Science | The Atlantic

Brace for the Plastic-Price Hikes

2026-04-22T10:21:20-04:00

The Iran war’s effect on fuel prices is easy to see, not least in the climbing numbers on gas-station signs. Less visible is the disruption cascading through another part of the fossil fuel–based economy: plastic production. Before long, prices not just for the gasoline that goes into cars but for the parts that make them—along with the cost of toys, furniture, clothing, and more—could start climbing too.

The plastics that proliferate through modern life are almost all made from oil and gas derivatives or by-products. Until the conflict began, many of the chemical ingredients that go into plastics, the ingredients for those ingredients, and raw plastics themselves originated in the Middle East. The Strait of Hormuz closure has already created shortages of key ingredients, which could mount into shortfalls of some plastics and plastic products. Even if tensions ease and the strait reopens soon, untangling supply lines would take months, likely until the end of the year, experts say.

So far, Asia, whose plastic makers depend heavily on oil and chemicals traveling through the strait, has borne the brunt of the disruption. In China, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, and other industrial powerhouses, many petrochemical producers have declared force majeure, invoking emergency provisions to warn that they might be unable to fulfill contractual commitments.

Some have scaled back production as they’ve run short of crucial ingredients such as naphtha, a crude-oil derivative. South Koreans began panic buying trash bags in March (although the run has since eased), and officials in Taiwan asked plastic suppliers to prioritize medical uses to avoid shortages of vital items. India’s biggest bottled-water seller raised prices by more than 10 percent because of escalating costs for its bottles and caps.

Given Asia’s role as a manufacturer of goods exported around the world, its troubles may soon ricochet more widely. Malaysia, for example, makes nearly half of the world’s synthetic rubber gloves. One producer announced that it would wind down operations this month because of spiking prices for raw materials, and others are raising prices by as much as 40 percent. Southeast Asia also makes a lot of tires, and Alexander Tullo, who covers plastic production for Chemical & Engineering News, told me that “if they’re seeing constrained synthetic rubber, maybe that means that the tire production will be affected too.”

Already, the prices that manufacturers pay to buy plastic are spiking everywhere. Dow, for example, hiked its North American polyethylene price by 10 cents a pound in March, then announced a 15-cent increase for April—which it promptly doubled—followed by another 20-cent jump planned for May.

“This is not normal for how prices are handled in this industry,” Anne Keller, a petrochemicals expert at Midstream Energy Group, a Texas-based consultancy, told me. “It’s essentially, ‘We can get it, so that’s what we’re going to charge.’”

In China, prices of polyethylene, polypropylene, and polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, the plastic typically used to make drink bottles, have all surged by at least 30 percent, Albert Li, a chemical analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence in Hong Kong, told me. Polyester, widely used in clothing, carpets and furniture, is getting more expensive too.

Jay Foreman, the CEO of Basic Fun, a Florida-based toy company whose brands include Tonka, Lite-Brite, and Care Bears, was recently in China meeting with contractors producing his products.

“Obviously, everybody is incredibly concerned,” he told me. Many of his suppliers bought large stocks of plastic when oil prices were low, so they haven’t hiked prices yet. But “they are signaling to us looming cost increases and supply-chain shortages.”

Such shortages are his primary worry, he said, because toy companies, especially smaller ones like his that can’t match the spending power of bigger rivals, are typically near the back of the line when supplies are tight. “We don’t have any leverage, so we’re at the whim of the market.”

Soon, he’ll have to lock in toy prices with retailers for spring 2027. Last year, when President Trump slapped tariffs on many imports, Basic Fun didn’t have time to pass on the new costs. “We had to eat them,” Foreman said, and he expects to be in the same position if he has to cough up more for toys in the coming months.

In other sectors, such as packaging, inventories move faster. Manufacturers and retailers may temporarily absorb the hit, but “they’ll pass it on as soon as they can,” Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Houston, told me. “It’s one of these pernicious price increases that’ll just inch its way into the consumer’s wallet.” The impact won’t be as big as that from fuel-price spikes, Hirs said, “but it’s there and it will” fuel inflation.

Among the biggest beneficiaries so far are companies making plastics in the United States. They are significantly less dependent on the Middle East for the ingredients because they source important ones domestically, from fracking. In recent years, petrochemical companies have plowed more than $200 billion into plants, many of them in Texas and Louisiana, that turn fracking by-products into plastic and other petrochemicals.

After China expanded its own plastic production, a global glut pushed down prices, as well as petrochemical companies’ profitability. The war abruptly changed that. Dow and other producers with extensive American operations are not paying dramatically inflated prices for their raw materials, Keller said, but plastic markets’ new tightness means they can charge their customers more. “They’re going to make a lot of money if this persists, and they’re probably making a lot of money already,” Tullo said. (The American Chemistry Council, the trade group that represents petrochemical producers, declined to comment. The Plastics Industry Association did not reply to an email requesting an interview, nor did Dow.)

Even so, Americans remain vulnerable to plastic and product shortages if the conflict continues. Plastics made from the ingredients available in the U.S. are most suited for producing single-use items such as bags, bottles, and disposable goods, Keller said. More durable plastics, including those used in car parts or some medical equipment, must be made from oil derivatives and are often imported from Asia. That means supply hiccups “may kick in sooner rather than later,” she said. Many people have internalized the idea that gas prices depend on global events; now they may be forced to recognize that dependence on plastic makes the world similarly vulnerable.

The ‘Missing-Scientist’ Story Is Unbelievably Dumb

2026-04-21T20:22:10-04:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

The mystery of the missing scientists began with a Silver Alert. In late February, a retired Air Force major general named Neil McCasland left his house in New Mexico for a walk and never returned. Rumors spread on social media that the elderly former astronautical engineer had been abducted or killed. Forget Nancy Guthrie, they said. Here was a guy who used to run a “UFO-linked” lab. Here was a guy with knowledge of “America’s deepest, darkest secrets.” So where was this guy?

McCasland’s wife did her best with a post on Facebook to address what she called the “misinformation circulating about Neil and his disappearance,” but wild notions only multiplied. Dots were added, then connected: Another scientist—an advanced-materials researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) named Monica Reza—had disappeared while hiking near Los Angeles in June 2025. A physicist at MIT had been murdered in December. “What is going on seems to be an enemy action,” Walter Kirn, the novelist and podcast contrarian, said last month.

Things got even dottier from there: Another eight names were added to a growing list of scientists who have recently either died or gone missing. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer expressed concern about the 11 missing scientists and said that “something sinister could be happening.” Another member of that committee proposed that China, Russia, or Iran might be involved. And last week, on the White House lawn, President Trump told a reporter from Fox News that he’d just been in a meeting to discuss the matter. (Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the administration will address the “legitimate questions about these troubling cases” and said that “no stone will be unturned.”)

[Read: Walter Kirn and the empty politics of defiance]

Which is all to say that another piece of flagrant nonsense has ascended to the highest levels of U.S. politics and media. To call it a conspiracy theory would be far too kind, because no comprehensive theory has been floated to explain the pattern of events. But then, even the phrase pattern of events is imprecise, because there is no pattern here at all. Given all the people who could have been roped into this narrative but weren’t, any hope of finding meaning falls away. Barring any dramatic new disclosures, the mystery of the missing scientists has the dubious honor of being a sham in every way at once.

The conspiracy theorists can’t even put their finger on the field of U.S. research that has fallen under threat. Our leading scientists are being targeted by foreign powers—but which ones, exactly? Well, it’s the people who study space technologies, or maybe the people who study asteroids and comets, or maybe the people who work on plasma physics? The Fox News reporter Peter Doocy tried to sum it up like this: The scientists who have died or gone missing are the ones “with access to classified stuff—nuclear material, aerospace.” Kirn’s attempt was somehow even less coherent: The missing experts, he said, work “in the most advanced realms of space-rocket propulsion and, you know, Air Force–NASA–type endeavors.”

If these attempts at explanations sound stupid, it’s because the people on the list of missing scientists have no common area of expertise. Sure, many happen to be physicists or engineers; some are or were affiliated with government labs. But what about Jason Thomas? His tragic death over the winter made the list even though he was a chemical biologist working for Novartis on ways to improve the process of drug discovery.

And what about Melissa Casias, a Los Alamos National Laboratory employee who went missing last year? She was not a scientist at all, but rather an administrative assistant. (Perhaps she had access to some “classified stuff”; who knows?) Another person on the list is Amy Eskridge, who was a “scientist” only in the way that a subway preacher is a “theologian.” Whatever fame she had derived from her claiming that her father, a former NASA propulsion engineer, had discovered the secret of antigravity and that she would soon go public with this world-changing scientific breakthrough. She also made frequent reference to a friend of hers, a “katana-wielding, time-traveling soldier” named Dan.

Maybe Casias chanced to open some ultrasensitive file in the course of doing her job, and had to be abducted. Maybe Eskridge really was onto some new technology. The bigger problem with the story is this: Their deaths and disappearances aren’t really unexplained. Reza went missing while hiking, a fate that probably befalls hundreds if not thousands of people every year. Two more people on the list, a pair of JPL-affiliated astrophysicists, each about 60 years old, may have died of natural causes, as happens to roughly 35,000 other Americans of their age each year. The MIT physicist was murdered by a former classmate who also shot and killed two undergraduates at Brown University. Several people on the list appeared to be suffering from personal distress: Thomas, the chemical biologist, was distraught over the recent loss of both of his parents; Casias had very significant personal problems, according to her daughter, and may have tried to run away from them; McCasland was tormented by brain fog and physical deterioration, according to his wife, and he’d told her more than once that “he didn’t want to live like that.”

And then there’s Eskridge, the antigravity theorist with the time-traveling-soldier friend. In what seems to be her final media appearance, from 2020, she is (by her own account) drunk and high, and appears to be in the grips of a paranoid delusion. Over the course of the interview, she claims that someone sneaked into her home while she was out and closed her bedroom window and that, in another incident, someone broke in and unplugged the charger for her boyfriend’s wireless headphones. Eskridge also said that she’d been followed by a car with a license plate that kept changing, that she’d been roofied multiple times, and that strangers at her local bar had been taunting her by using “buzzwords” relevant to her life. “I’m scared,” she said near the end of the interview. “I’m tired. I’m real tired.” Eskridge died in June 2022.

Read: An act of cosmic sabotage

Note the date: June 2022. Any good conspiracy theory starts with a notable coincidence. (The bacteria that cause Lyme disease were first discovered on an island that happens to be just 10 miles away from the former site of a military research lab …) But again, this is not a good conspiracy theory. When on the White House lawn Doocy asked for comment on the missing scientists, he described them as having “all gone missing or turned up dead in the last couple of months.” If that were true, we might indeed be looking at a “cluster” of events. In fact, the cited instances of dead or missing people extend across a span of nearly four years, from Eskridge’s death by suicide to McCasland’s disappearance two months ago.

Add in the diversity of individuals and circumstances—recall that we’re talking about a group of people who were either scientists or nonscientists, and who died of natural causes or got murdered or went missing—and it’s crystal clear that no coincidence actually exists. The loss of life is real, and families are mourning, but nothing sinister is going on. The “mystery” is just a p-hacked panic and a waste of everybody’s time.

[Read: Every scientific empire comes to an end]

Ironically, America doesn’t seem to need much help when it comes to disappearing scientists. About 1,000 employees have been laid off from NASA’s JPL in the past few years. One senior scientist who is still there told my colleague Ross Andersen last October that he’d never seen the place so empty and lifeless. In the meantime, the Trump administration has repeatedly proposed cutting NASA’s science research funding in half, a plan that would surely lead to further loss of staff at JPL, not to mention the abandonment of probes that have been sent into our solar system.

And while the FBI looks into potential foreign involvement in professors’ deaths at MIT and Caltech, the Trump administration says that it intends to halve the budget of the National Science Foundation, which in recent years has furnished those two schools with hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants. Already, more than 40 percent of the NSF’s scientific staff have left or been fired.

This is just a subset of the harms that have been done to the U.S. research enterprise since the start of 2025. In response, some top scientists have been getting up and walking out the door. Their absence can’t be blamed on China, Russia, or Iran. Maybe the White House should look into it.

The Challenge the Artemis II Crew Gave the Rest of Us

2026-04-14T07:26:44-04:00

As a reporter covering NASA during the early 1980s, I quickly grew accustomed to close encounters with real-life space legends. All part of the job. But a chance sighting at the Kennedy Space Center one evening reminded me of the magic of leaving Earth.

I had just finished anchoring a broadcast of the space shuttle’s first nighttime launch along with Gene Cernan, the commander of Apollo 17 and the last man to leave his footprints on the moon. Gene regularly joined me to add his expertise and eloquence to our coverage. As we left the booth, he stopped, pointed skyward, and said, “Lynn, you see that spot there, the left eye of the man in the moon?” I looked up and nodded. Gene continued: “That’s where I landed.”

Whoa. That face was a real place. The man next to me had stood there. I couldn’t stop staring.

Last week, the goosebumps returned. At a moment that perfectly dovetailed with many Americans’ yearning for a personal mental-health day (just one?), Artemis II, the first moon-bound mission with humans since 1972, delivered an unusually emotional escape. The magic, this time, wasn’t just the smooth launch and the “perfect, bullseye splashdown,” as NASA’s Rob Navias commented, but the palpable awe radiating from four extraordinary earthlings as they showed the rest of us what we were missing.

“You’d fall in straight to the center of the moon if you stepped in some of those,” the pilot Victor Glover reported about the vast field of craters, never seen before, that pockmark the other side of the moon. He described islands of light, valleys that looked like black holes. Our moon not only has a face; it has a spine.

Commander Reid Wiseman delivered a play-by-play of active meteoroid strikes on the lunar surface: “I saw two, and Jeremy [Hansen, the Canadian mission specialist,] has seen one,” Wiseman began; the science adviser Kelsey Young literally jumped out of her chair back at mission control. “Oh, Jeremy saw two.” These are valuable scientific observations—crucial information for future settlements on a celestial body with no atmosphere. But I couldn’t stop grinning either as Young smacked her forehead in delight.

The solar eclipse also provided invaluable data, thanks to the astronauts’ giant, magnified view as the moon blocked the sun. They reported subtle color nuances, photometry, and other details that might explain the evolution of the lunar surface. Understanding its origins could help us learn where we came from too, and, more important, where we are going. Or at least provide some answers to all those times we lay on the grass as kids and stared up into the night sky, wondering.

Wonder. It’s a hard experience to translate. And Commander Wiseman wasn’t shy about admitting that everything they’d seen had worn out his supply of adjectives. “Houston,” he radioed down, “if you could give me about 20 new superlatives in the mission summary for tomorrow, that will help my vocabulary out a bit.”

I’d never heard astronauts so candid, so uninhibited. Their excitement was profound, their enthusiasm contagious. When I emailed Marsha Ivins, a retired astronaut pal, to ask about her reaction to the mission, she admitted that when Integrity left the relative safety of Earth orbit—essentially flying without a net for anything requiring urgent attention—she had “one of those wonder/horror/amazement/buzzy/pride/respect-for-the-physics moments.” In other words: Ain’t science grand.

And what Artemis saw from Integrity (talk about a perfectly timed choice of name) is quickly rewriting the science books. It’s been a minute since we as a nation had a moment like this, in which our scientific prowess shone bright—a minute since we showed proper reverence for all those equations and computations and codes, the “little ones and zeroes,” as Cernan, an engineer, used to tell me. The facts that matter, that make you feel: Wow!

Ivins also reminded me, though, that Wow! works only when it’s put in motion by human beings. Don’t forget, she said, “the years of dedicated work the entire team has spent getting to these magical 10 days.”

Early on, the mission specialist Christina Koch was asked about living and working in a capsule about the size of a very large hot tub covered over with a seven-foot ceiling. It was so tight, Koch confessed, smiling, that even in the more spacious setting of microgravity, every movement was “a four-person activity.” This was not a complaint. They actually liked their group hugs. When Koch returned to Houston, she was asked to define the word crew. She didn’t hesitate: “a group that is in it all the time, no matter what, that is stroking together every minute, for the same purpose.” Then, in what I’d call a hopeful, if not generous, plea for global cooperation, she extended the metaphor to the rest of us. When she looked out the spacecraft’s windows and saw the home planet, she said, “Earth was just this lifeboat hanging, undisturbingly, in the universe … Planet Earth, you are a crew.”

If only.

People used to ask me why I liked covering the space program, and I never had to think twice: My other beat was politics, and it was more than satisfying to deal with individuals for whom spin described how a satellite moved when launched, not how to cover up a story. NASA is, of course, a public agency, and no journalist should ever give it a pass—should ever exonerate the deadly decisions and misguided management, for example, that led to the loss of 14 human beings in the hideous accidents that destroyed first Challenger, then Columbia. But today’s journalists seem, at least, to have a relationship with NASA management that’s strikingly different from that of their peers in other government agencies. With no media access of my own, I watched much of the activity on NASA’s TV feed, where the back-and-forth at press conferences was consistently cordial and sane. The questions ranged from tough to just informative, but no one on the podium belittled any reporter with a scornful slur. And almost every journalist bookended the question with a gracious “Thank you.”

I don’t know if this civility means that NASA is operating on its own planet, but I do find it appealing. And perhaps this concern—among the astronauts, between the crew and mission control, between the agency and the press—is how this very human mission accomplished so much. How four people traveled farther from their home planet than anyone, ever, and came back safely.

Maybe everyone was simply caught up in the seductive power of what the capcom Jacki Mahaffey teasingly called “moon joy.” The crew was smitten. They cooed openly about what they saw, about their families, about one another. Ground control was captivated. Management agreed.

“If you can’t take love to the stars, what are we doing?” Amit Kshatriya, the NASA associate administrator, asked at a press conference. “Like, why are we even going? That’s why we send humans instead of robots sometimes.”

That was, I repeat, a NASA official, speaking publicly. Love. Bring it on. Can the glow from this 10-day burst of joy possibly be sustained?

Maybe that’s not the right question. This mission humanized the moon. Now we should ask, can that glow ever reflect back on Earth?

A Different Moon From the One We’ve Known

2026-04-10T10:37:35-04:00

Updated at 11:25 a.m. on April 13, 2026

Galileo Galilei, one of the first people to see the moon through a telescope, described it using what he knew about the sun and the Earth. To convey the play of sunlight on craters, for example, he invoked an earthly sunrise, “when we behold the valleys, not yet flooded with light, but the mountains surrounding them on the side opposite to the Sun already ablaze with the splendour of his beams.”

You can probably conjure this vision of the moon—hold the image in your mind and transmit it off this planet and onto our shining opalescent companion. Peaks in the sun? I’ve seen that.

This week, we got a different moon—the Artemis moon. The moon captured by America’s first mission there in generations is not the moon I look for every time I step outside. It is not the moon I grew up with or the one my parents learned about during the Apollo missions.

On Monday—the moon’s day—we were introduced to a brown, battered world. Whole regions of its scarred far side did not appear a brilliant lunar white, but a much more familiar, homey hue. Mushroom, chestnut, hazel, cocoa, coffee, tea-stained, russet, brown: earth tones. Straight lines running over the moon’s surface; concentric rings that look like companion coffee-cup rings.

The new view comes from a combination of technology, orbital motion, and human nature, all of which are part of the point of the Artemis II mission. The camera quality on Artemis, let alone the ability to livestream the views, was inconceivable during the Apollo era. Film from cameras that were specially built for Apollo had to get home first, then be developed, before the images could grace the front pages of newspapers on Earth. During Artemis, we are getting at least a few of them straight from astronauts’ Instagram Stories. Many more stunning images will arrive home with the astronauts this evening, when their Orion capsule is scheduled to splash down in the Pacific, off the coast of San Diego.

The views are different from the ones decades ago because of planetary geometry. Artemis went farther past the moon than even Apollo 13, unveiling a whole new perspective on the moon-Earth system. And during Apollo, the far side was the dark side: The missions were timed so that astronauts would have daylight on the near side to do their work. But that didn’t matter for this mission, which is why the Artemis crew was able to describe areas of the moon that no human eyes had ever seen before. Scientists made a list of key surface features that they wanted the astronauts to scrutinize.

This moon is three-dimensional. It is being walloped by space rocks right now, and seeing its scars, boy, am I happy we have our atmosphere. Galileo wrote about the moon’s smattering of dark spots; on Artemis, the astronauts saw bright spots—newly formed impact craters and splayed ejecta—that no one before them had ever seen. They gave one on the boundary of the moon’s near and far sides a name, Carroll Crater.

When the moon was eclipsing the sun, at least from the Artemis capsule’s point of view, the astronauts saw the agave-green milky glow of the solar atmosphere and its dust, visible around the moon. On Earth, you can sometimes see a similar phenomenon through the atmosphere, when the air reflects moonlight and the moon seems swaddled in a halo. My younger daughter’s middle name is the Turkish word for this phenomenon: ayla. I showed her the space version on Tuesday, right before bedtime.

Of all the images Artemis has taken so far, the one I cannot stop looking at is the photo of the far side of the moon: a thick crescent foregrounding a tiny, distant crescent Earth. This is our planet viewed the way we usually see our moon, and our moon the way we’ve been able to see the Earth since astronauts first orbited the planet. I have never seen the moon this way. And I have looked at it a lot. This new view was both unnerving and exhilarating. I felt—to borrow a new phrase—“moon joy.”

Mission Specialist Christina Koch felt moved by the moon, too. At one point, after the astronauts had described various features that they had previously memorized using flash cards, Koch shared her amazement in a simple phrase: “It’s a real place.”

NASA

If Galileo was the first to describe the moon’s features in detail, his contemporary and sometimes pen pal Johannes Kepler was the first person who might have understood the importance of sending us there. Kepler devoted much of his career to figuring out optics, and was arguably the first scientific thinker to articulate the difference between seeing and perceiving. To Kepler, the human mind played an active role in any act of perception. Seeing something on the moon, describing it, and composing a photograph from a very close distance is a different experience from viewing something from afar, or even seeing a close-up captured by a robotic camera. NASA, too, apparently values this distinction—enough to do this strange thing of flinging people to the moon and asking them to look around and tell us about it with metaphor and human feeling.

The first humans to go around our moon, in 1968, saw a gibbous Earth coming up over the lunar horizon. That Earthrise photo, along with the slightly later Blue Marble photo, renewed our perspective on this planet; Artemis has a chance to do the same for our moon. That brown, pockmarked rock in the foreground is ours too. What do we owe to this companion world that has shepherded our entire existence?

The crew of Integrity will carry home many different legacies. It is supposed to be the first ship in a flotilla that will carry economic development, national self-interests, and the yearning for scientific discovery to the moon. No country is likely to build industry or human habitats on the moon anytime soon, but this is what NASA leaders say they want. It is what China is planning, too.

Commander Reid Wiseman said at the Artemis launch that he hopes his mission will be forgotten, eclipsed by successive landings and even bolder crews and missions. But the pictures he took, and the way he and his crewmates described what they were seeing, should stick in our memory. The pilot, Victor Glover, describing a beam of sunlight emerging through a crater, invoked one of the most visually assertive things on Earth: “If you’ve ever seen the spotlight off the top of the Luxor at night in Las Vegas, this looks like what that wants to be when it grows up.” Koch likened fresh little craters to light shining through a pinpricked lampshade. All the earthly, human, 21st-century language we have does not convey the enormity of what they witnessed: a brand-new moon for everyone.

This article originally said the Earth, rather than the moon, was eclipsing the sun from the capsule’s point of view.

A Cancer Treatment That Does More Than Scientists Thought

2026-04-09T11:00:00-04:00

By the time Fabian Müller met the patient at the center of his newest research paper, he was fairly certain that an experimental treatment was her last hope. The patient, a 47-year-old mother of two, had for years been battling three severe autoimmune diseases, all of which were triggering her body to attack components of her blood. Her doctors had made nine separate attempts to treat her conditions, but none of them had worked. By the start of 2025, she’d been confined to a hospital in Dresden, Germany, for more than two months, being dosed with multiple immunosuppressive drugs and receiving up to three daily transfusions of red blood cells, as her care team tried and failed to control a massive disease flare.

In desperation, the woman’s care team reached out to Müller, a hematologist-oncologist at the University Hospital of Erlangen, a roughly three-hour drive away by ambulance. In recent years, he and his colleagues have made a name for themselves pioneering experimental CAR-T cell treatments—a type of personalized immunotherapy originally developed for cancer—against a variety of autoimmune diseases, with promising early results. Small studies of CAR-T, as well as early results from several ongoing clinical trials, show that many people with autoimmune disease go into remission after treatment; some patients are now years out from CAR-T cell therapy and remain in good health without the help of any drugs. Müller hopes that this latest patient—the most complex autoimmune case to receive the treatment to date—will soon be able to say the same. She received CAR-T treatment early last year and has since returned to a mostly normal life. After years of being intermittently lashed to machines and tubes, she hasn’t needed a hospital stay in many months. (The patient has asked to remain anonymous to protect her privacy, Müller told me.)

Müller and other CAR-T researchers are cautious about forecasting the future of their technology. CAR-T is brand-new to autoimmune disease—it was first trialed in a patient in 2021—and scientists still aren’t certain how long remission might last or whether patients might experience long-term side effects. But for the first time, patients with some of the world’s most severe autoimmune conditions are entering prolonged remission after a one-and-done treatment. And many researchers are starting to think that CAR-T may offer people with autoimmune disease a new kind of hope: the possibility of permanent recovery.

