In the night hours after Hurricane Milton smashed into Siesta Key, a barrier island near Sarasota, Florida, high winds and a deluge of water pummeled the state’s coastal metropolises. In St. Petersburg, a construction crane toppled from its position on a luxury high-rise, meant to soon be the tallest building on the flood-vulnerable peninsula. The crane...

Updated at 5:59 a.m. on October 10, 2024After several days of whirling across the Gulf of Mexico, blowing at up to 180 miles per hour, Hurricane Milton made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast last night as the terrible embodiment of a historically destructive season. Milton inflated at a near-record pace, growing from a Category 1 storm into a Category...

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.As Hurricane Milton exploded from a Category 1 storm into a Category 5 storm over the course of 12 hours yesterday, climate scientists and meteorologists were stunned. NBC6’s John Morales, a veteran TV meteorologist in South Florida, choked up on air while describing...

The United States is trapped in a cycle of disasters bigger than the ones our systems were built for. Before Hurricane Helene made landfall late last month, FEMA was already running short on funds; now, Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security secretary, told reporters on Wednesday, if another hurricane hits, it will run out altogether. At the same...

A week after Hurricane Helene ripped through the American Southeast, it has careened into a terrible category of natural disasters: By some measures, it is now the third-deadliest storm to make landfall in the United States, after Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Katrina. More than 200 people have now been reported dead. Over half of the fatalities so...

Wikipedia’s “Timeline of the Far Future” is one of my favorite webpages from the internet’s pre-slop era. A Londoner named Nick Webb created it on the morning of December 22, 2010. “Certain events in the future of the universe can be predicted with a comfortable level of accuracy,” he wrote at the top of the page. He then proposed a chronological list...