Science Daily

The legend of St. Patrick banishing snakes from the emerald isle some 1,500 years ago is indelibly etched in folklore -- even if science suggests snakes were unlikely to have colonized the country following the last ice age. But what would happen if St. Patrick's scaly foes were introduced now? Experts believe snakes could certainly slither into Ireland's ecosystems if introduced but would likely cause trouble for native ecosystems.

At the peak of the last ice age, a vast ice sheet covered northern Europe, spanning from the British Isles, across Scandinavia and into Russia in the east and the Barents Sea in the north. A new reconstruction of this ice sheet shows the interaction between climate and glaciers - how the ice sheet grows and retreats.

When we talk about climate change today, we have to recognize the natural variations to be able to distinguish them from the human-induced changes. Researchers have analyzed the natural climate variations over the last 12,000 years, and they have looked back 5 million years to see the major features of the Earth's climate. The research shows that not only is the weather chaotic, but the Earth's climate is chaotic...

As the Earth emerged from its last ice age several thousand years ago, atmospheric carbon dioxide increased and further warmed the planet. Scientists have long speculated that the primary source of this CO2 was from the deep ocean around Antarctica, though it has been difficult to prove.

'Upside-down rivers' of warm ocean water threaten the stability of floating ice shelves in Antarctica, according to a new study. The study highlights how parts of Antarctica's ice sheet may be weakening due to contact with warm ocean water.

How does the ice on the polar caps change? And which are the geological characteristics of the Earth's crust beneath? Geophysicists will be able to answer these questions in the future using gravity field measurements from ESA's GOCE gravity satellite. Geodesists have prepared the measurement data mathematically in such a way that they can be used to resolve structures deep below the surface.

Rapid melting of ice and Arctic permafrost is altering tundra regions in Alaska, Canada and Russia, according to a new study. Ice-wedge degradation has been observed before in individual locations, but this is the first study to determine that rapid melting has become widespread throughout the Arctic.

Ancient super-eruptions west of Yellowstone, USA, were investigated by an international initiative to examine the frequency of massive volcanic events. Yellowstone famously erupted cataclysmically in recent times, but these were just the latest of a longer succession of huge explosive eruptions that burned a track from Oregon eastward toward Yellowstone during the past 16 million years.

Clouds are notoriously hard to simulate in computer programs that model climate. A new study suggests why -- either clouds are more variable than scientists give them credit for, or those bright white clouds in the sky are much dirtier than scientists thought.

Greenland's snowy surface has been getting darker over the past two decades, absorbing more heat from the sun and increasing snow melt, a new study of satellite data shows. That trend is likely to continue, with the surface's reflectivity, or albedo, decreasing by as much as 10 percent by the end of the century, the study says.

Once there was a dwarf deer on an island in the Pacific, but residents hunted it to extinction 6,000 years ago. Knowing this may help to conserve conservation of deer on a neighboring island.

A new study finds hazardous tropical cyclones in the Philippines are increasing in intensity causing widespread damage and loss of life, which may be due to rising sea-surface temperatures.

In the early Miocene Epoch, temperatures were 10 degrees warmer and ocean levels were 50 feet higher -- well above the ground level of modern-day New York, Tokyo and Berlin. Now a geochemist reports finding striking similarities between climate change patterns today and millions of years ago.

Researchers have studied how Zanzibar was formed, charting the extinction of various animals from the island.

Results from a new climate reconstruction of how Antarctica's ice sheets responded during the last period when atmospheric carbon dioxide reached levels like those expected to occur in about 30 years, plus sediment core findings reported in a companion paper, suggest that the ice sheets are more vulnerable to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide than previously thought.

A new statistical technique, analyzing data records since measuring started 150 years ago, independently confirms that human-made carbon dioxide and methane emissions have led to global warming, according to a recent article. The analysis also shows that the most pronounced consequences of such emissions are being felt in localized regions around the globe, such as Europe, North America, China, Siberia, the Sahel zone in Africa, and Alaska.

Greenland experienced several abrupt and brutal climate changes during the last ice age. But even during the coldest periods a blob of warm surface water existed nearby.

For long time freshwater has been seen as one potential cause for rapid climate change in the North Atlantic – Arctic region – probably most people have heard about the ‘Gulf Stream is slowing down’ scenarios with freshwater leading to sluggish currents and less heat being transported to northern high latitudes. In our two recent studies we were able to show that while such a scenario is plausible in the North Atlantic, the ocean response in the Arctic is quite the opposite.

In recent years, climate scientists have grown increasingly concerned that massive rivers of ice flowing into the ocean from Greenland and Antarctica could accelerate as the planet warms, leading to a catastrophic collapse of Earth's ice sheets. But a new article presents an alternative narrative of the manner in which an ice sheet can disappear.

Predicting the expected loss of ice sheet mass is difficult due to the complexity of modeling ice sheet behavior. To better understand this loss, a team of researchers has been improving the reliability and efficiency of computational models that describe ice sheet behavior and dynamics.