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Moon rocks reveal hidden lunar history

16 February 2025 at 12:03

In the summer of 2024, a robotic mission landed for the first time on the far side of the Moon. The Chinese Chang’e-6 lander planted a flag, dug up more than four pounds of rock and soil, and brought it back home—an accomplishment widely lauded as a technological tour de force.

That mission, and the 2020 Chang’e-5 robotic mission before it, are the first to return lunar rocks to Earth since the 1970s. Together they are building on what scientists learned from Apollo-era missions, helping to unravel mysteries about how the Moon was formed and why it looks the way it does today, and providing clues about our solar system’s history.

But big puzzles remain, such as why the far side of the Moon—the half that always faces away from Earth—is so radically different from the near side. And what is behind the surprising finding that lunar volcanoes may have been active much more recently than previously thought? “The more we look at the Moon, the more we’ve discovered—and the more we realize how little we know,” says Clive R. Neal, a geologist at the University of Notre Dame who specializes in lunar exploration.

China’s 2024 Chang’e-6 robotic lander mission brought more than four pounds of rocks from the far side of the Moon back to Earth. Credit: CNSA / CAS

With NASA planning to send astronauts back to the Moon’s surface in 2027 for the first time since 1972, geologists are excited about what rocks they might find there and the scientific secrets those samples could reveal—along with what resources could be mined for a future Moon base, or for renewable energy back home on Earth.

Origin story

The samples brought home from the Moon in the 1970s by the Apollo missions and the Soviet Union’s Luna missions cleared up quite a lot about the Moon’s history. Because the lunar samples shared strong similarities with Earth rocks, this added weight to the idea that the Moon was formed when a Mars-sized object called Theia collided with the proto-Earth roughly 4.5 billion years ago.

Debris from the impact was thrown into orbit around Earth and eventually coalesced into the Moon. In its early days, the Moon was entirely molten. As the magma ocean cooled over hundreds of millions of years, the Moon formed a crust and a mantle below. Giant pools of lava filled impact craters and settled into the lunar lowlands, or maria (Latin for “seas”), while highlands and volcanic domes loomed above them. Eventually, the volcanism died out.

Without plate tectonics or weather, the only things left to alter the Moon’s cold, dead surface were meteorites. A lot of the Apollo-era samples were found to have formed from the heat and pressure of impacts around 3.9 billion years ago, suggesting that they were the result of a short period of intense pummeling by space rocks called the Late Heavy Bombardment.

But research since the 1970s has refined or changed this picture. Higher-resolution orbital images have revealed plenty of large impact craters that seem far older than 3.9 billion years, for example. And meteorites found on Earth, thought to have been ejected from various areas of the Moon during big impacts, have been found to span a huge range of ages.

All this work together suggests that the asteroid bombardment didn’t happen in one dramatic spike but rather over an extended period lasting from perhaps 4.2 billion to 3.4 billion years ago. In this scenario, the Apollo samples dated to 3.9 billion years likely all came from just one huge impact that spewed rock over a very wide area that happened to include the Apollo-era landing sites.

The Moon: Dead or alive

Greater mysteries surround volcanism on the Moon. “The canonical thing I learned in school was that the Moon had been geologically dead for billions of years,” says Samuel Lawrence, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The long-held theory was that a small body like the Moon should have lost its heat to space relatively quickly—and a frigid, extinguished Moon shouldn’t have widespread volcanic activity. Apollo-era samples suggested that most of this volcanism stopped 3 billion years ago or earlier, supporting the theory. But research over the past two decades has overturned that view.

This geologic map of the Moon released in 2022 by China is the most detailed global map yet published and includes information gleaned from the 2020 Chang’e-5 mission. Credit: J. JI ET AL / THE 1:2,500,000-SCALE GEOLOGIC MAP OF THE GLOBAL MOON 2022.

In 2014, Lawrence and colleagues posited that some patches of irregular terrain in the middle of the dark plains, or mare, spotted by the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter were the result of volcanism that kept going until less than 100 million years ago. “That is totally, totally surprising,” says cosmochemist Qing-Zhu Yin of the University of California, Davis.

