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An international team of researchers has now succeeded in reconstructing changes in rainfall in Central Asia over the past five million years. The information preserved within the sedimentary succession provides the missing link for understanding land-water feedbacks for global climate.

An analysis of sediment cores from the Bering Sea has revealed a recurring relationship between warmer climates and abrupt episodes of low-oxygen 'dead zones' in the subarctic North Pacific Ocean over the past 1.2 million years. The findings provide crucial information for understanding the causes of low oxygen or 'hypoxia' in the North Pacific and for predicting the occurrence of hypoxic conditions in the future.

Experts have experimentally measured the release of iron from the fecal pellets of krill and salps under natural conditions and tested its bioavailability using a natural community of microalgae in the Southern Ocean.

High levels of aviation drive global warming, not only through greenhouse gas emissions, but also through additional clouds, researchers conclude in a new study.

An unexpected discovery suggests that the first humans may have arrived in North America more than 30,000 years ago - nearly 20,000 years earlier than originally thought.

Researchers have conducted the first precise and comprehensive measurements of sea level rises in the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. A new method now makes it possible to determine sea level changes with millimeter accuracy even in coastal areas and in case of sea ice coverage. This is of vital importance for planning protective measures.

Although sun radiation was relatively low, the temperature on the young Earth was warm. An international team of geoscientists has found important clues that high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were responsible for these high temperatures. It only got cooler with the beginning of plate tectonics, as the CO2 was gradually captured and stored on the emerging continents.

A scientific consortium has found that ancient El Niño-like weather patterns were the primary drivers of environmental change in sub-Saharan Africa over the last 620 thousand years - the critical time-frame for the evolution of our species. The group found that these ancient weather patterns had more profound impacts in sub-Saharan Africa than glacial-interglacial cycles more commonly linked to human evolution.

Centuries-old smoke particles preserved in the ice reveal a fiery past in the Southern Hemisphere and shed new light on the future impacts of global climate change.

With global warming decreasing the size of New Zealand's alpine zone, a new study found out what this means for our altitude-loving kea.

shows that a relaxation in the thick aggregate of icebergs floating at the glacier-ocean boundary of the Jakobshavn Isbræ occurs up to an hour before calving events. This finding may help scientists better understand future sea-level rise scenarios and could also help them predict when major episodes of calving are about to occur.

A cross-disciplinary collaboration found that a majority of the U.S. public is supportive of soil carbon storage as a climate change mitigation strategy, particularly when that and similar approaches are seen as 'natural' strategies.

Fishery and aquaculture have given rise to an enormous uniformity in the diversity of bivalves along the more than 18,000 kilometer long Chinese coast, biologists report.

Researchers have found strong evidence that warm ice - that is, ice very close in temperature to zero degrees Celsius - may fracture differently than the kinds of ice typically studied in laboratories or nature. A new study takes a closer look at the phenomenon.

The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, was a short interval of highly elevated global temperatures 56 million years ago that is frequently described as the best ancient analog for present-day climate warming.

New research shows that concentrations of the toxic element mercury in rivers and fjords connected to the Greenland Ice Sheet are comparable to rivers in industrial China, an unexpected finding that is raising questions about the effects of glacial melting in an area that is a major exporter of seafood. 

A global survey of fossil pollen has discovered that the planet's vegetation is changing at least as quickly today as it did when the last ice sheets retreated around 10,000 years ago.

Researchers have detected groundwater beneath a glacier in Greenland for the first time using airborne radar data. If applicable to other glaciers and ice sheets, the technique could allow for more accurate predictions of future sea-level rise.

The work is a global assessment of Earth's 92,033 debris-covered glaciers and shows that debris, taken as a whole, substantially reduces glacier mass loss.

Normally, mountain forests are among the most diverse habitats in alpine regions. Yet, as a team discovered in the Tibetan Plateau, the higher, treeless areas are home to far more species.