Science Daily

Two new studies refute the hypothesis that one or more comets/bolides struck North America approximately 12,900 years ago triggering rapid climate change and the start of the Younger Dryas period.

Arctic lakes, covered with ice during the winter months, are melting earlier each spring, research has found. The team, who monitored 13,300 lakes using satellite imagery, have shown that on average ice is breaking up one day earlier per year, based on a 14-year period between 2000 and 2013.

Policymakers and scientists must act quickly and collaboratively to help coastal areas better prepare for rising sea levels globally, say climate change experts.

Scientists documented a spring pulse in northern Alaska in 2014 that included carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to 46 percent of the net carbon dioxide that is absorbed in the summer months and methane emissions that added 6 percent to summer fluxes. What's more, recent climate trends may make such emissions more frequent, the scientists conclude.

As Earth warms, much of the extra heat is stored in the planet's ocean. Monitoring the magnitude of that heat content is difficult, but a surprising feature of the tides could help. Scientists are developing a new way to use satellite observations of magnetic fields to measure heat stored in the ocean.

From the Arctic to the Mojave Desert, terrestrial and marine habitats are quickly changing. Satellites are particularly well-suited to observe habitat transformation and help scientists forecast what animals might do next, suggest experts.

Oil spills could be cleaned up in the icy, rough waters of the Arctic with a chemically modified sawdust material that absorbs up to five times its weight in oil and stays afloat for at least four months.

Neanderthals kept coming back to a coastal cave site in Jersey from at least 180,000 years ago until around 40,000 years ago. researchers report. As part of a re-examination of La Cotte de St Brelade and its surrounding landscape, archaeologists have taken a fresh look at artefacts and mammoth bones originally excavated from within the site's granite cliffs in the 1970s.

An international team of researchers has concluded that the Antarctic Ice Sheet actually plays a major role in regional and global climate variability -- a discovery that may also help explain why sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere has been increasing despite the warming of the rest of the Earth.

The East Antarctic ice sheet is more vulnerable than expected, due to a strong wind that brings warm air and blows away the snow. Scientists combined climate models, satellite observations and on-site measurements.

Mountain glaciers move slowly and it has been hard to pin an individual glacier's retreat to a change in global climate. A new method finds that for most of the glaciers studied, the observed retreat is more than 99 percent likely due to climate change.

Often portrayed as pulling Santa’s sleigh, reindeer are a Christmas staple. Now, ecologists have found that reindeer are shrinking due to the impact of climate change on their food supplies.

On July 17, 2016, more than 70 million tons of ice broke off from the Aru glacier in the mountains of western Tibet and tumbled into a valley below, taking the lives of nine nomadic yak herders living there. Researchers conducted a kind of forensic analysis of the disaster, and the cause was likely climate change.

In the atmosphere, feldspar particles act as ice nuclei that make ice crystals grow in clouds and enable precipitation. The reason was found with the help of electron microscopy observations and molecular dynamics computer modeling. The ice nucleus proper is a quasi-hidden crystal surface of the feldspar that is exposed at surface defects only. The researchers present their findings that are of major relevance to the understanding of cloud and precipitation formation in Science.

Researchers create a global map of soil pH and illuminate how it changes between wet and dry climates.

Scientists have found evidence in a chunk of bedrock drilled from nearly two miles below the summit of the Greenland ice sheet that the sheet nearly disappeared for an extended time in the last million years or so. The finding casts doubt on assumptions that Greenland has been relatively stable during the recent geological past, and implies that global warming could tip it into decline more precipitously than previously thought.

First-of-their-kind studies provide new insight into the deep history of the Greenland Ice Sheet, looking back millions of years farther than previous techniques allowed. However, the two studies present some strongly contrasting evidence about how Greenland's ice sheet may have responded to past climate change.

New research examines how vertebrate species in the eastern United States ranging from snakes to mammals to birds responded to climate change over the last 500,000 years. The study reveals that contrary to expectation, the massive glaciers that expanded and contracted across the region affected animal populations in different ways at different times. The analysis provides a window into how animals might react to any kind of climate change, whether glacial cycles or global warming.

Unusually high air temperatures and a warm ocean have led to a record low Arctic sea ice extent for November, according to scientists. In the Southern Hemisphere, Antarctic sea ice extent also hit a record low for the month, caused by moderately warm temperatures and a rapid shift in circumpolar winds.

Scientists have sorted and studied thousands of clam shells to build a 1,000-year record of ocean conditions and climate changes at a spot just off North Iceland.