The latest sample-return missions added more concrete evidence for recent volcanism. In 2020, the Chang’e-5 robotic mission landed in Oceanus Procellarum (the Ocean of Storms) — a spot picked in part because it looked geologically young given how few craters had accumulated there. Sure enough, the volcanic rocks brought home by that mission were found to be 2 billion years old, the youngest ever retrieved from the Moon. “That was big news,” says planetary geoscientist Jim Head of Brown University, who worked on NASA’s Apollo missions.

On top of this, when researchers trawled through thousands of glass beads found in the Chang’e-5 soil samples, most of which are thought to have been created by impacts, they identified three that were volcanic—and only 120 million years old. This finding was published just last year and still needs to be verified, but if such recent dates hold up, they suggest that the Moon might still be capable of producing deep magma even today, Yin says.

All this indicates that the Moon might not have cooled as fast as everyone thought it did. It’s also possible that some of the younger volcanism could have been powered by radioactive elements underground, which can generate enough heat to form magma and are known to be prevalent in certain patches of the Moon. This could explain the 120-million-year-old volcanic glass beads, for example. But not all the early volcanism can be explained this way: The Chang’e-5 volcanic rocks, along with some 2.8-billion-year-old volcanic rock brought back from the far side by Chang’e-6, came from source rocks not enriched with these elements.

“It throws up more questions than it answers,” Neal says. “It’s job security for people like me — we now have new questions to address.”

Lunar exploration ahead

Untangling these mysteries is challenging with so much of the Moon unexplored: While about 850 pounds of Moon rock and soil have now been brought back to Earth, it has all been from just a handful of sites.

Chang’e-6 expanded this picture by bringing back the first samples from the Moon’s far side, taken from the South Pole-Aitken Basin, the satellite’s largest, deepest and oldest impact crater. Researchers are keen to use these samples to start determining why the far side is so dramatically different from the near side. The questions that remain unanswered are why the far side has a thicker crust and is nearly devoid of mare from ancient lava oceans when compared with the near side.

NASA’s Artemis III mission, planned for 2027 (though that could change), aims to break more new ground by landing astronauts near the Moon’s south pole—in a spot that is more representative of the Moon’s typical geology than the Apollo sites—and bring home a bonanza of 150 to 180 pounds of samples.

This site should provide fresh geological insights, along with more information about lunar water. In 2018, scientists analyzing orbital mapping data confirmed that there is water ice at the poles—but in what form no one yet knows. “Is it frost on the surface? Is it discrete patches underneath the surface? Is it absorbed onto mineral grains? Is it baked into the regolith like cement?” says NASA’s Juliane Gross, who is helping to develop the plans for lunar sample collection and curation for the Artemis science team. “We don’t know.”

What the Artemis astronauts find could inform ongoing projects spearheaded by China and the United States to establish permanent bases on the Moon, which could benefit from the south pole’s water. “That’s stuff you can breathe, that’s stuff you can drink, it’s rocket fuel,” Lawrence says.

Lunar quarry

In addition to water ice, other potentially mineable resources on the Moon have garnered attention, particularly helium-3. This stable isotope of helium is far more plentiful on the Moon than on Earth and could be an ideal fuel for nuclear fusion (if physicists can get that process to work). Commercial enterprises seeking to mine the Moon have popped up, including Seattle-based Interlune, which plans to bring helium-3 back to Earth in the 2030s, followed by other resources such as rare earth elements needed for technologies like batteries. But when lunar mining will be a reality—considering the logistics, the economics and the legal concerns—is an open question, Lawrence says.

While some people find the idea of mining the pristine Moon distasteful, there could be side benefits for mining on Earth, Neal says. With polar temperatures around -230° C (-380° F), lunar mining would have to be done without fluids. Developing the technologies needed for fluid-free mining could mitigate environmental concerns about wastewater and tailing fluids from mining on Earth. “Just think how you could revolutionize mining on this planet,” he says.

But first, researchers need to simply find out more about the Moon, its history, its geology and the possibility of extracting resources—and that requires up-close exploration, which is sure to bring more surprises. “Once you’re on the ground, you’re like, oh … what’s this?” Gross says. She’s hoping the astronauts can bring home a large haul. “The more they return, the more we can do.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter.

