Science Daily

This summer, with sea ice across the Arctic Ocean shrinking to below-average levels, a NASA airborne survey of polar ice just completed its first flights. Its target: aquamarine pools of melt water on the ice surface that may be accelerating the overall sea ice retreat.

How will the melting of ice in Greenland affect our climate? In order to gain an idea how that process might look like, researchers have taken a look into the past. In the early Holocene period -- approximately 11,700 to 8,000 years ago -- a large ice sheet melted in North America. By analyzing dripstones in caves (speleothems) and using computer simulations, an international team reconstructed the consequences.

Scientists have overcome a seeming weakness of global climate models. They had previously not been able to simulate the extreme warm period of the Eocene.

Scientists have made a scientific breakthrough by measuring the oxygen content of Earth's ancient atmosphere. They discovered that gases trapped by halite (rock salt) during crystallization may contain atmospheric gases, among them oxygen.

A new study has found for the first time that ocean warming is the primary cause of retreat of glaciers on the western Antarctic Peninsula. The Peninsula is one of the largest current contributors to sea-level rise and this new finding will enable researchers to make better predictions of ice loss from this region.

The Bardarbunga eruption on Iceland has broken many records. The event in 2014 was the strongest in Europe since more than 240 years. The hole it left behind is the biggest caldera formation ever observed.

Environmental records obtained from archaeological sites in South Africa's southern Cape suggest climate may not have been directly linked to cultural and technological innovations of Middle Stone Age humans in southern Africa after all.

Algae that live in and under the sea ice play a much greater role for the Arctic food web than previously assumed. In a new study, biologists show that not only animals that live directly under the ice thrive on carbon produced by so-called ice algae.

Scientists have found that changes in cloud patterns during the last three decades match those predicted by climate model simulations. These cloud changes are likely to have had a warming effect on the planet.

The phrase "tipping point" passed its own tipping point and caught fire after author Malcolm Gladwell's so-named 2000 book. It's now frequently used in discussions about climate change, but what are "climate tipping points"? And what do they mean for society and the economy? Scientists tackle the terminology and outline a strategy for investigating the consequences of climate tipping points in a new study.

Scientists have long suggested that global warming could lead to a slowdown -- or even shutdown -- of the vast system of ocean currents, including the Gulf Stream, that keeps Europe warm. However, a new study finds that, rather than cooling Europe, a slowdown of the Thermohaline Circulation would mean the continent still warms, but less quickly than other parts of the world.

A new reconstruction of Antarctic ocean temperatures around the time the dinosaurs disappeared 66 million years ago supports the idea that one of the planet's biggest mass extinctions was due to the combined effects of volcanic eruptions and an asteroid impact.

The recent trend of increasing Antarctic sea ice extent -- seemingly at odds with climate model projections -- can largely be explained by a natural climate fluctuation, according to a new study.

There was a period during the last ice age when temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere went on a rollercoaster ride, plummeting and then rising again every 1,500 years or so. Those abrupt climate changes wreaked havoc on ecosystems, but their cause has been something of a mystery. New evidence shows for the first time that the ocean's overturning circulation slowed during every one of those temperature plunges -- at times almost stopping.

Scientists found that melt on the surface of glaciers in the McMurdo Dry Valley is rare, but internal melting is extensive.

Antarctic sea ice production spanning more than 20 years has been understood through the analysis of satellite observations using specially developed techniques. The results of this analysis revealed that changes to the sea ice production in the Southern Ocean were caused mainly because of surrounding ice shelf and fast ice conditions, rather than by wind, temperature, or other factors.

Approximately 30 percent of current Adélie penguin colonies may be in decline by 2060, researchers predict, and approximately 60 percent may be in decline by 2099. The declines are associated with warming -- many regions of Antarctica have warmed too much and further warming is no longer positive for the species.

Species across the world are rapidly going extinct due to human activities, but humans are also causing rapid evolution and the emergence of new species. A new study summarizes the causes of humanmade speciation, and discusses why newly evolved species cannot simply replace extinct wild species.

Adaptation to climate change has a lag of several thousands of years, report researchers. The permafrost regions in the Arctic are among those areas of the world in which the temperature is rising particularly fast due to climate change. However, biologists are currently observing that the tree vegetation is only minimally adapting to these changes. In those areas where pine and spruce trees should be growing according to the air temperature, the Siberian larch is still thriving.

Antarctic sea ice is constantly on the move as powerful winds blow it away from the coast and out toward the open ocean. A new study shows how that ice migration may be more important for the global ocean circulation than anyone realized.