Autoimmune diseases—a broad and complex category of ailments including rheumatoid arthritis and type 1 diabetes—have long puzzled researchers. For reasons that are still poorly understood, the body’s immune system, normally tuned exquisitely to root out and destroy invasive pathogens or sickly cells, begins to assault healthy cells instead. Although the conditions can be managed, usually with immunosuppressive drugs, scientists have never figured out a way to permanently jolt the immune system back on track.

CAR-T therapies could be exactly the kind of factory reset that the immune system needs. The treatment involves reengineering T cells—a type of immune defender—into chimeric antigen receptor T cells (hence, CAR-T) that can kill other cells of scientists’ choosing. In the case of many autoimmune diseases, that means targeting B cells, another variety of immune cell that is commonly responsible for the body mistakenly turning on itself. CAR-T treatments wipe out the misbehaving cells, allowing the body to, theoretically, restock its B cells with ones that leave healthy tissues alone.

So far, that theory has panned out. Early experiments—many of them headed by Müller’s team—suggest that CAR-T therapies can work against several different autoimmune diseases, including myositis, systemic sclerosis, ulcerative colitis, and myasthenia gravis, with few side effects. Across trials, including several recent studies from Müller and his colleagues, most of the dozens of lupus patients that researchers have infused with CAR-Ts have gone into remission, and stayed there for many months. Overall, CAR-T has been astoundingly successful against autoimmune disease, Marcela Maus, the director of the Cellular Immunotherapy Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, told me, especially considering CAR-T’s somewhat spotty track record against certain cancers. These experimental treatments also offer a major lifestyle improvement over traditional management of very severe and complex autoimmune disease, which can entail a lifetime of regularly dosing immunosuppressive drugs. And although CAR-T can trigger extreme inflammatory responses in some cancer patients, those risks don’t seem as common in people with autoimmune disease.

[Read: A ‘crazy’ idea for treating autoimmune diseases might actually work]

Müller’s recent patient still presented a new puzzle—not least because she suffered from three separate autoimmune diseases. In 2014, around the time she had her first son, she’d been diagnosed with autoimmune hemolytic anemia, in which the body rampantly annihilates its own red blood cells. Shortly after, she developed two other autoimmune conditions: one that caused her blood to clot excessively, and another that destroyed platelets, making her more prone to uncontrolled bleeding. Before falling ill, the patient had been active, energetic, “always doing a million things at once,” Müller told me. Within a few years of her diagnosis, though, she was struggling through daily tasks, unable to work, hospitalized for months every year. Her younger son, who’s about 8 years old, knew his mother “only as a sick person,” Müller said. In early 2025, the patient told Müller that she was willing to try whatever he and his colleagues had to offer. With each additional day of intensive, unsuccessful treatment, her risk of a serious complication was rising while her chances of survival were ticking steadily down.

Early last year, Müller and his colleagues extracted the patient’s T cells, programmed them to destroy most of her body’s B cells, and then infused the modified T cells back into her body. Her B cells quickly began to disappear, and within weeks, her bloodwork began to look roughly normal. A year out from treatment, she still has lingering fatigue, and has to undergo weekly bloodletting to purge the iron that built up in her body after receiving so much donated blood. But her outpatient doctor manages that care, and she no longer depends on drugs or blood transfusions. She’s spending time with her children in ways she never could before. As far as Müller’s team can tell, the treatment accomplished the immunological reboot they hoped for: Her body has since produced new B cells, and they so far seem unperturbed by any components of her blood, just as immune cells should be.

Not everyone will be so lucky. CAR-T therapy can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. Germany allows people with serious autoimmune conditions to receive the treatment on the basis of compassionate use, and covers it through the country’s universal health-care system. But in the United States, the only reliable access to CAR-T for those patients comes through sparse clinical trials. Some researchers worry that certain patients won’t stay in remission, perhaps because they carry some sort of predisposition to generate rogue immune cells. And certain autoimmune diseases—especially those that might not hinge on misbehaving B cells—may be harder to treat with CAR-T. Wiping out a lot of T cells, for example, carries a high risk of pushing someone into an immunocompromised state, similar to AIDS, Avery Posey, a CAR-T expert at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. But new developments are in the works that could address some of those issues, Posey said. Scientists are tinkering with new ways to generate CAR-T cells more efficiently and cheaply, including via injections, somewhat similar to vaccines, that can coax patients’ bodies into reprogramming some of their T cells—that is, generating their own CAR-Ts in house. In some cases, the subsets of cells that CAR-Ts target can also be narrowed, so that only the body’s most problematic cells are taken out of commission, while healthy immune cells remain intact.

Müller remains encouraged by the fact that his first autoimmune patient, a young woman with lupus, is still doing well more than five years out from her CAR-T treatment. She’s since gotten her master’s degree and now works at his hospital, running clinical trials; they wave when they glimpse each other in the cafeteria. For now, her immune system seems to be behaving just as it should.

The Most Beautiful Moment of the Artemis II Mission

2026-04-07T16:54:01-04:00

The most moving image to emerge from the Artemis II mission has not been a snapshot of the moon or the Earth. The camera was instead pointed at the astronauts themselves, squeezed inside their tiny capsule. Christina Koch sat in the foreground, strapped into her chair. Only parts of the other three were visible. Jeremy Hansen, the Canadian, was talking to ground control but also to an international livestream audience.

Hansen said that the crew had spent part of yesterday morning looking out the window at the moon. The astronauts had seen an abundance of craters, including a few scars likely incurred about 4 billion years ago, when, during their shared childhood, the Earth and its satellite were both bombarded by asteroids. Many of the lunar dimples and round basins already have official names, but not all of them. Hansen said that the crew would like to propose a couple of new ones.

Naming is a poetic act, and it can go wrong. Before Richard Nixon’s 1972 announcement of a new spacecraft that would carry Americans to orbit more regularly, Peter Flanigan, his assistant, made the case that it ought to have an exciting name. Someone had suggested Pegasus. Naming the program for a winged horse—a working animal that could fly to and fro—made sense, and it was a callback to the classical Greek grandeur of Gemini and Apollo. Flanigan liked “Space Clipper” and “Starlighter,” but he warned against “the Space Shuttle,” Nixon’s eventual choice, because to him, that name connoted “second-class travel.” By emphasizing the routine nature of the cosmic jaunts that the new spacecraft would enable, it risked reminding people of their dreary commute. It robbed the shuttle’s destination—the celestial realm!—of mystique.

For this mission that has just flown around the moon, and those that will succeed it, NASA picked a much more inspired name, better even than the one given to the agency’s previous moon program, more than half a century ago. “Apollo” was never quite right. It is the name of a sun god, an avatar of reason, order, and harmony. Artemis is a proper moon deity. As a wild forest huntress, she embodies the dreamier lunar qualities, the nighttime longing and magic.

On Monday, while flying around the moon, the crew tried to live up to this elevated standard of naming. During the livestream, Hansen said that the crew hoped that a crater on the moon’s far side might share the name of their spacecraft, Integrity. You can understand why they might have been feeling gratitude for the little vessel at that moment. In carrying them farther from Earth than any humans had ever traveled, it had bested the Santa María, the H.M.S. Endeavour, and every single one of the Apollo crew modules. For days, its thin walls had been the only thing separating their soft animal bodies from the lethal vacuum of space.

[Read: Why doesn’t anybody realize we’re going back to the moon?]

Hansen said that the second crater was especially meaningful to the crew. It was located close to the boundary line between the moon’s near and far sides, and can be seen from Earth for part of the year. Hansen proposed that it be named for a departed loved one from their “astronaut family.” To his right was Reid Wiseman, the mission’s commander, who in 2020 lost his wife, Carroll, to a five-year battle with cancer. The couple’s two daughters were teenagers at the time, and since then, he has raised them on his own. “We would like to call it Carroll,” Hansen said of the crater. His voice cracked as he spelled it out. C-A-R-R-O-L-L. The astronauts wiped away tears, and all four of them floated up to the top of the capsule, in a group hug—an image of human tenderness, beamed down to a planet that badly needed one.

Wiseman is now on his way home to his daughters. The crew blasted off from the Atlantic coast, but on Friday, they will splash down in the Pacific. They’ll don entry suits and point Integrity’s heat shield at Earth’s fast-approaching atmosphere. The friction and burn will surround them in a placenta of superheated plasma. When it nears 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the astronauts will lose contact with ground control. Parachutes will shoot out of the spacecraft to slow it down and stabilize it. According to NASA, the fabric will have been packed tight, to the density of oak wood. The capsule will splash down off the coast of San Diego, and orange airbags will inflate to flip it upright. Divers from the U.S. Navy will approach in choppers and quickly set up a platform. Someone will slide open the capsule’s door, and the astronauts will come out and huff down sweet lungfuls of sea air.

A Private Company Wants to Block the Sun, Responsibly

2026-04-02T09:35:25-04:00

The world’s first major private geoengineering start-up must have known it’d have skeptics. The basic premise—dimming the sun to artificially cool the planet—has been called reckless by scientists and climate advocates; military analysts have said it has real security risks. (Don’t even get conspiracy theorists started.) Still, Stardust Solutions, an American-Israeli company planning to build a solar-reflecting system in the next few years, has enough fans that it raised $60 million in 2025. Now it’s trying to bring around the public and ease concerns over a technology for which its founders would prefer there wasn’t any conceivable global need.

For years, solar-geoengineering research has focused on sulfate aerosols that effectively mimic the impact of volcanic eruptions. Because the cooling effects of volcanoes are well studied, the problems that could arise from spraying sulfur into the atmosphere are also well understood: They include damage to the Earth’s ozone layer and acid rain. Stardust claims to have invented a unique particle that avoids those issues while matching the reflective powers of sulfur.

This week, Stardust is planning to release two documents that it hopes will help alleviate any fears over its next steps. (The company shared both with me in advance of their release.) The first is four pages of “guiding principles,” explaining why the company sees research into solar-radiation modification, or SRM, as essential. The second document outlines a 14-page framework for safely deploying it outdoors.

The documents are grand in their language and intricate in details. But neither document addresses the two key questions facing this initiative: What kind of particle does Stardust want to inject into the atmosphere, and why should a private company be trusted to control a planet-altering technology?

In its guiding principles, Stardust makes an argument for geoengineering that has quickly gained traction in the past couple of years among scientists and even environmentalists. Few advocate the use of geoengineering—right now at least. But as record heat waves turn deadly and polar ice melt threatens to set off uncontrollable natural cycles, a growing consensus is emerging that the technology needs to be at least studied. In that vein, the company stresses in the memo that “Stardust is pursuing R&D, not deployment.” Researching the technology now, it argues, is “essential for any future informed decision-making by governments on whether - and, if so, how - to deploy SRM.” The principles also promise that Stardust will be cautious and “committed to avoiding environmental harm” as it begins to test its technology this year, and that it will release its data, methods, and results, “including unfavorable ones,” in “a timely manner, following appropriate scientific validation.”

The framework in the second document focuses on testing. As a field, although admittedly a small one, geoengineering’s testing strategy has hitherto erred on the side of asking for forgiveness, not permission: In 2012, for instance, a U.S. businessman conducted an experiment that allegedly violated United Nations rules and involved dumping iron sulfate off Canada’s west coast in a bid to speed up carbon absorption. Ten years later, a start-up carried out a rogue experiment in Mexico, sending two weather balloons filled with sulfur dioxide and helium into the air. Stardust told me it has no outdoor tests planned and that it will not conduct any until relevant regulations are established; its framework proposes extensive laboratory testing and computer modeling before beginning small-scale testing that they will “tightly monitor,” eventually scaling up to dispersing the particles across a wider area.

Still, “it’s just a framework,” without any specifics on research plans, Holly Jean Buck, a University at Buffalo researcher whose book After Geoengineering spells out potential benefits of this type of technology, told me. “Frameworks are everywhere in academia,” she said. Likewise, after I reviewed the details of the documents with her, she said that “the guiding principles just seem like generic things that the research community has been talking about.”

The most obvious details missing from the documents are any information about Stardust’s proprietary particle. “None of us knows what they are hoping to put into the stratosphere—for a profit,” Cynthia Scharf, a senior fellow at the Brussels-based Centre for Future Generations who studies geoengineering, told me. Rather, she said, the new documents “repeat blithe paeans to transparency, safety, and informed governance.”

Yanai Yedvab, Stardust’s CEO and a former nuclear scientist, told me that Stardust plans to unveil its particle “in the coming months.” And he insists the company wants to be regulated. I asked him what industry or company might compare to Stardust and its model—weapons production, for instance? Raytheon, after all, does not decide whether or where to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles; the use of massively destructive weapons is constrained, to some degree, by the types of international agreements that might govern geoengineering.

Yedvab offered an alternative: pharmaceutical companies, which are often funded by and work in partnership with governments, but which also work under strict regulation. “You’d never believe a pharmaceutical company telling you that a cure for cancer is safe,” he said. “You have, for this, the regulators and independent bodies.”

But right now, at least in the U.S., no obvious agency could act as the Food and Drug Administration for geoengineering. And Stardust is already trying to shape whatever regulatory environment it might face. In November, the environmental newswire E&E News reported that the company had hired the lobbying powerhouse Holland & Knight to begin “informing members of Congress about our work and the need for appropriate and robust oversight” of its research, Yedvab said in a statement at the time. (The lobbying shop had failed to publicly disclose its work for Stardust due to what it said was a clerical error.)

In its new guiding principles, too, Stardust forswears working with “entities likely to engage in irresponsible” activities with its technologies and argues that potential deployment “should only take place through credible and informed international decision-making.” Ultimately, the company envisions selling its services exclusively to national governments or international bodies, such as a United Nations agency. “We expect and hope that governments will come together in a few years to allow international decision making on SRM, much as they did with the Montreal Protocol,” Yedvab told me, referring to the 1987 treaty to phase out use of the chemicals causing a hole in the Earth’s ozone layer.

As a business strategy, it’s necessarily unusual. A global project to spray aerosols into the atmosphere could not have competition without unpredictable and potentially disastrous results. Who exactly might its customers be? Perhaps the U.S. and China, together, through some UN partnership; perhaps a middle power, such as Brazil or India, could buy Stardust’s intellectual property and engage the UN in some kind of global effort. Smaller countries already facing some of the worst effects of climate change, such as Ghana, recently started openly calling for access to their own geoengineering solutions. If governments don’t buy into Stardust’s technology, the company’s work could at the very least underscore how little progress governments themselves are making.

Certainly, private industry is producing some of the most powerful breakthroughs of our age: reusable commercial rockets, deep-ocean mining, chemistry that generates clean water from thin air, AI. Stardust could end up inventing a tool that wins over the public with transparent science and practices that prioritize public good. It could also be the West’s best bet to maintain its lead over a technology that could offer humanity one of its most profound instruments to reshape the world, given that China has so far made only modest research efforts.

Once we start geoengineering, though, stopping may be difficult. Scientists and green groups have come around to the idea of researching these technologies more because of concerns over the failure of decarbonization efforts than a bullishness on geoengineering. Yedvab echoes the ideas of the emerging middle ground, that geoengineering might buy the world time to build enough nuclear reactors, solar panels, and carbon-capture projects to avoid reaching calamitous levels of heat. But he also told me that he sees geoengineering as a way to keep the standard of living we have now. This technology will “allow people to live more or less the life they aspire to live, the life they’re used to living,” he said. “We want to make sure our children will live in a world where they don’t suffer the horrors of climate change. While this is not the only tool and we should have the full portfolio, I think it’s a unique tool that enables you to hold both sides at once.”

For how long? If the world’s governments do use geoengineering to slow-walk a transition from fossil fuels—as critics of the technology fear—the world could be locked into decades or even centuries of spraying the atmosphere to maintain the habitability of our planet. All the while, we could end up paying private companies for that privilege. But the costs of not having some kind of insurance policy against runaway warming could be even higher.

Why Doesn’t Anybody Realize We’re Going Back to the Moon?

2026-04-01T19:52:00-04:00

The most momentous launch since the Apollo era was about to begin, and along Florida’s space coast, a secondhand exhilaration was working its way through the assembled crowd, as though all of us, and not just the astronauts, would soon ride out of Earth’s gravity well on a pillar of fire. The space faithful had started arriving at the A. Max Brewer Bridge in Titusville before dawn, under the light of a full, yellow moon. They had set up their folding chairs and tripods at the high point of the bridge, to get the best line of sight, and stayed fixed in place during a brief rain, and again later, when a concerning wind blew across the lagoon.

On the launchpad, the rocket stood more than 30 stories high, illuminated by banks of stadium lights. As the day wore on, a tailgate atmosphere took hold in the park at the foot of the bridge. For miles, cars had pulled onto nearly every available stretch of grass. Families spread out on picnic blankets, and college-age kids wheeled out coolers. They threw footballs and baseballs back and forth and drank beer.

Two hours before sunset, thousands of us massed on the bridge. Again and again, people told me that they’d come to see history. If Artemis II is successful, the astronauts will be the first humans to reach the moon’s orbit in more than 50 years, and their path around its far side will take them farther into the universe than any human being has previously traveled. The man next to me was streaming the NASA telecast on his phone. He told me that we were one minute from liftoff.

The Artemis II mission has seemingly come out of nowhere. In January, a few weeks before an earlier launch attempt, I’d started asking friends if they were looking forward to it. Few of them had any idea it was happening. “We’re going back to the moon?” they would ask, with the sort of mild surprise that one might experience upon being told that the Super Bowl is only a week away. They didn’t linger on the subject. Anyway, how are the kids?

The original moon missions of the 1960s could be sold as history’s grandest adventure. The Apollo program was the triple-back-handspring exclamation mark on a century of American technological transformations, during which Americans had electrified their cities, filled their streets with cars and their skies with airplanes, split atoms, and invented digital computers. To complete this phase shift into the future, the country banded together to build a spaceship that carried humans to another world, and performed a flag planting for the ages, a peaceful Iwo Jima. Wernher von Braun, the (ex-Nazi and) intellectual architect of Apollo, had compared the moon landing to the epochal moment when aquatic life had first crawled onto land.

In the decades since, the Apollo program has lost some of its aura, in part because it did not lead to a glorious space future in the way that its architects, including von Braun himself, had hoped. Six decades have passed, during which time we’ve had the invention of the internet, the smartphone, and powerful artificial intelligence, and yet this year’s launch is not to Mars or the outer planets or the stars. We’re just returning to the moon. Even though three-fourths of the world’s population is young enough to have never experienced a crewed lunar mission like this one, it has the feel of a rerun. Again we’re rushing to arrive before another nation does, this time China instead of the Soviet Union. We’re told that if we don’t get there first, the Chinese might claim the craters with the best water ice.

Gerardo Mora / Getty
Thousands of spectators gathered on a bridge in Titusville, Florida, to watch the first moon launch in half a century.

Jared Isaacman, NASA’s administrator, often says that the Artemis program will be different from Apollo because this time we’re going to the moon to stay. But are we really? The Artemis II astronauts won’t even leave their ship. They won’t even be stopping at the moon. After they swing around its far side, they’ll come right home. NASA has plans for future Artemis moon landings, in which astronauts will supposedly lay the foundations for a nuclear-powered moon base. But although these plans are more than mere renderings on a PowerPoint slide, they will likely need to weather several NASA budget fights in Congress and at least one presidential transition. The Apollo program’s architects had grand plans for a moon base, too, but without sustained political support, those came to nothing. On the bridge, Carl Ulzheimer, a self-described “old dog from the Bronx,” told me that he’d made sure to come to this moon launch, because 50 years might pass before there was another one, and he didn’t have that kind of time.

That this Artemis launch is happening in the lead-up to America’s 250th birthday has heightened the sense that it’s a nostalgia act for the Baby Boomer gerontocracy. All the more so because Donald Trump, the oldest person ever to be elected to the White House, is presiding over the whole affair. His administration has sought to sabotage NASA’s scientific missions, but the president seems delighted to have the agency gin up a national spectacle on his behalf, just as he was happy to have a military parade on his birthday.

To me, it was a small mercy that he hadn’t embossed his own face on the rocket, or otherwise put himself at the center of the launch. Brad Kowalski, who lives nearby, told me that Trump should have at least come down to see it. “It’s significant that the son of a bitch isn’t here,” he said. Just as a matter of statistics, surely many of the president’s fans were on the bridge, but I was surprised not to see a single red MAGA cap.

[Read: How Donald Trump tried to ground NASA’s science missions]

The world has cheered on America’s previous moments of cosmic glory. After one Apollo mission, a Soviet space scientist congratulated the United States for marking a new “stage in the development of the universal culture of Earthmen.” But with Trump having started a war and a global energy crisis in the 30-day run-up to launch, the idea of a universal culture of Earthmen suddenly felt quaint and distant.

With 30 seconds to go, I stared across the lagoon, mesmerized by the rocket. The Space Launch System is a techno-boondoggle for the ages. On a cost-per-launch basis, it’s likely the most expensive rocket ever built. The initial version took 11 years to develop—the Saturn V took just six—and its launch cadence has been dreadfully slow. Worst of all, as a single-use rocket in the age of new, relaunchable technology, SLS is already obsolete, and the design may well be discontinued before the Artemis missions actually start landing on the moon.

And yet, what a handsome rocket! On the launchpad, it had a retro-futuristic charisma, not least because old space-shuttle parts were used in its construction. The large core stage is insulated in the same distinctive orange foam as the big one that fired the space shuttle into orbit. On its sides, two slim, white boosters have NASA written on them in that old “worm” font that rounds off every letter’s sharp angles, and simplifies the As into upside-down Vs. Once the monstrous explosives in these boosters begin to burn, they can’t be stopped. No human has ever caught a ride on this system, and yet in the small, conical capsule at its top, the four astronauts were tilted back in seats, staring straight up, awaiting ignition.

Austin DeSisto / NurPhoto / Getty
Unlike with the original moon landing, the Artemis II astronauts won’t even leave their ship. They won’t even be stopping at the moon. After they swing around its far side, they’ll come right home.

The crowd on the bridge had just finished counting down when the arms of the rocket’s adjoining tower pulled away. NASA calls this process umbilical separation. At first, the launch itself was like a little silent movie. Smoke billowed out from the rocket’s base, followed by the first flames. And then, a churning river of the brightest orange light you have ever seen shot straight down at the pad. For a moment, much of the surrounding marsh looked to be engulfed. A second sun seemed to have risen, and the whole hulking rocket was ascending out of it, miraculously. Children stood around me, slack-jawed, and when the sound finally hit, they flinched. It was a holy rolling thunder. It shook the bridge and enveloped our entire bodies as we watched the spaceship rise and rise in the sky.

How joined we felt to the astronauts, just then. NASA doesn’t so much choose its crews as cast them, and in this dark moment, they’d done their best to embody a wholesome sense of America. The mission’s commander, Reid Wiseman, is a single dad of two daughters who lost his wife, a pediatric nurse, to cancer. Victor Glover, its pilot, grew up in Southern California’s Inland Empire. Before he became an astronaut, he went to the Navy to fly fighter jets. Now he’s the first Black man ever to journey to the moon. Sitting alongside him is Christina Koch, a veteran of several Antarctic expeditions, who also once spent nearly a year at the International Space Station, during which she participated in the first all-female space walks. On this mission, she’ll make history again, as will the crew’s lone Canadian, Jeremy Hansen, when he becomes the first non-American to venture beyond low Earth orbit.

The four of them were now streaking toward the stratosphere. After only two minutes, the boosters fell away, exhausted, but we could still see the spaceship trailed by a flame longer than itself. The astronauts had not even gone halfway up into the dome of the sky, and control of the flight had already shifted to NASA’s nerve center for human spaceflight, in Houston. In ground control, the rows of technicians would guide them as they twice circled the Earth, and then fired one last burn to intercept the moon, which is itself moving at more than 2,200 miles an hour.

What will the astronauts be thinking, as they watch our blue planet receding through their windows of acrylic aquarium glass? The world’s affairs may take on a different cast from up there. Before humanity’s first visit to the moon, the lunar-flyby mission of Apollo 8, Americans had also found the culture of their country riven. The Tet Offensive suggested that the Vietnam War could spiral into something longer and bloodier. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had just been assassinated, and the Democratic National Convention had descended into riots.

Apollo 8 is said to have provided some measure of national healing, but these things are difficult to measure. On Christmas Eve, as the astronauts came around the moon’s far side, they took turns reading from the book of Genesis: In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. With cameras, they tried to capture the glory of our home planet. A snapshot that the crew took of Earth rising from the ashen lunar plain has been credited with giving us a new cosmic orientation, and galvanizing the environmental movement. But again, these things are hard to measure.

Do we even dare to hope that Artemis II might deliver a similar moment of historical gravitas? The astronauts will surely send back some extraordinary images. The mission has been timed so that the sun will be at their backs. Geologists have coached them to look out from their ship at certain features of the far side, including the Mare Orientale, an impact crater with concentric rings of mountains inside it, which terminate in a dark lava basin, a bullseye. No human has ever laid eyes on it, in situ. For 30 to 50 minutes, the astronauts will lose communication with NASA, and they’ll be alone with these fresh vistas. When they see the Earth again, it will be dwarfed by the moon. Perhaps the astronauts will be moved to say something new and beautiful about its fragility; perhaps all such things have already been said. Either way, they’ll already be homebound. On the seventh day, their official schedule calls for rest.

But all that is in the future. For just another few moments, the Artemis spaceship still belonged to the Earth. After it faded from view, I looked around and saw people hugging, speaking in secular tongues, making great whooping noises, laughing with glee. A few college boys started chanting “USA! USA!” They looked like they might storm a football field and knock down some uprights. The awesome sound of the rocket finally tapered to a faint rumble. We could once again hear waves lapping below. To the east, somewhere on the horizon, the full moon was about to rise.

