It had a few teachers who were open to trying something different, pupils who had mostly been let down by traditional schools, and a legal status—charter school—that had practically just been created to permit it to exist. It was the country’s first charter school. The Twin Cities were the location. Additionally, it was structured on the notion that students learn best when their work has a real-world application.

In the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro area, this concept has been developed for more than thirty years, leading to the construction of a number of schools in various formats. The K–8 charter New City School in Minneapolis follows the nationally acclaimed EL Education model, which centers its curriculum around what it refers to as “Learning Expeditions.” These are lengthy, multidisciplinary studies that can span weeks or months, integrating topics that would be taught independently in a traditional classroom into a single, ongoing examination.

Science, writing, arithmetic, and community engagement might all be done concurrently in a class researching a nearby watershed. The students would produce reports, maps, presentations, and physical projects that are meant for a real audience rather than a teacher’s gradebook. The daily “Crew” circles, which start every morning, are organized community-building activities intended to foster the kind of trust necessary for cooperative initiatives to succeed. They are not homeroom.

The model is further advanced at St. Paul’s Avalon School. There, students develop and oversee their own extensive projects, collaborating with advisers who provide guidance rather than instruction, rather than adhering to a traditional teacher-designed curriculum. A student who is interested in urban farming might devote a large amount of the academic year to creating a community garden, combining economics, biology, and civic participation into a single project that takes place in the real world as opposed to on paper.

Some students find it difficult to adapt to the lack of external scheduling, and the structure necessitates a type of self-directed discipline that takes time to establish. However, the engagement tends to be qualitatively different from what is produced in traditional classrooms for the kids who succeed in it. These schools deal with genuine and ongoing conflict. No matter how innovatively a school plans its year, it must still adhere to the accountability frameworks based on standardized testing since Minnesota charter schools must achieve state academic standards.

Extended, high-quality project work yields results that tests can measure, according to some instructors who use project-based learning methods, but the measurement is a poor proxy for what the kids actually learned. Others are more circumspect about expressing that assertion too widely, recognizing that project-based learning necessitates qualified instructors, carefully thought-out curricula, and a persistent institutional commitment that not all schools can sustain over time. PBLWorks has been carefully constructing the body of evidence rather than asserting certainty, and the study on results is promising but still in its early stages.

Observing what the Twin Cities have developed over the last thirty years in this area, it seems as though the area has unintentionally become a laboratory for alternatives to the traditional American school model. This is not due to any coordinated policy, but rather because the charter framework allowed educators to try new things, and a critical mass of people in Minneapolis and St. Paul have been trying things long enough for the models to mature.

The following thirty years will provide a clearer response to the question of whether such models scale, if they endure budgetary constraints, leadership changes, and the accountability requirements that every public school must meet.

The post The Minneapolis Charter School That Builds Its Entire Academic Year Around One Large-Scale Creative Community Project appeared first on Creative Learning Guild.

Researchers may now observe what truly occurs in the prefrontal cortex during creative, unplanned work because to advancements in brain imaging technology that are both affordable and high-quality. The results of these studies differ with the assumptions made by decades of standardized testing.

During imaginative play, the prefrontal cortex, which controls the executive functions that most people would identify as fundamental academic and life skills—planning, impulse control, working memory, and the capacity to multitask—is very active. More dynamic than the rote memory tasks that have long dominated classroom design, according to the majority of documented cases. While playing, the brain is not at rest. It is performing a particular, challenging work, and it is improving through repetition in a way that applies to other activities.

It is difficult to ignore the additional depth that the neurochemical picture brings. Cortisol, the stress hormone that, at high levels, functions as a real cognitive barrier, restricting attention and preventing the kind of open-ended thinking necessary for creative problem-solving, is demonstrably reduced by playful learning.

Play also causes the release of dopamine, which serves as a natural motivational signal, priming the brain to seek out more of whatever recently caused the reward and, importantly, increasing the likelihood that the knowledge learned during that state will be retained. Anyone who believes that high-stakes testing should be the main method of accountability finds the implications for how anxiety-inducing classroom conditions impact learning unsettling.

The most unexpected discovery to come out of recent studies may concern pairs of brains rather than individual brains. Data from dyadic EEG, a method that simultaneously monitors two people’s cerebral activity, suggests that teachers’ and students’ brains synchronize in quantifiable ways during guided play. When peers play together, they follow the same pattern. Information transfer becomes more effective and empathy increases noticeably when that synchronization takes place.

