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All living toothed whales rely upon echoes of their own calls to navigate and hunt underwater, a skill that works best in conjunction with high-frequency hearing. Now, researchers who studied one of the best-preserved ears of any ancient whale ever discovered find that whales' high-frequency hearing abilities arose earlier than anticipated.

Clusters of hunter-gatherers spent much of the late Stone Age working out the basics of farming on the fertile lands of Turkey before taking this knowledge to Europe. In an analysis of ancient genomes, researchers report that two waves of early European settlers belonged to the same gene pool as farmers in Turkey -- genealogy that can be traced back to some of the first people to cultivate crops outside of Mesopotamia.

Scientists have revealed how a tiny Arctic microbe, crucial to shaping the surface of glaciers, survives in such extreme conditions.

New observations show that warm deep water reaches the large Filchner ice shelf in the southern Weddell Sea.

New research by a forest landscape ecology professor shows that organisms will face more hardships as they relocate when climate change makes their current homes uninhabitable.

In the future, people in the Himalayas will have to contend with flooding, while those in the Andes will have longer dry spells and less water. These are the conclusions drawn by researchers, who have used measurement data and climate models to closely examine water balance in both of these mountain ranges.

New research has found methylmercury -- a potent neurotoxin - in sea ice in the Southern Ocean. The results are the first to show that sea-ice bacteria can change mercury into methylmercury, a more toxic form that can contaminate the marine environment, including fish and birds.

A new study by an international team of scientists reveals the exact timing of the onset of the modern monsoon pattern in the Maldives 12.9 million years ago, and its connection to past climate changes and coral reefs in the region. The analysis of sediment cores provides direct physical evidence of the environmental conditions that sparked the monsoon conditions that exist today around the low-lying island nation and the Indian subcontinent.

Variations in the ability of sand particles kicked into the atmosphere from deserts in the Middle East to absorb heat can change the intensity of the Indian Summer Monsoon, according to new research.

A new NASA-led study finds that almost one-fifth of the global warming that has occurred in the past 150 years has been missed by historical records due to quirks in how global temperatures were recorded. The study explains why projections of future climate based solely on historical records estimate lower rates of warming than predictions from climate models.

There is some consolation in how the fossil fuel-induced climatic changes we increasingly experience through droughts and storm surges are playing out. It could have happened sooner, and therefore already have been much worse.

The project’s first mission to protect the world’s ice memory will be launched in France on 15 August, in the Mont Blanc massif. Researchers from the CNRS, the IRD and the Université Grenoble Alpes will be extracting ice samples from the Col du Dôme, ultimately for storage in Antarctica.

Groundwater discharge that flows into the Upper Colorado River Basin varies in response to drought, which is likely due to aquifer systems that contain relatively young groundwater, according to a new study.

The rapid warming of the Antarctic Peninsula, which occurred from the early-1950s to the late 1990s, has paused. Stabilization of the ozone hole along with natural climate variability were significant in bringing about the change. Together these influences have now caused the peninsula to enter a temporary cooling phase. Temperatures remain higher than measured during the middle of the 20th Century and glacial retreat is still taking place.

Tree-ring dating and radiocarbon research has established an absolute timeline for the archaeological, historical and environmental record in Mesopotamia from the early second millennium B.C.

Two key climate change indicators -- global surface temperatures and Arctic sea ice extent -- have broken numerous records through the first half of 2016, according to NASA analyses of ground-based observations and satellite data.

This summer, with sea ice across the Arctic Ocean shrinking to below-average levels, a NASA airborne survey of polar ice just completed its first flights. Its target: aquamarine pools of melt water on the ice surface that may be accelerating the overall sea ice retreat.

How will the melting of ice in Greenland affect our climate? In order to gain an idea how that process might look like, researchers have taken a look into the past. In the early Holocene period -- approximately 11,700 to 8,000 years ago -- a large ice sheet melted in North America. By analyzing dripstones in caves (speleothems) and using computer simulations, an international team reconstructed the consequences.

Scientists have overcome a seeming weakness of global climate models. They had previously not been able to simulate the extreme warm period of the Eocene.

Scientists have made a scientific breakthrough by measuring the oxygen content of Earth's ancient atmosphere. They discovered that gases trapped by halite (rock salt) during crystallization may contain atmospheric gases, among them oxygen.