Don’t Get Sucked Into the War on Lice

2026-03-29T10:53:35-04:00

The human-head louse has a ghostly quality. It tends to glimmer in and out of view, leaving only subtle signs and omens of its presence. Is that oblong speck an egg sac or a flake of dandruff? Was that a prickle on your scalp? Is it normal that your son is scratching just behind his ear? Maybe you have lice and he has lice, and you’ve all had lice for weeks. The possibility is frightening. The uncertainty leads to madness.

The louse evolved to be intrepid and sneaky. Its behavioral imperative is simple and relentless: “They are naturally negatively geotropic,” Ian Burgess, a medical entomologist who runs a company that tests insect-control products, told me. “They will always climb upwards towards the head.” He recalled a day when one must have fallen on his shoe during a comb-out in his lab. He was driving home that afternoon and noticed that the bug was sitting on his knee, apparently confused. “It had climbed to the highest point it could get, and it didn’t know where to go from there.”

Once the bugs ascend, they suck your blood and attach their eggs to the roots of your hair. Within a month or two, your skin might start reacting to the parasites’ saliva, and some degree of itching will ensue. But otherwise, a case of head lice has no ill effects. “To say the truth, head lice are not a real medical problem,” Kosta Mumcuoglu, a lice entomologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told me. Still, their presence is unwelcome, to say the very least. Emergency scalp checks, precautionary treatments, instant-onset symptoms of delusional parasitosis: “It is definitely a psychological, emotional problem,” Mumcuoglu said.

Mumcuoglu is an expert, but this was not a useful insight. I have two kids in elementary school. I am quite familiar with the psychological, emotional problem that is lice.

For decades now, experts have been trying to convince Americans that the plague of Pediculus humanus capitis is very mild, and that it doesn’t really merit drastic measures; for decades, too, parents have heard the opposite from schools, in the form of urgent letters saying lice have been detected and countermeasures are essential. Along the way, we’ve heard claims and rumors that the head-lice situation is deteriorating—that outbreaks are increasing, that drug-resistant superbugs are taking over. Yet the basic facts of lice remain the same. The parasites are programmed to get up to our heads. We are programmed to let them get inside our minds.

The modern lice wars got their start in Newton, Massachusetts. Deborah Altschuler’s son had lice, and his school implied that this was her fault—that a family like hers would not be welcome anymore. It seemed to her just then, in the early 1980s, that the school itself should have taken more responsibility, that its policies on lice should have been clearer. For that matter, shouldn’t everyone, from parents up to politicians, have been more informed about the problem?

The group she formed out of her home, first called Parents Against Lice and later the National Pediculosis Association, would advocate for aggressive lice-check protocols and more systematic rules for expelling kids from class. If this was not a movement to abolish lice, then it was at least an all-out bid for taking head lice seriously as a public-health concern. With the help of several entomologists at Harvard and the University of Massachusetts, Altschuler pressed the case. At one point, she proposed that head lice were a vector for the virus causing AIDS, spreading it from scalp to scalp. “I felt that AIDS was a wake-up call,” she told me. “We got lucky that it wasn’t insect borne, but it could’ve been.”

[From the September 1987 issue: AIDS and insects ]

Altschuler also worried that the common treatments of the time—various insecticide shampoos either used alone or, more distressingly, in combination—were causing harm to kids. In this and other ways, she was an early incarnation of the MAHA mom: incensed about the failings of the public-health establishment, inclined to do her own research, worried about toxic products and the companies that manufacture them. And in the ’90s, her approach to lice caught on. A new industry of lice consultants and lice-removal salons began to form. Altschuler herself became a known expert in the field. (Her proudest moment, she said, was speaking to the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board in 1992, not long after Operation Desert Storm.) Eventually she’d have a dozen people working for her association, taking about 100 calls a day and selling T-shirts with messages such as Keep your wits, not your nits and Don’t let your child become an egghead.

But even as this wave was gaining strength, a sort of countercurrent formed beneath it. One of Altschuler’s Harvard contacts, a public-health entomologist named Richard Pollack, had begun to worry that the newly fostered panic was unfounded. He knew that the bugs were harmless in themselves; more than that, he believed that they might be far less prevalent than many people suspected, especially the ones who had been reaching out to him with horror stories: “They were telling me that lice had become so common, so abundant, that I could go into any elementary school and collect thousands of them in a morning.” But when he followed up on this idea, and started doing field research on grade-schoolers’ heads, the results weren’t really that alarming. Misdiagnosis was indeed a rampant problem, and the people who were the most upset—the ones who’d put their families through repeated treatments—were the least likely, as he saw it, to actually have lice. “They were stuck in this vicious cycle,” he told me.

A folk entomology of head lice had taken hold, and it entailed a range of false beliefs. Pollack sometimes heard it said that lice could jump from one child’s head to another, and that they were infesting kids from classroom desks and rugs. None of this was true, he said; in general, contagion happens with only direct head-to-head contact—and a louse that falls off a kid at school will soon dry out, infesting no one else. (Mumcuoglu told me that parents needn’t worry about lice-infested furniture or bedding either.)

Even worse, for many schools and lots of parents, the mere presence of a nit, or even a nitlike object in a child’s hair, was prima facie evidence of a dangerous contagion. But a louse’s empty egg sac can remain adhered to growing hair for months, like a shell casing on a dormant battlefield. This is one reason why studies find little benefit from screening kids in class: False positives abound. In 2006, Mumcuoglu estimated that two-thirds of all lice treatments in the U.S. are given to children who don’t have an active infestation. And because many schools send kids home if they’re suspected of having lice, those false positives may add up to as many as 24 million lost days of school. (No one has tallied the time and tears wasted on unnecessary pillow quarantines and the bagging of stuffed animals.)

If Altschuler and her group hoped to raise awareness and concern, then Pollack sought, in part, to tone things down. The two of them had worked together in the ’90s, but inevitably they had a falling out. “Early on, I saw him as a wonderful ally and a helpful person to the cause,” Altschuler told me, “but then he started trying to become us, in his own way, with information that was inconsistent with ours.”

In particular, Pollack and the other head-lice moderates took aim at the unforgiving “no nit” policies in schools, which might exclude a child from the classroom on the basis of a single empty egg sac, and they were winning some important hearts and minds. In 2002, when the American Academy of Pediatrics put out its first clinical report on treating head lice, its authors called no-nit policies “detrimental” and “a response to infestations that is out of proportion to their medical significance.” Two years later, the nation’s school nurses—who have been focused on the scourge of head lice since their profession’s founding in 1902—followed suit. Eventually, some school systems would ease up too. In New York City, where I live, the public schools that service a million students had done away with no-nit policies by 2008.

These were salutary changes, to be sure. Fewer kids would be ejected from the classroom, and presumably some degree of lice-related learning loss was curbed. But the new guidelines did not eliminate the broader set of problems that the parasites create for children and their families. Even though some schools now tolerate nits on children’s heads during the school day, they still communicate aggressively with parents on lice-related matters, encouraging frequent checks at home and better-safe-than-sorry interventions.

No one ever articulates the rationale for treating the mere possibility of lice with more concern than a cold or even COVID. (No one ever gets a letter home from school saying A case of rhinovirus has been detected in your classroom.) But the thinking surely boils down to this: It’s icky to imagine that your child’s hair—and yours!—might at this very moment be aswarm with bloodsucking bugs. Once the lice have gotten to your head, and in your head, no amount of “Just calm down” can make them go away.

If the fear of lice can be recalcitrant, the lice themselves are even more defiant. “It’s an insect that is abnormally subjected to stresses on its survival,” Burgess, the entomologist who tests insect-control products, told me. A louse’s clawlike feet hold fast in both a shower and a swimming pool. Its physiology weathers perfumes and soaps and the bristles on our hairbrushes. And given time enough, its genome may adapt to shrug off almost any poison we apply.

You don’t need to hire experts to dislodge an infestation—humans have managed to delouse themselves since deep antiquity—but the process takes some work, along with proper information. I’m sorry to say that the latter isn’t always near at hand. The New York City schools, for instance, suggest that parents give their kids chemical treatments, naming two kinds in particular—permethrins and pyrethrins—that were obsolesced long ago by insect evolution. America’s head-lice problem will never improve, Mumcuoglu told me with some annoyance in his voice, so long as our institutions insist on making this mistake, particularly about permethrin. (In an emailed statement, the New York City Department of Health said that over-the-counter, permethrin-based products are “an accessible starting point for many families,” but other products may be necessary if “there is treatment failure or suspected resistance.”)

In fact, we do have many other ways of getting rid of lice, even so-called drug-resistant superlice. Ivermectin may not be an anti-cancer, anti-COVID wonder drug, but it’s miraculous at treating parasites: A topical ivermectin cream can likely cure your child of an infestation, and may be purchased over the counter. Ivermectin pills—which could be even more effective—can be prescribed off-label. (Dawn Nolt, the lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ head-lice report, told me that ivermectin may be upgraded to a first-line treatment in the next update to the guidelines.) I happen to be partial to dimethicone, a lubricant that will coat a louse’s body and seal up the holes it uses to get rid of excess water. Since dimethicone’s effect on lice is physical instead of chemical, it may be less likely to provoke resistance over the long term. But Burgess, who first identified dimethicone as a lice-killer, warned me that he’s seeing signs of its waning potency. (Perhaps the louse’s body has been changing shape, he said, and their excretion holes are now harder to plug up.)

[Read: How ivermectin became right-wing aspirin]

And then, of course, there is the fine-toothed comb—a medical device that seems to have been in use by human populations for at least 5,000 years. (Archaeologists have found lice on human mummies, and lice combs in mummies’ tombs.) Combing, when performed with diligence, can sometimes be effective on its own accord, even if it’s also highly, highly inconvenient. Proper combing technique involves sectioning out and clipping up the hair in strips, then combing out each section repeatedly while inspecting for lice and nits that may be the size of sesame seeds. After that, one might need to repeat the entire procedure as soon as two or three days later. Strangely, the AAP guidelines say this process might be beneficial, head lice notwithstanding, in the sense that it allows “a caregiver and child or adolescent to have some close, extended time together.” Extended? Yes. Close? Please be serious. I asked Nolt why the AAP was spreading this absurd misinformation. “We were trying to have a silver lining,” she said.

But there is no silver lining, I’m afraid. In the end, the lice wars have only brought us back to where we started, and also where we’ve always been: worried, inconvenienced, and confused. Pollack says he’s proud of what his 40 years of advocacy accomplished—“an awful lot of kids stayed in school, rather than being sent home,” he said. But he also knows that certain head-lice myths have never gone away, and maybe never will.

When I spoke with Altschuler, she lamented the idea, sometimes floated by today’s head-lice experts, that head lice aren’t so important. “They are important for the people who have them,” she said. This, at least, is a scientific fact.

The Shocking Speed of China’s Scientific Rise

2026-03-27T07:33:38-04:00

If China finally eclipses the United States as the world’s preeminent scientific superpower, there won’t be an official announcement. Neither will there necessarily be a dramatic Promethean demonstration, a bomb flash in the desert, a satellite beeping overhead, a moon landing. It will be a quiet moment, observed by a small, specialized subset of scientists who have forsaken the study of the stars, animals, and plants in favor of a more navel-gazing subject: the practice of science itself.

This moment may now be at hand. American science has been the envy of the planet since the Second World War at least, but it has recently gone into decline. After President Trump took office last year, his administration started vandalizing the country’s scientific institutions, suspending research grants in bulk and putting entire lines of cutting-edge research on ice. In August, Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services canceled $500 million in mRNA-vaccine research, less than two years after Americans won a Nobel Prize for pioneering that technology. More than 10,000 science Ph.D.s have left the federal workforce, according to one group’s estimate, and the White House has been withholding money from frontline researchers in computer science, biomedicine, and hundreds of other fields that will define the human future. As one historian of science put it to me in July, “This is an unparalleled destruction from within.”

[Read: Every scientific empire comes to an end ]

While all of this has been unfolding, metascientists have been following a very different story overseas. They’ve watched in wonder as China has built out a gigantic research apparatus at world-record speed, stocking institutions, universities, and laboratories with talent and some of the best equipment and facilities money can buy. In 1991, China spent $13 billion on research and development. Today, its annual spending is more than $800 billion, second only to the U.S. The Chinese government just unveiled a plan to grow the country’s science budget by 7 percent each year for the next five years. According to a new forecast from Nature, China’s public spending on research is likely to overtake the United States’ by 2029.

Just because a research ecosystem is sprawling and expensive doesn’t mean that it reliably creates and diffuses new knowledge. (At its peak, the Soviet Union had the world’s largest scientific workforce, yet it couldn’t keep pace with America’s more open system.) But we haven’t seen the scale at which Chinese science will operate once the country fully taps its talent pool. China’s population is four times the size of America’s, and its culture is unabashedly pro-science, even relative to other developed countries. Its universities are already handing out twice as many STEM degrees as their U.S. counterparts do, and nearly double the number of Ph.D.s.

For almost a decade now, Chinese scientists have been publishing more papers too. Again, the sheer volume of this effort gives us only a coarse sense of what’s happening there. When China began to dominate that metric, some of its universities were paying cash rewards to scholars for each publication, and a lot of Chinese research papers were shoddy make-work. The government has since ordered universities to stop encouraging academic mass production. The factors that drive salaries and promotions for professors are now more fine-grained, and it shows: China’s share of the world’s most widely cited scientific papers has grown, Caroline Wagner, a professor at Ohio State University who studies scientific policy, told me. In 2023, Chinese scientists produced 58,000 of the world’s roughly 190,000 most influential publications, according to Wagner. Their contribution was second only to the United States’. Wagner likes this metric because it’s relatively hard to game (though some Chinese scientists do seem to be trying).

If you were building a bespoke dashboard to monitor the state of science in China, you’d have many such data streams to choose from. The problem is, they’d all be lagging indicators. We can’t easily assess the quality of research that China’s scientists are doing today, because that work won’t be published for another year or two at least, and then its scientific influence—measured by the resulting papers’ citation rates—won’t peak until a few years after that, on average. (Some papers experience a citation boom even later; metascientists call them “sleeping beauties.”) Nobel Prizes have an even more dramatic lag: So far, only one Chinese scientist has earned a Nobel for scientific work done in China, but Nobel laureates are often summoned to Stockholm decades after they’ve completed their revolutionary research.

In the meantime, we do have some more immediate signs that Chinese scientists are ascendant. Last year, a team of American and Chinese researchers published an analysis of international research collaborations. Their machine-learning model identified the lead authors of nearly 6 million scientific teams to see who was actually in charge. The team found that among U.S.-China collaborations, the share of leaders who were affiliated with Chinese institutions had grown from 30 percent in 2010 to 45 percent in 2023. The researchers projected that China will pull even with the U.S. next year or in 2028 at the latest.

In the end, China’s scientific-superpower status will likely depend on the world-changing force of its discoveries. “We don’t just want papers,” Yian Yin, a professor of information science at Cornell, told me. “We want papers that turn into real theoretical insights or technologies.” Some of these can be tracked by looking at how research is cited in patent applications, but this additional diffusion can introduce its own lag of 10 years or more. Even so, China’s fast rise in the applied sciences is already obvious, Yin said. The country is in the midst of a solarpunk revolution. Thanks to its advances in chemistry and materials science, China has caught up with or surpassed the U.S. in the design and manufacture of advanced batteries, electric vehicles, and solar cells—key technologies for the 21st century.

Future historians of science will have a better perspective on precisely when the torch-passing occurs, if it does. The significance of a scientific achievement is not always easy to recognize in real time. When Chinese alchemists invented gunpowder in the ninth century, no one grasped the full range of its potential uses. It was initially thought to be a curiosity, a firework or a special effect, until Song-dynasty arms dealers started using it to make fire arrows and other military explosives. European scientists heard about it only centuries later.

A thousand years before that, when the Chinese invented paper, they initially used it for padding and packing. No one thought to use it for disseminating knowledge. About that same time, Chinese scholars were compiling the Jiuzhang Suanshu, a mathematical treatise focused on solving practical problems with computation. There are 246 of them, drawn from the everyday realms of agriculture, land surveying, and taxation. One chapter includes a matrix technique. It is now regarded as an early intellectual ancestor of matrix-based linear algebra, which powers neural networks, up to and including large language models.

History is a story that we tell ourselves about how we got to the present, and if China soon sits atop the sciences, history will be reinterpreted. China’s past glories may be recast as part of an extended narrative of dominance, and America’s eight-decade reign may come to be regarded as a mere blip.

There’s No Way the American West Will Have a Normal Summer

2026-03-19T11:35:53-04:00

Spring is just about here, if you go by its official start date, on the equinox. But in the American West, it feels like we skipped right to summer. A record-smashing heat dome has settled over a huge swath of the United States, from California to Montana and down to Texas. At my house in Colorado Springs, where we are 6,700 feet in elevation, highs could hit 90 degrees Fahrenheit this Saturday. The usual high temperature should be around 55 this time of year. Just outside Phoenix, a baseball spring-training matchup between the Chicago Cubs and Cincinnati Reds was rescheduled to 6:05 p.m. Friday, rather than a typical afternoon start time. Highs around Phoenix are expected to hit 106 Friday and Saturday, about 30 degrees above normal for mid-March. We are roasting out here.

This is not normal. Or at least it wasn’t normal in the past. The heat wave is happening because of a bizarrely strong ridge of high pressure in Earth’s atmosphere. The ridge suppresses cloud formation and brings in warmer air. Such atmospheric ridges are more common in the summer, but this one would be unusually intense even for that season. It is the strongest ridge ever observed in March, Kaitlyn Trudeau, a senior researcher at the science nonprofit group Climate Central, told me. The group’s researchers have developed a prediction model that assesses how much a warming trend or record high can be attributed to human-caused climate change. According to the model, climate change is making this week’s western high temps five times more likely.

More subjectively, this heat dome is “otherworldly,” “genuinely startling,” and “absurd,” depending on which meteorologist you ask. The spread of March temperatures on Colorado’s Front Range is typically wide, but not so wide that the Denver metro area should be expecting highs in the 80s—even inching up to 90. March is also, famously, the state’s snowiest month. Peak snowpack usually falls around April 9. This year, we passed peak snowpack a couple of weeks ago, and the heat wave means that by mid-April, much of the snow will probably be gone for the season.

This is not just our problem, or Arizona’s; the whole West is baking right now. In Nevada, a state whose name literally means “snowy,” Great Basin National Park will see temperatures in the 70s. From March 4 to March 16 in California, the snowpack melted at 1 percent a day on average, according to the state’s Department of Water Resources. Peak snowpack in the state probably happened in mid-February, about 40 days before the typical peak.

Snowpack is vital for water in the West, serving as a savings account for summer water needs; the heat wave will flush that account empty. My favorite Colorado ski area, which reaches 11,952 feet in elevation at its summit, could see high temperatures of 55 degrees over the weekend, for instance. The snow will turn to slush and melt fast, and streams will be high and turbid; one of the threats from this heat wave is actually hypothermia, for people who find themselves (intentionally or otherwise) in rushing, snow-fed rivers.

But then the rivers and lakes filled by melting snow will run dry, months sooner than they should. Lake Powell and Lake Mead will drop, maybe by a lot. The parched ground throughout western states will become a tinderbox. Already, communities in the Denver metro area have declared Stage 1 drought, and others are considering the same, which means restrictions on water use. Governor Jared Polis activated the state drought task force on Tuesday, often a harbinger of statewide-drought declaration. Again, let me punctuate that this is happening in the middle of March.

“This is exactly the opposite of what you want to see at this point,” Trudeau said.

This oddly powerful heat wave caps off an already anomalous, ominous winter season. February closed out the warmest winter ever measured in Colorado. Together, December, January, and February were a whopping 8.1 degrees warmer than the 20th-century average, and 6.4 degrees warmer than the 1991–2020 average. It was by far the warmest winter here in all 131 years of recordkeeping. Many locations around the state shattered previous records for the number of winter days above 60 degrees.

The falling records are a symptom of change, and could portend a new normal, Trudeau said.

“It’s going to become increasingly harder to use the past as a playbook for the future, because we are shifting into a completely different climate system.” For those of us who grew up here and remember what it’s supposed to be like, this week’s weather feels wrong, especially after we didn’t really have a winter.

At the same time, we have some experience with what that could mean for the other three seasons. I keep thinking back to 2012, when I was living in the Midwest, homesick for the mountains, and watching them burn on national TV. That year was also weirdly hot—it was the hottest year on record for the continental United States until 2024—and Colorado suffered immensely. Wildfires raged across every corner of the state, and Front Range communities burned from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins. That summer, black smoke billowed over Colorado Springs and officials evacuated the Air Force Academy. We worry about reliving the terrifying scene this year, from the mountains to the prairies.

While I was working on this article, I got an alert from the Watch Duty app about a new grass fire 20 minutes south of my house. We are getting too accustomed to springtime fire watches and warnings. But besides grass fires here and there, as of this writing, nothing catastrophic has yet begun in the mountains. I think about how one brutal fire season, Colorado’s then-governor, Bill Owens, was infamously quoted saying that “all of Colorado is burning.” Right now all of Colorado is hot, and all of Colorado is dry. We are all bracing for what that means for us in a few months.

Who Will Apologize for D.C.’s Tornado Bust?

2026-03-17T17:18:09-04:00

Tornadoes did not hit the nation’s capital yesterday, and many meteorologists on the internet are extremely sorry. “What a HORRIBLE forecast by meteorologists—especially myself,” Matthew Cappucci, of the weather app MyRadar, posted on X yesterday after the tornado warnings that prompted schools, businesses, and museums to close across the Washington region had fizzled into your average rainy day.

Brady Harris, who calls himself “Weathers #1 HYPE Man,” wrote that meteorologists had “screwed up the Forecast BIG Time today.” He pledged to do better. In wraparound shades and a T-shirt featuring a kitty cat in a lightning storm (his handle is “StormCat5_”), Harris explained to his followers in a video: “I made the prediction. You have to own it. And you have to tell people, you know, publicly, that, ‘Hey, I messed up.’”

Surely, the weathermen of the world hold some sincere remorse here for a situation that alarmed the mid-Atlantic, sent parents scurrying to retrieve their kids, grounded hundreds of flights, and disrupted daily life for millions of people. But the abject tenor of some of the apologies, following the ominous buildup about the prospect of destructive tornadoes, has become its own minor storm system. When a threat looms and throngs of forecasters and weather fans—some highly credentialed, others less so—all weigh in online, the incentives to make both the forecast and the failings dramatic go up. In the attention economy, who wants to tune in for un-extreme weather?

“Social media certainly drives what I call the ‘hype machine,’” Jeffrey Halverson, an expert on D.C.-area weather and a professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, told me. “I think severe-thunderstorm forecasting”—which includes tornadoes—“could benefit from better communication of uncertainty.”

For snowstorms, the National Weather Service puts out a range of possible outcomes, building that uncertainty more explicitly into the forecasts. But tornadoes are particularly hard to predict. And although they happen in the Washington region—a 2002 twister killed three people and destroyed large swaths of La Plata in Southern Maryland—they are far rarer than in the South or the Great Plains.

The day before the storm, the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center put the threat at Level 4 out of 5 for a stretch of the East Coast from Maryland to the Carolinas—a “moderate” risk, but one that means severe storms could be widespread. It was the first such warning for the region in more than two years. That got everyone’s attention, Halverson told me. Meteorologists are always thinking about their responsibility to warn the public about impending dangers. Many started sounding the alarm.

It worked: School systems across the D.C. region began weighing their options. Many decided to close early on Monday. But not all of them. In Loudoun County, Virginia, the public-schools superintendent, Aaron Spence, told me that he and his team wrestled with the decision on Sunday night and the next morning. They, too, were looking at weather models, and those suggested that if they ended school early, students would likely be traveling in the middle of whatever the storm was delivering—around noon to 2 p.m. in his county. “So really, truly, had we done an early dismissal, that would have been precisely the time our elementary students would have been on buses,” Spence said. He was also worried about kids staying home alone if the forecast proved correct: The schools had designated shelters, backup power, access to food. They decided to keep the kids there and, during the tornado warning, which lasted for about 45 minutes in the late morning, had them shelter in place, away from the windows.

But as neighboring districts closed early, Spence’s restraint was not particularly popular, and he heard a lot of criticism about the decision. He doesn’t hold it against the meteorologists, though, even if the forecast was off. “I always in these moments hope and appreciate when our parents extend us patience and grace, because these are very difficult decisions. So I would extend the same patience and grace to these meteorologists,” he told me.

As it turned out, thick cloud cover on Monday morning kept the sun from warming up and destabilizing the atmosphere in a way that could fuel tornadoes. In retrospect, Halverson said, he believes the National Weather Service would have been prudent to wait longer to see how conditions evolved before such a stark warning. “A lot of us in the community thought a Level 3 would have been more appropriate,” he said. Some local weather fans, such as Logan Giles, who writes Beltway Weather Today on Substack, defended the forecast, writing on X that “you can’t call this a bust. Numerous gusts over 65 mph with the strongest gust for D.C. since 2012, 68 mph.”

But, as the online weather discourse broke into for- and against-apologies by meteorologists, he told me perhaps a mea culpa was warranted, if only because the warnings disrupted so many people’s day. “I think it deserves an apology when people’s lives are impacted,” he said.

