Brilliant Light Power, Inc. (BrLP) announced today that it has continuously generated over a million watts of power from a new primary source until the cell vaporized from the intense heat...

Folsom Lake, just outside Sacramento, California, was 63 percent full on Dec. 16, 2016. But that was 130 percent of its historical average for that date, following strong rains in the area. Folsom Lake is California's ninth-largest reservoir.(Photo: Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun)

Droughts are already getting longer and more severe because of human-caused climate change in the American Southwest and around the world. But the drought-climate connection goes both ways: California's prolonged dry spell has also made climate change a little bit worse...

2016 really was the year of the flood in the U.S.: In total, 19 separate floods swamped the nation last year, the most in one single year since records began in 1980. USA TODAY

credit: Climate Central

2016 will be remembered for many things. One of them will be heat...

Richie Blink, born and raised in Plaquemines Parish, La., south of New Orleans, works for the National Wildlife Federation. He got in touch with an archaeologist to take a look at some shards of pottery that were eroding into the Gulf of Mexico. Blink holds a pottery shard that could be 300 to 500 years old, from the Plaquemine culture of what's called the Bayou Petre phase. (WWNO)

Louisiana is losing its coast at a rapid rate because of rising sea levels, development and sinking marshland. Officials are trying to rebuild those marshes and the wetlands, but much of the coast can't be saved. This makes Louisiana's history an unwitting victim. As land disappears and the water creeps inland, ancient archaeology sites are washing away, too...

Sign in downtown Gillette, Wyoming | Photo by Toby Brusseau

The state's political leadership doubles down on coal while the industry flounders...

What's currently left of the marsh along the East Pearl River and the Rigolets, where the 2017 Coastal Master Plan now includes a flood gate to combat storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. (Photo by David Grunfeld, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune) ((Photo by David Grunfeld, NOLA.com |The Times-Picayune))

The ambitious 2017 rewrite of Louisiana's $50 billion, 50-year coastal protection and restoration master plan could reduce hurricane storm surge damage by $8.3 billion a year through 2067 and create 800 more square miles of coastal wetlands and dry land than if the plan is not implemented...

The Annapurna range in Nepal provides the backdrop to a vibrant display of rhododendrons. Image: Andrew Miller via Flickr

The flowering season of the Himalayan rhododendron has moved forward by three months in response to climate change...

A clean energy project in China. Credit: Asian Development Bank/Flickr

The past year epitomized the toing-and-froing of planetary fortunes that have come to define global climate policy and debates...

Photo by Travis Warren/CC By-NC 2.0

America’s first comprehensive environmental legislation, the National Environmental Policy Act, was the result of escalating public demand for less pollution and less impact...

Can a rising sea level can act as a boost for glaciers calving into the sea and trigger a surge of ice into the oceans? I finally got round to watch the documentary Chasing Ice over the Christmas and New Year’s break, and it made a big impression. I also was left with this question after watching it...

Water tanks to collect rainfall water behind a house in Buena Esperanza, a settlement of 45 families in the state of Pernambuco in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast region, where thanks to such initiatives the rural population manages to survive prolonged droughts, without the tragedies of the past. Credit: Mario Osava/ IPS

 The drought that has plagued Brazil’s semiarid Northeast region since 2012 is already more severe than the 1979-1983 drought, the longest in the 20th century. But prolonged dry spells no longer cause the tragedies of the past...

Brian Dupont/Wikimedia

And things look dicey for a few more species...

Dredge material is applied to the wetlands at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge to help them keep up with rising sea levels. Kim Hairston / Baltimore Sun

Conservationists have a plan to save marshland at Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge from rising sea levels...

Major Oak in Sherwood Forest country park, Nottinghamshire, was voted England’s tree of the year in 2014. According to folklore the tree sheltered Robin Hood and his merry men. Photograph: Phil Lockwood/Woodland Trust/PA

Ineos to conduct seismic survey for shale gas and could be working within 200m of the 1,000-year-old tree Major Oak, documents reveal...

Hot water drilling, Petermann ice shelf, NW Greenland/ British Antarctic Survey

As one of Greenland’s largest ice shelves shrinks, a once-doubtful scientist has come around to the role of climate change in melting it.

With enough evidence, even skepticism will thaw...

A chinstrap penguin surveys his domain near the shore of the Antarctic Peninsula. Some penguin species have already been displaced by the decline of ice in the region, and many populations will lose habitat in the decades ahead. (Photo: Bob Berwyn)

Stories not to miss from our environmental coverage over the past year...

Getty Images/ Joe Raedle

Now might not be the time to invest in beach-front property...