The Los Angeles metro area, home to more than 18 million people, could be one major earthquake along the famed San Andreas fault away from losing most of its water supply and causing a $50 billion economic disaster. That's because Los Angeles gets 88 percent of its water from the Colorado River, Owens River Valley and the Sacramento and San Joaquin River Delta, all hundreds of miles away, transported to the area via three aqueducts (Colorado River Aqueduct, Los AngelesAqueduct...

Earlier this year a "pulse" of 105,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water was released from the Morelos Dam on the Arizona/Mexico border in an international effort to study the environmental impact of restoring the flow of the river to its historic reach into the Sea of Cortez. Due to water demand and allocation, the Colorado River -- considered the most endangered waterway in the U.S. -- hadn't reached the Sea of Cortez in 15 years, leaving the once lush delta...

Living Christmas founder Scott Martin shakes hands with Mark Cuban on an episode of the television show "Shark Tank." Cuban agreed to back Martin's company, which rents out live Christmas trees in California. (Kelsey McNeal ABC/via Getty Images) Christmas is a week away. That still leaves time to get a tree if you don’t yet have one. Usually around this time of a year, a ferocious debate takes place about whether real or fake trees do more harm to the...

CO2 concentration around the world in early November. (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) It’s been a busy five months for NASA’s newest carbon dioxide-monitoring satellite, snapping up to 1 million measurements a day of how carbon dioxide moves across the planet. Now NASA scientists have shared the first global maps created using that data, showing one of the most detailed views of CO2 ever created. The satellite — known as OCO-2 — has been in orbit since July. While it’s returned...

So there’s good news, and there’s bad news on the California drought. The good news is that recent rain has finally started to chip away at the severe precipitation deficits the state is facing. The bad news is that most of California is still in adeep droughtand it’s going to take a long time to fully recover. Or, to quote the summary from Thursday’sU.S. Drought Monitor update: “Cautious optimism, but still a long way to go.” The drought has been...

Tourists from all over the world flock toYellowstone's geothermal pools, like Morning Glory (seen above), to witness their brilliant hues. But according to a new study, those same visitors completely changed the pools' appearance. The study, by researchers from Montana State University, used a mathematical model to analyze measurements taken at geothermal pools across Yellowstone to reconstruct what the pools might have looked like before humans first set foot in the area. What they found at Morning Glory was stunning:...

Finland is receiving the brunt of global warming, as temperatures across the Nordic country climb faster than anywhere else in the world. A study conducted by the University of Eastern Finland and the Finnish Meteorological Institute found over the past 40 years, the average temperature has risen more than 0.2 degrees per decade, according to the University of Eastern Finland. Over the past 166 years, the mean temperature has risen over 35 degrees Fahrenheit, Finnish news outlet YLE reported. This...

What’s better than a year-end list? A year-end list ... from space. As of July this year, there were 1,235 satellites in operation by countries around the world tracking everything from carbon dioxide to the weather. Throw in the International Space Station and you’ve got one heck of an Earth-observing system circling this fair planet. (PHOTOS: weather.com's Year in Pictures) The images and data from that system provides a perspective on the natural processes that shape the world and reveals...

The globe is on track for itswarmest year on record. But global average temperature watchers won't be the only ones feting record heat when the clock strikes midnight on Wednesday. Anumber of U.S. urban areas will also join in the record-setting festivities, while not a single major urban area will be raising a glass to record cold. In fact, it's been nearly 30 years since a major U.S. city had a record cold year. Climate Central conducted analysis of the...

Editor’s Note:This is one in a series of stories in which we look back at key issues and events of 2014 and why they will continue to make headlines in 2015. Probing a blue abyss can be an abysmal recipe for the blues. For every 10 joules of energy that our greenhouse gas pollution traps here on Earth, about nine of them end up in an ocean. There, the effects of global warming bite into fisheries, ecosystems and ice. But...

Editor’s Note:This is one in a series of stories in which we look back at key issues and events of 2014 and why they will continue to make headlines in 2015. Road tripping used to feel like it broke the bank, with gasoline prices in many places hovering above $3.50 per gallon or higher. Today, filling up for more than $2 per gallon in some places feels jarring. Crude oil prices tumbled into an unexpected free fall in 2014, pushing...

Jeffrey Linn’s maps look like normal maps, until you deep dive into their detail. Vancouver’s Stanley Park is underwater, as is the Seattle Space Needle and much of the San Diego coastline. Linn’s representations of seven cities in the United States and Canada portray how they would look if all the world’s ice caps melted and sea levels rose more than 200 feet. “The sea level rise that the [U.S. Geological Survey] has predicted [in the most extreme scenario possible]...

A wind turbine that collapsed at Screggagh wind farm in Northern Ireland on Friday, Jan. 2, 2015. The seven others of the wind farm will remain off until an investigation provides a cause for the fall. (Niall Carson/Press Association via AP Images) What makes a massive wind turbine crumple like a flimsy piece of tin? That’s precisely what an investigation by one supplier will aim to determine, after a 260-foot-tall turbine in Northern Ireland collapsed without explanation Friday, Jan. 2,...