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Return of the California Condor

The spring morning is cool and bright in the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir National Park in Baja California, Mexico, as a bird takes to the skies. Its 9.8-foot wingspan casts a looming silhouette against the sunlight; the sound of its flight is like that of a light aircraft cutting through the wind. In this forest thick with trees up to 600 years old lives the southernmost population of the California condor (Gymnogyps californianus), the only one outside the United States. Dozens of the scavenging birds have been reintroduced here, to live and breed once again in the wild.

Their return has been captained for more than 20 years by biologist Juan Vargas Velasco and his partner María Catalina Porras Peña, a couple who long ago moved away from the comforts of the city to endure extreme winters living in a tent or small trailer, to manage the lives of the 48 condors known to fly over Mexican territory. Together—she as coordinator of the California Condor Conservation Program, and he as field manager—they are the guardians of a project whose origins go back to condor recovery efforts that began in the 1980s in the United States, when populations were decimated, mainly from eating the meat of animals shot by hunters’ lead bullets.

In Mexico, the species disappeared even earlier, in the late 1930s. Its historic return—the first captive-bred condors were released into Mexican territory in 2002—is the result of close binational collaboration among zoos and other institutions in the United States and Mexico.

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Solving renewable energy’s sticky storage problem

When the Sun is blazing and the wind is blowing, Germany’s solar and wind power plants swing into high gear. For nine days in July 2023, renewables produced more than 70 percent of the electricity generated in the country; there are times when wind turbines even need to be turned off to avoid overloading the grid.

But on other days, clouds mute solar energy down to a flicker and wind turbines languish. For nearly a week in January 2023, renewable energy generation fell to less than 30 percent of the nation’s total, and gas-, oil- and coal-powered plants revved up to pick up the slack.

Germans call these periods Dunkelflauten, meaning “dark doldrums,” and they can last for a week or longer. They’re a major concern for doldrum-afflicted places like Germany and parts of the United States as nations increasingly push renewable-energy development. Solar and wind combined contribute 40 percent of overall energy generation in Germany and 15 percent in the US and, as of December 2024, both countries have goals of becoming 100 percent clean-energy-powered by 2035.

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Can desalination quench agriculture’s thirst?

Ralph Loya was pretty sure he was going to lose the corn. His farm had been scorched by El Paso’s hottest-ever June and second-hottest August; the West Texas county saw 53 days soar over 100° Fahrenheit in the summer of 2024. The region was also experiencing an ongoing drought, which meant that crops on Loya’s eight-plus acres of melons, okra, cucumbers, and other produce had to be watered more often than normal.

Loya had been irrigating his corn with somewhat salty, or brackish, water pumped from his well, as much as the salt-sensitive crop could tolerate. It wasn’t enough, and the municipal water was expensive; he was using it in moderation, and the corn ears were desiccating where they stood.

Ensuring the survival of agriculture under an increasingly erratic climate is approaching a crisis in the sere and sweltering Western and Southwestern United States, an area that supplies much of our beef and dairy, alfalfa, tree nuts, and produce. Contending with too little water to support their plants and animals, farmers have tilled under crops, pulled out trees, fallowed fields, and sold off herds. They’ve also used drip irrigation to inject smaller doses of water closer to a plant’s roots and installed sensors in soil that tell more precisely when and how much to water.

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Cracking the recipe for perfect plant-based eggs

An egg is an amazing thing, culinarily speaking: delicious, nutritious, and versatile. Americans eat nearly 100 billion of them every year, almost 300 per person. But eggs, while greener than other animal food sources, have a bigger environmental footprint than almost any plant food—and industrial egg production raises significant animal welfare issues.

So food scientists, and a few companies, are trying hard to come up with ever-better plant-based egg substitutes. “We’re trying to reverse-engineer an egg,” says David Julian McClements, a food scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

That’s not easy, because real eggs play so many roles in the kitchen. You can use beaten eggs to bind breadcrumbs in a coating, or to hold together meatballs; you can use them to emulsify oil and water into mayonnaise, scramble them into an omelet or whip them to loft a meringue or angel food cake. An all-purpose egg substitute must do all those things acceptably well, while also yielding the familiar texture and—perhaps—flavor of real eggs.

