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Revealing winners and losers in projected future climates

Science Daily - Fri, 07/10/2020 - 09:09
Evolutionary biologists have shown that resilience or vulnerability to future climates is influenced by the thermal conditions of the climatic regions where species evolved.

A 'regime shift' is happening in the Arctic Ocean

Science Daily - Thu, 07/09/2020 - 13:15
Scientists find the growth of phytoplankton in the Arctic Ocean has increased 57 percent over just two decades, enhancing its ability to soak up carbon dioxide. While once linked to melting sea ice, the increase is now propelled by rising concentrations of tiny algae.

Texas will face driest conditions of the last 1,000 years

Science Daily - Wed, 07/08/2020 - 11:14
Texas' future climate will feature drier summers and decreasing water supplies for much of the state for the remainder of the 21st century -- likely resulting in the driest conditions the state has endured in the last 1,000 years, according to a team of researchers.

Climate change may cause extreme waves in Arctic

Science Daily - Tue, 07/07/2020 - 10:32
Extreme ocean surface waves with a devastating impact on coastal communities and infrastructure in the Arctic may become larger due to climate change, according to a new study.

MOSAiC floe: Sea ice formation

Science Daily - Sun, 07/05/2020 - 17:59
The New Siberian Islands were the birthplace of the MOSAiC floe: the sea ice in which the research vessel Polarstern is now drifting through the Arctic was formed off the coast of the archipelago, which separates the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea to the north of Siberia, in December 2018.

Extreme warming of the South Pole

Science Daily - Tue, 06/30/2020 - 10:13
The South Pole has been warming at more than three times the global average over the past 30 years, according to recent research.

Major new paleoclimatology study shows global warming has upended 6,500 years of cooling

Science Daily - Tue, 06/30/2020 - 06:20
Over the past 150 years, global warming has more than undone the global cooling that occurred over the past six millennia, according to a major new study. The findings show that the millennial-scale global cooling began approximately 6,500 years ago when the long-term average global temperature topped out at around 0.7°C warmer than the mid-19th century.

Beavers gnawing away at the permafrost

Science Daily - Mon, 06/29/2020 - 19:20
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 magnetic history of ice

Science Daily - Mon, 06/29/2020 - 11:02
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.

Native bees' exotic origins reveal cross-pollination

Science Daily - Fri, 06/26/2020 - 10:48
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.

Unknown currents in Southern Ocean have been observed with help of seals

Science Daily - Fri, 06/26/2020 - 10:47
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.

Changes in water of Canadian Arctic

Science Daily - Wed, 06/24/2020 - 16:20
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.

Eruption of Alaska's Okmok volcano linked to period of extreme cold in ancient Rome

Science Daily - Mon, 06/22/2020 - 14:25
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.

Research sheds new light on the role of sea ice in controlling atmospheric carbon levels

Science Daily - Mon, 06/22/2020 - 12:30
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.

Ice core research in Antarctica sheds new light on role of sea ice in carbon balance

Science Daily - Mon, 06/22/2020 - 12:29
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.

Parallel evolution in three-spined sticklebacks

Science Daily - Mon, 06/22/2020 - 12:29
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.

Antarctic sea ice loss explained in new study

Science Daily - Wed, 06/17/2020 - 11:14
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.

Seafood helped prehistoric people migrate out of Africa

Science Daily - Tue, 06/16/2020 - 12:58
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.

A carbon sink shrinks in the Arctic

Science Daily - Mon, 06/15/2020 - 14:21
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.

Clues to a dramatic chapter of Earth's geological history

Science Daily - Mon, 06/15/2020 - 13:09
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.

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