Others, including Halverson, would like to see the self-flagellation calm down. He thinks forecasters are pretty genuine people, for the most part, who don’t want to cause unnecessary stress, even though sensationalism has become more common in online weather talk. “So there’s a lot of soul-searching today,” he told me. “I don’t think that apologies are warranted. Please, let’s not get into the business of apologizing for acts of God that (1) we can’t control, and (2) we still don’t know a lot about. That’s a slippery slope.”

Cappucci told me that more than 1 million people have watched his video admitting that “my forecast was a poor one.” Even though the pieces for a weather disaster were in place, he felt he should have communicated better about the possibility of a bust when it became more apparent on Sunday evening. “We thought we had the juice; we had the spin; we had the jet-stream dynamics—we had all these different things,” he told me. “What we didn’t look for enough were potential off-ramps, potential limiting factors or failure modes.”

Cappucci, who is 28 and one of the younger meteorologists in the area, works on forecasts for radio, print, TV, and a weather app. He is also one of the most followed, and tries to keep an ongoing dialogue with his audience. Cappucci has seen how other forecasters can make thousands of dollars a month with an average-size social-media account posting outlandish weather reports. And he told me that he regularly gets blamed for bad forecasts, because viewers often don’t distinguish who said what.

That so many people have now seen him say he was wrong “is certainly a humbling thing,” he said. “And yet, in the long range, I genuinely believe that the humbleness and humility of addressing one’s faults professionally garners more trust in the long range.” Getting people’s attention is part of his job, but, he said, keeping their trust is his ultimate goal.

What 100 Million Volts Do to the Body and Mind

2026-03-16T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Stacy Kranitz

Updated at 11:04 p.m. ET on March 23, 2026

What does it feel like to be struck by lightning?

There is no easy analogue. A defibrillator delivers up to 1,000 volts to a patient’s heart; inmates executed by electric chair typically receive about 2,000. A typical lightning strike, by contrast, transmits 100 million volts or more. But lightning races through the body in milliseconds, and therefore often spares it. Some people black out instantly upon being struck. Others recall the moment vividly, as if in slow motion: the flash of light whiting out all vision; the sound, which many survivors say is the loudest they’ve ever heard. The pain, for some, is excruciating, yet others feel no pain at all. “It felt like adrenaline, but stronger,” one survivor reported. “I felt an incredible pulsing,” another said, “a burning sensation from head to toe.”

The severity of the resulting injury depends on, among countless other variables, how the electricity enters the body, and where, and the path the current takes through it. Direct strikes are the deadliest, but most strikes are indirect—a side flash coming off a tree, a current running through the ground, a streamer rising up from below—and most people survive these.

In some cases, the damage is immediately apparent. Lightning, in addition to being very bright and very loud, is very hot—the air around it can hit temperatures about five times hotter than the surface of the sun—and so it can singe or burn people. The shock wave from the strike can fling victims a great distance, breaking bones or causing concussions as they land. The current inscribes some victims’ skin with mysterious scarlike patterns called Lichtenberg figures, which resemble the limbs of a barren tree—or the branching structure of lightning itself.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Just as often, though, survivors manifest no burns, bruises, or scars. Even Lichtenberg figures generally vanish within a few days; no one knows exactly why. On the outside, survivors look normal. Which doesn’t mean they feel that way.

Many of the body’s essential systems—the heart, the brain, the nervous system—depend on electrical signals, and lightning can throw these thoroughly out of whack. Forgetfulness, sleep problems, sexual dysfunction, and headaches that manifest as intense pressure—like “my eyeballs are just popping out,” one person told me—are common. Some people become hypersensitive to noise; others lose their hearing entirely. A few, almost miraculously, are freed of a prior ailment: a bad leg healed; vision, once impaired, restored. Pretty much all of them feel permanently off balance. Some have to relearn simple things, things they’ve done their whole life—how to read, how to sing, how to ride a bike.

Phantom sensations are prevalent. One woman told me she often feels as though water is running down her limbs. Another, in a Facebook group for survivors, said she feels “an indescribable itching” coming from inside the back of her head. Inexplicable odors can emerge; food can taste like cardboard or glue. The symptoms can last for decades. Yet standard neurological imaging, such as MRI scans, almost never detects abnormalities, and most physicians, who understand the symptoms’ basis in only the most rudimentary sense, can offer little useful counsel. Faith in survivors’ stories—among friends, colleagues, even loved ones—can waver.

The most fundamental consequences of being struck by lightning are often metaphysical, and not easily communicable. How does falling victim to one of the most notoriously unlikely of all misfortunes reorient your sense of chance, of fate? How does it feel, when you’re trying to describe the most transformative experience of your life, to be met, routinely, with disbelief?

Last May, I attended a conference of Lightning Strike and Electrical Shock Survivors International. It was held, as it often is, in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, a smallish town on the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains best known as the home of Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s Appalachia-themed amusement park. The town’s main drag resembles a sort of family-friendly version of the Las Vegas strip. Instead of casinos, there are dinner-show theaters, go-kart tracks, and a sprawling Margaritaville megacomplex, its central fountain inhabited by giant animatronic Brachiosaurus that roar from time to time.

The conference was staged at a Staybridge Suites just off the strip. About 30 people were there, mostly men who looked to be over the age of 60, many of them conference regulars who’d been struck long ago, though there were some women and younger attendees too. Most had brought their spouse and were making a weekend of it. They were there primarily to connect with other people who understood what they had been through.

Like senior prom, the conference always has a theme, and this year’s was Hawaii. Survivors wore leis, and pineapples adorned with sunglasses sat on every table in the Staybridge’s modest meeting room. A folding table converted into a makeshift tiki bar dispensed virgin piña coladas and hurricanes. Against this backdrop, specialists gave presentations on trauma therapies. Attendees compared notes on which treatments have worked for them and which haven’t.

Stacy Kranitz for The Atlantic

Steve Marshburn Sr., the founder of the group, seated at a conference luncheon. The conference always has a theme, and that year’s was Hawaii.

In one session, a man I’ll call Matt, a young, redheaded survivor who for a year and a half after his strike could hardly feel pain, temperature, or most other sensations on much of his skin, said laser therapy had eventually restored his nerves. Having a massage therapist work on his vagus nerve had helped too. For a while, he’d slept inside a Faraday cage, to protect him from static electricity during storms. Today, to cope with intrusive thoughts about lightning, he dumps a packet of salt in his mouth because when you do that, he said, “that’s all you can think about.”

A woman I’ll call Caroline, who’d been struck on the job two years earlier, used that same strategy, she said, only with Warheads candies instead of salt. One problem she had not solved was that no matter how hot she gets, no matter how hard she exerts herself, she can’t sweat anymore. Matt said he’d had the same problem for a while. What fixed it for him was spending significant time in a sauna—up to 90 minutes three times a day.

If the discussion had a certain DIY quality to it, that reflects the paucity of medical literature on what lightning does to the body. Few systematic studies have been conducted, and most physicians have never treated a strike victim. Many survivors’ experiences defy medical explanation, so doctors have little to say.

Given the limited counsel that the medical establishment can offer them, survivors tend to be open to alternative therapies, but they’re also wary of being taken advantage of. At the conference, several attendees reminisced about the year when two “hippies” had shown up and started hawking New Age–type products. “They said they were linked in voodoo,” one survivor recalled.

Much of the group conversation focused on Caroline, whose injury was the freshest. She used to cook her family elaborate meals, but “after the accident,” she said, “I left the oven on so many times that I even ended up burning the element out.” For a while she refused to get a new one, because she worried she’d burn the house down. She leaves sticky notes everywhere to remind her of what she needs to do, but even so, she rarely has the energy to do all of it. She has to ask for help, which makes her feel bossy. She worries that others think she’s lazy.

Gary Reynolds’s experiences after he was struck in the summer of 2007 were similar. He was grabbing sodas from his family’s extra fridge, he’d told me earlier, when lightning hit him through the open garage door. For months, he could barely get out of bed. His whole body hurt constantly. He had trouble concentrating, and simple tasks that had once been second nature now seemed complex. On warm afternoons, he watched the sky warily. A therapist diagnosed him with PTSD, which by some estimates afflicts more than 25 percent of lightning-strike survivors. In 2009, just a few months shy of their 20th anniversary, Reynolds and his wife divorced. Initially she’d been sympathetic, he said, but over time she lost patience. “You’re not over this yet?” Reynolds recalled her saying. “It can’t be that bad.”

Stacy Kranitz for The Atlantic

Gary Reynolds, who was first struck in 2007

“I just keep thinking, I want to wake up the next day and it’s going to be normal,” Caroline said at one point during the session. But she wasn’t even two years out from her strike. She had not yet come to the conclusion that the veteran survivors at the conference had reached long ago: that no matter what you do, no matter how many therapies you try, you still have to accept that you’ll never be the person you were before. “You still look the same and everything else, but it’s like a different person inside,” Reynolds said. “It’s a different soul.”

The odds of being struck by lightning in the United States in a given year are roughly one in 1.2 million, according to a 2019 analysis by the National Weather Service—about the same as flipping a coin and landing on heads 20 times in a row. But this is only a generic estimate. The likelihood of being struck in San Francisco is not the same as the likelihood of being struck in Orlando, last year’s urban lightning capital of America, according to Vaisala Xweather, a provider of local weather data. The likelihood of being struck for lawyers is not the same as the likelihood of being struck for roofers.

The majority of people killed by lightning—about 20 each year in the U.S.—are struck while engaging in some sort of outdoor leisure or labor. But in truth, almost anyone can be struck almost anytime. People have been struck while talking on landlines, while using computers, even while sitting on the toilet, according to the National Weather Service, because current can travel through telephone wires, electrical connections, and metal pipes. When lightning survivors insist, as many do, on unplugging their appliances in preparation for a storm, this is not tinfoil-hat mania. And the old advice about not showering during a thunderstorm? Sensible.

[Read: Almost no Americans die from lightning strikes anymore—why?]

Steve Marshburn Sr., who founded Lightning Strike and Electrical Shock Survivors International in 1989, told me that he was struck at age 25 on a seemingly clear November morning in 1969. He was working as a teller at First Citizens Bank in Swansboro, North Carolina, sitting at the drive-through window, and he thinks the bolt must have passed through an ungrounded speaker. For years, he struggled not only with debilitating headaches and back problems, but also with the sheer improbability of the event that had produced them. Many of the doctors he visited didn’t believe his story. For a long time, even his parents wondered whether he was making the whole thing up.

And to some extent, Marshburn understands why. “It’s so unbelievable that it’s hard to talk about,” he said. Eventually, a doctor introduced him to another patient who had survived an electrical injury, and that experience led Marshburn to start his survivors’ group. Membership now numbers about 2,000, and in September the organization hosted its first-ever West Coast conference, in Scottsdale, Arizona. For years, most people found their way to the group via their local weather station, or after seeing it featured in news outlets or on TV. Now more find it through Facebook.

That’s how Gary Reynolds did. His second wife, Lisa, discovered the group while searching online for other people who’d been struck, people who could understand him. Doctors never had. When he first went to the emergency room, they ran a battery of tests, but the results all came back normal. After he’d been at the hospital for about nine hours, a doctor said, “I’m not really sure what to tell you,” and sent him home. Roughly the same thing happened when he visited his primary-care physician. Other doctors told him to his face that he was making the whole thing up.

Not until his first conference did he meet people who could truly empathize with him. He’d never spoken with a fellow lightning-strike survivor in person before, and he was nervous on the drive up, but when he arrived he felt almost like he was at a reunion. “You walk into that room and it’s like we’re family,” he said. After he joined the group, he felt normal for the first time in years. “It was validating,” he said. “Like, Okay, I’m not crazy.”

Stacy Kranitz for The Atlantic

A walking stick used by one attendee

A poem describing the feeling of being struck, and then the aftermath, by Lisa Devine, who attended the conference with her husband, Danny, a strike survivor

In June 2008, Reynolds told me, he was struck by lightning a second time. It was 11 months after his first strike, and he’d woken up at 2 a.m. with an awful headache. Ever since the initial incident, his head had throbbed in exactly the same spot when he sensed a storm coming. As he lay beside his open bedroom window, he felt a shock go through his hand. “Not again,” he thought. Half of his hand turned bright red, he said, but he hadn’t yet paid off the previous year’s hospital bills, and this strike seemed less serious than the last, so he decided not to seek care. In the following months, though, his lingering symptoms from the first strike all worsened. He was often dizzy, and he couldn’t grip well. Reynolds ran a tree service at the time, one he’d started a few years after high school, and these were serious problems for someone whose vocation involved wielding a chainsaw. The divorce came about six months later.

In the years that followed, Reynolds pieced his life back together: He remarried, moved his family to western North Carolina, began working at a lumberyard, started attending survivors’ conferences. Then, while standing in the kitchen of his mountainside home on a June afternoon in 2016, he was struck a third time. And six years after that, a fourth, he said, this time while sitting in a leather recliner watching TV with his grandchildren. Must’ve been a streamer, he told me. Came up through the floor and hit him square in the back.

If the likelihood of getting struck once in your lifetime is one in 15,300, as the National Weather Service estimated in 2019, then statistically, the number of people in the United States today whom you’d expect to have been struck multiple times is … one. One single person. And yet the National Weather Service’s collection of about 50 lightning-survivor stories on its website includes two from people who say they’ve been struck twice and another from someone who says she’s been struck three times. Andy Upshaw, a North Carolina landscaper, says that he, too, has been hit three times. Charles Winlake, struck four times before the age of 30, added rubber soles to all of his shoes and began to wear only plastic-rimmed glasses. Linda Cooper, a former South Carolina schoolteacher, says she’s been struck six times, and so does Carl Mize, a former Oklahoma rodeo rider. One member of the Lightning Strike and Electric Shock Survivors Support Facebook group says she’s been struck nine times, and another says she stopped counting after 13. Media reports document more multistrike cases. In all, my far-from-exhaustive search turned up more than two dozen.

Stacy Kranitz for The Atlantic

Clockwise from top left: Electrical-shock survivor Rodney Burkholder and lightning-strike survivors Danny Devine, Danny “Joe” Jude, and Betsy Silby, in Pigeon Forge with their partners and caregivers

All of this, to state the obvious, is incredibly improbable. Extrapolating from the National Weather Service estimates, the likelihood of being struck six times is roughly one in 13 septillion—that’s a 13 followed by 24 zeros. If you multiplied the number of people who have ever existed on Earth by about 100 trillion, you’d expect one person among them to have been struck six times.

It can seem cruel to suggest that some lightning-strike survivors may be lying, especially when disbelief causes so much hardship for those who are not. But because relatively few lightning strikes are documented, the question often lingers. People lie for all kinds of reasons, and there can be financial incentives to claiming you’ve been struck: workers’ compensation, disability benefits. Mary Ann Cooper was an emergency-medicine faculty member at the University of Louisville when she published the first systematic study of lightning injury in 1980—instantly becoming the leading authority on the subject in doing so. Cooper served for years as an expert witness in workers’-comp cases, brought in to assess whether the claimant really had been struck. She told me that she’s encountered some frauds, identifiable because they reported inconsistent or physiologically impossible symptoms.

But the people trying to cheat their way into benefits, Cooper said, are largely not the ones attending survivors’ conferences. She believes that the overwhelming majority of the people she has met at those conferences are telling the truth about being struck, and about all the calamities that followed, at least as they understand them. Which is not to say that every statement should be taken at face value.

Like several doctors and scientists I spoke with, Cooper thinks that most people who say they’ve been struck multiple times genuinely believe that, even if they haven’t. Many survivors have flashbacks as a result of PTSD, just as combat veterans and wildfire survivors do. But when a combat veteran or a wildfire survivor resurfaces from a flashback, their surroundings verify to them that they are not, in fact, caught in the middle of a war zone or a fire. A lightning-strike flashback prompted by a storm involves no such assurance. A lightning bolt is there and gone in an instant.

What’s more, because lightning leaves the nervous system damaged, it can make people feel bursts of pain—real, excruciating, and unconnected to any physical stimulus. Together, PTSD and nervous-system damage may explain many reports of second or third or fourth strikes.

Stacy Kranitz for The Atlantic

Charles O’Connor Jr., a lightning-strike survivor, attending the conference for the first time with his wife, Chrissy

Not so long ago, that explanation might have sounded far-fetched, just as some of the chronic symptoms of a lightning strike still do, to some. But the idea that trauma can alter the way people perceive the world and interpret their experience is ubiquitous now. And the emergence of long COVID, along with increased awareness of other difficult-to-diagnose chronic conditions, has created a greater respect for individual testimony, and a greater appreciation for how much the medical profession does not know. In this sense, society is finally catching up to what lightning survivors and the people who study them have long understood.

The most grinding suspicions encountered by many survivors—about whether they were ever really struck at all—may in any case be mooted in the coming years. On a recent trip to France, Cooper met with a physician who told her he’d identified a biological marker for lightning injury, which may enable doctors to determine, with a simple urine test, whether someone really has been struck. Nothing has been published on it yet, Cooper said, and no such test seems imminent, so for the moment she isn’t getting too excited. But she has an open mind to the possibility.

All of this, of course, is mostly to the good. Yet the lightning-survivor community has always defined itself by a sort of oppositional faith: There, you are doubted; here, you are believed. There, you are strange; here, you are normal. When I asked Reynolds what he made of the trauma-plus-nervous-system-damage theory of why there are so many multistrike survivors, I felt as though I was doing something almost sacrilegious, as though I was violating that ethos of mutual faith. I worried that he’d react with indignation. The notion that he might hang up on me and refuse to speak with me again did not seem unlikely. Instead, he said he thought the theory made a lot of sense.

Might then it explain his multiple strikes? I asked.

Well, he answered, not his.

What does one make of a life so fundamentally altered by an event as unlikely as a lightning strike? In Pigeon Forge, when I asked survivors whether on balance they felt lucky (for having survived a lightning strike) or unlucky (for having been struck in the first place), the question didn’t register. “I don’t think luck has anything to do with it,” Susan Deatrick told me. She doesn’t like the word providential either, she said, “but at the same time, God is in control over everything down to the minutest detail.”

This response, and others like it, initially surprised me. If lightning is a manifestation of the divine, I thought, how do people explain why it struck them? How do you make sense of a miracle that comes at your expense?

[From the July 1875 issue: Lightning and lightning-rods]

Jim Segneri, who moderated the conference’s final and most intense group discussion, has a succinct answer, one more focused on his having been spared than his having been struck. “I firmly believe that whether you worship Allah or Buddha or God or Jesus or whoever put us here, the reason we’re still here is so that we can help other people”—those who are doubted, those who are struggling.

Large numbers of survivors hold some version of this belief. Marshburn, the group’s founder, often speaks of the number of survivors—more than 20—whom he has talked out of suicide, reciting in vivid detail the conversations he’s had with people on the brink. Over her many years speaking with lightning-strike victims, Mary Ann Cooper said, “I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, ‘I should have been dead. God must have kept me alive for a reason.’”

And yet for those survivors who hold it, the belief in destiny can cut both ways. Reynolds says that after his third strike, he felt doomed. He’d left his career, gotten divorced, gotten remarried, started a new job, moved more than 600 miles away—and still the lightning had found him. “It’s like it’s looking for me,” he told his therapist. “It’s like it’s a living, breathing creature.”

She assured him that it wasn’t, and part of him knew she was right, but he couldn’t stop thinking that he was fated to be struck again. She told him that she doesn’t believe in destiny. That there is no providence, only circumstance. That sometimes you’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’d believed that once. But now he can’t shake the feeling that she’s wrong.

This article appears in the April 2026 print edition with the headline “Struck.” It has been updated to clarify the source of the data used to determine the urban lightning capital of the U.S. last year. The data was provided by Vaisala Xweather.

Inside the Dirty, Dystopian World of AI Data Centers

2026-03-13T08:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Landon Speers

As we drove through southwest Memphis, KeShaun Pearson told me to keep my window down—our destination was best tasted, not viewed. Along the way, we passed an abandoned coal plant to our right, then an active power plant to our left, equipped with enormous natural-gas turbines. Pearson, who directs the nonprofit Memphis Community Against Pollution, was bringing me to his hometown’s latest industrial megaproject.

Already, the air smelled of soot, gasoline, and asphalt. Then I felt a tickle sliding up my nostrils and down into my throat, like I was getting a cold. As we approached, I heard the rumble of cranes and trucks, and then from behind a patch of trees emerged a forest of electrical towers. Finally, I saw it—a white-walled hangar, bigger than a dozen football fields, where Elon Musk intends to build a god.

This is Colossus: a data center that Musk’s artificial-intelligence company, xAI, is using as a training ground for Grok, one of the world’s most advanced generative-AI models. Training these models takes a staggering amount of energy; if run at full strength for a year, Colossus would use as much electricity as 200,000 American homes. When fully operational, Musk has written on X, this facility and two other xAI data centers nearby will require nearly two gigawatts of power. Annually, those facilities could consume roughly twice as much electricity as the city of Seattle.

To get Colossus up and running fast, xAI built its own power plant, setting up as many as 35 natural-gas turbines—railcar-size engines that can be major sources of smog—according to imagery obtained by the Southern Environmental Law Center. Pearson coughed as we drove by the facility. The scratch in my throat worsened, and I rolled up my window.

xAI’s rivals are all building similarly large data centers to develop their most powerful generative-AI models; a metropolis’s worth of electricity will surge through facilities that occupy a few city blocks. These companies have primarily made their chatbots “smarter” not by writing niftier code but by making them bigger: ramming more data through more powerful computer chips that use more electricity. OpenAI has announced plans for facilities requiring more than 30 gigawatts of power in total—more than the largest recorded demand for all of New England. Since ChatGPT’s launch, in November 2022, the capital expenditures of Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google have exceeded $600 billion, and much of that spending has gone toward data centers—more, even after adjusting for inflation, than the government spent to build the entire interstate-highway system. “These are the largest single points of consumption of electricity in history,” Jesse Jenkins, a climate modeler at Princeton, told me.

Even conservative analyses forecast that the tech industry will drop the equivalent of roughly 40 Seattles onto America’s grid within a decade; aggressive scenarios predict more than 60 in half that time. According to Siddharth Singh, an energy-investment analyst at the International Energy Agency, by 2030, U.S. data centers will consume more electricity than all of the country’s heavy industries—more than the cement, steel, chemical, car, and other industrial facilities put together. Roughly half of that demand will come from data centers equipped for the particular needs of generative AI—programs, such as ChatGPT, that can produce text and images, solve complex math problems, and perhaps one day inform scientific discoveries.

Colossus, Elon Musk’s data center in Memphis, can consume as much electricity over the course of a year as 200,000 American homes. (Landon Speers for The Atlantic)

To power AI, energy and tech companies are turning to fossil fuels, which they regard as more reliable and readily available than wind, solar, or nuclear. Asked where the energy for data centers should come from, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has repeatedly said, “Short-term: natural gas.” (OpenAI and The Atlantic have a corporate partnership.) A Louisiana utility plans to build three natural-gas plants for a Meta data center that, upon completion, will be among the largest in this hemisphere. The lifespans of coal plants, too, are being extended to power new data centers. And the IEA estimates that data-center emissions could more than double by 2030—becoming one of the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gases in the world.

The optimist’s case is that, by then, advanced nuclear reactors will have obviated many of the new fossil-fuel plants, and AI tools will have invented technologies that can solve the climate crisis. That may well happen. But today, “the market has converged on Add gas now, and then add nuclear later,” Jenkins said. In other words, if natural-gas turbines seem to offer the most expedient path to an AI-enhanced future, then clean air may have to wait.

A data center is a planet of contradictions: heat without motion, shelter without bodies, light without sky. “The lifeblood of the internet is essentially flowing through these sites,” Jon Lin, the chief business officer at Equinix, one of the world’s largest data-center companies, told me in an Equinix facility in Loudoun County, Virginia. Behind Lin, someone in a green hoodie fiddled with computer chips shelved in a row of humming, refrigerator-size cabinets on the data-center floor. There were no windows, to keep the facility secure and to guard against the sun’s heat. As we walked along a corridor of cabinets, motion-activated lights illuminated the way. Farther ahead, only faint blue lights and blinking computer equipment pierced the darkness.

Ever since the first data centers were built, in the mid-20th century, their purpose has remained constant: pack computer equipment close together to store and send information as efficiently as possible. But their scale has grown dramatically. The original data centers were simply large rooms housing mainframe computers. With the rise of the internet, in the 1990s, backroom computers gave way to entire buildings, such as the one Lin and I stood in—facilities that enable us to stream movies, trade stocks, store medical records, manage supply chains, and make military decisions. Now the AI race is requiring vastly greater computing power, which has led to even bigger data centers, ones filled with computer chips that are much hungrier and run much hotter.

[Read: The lifeblood of the AI boom]

In a traditional data center, the cabinets are cooled by industrial fans—as we walked through the Equinix facility, I felt a constant breeze on my cheek—and rooftop cooling towers eventually expel the heat. The cabinets in a generative-AI data center use dozens of times more electricity. Lin showed me a row of AI-specialized cabinets used by Block, the firm that owns Square and Cash App, which radiated enough heat to make me break a sweat; to cool them, water runs into special metal plates that sit atop the chips inside the cabinets. AI data centers are filled with similar equipment, and cooling thousands of cabinets can require a lot of water. Public records from the Memphis water utility, for instance, show that the address for Colossus used more than 11 million gallons in September alone, as much as 150 homes use in an entire year. When a data center’s cooling equipment malfunctions, spiraling heat combined with humid air has yielded that rarest of meteorological events: indoor rain.

