Brian Burt

The Hudson Bay peatlands in northern Canada, a 90-mil

The Hudson Bay peatlands in northern Canada, a 90-million-acre area stretching from northern Manitoba to Quebec, are a haven for biodiversity, home to more than 1,000 species of plants and 175 species of birds. But the secret of this unique ecosystem lies below the surface, in a buildup of water-saturated mosses called peat.

Though it looks like little more than fibrous dirt, peat has near-magical properties.

Acidic and anaerobic, it can preserve artifacts, food, and even human remains for centuries or more. And because the process of decomposition slows down in such environments, they trap carbon dioxide and keep it out of the atmosphere, slowing the process of climate change.

The Hudson Bay peatlands in particular store five times as much carbon per acre as the Amazon rainforest, Janet Sumner, executive director of the Wildlands League, a Canadian conservation group, told me. Indigenous nations around Hudson Bay call the area “the breathing lands.”

The Antarctic ice sheet covers about 5.4 million square miles, an area larger than Europe. On average, it is more than 1 mil

The Antarctic ice sheet covers about 5.4 million square miles, an area larger than Europe. On average, it is more than 1 mile thick and holds 61 percent of all the fresh water on Earth, enough to raise the global average sea level by about 190 feet if it all melts. The smaller, western portion of the ice sheet is especially vulnerable, with enough ice to raise sea level more than 10 feet.

Thirty years ago, undergraduate students were told that the Antarctic ice sheets were going to be stable and that they weren’t going to melt much, said Ruth Mottram, an ice researcher with the Danish Meteorological Institute and lead author of a new paper in Nature Geoscience that examined the accelerating ice melt and other similarities between changes in northern and southern polar regions.

“We thought it was just going to take ages for any kind of climate impacts to be seen in Antarctica. And that’s really not true,” said Mottram, adding that some of the earliest warnings came from scientists who saw collapsing ice shelves, retreating glaciers and increased surface melting in satellite data.

“This is not a climate-zealot kind of approach,” AEMO CEO Daniel Westerman told Canary Media. ​“Our old coal-fired power stations are breaking down; they’re retiring,” he said. ​“They’re getting replaced by the least-cost energy, which is renewable energy, backed with storage, connected in with transmission. We’ll have a bit of gas there for the winter doldrums. That is just what’s happening.”

Australia’s efforts could offer a proof of concept for how a nation with a bustling, modern economy can rapidly shift its electricity from fossil fuels—mostly coal with some gas—to wind, solar, storage, and other renewable sources like hydropower.

“There’s nothing impossible about 100 percent renewable supply,” said Jesse Jenkins, a Princeton University professor who has studied net-zero pathways for the US. ​“Australia has a better chance of this than almost anywhere.”