Science Daily

Alaska's beavers are profiting from climate change, and spreading rapidly. In just a few years' time, they have not only expanded into many tundra regions where they'd never been seen before; they're also building more and more dams in their new homes, creating a host of new water bodies.

The history of our planet has been written, among other things, in the periodic reversal of its magnetic poles. Scientists propose a new means of reading this historic record: in ice. Their findings could lead to a refined probing ice cores and, in the future, might be applied to understanding the magnetic history of other bodies in our solar system, including Mars and Jupiter's moon Europa.

Ancestors of a distinctive pollinating bee found across Australia probably originated in tropical Asian countries, islands in the south-west Pacific or greater Oceania region, ecology researchers claim. Describing the likely dispersal corridor for the ancestral lineage of the bee genus Homalictus will help understand the social evolution of the vibrant halictine bees, researchers say.

Using state-of-the-art ocean robots and scientific sensors attached to seals, researchers have for the first time observed small and energetic ocean currents in the Southern Ocean. The currents are critical at controlling the amount of heat and carbon moving between the ocean and the atmosphere -- information vital for understanding our global climate and how it may change in the future.

Melting of Arctic ice due to climate change has exposed more sea surface to an atmosphere with higher concentrations of carbon dioxide. Scientists have long suspected this trend would raise CO2 in Arctic Ocean water. Now researchers have determined that, indeed, CO2 levels are rising in water across wide swaths of the Arctic Ocean's Canada Basin.

Scientists and historians have found evidence connecting an unexplained period of extreme cold in ancient Rome with an unlikely source: a massive eruption of Alaska's Okmok volcano, located on the opposite side of the Earth. A new study uses an analysis of tephra (volcanic ash) found in Arctic ice cores to link this period of extreme climate in the Mediterranean with the caldera-forming eruption of Alaska's Okmok volcano in 43 BCE.

A new study has highlighted the crucial role that sea ice across the Southern Ocean played in controlling atmospheric carbon dioxide levels during times of past climate change, and could provide a critical resource for developing future climate change models.

New research findings underline the crucial role that sea ice throughout the Southern Ocean played for atmospheric CO2 in times of rapid climate change in the past. An international team has shown that the seasonal growth and destruction of sea ice in a warming world increases the biological productivity of the seas around Antarctica by extracting carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in the deep ocean.

A group of researchers used novel and powerful methods to disentangle the patterns of parallel evolution of freshwater three-spined sticklebacks at different geographic scales across their distribution range. The group concludes that the conditions under which striking genome-wide patterns of genetic parallelism can occur may in fact be far from common - perhaps even exceptional.

Scientists have discovered that the summer sea ice in the Weddell Sea sector of Antarctica has decreased by one million square kilometers -- an area twice the size of Spain -- in the last five years, with implications for the marine ecosystem.

A study has examined fossil reefs near to the now-submerged Red Sea shorelines that marked prehistoric migratory routes from Africa to Arabia. The findings suggest this coast offered the resources necessary to act as a gateway out of Africa during periods of little rainfall when other food sources were scarce.

Ice melts in the Arctic Ocean were thought to be drawing large amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, acting as a carbon sink and helping to mitigate greenhouse gases. But new research shows that may not be the case in all areas, particularly in the Canada Basin, where the carbon sink is shrinking, inhibiting the ocean's ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into the deep ocean and store it there.

How could the planet be covered entirely in ice -- a state known as 'Snowball Earth'-- and still give rise to multicellular life? The transition to such icy periods may not have been as abrupt as previously thought, new research shows.

The discovery of a tiny insect fossil in Western Canada is unearthing big questions about the global movement of animals across deep time. The fossil, estimated to be 50 million years old, is the latest in a pattern of discoveries that are leading experts to contemplate a Canada-Australia connection not previously considered.

Picture 500 million cars stacked in rows. That's how much carbon -- about 1,000 petagrams, or one billion metric tons - -is locked away in Arctic permafrost.

All the new coupled climate models project that the area of sea ice around Antarctica will decline by 2100, but the amount of loss varies considerably between the emissions scenarios.

A new article provides a new explanation for two recent strange events that occurred in Antarctica -- high-energy neutrinos appearing to come up out of the Earth on their own accord and head skyward.

Researchers have studied presolar materials that landed on a planet-like body. Their findings may help solve the mystery: where did all the water on Earth come from?

250-million-year-old cracks in the seafloor feed greenhouse gas methane into giant craters in the Barents Sea. More than 100 craters, presently expelling enormous amounts of the greenhouse gas into the ocean, are found in the area.

A common message in use to convey the seriousness of climate change to the public is: 'Carbon dioxide levels are higher today than they have been for the past one million years!' This new study used a novel method to conclude that today's carbon dioxide (CO2) levels are actually higher than they have been for the past 23 million years.