Placing servers in the same or neighboring buildings allows them to exchange information seamlessly and quickly, and Loudoun County has the highest concentration of data centers in the world, with 199 already operating and another 30 or so on the way. According to one report, 13 percent of global data-center capacity is squeezed into the county’s 520 square miles. One particularly dense stretch is called “Data Center Alley.”

Cabinets of computer chips at a data center in Loudoun County, Virginia (Landon Speers for The Atlantic)

Northern Virginia offers a glimpse into what the AI rush may bring to the rest of the nation. Loudoun is running out of space, but new data-center hubs are popping up in Phoenix, Atlanta, and Dallas. Amazon and Meta are building AI data centers in Indiana and Louisiana, respectively, that will each require more than two gigawatts of electricity, dozens of times more than standard facilities. OpenAI has proposed that the U.S. establish “AI Economic Zones”: little Loudouns everywhere.

As I drove into Data Center Alley with Julie Bolthouse, the director of land use at the Piedmont Environmental Council, she explained how to distinguish data centers from warehouses: cooling towers on the roof, dozens of backup diesel generators to one side, no windows (or false ones, decorative glass panels backed by a wall of concrete). There didn’t seem to be any warehouses, though, and I gave up counting data centers within minutes, unable to tell where one facility ended and the next one began. Bolthouse helps run a coalition aiming to slow data-center development throughout Virginia, but in Loudoun, it is too late. So many data centers are under construction just north of Dulles International Airport that hills of freshly dug dirt loom over roads and orange dust tints the air. Should Musk successfully colonize Mars, the early stages of terraforming might look like this.

The architect of this labyrinth is Buddy Rizer, Loudoun’s longtime executive director of economic development. Rizer has courted data centers with regulatory and state tax incentives, and when we met in his office, he told me that since 2009, at least one has been under construction at any given time. Data centers are typically operated by only a few dozen staff members, but building them has produced a steady source of employment. They also provide nearly 40 percent of the county’s budget, helping to pay for police, schools, and parks for a population that has grown steadily since 2010.

Within a 1.5-mile radius of us, Rizer said, were 12 substations: small jungles of metal poles and wiring that convert high-voltage electricity into a form you’d use to charge your iPhone or, in this case, run a data center. All around us were towering utility poles strung with high-voltage transmission lines that carry raw electricity from power plants to those substations; they hang over Loudoun like a canopy, or a cobweb. Follow any one cable far enough, and you’re likely to reach a data center.

For years to come, the AI race is projected to be the main force driving roughly 2 percent annual growth in U.S. electricity demand, which has been stagnant for nearly two decades. Nationally, this is not a crisis; regionally, it may be. Dominion Energy, the major electrical utility in Virginia, predicts growth of 5.5 percent each year, with overall electricity demand doubling by 2039. Aaron Ruby, a spokesperson for Dominion, told me that the company is preparing to meet that surge, though he was frank about the challenge: “We are experiencing the largest growth in power demand since the years following World War II.” By the end of the decade, training the industry’s most powerful AI model could require as much electricity as millions of American homes.

In China, hundreds of data centers have been announced since 2023, and additional facilities are planned for beneath the ocean and in the desert. China’s biggest advantage in the AI race is not the talent of its software engineers or the quantity of its data centers, but its abundance of energy: In 2024, the nation produced nearly as much electricity as the U.S., Europe, and India combined.

President Trump has declared that the nation is in an “energy emergency,” and been vocal about the need to build more power plants for the U.S. to win the AI race. A senior executive at OpenAI told me that the U.S. needs to activate every resource at its disposal—solar panels, natural-gas turbines, nuclear reactors. And Anthropic, OpenAI’s top rival, published a report arguing that the U.S. should streamline permitting for data centers and power plants in order to keep pace with China.

But an internet-driven energy crisis has failed to materialize before: As fiber-optic cables were being laid in Loudoun in the 1990s, energy companies built more coal- and gas-fired plants. “Dig More Coal—The PCs Are Coming,” read a 1999 Forbes headline. When the demand didn’t arrive, the nation was left with a glut of gas plants and multiple bankrupt energy companies.

The generative-AI boom, too, could prove to be a bubble. The technology remains extraordinarily expensive, largely because of the cost of advanced computer chips, and no AI firm has presented a convincing business model. One path to profitability might be more efficient algorithms—which would preclude the need for the new natural-gas plants. And if AI doesn’t turn out to be as transformative a technology as experts predict, swaths of data centers could be left unused or unfinished—ruins from a future that never came to pass.

Either way, the rush to power data centers as fast as possible has already pushed the U.S. to expand its reliance on fossil fuels.

Behind her one-story brick home in southwest Memphis, Sarah Gladney grows tomatoes, and when the vines wilted early last summer, she had a suspect in mind. “When the wind comes up early in the morning, I can smell it,” Gladney told me, nodding in the direction of Colossus. One of her neighbors, Marilyn Gooch, told me the data center’s turbines have made her uncertain about whether she should let her grandchildren visit.

Their neighborhood, Boxtown, is named for the railway boxcars that formerly enslaved people used to build homes, and is still almost entirely Black. Virtually every heavy industry has set up nearby—a wastewater facility, an oil refinery, a coal-fired power plant. Colossus itself, which is next to a steel mill and a trucking and rail yard, occupies the hull of an old oven factory. Life expectancy in and around Boxtown is more than five years below the national average, and the cancer risk in southwest Memphis is four times higher. What KeShaun Pearson and I smelled may not have been Colossus itself; xAI had chosen an area so besieged by heavy industry that any exhaust from the facility’s turbines would mix in with a pervasive smog.

In Boxtown, a neighborhood in southwest Memphis, many residents and elected officials were unaware that Colossus was being built until the project was well under way. (Landon Speers for The Atlantic)

Colossus was built so quickly that many Boxtown residents and elected officials didn’t know what was happening until the project was well under way. Construction began in May 2024, and the project was announced the following month. Gladney, Pearson, and his younger brother Justin—who represents the district in the Tennessee General Assembly—found out about the project that day in June. By Labor Day weekend, less than three months after the press conference, Colossus was up and running.

The company installed its own gas turbines because that was faster than waiting on the local grid, and argued that it did not need a permit to do so because the turbines would operate for less than a year, a claim that the Southern Environmental Law Center, representing the NAACP, contested in a letter threatening to sue the company. (xAI has since received a permit for 15 turbines, and is reportedly operating 12.) Meanwhile, residents report that they have had respiratory issues flare up since xAI moved in.

Last June, when an analysis commissioned by the city of Memphis found “no dangerous levels” of pollutants in Boxtown and at two other test locations, the SELC criticized the study’s methods. Using satellite data, researchers at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville found that levels of nitrogen dioxide—which causes smog and is associated with asthma and other respiratory problems—near Colossus have been substantially elevated since its public announcement. (xAI says on its website that it will install technology to reduce the pollution from its turbines. The company, the Shelby County Health Department, and the Memphis mayor’s office did not respond to a list of questions about Colossus’s environmental impacts and xAI’s presence in Memphis; the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce declined to comment.)

Fossil fuels have become the default for data centers around the country. OpenAI’s first Stargate data center, in Texas, also has its own gas-fired power plant. Chevron and Exxon are angling to hook natural-gas facilities directly into data centers, and the world’s three major manufacturers of natural-gas turbines all advertise their products as convenient energy sources for data centers. Michael Eugenis, the director of resource planning at Arizona Public Service, the state’s largest utility, told me that because of the demand from data centers, the company is adding more fossil-fuel capacity than it otherwise would have; natural gas will help power Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle data centers, too.

Transmission lines, like these in Memphis, carry electricity throughout the grid—including to data centers. (Landon Speers for The Atlantic)

In early 2025, a company affiliated with xAI purchased a former warehouse and nearly 200 acres south of Colossus to set up another data center, Colossus II. On a weekday afternoon, the road near the site was dense with traffic—not dump trucks and forklifts, but sedans lining up outside the adjacent public school for pickup. An xAI affiliate bought a retired Duke Energy plant about a mile away in Mississippi that is likely to power this facility, and filed an application to operate 41 natural-gas turbines on the site. Those turbines could emit more carbon dioxide annually than the city of San Jose.

On an island in the Susquehanna River, just south of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I saw another way to power the AI boom. Above me loomed four beige hourglass-shaped structures, each some 365 feet tall: the cooling towers for Three Mile Island, the site of the worst nuclear disaster in American history. On March 28, 1979, the facility was only a few years old, and nuclear-energy reactors were being built across the country. But a series of mechanical and human errors caused the core of one of the reactors, Unit Two, to rapidly overheat and leak radioactive material. The effects on human health and the environment were negligible, but together with the catastrophe at Chernobyl seven years later, the partial meltdown turned public sentiment strongly against nuclear power.

Three Mile Island’s Unit One went undamaged and continued operating, after a brief pause, until 2019. By then natural gas was too cheap, the regulatory environment was too unfriendly, and the losses—hundreds of millions of dollars—were too great for Constellation Energy, which owns Unit One, to keep the plant running.

[From the March 2023 issue: Jonathan Rauch on the real obstacle to nuclear power]

Nobody has ever resuscitated a fully shut-down U.S. nuclear-power plant, but in fall 2024, Constellation announced plans to do just that. Microsoft had agreed to purchase electricity from Unit One to power its data centers over the next two decades, a guarantee allowing Constellation to spend the $1.6 billion needed to restart the plant. It was the ultimate bellwether of the AI age: Experts have long argued that we need clean nuclear power to reduce the grid’s existing carbon footprint. Instead, Three Mile Island will help offset a new source of emissions from a single company.

Constellation is now reversing the steps it took to decommission the reactor: renewing its license, restoring equipment, retraining personnel. Dave Marcheskie, a community-relations manager, explained this to me in a conference room overlooking the nuclear core, which is housed in a building that resembles a large grain silo. Behind him, a clock counted down the time to launch: 650 days, zero hours, 42 minutes, and one second.

As the need for carbon-free electricity grows more urgent, Americans are having to reckon with nuclear energy again, and the AI boom has provided the industry with wealthy backers and an army of tech cheerleaders. Meta and Amazon are buying electricity from large nuclear-power plants, and nearly every major data-center company is investing in experimental nuclear technologies—especially small modular reactors, which in theory will make fission cheaper and easier to deploy.

[Read: A new reckoning for nuclear energy]

Nuclear energy has its downsides, of course. The waste is radioactive and must be stored almost indefinitely, and the meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima plant in 2011 was a reminder of how spectacularly dangerous nuclear reactors can be. But the dangers posed by the burning of fossil fuels are far more imminent.

At Three Mile Island, Marcheskie led me down a hall and into the actual power plant. Pipes, tubes, and hulking machines lined the floor and ceiling; a trefoil sign warned that a large tank potentially contained radioactive materials. The elevator was broken, so we walked a few stories up to the stadium-size room from which all of Three Mile Island’s electricity will flow. Scaffolding and shipping containers were scattered around a row of pistachio-green semi-cylinders. Once the plant restarts, uranium atoms ripped apart in the adjacent core will generate immense amounts of heat, vaporizing water into steam that will spin blades inside those cylinders 1,800 times a minute, which will in turn produce hundreds of megawatts of electricity.

This will be orchestrated from a nearby control room, where hundreds of lights and switches line muted-green walls. The shift manager, Bill Price, explained that one half of the main panel controls the nuclear core, while the other half controls the turbines. In the middle is the most important control of all: a red button that shuts down the reactor, and above it an identical button that serves as a backup. In the event of an emergency, Price said, you’d press both. I put a finger on each button and pushed.

The original control room at Three Mile Island Unit One will become operational again when the reactor restarts. (Landon Speers for The Atlantic)

A small amount of the electricity generated here will support the plant itself. Microsoft is buying the remainder through a power-purchase agreement, a mechanism companies use to buy carbon-free electricity to match whatever their facilities draw from the grid. Power generated at Three Mile Island will help offset the energy used by data centers in Virginia and Illinois; Microsoft says it purchases enough clean energy to match all of its electricity consumption, as do Google, Amazon, and Meta. These companies are also investing in hydropower, geothermal plants, and solar panels; Google is exploring building a data center in space, to enable cloud-free access to the sun.

[Read: For now, there’s only one good way to power AI]

Still, tech firms insist that nuclear and other clean technologies cannot be deployed quickly enough to meet their needs. President Trump has signed an executive order to accelerate permitting for natural-gas and coal-fired plants to support data centers. Yet China’s energy advantage in the AI race comes from nuclear reactors and solar panels, not coal and oil; the country is building nearly two-thirds of the world’s new solar and wind capacity.

The U.S. could still catch up, thanks to private investments by the likes of Google and Microsoft. A majority of planned electricity generation in the U.S. will be carbon-free, and running data centers on renewables can be done, Jenkins, the Princeton climate modeler, told me. Meanwhile, natural-gas turbines are so far back-ordered that acquiring one in the next few years will be virtually impossible.

For now, using existing power sources more wisely, rather than building new ones, may be all the AI industry needs. Electrical grids are designed for periods of peak demand—cooling on summer afternoons, heating on winter mornings—but mostly they run well below maximum capacity. Researchers at Duke University have shown that if data centers reduced their electricity consumption during some of those peaks, it would free up enough electricity to accommodate the country’s planned data centers for years. Google and xAI have already entered agreements to do so.

That strategy would allow tech companies to continue building more data centers without waiting for utilities to expand the grid. And time, not dollars or electrons, is the AI industry’s primary currency. Google, Microsoft, and their competitors can afford to spend historic sums without near-term financial returns, but they cannot afford to slip behind one another.

Time is also the biggest problem for Microsoft’s deal with Three Mile Island, which is taking years to restart. As we left the facility, Marcheskie led me south, past the beige towers and through a fog that had settled over the river. At one point we passed a cluster of concrete barrels that had escaped my attention on the drive up. Marcheskie told me that they contained all of the nuclear waste from Unit One’s 45 years of operation. Perhaps one day such casks will also line the perimeters of Colossus and Stargate.

AI may well overhaul how humans think and work, but it’s also pushing us toward another inflection point. We can unlock the promises of this technology by doubling down on the energy systems of the past, or we can seize the opportunity to push the grid into a carbon-free future. To get there, an industry that likes to move at warp speed will have to develop a quality it severely lacks: patience.

This article appears in the April 2026 print edition with the headline “Insatiable.”

Spain’s Wind-Farm Bargain

2026-03-10T13:46:34-04:00

Go looking for wind farms in Spain, and you might quickly end up in Castilla–La Mancha, a region southeast of Madrid. This is the place where Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes’s delusional Man of La Mancha, attacked small wooden windmills he perceived as fierce giants and where today giant wind turbines have become an embedded part of the landscape.

There, I met Mayor Isabel Martínez Arnedo, who has run the town of Higueruela since 2019. The region’s distinctive wind whipped her dark curls as she stepped out of her car. “Look!” she said in Spanish. “Windmills, windmills, windmills.” They were lined up along a ridge at the edge of the small rural town, blades spinning high atop pale-blue towers. A verdant valley lay below, and beyond that, another ridge was crowned with more turbines. When the town’s wind farms were first built, more than 25 years ago, “this was seen as futuristic,” she told me. She was just 23 years old then, and it was the largest wind farm in Europe, the second largest in the world. Since that time, she said, she has come to believe that renewable-energy projects can save a dying town, as long as it has a guiding role in their implementation.

In the United States, views on renewable-energy projects are fraught. Adoption has been exponential; so has resistance. Last year, President Trump signed a bill that gutted support for projects, and he holds a particular animus toward wind power. Efforts to shut down renewable-energy projects are under way in every state except Alaska. Communities object to renewables for a variety of reasons, researchers from MIT found—including concerns about public and environmental health, diminished property values, and lack of public participation—and that opposition can prioritize such values even over possible economic gain.

In the past six years, by contrast, Spain has doubled its wind and solar capacity and reduced its dependence on gas power dramatically. Renewables account for about 16 percent of the energy mix in the U.S., whereas more than half of Spain’s energy now comes from them as it races toward the goal of climate neutrality by 2050. Spain’s economy is booming, and many consider lower energy costs a contributing factor. Though I found pockets of resistance to the shift, most people I spoke with during three months of reporting across the country recognized Spain’s role in contributing to the fight against climate change.

If the global shift to more clean energy is irreversible, as many economic and technological indicators suggest, then American rollbacks seem destined to cause more problems than they solve. At the same time, renewable development can radically alter landscapes, as in India, where I’d reported on how one of the world’s largest solar farms took up 13,000 acres, surrounding five small villages that remain like stranded islands. Was there a way to develop renewables that worked better for the communities in which they’re located? Perhaps Higueruela, as an early wind-energy adopter, could offer a lesson.

When the wind farm arrived, the municipality of Higueruela was dying. Young people left to study and find work and never returned. In 1960, the town had about 3,500 citizens. By 2000, there were just over 1,000. This “great emptying” is widespread in rural parts of Spain, as it is in rural America. If the wind park was futuristic, it also helped the town imagine a future in which young people would not leave, Martínez Arnedo told me.

Opportunity often depends on money, and the windfall from wind energy delivered it. Taxes on the renewable-energy companies and leasing fees transformed Higueruela’s economics, Martínez Arnedo said: Of its annual budget, roughly 40 percent now comes directly from the presence of wind energy. A few locals do work for Iberdrola, the company that manages the wind farms, or have started businesses that directly relate to the industry, such as a turbine-oil-changing business that now works regionally. But most of the jobs grew out of the broader ecosystem stimulated by the presence of renewables, the mayor said.

Over 20 years, using its boosted revenue, the town built a library and a youth center; the elementary school added sports, music, English, and dancing. The town now operates a bus that carries secondary-school children to a larger town 22 kilometers away, and a free bus to Albacete, a small city 50 kilometers away, so access to higher education is possible without having to move away. For adults, community offerings include Pilates and painting. Higueruela offers support to help seniors stay in their homes, and when they can’t, they can move to the El Jardín Senior Center on the town square, which opened in 2006 and employs 100 locals, many of them women who might struggle to find employment in more industrial, male-dominated sectors. Although electricity grids are too complicated to pass along free or discounted power to locals, the town now provides up to 2,000 euros to install rooftop solar and improve home insulation to bring energy bills down. Without the wind farms, the town would not be able to have all of these services and facilities, the mayor told me.

Each of these offerings also translates into jobs, and traditional agriculture has continued unabated beneath the wind turbines. Though the town’s population is not rising, it is sustaining itself. Young people who stayed are now having babies. “We have a group of children,” the mayor told me, of her students at the elementary school, where she teaches. “We call them Generation Wind.”

Higueruela is not unique. Cláudia Serra-Sala, an economist at the University of Girona, collected budget data from 1994 to 2022 to see how Spanish wind farms change municipal finances and found, on average, a 45 percent increase in revenue per capita. The funds buoyed towns and served as a positive feedback loop of development, the way bringing a railroad to town once did.

Wind energy has its critics in Spain. In the lowlands of Higueruela, I met Lucas del las Heras and Pablo Jutglá Monedon, avid birders who live in the area, although not Higueruela itself, and are members of the conservation cooperative Dendros. As we watched European red-rumped swallows and marsh harriers swoop in front of us, they argued that wind farms are a land grab that are wrecking vistas and harming biodiversity. Best practices—including community input during initial planning and avoiding biodiverse hot spots such as Natura 2000 areas, a European network of valuable habitats—are not always required, or followed. The Ukraine war deepened Spain’s aggressive push toward renewables and energy independence, and the men from Dendros and others I spoke with felt that environmental protections were being left by the wayside.

These complaints all have truth to them. Electricity can seem like a bit of a magic trick, but every watt of energy comes from somewhere. That ridge where I stood with the mayor was far from pristine—we walked amid Moorish ruins that lay in the turbines’ shadow—but without the wind generators, Higueruela’s vista would have maintained a timeless bucolic aura.

At the same time, the fossil-fuel-production system has costs, too, not least the grave environmental and health impacts on communities, which differ substantively from the impacts of a solar or wind farm. A 2023 World Resources Institute report, for instance, found that nearly half of people living in U.S. communities historically based on oil, coal, and gas economies were in areas identified as disadvantaged, plagued by air pollution, poverty, and health problems.

The current scale of fossil-fuel burning is also disrupting entire Earth-system functions, which in turn drives fuel demand (as people try to stay warm or cool) and exacerbates the kind of extreme weather that can destroy communities and transform ecosystems. Spain is already experiencing heat waves and the whiplash of drought and flood. Outside Sevilla, the town of Carmona, in Andalusia, is a place so picturesque that it’s being considered as a UNESCO World Heritage site, yet it is embracing solar farms. “If you do not put in renewable energy, it is true, there is the most beautiful field,” Carmona’s mayor, Juan Avila, told me. “But why do you need the most beautiful field if later it does not rain?”

Still, even willing towns have their limits. A few years ago, Iberdrola, the energy company, proposed a hybrid project in Higueruela, adding solar to the wind-energy mix. It wanted to use “the most fertile lands of Higueruela,” Martínez Arnedo told me. “We said no.” Instead, the town and Iberdrola are exploring the possibility of replacing the 243 existing turbines with just 63 much larger ones, and still generate the same amount of power.

The possibility of local benefits from renewables is not confined to Spain. While reporting on renewables years ago in Texas, I learned that Sweetwater—another town that adopted wind energy early and eagerly (and with Republican support)—had increased its tax base fivefold and channeled the money into civic improvements. But that was before energy production in the United States became so politicized. Martínez Arnedo told me that, for a town to benefit from renewable development, “in that mediation between the companies that want to eat the municipalities and the municipalities themselves, you have to look for a balance.” Many Americans seem unwilling to even consider trying to find that. Change always has a cost, but any place facing the same type of downturn Higueruela experienced also has to contend with the risk of maintaining the status quo and consider whether that’s even possible. A place like this one could easily end up with no wind farms, but soon enough it may not have rain and eventually no town, either.

Reporting for this story was supported by the FRONTIERS science-journalism fellowship.

California’s Deadliest Avalanche Turned on One Choice

2026-03-04T09:47:19-05:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

On the morning of the deadliest avalanche in California’s modern history, Cody Townsend was skiing above the west shore of Lake Tahoe. People like him, who live for untracked expanses of wilderness snow, had found little to celebrate this season. Across much of the American West, the temperatures had been high, and the hills bare and brown. According to the Central Sierra Snow Lab, operating from a cabin nearby, accumulation had been running seven feet below normal.

But now snow was dumping. Dry, light flakes swirled around him, and with every turn, Townsend disappeared into great clouds of powder. It was the storm of the year in the Sierras, he would write that day. Yet something felt off. The wind was picking up. The temperature seemed odd. Townsend is a professional backcountry skier who learned the sport around Tahoe, and “it was just the consistency of the snowfall, the way that the flakes were coming down, the winds that were coming through, that had just something different, something I wasn’t used to,” he told me. He and his wife, Elyse Saugstad, a professional freeskier who had survived a 2012 avalanche that left three others in her group dead, decided to bail.

When he got home, Townsend posted on Instagram, warning his followers to be wary: “It’s fun out there for sure but definitely not time for full-send mode.” The light powder was piling up on a crust that had melted and refrozen, creating slabs of unstable snow.

In his comments, someone shared the news: “There was already a slide at Castle Peak.”

That morning, elsewhere around Lake Tahoe, a group of 15 skiers ventured out into the storm from the Frog Lake Backcountry Huts, a cluster of coveted off-the-grid cabins, where they had stayed for the past two nights. The group included several women who were close friends and relatives—accomplished working mothers, many of whom lived in the Bay Area and whose kids attended a Tahoe ski school—and was led by four guides employed by a local company, Blackbird Mountain Guides.

The group was there to ski far from chairlifts and groomed runs, to trek uphill aided by grips on the bottom of skis and glide down untracked bowls. The huts, set on the lakeshore at 7,600 feet amid red fir and Jeffrey pine, opened in 2022 and quickly became regarded as a jewel of the country’s network of wilderness cabins. The huts are rustic but, in some ways, luxurious: They come with access to hot water, leather couches, a roaring fireplace, and a pair of North Face slippers; booking them can cost more than $1,000 for a multiday trip. Some trips include chefs to prepare meals in the commercial-grade kitchen. When reservations become available, they normally book within minutes.

This group was scheduled to return home that day, and despite the storm, the skiers set off along a route of more than three miles that begins with a climb, proceeds through a gap in the mountains, and runs along a forested ridge. They had gone less than a mile when someone shouted, “Avalanche,” a local sheriff’s deputy would later report. Then a slab of snow about the length of a football field crashed down onto them, catching all but two of the skiers. Ultimately, only six of the group would survive.

Two weeks after this tragedy, the guides’ decisions—to ski through a blizzard; to travel a risky route—remain the mystery at its center, as law enforcement and the wider community look for answers. The Nevada County sheriff’s office and California’s workplace-safety agency are investigating potential safety violations or criminal negligence by Blackbird. Zeb Blais, the owner of Blackbird, has offered condolences in a statement, but he has not otherwise spoken publicly. (His company referred questions to a public-relations firm that did not respond to requests for comment.) Blais himself has skied and guided in Alaska and Antarctica, Japan and the Himalayas; in a podcast a couple of years ago, while describing how guides monitor avalanche conditions, he allowed that “there’s just a certain degree of uncertainty that we just can’t eliminate.”

