Constructed from a quarter century's worth of satellite data, a new map of Antarctic ice velocity by glaciologists from the University of California, Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the most precise ever created. Published today in a paper...
About a dozen megadroughts struck the American Southwest during the 9th through the 15th centuries, but then they mysteriously ceased around the year 1600. What caused this clustering of megadroughts -- that is, severe droughts that last for decades...
Researchers have developed a new method to allow for the first direct measurement of the submarine melt rate of a tidewater glacier, and, in doing so, they concluded that current theoretical models may be underestimating glacial melt by up...
Many people have a clear picture of the "Little Ice Age" (from approx. 1300 to 1850). It's characterized by paintings showing people skating on Dutch canals and glaciers advancing far into the alpine valleys. That it was extraordinarily cool...
A new reconstruction of global average surface temperature change over the past 2,000 years has identified the main causes for decade-scale climate changes. The analysis suggests that Earth's current warming rate, caused by human greenhouse gas emissions, is higher...
Black carbon, commonly known as soot, is a significant contributor to global warming and is strongly linked to adverse health outcomes. Produced by the incomplete combustion of fuels—emitted from large trucks, trains, and marine vessels—it is an air pollutant...
The molten rock that feeds volcanoes can be stored in the Earth's crust for as long as a thousand years, a result which may help with volcanic hazard management and better forecasting of when eruptions might occur. Researchers from the...
The development of new hunting projectiles by European hunter-gatherers during the Mesolithic may have been linked to territoriality in a rapidly-changing climate, according to a study published July 17, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONEby Philippe Crombé from Ghent...
Researchers at CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, have painstakingly reconstructed the nation's 'once in a century drought' in the early 1900s, revealing that it caused mass ecosystem collapse and dramatic declines in plant and animal populations across more than...
Coral reefs are considered one of the most threatened ecosystems on the planet and are dying at alarming rates around the world. Scientists attribute coral bleaching and ultimately massive coral death to a number of environmental stressors, in particular,...
Ice on the Greenland Ice Sheet doesn't just melt. The ice actually slides rapidly across its bed toward the ice sheet's edges. As a result, because ice motion is from sliding as opposed to ice deformation, ice is being...