Feed aggregator

Ancient Maya in the once-bustling city of Tikal built sophisticated water filters using natural materials they imported from miles away, according to new research. A multidisciplinary team of anthropologists, geographers and biologists identified quartz and zeolite, a crystalline compound consisting of silicon and aluminum, that created a natural molecular sieve. Both minerals are used in modern water filtration.

Geological investigations of low-temperature young deposits on the Styrian Erzberg provide paleoclimatology with new data on the Earth's history and its development.

A team of geologists believes they have found the lost plate known as Resurrection in northern Canada by using existing mantle tomography images.

Mussels, barnacles, and snails are declining in the Gulf of Maine, according to a new article by biologists. Their 20-year dataset reveals that the populations' steady dwindling matches up with the effects of climate change on the region.

Species on the Antarctic Peninsula are threatened by climate change and human activities including commercial fishing, tourism, and research infrastructure.

The fossilized remains of ancient deep-sea corals may act as time machines providing new insights into the effect the ocean has on rising CO2 levels.

Sea floor sediments of the Arctic Ocean can reveal how permafrost responds to climate warming. Researchers have found evidence of past permafrost thawing during climate warming events at the end of the last ice age. Their findings caution about what could happen in the near future: Arctic warming by only a few degrees Celsius may trigger massive permafrost thawing, coastal erosion, and the release of greenhouse gases.

Of the six or more different species of early humans, all belonging to the genus Homo, only we Homo sapiens have managed to survive. Now, a study combining climate modeling and the fossil record in search of clues to what led to all those earlier extinctions suggests that climate change -- the inability to adapt to either warming or cooling temperatures -- likely played a major role in sealing their fate.

Sediments from a lake in the Canadian High Arctic allow climate scientists to extend the record of Atlantic sea-surface temperature from about 100 to 2,900 years. It shows that the warmest interval over this period has been the past 10 years.

Favourable climatic conditions influenced the sequence of settlement movements of Homo sapiens in the Levant on their way from Africa to Europe. In a first step, modern humans settled along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Only then did they spread out into the Sinai desert and the eastern Jordanian Rift Valley.

With the return of the Polarstern, the largest Arctic expedition of all times has come to a successful end. For more than a year, the German research icebreaker traveled in 5 cruise legs with more than 400 people from 20 countries to investigate the epicenter of climate change more precisely than ever before.

Charles Darwin's 1842 theory about the formation of ring-shaped reefs, called atolls, is incorrect, but 'it's so beautiful, so simple and pleasing' that it still appears in textbooks and university courses, said a marine geologist. The accurate description is more complicated, and biologists are hoping to set the record straight.

Meltwater lakes that form at glacier margins cause ice to recede much further and faster compared to glaciers that terminate on land, according to a new study. But the effects of these glacial lakes are not represented in current ice loss models, warn the study authors. Therefore, estimates of recession rates and ice mass loss from lake-terminating glaciers in the coming decades are likely to be under-estimated.

Fluctuations in the weather can have a significant impact on melting Antarctic ice, and models that do not include this factor can underestimate the global impact of sea level rise, according to scientists.

Researchers have found varying projections on global warming trends put forth by climate change scientists can be explained by differing models' predictions regarding ice loss and atmospheric water vapor.

Projections of potentially dramatic sea-level rise from ice-sheet melting in Antarctica have been wide-ranging, but a Rutgers-led team has created a model that enables improved projections and could help better address climate change threats.

Researchers probing peatlands to discover clues about past environments and carbon stocks on land have identified peatland on Borneo that is twice as old and much deeper than previously thought. An inland site near Putussibau formed at least 47,800 years old and contains peat 18 meters deep.

Warmer winters due to climate change are causing lakes in the Northern Hemisphere to experience more ice-free years, according to a new study. Researchers recently analyzed nearly 80 years of lake ice data, stretching from 1939 to 2016, for 122 lakes that typically freeze every winter. They found ice-free years have become more than three times more frequent since 1978 and 11% of lakes studied experienced at least one completely ice-free year since 1939.

The current climate crisis underlines that carbon cycle perturbations can cause significant climate change. New research reveals how carbon cycle and global climate have been interacting throughout the last 35 million years of geologic history, under natural circumstances.

Dust blowing onto high mountains in the western Himalayas is a bigger factor than previously thought in hastening the melting of snow there, researchers show. That's because dust - lots of it in the Himalayas - absorbs sunlight, heating the snow that surrounds it.