Science Daily

How are warming temperatures and a loss of sea ice affecting polar bears and their marine mammal prey in the Arctic? A York University-led research team used a novel approach to the question by monitoring what polar bears eat across Nunavut and where they are catching their prey.

Climate 'tipping points' can be better understood and predicted using climate change data taken from the ancient past, new research shows.

Lakes in the Northern Hemisphere are warming six times faster since 1992 than any other time period in the last 100 years, new research has found.

While analyzing some of the world's oldest colored gemstones, researchers discovered carbon residue that was once ancient life, encased in a 2.5 billion-year-old ruby.

Slower ocean circulation as the result of climate change could intensify extreme cold weather in the U.S., according to new research.

A new study reconstructs the path of frozen trees as they made their way across the Arctic Ocean over 500 years, giving scientists a unique look into changes in sea ice and currents over the last half millennium. By dating and tracing pieces of driftwood on beaches in Svalbard, Norway's archipelago in the Arctic Circle, scientists have determined where these fallen trees floated.

Worldwide, lake temperatures are rising and seasonal ice cover is shorter and thiner. This effects lake ecosystems, drinking water supply and fishing. International research now shows that these global changes in lake temperature and ice cover are not due to natural climate variability. They can only be explained by massive greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution. To demonstrate this, the team has developed multiple computer simulations with models of lakes on a global scale, on which they ran a series of climate models. The researchers found clear similarities between the observed changes in lakes and model simulations of lakes in a climate influenced by greenhouse gas emissions. Besides measuring the historical impact of climate change, the team also analyzed various future climate scenarios.

In May 2020, a hole a little smaller than the state of Rhode Island opened up for two weeks in the Last Ice Area, a million-square-kilometer patch of sea ice north of Greenland and Ellesmere Island that's expected to be the last refuge of ice in a rapidly warming Arctic. The polynya is the first one that has been identified in this part of the Last Ice Area.

A widely accepted theory of Native American origins coming from Japan has been attacked in a new scientific study, which shows that the genetics and skeletal biology 'simply does not match-up.'

With warming climate, summer sea ice in the Arctic has been shrinking fast, and now consistently spans less than half the area it did in the early 1980s. This raises the question: It this keeps up, in the future will year-round sea ice -- and the creatures who need it to survive -- persist anywhere? A new study addresses this question, and the results are daunting.

For more than a decade, a team of researchers and students have studied the dynamics of the Greenland Ice Sheet as it responds to a warming climate. But while much of their focus has been on the importance of water in controlling processes occurring on the ice sheet, their most recent research findings have flipped the order of their thinking. Researchers discovered that changes to the ice sheet have an immediate impact on the groundwater underlying the Greenland island, an area larger than the state of Alaska.

Experiments and modeling work offers new insights into the striking patterns of repeating stones seen in frost-prone landscapes.

An international team of scientists used data from Antarctic ice cores to trace a 700-year old increase in black carbon to an unlikely source: ancient Maori land-burning practices in New Zealand, conducted at a scale that impacted the atmosphere across much of the Southern Hemisphere and dwarfed other preindustrial emissions in the region during the past 2,000 years. Their results make it clear that human activities have impacted Earth's atmosphere and climate earlier and at larger scales than previously known.

Deep in the heart of the Yucatan Peninsula, an ancient mangrove ecosystem flourishes more than 200 kilometers (124 miles) from the nearest ocean. This is unusual because mangroves -- salt-tolerant trees, shrubs, and palms -- are typically found along tropical and subtropical coastlines.

A research team has completed a global population estimate of Weddell seals in Antarctica, showing that there are significantly fewer seals than previously thought. Documenting the seals' population trends over time will help scientists better understand the effects of climate change and commercial fishing.

Scientists used a nuclear dating technique to study the dynamics of the Floridan Aquifer. The findings show the promise of this emerging technique to help understand geological processes and to forecast the effects of climate change on coastal aquifers.

The catastrophic rockslide of February 7, 2021, in India's Dhauli Ganga Valley and the subsequent flood killed at least a hundred people and destroyed two hydroelectric power plants. Researchers traced the disaster minute by minute using data from a network of seismometers. The team posits that seismic networks could be used to establish an early warning system for high mountain regions.

Why did some ancient Khmer and Mesoamerican cities collapse between 900-1500CE, while their rural surrounds continued to prosper? Intentional adaptation to climate changed conditions may be the answer, suggests a new study.

A new study found that the Kuroshio Current Extension is sensitive to global climate change and has the potential to warm greatly with increased carbon dioxide levels.

Ice melange, a slushy mixture of snow and ice chunks, can heal large rifts in Antarctica's ice shelves. Researchers found that a thinning of ice melange may have enabled a Delaware-sized iceberg to break off from the Larsen C ice shelf in 2017. A new article has the scientists' analysis of the dynamics behind large iceberg calving events.