The practical implication is that the social environment of learning is important at a biological level, not simply a cultural one, and that the brain states most conducive to learning may be physically undermined in schools intended for quiet individual work.

Researchers in this field have started incorporating their findings into discussions about school architecture, which is an indication that the work has progressed beyond scholarly curiosity to something that could potentially alter physical structures. Instead than relying solely on pedagogical preference, brain data is increasingly being used to support the case for enhanced, adaptable sensory settings over fixed-desk rows.

It is another matter completely whether that argument is heard by curriculum committees, school boards, and the people who decide how much money is spent for standardized testing. Perhaps not surprisingly, the body of research is growing more quickly than the institutional reaction. It’s difficult to ignore the tendency for a finding that contradicts the measures used to evaluate schools to move slowly through the structures those metrics control.

The post Why the Most Interesting New Education Research Is Happening at the Intersection of Neuroscience and Creative Play appeared first on Creative Learning Guild.

For years, the Media Lab has operated under a philosophy that, depending on who you ask, most traditional schools would find either deeply uncomfortable or inspiring. The concept challenges the idea that learning occurs in silence, sequentially, and according to someone else’s schedule. It is based on what researchers here refer to as the four P’s: Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play. Throughout 2023, the Lab’s Creative Learning program was more than just an internal test. Every institution that still maintains that a standardized test measures anything worth measuring was quietly challenged.

What’s intriguing—and possibly a little unexpected—is how concrete the outcomes of this philosophy have become. This same energy is transformed into something much more portable through the Day of Design initiative, which was started in September 2025 by the WPS Institute and MIT’s Morningside Academy for Design. The materials are free, open-source, and classroom-ready, so a teacher in suburban Karachi or rural Ohio can use them without a PhD in design theory. One developer compared the purposefully scaffolded activities to “grammar lessons” for design thinking. That phrase reveals a lot. It implies a foundation without a ceiling, a structure without rigidity.

The initiative’s co-leader, Rosa Weinberg, has emphasized that design at MIT isn’t limited to the obvious departments. Experiments are designed by biologists. Chemists create procedures. The claim is that schools have been teaching around rather than through design thinking, which is a transferable cognitive skill. It’s difficult to ignore how that framing differs from how most K–12 systems discuss creativity: as an elective, an enrichment activity, or something you do after the real work is finished.

Then there’s CoCo, a real-time co-creative platform created by two MIT PhD candidates who began focusing on a seemingly insignificant detail: a twelve-year-old at a mindfulness retreat reported that he spent hours every evening playing shooter games because there was nothing else to do. That seemingly insignificant detail became the emotional focal point of a whole line of inquiry. The platform they created was intended to provide young people with a digital space for real collaboration rather than just consumption. It’s still unclear if it will scale as its creators had hoped, but the idea behind it seems reasonable.

Walking away from all of this, it seems as though MIT is questioning whether the classroom as a concept was ever created with the learner in mind, rather than merely redesigning it. On paper, the four Ps seem almost too straightforward. initiatives. ardor. peers. Engage in play. However, simplicity is typically more difficult to implement in education than complexity. It takes a type of instruction that most schools don’t prepare for to get a class of eighth graders genuinely excited about working together to build something, with no right or wrong answer at the end.

It remains to be seen if the larger educational system is prepared to emulate MIT. This will be welcomed by some teachers. Some will refer to it as unfeasible. Most likely, both responses are reasonable.

The post Inside MIT Media Lab’s Newest Project – Reimagining What a Creative Classroom Even Looks Like appeared first on Creative Learning Guild.

When Lisa Mott, the assistant superintendent of Waxahachie ISD, appeared before the board of trustees to discuss proposed changes to the district’s District of Innovation Plan, that was, by most accounts, the mood. It wasn’t very loud. Seldom is it. However, it seems that the issues being discussed in this Ellis County district have far-reaching effects outside of the boundaries of Waxahachie.

The District of Innovation framework was never intended to be a loophole. It was created during the 84th session of the Texas Legislature under H.B. 1842. It was intended to serve as a pressure valve, a formal mechanism that permitted school districts to choose not to comply with certain Texas Education Code provisions when those provisions actually interfered with their ability to serve students. It made sense.

