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Rapid changes in terrain are taking place in Canada's high Arctic polar deserts due to increases in summer air temperatures.

Newly discovered layers of ice buried a mile beneath Mars' north pole are the remnants of ancient polar ice sheets and could be one of the largest water reservoirs on the planet, according to scientists. The layers of ice are a record of past climate on Mars in much the same way tree rings are a record of climate on Earth.

New research shows the importance of how the three main river valleys in China contributed to Han genetic diversity.

Using a technique called structured expert judgment, researchers asked 22 ice sheet experts to estimate plausible ranges for future sea level rise due to the projected melting of each of the Greenland, West Antarctic and East Antarctic ice sheets under low and high future global temperature rise scenarios.

New research paints an intricate picture of Earth's mantle as a geochemically diverse mosaic, far different from the relatively uniform lavas that eventually reach the surface.

In only 25 years, ocean melting has caused ice thinning to spread across West Antarctica so rapidly that a quarter of its glacier ice is now affected, according to a new study.

Changes to alpine streams fed by glaciers and snowfields due to a warming climate threaten to dramatically alter the types of bacteria and other microbes in those streams, according to new research. But streams that are fed by underground ice insulated by rock -- called 'icy seeps' -- offer some hope that the impact of climate change will be less severe in some areas.

An innovative use of instruments that measure the ocean near Antarctica has helped scientists to get a clearer picture of how the ocean is melting the Antarctic ice sheet. Until now, most measurements in Antarctica were made during summer, leaving winter conditions, when the sea freezes over with ice, largely unknown.

Most Europeans descend from a combination of European hunter-gatherers, Anatolian early farmers, and Steppe herders. But only European speakers of Uralic languages like Estonian and Finnish also have DNA from ancient Siberians. Now, with the help of ancient DNA samples, researchers suggest that these languages may have arrived from Siberia by the beginning of the Iron Age, about 2,500 years ago, rather than evolving in Northern Europe.

A stand of bald cypress trees in North Carolina, including one least 2,624 years old, are the oldest known living trees in eastern North America and the oldest wetland tree species in the world. They show evidence of severe flooding and drought during colonial and pre-colonial times.

Abrupt climate change some 8,000 years ago led to a dramatic decline in early South American populations, suggests new research.

Scientists have employed a new method utilizing tsunami signals to calculate the calving magnitude of an ocean-terminating glacier in northwestern Greenland, uncovering correlations between calving flux and environmental factors such as air temperature, ice speed, and ocean tides.

Coral experts around the world said it was impossible to extract a multi-century record of El Niño events. But now a persistent effort has produced the world's first 400-year long record of El Niño events. And the changes researchers have found to El Niños in recent decades are startling.

Forest fires are causing snow to melt earlier in the season, a trend occurring across the western US that may affect water supplies and trigger even more fires, according to a new study.

A study recently found that explosive volcanic eruptions were at least three to eight times more frequent during the peak of the Late Paleozoic Ice Age (about 360 to 260 million years ago).

Researchers have assessed abrupt thaw studies across the permafrost zone to estimate the overall effect. They found carbon emissions have the potential to double the climate feedback associated with permafrost thawing because abrupt thaw releases more methane. It will also have drastic effects on landscape, from altering traditional travel and hunting patterns in the North, to causing costly infrastructure damage to roads and rail lines.

Glaciers are set to disappear completely from almost half of World Heritage sites if business-as-usual emissions continue.

Atmospheric circulation changes about 6 million years ago dried the South American climate and fueled the expansion of grasslands and grass-eating mammals, according to new research.

An international team of scientists has found part of the world's largest ice shelf is melting 10 times faster than the overall ice shelf average, due to solar heating of the surrounding ocean surface.

When India slammed into Asia, the collision changed the configuration of the continents, the landscape, global climate and more. Now scientists have identified one more effect: the oxygen in the world's oceans increased, altering the conditions for life. They created an unprecedented nitrogen record destined to become one of the fundamental datasets for biogeochemical history of Earth.