of the plates above. This has profound implications for how we interpret surface volcanism, earthquake activity, and the process of continental breakup,' said Derek Keir, a co-author. 'The work shows that deep mantle upwellings can flow beneath the base of tectonic plates and help to focus volcanic activity to where the tectonic plate is thinnest. Follow on research includes understanding how and at what rate mantle flow occurs beneath plates,' The work is described in a new paper, 'Mantle upwelling at Afar triple junction shaped by overriding plate dynamics', published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Something Strange Is Happening 1,700 Miles Beneath Your Feet. Now We Know Why.
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: Over a thousand miles from the surface, in Earth's D' layer—right on the edge of the liquid metal outer core—there is a weird acceleration of seismic waves. Experiments recreating the phenomenon in a lab found that this is the result of post-perovskite crystals, which form from perovskite. The alignment of these crystals determines their hardness, which then determines how fast seismic waves can move through them. Deep beneath Earth's surface are layers of soil, rock strata often embedded with fossils, gurgling magma, and—back up. Before your Journey to the Center of the Earth mission can get any further, you're going to have to get past flows of solid rock. The D' layer—located between layers of magma above and the liquid rock of the outer core below—has been mystifying scientists for decades. This is in part because if you were to plunge down 2,700 kilometers (1,700 miles), you would be jump-scared by seismic waves that accelerate when they hit the threshold of the D' layer. It used to be thought the reason for this was the mineral perovskite, found in the lower mantle, morphing into a form known as post-perovskite close to the D' layer. But that still wasn't enough to explain the phenomenon. Geoscientist Motohiko Murakami wanted to investigate what could possibly be going on to cause the strange seismic wave acceleration known as the D' discontinuity. Because trekking to the core-mantle boundary (CMB) where the D' layer lies is obviously not an option, he led a team of researchers from Switzerland and Japan in running lab tests and computer simulations to find out what post-perovskite had to do with he unusual increase in seismic waves. Post-perovskite crystals are anisotropic, meaning their physical properties are different when measured in different directions. They have two different types of textures—one comes from transformation (the phase transition from the perovskite phase to post-perovskite), and the other is a result of deformation (when post-perovskite crystals turn to face in the same direction). Murakami and his team found out that it isn't just transformation that causes the rumbling. It actually happens with deformation. 'The deformation-induced texture forms when crystals undergo plastic deformation, causing their orientations to align in specific directions. It is mainly produced by dislocation slip or creep,' Murakami said in a study recently published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. How post-perovskite crystals are aligned determines their hardness, and the speed at which seismic waves move through them depends on how hard they are. Materials called perovskites can be created from any substances capable of being arranged into the same cubic crystal structure. Perovskite is a calcium titanium oxide mineral (CaTiO3), while post-perovskite is a form of magnesium silicate (MgSiO3) achieved at extremely high pressures. Its crystal structure is orthorhombic, meaning that the right angles of the cubes have unequal axes. For post-perovskite crystals to align with each other, the axes all have to be in the same position. Murakami used MgGeO3 to create crystals analogous to post-perovskite. Like perovskite, MgGeO3 crystals deform easily when pressure is applied, so how they behaved would reflect was is going on over a thousand miles underground. The crystals were heated by a laser, compressed, and heated again to synthesize post-perovskite. They were then exposed to high-pressure sound waves, and the wave velocity was measured once those waves passed through the crystals. It turned out that sound waves can experience a substantial increase in velocity when passing through aligned post-perovskite crystals. Researchers also discovered that the cause of this alignment—which determines the hardness of the material, and therefore the speed of sound waves in the lab and seismic waves deep in Earth—is convection. As hotter material rises, cooler material sinks, as it does in convective storms like hurricanes. Murakami thinks that convection of materials in the mantle (such as plumes rising and slavs sinking) is behind the deformation in the D' layer. This is the first time any evidence—even lab-based evidence—has been found for Earth's innards moving. 'While previous theoretical work has suggested that anisotropy could explain the observed seismic discontinuities,' he said. 'Our results, obtained through in situ measurements of post-perovskite velocities under high pressure, represent the experimental verification of this hypothesis, bridging the gap between theory and observation.' You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Yahoo