The unique rhythms of any one location cannot always be accommodated by state law, which is designed to apply uniformly across hundreds of districts that span farming communities, suburban sprawl, and dense urban centers. Waxahachie’s DOI Plan was first adopted in 2022, revised in June 2025, and is currently undergoing additional revisions. This pattern suggests either extraordinary institutional ambition or an understanding that the initial framework required more work than expected. Maybe both.

It’s not just the policy mechanics that make Waxahachie’s current revision push intriguing. The timing is the issue. Districts are forced to either stay up to date or lag behind due to the rapid pace of Texas education legislation. New interpretations, carve-outs, and prohibitions are introduced during new legislative sessions.

To its credit, the TEA has been open about its own limitations in this regard; it does not authorize innovation plans, does not direct district hiring decisions made under DOI authority, and specifically advises districts to obtain legal counsel prior to claiming any exemption. That final point merits more consideration than it usually receives. In essence, districts are being told by the state, “We gave you this tool, but we are not responsible for how you use it.” Speak with an attorney.

This puts smaller districts in a subtly vulnerable position, which is difficult to ignore. With employees like Mott presenting logical, well-organized changes to a working board, Waxahachie has the administrative capability to handle that complexity. However, not all districts do.

Although the DOI framework is egalitarian in theory, districts with better infrastructure are rewarded in practice. Although it’s not specific to Texas or education policy, it’s worth considering for a little while.

The two main goals of the proposed changes in Waxahachie seem to be updating exemptions to reflect changes in the law and providing clarification on procedures that the district may have been using informally for a while. It gets interesting in the second part. Formalizing something that is effective differs from formalizing something that has always been a little unclear from a legal standpoint.

The TEA’s reserved right to investigate, intervene, and enforce—even within DOI-designated districts—is not a theoretical concern, and it is still unclear which category some of these clarifications fall into. It is a real institutional mechanism that has been put to use.

A natural checkpoint is created by the framework’s five-year designation limit. Like all innovation districts, Waxahachie will eventually need to reapply, re-justify, and possibly reorganize. That clock is important. When the next designation cycle comes around, reforms that were implemented in a favorable legislative environment may look very different.

Some education observers believe that districts are developing institutional habits related to staffing, scheduling, and instructional delivery that may be challenging to break if the DOI designation expires or if state law closes the exemption gaps they have been using.

All of this does not justify Waxahachie’s actions. If anything, a district is doing exactly what the framework was intended to support when it actively reviews and improves its innovation plan. The alternative, which is to adopt a plan and essentially leave it unaltered, results in the kind of bureaucratic fossilization that innovation frameworks are meant to avoid.

In the end, the Waxahachie experiment examines whether local districts can make prudent, lawful, and genuinely beneficial use of that flexibility for the students who enter those doors each morning. There is currently no answer to that question. But it’s worth keeping a close eye on.

The post The Waxahachie Experiment: Proposing Radical Revisions to the District of Innovation Plan appeared first on Creative Learning Guild.

On April 1st, the Artemis II mission took off from Kennedy Space Center using the same Pad 39-B that launched Apollo crews toward the Moon over fifty years prior. The rocket cleared the Florida coast in a burst of white smoke that, according to most witnesses from the Cape, was truly breathtaking—the kind of launch that momentarily suspends disbelief about how challenging and costly all of this is. The mission is not a landing, but rather a test flight. On April 10, the four astronauts will return home by splashing down in the Pacific off San Diego after circling the Moon in a figure-eight trajectory that was first used by Apollo 13 during its emergency return. Not a touchdown. There are no footsteps on the ground. However, that framing downplays the reality of the situation. Since December 1972, this is the first time that people have left low Earth orbit. Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan, who were returning to their lunar module on Apollo 17, were the last people to see the Moon up close.

The Orion crew’s lunar flyby on Monday will surpass Apollo 13’s record distance from Earth of 248,655 statute miles, which was attained during that mission’s terrifying return following its oxygen tank explosion. Artemis II will reach a distance of 252,760 miles. It’s a figure worth considering. No human has ever traveled so far from home. Mission control anticipates that communications will be lost approximately five hours after the spacecraft passes behind the Moon, and the record will be broken at approximately 1:56 PM Eastern. Judd Frieling, the flight director for Artemis, stated that “physics takes over and physics will absolutely get us back to the front side of the moon” with the calm that seems to be a job requirement in Houston.

