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Scientists say collapse of Antarctic glacier is unstoppable
The West Antarctica ice sheet, which holds enough water to raise global seas by several feet, has started to collapse. The good news is that while the word “collapse” implies a sudden change, the...
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Ancient clamshells prove we don’t understand El Niño
Using a dating technique based on 10,000-year-old mollusk shells, scientist have cast doubt on computer models that point to El Niño’s weakling past. Scientists have suspected that El Niño was weaker...
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Snow on Arctic sea ice continues to thin
An analysis of recent and historic data confirms snow has thinned significantly in the Arctic, particularly on sea ice in western waters near Alaska. Scientists have been tracking the depth of snow...
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Tiny critters ‘pee’ enough to shift ocean chemistry
Tiny animals such as zooplankton make the world’s biggest migration—from feeding at the open ocean’s surface at night to hiding in sunless depths during the day. Their daytime ammonia output—the...
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How rain and snow combine to cause floods
Many of the worst winter floods that hit the US West Coast combined heavy rains and melting snow. The combined water washes down the mountain to breach riverbanks, wash out roads, and flood buildings....
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What’s to blame for dirty snow?
Sometimes snow is not as white as it looks. A new large-scale survey shows that agricultural practices, not just smokestacks and tailpipes, may have a big impact on its purity. Researchers made an epic...
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5 ways to help polar bears cope with climate change
A new report that examines the state of Arctic marine mammals warns that polar bears and seals are most at risk from a profound loss of sea ice. The study, published in Conservation Biology, offers...
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Boston can blame Pacific’s warm ‘blob’ for record snow
The West Coast in the United States is warm and parched. The East Coast spent the past winter cold and snowed under. What’s the cause of all this mayhem? Two new studies suggest a long-lived patch of...
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Will animals need ‘oxygen tanks’ as oceans warm?
Mountain climbers typically carry tanks of oxygen to help them reach the summit. It’s the combination of physical exertion and lack of oxygen at high altitudes that creates one of their biggest...
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Will climate change create more ‘pizzlies’?
Climate change has already caused the interbreeding of some animals—most notably a hybrid polar bear and grizzly bear cub known as a grolar bear or a pizzly. But new research suggests the interbreeding...
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Plankton in Southern Ocean brighten clouds above
To discover what gives clouds above the Southern Ocean their brightness, scientists took a close look at tiny drifting organisms in the sea below. Nobody knows what our skies looked like before fossil...
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Pacific coast sees spike in methane bubble plumes
Warming ocean temperatures found a third of a mile below the surface, in a dark ocean where not much lives, may not draw much attention. But this is precisely the depth where frozen pockets of methane...
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Whaling ship logbooks hold clues to Arctic ice
Currently, the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. But what was the Arctic like before—when maritime explorers and whale hunters first ventured into its icy seas? A...
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How oxygen ‘lit the fuse’ for life on Earth
It took 100 million years for oxygen levels in the oceans and atmosphere to increase to the level that allowed the explosion of animal life on Earth about 600 million years ago, according to a recent...
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When the moon is high, Earth gets less rain
When the moon is high in the sky, it creates bulges in Earth’s atmosphere that cause imperceptible changes in the amount of rain that falls below. “As far as I know, this is the first study to...
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No, butterflies won’t affect the weather forecast
In the 1970s, scientist Edward Lorenz famously asked whether the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could lead to a tornado in Texas. In the decades since, the butterfly effect and chaos theory...
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Bubbles in lava could change our view of early Earth
The idea that the young Earth had a thicker atmosphere turns out to be wrong. Researchers used bubbles trapped in rocks to show that the air 2.7 billion years ago exerted at most half the pressure of...
View ArticlePart of Earth’s crust spews out of arc volcano
New research shows that a common type of volcano isn’t just spewing molten rock from the mantle. Rather, it contains elements that suggest something more complicated is drawing material out of the...
View ArticleScience bolsters the tale of China’s Great Flood
A new study offers evidence to support stories that a huge flood took place in China about 4,000 years ago, during the reign of Emperor Yu. The study in Science, led by Chinese researcher Qinglong Wu,...
View ArticleLuna moths use twisty tails to flummox bats
The long hindwing tails sported by many moths have long been suspected as a strategy to confound predators. The moths are active mainly at night, so they don’t need a visual disguise. They need to...
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