22-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
How does a rockslide happen? 'The mountain that moves' was Canada's deadliest
A large rockslide in Banff National Park at Bow Glacier Falls left two hikers dead and up to 13 others injured Thursday, raising questions about how and why the disaster occurred. But a look at published research and archive news articles on rockslides provides some general information about the dangerous occurrences. A rockslide happens when a large chunk of rock detaches itself from the mountain where it sits and begins sliding down the slope. Why does this occur? Well, natural erosion or seismic activity can cause a rockslide, as can heavy rainfalls. Human activity such as excavation, construction or mining can also lead to a rockslide. As one chunk of rock begins its downward slide, it can quickly gain momentum and trigger massive amounts of other rock to also begin sliding, leading to devastating effects. notes a landslide or rockslide can occur 'when gravitational and other types of shear stresses within a slope exceed the shear strength (resistance to shearing) of the materials that form the slope.' Dr. Dan Shugar, a University of Calgary geoscience professor, said rockslides are a fairly common geological phenomenon, particularly in the Rocky Mountains, due to how steep the slopes are. The composition of rock is largely limestone, which is susceptible to water saturation, making the rocks heavier. 'Ultimately, the cause is gravity,' he said. 'Mountains get built up over geological time and then they get torn down. That's an entirely natural process. 'We see rockfalls, rock avalanches, rockslides — we see a variety of mass wasting in mountain environments all the time. They range from a small boulder that would hurt you if it hit you but wouldn't be that damaging to entire mountain sides collapsing, and everything in between.' A landslide occurs when sediment or loose dirt disengages from a hill or mountain and begins moving downwards. A rockslide, however, means solid rocks are also being swept down a slope during a similar type of event. Rockslides are also incredibly fast-moving, as they tend to move down a flat surface of a mountain. The Canadian Encyclopedia notes a rockslide can move up to 100 km/hr. The most horrific rockslide in Canadian history occurred in 1903 when a huge slab of Turtle Mountain crashed down onto the town of Frank and Crowsnest Pass (about 250 kilometres southwest of Calgary). At least 72 known residents were killed in the natural disaster, as were an undetermined number of others visiting or passing through the area. Some historians thus put the death toll closer to 90. An estimated 80 to 110 million tonnes of rock were involved in the deadly event that came to be known as Frank Slide. The rockslide only lasted about a minute and a half. Newspaper clippings and archive stories from the rockslide describe the horrific results that led to the deaths of men, women and children. As those clippings note, information about the state of some of the victims was disturbing, but shed light on how powerful the rockslide was: 'The leg and hip of a man was found lying fifty yards from the Imperial Hotel.' First Nations people in the area had noticed instability in the mountain decades earlier and even had a name for it that translated to 'the mountain that moves.' The geological structure of Turtle Mountain was said to be the primary cause of Frank Slide, but weather impacts and coal mining were also noted as factors in the deadly rockslide. An interpretive centre in Frank now tells the story of the slide and history of the area. Other Canadian rockslides of note include the 1841 rockfall in the Lower Town of Quebec City, killing 32 people and crushing eight homes, and the 1889 rockslide in the same area that killed more than 40, says the Canadian Encyclopedia. The worst rockslide worldwide was the Haiyuan Landslides of 1920 in China, when more than 200,000 people were killed. An earthquake caused those landslides. Apart from the Frank Slide, Shugar said Alberta has surprisingly not had that many significant rockfall events. He noted B.C. tends to get more, citing the Hope Slide of 1965 as an example. 'It certainly was a very big, impressive landslide right by the highway,' he said. The 680-tonne Big Rock, a type of quartzite, is an intriguing tourist attraction at Rocky Mountain House in Alberta, but how did this boulder measuring 9.7 metres by 9.4 metres by 5.5 metres get there? Well, the Rocky Mountain House Mountaineer reported the following 11 years back: 'Right around 20,000 years ago the Late Wisconsinan Glaciation was at its height; it was a glacier that could have been one kilometre thick. We know that all of the rocks in the Foothills Erratic Train come from the upper Athabasca drainage area south of Jasper,' said author and geologist Ben Gadd. 