The Frog Lake huts would have been a good place to ride out a storm. The guides and avalanche experts I talked with wondered why the group ventured out in such conditions, but even more so how they chose their path home. “The question is: Why did they go into the terrain that they went to?” Townsend told me. “What led them to believe their way out was the correct way out that day? It was an obvious mistake.”

From the beginning of the trip, the Sierra Avalanche Center, a nonprofit that works with a local Forest Service field office, had been warning about worsening avalanche danger, including near the Frog Lake huts. On the morning of the slide, the center put the avalanche danger at “high”—the fourth of five threat levels. “Travel in, near, or below avalanche terrain is not recommended today,” read the report issued at 6:29 a.m. that day.

The unusually warm conditions in the weeks before had melted some snow, even at high altitudes. A dry stretch had created a layer of weak, sugary grains, and the incoming storm had buried that in feet of heavy snow. The center’s observers had skied out to this area the day before the avalanche and witnessed widespread cracks and areas of unstable snow.

David Reichel, the center’s executive director, described the movement of such snow layers to me like sliding apart an Oreo cookie. A slab avalanche sends the top part of the cookie, the upper layer of snow, sliding over a weaker layer below, the cookie’s soft middle frosting. “This weak layer is expected to reach the point of failure today in some areas,” the center warned in its report.

On a backcountry trip, ski guides typically meet in the morning and evening to discuss conditions and plan routes. They closely follow these avalanche warnings. They know which parts of their route have avalanche risks and where runout zones exist for sliding snow. On the morning that the group at the Frog Lake huts was set to leave, the four guides had multiple ways out to choose from, including routes to the southeast that would have avoided exposure to avalanche risk, Dave Miller, a backcountry ski guide and avalanche instructor with 25 years of experience, told me. “Our standard is we don’t go in or under avalanche terrain when the level is high,” said Miller, who owns International Alpine Guides, which has operated in the Tahoe area for decades.

The solar-powered huts do have an internet connection, but it’s generally not accessible to guests. When Dustin Weatherford worked there for two winters, as the huts’ first caretaker, he printed out the avalanche and weather reports for guests each morning. He kept a couple of weeks’ worth of food in case anyone needed to extend their stay. “We were always, always ready, willing, and welcome to anybody staying if they weren’t feeling safe,” he told me. “Even if there isn’t avalanche danger, and someone just feels scared or they want to rest their hurting ankle, we’ll find them a place to sleep.” (The Truckee Donner Land Trust, which owns and operates the huts, does not charge for extra time in such a circumstance.)

The guides knew that the risks to the group were rising: They nixed part of the morning’s plan, and told the group they needed to head home, two of the trip’s survivors told The New York Times. The day of the avalanche, the four guides reportedly met without their clients to choose their route out.

Other guides told me that Blackbird had skilled employees and a good reputation for safety. Regardless of conditions, guides often choose the routes, Brennan Lagasse, a Tahoe ski guide who has led trips to the huts, told me. “Most clients are hiring guides to make those decisions for them,” he said. The four on this trip had varying degrees of experience. One of them was certified by the American Mountain Guides Association to guide people on splitboards—snowboards that split into skis for trekking uphill. Two others were apprentice ski guides, earlier in a training process that can take years; the last, the only one to survive the day, was an “assistant” ski guide, one notch below certified in the AMGA accreditation process.

Blackbird said in a statement that its senior guides communicate remotely with those leading trips to discuss routes and conditions. A former Blackbird guide, who requested anonymity owing to the sensitivity of the situation, told me that, typically, senior guides would have participated in a morning meeting with the on-site guides before the groups left the hut, and surely that happened the morning of the avalanche. But exactly how much discussion the guides and leadership had over routes is unclear. The surviving guide may be the only one who knows why, exactly, the group chose the route it did. He did not respond to my attempts to reach him.

When it left the huts that morning, the group started with a deviation from the typical path: It wrapped around Perry’s Peak from the north, rather than passing through Frog Lake Notch, an area with avalanche hazards. It was one of the shorter routes out and, the Times reported, the one that would put the skiers closest to their cars. But it still included stretches of avalanche terrain that are marked on the cellphone apps that skiing guides regularly consult, Miller said.

The guides would have known their choice carried real risk, especially under the conditions they faced—or they should have known. Snow was piling up that morning at four inches an hour—twice the rate that experts view as a threshold for increased avalanche danger. Because those first minutes after an avalanche are so crucial, guides will often consider, too, the added risk of venturing out in storm conditions that would make helicopter access impossible. “You’re generally going to take a lot less risk,” Miller said, “when the weather is bad and you’re not going to get a quick rescue.”

The 911 call came in at 11:30 a.m. on February 17. The Nevada County sheriff’s office started marshaling dozens of rescuers, many of them volunteers, from across multiple counties. They’d be split into two teams and sent in via different routes in motorized snowcats—a sort of truck on tracks—and on skis. By that time, wind-whipped snow was making it nearly impossible to see, and authorities had closed down Interstate 80, the highway that runs over the mountain pass. “We didn’t know what they were going to run into on their way in,” Lieutenant Dennis Haack, the incident commander throughout the recovery process, told me.

Authorities did know, from the satellite messages that were coming through, that several people had survived the crush. Some had stayed clear enough of the slide that they’d been able to dig out others in the group. “Knowing that we had six subjects who were alive in there, we were willing to risk a little bit more,” Haack said. But going in would be dangerous because of the treacherous weather and the risk of another avalanche. The authorities kept extra rescuers on hand in case they faced an “incident within an incident,” Haack said.

Blais, Blackbird’s owner, along with another employee of the company, headed out with skiers from the Tahoe Nordic Search & Rescue group, despite being advised against it by authorities, according to a spokesperson for the Nevada County sheriff’s office. To reach the avalanche site, the rescuers fought through whiteout conditions. The snowcats reached the Frog Lake huts, where they had to stop. Beyond that point, the slope got steeper. Only the rescue skiers could get there.

That rescuers were able to reach the area safely suggests to other guides that the backcountry skiers had strayed from a less dangerous path. If they had stayed across a creek north of what’s known in summer as the Red Dot trail, they’d have been in safer territory. “As to how or why they deviated only slightly—only 50 to 100 yards off of that route—and put themselves into that spot, is a big question that I think all of us would like to know,” the former Blackbird guide said.

When the rescuers found the survivors, six hours after the initial call, two survivors had injuries. But all six were able to move under their own power back to the huts, where snowcats had parked to drive them out. The nine dead skiers remained on the mountain that night.

Over the next days, snow kept falling. One hallmark of our warming climate is the whiplash from periods of extended drought to extreme precipitation. The Central Sierra Snow Lab would record more than nine feet of snow in 120 hours—the most to accumulate in any five-day period since April 1982, and the third-highest total since 1971, according to its director, Andrew Schwartz.

For two days, the authorities waited for a window in the weather to recover the dead. Eight of the nine had been found in the initial search, and their locations had been marked with poles. By 11:30 a.m. on the following Friday, Chad Weiland, a flight paramedic with Care Flight and a ski patrolman at Sugar Bowl Resort, was heading towards the site in a helicopter with two others.

Weiland circled Perry’s Peak four or five times, trying to see if rescue teams could go in safely to recover the bodies. On the north-facing slope where the avalanche occurred, he saw large banks of snow piled up by the winds. “The avalanche path looked heavily loaded,” he told me. It was still dangerous.

Using the traditional option for dislodging potential avalanches—explosives—would be difficult, given the timing and the aircraft the sheriff’s office had available. But the night before, at a high-school basketball game, a utility worker with Pacific Gas and Electric Company happened to tell a local sheriff’s deputy about an unusual method of dealing with risky slopes. Three years earlier, the company needed to rescue employees and their families who were snowed in at a power plant, and approval for explosives was taking too long. So PG&E had tried dumping water on the slope using a firefighting bucket, Pete Anderson, the senior manager of helicopter operations, told me. It had worked well, and they kept doing it.

By Friday morning, Anderson was on the phone explaining the technique to Haack; a few hours later, one of the company’s UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters was dangling a 660-gallon bucket full of water from a nearby lake and dumping it on the avalanche slope. The helicopter made seven drops, until the water in the bucket started freezing. Then it dragged the bucket through the slope, like a wrecking ball. “That was pretty effective too,” Anderson told me.

That day, rescue workers found the last missing skier. They had all been buried within a 20-by-20-foot area near the toe of the avalanche debris, under as much as eight feet of snow. A lingering question is why the group was clustered together if the guides knew the group was traveling below avalanche terrain. Standard backcountry protocol is to expose only one person at a time if traveling through an avalanche path.

When the area was finally safe, helicopters from the California Highway Patrol and the California Army National Guard hoisted the dead skiers’ bodies from the slope and airlifted them back to the huts, where they were driven out by snowcats. Rescuers worked at this over the next two days, until the last person was recovered.

The community of skiers and guides in the cozy mountain towns ringing Lake Tahoe is close-knit. Many of the people who participated in the five-day rescue and recovery effort knew people caught under the snow or were friends of friends. One volunteer with Tahoe Nordic Search & Rescue lost a spouse in the slide. A Blackbird guide lost his brother.

This community thrives on skiing, reveres skiing, even with the dangers of mountain life. In Truckee, the closest town to the avalanche site, neighbors and loved ones have written messages at a memorial to the skiers—nine light-blue hearts on wood posts in front of an eagle statue. “You’ll shred with me forever buddy,” someone wrote to Andrew Alissandratos, a 34-year-old guide from Nevada.

One day after the last bodies were recovered, dozens of people in hats and parkas crowded together at the vigil for a moment of silence and to pay their respects. “Why do we do this? Why do we put ourselves in harm’s way?” Kyle Konrad, a bearded backcountry skier, asked as he held a candle. “It comes from a place of love and joy.”

Peter Atkin, whose wife, Carrie, died in the avalanche, said something similar in a statement: “Some of our most precious family memories were built at the Frog Lake Huts.” Carrie was a leadership coach and mother of two; their family lived in the Tahoe area and had been to the cabins many times. Her husband described the huts as “a place where she felt truly at home.” The people who live here, who love these mountains, know even small mistakes can be unforgiving. And they know why people take those risks anyway.

MAGA’s Animal Nationalism

2026-02-22T08:00:00-05:00

In the week before Christmas, while the U.S. Department of Justice was getting ready to release a trove of documents relating to the Jeffrey Epstein case, some of the nation’s most important public servants gathered for a meeting at the DOJ headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. Two Cabinet secretaries were there, along with the attorney general. They had an important matter to discuss. The important matter was puppies.

A soft black puppy, for one. A baby yellow lab. A floppy noodlepuff with cream and caramel fur. Records of this meeting clearly indicate that each of these was in dire need of snuggling, as well as Cabinet-level scratches underneath its ears. But as representatives of America’s puppy politic, the animals were also due, per that day’s declarations, the full protection of the U.S. government. Brooke Rollins, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Pam Bondi would be joining up to lead a new “strike force” aimed at puppy mills, dog-fighting rings, and unscrupulous animal research. “We’re coming after you if you’re going after these babies,” Bondi warned, and then she squeezed the puppy in her lap for emphasis.

This is all good politics—both in the sense of being morally correct and of giving people what they want. (More than half of all adults oppose the use of animals for medical testing, for example, and surveys find that puppy mills are not, in fact, beloved institutions.) Yet the current administration is more determined on this front than any other president’s in recent memory. Since Donald Trump’s return to office in 2025, he and his appointees have made a project of protecting animals from abuse. By December, they had already banned U.S. Navy testing on dogs and cats, ended monkey research at the CDC, curtailed the use of animals at the FDA, and promised to abolish every trace of work on mammals at the EPA by 2035. Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy led the government’s attempt to save a flock of ostriches from being slaughtered up in Canada, and at the puppy summit, he declared that the entirety of his department, which includes the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, is now “deeply committed to ending animal experimentation.” In the meantime, though Trump hasn’t yet secured his own Nobel Peace Prize, he has received two official thank-yous from the activists at PETA.

[Read: Who would want to kill 314 ostriches?]

Trump is, of course, a man whose rise to power has been fueled by his denigration of people for being animal-like. The same politician who describes his political enemies as “vermin”—who claims that Somali gangs are roving Minnesota streets “looking for prey,” and who has said of some undocumented immigrants, “These aren’t people; these are animals”—also leads a government with a great concern for mice and rabbits. Some of the administration’s zeal for animal welfare is personal: Attorney General Bondi, for example, is so besotted by dogs that she has made a habit of bringing them to meetings dressed with bows, and Kennedy’s array of pets has reportedly included a pair of ravens and a free-ranging emu. It’s certainly not unusual for people to feel more affinity for animals than for certain other human beings. But the Trump administration’s PETA bona fides go beyond the predilections of its top officials, and hint at something more widespread in right-wing, nationalist politics.

Illiberal factions in Austria, Denmark, France, and Italy have all made a similar point of taking up the cause of animal welfare. In the United Kingdom, too, the scourge of animal abuse has been central to a nationalist project. Images of bloody bulls and butchered whales—portrayed as victims of the European Union’s moral laxity—were used to make the case for Brexit. Boris Johnson promised in his first speech as prime minister to “promote the welfare of animals that has always been so close to the hearts of the British people.” Even the Trump administration’s new “strike force” for going after puppy crime has its recent parallels in Europe, where zoophilic, far-right parties in both Sweden and the Netherlands have pushed for the creation of national “animal police” units.

This link, when it appears, can be “quite astonishing,” says Jakob Schwörer, a political scientist at Mälardalen University, in Sweden, who has analyzed the rhetoric of European party manifestos and social-media feeds. When he looked at the 2019 manifesto of Austria’s Freedom Party, a far-right group that has lately surged in popularity, he found that 7 percent of its sentences made positive reference to animal welfare—an extreme outlier, even in a data set that included materials from green parties, socialists, and other left-wing groups.

To some extent, such appeals may be strategic. “You can’t have an opposite position to it,” Schwörer told me, given the strong and nonpartisan appeal of not torturing animals. But according to his research, which he co-produced with Belén Fernández-García, a professor at the University of Granada, other groups at the illiberal fringe are either disinterested in animal welfare or take positions in support of culturally specific forms of animal exploitation. Schwörer noted that in Spain or Portugal, the right-wing nationalists might defend the right to hunt and hold a bullfight. Taken on the whole, he said, concern about the plight of animals is certainly not obligatory for Europe’s assorted far-right parties. But different rules may apply to countries such as Austria, France, and Italy, where the right-wing fringe has explicit fascist roots.

In fact, a particularly ferocious form of animal nationalism emerged in the spring of 1933, very shortly after Hitler first established his dictatorship. That April, the Nazi government banned the slaughter of warm-blooded animals without stunning. Six months later, it passed the most sweeping animal-welfare act of the time. The Animal Protection Law set careful rules for laboratory research, such that even a scientific study of a worm might be found against the law if it weren’t given anesthesia. The law also banned the force-feeding of poultry, the improper castration of piglets, and the general maltreatment or neglect, broadly defined, of any animals at all. Subsequent laws would add more detailed rules on how much space an animal must have while on a train or in a truck, and how it must be cooked. (The slow-boiling of lobsters was made illegal.)

Such policies were interwoven with the Nazis’ racist ideology. Jews and Romani—then known as “Gypsies”—were targeted for doing special harm to animals. The slaughter law was designed to banish kosher practices, and the pets of Jews were confiscated. Both groups were accused of eating hedgehogs, Mieke Roscher, a historian of human-animal relations at the University of Kassel, told me, as the lowly hedgehogs were in turn upheld as a symbol of the German people.

They are cruel to animals, but we are kind: This conceit is fundamental to the animal-nationalist idea. At the end of 2024, then-vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance spread the false rumor that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and dogs. The lie was taken up by Elon Musk, Charlie Kirk, and House Republicans, among other figures on the right, and Trump himself repeated it in a nationally televised debate. Sixteen months later, the federal government is preparing to send its paramilitary force of immigration agents into Springfield for a 30-day operation. “‘They’re eating the cats, and they’re eating the dogs’—that is right out of the playbook of fascism,” Roscher said. The hedgehogs have returned.

[Read: The real reason Trump and Vance are spreading lies about Haitians]

So have other echoes from the past. In her published work on the role of veterinarians in the Third Reich, Roscher quotes a journal article by a Nazi scientist who argues for applying eugenic principles to German farms, with the goal of creating “robust animals able to survive all hygienic conditions.” Selective breeding was used elsewhere in an effort to re-create lost species, such as the auroch and the tarpan, that were imagined as “primeval German game.” A similar fixation on the past, and on the lost purity of the natural world, has been central to the MAHA wing of Trump’s coalition. Last year, Kennedy proposed allowing bird flu to run rampant on the nation’s poultry farms, so as to kill off all the weakest chickens. Poultry experts say this plan would never work. Trump obsesses over bloodlines too. “Look, I am derived from Europe,” he said at Davos two weeks ago, in reference to his purebred European parents.

Animal nationalism has, in practice, a marked tendency to self-negate. The Nazis passed a law to limit animal experiments, then quickly scaled it back; Hermann Göring, though among the most aggressive of the Nazis’ animal protectionists (a contemporary cartoon shows him getting Sieg heils from a crowd of bunnies, frogs, and birds), was himself an avid hunter. In France, the National Rally party of Marine Le Pen—who is notably obsessed with cats—has talked up the healing power of touching animals (among other such positions) but will not forswear foie gras. And as Kenny Torella points out in Vox, despite the Trump administration’s play to be the great protector of the nation’s dogs and cats and guinea pigs, it has also undermined that goal—by scaling back enforcement of the Animal Welfare Act, by suing states to overturn their laws on cage-free eggs, by disbanding the research team that tried to limit animal suffering, and so on. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Through a spokesperson, Bondi told me: “I have fought against animal abuse my entire career and will never stop working to prosecute the sick individuals who prey upon innocent animals.” A USDA spokesperson told me that his department “continues to push for stronger, more consistent enforcement” of the Animal Welfare Act, especially when it comes to dog-breeding facilities.)

[Read: What I learned from a steer named Chico]

This may seem confusing only if you think that in this context, protecting animals is necessarily an act of love. “That has nothing to do with it, nothing,” Roscher said. “It’s not about love; it’s not about liking.” It’s about something else instead—a reordering of social values. This comes through in Trump’s own professed affinity for animals, which seems to overlap exactly with his antipathy for windmills. “Windmills are killing all of our beautiful Bald Eagles!” he wrote in a social-media post on December 30, above a photo of a feathered carcass in the sand. Note the possessive. Our birds, our land—we protect these things because they are our property.

It turned out that the photo he’d posted did not, in fact, depict our national bird, and also hadn’t been taken anywhere in the United States. But these were just the details on the ground. The important thing to know was this: Something in the natural world was broken, and Trump alone would be the one to fix it.

The West’s Winter Has Been a Slow-Moving Catastrophe

2026-02-18T17:05:21-05:00

If you are reading this on the East Coast, congratulations on the warmer weather you’re finally getting this week. It was cold and snowy for a while there. Here in the West, we wish we’d been in your shoes. Spare a thought for the tens of millions of us who live on the other side of the continent, where a catastrophe is unfolding.

In Colorado, where I live and grew up, this winter has been especially warm and dry. Last year closed with the warmest December in the history of recordkeeping. It was 8.9 degrees warmer than the average from 1991 to 2020, and the warmest of all in a record that goes back to the late 19th century. Over this past weekend, my neighbors and my family walked with our dogs and our kids in T-shirts and shorts, because it was in the mid-60s in Colorado Springs. About 60 miles north, my family in Denver saw a new record high of 68 degrees—on February 15.

But temperatures are not the only reason this winter is a catastrophe. This year, our snowpack is among the lowest ever measured, which means it won’t be enough to fill the rivers that are born in our mountains, which feed reservoirs and water farms from here to Los Angeles. Snow is finally coming to the mountains this week, but we still cannot avoid one of the worst water years in modern history. The West is already experiencing the worst drought we have seen in 1,200 years, as our junior senator, John Hickenlooper, reminded me in an email over the weekend. Colorado politicians have to be attuned to these dynamics: “The snowpack is pretty much as large as all of our reservoirs combined. That’s why winters like this one are so terrifying,” he wrote. Drought can mean economic disaster.

Hickenlooper, who was also the state’s governor and the mayor of Denver, is not a man given to hyperbole. It really is that dire. Unless a lot of snow falls soon, Colorado’s environment and economy will take a huge hit. Ski resorts are losing money now. In the spring, rivers that usually offer waist-high whitewater rapids and fishing pools will instead be a trickle; in the summer, farmers will lose peach crops. Hydrologists, fire scientists, and climate researchers are bracing for summer too; their spectrum of worry ranges from concern to actual panic.

“It’s as bad as you think it is,” Russ Schumacher, the Colorado state climatologist, told me. On top of the ongoing, decades-long drought in the region, all of Colorado is in a snow drought too. The amount of water stored in the snowpack is the lowest it’s been at this point in winter since at least 1987, when comprehensive measurements began, he said. Going back to older records, some of which date from the Dust Bowl, the 2025–26 water year is the third-worst ever measured. In the two worse years, snowpack measured about 40 to 42 percent of average at this point in winter; this year, Colorado is sitting around 58 percent of median overall, and lower in some areas.

Climatologists say that a weak La Niña pattern in the Pacific is partly to blame, parking a high-pressure “heartbreak ridge” farther east than usual, which continually pushes moisture away from the mountains. But the abysmal snowpack is also causing a bad feedback loop, allowing the mountains to warm more than usual. The pattern could finally break this week, and “we definitely have time to make up ground,” Allie Mazurek, a climatologist at the Colorado Climate Center, told me. But she also cautioned that “at this stage, it is looking almost impossible for us to get back to an average snowpack.”

Schumacher’s predecessor, the longtime state climatologist Nolan Doesken, used to say that Colorado’s snowmelt is well behaved. Rain comes in a flash and is gone just as quickly, but we know where snow falls, where it will lie in wait, and which rivers it will feed months later. Flakes accumulate on cold ground, and when the Rockies stay cold the way they should, the snow remains for many months. And the surrounding air stays colder with snowpack than without it. This winter, temperatures are soaring 10 to 12 degrees above normal in northwestern Colorado—temperatures that region would not be seeing if the ground were covered in snow, Mazurek said.

Western water monitors use a metric called snow water equivalent, which is just what it sounds like, to estimate how much water will flow into rivers when the snow melts. Since 1987, the Snowpack Telemetry Network, SNOTEL, has measured snowpack by weighing the snow that falls at hundreds of stations across the West, including more than 100 currently active ones in Colorado. Other measurements are taken by hikers who snowshoe up to designated spots and measure the snowpack by hand. Climate scientists have been doing this for decades. Last week, the snow water equivalent in the Colorado River basin was tied for the lowest ever recorded, according to Brad Udall, a senior water scientist at Colorado State University and an expert on the Colorado River.

That snowpack forms the headwaters of rivers including the Colorado, the Rio Grande, and the Arkansas. And the Colorado River feeds the two largest reservoirs in the United States: Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Both reservoirs are critically low and have been for years: Powell is about 25 percent full, and Mead is at about 34 percent. If Powell’s water level drops another 40 or so feet, which it could this year, there won’t be enough water to generate hydroelectric power at Glen Canyon Dam. Water managers are starting to worry about “dead pool” too, in which the lake will get too low to let water flow through Glen Canyon toward Lake Mead; they are likely to reduce water flow out of Powell this year to avoid it.

In most of the Colorado River’s upper basin—in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming—water is not collected in many reservoirs; instead, it is diverted out to thousands of small locations, from streams to irrigation ditches. And “this year, there just isn’t going to be any water in these rivers. Or there will be water, but instead of 12 weeks or 16 weeks of water, it will be four weeks of water,” Udall told me. “Under western water law, people can basically completely dry these rivers up.”

This is bad timing, because Colorado and the other basin states are currently failing to renegotiate key parts of the more-than-century-old Colorado River Compact, which expires later this year. Along with seven states, the river-management agreement includes the federal Bureau of Reclamation, 30 tribal nations, and Mexico, and controls how the river flows into and out of Lakes Powell and Mead. The states missed a major deadline on February 14, which means that the Bureau of Reclamation will instead impose its own plan—one that none of the states are likely to be happy with. In Colorado, at least, some residents are concerned that the Trump administration will punish the solidly blue state by simply giving more water to, say, Arizona, which Donald Trump won in 2024. This is far from an irrational worry. In late December, Trump vetoed funding for a pipeline, already under construction with bipartisan support, that would bring water from a reservoir to rural communities in southeastern Colorado. The fight over the Colorado River could shape up in similar fashion, pitting state against state. (In response to a request for comment, a Department of the Interior spokesperson pointed me to a press release in which Secretary Doug Burgum said that the department had “listened to every state’s perspective” and that a “fair compromise with shared responsibility remains within reach.”)

Further in the future, the effects of water reductions will spill through the western economy. Agriculture, water recreation such as fishing and river rafting, and entire mountain ecosystems—both environmental and economic—will falter. For now, though, we are worrying about our trees budding six weeks too early, and pouring buckets of water around their trunks to keep them hydrated in the warmth. We are updating our fire checklists and go bags during red-flag warnings: One went up yesterday as I was working on this story. Winter fire watches are abnormal, but we are growing all too accustomed to them. And we are checking the snow forecast every day.

How Many Wolves Is Enough?

2026-02-16T08:00:00-05:00

Updated at 10:02 a.m. ET on February 16, 2026

The wolves arrived in May of last year, just days after Paul Roen had driven his cattle back up to their summer pasture in Northern California’s Sierra Valley. He started finding the bleeding bodies of calves—some still alive, so badly paralyzed that they’d need to be shot. After weeks of this, Roen finally saw a kill himself. “One wolf grabbed a cow and spun her around, while another grabbed a calf,” he told me. “He tore it into three pieces in 30 seconds.”

