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Ancient pathogens that escape from melting permafrost have real potential to damage microbial communities and might potentially threaten human health, according to a new study.

An international team of linguists and geneticists has achieved a significant breakthrough in our understanding of the origins of Indo-European, a family of languages spoken by nearly half of the world's population.

Arctic terns -- which fly on the longest migrations of any animal on Earth -- may be able to navigate the dangers posed by climate change, new research suggests.

Important ocean currents that redistribute heat, cold and precipitation between the tropics and the northernmost parts of the Atlantic region will shut down around the year 2060 if current greenhouse gas emissions persist. This is the conclusion based on new calculations that contradict the latest report from the IPCC.

A large portion of Greenland was an ice-free tundra landscape -- perhaps covered by trees and roaming woolly mammoths -- in the recent geologic past (about 416,000 years ago), a new study shows. The results help overturn a previous view that much of the Greenland ice sheet persisted for most of the last two and a half million years. Instead, moderate warming, from 424,000 to 374,000 years ago, led to dramatic melting. At that time, the melting of Greenland caused at least five feet of sea level rise, despite atmospheric levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide being far lower than today (280 vs. 420 ppm). This indicates that the ice sheet on Greenland may be more sensitive to human-caused climate change than previously understood -- and will be vulnerable to irreversible, rapid melting in coming centuries.

A new radar technique developed by a graduate student allows imaging of the upper few feet of ice sheets on Earth and icy worlds. The technique uses instruments on airplanes or satellites to survey large regions quickly. The upper few feet of ice sheets are important for measuring melt on Earth or looking for habitable environments on icy worlds. Previous airborne or satellite techniques could not image this narrow region in detail.

An international team of researchers has chosen the location which best represents the beginnings of what could be a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene Working Group have put forward Crawford Lake, in Canada, as a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) for the Anthropocene. A GSSP is an internationally agreed-upon reference point to show the start of a new geological period or epoch in layers of rock that have built up through the ages.

Scientists in Japan have used a global climate model to show that dust from land without snow cover in the Arctic is a major source of particles that form ice crystals in Arctic low-level clouds. This finding could help improve predictions of Arctic warming, which is suggested to be much faster than in other parts of the world.

As the Arctic warms, shrinking glaciers are exposing bubbling groundwater springs which could provide an underestimated source of the potent greenhouse gas methane, finds new research.

Understanding when and where ships are entering areas of Arctic sea ice can help better understand the potential impacts of vessel traffic in the region.

An El Niño event has officially begun. The climate phenomenon, which originates in the tropical Pacific and occurs in intervals of a few years will shape weather across the planet for the next year or more and give rise to various climatic extremes. El Niño-like conditions can also occur on longer time scales of decades or centuries. This has been shown to have occurred in the recent past.

A new survey shows that the largely Indigenous population of Greenland is highly aware that the climate is changing, and far more likely than people in other Arctic nations to say they are personally affected. Yet, many do not blame human influences -- especially those living traditional subsistence lifestyles most directly hit by the impacts of rapidly wasting ice and radical changes in weather.

Pioneering analysis of deep-sea corals has overturned the idea that ocean currents contributed to increasing global levels of carbon dioxide in the air over the past 11,000 years.

Researchers have found that the cooling effect that volcanic eruptions have on Earth's surface temperature is likely underestimated by a factor of two, and potentially as much as a factor of four, in standard climate projections.

A team of glaciologists set out to quantify how much ice melt occurred on Antarctica's ice shelves from 1980 to 2021. The results might seem to be good news for the region, but the researchers say there's no cause for celebration just yet.

A scientific team has discovered the earliest-known evidence of freshwater fishing by ancient people in the Americas. The research offers a glimpse at how early humans used a changing landscape and could offer insight for modern people facing similar changes.

By pumping water out of the ground and moving it elsewhere, humans have shifted such a large mass of water that the Earth tilted nearly 80 centimeters (31.5 inches) east between 1993 and 2010 alone, according to a new study.

Climate change in current times has created problems for humans such as wildfires and reduced growing seasons for staple crops, spilling over into economic effects. Many researchers predict, and have observed in published literature, an increase in interpersonal violence and homicides when temperatures increase. Violence during climatic change has evidence in history, anthropology researchers say.

Research team predicts Arctic without ice by the end of 2030s if current increasing rate of greenhouse gas emission continues.

A survey of groundwater samples drawn from aquifers beneath more than 80,000 square miles of Canadian prairie reveals ancient groundwaters harbor not only diverse and active microbial communities, but also unexpectedly large numbers of microbial cells. Strikingly, some of these microbes seem to produce 'dark oxygen' (in the absence of sunlight) in such abundance that the oxygen may nourish not only those microbes, but may leak into the environment and support other oxygen-reliant microbes that can't produce it themselves.