'A rockslide, almost certainly, dropped the rocks on the glacier. The glacier then eventually began to flow eastward until running into the Laurentide ice sheet (a glacier much larger than the one carrying the boulders) right around the Edson area. The larger glacier forced the smaller one to begin to move southeastward, right towards Rocky Mountain House.' Along with this Big Rock, another famous boulder that is part of the Foothills Erratic Train is the big rock in Okotoks, south of Calgary. The Okotoks Erratic is 16,500 tonnes in size, but was discovered in large pieces rather than a single stone. As the glacier, now on a new path, moved in the southeastward direction, it slowly began to melt. And as this process continued, the boulders that fell and became embedded in the glacier from the upper Athabasca drainage area began to drop from the flowing glacier. According to Shugar, the U of C geoscientist, the short answer is probably yes. The reason for that is due to how climate change is accelerating glacial retreat, which causes rock to become less stable. Temperature and precipitation changes are other components, as warmer temperatures can melt more ice and increased rainfall can change glacial mass or erode cliffs, making them steeper. 'These landscapes, as they become newly created or newly exposed by glacier retreat, they often are unstable,' Shugar said. 'There's a sort of relaxation time over which they adjust to this new paradigm, new reality for them. Quite often they're very steep because of glacier erosion and so they need time to relax back to a geographical equilibrium.' In glaciated mountains like in the Rockies, Shugar said that as glaciers retreat, we can expect to see more landslides. In the case of the Bow Glacier Falls rockslide, he suspects there have been side-effects due to the recent creation of a new proglacial lake, which formed just 70 years ago at the toe of the Bow Glacier. He suspects that over those seven decades, water from that new lake has been seeping into the rock, saturating it over the years and making it heavier. 'We see this all over the place,' he said. 'This isn't unique to this particular location, but I suspect part of the ultimate cause of this event yesterday (Thursday) was that saturated rock.'
Forbes
19-06-2025
- Science
- Forbes
Fossils Suggests Sea Levels Could Rise Even Faster In The Future
Fossil coral exposed in a limestone outcrop above present sea level in the Seychelles. Newly uncovered evidence from fossil corals suggests that sea levels could rise even more steeply in our warming world than previously thought. 'This is not good news for us as we head into the future,' says Andrea Dutton, a professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Dutton and her PhD student Karen Vyverberg at the University of Florida led an international collaboration that included researchers from University of Sydney, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Victoria University of Wellington and University of Massachusetts Amherst who analyzed fossilized corals discovered in the Seychelles islands. Models of future sea level rise generally hover around a meter (3 feet) within the next 100 years, but factors like how much of the ice caps will melt, water temperatures, oceanic currents, tidal range, coastal geomorphology and land subsidence can affect local sea levels. Based on an analysis published by NASA in 2021, global mean sea levels rose by about 20 centimeters (around eight inches) between 1901 and 2018. Fossils provide an opportunity to reconstruct sea level change over a longer time span. The researchers used remnants of coral species that only live in shallows very near the sea surface. Their tropical location also means they were far away from any past ice sheets, which have a more pronounced effect on local sea levels. By determining the ages of two dozen fossil corals from various elevations on the islands and analyzing the sediments around the fossils, the team reconstructed the relationship between global climate and sea levels between 122,000 and 123,000 years ago. That was during a period known as the Eemian Interglacial, when global temperatures were actually very similar to what they are now. Perhaps more importantly, the researchers noted that sea levels didn't rise at a constant rate, but there were periods of stagnation followed by abrupt pulses. Likely the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica — thousands of kilometers away from the Seychelles islands — didn't melt simultaneously as it is happening today. 'These swings suggest that the polar ice sheets were growing and shrinking out of phase with each other as a result of temperature changes in the two hemispheres that were also not aligned,' explains Dutton. At the beginning of the Eemian, sea levels rose over 6,000 years leading up to a peak that was 5 to 7 meters (16 to 23 feet) higher globally than it is today. Such high levels are unlikely in the near future, however, today's sea level rise could happen much faster. 'So even though sea level rose at least several meters higher than present during this past warm period, if temperature rises simultaneously in both hemispheres as it is today, then we can expect future sea level rise to be even greater than it was back then.' 'This is hugely important for coastal planners, policy makers and those in the business of risk management,' concludes Dutton. Over 600 million people (around 10 percent of the world's population) live in coastal areas that are less than 10 meters (32 feet) above sea level. Rising sea levels not only will displace an estimated 267 million people worldwide, but contaminate groundwater, increase the risk for floods, cause beach erosion and habitat loss for animals and plants living on or near the shoreline. The study,"Episodic reef growth in the Last Interglacial driven by competing influence of polar ice sheets to sea-level rise," was published in the journal Science Advances. Additional material and interviews provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Yahoo