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The amorous adventures of earwigs

Few people are fond of earwigs, with their menacing abdominal pincers—whether they’re skittering across your floor, getting comfy in the folds of your camping tent, or minding their own business.

Scientists, too, have given them short shrift compared with the seemingly endless attention they have lavished on social insects like ants and bees.

Yet, there are a handful of exceptions. Some researchers have made conscious career decisions to dig into the hidden, underground world where earwigs reside, and have found the creatures to be surprisingly interesting and social, if still not exactly endearing.

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When ribosomes go rogue

In the 1940s, scientists at the recently established National Cancer Institute were trying to breed mice that could inform our understanding of cancer, either because they predictably developed certain cancers or were surprisingly resistant.

The team spotted a peculiar litter in which some baby mice had short, kinked tails and misplaced ribs growing out of their neck bones. The strain of mice, nicknamed “tail short,” has been faithfully bred ever since, in the hope that one day, research might reveal what was the matter with them.

After more than 60 years, researchers finally got their answer, when Maria Barna, a developmental biologist then at the University of California San Francisco, found that the mice had a genetic mutation that caused a protein to disappear from their ribosomes—the places in cells where proteins are made.

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Studies of migraine’s many triggers offer paths to new therapies

For Cherise Irons, chocolate, red wine, and aged cheeses are dangerous. So are certain sounds, perfumes and other strong scents, cold weather, and thunderstorms. Stress and lack of sleep, too.

She suspects all of these things can trigger her migraine attacks, which manifest in a variety of ways: pounding pain in the back of her head, exquisite sensitivity to the slightest sound, even blackouts and partial paralysis.

Irons, 48, of Coral Springs, Florida, once worked as a school assistant principal. Now, she’s on disability due to her migraine. Irons has tried so many migraine medications she’s lost count—but none has helped for long. Even a few of the much-touted new drugs that have quelled episodes for many people with migraine have failed for Irons.

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Sustainable building effort reaches new heights with wooden skyscrapers

At the University of Toronto, just across the street from the football stadium, workers are putting up a 14-story building with space for classrooms and faculty offices. What’s unusual is how they’re building it — by bolting together giant beams, columns, and panels made of manufactured slabs of wood.

As each wood element is delivered by flatbed, a tall crane lifts it into place and holds it in position while workers attach it with metal connectors. In its half-finished state, the building resembles flat-pack furniture in the process of being assembled.

The tower uses a new technology called mass timber. In this kind of construction, massive, manufactured wood elements that can extend more than half the length of a football field replace steel beams and concrete. Though still relatively uncommon, it is growing in popularity and beginning to pop up in skylines around the world.

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Why a diabetes drug fell short of anticancer hopes

Pamela Goodwin has received hundreds of emails from patients asking if they should take a cheap, readily available drug, metformin, to treat their cancer.

It’s a fair question: Metformin, commonly used to treat diabetes, has been investigated for treating a range of cancer types in thousands of studies on laboratory cells, animals, and people. But Goodwin, an epidemiologist and medical oncologist treating breast cancer at the University of Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital, advises against it. No gold-standard trials have proved that metformin helps treat breast cancer—and her recent research suggests it doesn’t.

Metformin’s development was inspired by centuries of use of French lilac, or goat’s rue (Galega officinalis), for diabetes-like symptoms. In 1918, researchers discovered that a compound from the herb lowers blood sugar. Metformin, a chemical relative of that compound, has been a top type 2 diabetes treatment in the United States since it was approved in 1994. It’s cheap—less than a dollar per dose—and readily available, with few side effects. Today, more than 150 million people worldwide take the stuff.

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Your cells are dying. All the time.

Billions of cells die in your body every day. Some go out with a bang, others with a whimper.

They can die by accident if they’re injured or infected. Alternatively, should they outlive their natural lifespan or start to fail, they can carefully arrange for a desirable demise, with their remains neatly tidied away.

Originally, scientists thought those were the only two ways an animal cell could die, by accident or by that neat-and-tidy version. But over the past couple of decades, researchers have racked up many more novel cellular death scenarios, some specific to certain cell types or situations. Understanding this panoply of death modes could help scientists save good cells and kill bad ones, leading to treatments for infections, autoimmune diseases, and cancer.