The flyby’s scientific goals are more significant than one might anticipate from a mission that is essentially a test flight. Thirty surface features were chosen by NASA’s lunar science team for the crew to study and take pictures of. They worked in pairs, reporting their observations in real time to scientists in Mission Control’s back rooms. The list includes the Hertzsprung Basin to its northwest, an older, more eroded structure that provides a helpful contrast, and the Orientale Basin, a nearly 600-mile-wide impact crater that straddles the Moon’s near and far sides and was formed 3.8 billion years ago. It is now fully illuminated and visible from Orion’s approach. Reporters were informed by Kelsey Young, the lead for lunar science, that the crew’s human eyes will be able to identify surface color variations that satellite imagery just cannot. “This is something that human eyes are just incredibly good at teasing out nuances about,” she replied. In addition, the crew will take pictures of Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Saturn, look for the earthshine phenomenon, which is a faint glow on the lunar surface caused by sunlight reflected off Earth, and witness a solar eclipse from a location that has never been occupied by a human.

There have been some less glamorous issues with the mission. The crew has experienced two issues with the Orion toilet, NASA’s Universal Waste Management System, which the organization optimistically refers to as the first deep-space restroom. Because waste could not be vented overnight due to a frozen line, flight controllers had to tell the crew to use “contingency urine devices.” With a commendable deadpan, Artemis flight director Rick Henfling confirmed that the crew is now “proceeding with the mission and the use of the toilet nominally.” The cost of launching the spacecraft was probably more than $4 billion. There was still a problem with the toilet.

Observing this mission in action through the crew’s posted photos and the daily briefings from Johnson Space Center gives the impression that the participants are aware that they are a part of something that will be chronicled in history books. Speaking prior to the mission, Victor Glover urged everyone to make the most of the 40-minute blackout by saying, “Let’s pray, hope, send your good thoughts and feelings that we get back in contact with the crew.” For Easter, Christina Koch stashed dehydrated scrambled eggs throughout the cabin. The gold astronaut pin, which replaces the silver one given during training, was given to Jeremy Hansen by his crewmates during his first spaceflight. It was humbling, he said. For him, making that tradition a reality required a large number of people.

The Artemis program has experienced budgetary constraints, delays, and political difficulties, all of which have persisted. In addition to preparing for a possible lunar landing as early as 2028, NASA is dealing with proposed cuts to its science budget, which has alarmed researchers who rely on the agency’s larger work. It is genuinely unclear if Artemis’s full potential will be funded and carried out. However, on April 6, 2026, the tracking antenna at Goonhilly Earth Station in Cornwall is anxiously waiting to pick up their signal once more as four individuals are passing behind the far side of the Moon and witnessing things no human eye has ever seen.

The post The 40 Minutes of Silence: What Happens When the Artemis II Crew Disappears Behind the Moon appeared first on Creative Learning Guild.

You get a message at 11 o’clock at night saying, ‘This is going down tomorrow,'” Richards told the BBC that evening. “You make an effort to enjoy your day, but then everything goes wrong. You simply download data all night long. She claimed that some of the messages are devastating. Fearing that the data they have dedicated their professional lives to gathering—years of fieldwork, measurement, and meticulous archiving—will soon vanish from the internet with no assurance that it can be retrieved, scientists reach out. “You hear the urgency,” she remarked. “You understand that this is someone’s X amount of years of research and this is their baby.”

Government Climate Data Deletions & Archiving Efforts: Key Facts

From the inside, the data rescue movement appears like this. Hundreds of volunteers are dispersed throughout the nation and the world, keeping an eye on government websites, tracking deletions, downloading datasets, and rebuilding tools that agencies have taken offline. This is not dramatic in the sense of a movie, but it is urgent in a way that builds up subtly over weeks and months. Since its formation the week following Trump’s first election in 2016, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, or EDGI, has been carrying out this work in one way or another. Researchers took Trump’s declared animosity toward climate science seriously. After eight years, their organization had improved. The data losses this time, however, were worse than almost anyone anticipated.

By the end of January 2025, roughly 2,000 records had disappeared from Data.gov, the central federal repository that indexes government datasets. By spring, the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool — a Biden-era resource used to direct federal climate investment to disadvantaged communities — had been taken offline within 72 hours of Trump’s inauguration. Early in February, the EPA released its EJScreen environmental justice mapping tool. NOAA announced in April that ocean monitoring datasets would be removed in May. On June 30, 2025, the US Global Change Research Program website was dismantled and all five previously published National Climate Assessments — the authoritative scientific reports on how climate change is affecting the United States — disappeared from federal servers. NOAA’s Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, which had tracked extreme weather costs since 1980, stopped being updated in May. NOAA’s climate.gov stopped publishing new content in July after its entire staff was fired.

