Can a planet be alive? Lynn Margulis, a giant of late 20th-century biology, who had an incandescent intellect that veered toward the unorthodox, thought so. She and chemist James Lovelock…

In late winter of 1975, a seismologist named Cao Xianqing tracked a series of small earthquakes near Haicheng, China, which he took to presage a much larger one to come. On the morning…

It was nearly midnight aboard the research vessel Atlantis. The ship was about a thousand miles west of Costa Rica, where she’d sailed from, hovering over a hydrothermal vent field…

“If the Lord won’t send us water, oh, we’ll get it from the devil.”—Banjo Paterson, “Song of the Artesian Water” (1896) It’s April in the outback of New South Wales,…

One day last May, a muddy truck bound down a dirt road through the backwoods of Gainesville, Florida. It pulled up in a cloud of dust to a sprawling green farmhouse with a wide front…

In February 1987, Neil Gehrels, a young researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, boarded a military plane bound for the Australian Outback. Gehrels carried some peculiar…

The San Gabriel Mountains are waging war on Los Angeles and Ed Heinlein’s chainsaw is screaming in the late afternoon sun. It’s January 2015 and Heinlein, who has a friendly paunch…

It was nearly midnight aboard the research vessel Atlantis. The ship was about a thousand miles west of Costa Rica, where she’d sailed from, hovering over a hydrothermal vent field…

I first met James Lovelock in 1988 at a conference on his controversial Gaia Hypothesis that was sponsored by the American Geophysical Union. Gaia, to remind you, was the mythical…

The novelist William Golding suggested to James Lovelock that he name his now-famous hypothesis after the Greek goddess of the Earth, Gaia. It was a good fit: Lovelock believed that…