Science Daily

For the first time, researchers have attempted to measure all the material leaving and entering a mountain range over more than a million years, and discovered that erosion caused by glaciation during ice ages can, in the right circumstances, wear down mountains faster than plate tectonics can build them.

Massive volcanic eruptions could cause localized warming that might destabilize some of the world's biggest ice sheets, according to new research.

By studying rocks at different elevations beside the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, scientists have concluded that a period of rapid glacier thinning occurred in the recent geological past, and persisted for several centuries.

Lush greenery rich in Douglas fir and hemlock trees covers the Triangle Lake valley of the Oregon Coast Range. Today, however, geologists are more focused on sediment samples dating back 50,000 years and which show the region, not covered by glaciers in the last ice age, was frost-covered and endured erosion rates must higher than those seen today.

The world-famous Australian reef is providing an effective barrier against landslide-induced tsunamis, new research shows. An underwater landslide has been found to have occurred some 20,000 years ago, causing a tsunami. Similar submarine landslides could occur without our knowledge but the Great Barrier Reef can absorb some of that potential wave energy.

NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne survey of polar ice, recently finalized two overlapping campaigns at both of Earth's poles. Down south, the mission observed a big drop in the height of two glaciers situated in the Antarctic Peninsula, while in the north it collected much needed measurements of the status of land and sea ice at the end of the Arctic summer melt season.

Planet Earth experienced a global climate shift in the late 1980s on an unprecedented scale, fueled by anthropogenic warming and a volcanic eruption, according to new research. Scientists say that a major step change, or 'regime shift,' in Earth's biophysical systems, from the upper atmosphere to the depths of the ocean and from the Arctic to Antarctica, was centered around 1987, and was sparked by the El Chichón volcanic eruption in Mexico five years earlier.

Erosion caused by glaciation during ice ages can, in the right circumstances, wear down mountains faster than plate tectonics can build them, groundbreaking new research has shown.

Drifting snow is a complicated and poorly understood process that is important to fathom because it accounts for a major fraction of wind-blown snow redistribution within polar and mountainous regions of the world. To understand it better, a group researchers is exploring mass and momentum fluxes during drifting snow events, pursuing an improved understanding of the link between snow cover erosion and deposition.

The warming of arctic waters in the wake of climate change is likely to produce radical changes in the marine habitats of the High North. This is indicated by data from long-term observations in the Fram Strait.

A new study by scientists in the UK and France has found that Antarctic ice sheet collapse will have serious consequences for sea level rise over the next two hundred years, though not as much as some have suggested.

A new study has found a link between abrupt ocean warming at the end of the last ice age and the sudden onset of low-oxygen, or hypoxic conditions that led to vast marine dead zones.

Molecular-based moisture indicators, remains of midges and climate simulations have provided climate scientists with the final piece to one of the most enduring puzzles of the last Ice Age.

Pingos are spectacular landforms associated with permafrost in the Arctic. They are circular or elliptical formations protruding from the level ground of the tundra, and can be up to 60 meters high. In essence, they are huge lumps of ice covered with soil. Similar structures are now found strewn on the ocean floor in the Arctic shallow seas.

Ancient climates on Earth may have been more sensitive to carbon dioxide than was previously thought, according to new research. Scientists examined nahcolite crystals found in Colorado's Green River Formation, formed 50 million years old during a hothouse climate. They found that carbon dioxide levels during this time may have been as low as 680 parts per million (ppm), nearly half the 1,125 ppm predicted by previous experiments. The new data suggests that past predictions significantly underestimate the impact of greenhouse warming and that Earth's climate may be more sensitive to increased carbon dioxide than was once thought.

Researchers argue that both ocean scientists and world leaders should pay more attention to how communities are experiencing, adapting to and even influencing changes in the world's oceans.

A glacier in northeast Greenland that holds enough water to raise global sea levels by more than 18 inches has come unmoored from a stabilizing sill and is crumbling into the North Atlantic Ocean. Losing mass at a rate of 5 billion tons per year, glacier Zachariae Isstrom entered a phase of accelerated retreat in 2012.

Dust begets life, and Earth's atmosphere 300 million years ago was perhaps the dustiest of all time, with large consequences for carbon cycling and the climate system. In a new article geologists examine the bioavailability of iron in dust from Earth's penultimate icehouse of the late Paleozoic. Dust links to carbon because of the iron -- a key nutrient for nearly all life, so atmospheric dust acts as a fertilizer.

A new study that analyzed four California science textbooks from major publishers found they position climate change as a debate over differing opinions. Contrary to the near majority of climate scientists who cite scientific data and evidence of human-caused climate change, the textbooks present the topic as uncertain, that humans may or may not cause it, and that its unclear if we need immediate mitigating action, the researchers found.

The anticipated melting of the massive West Antarctic Ice Sheet could be slowed by two big factors that are largely overlooked in current computer models, according to a new study. The findings suggest that the impact on global sea levels from the retreating ice sheet could be less drastic -- or at least more gradual -- than recent computer simulations have indicated.