There’s a particular quality to the CEJST story that captures what this effort actually involves. The Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool had been built under Biden’s Justice40 initiative, designed to identify which communities should receive 40 percent of federal climate investment. It was open-source from day one, meaning the underlying code was publicly accessible. So when it came down, three people working with the Public Environmental Data Partners coalition rebuilt a functional version within 24 hours and hosted it on their own servers. That’s the optimistic version of the data rescue story. The EJScreen narrative is not as neat. That tool was not open-source and had been in use since the Obama administration, even during Trump’s first term. It took seven workers over three weeks to rebuild it, essentially attempting to recreate a recipe from an ingredient list without assembly instructions. It’s still being refined.

The extent of what transpired in the first year of Trump’s second term, according to Eric Nost, a geographer at the University of Guelph in Canada who has been working with EDGI since 2016, was radically different from the first. He and his colleagues recorded the removal and modification of webpages, the softening of climate language, and the disappearance of particular documents between 2017 and 2021. The majority of raw datasets survived. The deletion has moved more quickly and deeper this time. Nost simply referred to what he was witnessing as propaganda and censorship. This is an evaluation of what occurs when public information is removed in deceptive ways without justification; it is not a partisan assessment.

As Nost pointed out, the largest publisher in the world is the US government. For generations, people from all over the world have relied on it as a source of scientific knowledge. USDA climate tools are used by Illinois farmers to decide what to plant. Environmental hazards in communities of color were documented and grant applications were written by nonprofit organizations using CEJST and EJScreen. University researchers have developed entire research programs using NOAA datasets that are currently in a state that is somewhere between deleted and just inaccessible. Paul Bierman, a geomorphologist at the University of Vermont who has studied Arctic ice sheets and landscape change for almost 40 years, told the BBC that he had never seen anything like it in his whole career. For the first time, he was doubting the security of the National Science Foundation data repositories where he had stored his research.

The irony that permeates the entire situation is difficult to ignore. Since 1958, the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii has been continuously monitoring atmospheric CO2 concentrations. It saw the biggest increase in CO2 levels in a single year since measurements started last year. According to reports, the Trump administration was thinking of terminating the support office’s lease. The infrastructure for gathering and storing the data is being dismantled at the exact moment when it is most important.

As they observe all of this, the researchers involved feel that they are carrying out a role that democratic societies were meant to incorporate into their institutions from the start: redundancy, resilience, and backup. According to Gretchen Gehrke of EDGI, there is a structural failure of public information infrastructure in the digital age when decades of taxpayer-funded scientific data are now primarily protected by a few hundred volunteers working on pro bono cloud storage agreements. The books are slowly burning. It is these individuals who arrive carrying boxes.

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Examining vegetation data dating back to the 1930s, researchers have discovered that much of what you see isn’t exactly what it seems. The trees are living things. However, the climate beneath about 20% of the conifers in the Sierra Nevada, such as sugar pine, Douglas fir, and ponderosa pine, has changed to the point where they are unable to reproduce, which is a basic requirement for forests. The seedlings don’t make it. The saplings fail to establish themselves. The mature trees are still standing, photosynthesizing, and providing shade, but they are not producing any offspring. The idea is known as ecological inertia, according to ecologist Avery Hill, who worked on the Stanford study that gave this phenomenon its name. The trees continue to exist because the conditions that once supported them haven’t completely unwound. These regions were dubbed “zombie forests” by Hill and his associates. the lifeless.

Zombie Forests: Key Facts & Reference

This situation can be explained by a straightforward and depressing gap. The average elevation of Sierra Nevada conifers has increased by roughly 112 feet since the 1930s, as trees at lower, warmer elevations have perished while those higher up, where the air remains cooler, have survived. It sounds like a significant uphill migration. However, during the same time period, conifer-friendly climate conditions have shifted about 600 feet higher. The trees are shifting. The climate is changing more quickly. Technically speaking, zombie forests exist in that gap—nearly 500 feet of ecological mismatch—because they are unable to persist over time.