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Your cells are dying. All the time.

Billions of cells die in your body every day. Some go out with a bang, others with a whimper.

They can die by accident if they’re injured or infected. Alternatively, should they outlive their natural lifespan or start to fail, they can carefully arrange for a desirable demise, with their remains neatly tidied away.

Originally, scientists thought those were the only two ways an animal cell could die, by accident or by that neat-and-tidy version. But over the past couple of decades, researchers have racked up many more novel cellular death scenarios, some specific to certain cell types or situations. Understanding this panoply of death modes could help scientists save good cells and kill bad ones, leading to treatments for infections, autoimmune diseases, and cancer.

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Hummingbirds thrive on an extreme lifestyle. Here’s how.

26 September 2024 at 13:29
Golden-Tailed Sapphire Hummingbird about to extract nectar from a yellow and red flower

Enlarge / Hummingbirds—like this golden-tailed sapphire from South America—draw the eye with their bright colors and busy, hovering flight. Biologists are drawn to understand the suite of adaptations they have evolved to survive extreme lifestyles. (credit: webguzs via Getty)

Everyone loves to watch hummingbirds—tiny, brightly colored blurs that dart about, hovering at flowers and pugnaciously defending their ownership of a feeder.

But to the scientists who study them, hummingbirds offer much more than an entertaining spectacle. Their small size and blazing metabolism mean they live life on a knife-edge, sometimes needing to shut down their bodies almost completely just to conserve enough energy to survive the night—or to migrate thousands of miles, at times across open ocean.

Their nectar-rich diet leads to blood-sugar levels that would put a person in a coma. And their zipping, zooming flight sometimes generates g-forces high enough to make a fighter pilot black out. The more researchers look, the more surprises lurk within those tiny bodies, the smallest in the avian world.

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Air pollution makes it harder for bees to smell flowers

29 July 2024 at 18:34
Scientists are uncovering various ways that air pollution can interfere with the ability of insects to pollinate plants.

Scientists are uncovering various ways that air pollution can interfere with the ability of insects to pollinate plants. (credit: Utah.gov)

In the summers of 2018 and 2019, ecologist James Ryalls and his colleagues would go out to a field near Reading in southern England to stare at the insects buzzing around black mustard plants. Each time a bee, hoverfly, moth, butterfly, or other insect tried to get at the pollen or nectar in the small yellow flowers, they’d make a note.

It was part of an unusual experiment. Some patches of mustard plants were surrounded by pipes that released ozone and nitrogen oxides—polluting gases produced around power plants and conventional cars. Other plots had pipes releasing normal air.

The results startled the scientists. Plants smothered by pollutants were visited by up to 70 percent fewer insects overall, and their flowers received 90 percent fewer visits compared with those in unpolluted plots. The concentrations of pollutants were well below what US regulators consider safe. “We didn’t expect it to be quite as dramatic as that,” says study coauthor Robbie Girling, an entomologist at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia and a visiting professor at the University of Reading.

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Are you a workaholic? Here’s how to spot the signs

28 July 2024 at 11:02
Man works late in dimly lit cubicle amid a dark office space

Enlarge (credit: Bill Varie/Getty Images)

An accountant who fills out spreadsheets at the beach, a dog groomer who always has time for one more client, a basketball player who shoots free throws to the point of exhaustion.

Every profession has its share of hard chargers and overachievers. But for some workers—perhaps more than ever in our always-on, always-connected world—the drive to send one more email, clip one more poodle, sink one more shot becomes all-consuming.

Workaholism is a common feature of the modern workplace. A recent review gauging its pervasiveness across occupational fields and cultures found that roughly 15 percent of workers qualify as workaholics. That adds up to millions of overextended employees around the world who don’t know when—or how, or why—to quit.