Every night, Roen would go out in his pickup truck and try to keep the wolves away from his animals, until exhaustion drove him to bed in the hours before dawn. He came to dread the sound of his cows bawling for their lost calves. By June, Roen, who is also a Sierra County supervisor, and his fellow ranchers had persuaded the state to intervene: A team started to patrol the Sierra Valley rangeland, harassing wolves with rubber bullets, sirens, and eventually drones. At one point, Roen said, officials even tried piling frozen beavers outside the wolves’ den to sate their hunger. But still, the kills continued.

What Roen and other ranchers wanted, really, was for the state to kill the wolves. But gray wolves, which were exterminated from California roughly a century ago, are still listed as endangered there, making it illegal to kill, harm, or harass them. By the fall, the same pack of wolves had taken down roughly 50 of Roen’s cattle, he estimates—more than he’d ever lost to mountain lions or any other predators, and a major proportion of the roughly 90 livestock killed or injured in the region. The state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife determined that this was “far outside any comparable experience across the state or the West,” and sanctioned the first wolf killings since the animals had returned to California in 2011. In October, officials tranquilized three adult wolves from a helicopter, then injected them with chemical euthanasia. They also shot a fourth wolf—a six-month-old pup—who’d been mistaken for a similar-looking adult.

The consequences of killing wolves are not what they might have been 50 years ago, when just hundreds of them were left in the contiguous United States and the federal government first declared the species endangered. Nowadays, thousands prowl the landscape—a fraction of the millions that may have once lived here, but still constituting one of the most successfully recovered species in the country. At this point, “I don’t think you can shoot and trap wolves out of existence,” Diane K. Boyd, a wildlife biologist who has extensively researched wolves, told me.

Some Americans are hoping that killing wolves could again become a national norm. Already a few western states are actively working to reduce their gray-wolf populations through annual hunts. When I asked Richard Egan, another California rancher, how many wolves should be in the state, he told me there was no correct answer other than zero. The country’s official stance is that gray wolves should live here. Americans are still deciding how many they can tolerate.

The tensions between today’s wolves and humans are, essentially, the same as they were in the 1800s. As expanding agriculture sent wild populations of deer and elk into decline, wolves began to prey instead on livestock—prompting people, in turn, to kill wolves. By the middle of the 20th century, decades of aggressive hunting, trapping, and mass poisoning had pushed the Lower 48’s gray wolves to the point of near extermination.

After decades of monitoring and intervention, some imperiled species are still barely staving off extinction; wolves’ evolutionary grit, meanwhile, has surprised even conservationists. Human initiatives have undoubtedly helped—particularly, the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park and Idaho in 1995, which was driven by the Nez Perce Tribe. But on their own, gray wolves trickled across the Canadian border, back into Montana; after expanding throughout the Mountain West and Northwest, they wandered down into California. In 2021, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service moved to take gray wolves off the federal endangered-species list, though that decision has been under contention since.

With the return of gray wolves has come the return of gray-wolf problems. The wolves are facing greater pressures than they once did to find food in a country filled out with cities and people; naturally, they are again preying on livestock. Ranching, too, has become more challenging and less stable in recent years, amid droughts and rising feed costs. In California, in particular, where elk remain relatively scarce, and deer populations have been in prolonged decline, “there’s nothing to sustain these wolves but cattle,” Roen told me. One recent analysis found that a single wolf can cost a rancher up to $162,000. But ranchers remain limited in how much they can intervene. “If they killed every one of my cattle, I’d just have to sit and watch unless they threatened me personally,” Egan, whose cattle losses have roughly quadrupled since wolves arrived in his county, said.

In Oregon, too, where gray wolves have been established for longer, ranchers feel hamstrung. Kimberlee Kerns’s family has lost hundreds of sheep and cattle to wolves since 2009; the animals that survive tend to gain less weight and conceive fewer lambs and calves. To keep the sheep safe, her team has been herding them into pens every night, which raises the animals’ stress levels and makes it easier for them to get one another sick. And after being repeatedly vexed by wolves, Kerns told me, her cattle “want to fight the herding dogs”—which, although domesticated, are still technically the same species.

Ranchers and wolf advocates have been able to deter wolves from feasting on livestock on some properties, Karin Vardaman, who’s part of a group trying to minimize wolf-human conflict, told me. Ranchers can fly brightly colored streamers to spook wolves, and try to keep animals off terrain that might make hunting easier; they can dispatch horseback patrols on their property. But Egan and Roen said that they’ve seen those tactics fail, too—perhaps because the wolves quickly learn that flashy repellents pose no genuine threat. “They’re desensitizing the wolves to the point where they’re emboldened,” Egan said.

These gentler efforts, Egan and Roen argue, might carry more weight if local wolves understood that humans might kill them, too. And, of course, the more wolves die in these harvests, the fewer might trouble livestock.

Around the end of 2008, the year before Montana opened its first gray wolf-hunting season, animus against the predators reached a boiling point. A series of tougher-than-average winters had squeezed the local wildlife; hunters were driving into town with less to show for their efforts. “The hunters that year saw not as much deer, and wolf tracks everywhere,” Kent Laudon, a wildlife biologist who worked as a wolf specialist in Montana’s wildlife department for more than a decade, told me. Locals began to protest outside of his department’s office, calling for wolves to be purged. That winter, Laudon recalled driving across town and counting the bumper stickers, which were emblazoned with the silhouette of a wolf head and read Smoke a pack a day.

The next year, Montana’s quota for wolf kills debuted at 75. That number has grown steadily over the past couple of decades to more than 400. Quentin Kujala, the chief of conservation policy at Montana’s Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, told me that the number of lethal wolf removals that officials have had to conduct due to livestock conflicts has decreased in that same time frame. But livestock conflicts—and complaints about them—also plateaued in the 2010s, and have stayed at roughly that level ever since. The state’s wolf population, too, has held rather steady at about 1,100 for several years. “We seem to have arrived at an equilibrium,” Kujala said.

For years, Montana’s official policy has said that the state must maintain at least 15 breeding pairs of wolves to keep them off the state’s endangered-species list. (Because of wolves’ complex social structure, researchers have disagreed on the size of the wolf population necessary to maintain that many breeding pairs—but according to Kujala, the state now relies on a very conservative estimate of about 450 wolves.) But locals and politicians disagree vehemently about how many wolves above that threshold they’d like to support. In 2021, the state government passed a law that called for reducing the wolf population to a “sustainable” level.

Apart from specifying that the number of wolves had to exceed the state’s endangerment cutoff, legislators never defined what such a sustainable level might be. Mike Phillips, a former Democratic member of Montana’s state Senate, told me that if the goal is to actually recover the species, humans should set their sights higher than just barely exceeding the threshold at which the animals might snuff out. Paul Fielder, a Republican member of the state’s House of Representatives and a longtime advocate for more aggressive wolf management, told me he sees little reason for the state to maintain more wolves than the bare minimum. “They’re four-legged terrorists,” Fielder said. “How many terrorists are okay in your neighborhood?”

Across the rest of the country, too, opinions about how to manage wolves tend to break along partisan lines—to the point where reminding people of their political identity can amplify their positive or negative feelings toward the animals. And although most Americans remain in favor of protecting gray wolves, only a very small minority of people in the U.S. regularly interact with the animals—primarily in rural regions. A few ranchers told me they were frustrated that so much of the wolves’ fate was being determined by people who wouldn’t have to live through the direct consequences.

Wolves do have a way of riling peoples’ emotions, Alma Sanchez, a carnivore biologist with the Nez Perce Tribe, told me—perhaps, she and others said, because conflicts over their future put into relief so many fault lines of American life, between urban and rural existence, between conservatives and liberals, between trust in government and a desire for individual sovereignty. Some researchers hoped that a few wolf killings might mollify ranchers, but recent studies have suggested that this approach can instead reinforce anti-wolf sentiment. In one infamous case in Wyoming—where wolves have been delisted since 2017 and can be hunted and trapped year-round in most of the state—a man was arrested in 2024 after he allegedly ran over a wolf with his snowmobile, then paraded her injured body around a bar before shooting her. (He has pleaded not guilty to the charge.)

And as Montana has found, the math of “fewer wolves, fewer problems” doesn’t always work out. Killing a wolf can destabilize its pack to the point where the remaining members become more likely to go after livestock. And although wolves do naturally prey on wild deer and elk, support for the notion that the predators are cratering wild game populations is mixed at best, several experts told me. In several cases, researchers have found that wolves’ effect on those species pales in comparison to the impact of factors such as disease, environmental conditions, habitat loss, and other predators. The benefits to livestock, too, may be quite modest: One recent study found that, across states, killing one wolf saves, on average, less than 10 percent of a single cow. For those reasons and more, several wolf researchers told me they remain skeptical that ever-increasing wolf killings will chart the path to coexistence. “If it’s not going to reduce conflict, or make you feel better about wolves, why do you want to kill wolves?” Naomi Louchouarn, a conservation ecologist with Humane World for Animals, told me.

Although some advocates for increased wolf harvests can point to an ideal—and low—number of wolves they’d like to aim for, the conservationists I spoke with didn’t feel comfortable identifying a “correct” number of wolves for the country. The answer, Sanchez told me, depends less on what the landscape can support and more on what Americans’ attitudes will. But people who want more wolves and people who want fewer both argue that the other side is letting their feelings about wolves get in the way of rational thinking. Fielder, while making the case that Montana needed fewer wolves, repeatedly told me that the worst way to approach wolf management was “entirely through emotion.” Days earlier, while advocating for the animals, Boyd, the wildlife biologist, had told me exactly the same.

This article has been updated to reflect which other predators have killed Paul Roen’s cattle.

The Blind Spot at the Top of the World

2026-02-13T10:32:39-05:00

Last week, Thomas E. Dans, the recently appointed chair of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, showed up unexpectedly in Tromsø, Norway, at an annual conference about the Arctic’s future. He had flown in from Mar-a-Lago and, he told me, was there to observe. The next day, he watched as Åsa Rennermalm, a Rutgers University professor who studies polar regions, sat onstage with European foreign ministers and spoke out against cuts to U.S. science funding.

“A leading US Arctic scientist is on stage absolutely ripping her country to the delight of the audience,” Dans wrote on X. “Embarrassing.” He punctuated his post with an American-flag emoji.

When I asked him at the conference about his plans in his new job—the commission’s main function is advising the federal government on what Arctic science to pursue—he said that future research will put America first and focus on the economic opportunities of the north. In a later email, he emphasized investments in Arctic military and energy security. “Under President Trump, our expansive Arctic research enterprise, across the entirety of the U.S. government enterprise, is increasing not decreasing,” he wrote.

But his comments were also consistent with the Trump administration’s posture toward Arctic climate research in particular: The United States has been doing too much of it. The Trump administration’s choices are leading to an odd predicament, in that the more the U.S. takes a geopolitical interest in the Arctic, the less it’s contributing to the world’s basic understanding of the region. By slashing any science related to climate change, the U.S. is willfully remaining ignorant about the place key to the world’s future.

In the past year, the government’s own scientists, as well as scientists who depended on federal funding, have had to leave the region in droves, while thousands of federal data sets have vanished without warning, including many key to climate research. One day last May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that the Sea Ice Index, a nearly half-century-long archive kept by one of its centers, would no longer be maintained or updated. In December, when NOAA quietly published its 20th-anniversary Arctic Report Card, it not only detailed record-high temperatures and record-low winter sea-ice cover, but also indexed the report’s own at-risk projects, threatened by U.S. staffing and budget cuts—including, for instance, a sea-ice-monitoring satellite system already scheduled for decommission.

Not long ago, the U.S. was the world’s greatest public funder of Arctic research, and the most frequent research-project initiator, according to an analysis by UArctic, a network of universities and research institutions studying the high north. “Frighteningly, a lot of the world’s critical climate data is being stored in data centers in the U.S.,” Morven Muilwijk, an oceanographer at the Norwegian Polar Institute who studies sea ice, told me. Scientists around the world have been scrambling to fill in gaps and make space on their servers for American data sets, before more of them suddenly disappear.

Polar peace, and the scientific collaboration it’s enabled, is a relatively recent idea; the eight Arctic nations created the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) in 1991, at the Cold War’s end. More than a decade later, AMAP published the first ever international and multidisciplinary report on Arctic climate change and its driving role in planetary warming. At its height, AMAP grew to a network involving more than 800 global scientists and experts.

Arctic research always required diplomacy, and even before Donald Trump took office, it had been in a rough stretch. In March 2022, one week after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Western nations started issuing sanctions against Russia that limited cross-border science and data-sharing, effectively wiping half of the geographical Arctic from climate models. The Arctic Council, the diplomatic forum that directs AMAP, paused its work. Practically overnight, hundreds of projects were halted, and once-daily contact among colleagues ceased. Scientists co-signed editorials pleading with their governments to end the sanctions for the sake of tracking planetary change. Only in mid-2024 did AMAP shakily open conversations about how to resume data-sharing.

Rolf Rødven, AMAP’s executive secretary, told me that today he’s optimistic and that the “intentions are there on both sides” to reopen the data channels. Still, he noted that, in recent years, attitudes toward data-sharing have changed. All environmental data shared across borders have the potential to be used for civilian technology or for military purposes. For example, high-resolution permafrost maps are key to understanding Arctic changes, but also reveal strategic details about a country’s terrain. In 2024, a Newsweek investigation found that a Chinese atmospheric station on Svalbard was using instruments owned by a state military-electronics group, which is also known for developing radar that can spot submarines and missiles at great distances. Just this week, The Barents Observer reported that a Russian AMAP scientist was arrested in January, accused of state treason by security services who say they found information in his publications on the Arctic environment that could be used by Norwegian intelligence. According to the First Report, a group of Russian human-rights lawyers in exile, the scientist has denied the charges.

Given the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to Arctic politics, any wariness about continuing to share data would be unsurprising. But not even American scientists can access the decades-long data sets they’ve removed, nor is it clear that those data sets exist anymore. To Rødven, “the U.S. situation is much worse” than the 2022 breakdown in Russian science collaboration. Russia is still collecting key data, even if other countries can’t currently access the information. The Trump administration has been planning to pull carbon-measuring satellites out of the sky. European institutions are now preparing for a future without American data: The Norwegian Meteorological Institute, for example, has been downloading still-online NOAA and NASA data sets to its own servers; the European Space Agency, Muilwijk said, “is really stepping up” with its satellite data sets. But these efforts may not be enough to patch the holes the U.S. is leaving behind.

Late last year, at the American Geophysical Union’s annual conference, Rennermalm, the Rutgers scientist, gave a talk titled “The End of the Golden Era of Polar and Cryosphere Science in the United States?” In it, she raised concerns that the administration’s disinvestments could seriously hurt the global understanding of the poles, and discourage an entire generation of young researchers. At the conference, one of the most important gatherings for climate research, she noticed that fewer attendees had come from outside the U.S. than she’d expected, she told me. Scientists from other countries—Muilwijk and his colleagues among them—have started skipping American conferences. They’ve also stopped submitting to American academic journals, Muilwijk told me, in part because as available American peer reviewers shrink, these journals are running monthslong backlogs. The U.S. continues to pull away from international collaboration, too: In January, the Trump administration formally announced that it would withdraw the United States from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, just two years before initial reports from its next comprehensive, meticulous account of planetary changes and forecasts are due to be published.

The impact of losing American involvement in the IPCC report is difficult to quantify. But one consequence is fairly straightforward: The National Center for Atmospheric Research, which the Trump administration wants to dismantle entirely, produces a major model of the Earth system that the report depends on. NCAR has been a leader in improving the accuracy of climate predictions, Muilwijk told me. The science has been moving toward linking Arctic changes to other regions and predicting hyperlocal impacts—future storms, erosion, sea-level rise—with greater specificity. Losing NCAR models and data may make those predictions a lot harder. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)

Rennermalm took what she thinks may be her final research trip to Greenland last summer. She’s been studying changes to the ice sheet there for two decades, during which it has lost 5,000 billion tons of ice, and at a research station that was once full of American scientists, she saw only two other senior researchers like herself, “there to pack down the science,” she told me. At the harbor, she could see naval ships. “This Greenland-occupation rhetoric is now a world issue consuming every conversation,” she said, when I called three weeks before the Tromsø conference, “when what we should be focusing on is what’s happening to our Earth system and our ability to live on this planet.”

That’s what happened at the conference, too—an exchange between Dans and Aaja Chemnitz, a Greenlandic member of the Danish Parliament, became the talk of the week. Dans had just given an interview to Norwegian national TV, in which he expounded on America’s designs on Greenland. Afterward, when his mic was still on, he glibly told Chemnitz that the “check is in the mail.” The next night Chemnitz recounted the whole exchange at a talk with, among others, Michael Sfraga, who chaired the U.S. Arctic Research Commission under Joe Biden; he told Chemnitz to “rip the check up.” (In his email, Dans told me that he’d encourage people to listen to the full interview, and that “Greenlanders themselves deserve better and they have no greater friend in America.”)

When I spoke with Sfraga about the exchange, he said that “it’s getting harder to stay measured in my reactions.” But he noted that in mid-January, Congress passed a bipartisan bill restoring much of the climate-science funding cut from NOAA, NASA, and the National Science Foundation last year. And even an administration pursuing an “America First” strategy in the Arctic should see some value in investing in polar science. “You can not divorce basic research from national security, homeland security, energy security, community security, or economic security,” Sfraga told me. Whatever U.S. leaders might think about climate change, that reality will affect their future plans, too.

Scientists Figured Out the Problem With Johnson & Johnson’s COVID Vaccine

2026-02-11T17:00:00-05:00

In 2021, just months after the first COVID vaccines debuted, concern was growing about an exceedingly rare but sometimes deadly outcome of certain shots. Two related vaccines—one from AstraZeneca and the other from Johnson & Johnson—were linked to dangerous blood clotting.

Out of almost 19 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s version given in the United States during the first two years of the pandemic, at least 60 such cases were identified. Nine of them were fatal. In the United Kingdom, where almost 50 million doses of the AstraZeneca shot were given, 455 cases occurred; 81 people died. In Germany, at least 71 cases were identified, also linked to AstraZeneca. By late spring, use of both the AstraZeneca and the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was paused, and ultimately both were pulled from the market. But the mystery surrounding the rare blood clotting caused by these vaccines lingered.

Now researchers believe they have cracked the case. They have hard evidence for how the blood clotting happened, and they believe that their findings could help make similar vaccines even safer. Understanding the blood-clotting problem is important, they say, because vaccines of this type could be essential in protecting people during future pandemics.

The team that initially gave this condition a name—vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia, or VITT—included Andreas Greinacher, a blood expert at the University of Greifswald, in Germany. Back in 2021, as the cases of VITT emerged, he and others were unsure of what precipitated them. One theory was that they were caused by the body’s accidental reaction to the type of virus used in both the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines: adenoviruses, which had been engineered to prompt the body to recognize the pandemic coronavirus but were unable to replicate and considered harmless to people. Scientists had noticed that patients with VITT had telltale markers in their blood—antibodies that bind to a chemical signal released by platelets. Maybe a reaction to the adenovirus was causing immune cells to mistakenly go after a blood component and precipitate clotting. An alternative theory was that the body was reacting to a portion of the coronavirus called “spike protein,” which showed up as part of the immunization.

In a study published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, Greinacher and his colleagues show that the first theory was correct: VITT was a response to the adenovirus gone awry. And they discovered a further twist: This immune overreaction happened in people who were genetically prone to it.

In the study, Greinacher and his colleagues looked at the antibodies in stored blood from 21 patients with VITT. Among those antibodies, they found a subset that could glom on to a portion of the adenovirus and to one of the body’s own molecules, PF4, that can influence blood clotting. A person who received one of the adenovirus vaccines but did not have a reaction also had antibodies against that same part of the adenovirus. But, crucially, that person’s antibodies did not cross-react with PF4.

Those antibody molecules also offered clues about the immune cells that made them. And the scientists were able to link the immune cells responsible for VITT to patients who had two specific DNA variants. A wider survey of 100 VITT patients found that all of them had immune cells with one of these genetic types—which are far from universal. This signaled to the researchers that having these particular variants is a strong risk factor for blood clotting following an adenovirus vaccine.

But the study also showed that this genetic background on its own was not enough to cause VITT. The immune cells that made the dangerous antibodies had experienced an additional small genetic change, and that extra mutation had prompted them to produce those cross-reactive molecules.

In the past, scientists have suggested that genetic predispositions might explain some adverse events that happen after vaccination. For example, some data have indicated that certain people were genetically prone to developing narcolepsy following a version of swine-flu vaccine that was briefly used in Europe. But the new study from Greinacher and his team is the first to provide concrete evidence of how people with a particular DNA variant can develop self-sabotaging antibodies following a vaccination. Arnold Lining Ju, a biomedical engineer at the University of Sydney who has studied blood clotting, told me that the paper was a landmark finding in part because of how elegantly it explains the way a specific genetic trait, combined with a particular chance mutation in certain cells, creates VITT. And because the study shows that multiple genetic changes are involved, it finally explains why this immune reaction is so rare, he said.

This discovery will help guide researchers more than it will influence vaccination choices for individual patients. Most vaccine recipients will not know their genetic predisposition to an adverse event, Jennifer Juno, a vaccine researcher at the University of Melbourne, points out. But this type of work will help improve vaccine design—particularly in the field of “precision vaccinology,” in which vaccines are tailored to individual traits, Joanne Reed, the director of the Centre for Immunology and Allergy Research at the Westmead Institute in Australia, told me.

These results also mean that adenovirus-based vaccines could be made safer if they can be designed without the protein region that triggered the dangerous antibodies in VITT. “Instead of abandoning an entire vaccine platform because of a rare problem, we can engineer around the specific issue, and that’s the power of this kind of science,” Joann Arce of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital told me. The hope is that understanding the biology of a rare event like VITT, and then addressing it, helps bolster public trust in vaccines too. Greinacher told me that adenovirus-based vaccines remain vital, including for the development of vaccines for diseases that affect mostly low- and middle-income countries. The shots could also be useful in a future pandemic, because they can be scaled up in production relatively quickly.

Still, this one study may not have entirely answered the question of why adenovirus-based COVID vaccines caused clotting. A study published last year from Ju’s group suggested that a separate biophysical mechanism might cause a viral component found in the AstraZeneca vaccine to directly aggregate platelets, independent of the immune reaction identified in VITT. And a bigger mystery remains open too—why infections themselves are sometimes associated with dangerous blood clotting. Rushad Pavri, an immunologist at King’s College London, told me that the new study—because it shows how similarities between a virus particle and an innate protein involved in clotting can confuse the immune system—can shed light on that question. Ultimately, understanding why viruses can provoke immune overreactions might help limit damaging complications from sickness to begin with.

The Mysterious Devices Speeding Mining Exploration in Utah

2026-02-07T08:00:00-05:00

Bushwhacking through a stand of stunted aspens above 10,000 feet in Utah’s Tushar mountain range, the mountain guide Trevor Katz held his Garmin to the sky and pointed it south. “We should just look for an opening,” he said, glancing over at his colleague, Bailey Pugh, from under a ball cap he’d cut into a visor.

He took a few steps steeply uphill, then down, careful not to slide on the scree. “It says it’s right below us, by probably 10 meters. Wait, five.”

Wading through walls of branches, he and Pugh circled, eyes trained on the ground. Then, there it was. Stuck in the dirt, the hexagonal silver node looked like a device an alien could have planted. Its small antenna and carrying strap sat above the earth. A sharp spike below anchored it into the slope. It would be a strange thing to stumble upon this so high in the mountains, surrounded only by what can survive at such an elevation.

This is just one of 200 nodes planted across the range in a tidy grid, each tracked with a GPS waypoint. Earlier, they had placed the nodes in the ground; now it was time to extract them. Pugh hoisted this one out of the ground and into her pack. Then it was back to bushwhacking.

“This is why they had to hire mountain guides,” Pugh told me, as we picked our steps carefully across boulders.

At the beginning of the summer, Katz and Pugh had received an email from the owner of a guiding company they’d worked for in the past: A client needed mountain-savvy day workers for a new project—any interest? The biggest hint they got about the purpose of the project was the field crew’s meeting place, the Deer Trail Mine, at the mountains’ eastern base. Each team was given a set of GPS waypoints and told to take a 20-pound node, about as big as a football, to each location, plant it in the ground, and mark its location. “It was really mysterious,” Levi Warr, another crew member, told me. But the pay was good—$500 a day, plus a per diem, as much as they’d usually earn for a few days of guiding—and the instructions were clear enough, so out they went.

Only as the summer went on did the crew come to understand, from chatting with the project geologists and fieldwork managers, what exactly they were doing: helping locate some of the nation’s most in-demand minable resources across a patchwork of public and private lands. Arranged in grids that connect to low-Earth-orbit satellites, the nodes are capable of collecting and sharing data used to create high-resolution maps of anomalies, miles underground, that might be gold, copper, nickel, lithium, or other minerals.