Mature conifers are incredibly resilient organisms, which makes this difficult to see from a car window or a hiking trail. A large ponderosa pine can withstand years of stress, drought, and slight temperature increases that would kill a younger tree. In its coverage of this study, the Sierra Club pointed out that a large conifer cannot be killed by climate stress alone. A disturbance is what you need. A wildfire. a prolonged drought that exceeds what even an old tree can withstand. This is where the narrative takes a darker turn: zombie forests are stressed forests by nature. Stressed trees are more vulnerable to disease, bark beetle infestations, and the kind of devastating wildfire that scorches the soil to the point where replanting is impossible.

Parts of this have already occurred in California. The burned trees in places like Eldorado National Forest, which experienced a drought and a wildfire in quick succession, have not been replaced by new conifers. Chaparral, or shrubland better suited to the hotter, drier climate that now characterizes these elevations, is reappearing. Some of what we’ve been referring to as wildfire recovery may actually be transition rather than recovery. The centuries-old forest is not returning. It’s being replaced by something else.

Once you realize what zombie forests are, you get a certain feeling. When you reflect on all the hikes you’ve done, the drives you’ve taken through mountain passes, and the times you’ve seen a conifer forest, it seems like proof that some things have not changed. It’s a slight change in the way you interpret a landscape. These trees may be more ancient than any human being, having survived decades of drought, fire, and snowpack, and they may continue to stand for decades to come. However, the ecosystem of which they were a part, which both supported and would have supplanted them, is already operating in a different way. There is a forest. The forest’s future is not.

Building on Hill’s initial mapping work, the Stanford research team led by Chris Field is attempting to make this understanding useful. The areas that are most at odds with their current climate and most likely to undergo a transition within the next generation can be identified with a fair degree of specificity using the maps they have created. In order to lessen the catastrophic fire risk that these stressed forests carry, land managers can use this information to determine where to concentrate prescribed burning and where to take into account what researchers refer to as assisted migration, which involves actively moving tree species upslope to areas where conditions are now more suitable for them. It’s a seemingly pointless intervention, but in some of these situations, it might be the only practical choice.

The amount of conifer forest in the Sierra Nevada that can be preserved in any meaningful ecological sense is still unknown, as is whether the lower elevations’ trajectory toward shrubland is just the way things are going regardless of what managers do. On that point, the research does not provide false solace. The 20% figure represents the current situation as determined by data. Climate models, which have historically tended to be conservative rather than alarmist, are the source of the doubling prediction within 77 years. In all honesty, zombie forests are not a sign of impending danger. They are records of something that is already happening, visible on a Californian hillside, tall, green, and silently past the point of no return.

The post The Rise of “Zombie Forests”: Why the Trees You See May Already Be Dead appeared first on Creative Learning Guild.

There will be no lunar landing by the Artemis II mission. It’s crucial to comprehend this distinction, which occasionally irritates those who question why NASA keeps adding steps prior to the landing. The answer is that before anyone can defend placing those same humans on the surface, the systems must be tested with humans on board. In November 2022, Artemis I validated the hardware by flying the Orion capsule and SLS without crew. In addition to testing the crew’s ability to survive and function inside Orion during a prolonged deep-space mission, Artemis II will validate the life-support systems and showcase the docking capabilities that will be essential for future lunar landers. In the words of planetary scientist and Artemis II project scientist Barbara Cohen: “We no longer need to test the rocket or the capsule.” The life support systems and the crew’s living and working conditions within the capsule are currently being tested.
No human, not even the Apollo astronauts, has ever truly seen the view from those windows, Cohen continued. The crew will have an unprecedented view of the lunar surface thanks to Artemis II’s unique orbit, and NASA intends to investigate how the human eye and brain interpret this view—information that will be useful for future surface operations. A detail like that has a subtle quality. Not one of the twelve humans who visited the Moon saw it from this specific angle. The first will be Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen.
There have been some difficulties along the way to April 1. In order to address problems with the helium system on the upper stage and to review concerns regarding heat shield performance, NASA moved the rocket back to the assembly building. This is the kind of engineering detour that the agency’s detractors point out, and the agency’s supporters correctly point out is exactly the right thing to do before flying people. During the Flight Readiness Review in March, NASA’s SLS Program manager John Honeycutt told reporters that his teams had spent months analyzing risks related to every aspect of the mission. He stated, “We didn’t find any new integrated risks,” but he conceded that surprises could still happen because SLS was only on its second flight and its first crewed mission.
There is a comprehensive emergency architecture in place for those unforeseen events. If something goes wrong prior to liftoff, a 1,335-foot cable system at the launch pad can transport astronauts in four tiny baskets down to safety. If necessary, a 44-foot Launch Abort System tower atop Orion can quickly separate the spacecraft from the rocket once it is inside the capsule. The mission can be canceled and the crew returned if problems occur prior to the burn to high Earth orbit after launch. The physics of the free-return trajectory, which uses the Earth’s and Moon’s gravity to arc the spacecraft home, is their only choice once they are committed to the Moon. According to Honeycutt, NASA won’t unwind “until we get Reid and Victor and Christina and Jeremy safely home.”
The fact that over 5 million people have already entered their names to fly on an SD card inside Orion is a tiny but significant detail. The Kennedy Space Center’s launch viewing packages were sold out weeks ago. On April 1, nearly 500,000 people might attempt to get in close proximity to Pad 39B. Brevard County’s traffic advisories advise departing much earlier than you believe is necessary. The SLS will be visible and audible for miles in all directions. Regular rocket launches don’t attract that kind of crowd. When the object on the pad moves in a way that causes people to pause and sense the distance, it gathers.

