Science Daily

A new review of silicon cycling in glacial environments highlights the potential importance of glaciers in exporting silicon to downstream ecosystems.

Arctic sea ice could disappear completely through September each summer if average global temperatures increase by as little as 2 degrees, according to a new study.

Future warming can accelerate the disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet. A large fraction of the ice will enter the Southern Ocean in form of icebergs, which melt and provide a cooling and freshening effect to the warmer and denser ocean water. This process will increase the formation of sea-ice and shift winds and ocean currents. The overall effect is a slowdown in the magnitude of human-induced Southern Hemispheric warming and sea-level rise, according to a new study.

The dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice through climate change has only a 'minimal influence' on severe cold winter weather across Asia and North America, new research has shown.

In addition to 10 years of data on the flow of heat in the Arctic ocean seafloor, researchers have published an analysis of that data using modern seismic data.

People in Ethiopia did not live in low valleys during the last ice age. Instead they lived high up in the inhospitable Bale Mountains where they had enough water, built tools out of obsidian and relied mainly on giant mole rats for nourishment.Researchers provides the first evidence that our African ancestors had already settled in the mountains during the Palaeolithic period, about 45,000 years ago.

A new study provides a 110-year record of the total volume of Arctic sea ice, using early US ships' voyages to verify the earlier part of the record. The current sea ice volume and rate of loss are unprecedented in the 110-year record.

Every several hundred thousand years or so, Earth's magnetic field dramatically shifts and reverses its polarity. Geologist found that the most recent field reversal, some 770,000 years ago, took at least 22,000 years to complete. That's several times longer than previously thought, and the results further call into question controversial findings that some reversals could occur within a human lifetime.

Temperature data inferred from plankton fossils from the Pliocene, an era with CO2 levels similar to today's, allowed a team to rectify discrepancies between climate models and other proxy temperature measurements.

Getting reliable precipitation data from the past has proven difficult, as is predicting regional changes for climate models in the present. A combination of isotope techniques may help resolve both.

Researchers have developed a new method to allow for the first direct measurement of the submarine melt rate of a tidewater glacier, and, in doing so, they concluded that current theoretical models may be underestimating glacial melt by up to two orders of magnitude.

Five large volcanic eruptions occurred in the early 19th century. They caused cooling and -- as a new study shows -- to drying in the monsoon regions and glaciers growing in the Alps. The study shows that the pre-industrial climate was not constant: if one takes this cold period as the starting point for current global warming, the climate has already warmed up more than assumed in the current discussions.

A new reconstruction of global average surface temperature change over the past 2,000 years has identified the main causes for decade-scale climate changes. The new temperature reconstruction also largely agrees with climate model simulations of the same time period. This suggests that current climate models accurately represent the contributions of various influences on global climate change -- and are capable of correctly predicting future climate warming.

In contrast to pre-industrial climate fluctuations, current, anthropogenic climate change is occurring across the whole world at the same time, according to new studies. In addition, the speed of global warming is higher than it has been in at least 2,000 years.

A new study reveals how local factors influence the Ross Ice Shelf's stability, refining predictions of how it will change and influence sea rise in the future.

New radar technology allowed geoscientists to look at Greenland's dynamic ice-ocean interface that drives sea level rise.

Warming temperatures and changes in ocean circulation and salinity are driving the breakup of ice sheets in Antarctica, but a new study suggests that intense storms may help push the system over the edge.

The ice sheet covering West Antarctica is at risk of sliding off into the ocean. While further ice-sheet destabilisation in other parts of the continent may be limited by a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, the slow, yet inexorable loss of West Antarctic ice is likely to continue even after climate warming is stabilised. A collapse might take hundreds of years but will raise sea levels worldwide by more than three meters.

Over the past 22 years, sea levels in the Arctic have risen an average of 2.2 millimeters per year. This is the conclusion of a research team after evaluating 1.5 billion radar measurements of various satellites using specially developed algorithms.

New research suggest that regions of the Martian surface could be made habitable with a material -- silica aerogel -- that mimics Earth's atmospheric greenhouse effect. Through modeling and experiments, the researchers show that a 2- to 3-centimeter-thick shield of silica aerogel could transmit enough visible light for photosynthesis, block hazardous ultraviolet radiation, and raise temperatures underneath permanently above the melting point of water, all without the need for any internal heat source.