What happened when a Pacific archipelago cleared rats and stoats from 117 offshore islands and let seabirds, flightless parrots, and giant crickets return to ground they had not touched in 150 years?

New Zealand has spent six decades clearing rats, stoats, and cats from its offshore islands so that flightless parrots, giant crickets, tuatara, and seabird colonies can rebuild. The recovery is now reshaping the reefs offshore too.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 13, 2026

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Space Travel

NASA's Psyche spacecraft used Mars as a gravitational slingshot on 15 May 2026, skimming within 2,864 miles of the surface and walking away 1,000 miles per hour faster — burning no fuel in the process — on its way to an asteroid that may be the exposed metal core of a dead planet

NASA's Psyche probe gained 1,000 mph from Mars without using propellant during the flyby. The physics is exact, while the asteroid's core identity remains a hypothesis.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 13, 2026

Space Travel

The Voyager Golden Record carries a small sample of uranium on its cover, placed there so that whoever finds it can measure the decay and work out how long it has been drifting — a built-in clock for a message engineered to last around a billion years.

Voyager’s Golden Record cover carries a tiny uranium-238 reference whose decay can reveal elapsed time, independently checking its pulsar-map date.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 12, 2026

Marsdaily

At the equator on a Martian summer afternoon, temperatures can reach a tolerable 20°C — but the moment the sun sets, the near-absent atmosphere bleeds the heat away and the surface drops to −84°C by morning, a daily swing no unprotected human body could survive.

Mars can briefly produce Earthlike ground temperatures in equatorial sunlight, then plunge toward −84°C before dawn. The physics behind that swing exposes just how alien the planet remains.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 7, 2026

Uncategorized

Between five and six million years ago, the Mediterranean Sea nearly dried out — and when Atlantic water finally broke back in near Gibraltar, one model suggests the basin may have refilled so violently that sea level rose by metres a day

A catastrophic deluge five million years ago may have refilled an entire sea in mere weeks, reshaping the Mediterranean's geology in the process.

By Brendan Brown · Aug 6, 2026

Climate Science

How does a spacecraft launched in 1977, now more than 25 billion kilometres from home, still transmit data back to Earth on less power than a household hallway bulb?

Voyager 1 is transmitting from 25 billion kilometres away on a 22-watt radio — less power than a hallway bulb — thanks to decaying plutonium, a 3.7-metre dish, and 70-metre antennas on Earth listening for a signal that takes nearly a full day to arrive.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team · Aug 5, 2026

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Terra Daily

Earth science, climate impacts, ecosystems, agriculture, forests, and the broad environmental changes shaping life on a changing planet.

Climate Science

In 1869, 24-year-old Swiss researcher Friedrich Miescher washed white blood cells out of pus-soaked surgical bandages, separated their nuclei, and isolated a phosphorus-rich substance unlike protein or fat, the first isolation of the molecule the world would later call DNA

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Climate Science

How does a hectare of coastal trees rooted in tidal mud store three to five times more carbon than the same area of tropical rainforest, while also blunting cyclone storm surges for the villages behind them?

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Climate Science

In 1846, Ignaz Semmelweis noticed the Vienna maternity ward run by doctors coming straight from autopsies had a death rate three times higher than the midwives' ward, and when he ordered handwashing in chlorinated lime, deaths fell from 18% to about 2% — a result the medical establishment rejected until he died in an asylum.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Climate Science

In 1908, something exploded roughly 8 kilometres above the Tunguska River in Siberia with the force of about 1,000 Hiroshima bombs, flattening 80 million trees across 2,150 square kilometres, and the first scientific expedition did not reach the site until 1927 because the region was so remote.

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

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Shake and Blow

Earthquakes, volcanoes, severe weather, fire, tectonics, disaster response, and the natural hazards reshaping communities and landscapes.

Disaster Management

Zaporizhzhia accident would impact neighbouring countries: Ukraine

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Weather Report

Year so far the hottest in US history

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Disaster Management

'Worse than war': trauma of Libya flood haunts survivors

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Weather Report

World sees record August heat for second year running

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

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Water World

Oceans, rivers, polar ice, water systems, marine life, and the environmental changes affecting the planet's blue and frozen regions.

Water World

We tend to think of AI as a software problem, weightless and waterless, but even a 100-word email written with ChatGPT has been estimated to require roughly a bottle’s worth of water once data-centre cooling and electricity generation are counted — and scaled to global demand, researchers project AI could withdraw 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic metres of water a year by 2027, roughly half the United Kingdom’s annual freshwater withdrawals.

By Lachlan Brown

Iron and Ice

Titan is the only moon among the 150-plus in the solar system with a thick atmosphere — its air presses on the surface about 1.5 times harder than Earth's at sea level, roughly what you'd feel at the bottom of a swimming pool

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Water World

Zimbabwean capital grapples with water shortage

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

Water World

Zimbabwe city orders 'big flush' amid water rationing

By Terra Daily Editorial Team

About Terra Daily

News about planet Earth.

Terra Daily is an independent publication covering planet Earth, natural hazards, water systems, ecosystems, climate impacts, and the science behind life on a changing planet. The site pairs a deep archive with current reporting on the research, communities, policy shifts, and environmental events shaping Earth's living and physical systems. We employ modern AI technologies to support our editorial workflows; every published piece is editorially directed and reviewed.

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