Dear Reader,
I am writing this from a research camp in northern Tanzania, where the Serengeti stretches to the horizon in every direction. This morning, at dawn, I watched a herd of elephants cross the Mara River — the matriarch leading, the youngest sheltered between the bodies of her aunts, the water rising to their bellies as the current pulled at their legs.
It was a crossing they have made for centuries. And it was, in that moment, the most important thing happening on Earth.
This issue is dedicated to the forces — geological, biological, atmospheric — that remind us our planet is alive. We dive to coral reefs that pulse with colour in water no sunlight has touched. We stand at the rim of volcanoes that reshape continents. We chase the aurora across Arctic skies.
The world does not need us to be amazed by it. But we need it. We need the reminder that we belong to something vast and beautiful and worth protecting.
Stay curious.
The matriarch is called Noor by the researchers who have followed her family for twenty-three years. She is fifty-one years old, weighs roughly four tonnes, and carries in her memory a map of water sources that stretches across two thousand square kilometres of savanna.
This knowledge — passed from mother to daughter across generations — is the family's most vital resource. In the dry season, when the Serengeti turns from green to gold to dust, Noor leads her herd to waterholes that younger elephants have never seen. She remembers droughts from decades past, routes that bypass human settlements, river crossings where the footing is firm.
The Serengeti's elephant population has stabilised in recent years — roughly 6,500 individuals, up from a catastrophic low of 2,300 in 2009. Anti-poaching patrols, community conservation programmes, and international ivory bans have made a difference. But the threats have evolved.
Climate change is redrawing the map Noor carries. Rivers that flowed year-round now run dry by August. Grazing lands shrink as agriculture expands. Corridors that once connected protected areas are narrowing, forcing families into ever-closer contact with human communities.
Kilauea has been erupting, in one form or another, since 1983. That makes it the longest continuous eruption in recorded history — a slow, relentless act of creation that has added over 230 hectares of new land to the island of Hawaii.
Stand at the rim of Halema'uma'u crater at night and you see the Earth breathing. The lava lake rises and falls in cycles, its surface cracking into incandescent orange plates that drift apart like continental shelves in miniature. The heat is extraordinary — 1,170 degrees Celsius at the surface.
The Ring of Fire — a 40,000-kilometre horseshoe of tectonic boundaries circling the Pacific — accounts for 75% of the world's active volcanoes and 90% of its earthquakes. It runs from New Zealand through Indonesia, Japan, Kamchatka, Alaska, and down the western coast of the Americas.
In Iceland, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge surfaces, splitting the island in two. The 2024 eruptions near Grindavik reminded the world that geology operates on its own timetable, indifferent to property lines and evacuation plans.
We spend three months in the Brazilian Amazon documenting the frontline between deforestation and one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth. Plus: the hidden rivers beneath Antarctica, why coral may hold the key to medicine, and a photo portfolio from the Galápagos at 200 years.
April 2026 · Volume 42 · No. 4