F rom the snow-covered landscapes of Alaska to the southern tip of Chile and all points between, The Americas takes viewers on an epic 10-part journey of natural splendor. In the third episode, we ...

Most geographers consider the Great Plains the area between the Rocky Mountain Front Range and the 100th Meridian. That's roughly a line stretching from Bismarck, North Dakota, south through Texas.

Of the Great Plains we expected better, and the Plains failed us. This is a fact we prefer to forget. No less perceptive a reader of nineteenth-century American history than Marilynne Robinson has ...

You probably know about the drought in California. But the state does have surface water: reservoirs, lakes, streams, rivers, snow melt from the Sierra Nevada and a water transportation system.

It’s well-established that much of the West was still at sea level 70 million years ago and that tectonic shifts don’t fully explain the High Plains’ altitude.

Record single-storm totals from across the Great Plains region suggest that snowfalls of up to four feet are possible, although rare. The Halloween blizzard of 1991 dropped 36 inches on Duluth.

Some regions, such as areas of the Central Great Plains, still rely heavily on fallow. There, the climate is so dry that alternative farming techniques, such as crop sequencing, are not currently ...