18-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Doomscroll detox
In 2010, 16-year-old Hannah Ritchie arrived at the University of Edinburgh to start a degree in environmental geoscience. Environmental issues were her passion, and she was excited to learn how to solve some of these great global challenges. 'Four years later,' she writes in her first book, 'I left with no solutions. Instead, I felt the deadweight of endless unsolvable problems. Each day at Edinburgh was a constant reminder of how humanity was ravaging the planet.' Contributing to this sense of deadweight was mainstream media. 'During my time at university, I made a conscious effort to keep up with the news,' Ritchie notes. 'Everywhere were images of natural disasters, droughts and hungry faces. More people seemed to be dying than ever before, more were living in poverty and more children were starving than at any time in history. I believed I was living through humanity's most tragic period.' The unrelenting exposure to the world's negative trends looked like it was going to change the trajectory of Ritchie's life. 'Despite working relentlessly to get my degree, I was ready to turn my back on my obsession and find a new career path. I started applying for jobs far away from environmental science,' she writes. 'Those years made me feel helpless.' This chapter of Hannah Ritchie's story may be familiar to many news readers. 'More people are turning away from news, describing it as depressing, relentless and boring, a global study suggests,' writes Noor Nanji for the BBC. 'Almost 4 in 10 (39 percent) people worldwide said they sometimes or often actively avoid the news, compared with 29 percent in 2017,' Nanji highlights from a report by Oxford University's Reuters Institute that noted record high levels of news avoidance. A key reason for actively avoiding the news has to do with that emotion of helplessness that Ritchie experienced. The report's lead author, Nic Newman, tells the BBC that people often choose to avoid the news because they feel 'they have no agency over massive things that are happening in the world.' People are similarly driven away by the focus on 'endless unsolvable problems.' 'Haunted by a sense that the news is relentlessly toxic, once-loyal readers and viewers have been gradually ebbing away,' Paul Farhi reports in The Washington Post. 'Digital media has made news ubiquitous. … And much of it, people say, drives feelings of depression, anger, anxiety or helplessness.' Farhi quotes one reader who's backed off her dedicated news reading: 'I can't handle the stress put on me when I go to the front page,' she said. 'It feels like it affects me directly. I don't know if the world is worse now than it was before. But it never used to feel like a personal threat.' Ritchie once felt powerless to make a difference. But she didn't stop consuming news; instead, she expanded the kinds of stories she reads. Today, she is one of a growing number of voices in journalism dedicated to highlighting what's improving in our world and how we can lean into progress. When we know what's going well — and why — we can help it keep going. Michelle Cottle became a champion of spotlighting progress in the news for similar reasons. In 2018, Cottle joined The New York Times as a national political writer for its opinion section. In the two years following the January 6 insurrection, she had a particular focus on 'ways to protect democracy.' 'This is not a question of ideology,' she says. 'I have deep respect for members of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.' The concern was over 'efforts to undermine the foundations of democracy, like the peaceful transfer of power, respecting the will of voters.' The question was, what role would the news play in helping shore up those foundations of democracy? That lack of awareness of crucial facts can have serious consequences. One is the uptick of anxiety that negative misperceptions can cause. Another is the way that anxiety can prevent engagement. 'On one level, that's a very important story that people get very stressed out about. But when you get down to the mechanics of what you have to worry about, like the officeholders way down the political food chain, like county clerks, secretaries of state, the attorneys general … election board commissioners, those are really boring races for people,' Cottle says. Even though these stories about obscure elected offices are crucial to explaining how U.S. elections function, it's hard to get readers to take an interest in them. The potential danger of this lack of interest surfaced in the 2022 midterm election season. As Cottle explains, there had been a push from certain quarters after January 6 for those who believed the electoral process was corrupt to take over local election machinery: 'Steve Bannon, the Trump adviser, pushed this strategy out nationwide, trying to stack the election infrastructure with people who were convinced that there was massive democratic fraud and they needed to stop it at all costs. You saw stories of election watchers out eyeballing people and being vaguely intimidating. So we learned that this was an ongoing, multi-pronged plan.' In response to this election-stacking plan, the Times and other news organizations strove to alert voters to the candidates running for less prominent local offices. 