Award Winners

Scientists are finding direct, sometimes surprising, connections between climate changes in the Arctic and Antarctic and disruptive events closer to home. The NPR team used text and supporting multimedia resources to vividly explain how phenomena occurring thousands of miles away are producing sea level rise along the coast of Texas, increasingly destructive wildfires in the western United States, and changes in the feeding behavior of right whales in the North Atlantic. Melting ice in West Antarctica disproportionately affects Texas, in part because major ocean currents carry the meltwater to…

In a comprehensive multimedia story, the Washington Post team told how Crawford Lake in Ontario has evidence, perhaps more than any other place on Earth, that humans have changed the planet’s chemistry and climate in such fundamental ways that many scientists believe they mark a new chapter in geologic time called the Anthropocene. Digging into the sediments of the lake, scientists uncovered a record of more than a thousand years of history. By 1950 or so, a rapid, dramatic increase of carbon-based particles shows up from industrial processes, including coal-fired steelmaking in a nearby…

In an evocative piece from Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, reporter Juliet Eilperin and photographer Salwan Georges use a single majestic Sitka spruce tree, the height of a 17-story building, to spotlight the battle over the fate of increasingly scarce old-growth timber. The tree is estimated to contain at least 6,000 board feet of lumber worth $17,500. Just as impressively, it has locked up nearly 12 metric tons of carbon dioxide in its fibers, a repository for the heat-trapping greenhouse gases that threaten humanity. “Covered in a riotous mix of pale lichens and deep-green moss,” Eilperin…

Throughout much of 2020, the World Health Organization maintained that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, spreads through relatively large respiratory droplets that are expelled by infected people while coughing, sneezing or speaking. It took many months for the agency to acknowledge that the virus could travel on tiny particles called aerosols that can spread widely and linger in the air. What happens inside the aerosol particles and how does the virus get into the lungs and cells of a new victim? A research team led by biophysicist Rommie Amaro of the University of California San…

Lauren Weber, Laura Ungar, Hannah Recht and Anna Maria Barry-Jester of Kaiser Health News teamed up with Michelle R. Smith of The Associated Press for an extensive investigation into decades of public health defunding that has exacerbated the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. The team uncovered just how ill-equipped state and local health programs had become when the pandemic hit. When a bungled federal response left local health departments to often fend for themselves, the pandemic placed an overwhelming new strain on these underfunded systems. The reporters spoke with “more than 150…

Sarah Kaplan told the heart-wrenching story of Keith Redding, an early March COVID-19 victim who became an important case study for doctors battling the virus. Redding first checked into the hospital with a suspected pneumonia infection. Early CT scans showed a lung symptom doctors have come to associate with the virus called “ground glass opacity.” Redding later experienced a cytokine storm, another tell-tale effect of the virus that occurs when a patient’s stressed immune system mounts an overaggressive internal attack. “This is the tragedy of the coronavirus,” writes Kaplan. “It hijacks the…