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It’s not just us: Other animals change their social habits in old age

27 July 2024 at 11:08
A Rhesus macaque on a Buddhist stupa in the Swayambhunath temple complex in Kathmandu, Nepal

Enlarge / As female macaques age, the size of their social network shrinks. (credit: Jon G. Fuller/VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Walnut was born on June 3, 1995, at the start of what would become an unusually hot summer, on an island called Rum (pronounced room), the largest of the Small Isles off the west coast of Scotland. We know this because since 1974, researchers have diligently recorded the births of red deer like her, and caught, weighed and marked every calf they could get their hands on—about 9 out of every 10.

Near the cottage in Kilmory on the northern side of the island where the researchers are based, there has been no hunting since the project began, which allowed the deer to relax and get used to human observers. Walnut was a regular there, grazing the invariably short-clipped grass in this popular spot. “She would always just be there in the group, with her sisters and their families,” says biologist Alison Morris, who has lived on Rum for more than 23 years and studies the deer year-round.

Walnut raised 14 offspring, the last one in 2013, when she was 18 years old. In her later years, Morris recalls, Walnut would spend most of her time away from the herd, usually with Vanity, another female (called a hind) of the same age who had never calved. “They were often seen affectionately grooming each other, and after Walnut died of old age in October 2016, at the age of 21—quite extraordinary for a hind—Vanity spent most of her time alone. She died two years later, at the grand age of 23.”

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Animals use physics? Let us count the ways

14 July 2024 at 11:13
kitten latches on to a pole with its two front paws

Enlarge (credit: Fernando Trabanco Fotografía via Getty Images)

Isaac Newton would never have discovered the laws of motion had he studied only cats.

Suppose you hold a cat, stomach up, and drop it from a second-story window. If a cat is simply a mechanical system that obeys Newton’s rules of matter in motion, it should land on its back. (OK, there are some technicalities—like this should be done in a vacuum, but ignore that for now.) Instead, most cats usually avoid injury by twisting themselves on the way down to land on their feet.

Most people are not mystified by this trick—everybody has seen videos attesting to cats’ acrobatic prowess. But for more than a century, scientists have wondered about the physics of how cats do it. Clearly, the mathematical theorem analyzing the falling cat as a mechanical system fails for live cats, as Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek points out in a recent paper.

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To help with climate change, carbon capture will have to evolve

11 July 2024 at 11:11
Image of a facility filled with green-colored tubes.

Enlarge / Bioreactors that host algae would be one option for carbon sequestration—as long as the carbon is stored somehow. (credit: Getty Images)

More than 200 kilometers off Norway’s coast in the North Sea sits the world’s first offshore carbon capture and storage project. Built in 1996, the Sleipner project strips carbon dioxide from natural gas—largely made up of methane—to make it marketable. But instead of releasing the CO2 into the atmosphere, the greenhouse gas is buried.

The effort stores around 1 million metric tons of CO2 per year—and is praised by many as a pioneering success in global attempts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Last year, total global CO2 emissions hit an all-time high of around 35.8 billion tons, or gigatons. At these levels, scientists estimate, we have roughly six years left before we emit so much CO2 that global warming will consistently exceed 1.5° Celsius above average preindustrial temperatures, an internationally agreed-upon limit. (Notably, the global average temperature for the past 12 months has exceeded this threshold.)

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The greening of planes, trains, and automobiles

The greening of planes, trains, and automobiles

Enlarge (credit: Petmal / Getty Images)

As the world races to decarbonize everything from the electricity grid to industry, it faces particular problems with transportation—which alone is responsible for about a quarter of our planet’s energy-related greenhouse gas emissions. The fuels for transport need to be not just green, cheap, and powerful, but also lightweight and safe enough to be carried around.

Fossil fuels—mainly gasoline and diesel—have been extraordinarily effective at powering a diverse range of mobile machines. Since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has perfected the art of dredging these up, refining them, distributing them and combusting them in engines, creating a vast and hard-to-budge industry. Now we have to step away from fossil fuels, and the world is finding no one-size-fits-all replacement.

Each type of transportation has its own peculiarities—which is one reason we have different formulations of hydrocarbons today, from gasoline to diesel, bunker fuel to jet fuel. Cars need a convenient, lightweight power source; container ships need enough oomph to last months; planes absolutely need to be reliable and to work at subzero temperatures. As the fossil fuels are phased out, the transport fuel landscape is “getting more diverse,” says Timothy Lipman, co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

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