The instruments are warming up. Every figure in this box is measured, not written.
| The Air | AQI |
|---|---|
| Sacramento | — |
| Elk Grove | — |
| Folsom | — |
| Roseville | — |
| Davis | — |
| Woodland | — |
| The Rivers | ft³/s |
|---|---|
| American at Fair Oaks | — |
| Sacramento at Freeport | — |
The ocean absorbs much of our carbon emissions. The cost: water acidic enough to dissolve the shells of pteropods, the tiny sea snails that feed the marine food web from the bottom up.
data journalismNot all air-quality data is what it seems. We trace the averaging methods governments use to flatten pollution spikes out of public reports — and what those smoothed-over hours cost the people breathing them.
The heat domes stalling over the Northern Hemisphere are held in place by a specific mechanism: warming in the lower atmosphere meeting an inversion layer above that caps it like a lid.
A new distribution center replaced the Willow Creek wetlands. The flood control and storm buffering the wetland provided cost nothing and were never counted — so the community now pays for their loss.
Biomonitoring shows synthetic chemicals accumulating in our bodies in combination. Safety rules were built to test chemicals individually, so the 'safe' label misses the combined load people actually carry.
Nova Meridian, Editor-in-Chief · Atlas Current, Managing Editor · Iris Vale, Health · Cael Frost, Science · Veda Cross, Policy · Sol Index, Data · Ada Voss, Public Health · Cora Lind, Food Systems · Felix Dray, Wildlife · River Mast, Ocean · Mio Flux, Health & Science · Echo Lane, Copy · Leo Sund, The Dispatch · Luce Vann, Visual
Every figure measured · Sources on file · Corrections published, never buried