'In addition to all the pieces about the Senate races and the House races,' Cottle says, 'we were constantly hammering the whole, 'These secretaries of state candidates need to be watched; they are a danger.'' If voters had just avoided the news, they might never have known about the candidates' positions. They might not have reflected their real values with their vote, or might never have turned out to vote at all. As it turned out, voters apparently did pay attention to the news. Candidates who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election were overwhelmingly defeated in battleground states. For Cottle, the midterm results had a very positive message about people's ability to change outcomes — and she wants this message shared. 'What I learned is that you really do need to put the spotlight on these things. One of the things that you worry about when you cover politics is that people just get exhausted and frustrated and they lose any sense that they have the ability to affect things. And so when they do, it's very important to jump up and down and say, 'See, you need to go out and vote. This matters.'' The direct impact of local politics on individual lives is one reason many media scholars recommend reading and supporting local news. If you're concerned about making an impact in the world, your own community is a good place to start. Following local news will help you discover where your efforts can make a positive difference. Whatever you can do locally, you might still feel overwhelmed by the crises you see happening around the world. If so, it's essential to remember that 'the news' isn't actually the best way to understand the world. Discouraged by a fiercely negative picture of global events, Ritchie was tempted to abandon environmental science as a career path. But her mind was changed when she came upon a new way of looking at global issues — something quite different from the tragic headlines and images she saw in every day's news. It started with a presentation by a man named Hans Rosling. Rosling, who died in 2017, was a physician, professor of global health and statistician who developed new ways of visualizing and understanding statistics. In particular, he used big sets of data to reveal hidden truths about global trends. These truths were often startling to his viewers because of the positive picture they portrayed, exposing audiences to a different perspective than the one they had seen while scrolling the web, watching cable TV or thumbing through the paper. The news is designed to tell us something new. But those unlikely events are not the most probable ones. Rosling's presentation changed Ritchie's outlook on the state of the world. She had assumed everything was getting worse. What Rosling showed in this presentation was how many things were actually getting better — how countries around the world, for example, were getting healthier and healthier. There was a vast gap between Ritchie's perception of the world and reality — a gap that comes from the way we take in information about the world. The kinds of daily news stories we consume are not designed to tell us the whole truth about world trends. 'The news is designed to tell us, well, something new — an individual story, a rare event, the latest disaster. Because we see them in the news so often, unlikely events seem like probable ones. But they're often not,' Ritchie explains. 'That's why they make the news and why they capture our attention.' It is the disasters, in particular, that are highlighted to draw us in. In an attention economy, news outlets bank on crises as the best bet for attracting our clicks. They've learned that their audiences are drawn to catastrophes and potential threats to their well-being. 'These individual (news stories) are important,' Ritchie writes. 'But it's a terrible way to understand the bigger picture. Many changes that do profoundly shape the world are not rare, exciting or headline-grabbing. They are persistent things that happen day by day and year by year. … The only way to really see these changes is to step back and look at the long-run data.' And what Ritchie saw, as she studied that data, was a global picture far more positive than the one she'd seen in those despondent years at university. As she states in her book, 'If we take several steps back, we can see something truly radical, game-changing and life-giving: Humanity is in a truly unique position to build a sustainable world.' Her book is, fittingly, titled 'Not the End of the World: How to be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet.' There are still many ways we can change the world for the better. A crucial way to make these changes is to find broader and better stories about the world. Broader, in that they capture more data. Better, in that they focus on what's going well. Ritchie is a featured author with 'The Progress Network.' Supported by over 100 scholars in diverse fields, this organization is dedicated to sharing