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Key Facts: Atlantic Hurricanes & Climate Change

Some areas of Texas received more than 60 inches of rain during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. In 2018, Florence brought more than 35 inches to the Carolinas. In 2019, Imelda, a catastrophic event that most people hardly remember, added 44 inches to southeastern Texas. These didn’t just happen. Researchers have determined that these storms were significantly wetter due to climate change, and the mechanism is important in this case. The atmosphere retains more moisture as air temperatures rise. As storms move, more water evaporates due to rising ocean temperatures. As a result, communities that still have storm drainage systems built for a different era experience rainfall totals that would have been deemed practically impossible in the middle of the twentieth century.
Another phenomenon that receives little attention outside of meteorological circles is the slowing down of storms. Once passing through a coastal area in twelve or fifteen hours, a hurricane may now linger for twenty or twenty-five. The effect is uncontested, but the precise cause is still up for debate. The prevailing theory suggests that changes in the steering winds that direct tropical systems may be related to Arctic warming. Longer durations of severe wind, longer storm surges, and catastrophic rainfall concentrated over a single area are all signs of a stalling storm. There was more to Harvey’s flooding than just the amount of rain. It had to do with how long Harvey sat there letting it fall.
The other aspect of this that worries emergency managers is the phenomenon of rapid intensification. Coastal communities have very little time to evacuate when a storm intensifies from a Category 1 to a Category 4 in just twenty-four hours. In 2018, Hurricane Michael made landfall in the Florida Panhandle as a Category 5 after intensifying at a rate that surprised many locals. Similar damage was caused off the Pacific coast of Mexico by Hurricane Otis in 2023. Although rapid intensification has always occurred, warmer ocean waters are making it possible for it to occur more frequently, closer to shore, and more quickly. Climate change increased peak wind speeds by an average of about 19 miles per hour during Atlantic storms from 2019 to 2023, according to research. An additional destructive force of one category, essentially due to warming alone.
It’s simple to ignore the quiet harm that sea level rise is doing to the equation until a storm surge occurs. Since 1900, average sea levels have already increased by more than half a foot on a global scale, and this increase is accelerating. In 2022, Hurricane Ian was traveling across an ocean surface that began several inches higher than it would have a generation ago when its surge reached fifteen feet at Fort Myers Beach. Research on Hurricane Katrina revealed that flood elevations during the storm were 15 to 60 percent higher than they would have been in 1900 due to higher sea levels. It’s not a small difference. That is the distinction between a neighborhood that has been destroyed and a street that has flooded.
It’s difficult to avoid thinking about what’s already in the way of these storms as you watch all of this happen. Within an eighth of a mile of the U.S. coastline are nearly 50 million residences. assets worth at least $1.4 trillion. Between 1970 and 2010, America’s coastal population increased by about 35 million due to beaches, mild winters, and waterfront views. However, the possibility that the Atlantic would eventually alter the terms of that agreement was not given much thought. Over 1,800 people were killed by Hurricane Katrina. In Puerto Rico, Maria killed close to 3,000 people. An entire island was rendered powerless by Fiona. These are not statistical abstractions; rather, they are the result of poor planning in the face of storms that outgrew the capacity of the systems intended to manage them.
The precise way that hurricane tracks will change as global warming persists is still unknown. As sea surface temperatures rise along the U.S. East Coast, scientists have noticed a northward drift in peak storm intensity in the Pacific, and there is growing evidence that Atlantic storms may be forming in more northern waters. Cities and areas that have traditionally viewed themselves as low risk may find themselves inside the cone of uncertainty more frequently than anyone currently anticipates if that pattern continues. Although it’s not a given, the data is pointing in that direction.

