Science Daily

A new research project has provided the first modern evidence of a landscape-level permafrost carbon feedback, in which thawing permafrost releases ancient carbon as climate-warming greenhouse gases.

Fresh understanding of West Antarctica has revealed how the region's ice sheet could become unstable in a warming world.

This year's melt season in the Arctic Ocean and surrounding seas started with a bang, with a record low maximum extent in March and relatively rapid ice loss through May. One NASA sea ice scientist describes this as 'the new normal.'

Thin clouds at about 5 km altitude are more ubiquitous in the tropics than previously thought and they have a substantial cooling effect on climate, report researchers. The cooling effect of mid-level clouds is currently missing in global climate models.

Expansion and retreat of sea ice varied consistently in pace with rapid climate changes through past 90,000 years, a new study shows.

A team of scientists has discovered a 65 percent reduction in sea ice during the last interglacial period around 128,000 years ago.

Natural and cultural areas that will remain similar to what they are today -- despite climate change -- need to be identified, managed and conserved as 'refugia' for at-risk species, according to a new study. The study sets out, for the first time, specific steps to help identify and manage these more resilient and climate-stable havens for plants, animals and fishes.

Greenhouse gases are already having an accelerating effect on sea level rise, but the impact has so far been masked by the cataclysmic 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, according to a new study.

Solutions including electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, vehicle connectivity, and automation are examined.

The decrease in fishery productivity in Lake Tanganyika since the 1950s is a consequence of global warming rather than just overfishing, according to a new report. The lake was becoming warmer at the same time in the 1800s that the abundance of fish began declining and the lake's algae started decreasing. Large-scale commercial fishing did not begin on Lake Tanganyika until the 1950s.

Climate change is threatening to expose hazardous waste at an abandoned camp thought to be buried forever in the Greenland Ice Sheet, new research has found. Camp Century, a United States military base built within the Greenland ice sheet in 1959, doubled as a top-secret site for testing the feasibility of deploying nuclear missiles during the Cold War. When the camp was decommissioned in 1967, its infrastructure and waste were abandoned.

All living toothed whales rely upon echoes of their own calls to navigate and hunt underwater, a skill that works best in conjunction with high-frequency hearing. Now, researchers who studied one of the best-preserved ears of any ancient whale ever discovered find that whales' high-frequency hearing abilities arose earlier than anticipated.

Clusters of hunter-gatherers spent much of the late Stone Age working out the basics of farming on the fertile lands of Turkey before taking this knowledge to Europe. In an analysis of ancient genomes, researchers report that two waves of early European settlers belonged to the same gene pool as farmers in Turkey -- genealogy that can be traced back to some of the first people to cultivate crops outside of Mesopotamia.

Scientists have revealed how a tiny Arctic microbe, crucial to shaping the surface of glaciers, survives in such extreme conditions.

New observations show that warm deep water reaches the large Filchner ice shelf in the southern Weddell Sea.

New research by a forest landscape ecology professor shows that organisms will face more hardships as they relocate when climate change makes their current homes uninhabitable.

In the future, people in the Himalayas will have to contend with flooding, while those in the Andes will have longer dry spells and less water. These are the conclusions drawn by researchers, who have used measurement data and climate models to closely examine water balance in both of these mountain ranges.

New research has found methylmercury -- a potent neurotoxin - in sea ice in the Southern Ocean. The results are the first to show that sea-ice bacteria can change mercury into methylmercury, a more toxic form that can contaminate the marine environment, including fish and birds.

A new study by an international team of scientists reveals the exact timing of the onset of the modern monsoon pattern in the Maldives 12.9 million years ago, and its connection to past climate changes and coral reefs in the region. The analysis of sediment cores provides direct physical evidence of the environmental conditions that sparked the monsoon conditions that exist today around the low-lying island nation and the Indian subcontinent.

Variations in the ability of sand particles kicked into the atmosphere from deserts in the Middle East to absorb heat can change the intensity of the Indian Summer Monsoon, according to new research.