The nodes used in the project were first released three years ago by the Australian company Fleet Space Technologies, and although they’ve been adopted by mining giants internationally, how widely they’re being used in the United States is unclear. Compared with older and more invasive survey methods, this technology can be deployed with minimal impact. According to Fleet Space, it can be particularly useful for surveying areas where permits are required—for the Fishlake National Forest, for example, and the Bureau of Land Management territory enveloping the Tushar Mountains. If this quiet method of mineral exploration is successful, it will have threaded a loophole in the law governing public lands, helping open them for mining that much more quickly—and controversially. All it will take is a few hundred nodes, a clear view of the sky to connect to satellites, and a small team of people who know how to traverse rough terrain.

Lauren Steele

Utah locals, including Bailey Pugh and Trevor Katz, were hired to conduct fieldwork for the mining project.

Historically, mining-exploration projects have depended on a giant boom. Drop hammers, trucks with vibrating baseplates, and dynamite blasts send seismic waves through the Earth’s subsurface to a grid of geophones. The waves’ travel times are translated into rough maps of mineralized zones. On U.S. public lands, taking even this first step toward a new mine means getting approval, whether from the Forest Service or the BLM, a process that can be stringent and slow, requiring data collection and environmental assessment.

Instead of shakes and booms, Fleet Space’s node system relies on the naturally occurring vibrations of the earth and the sound waves created by those walking upon it. These scraps of seismic data from everyday life are gathered by the nodes’ internal geophones. After collection, the data are processed into “ambient-noise tomography,” or ANT, surveys, which provide the highest level of detail of what is underground, compared with traditional methods. (Fleet Space did not respond to a request for comment.)

The American West has long led the country in producing gold, copper, coal, and silver, as well as rare, sought-after elements, such as beryllium, that can be used for aerospace and defense technologies. The unique geologic profiles here—the Colorado Plateau, the Basin and Range region, the Rocky Mountains—are side effects of ancient inland seas, volcanic history, and an active boundary between two tectonic plates. Billions of years of pressure, folding, and depositing created a region rich with minerals just close enough to the surface to mine.

In the 1860s, white settlers flocked to what would become Marysvale, where the Deer Trail Mine is now located, with high hopes to strike gold, silver, and copper. By the 1930s, though, most of the mines had closed: The shallower, more accessible resources had been tapped, and it was too expensive to keep trying to get rich.

Over the years, a series of companies have bought the Deer Trail Mine in failed attempts to revive it, Helen and Alan Johnson told me. They’re lifelong residents of Marysvale and former employees of the mine, and they agreed to meet me at a Mexican restaurant in Orem, Utah, to talk history. Most recently, in 2018, MAG Silver, a Canadian company, bought the mine. The new owners had started exploring national-forest land for silver, gold, and copper with more traditional methods before turning to the Fleet Space nodes for this summer’s surveys.

These minerals, plus others that Fleet Space nodes can help discover, including cobalt, nickel, and lithium, are all on the country’s list of critical minerals. Demand for these materials is growing exponentially: Together and separately, they are used in iPhones, photovoltaic panels, combat drones, and many other technologies now key to Americans’ quality of life or national security. Some materials, like diamonds, can be whipped up in labs, but these particular resources come only from the ground.

Now the right combination of technology and political timing could mean that whatever is still in Utah’s mountains and elsewhere could be within reach for those who want it. As tariffs have kicked in and America seeks to ease its reliance on China for refined metals and minerals, the Trump administration has turned its attention to opening up U.S. land for mining—even when that means that the companies doing the mining aren’t American ones.

Lauren Steele

Nodes are left in the field for days or weeks to collect data before they are removed from the ground.

To plant one of the ANT nodes, Trevor Katz told me while walking up a slope scattered with juniper trees, does not require much. Hike in with a pickax, dig a hole a few inches deep, and place the sharp end of the node into that hole, making sure the spike containing the geophone is completely covered. To extract it, just pull it out of the ground and hike it out.

He and Pugh did this over and over, often putting in a dozen miles a day, as the field crew placed and extracted 200 nodes four separate times, first for a regional survey that covered about 50 square miles across BLM territory, national forest, and land the mine already owns, then for three surveys, mostly on Forest Service land, that made a more detailed search for anomalies.

To regulate mining activities on public land, balancing its responsibility to both conserve the land and make it useful, the Forest Service is supposed to consider an activity’s “surface disturbance.” Exploration that’s unlikely to cause “significant” disturbance can go forward without the Forest Service’s involvement. This distinction has helped separate casual use of public lands—such as private citizens panning for gold, which anyone can do freely—from commercial activities.

The surveys conducted last summer for the Deer Trail Mine project didn’t have any permits associated with them. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documentation of the ANT surveys filed by or on behalf of any of the stakeholders involved in the project, including MAG Silver and the Deer Trail Mine; none were filed with the BLM or the U.S. Forest Service. The companies involved in the project either did not respond to requests for comment or declined to comment for this article. The Fishlake National Forest Ranger Station, which has long worked with Deer Trail Mine and is responsible for all permitting and communication regarding the company’s mining activities on Forest Service land, told me that any commercial exploration at all would be expected to be disclosed to the rangers but that the station had no knowledge of the ANT surveys.

A spokesperson for the Forest Service’s national press office told me, however, that this type of survey does not need a permit or even a formal notice of intent, which the agency uses to determine whether further oversight is needed. But the legal experts I asked about the ANT nodes told me that they fall into a gray area of the law.

The key term is “significant disturbance,” Elizabeth Craddock, a government-relations attorney and a partner at Holland & Knight in Washington, D.C., who specializes in natural resources, told me. But the regulation itself doesn’t define what significant means, she said, so what counts is up for interpretation. These commercial-exploration projects seem to have found a way to quietly bypass federal regulations that outline how and when approval is given before exploration begins on public lands.

Lauren Steele

Utah's Fishlake National Forest spans nearly 2 million acres and is home to the world's largest living organism, an aspen stand called Pando.

If the Deer Trail Mine project goes back into operation, it will need permits. This past fall, it was acquired, as part of MAG Silver, by another Canadian company, Pan American Silver—which has not pursued any further work on the project so far. But any next steps toward reopening a mine here could go faster than ever too.

Last March, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to expedite mining projects and prioritize mining activities on public lands. The administration has also made changes, at least temporarily, to the National Environmental Policy Act review process to accelerate project approvals. Agencies are no longer required to analyze long-term environmental effects that are hard to trace back to the initial cause, which significantly reduces the scope of every project’s review.

Opening up new mining operations would be in keeping with the founding directive of the Forest Service, which mandates the balance of protecting resources and extracting them. Many mines give small, rural towns a needed economic boost too—in Marysvale, for instance, the median household income is $28,750 a year, and the unemployment rate is 63 percent.

Still, while he’s out retrieving the nodes that could make new mines a reality, Katz told me, he’s been “telling myself the little copes that everybody does”—that it’ll be a long time before this land is developed. Looking out over the windswept tops of Mount Holly and Delano Peak, into a valley meadow called Horse Heaven, and across the entire range, I imagined 800 empty holes where the nodes used to be. Katz had mentioned that the project’s marketing materials clearly said that all the holes would be filled in—perhaps a gesture toward a remediation plan for the survey’s relatively small impacts—but that he and other guides had not, in fact, filled them in. Those holes were nothing you’d see unless you were looking; it’s likely that the first hard autumn rain quietly washed them away. But if this particular combination of technology and policy does add up to more mining across the country, the result will be loud and obvious.

American Milk Has Changed

2026-02-04T12:19:51-05:00

In recent years, American milk has undergone a quiet transformation. The milk produced by our dairy cows has become creamier and more luscious as breakthroughs in cow genetics and nutrition have pushed the fat component of milk—also known as butterfat—to all-time highs. In 2000, the average dairy cow made 670 pounds of fat in her milk a year; today, she’s making 1,025 pounds. No single trait in dairy cows has improved as rapidly with genomic selection as fat, according to Chad Dechow, a dairy-cattle geneticist at Penn State. It’s a triumph of dairy science.

Lately, though, all is not well in the world of butterfat. Dairy science has arguably made our cows too good too fast at fat-maxxing.

This past fall, butter prices collapsed as a “tsunami” of butterfat inundated the market. “We really have an oversupply right now,” Corey Geiger, the lead economist for dairy at CoBank, told me. The reason is twofold, he explained: U.S. farmers are keeping a near-record number of dairy cows, which are in turn producing milk with a record level of fat. For customers, this oversupply means cheaper butter. For farmers, “it’s going to be a tough year,” Dechow told me. “The farmers take it on the chin.”

Until last autumn’s crash, farmers had every economic incentive to keep pushing the limit on fat. Butter and cheese consumption have been growing steadily since the 1990s, and butterfat prices were sky-high for several years running. When dairy farmers sell milk, they are generally paid not by volume—milk is mostly water, after all—but by the weight of its solid components, primarily fat and protein. More fat plus more protein adds up to a bigger milk check. Although protein, too, has ticked up in milk, fat has proved more responsive to changes in genetics and diet. After hovering for decades around 3.65 percent, milk fat began rising first slowly and then quickly, reaching 4.24 percent in 2024.

“Genetics sets the ceiling, and nutrition determines the floor,” Dechow said. After the first dairy cow’s genome was sequenced in 2009, the industry started raising the genetic ceiling. By marrying DNA markers to the milk-production records of millions of cows, farmers are able to choose bulls for breeding based on the predicted traits—including milk-fat yield—of their future daughters. And when those daughters are born, some farmers once again DNA-test the young cows, keeping only the ones with the most potential. This precise level of selection has allowed the high-butterfat versions of milk genes to spread far and wide in the American dairy herd over just a few generations. Genetics explains about half to two-thirds of the rise in butterfat levels, experts told me.

For a cow to meet her genetic butterfat potential, though, she needs the right diet. “Cows do not make milk fat from thin air,” Kevin Harvatine, a dairy nutritionist at Penn State, told me. A modern cow’s dietary intake is precisely managed, down to the length of plant fibers optimal for digestion. Even the crops they eat—low-lignin alfalfa, high-oleic soybeans—have been genetically modified or bred to stimulate high milk and milk-fat production in a cow’s body. Farmers can also add specific supplements, such as palmitic acid, a by-product of palm-oil production, to further boost butterfat. (This practice came to widespread attention during Buttergate, in 2021, when Canadians began noticing that their butter had become firmer and less spreadable at room temperature. Palmitic acid does indeed increase the melting temperature of butter.)

You can’t actually buy this extra-rich cow’s milk at grocery stores. Despite its name, the whole milk sold in plastic jugs is not the whole milk, but a standardized fiction: For decades, the U.S. has defined whole milk to meet a minimum of 3.25 percent fat—the low end of what was once a cow’s natural range. That number has remained unchanged even as the actual average fat content of milk has risen a full percentage point above it. Any excess of fat from “whole milk” is instead transformed into high-fat dairy products: the various creams (heavy, whipping, sour, ice), butter, triple-crème Bries, ultra-lush yogurts, and so on.

Today’s 4-percent-plus milk has created problems for certain cheese makers. It is simply too rich for varieties such as cheddar, Colby, and Monterey Jack, which require a lower fat-protein ratio. Cheese makers have had to reconfigure their manufacturing lines, either to receive extra dairy protein in the form of skim milk or to install a million-dollar separator to remove excess fat. “It’s extra cost, extra steps, extra bother,” Dean Sommer, a cheese and food technologist at the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “They’re transitioning from the world they knew, when it comes to the fat content of milk, to the world we’re dealing with.”

The unwanted fat from cheesemaking ends up at processors such as Grassland Dairy, a large butter maker based in Wisconsin. Lately, says its president, Trevor Wuethrich, Grassland has had to keep its facility running more often to keep up with all of the leftover fat coming from cheese makers. Cheese makers that used to send a truckload of cream a week, he told me, are now sending “a load a day.” Some days, he has to turn loads away.

Where else can the extra butterfat go? A few years ago, back when butterfat prices were high, Geiger said, some ice-cream makers swapped out dairy cream for cheap gums and air, making “frozen dairy desserts” that contained too little dairy cream to be legally labeled “ice cream.” “I think there’s an opportunity to get more cream back into ice cream,” he told me. Ice-cream makers, naturally, may want to see sustained low prices before jumping back on the butterfat train.

Meanwhile, dairy farmers are already looking to hedge their bets: If not fat, then protein? (And Americans sure love their protein these days.) But breeding cows for milk protein would be more challenging, Dechow said. Milk-protein yield varies less from cow to cow, making it more difficult to make changes through genetic selection. The fat and protein levels of milk are also linked, so enhancing protein would likely enhance fat too.

The high-milk-fat dairy cow won’t be going anywhere, though. At current prices, Harvatine said, “it still makes sense for us to convert feed into butter. It’s just not nearly as profitable as it was a year ago.” If a dairy farmer is doing 10 different things to maximize butterfat, the first nine things might still make sense, he said—only “now I’m questioning the last thing that I’m doing.” And genetically, the American cow is locked in. Breeding decisions made as recently as a few months ago—when butterfat prices were at a peak—will come to fruition only over the next three or four years, as those calves are born, mature into cows, and start producing the super-rich milk of their genetic destiny. The butterfat boom is far from over.

The Storms That Teach What We Can Tolerate

2026-02-01T09:16:37-05:00

On the Saturday night that the storm hit Mississippi, we had dripped our faucets for the temperature drop and stockpiled flashlights, groceries, extra blankets. By 11:30 p.m., my husband was pulling on his rain boots and heading outside to tarp our heating unit: “A branch has already fallen onto a power line in our backyard,” he told me. Three hours later, I was shaken awake. “Mom, I think a tree just fell on our house,” my 13-year-old son said. I stumbled around, looking for any sign that tree branches had breached my home. As I searched, I saw the pine tree behind our home drop a giant branch into the neighbor’s yard.

Crack. Boom. For the next six or so hours, every few minutes, we heard tree branches cracking, encased in ice and barreling to the ground like meteorites, exploding on contact with the earth. At each crack, we thought, Will this be the one that hits our house? Or our neighbors’? Will we lose our giant oak tree? Under the weight of five blankets and three sleeping bags, we waited for the storm to pass, for daylight to break, and for the fate of our town to become clear.

We know warm-weather storms in the South. Tornado sirens and weather alerts send us to shelter in our bathtub from spring into summer, when hurricane season begins and then runs into fall. We rarely get a break, yet something keeps us in place. My family and I live in Water Valley, a small town of about 3,400 in the Hill Country, just under 20 miles from Oxford, where I grew up. As a young child, often surrounded by oaks, pines, sycamores, cedars, and more, I found comfort and beauty in the trees. Many of the old trees in Mississippi have been preserved simply because no one had reason to cut them down. So much of the state is undeveloped, and that has allowed nature to be still and simply continue to live. My childhood house backed up to Bailey’s Woods, which connects the University of Mississippi to Rowan Oak, the home of William Faulkner. I’d build forts hidden deep in the woods or follow a shortcut to campus to get a milkshake from the cafeteria. I knew the trails so well that I could walk home at dusk without a flashlight.

Last Sunday morning, I began to assess the damage. I opened the front door, and the undeniable smell of pine trees hit my son and me in the face. My neighbors, whose home is flanked by pines, were now trapped by them. Their driveway was impassable, with broken branches everywhere. I heard the sound of a chainsaw down the street: Someone was already working to clear downed branches covering the road. A few neighborhood kids had wasted no time and were at the top of the hill in front of my house, hopping on bright-green disc sleds, hopeful that the ice on the road would be as fun as snow.

In the backyard, two neighbors were looking up at the pine and its scattered branches. Another neighbor’s fence was now mangled metal covered in tree parts. I saw that we had lost a smaller tree, too, and a pine-tree branch had pierced its fallen body, now split in half. When I fed the birds on our deck, as I normally do, I counted as many as 40 birds feasting, having just been displaced from the trees. I decided to feed them twice as much.

My mom, who lives a couple of blocks away, and my friends were all okay. We were among the more than 150,000 homes and businesses in the state without power. With nothing else to do, exhausted from the long night, I went back to sleep under my pile of blankets. This became a new pattern: sleeping more than 12 hours each night, just trying to stay warm, eating dinner at 3:30 or 4 before the sun set and the quiet of the town began. I stayed close to the house, while my husband volunteered overnight at the town warming center.

Our power returned after five and a half days, at 11:30 in the morning. That Thursday was the first day that the count of utility customers without power dropped below 100,000, but only barely. In my town, the Water Valley Electric Commission and its volunteer chairman, Brandon Presley, had worked hard to execute mutual-aid agreements with other municipally owned utilities and to engage private contractors and suppliers before the storm. That diligence paid off, and on Main Street, businesses were quickly up and running, providing us with resources and sustenance. The storm that we just lived through is the type that comes around every few decades, but dealing with dangerous ice here is starting to feel like a new routine. Not so long ago, another ice storm had trapped us atop our slippery hill. My neighbors are discussing their lists of winter needs for the future: ice cleats, hand warmers, a good pair of gloves, a snow shovel, a power bank, a camping stove.

Even if they are rare, storms like these teach us what we can tolerate. I lived in Memphis during the summer storm of 2003—a derecho that was affectionately called Hurricane Elvis. For 10 long days, I had no air-conditioning in 90-plus degrees, and I thought that was the worst I could feel, living in air so thick you’d think you could cut it with a knife. Winter Storm Fern changed my mind. Losing power in the cold, living in air so frigid I could see my breath inside my home, is much worse than the heat.

As of Friday, almost a week after the storm, tens of thousands of households still didn’t have power. Some families, in the more rural parts of an already rural state, have no idea how long the wait will be for their power to return. In my neighborhood, a warmer day melted some of the snow and ice away on the roads, but cold has set in again, and this weekend, temperatures dropped below freezing. I thought I might have a level of resilience to endure that kind of challenge, but I quickly learned that I really don’t.

The trees have their own kind of resilience, and they, too, will return—although that will take much longer than the power. Whereas pines grow relatively fast, oaks are slower. Thankfully, our 133-year-old oak tree was spared and will, I hope, continue to be a towering beacon, reminding us of the beauty of trees but also of the danger they can quickly create during storms. Especially when they’re covered in ice.

The ‘Doomsday Glacier’ Could Flood the Earth. Can a 50-Mile Wall Stop It?

2026-01-31T08:00:00-05:00

This month, an international team of scientists has been trying to set up sensors on and around Thwaites Glacier, one of the most unstable in the world. It’s often called Antarctica’s “doomsday glacier” because, if it collapses, it would add two feet of sea-level rise to the world’s oceans. On Thwaites itself, part of the team will try today to drop a fiber-optic cable through a 3,200-foot borehole in the ice, near the glacier’s grounding line, where the ocean is eating away at it from below. Sometime in the next week, another part of the team, working from the South Korean icebreaker RV Araon, aims to drop another cable, which a robot will traverse once a day, down to a rocky moraine in the Amundsen Sea. The data the sensors gather over the next two years will fill gaps in basic scientific knowledge about Thawaites. They will also determine the future of an audacious idea to slow its demise.

Right now, warm water is barely cresting the moraine, then flowing down a seabed canyon toward the glacier. If this natural dam were a little taller, it could block those warm ocean currents. Using the data on current speeds and water temperatures, scientists and engineers will model whether a giant curtain atop the moraine could divert warm water away from the glacier’s base—and if it would even be possible to construct one.

To avert catastrophe in this way would be a massive undertaking: The curtain itself would need to be up to 500 feet tall and 50 miles long. But these local conditions are in such tentative balance—“on a knife’s edge,” David Holland, a climate scientist at NYU and a member of the Seabed Curtain Project, told me from the deck of the RV Araon—that Holland and some other scientists believe that an intervention could change the glacier’s fate. Of his colleagues on the boat, he may be the only one thinking along those lines right now, he said. “But everyone’s data is going to be used by people for years and years for that purpose.”

A few years ago, the curtain project was a fringe idea that John Moore, a glaciologist at the University of Lapland, and a couple of like-minded colleagues had proposed in a series of academic articles. This kind of geoengineering, meant to address the symptoms of climate change without slowing it down, was a bête noire in the glaciology community. Now more scientists are coming to see targeted interventions in our climate as inevitable. The curtain project and at least one competing idea for slowing Thwaites’s melt have raised millions of dollars—not just from the usual geoengineering proponents but from traditional philanthropic foundations.

“The idea that there’s a clean exit on climate change, people need to get over that,” Holland said, before he set out on the icebreaker. “What is the least brutal outcome for the world is what will be decided.”

Geoengineering—which could also include removing carbon dioxide from the ocean and using stratospheric aerosol injection to dim the sun—is gaining adherents in part because decarbonization simply isn’t proceeding quickly enough. This past fall, the United Nations announced that within the next decade, global temperatures will likely rise by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, a threshold that the Paris Agreement aimed to avoid. At the same time, climate impacts are getting real—droughts are supercharging fire seasons; hotter seas are intensifying hurricanes.

Marianne Hagen, a former Norwegian deputy minister of foreign affairs, told me that she’d long considered geoengineering “science fiction and just something not worth spending a lot of time on.” Then she watched as the Ukraine war changed the conversations around her: Energy security came to the forefront of European politics, and “nobody talked about energy transition anymore.” She thought of the vulnerable coastal nations she’d visited as a government official and, in 2024, signed on to co-lead the curtain project with Moore. “I ended up in John’s camp, mostly out of despair, because I could not see a safe pathway forward for future generations without doing the necessary research on these Band-Aid, buy-time solutions,” she said.

After that, the project quickly raised initial research funding from the nonprofits Outlier Projects, run by a former Meta executive, and the Tom Wilhelmsen Foundation, founded by a prominent Norwegian shipping company. Although government agencies in the United States and United Kingdom have funded lab research on geoengineering, rich patrons have been comparably powerful funders of geoengineering in general—and the primary funders of polar-geoengineering research. “There are lots of people with lots of money, and it’s in the scale of the private sector to do this,” Holland told me.

Another group, the Arête Glacier Initiative, is investigating the idea of refreezing Thwaites to bedrock by pumping lubricating meltwater out from its base or drawing heat away with passive heat pumps. An initiative called Real Ice is trying to pump seawater atop Arctic sea ice to thicken it. “We’ve found a lot of enthusiasm among the philanthropic community” for targeted geoengineering interventions that could limit damage to coastal communities, Brent Minchew, a geophysicist at Caltech and a co-founder of Arête, told me. “These are very localized interventions for global benefits.”

Scientists agree that, absent intervention, Thwaites’s retreat will accelerate within the next century and the glacier will eventually collapse. And Thwaites acts as a cork in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which contains enough water to raise sea levels by nearly 17 feet. The price of localized interventions at Thwaites, proponents say, pales in comparison with the price of building seawalls around major cities. In one paper, Moore and two colleagues estimated that the curtain could cost $40 billion to $80 billion to install (and $1 billion to $2 billion a year to maintain), whereas adapting to rising sea levels could cost an estimated $40 billion a year. One way or another, we are going to have to build in order to fight the sea.

But many in the science community still disagree, vehemently, both with geoengineering proposals and with the rationale for considering them at all. In a prominent paper published in the fall, the University of Exeter polar glaciologist Martin Siegert and 41 co-authors explained in detail how the curtain project, the type of refreezing that Arête wants to try, sea-ice thickening, and two other polar-geoengineering proposals would be too expensive, technically impossible, and potentially damaging to fragile ecosystems. The paper also raised a common argument against geoengineering—that pursuing these ideas is a dangerous distraction from decarbonization, the best solution to climate change.

Siegert decided to write the paper, he told me, after he was the sole dissenter at a talk on sea-ice thickening at the UN’s climate conference in 2023. He was shocked how mainstream the once-fringe field had become. To him, these ideas are so far from feasible, they offer a false hope that distracts from the necessary work of cutting back on fossil-fuel use to avoid catastrophe. Ted Scambos, a glaciologist who co-led the major U.S.-U.K. collaboration that studied the mechanisms driving Thwaites’s retreat, told me that he was once tentatively supportive of geoengineering research but, given that the Trump administration has slashed funding for climate science and renewable-energy development, is now strongly against it. “We absolutely should not fund or support efforts, or even tests, of climate or ice loss mitigation methods,” he wrote in an email. “It should be a matter of international law, and it should be set up as such immediately.” Instead, research and policies should “remain laser-focused on reducing fossil fuel use” and on minimizing the related economic impacts.

Those working on geoengineering research see opponents as equally shortsighted. Merely documenting changes to the cryosphere is like “choosing the best seat on the Titanic to listen to the last tune of the orchestra as the ship goes down,” Moore said. Studying geoengineering interventions is like “launching a few lifeboats.” At this point, decarbonization, even if it happened tomorrow, would not necessarily save Thwaites from collapse, he argued. “To decarbonize to the point at which we will be keeping the glaciers safe, you require actual magic to do that. It is delusional.”

Some proponents of projects like the sea curtain argue that they’re not a novel class of environmental action. They are an act of preservation not dissimilar from redirecting rivers and rebuilding beaches. Letting Thwaites collapse arguably violates the Antarctic Treaty System’s environmental-preservation clause, Minchew said.

How far we’re willing to go to keep the cryosphere in a recognizable shape while the world works on decarbonization is an open question. To geoengineering proponents, persuading the 29 member nations of the Antarctic Treaty with decision-making power to try to build a sea curtain looks easier than persuading the 193 members of the United Nations to, say, try seeding the atmosphere with sun-blocking chemicals. Opponents worry about breaking existing environmental protections for the region, and endangering the treaty altogether. But Holland, at least, is willing to predict the outcome of these debates.

“Fast-forward 1,000 years, the Earth will be geoengineered,” he said. “The entire climate will be regulated like a modern house—no question.” The climate may get screwed up in new ways as scientists attempt to turn the planet’s temperature dial down. But “if it survives, humanity is simply going to do this.”