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Although scientists have been discussing a tipping point for years, the discourse has recently changed. It’s no longer just a remote possibility. The Amazon rainforest may already be approaching a point at which a recovery is improbable. According to some estimates, a combination of deforestation, rising temperatures, and recurrent drought could put almost half of the forest under extreme stress by 2050. That figure, 47%, seems abstract until you observe how quickly green transforms into something else.

The forest seems to be losing its rhythm. The first, and possibly most obvious, communities to notice it are Indigenous. fruits that ripen too soon. Fish migrate in erratic ways. Harvests of honey are getting smaller, from buckets to tiny bottles. On their own, these incidents aren’t particularly dramatic, but when taken as a whole, they point to a more profound issue: an ecosystem that is becoming out of balance. It’s difficult to ignore the cumulative effect of these minor adjustments.

Naturally, the most obvious cause is still deforestation. Large tracts of forest are still being cleared, frequently by burning, leaving behind dry soil that fractures in the sun. Over the past few decades, millions of hectares have been lost in Brazil alone. The fact that the effects go beyond those cleared areas, however, is more disturbing. In addition to decreasing the amount of forest cover, tree removal upsets the water cycle that supports the entire area.

After all, the Amazon produces its own climate. Scientists sometimes refer to the water that trees extract from the earth and release into the atmosphere as “flying rivers.” Those rivers become weaker when enough trees are lost. Rainfall decreases. Seasons that are dry last longer. Fires, which are frequently started on purpose, are more likely to spread farther than anticipated. Looking at satellite photos over time, the pattern appears more like a slow unraveling than isolated damage.

Everything is made more difficult by climate change. The region’s temperatures have increased, and droughts that were previously uncommon now occur unsettlingly frequently. The forest’s ability to swiftly adjust to these changes remains uncertain, particularly in light of human activity. It’s possible that some regions have already switched from absorbing carbon to releasing it, especially in the southeast Amazon. Even though it hasn’t been fully acknowledged in public discourse, that reversal feels important.

Additionally, there is an almost mechanical feedback loop at work. Drought increases as the temperature rises. Fires increase when there is more drought. Carbon emissions from fires contribute to additional global warming. The cycle quietly gains momentum as it feeds itself. In practical terms, this means that the forest may start to change more quickly than anticipated. Scientists refer to this as a self-reinforcing system.

However, the concept of “irreversible change” is still hard to understand. It’s not a one-time event or a catastrophic breakdown. The forest is gradually becoming thinner, drying out, and becoming more like a savanna. This process might already be in progress in some southern areas. The canopy lifts. The forest floor is more directly exposed to sunlight. The underbrush dries out. Fires become more manageable. It’s persistent but not abrupt.

This is a historical irony. The Amazon has withstood climate change for millions of years, enduring circumstances that would have altered less complex ecosystems. However, the current mix of pressures—rapid global warming on top of industrial deforestation—seems different. quicker. less tolerant. Resilience itself may have its limitations.

However, there are indications that the plot isn’t totally set in stone. Deforestation rates are typically lower and ecological stability is higher in areas under Indigenous community management. The forest frequently feels intact, even vibrant, when strolling through those areas. It implies that only some forms of human presence are intrinsically harmful. Another question is whether that model can scale rapidly enough.

The consequences are hard to overlook on a global scale. Large volumes of carbon are stored in the Amazon, and its depletion could hasten climate change in ways that extend well beyond South America. Continental variations in rainfall patterns are possible. The effect may be felt by agricultural systems. However, those results still seem far off in comparison to the immediate, noticeable changes taking place on the ground.

As you watch this happen, you get the impression that the world is changing more slowly than the forest. Policies are discussed. Goals are established. In the meantime, dry seasons lengthen, trees fall, and fires burn. There is a noticeable disparity in pace.

Uncertainty still exists, though. Reduced deforestation and restoration initiatives, according to some scientists, could help the Amazon recover from its impending collapse. Some are less hopeful, speculating that some thresholds might already be too near for comfort. It’s hard to predict which point of view will be right.

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