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The quest to discover what drove the last, long-term global climate shift on Earth, which took place around a million years ago, has taken a new, revealing twist.

Southwest forests may decline in productivity on average as much as 75 percent over the 21st century as climate warms. The finding is based on a treasure trove of about 20,000 unanalyzed tree cores discovered in a Utah laboratory about a decade ago.

Despite the looming ecological consequences, glacier motion remains poorly understood. The bedrock, the ice-bed interface and the water-filled cavities all affect friction and influence how the ice will flow, but studying these poses challenges -- remote radar sensing can track glacial movement, but it can't measure detailed properties of the ice and rock.

Climate change could have devastating effects on vulnerable residents in the Andes mountains and the Tibetan plateau, according to researchers who have been studying glaciers in those areas for decades.

When making sense of the massive amount of information packed into an ice core, scientists face a forensic challenge: how best to separate the useful information from the corrupt. Tools from information theory, a branch of complexity science, can quickly flag which segments, in over a million data points, require further investigation.

Asia's high mountain glaciers are flowing more slowly in response to widespread ice loss, affecting freshwater availability downstream in India, Pakistan and China, a new study finds.

An increase in snowfall accumulation over Antarctica during the 20th century mitigated sea level rise by 0.4 inches. However, Antarctica's additional ice mass gained from snowfall makes up for just about a third of its current ice loss.

Researchers studying ancient corncobs found at a Native American archeological site have recovered a 1,000-year-old virus, the oldest plant virus ever reported.

NOAA's annual report card on the Arctic, released today, shows that the Arctic region experienced the second-warmest air temperatures ever recorded; the second-lowest overall sea-ice coverage; lowest recorded winter ice in the Bering Sea; and earlier plankton blooms due to early melting of sea ice in the Bering Sea.

With each pass of the ICESat-2 satellite, the mission is adding to datasets tracking Earth's rapidly changing ice.

Our future on Earth may also be our past. Researchers show that humans are reversing a long-term cooling trend tracing back at least 50 million years. And it's taken just two centuries.

Ozone layer depletion has increased snowfall over Antarctica in recent decades, partially mitigating the ongoing loss of the continent's ice sheet mass, new research finds.

The production of chlorofluorocarbons, which damage the ozone layer, has been banned as far as possible. However, other substances can also tear holes in the ozone layer in combination with ice particles, such as those found in clouds. Researchers have discovered a possible mechanism for this.

New research has found that increases in the rate at which Arctic sea ice grows in the winter may have partially slowed down the decline of the Arctic sea ice cover.

Surface melting across Greenland's mile-thick ice sheet began increasing in the mid-19th century and then ramped up dramatically during the 20th and early 21st centuries, showing no signs of abating, according to new research.

The pattern of uneven sea level rise over the last quarter century has been driven in part by human-caused climate change, not just natural variability, according to a new study.

A new study reveals that water storage declines in global landlocked basins has aggravated local water stress and caused potential sea level rise.

In August 2012, the Jakobshavn Glacier was flowing and breaking off into the sea at record speeds, three times faster than in previous years. As the glacier flowed faster, it became thinner and more unstable and in a twist, a pileup of thick ice replenished the glacier's terminus, slowing it down again. New work explaining the fast-then-slow movement of Jakobshavn may help scientists better predict how tidewater glaciers contribute to sea level rise.

Blue whales have been dropping pitch incrementally over several decades, but the cause has remained a mystery. A new study finds a seasonal variation in the whales' pitch correlated with breaking sea ice in the southern Indian Ocean. The new research also extends the mysterious long-term falling pitch to related baleen whales and rules out noise pollution as the cause of the global long-term trend, according to the study's authors.

The chances of survival for the offspring of important fish species will dramatically worsen, if the 1.5 ° C target of the Paris Climate Agreement is not achieved.