stories about the progress that humankind is making in many areas — stories backed up by the kind of big data for which Rosling advocated. The goal is to 'balance out this strongly negative viewpoint (in) the mainstream media' and 'help show people there is progress actually happening,' says Emma Varvaloucas, the network's executive director. This is a vital task because many people are not aware of this progress. Take climate change. Anxiety levels would likely not be so high, says Varvaloucas, if more people knew 'that the truly apocalyptic levels of warming that were possible even 10 years ago are widely seen as implausible now. So the really scary scenarios that (a United Nations panel) outlined for 7, 8, 9 degrees of warming, we're done with them. We avoided them already.' We're still faced with a very serious situation trying to avert the possibility of 3 degrees of warming and hopefully keep warming under 2 degrees, she says, but progress is happening toward this goal. Stories about progress provide the information and the motivation necessary to drive engagement with crucial problems — to let people know that it's worth it to get involved. 'What we're doing already has worked,' says Varvaloucas. 'I really wish that a lot of climate coverage in the U.S. would mention that emissions … are down almost 20 percent already from 2005 levels. … People think that the world is about to blow up in 10 years … and that (scenario) is just not the case anymore.' That lack of awareness of crucial facts can have serious consequences. One is the uptick of anxiety that negative misperceptions can cause. Another is the way that anxiety can prevent engagement. For the past 10 years, the narrative around climate change has simply been one of urgency and alarm. There was good reason for this strategy in the past, but Varvaloucas contends that it has become counterproductive as the distress it creates has possibly prevented people from engaging with the issue as much as they could and engaging with it in a healthy way. Varvaloucas was one of those people. 'I was really turned off by the whole climate change discussion for a long time because I just felt there weren't any entry points. It was just like, 'Hey, we have this problem. No one's solving it. The end.' And I was like, 'OK, well, what do you want me to do about that?'' This is where stories about progress can help. They provide the information and the motivation necessary to drive engagement with crucial problems — to let people know that it's worth it to get involved. 'If you are aware that progress has happened, it leads to a completely different set of decisions,' says Varvaloucas. When people have access to the data on where progress is happening and what's driving it, they can invest in strategies that have actually worked to improve people's lives. For example, Ritchie wrote on her Substack newsletter, 'Every month I donate a share of my income to global health charities. The money goes toward the most cost-effective ways to save lives and improve health: malarial bed nets; nutritional supplements for low-income kids. … I only donate because I know that it's effective and I know it works.' Contrary to what some critics say, stories that focus on progress don't tend to cause complacency, Ritchie says; they inspire action. 'When we can see real results coming through, we tend to lean in, not out.' Public health is just one area where the Progress Network documents significant advancements over the past decades: reductions in new HIV infections and deaths from AIDS; positive developments in vaccines for diseases like malaria and RSV (not to mention Covid-19); huge drops in child mortality; and declines in severe poverty. To learn about the positive changes that are happening and how to help sustain them, you can start with the Progress Network's website and weekly newsletter, and the Solutions Story Tracker at To improve your understanding of global trends, including trends for the better, you can check out Gapminder. Co-founded by Rosling, the site uses clear, reliable data to expand understanding and correct misconceptions about global issues. Our World in Data is also dedicated to using data to make progress on the world's biggest problems — and to share news about the progress that has been made. Today, Ritchie is deputy editor and science outreach lead at Our World in Data. After almost giving up on a career in the environmental field, she has now spent nearly a decade researching, writing about and sharing the news on environmental issues. A key part of her work is letting the world know about the problems we still face and the magnitude of those problems. But, she notes, she couldn't have embarked on this vital work at all without an escape from doomsday thinking. 'Our impending doom leaves us feeling paralyzed,' she writes in her book. 'I recognize this from my own dark period when I nearly walked away from the field entirely. I can assure you that after reframing how I saw the world, I have had a much, much bigger impact on changing things.' Maria McNair is a writer and podcast producer based in St. Louis, Missouri. This essay is an adaptation of an episode of 'Article 13,' a Faith Matters podcast she researched and co-produced. This story appears in the June 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.
