Focus: Climate Channel Featured Story 2

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Human-caused climate change is shortening the snow cover period in the Arctic.

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Biologists attempting to conserve and restore denuded environments are limited by their scant knowledge of what those environments looked like before the arrival of humans.

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About 13,000 years ago, a climate crisis caused a global drop in temperatures in the northern hemisphere. This episode of intense cold, known as the Younger Dryas, also caused severe aridity across the Mediterranean basin, which had a major impact on terrestrial and marine ecosystems.

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While conducting a study of Petermann Glacier in northwest Greenland, researchers at the University of California, Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory uncovered a previously unseen way in which the ice and ocean interact. The glaciologists said their findings could mean that the climate community has been vastly underestimating the magnitude of future sea level rise caused by polar ice deterioration.

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There are no plants, and only very few animals: people rarely come here. The large glaciers in Greenland have long been perceived as ice deserts. Gigantic ice sheets where conditions for life are extremely harsh.

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Whether an animal is flying, running or swimming, its traveling speed is limited by how effectively it sheds the excess heat generated by its muscles, according to a new study led by Alexander Dyer from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany published April 18th in the open access journal PLOS Biology.

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In a paper published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters, an international research team composed of scientists affiliated with more than a dozen institutions, including the California Academy of Sciences, propose a first-of-its-kind framework for governments around the world to evaluate their preparedness for—and guide future policies to address—ocean acidification, among the most dire threats to marine ecosystems.

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The "Last Ice Area" north of Greenland and Canada is the last sanctuary of all-year sea ice in this time of rising temperatures caused by climate change.

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Bald Eagles and dairy farmers exist in a mutually beneficial relationship in parts of northwestern Washington State. According to a new study, this "win-win" relationship has been a more recent development, driven by the impact of climate change on eagles' traditional winter diet of salmon carcasses, as well as by increased eagle abundance following decades of conservation efforts.

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Data stored in ice cores dating back 55 years bring new insight into atmospheric levels of a molecule that can significantly affect weather and climate.

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In their new paper for the Geological Society of America journal Geology, Dulcinea Groff and colleagues used radiocarbon ages (kill dates) of previously ice-entombed dead black mosses to reveal that glaciers advanced during three distinct phases in the northern Antarctic Peninsula over the past 1,500 years.

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A new study by Stony Brook University researchers published in the journal Global Change Biology demonstrates that warming waters and heat waves have contributed to the loss of an economically and culturally important fishery, the production of bay scallops.

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Despite recent, torrential rains, most of Southern California remains in a drought.

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As strong winds and torrential rains inundate Australia’s south-eastern coast, new research suggests that high intensity bushfires might not be too far behind, with their dual effects extending damage zones and encroaching on previously low-risk residential areas.

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An international group of marine scientists has published a letter in Science that is a call to action for policy makers, government agencies and ocean conservation groups to take major steps to preserve Egypt’s coral reefs, which generate billions of dollars annually from tourism and tourism-related commerce.

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A team of researchers led by the University of Minnesota Twin Cities has released four more years of high-resolution imagery data, which has been added to eight years of previous data, to create the most detailed polar region terrain maps ever created.

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Clouds are notoriously hard to pin down, especially in climate science.

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New research indicates better groundwater supply management could hold the key to help combat the impact of climate change in East Africa, where countries are currently facing the worst drought and food insecurity in a generation.

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Trees have long been known to buffer humans from the worst effects of climate change by pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Now new research shows just how much forests have been bulking up on that excess carbon.

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Pioneering research deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) and satellite modelling means the thickness of Arctic sea ice can be measured all year round for the first time, bringing significant benefits for future weather forecasts and shipping in the region.

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Comprehensive data from several seasons of field research in the Alaskan Arctic will address uncertainties in Earth-system and climate-change models about snow cover across the region and its impacts on water and the environment.

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In heatwaves where heat and drought combine, effects can destabilize interlinked sectors, including health, energy and food production systems.

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A new study measured 38 years of change for glaciers in Kenai Fjords National Park, which lies south of Anchorage, and found that 13 of 19 glaciers show substantial retreat, four are relatively stable, and two have advanced. It also finds trends in which glacier types are disappearing fastest.

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More of the world’s coastal glaciers are melting faster than ever, but exactly what’s triggering the large-scale retreat has been difficult to pin down because of natural fluctuations in the glaciers’ surroundings. Now, researchers have developed a methodology that they think cracks the code to why coastal glaciers are retreating, and in turn, how much can be attributed to human-caused climate change.

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The high heat and low water conditions produced by global warming weaken pine trees’ resistance to disease by hindering their ability to mount an effective defense at the same time that pathogenic fungi in their tissues become more aggressive, new research suggests.

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Researchers at University College Cork (UCC) and the Swedish Museum of Natural History examined the end-Permian mass extinction (252 million years ago) that eliminated almost every species on Earth, with entire ecosystems collapsing.

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Not a fan of mowing the lawn? Good news, cutting the grass less may be better for the environment. Trimming the number of times you run the mower around the yard, known as “low mow”, can help reduce carbon emissions, build soil organic matter and even enhance pollinating habitats for bees.

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Because of their proximity to the ocean, Californians get to enjoy locally-sourced oysters, mussels, abalone and clams.

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Earth’s oceans are home to some of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet, but warming temperatures are causing many marine animals, including coral, to die out.

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As the impacts of climate change are felt around the world, no area is experiencing more drastic changes than the northern polar region.

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Sea ice around Antarctica retreats more quickly than it advances, an asymmetry that has been a puzzle. New analysis shows that the Southern Hemisphere is following simple rules of physics, as peak midsummer sun causes rapid changes. In this aspect, it seems, it's Arctic sea ice that is more mysterious.

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A new study led by Georgia Tech points to possible help for restoring marine ecosystems — and provides more data on the role microbes play in marsh plant health and productivity.

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A first-of-its-kind study shows that some ocean animals may be able evolve their way out of troubles caused by climate change—but at a high cost. By artificially evolving 23 generations of a marine copepod, Acartia tonsa, a team of scientists at the University of Vermont found that the tiny creatures could adapt to the high temperatures and carbon dioxide levels forecast for the warming oceans. But to get there, the populations had to spend a lot of their genetic flexibility—leaving them vulnerable to new stresses, like low food.

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New analysis confirms a palpable change in fire dynamics already suspected by many.

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The boreal forest is a belt of cold-tolerant conifer trees that stretches nearly 9,000 miles across northern North American and Eurasia; it makes up almost a quarter of the Earth's forest area. It's also the coldest—and most rapidly warming—forest biome on the planet, and its shifting characteristics amid climate change are raising concerns about increased fire activity, decreased biodiversity and other long-term adverse effects for the human and natural ecosystems.

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Scientists have long hypothesized that climate change, by intensifying stressors like drought or wildfires, would make an ecosystem more vulnerable to invasive plants. Those invasive plants may in turn alter the environment in ways that amplify the impacts of climate change, explained Luke Flory, a professor of ecology in the UF/IFAS agronomy department. A new long-term field study conducted by Flory’s lab offers the first experimental evidence to support this hypothesis.

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While climate change is making much of the world warmer, temperatures in a subpolar region of the North Atlantic are getting cooler. A team of researchers report that changes in the wind pattern, among other factors, may be contributing to this “cold blob.”

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Shrubs in the desert Southwest have increased their water use efficiency at some of the highest rates ever observed to cope with a decades-long megadrought. That’s the finding of a new study from University of Utah researchers, who found that although the shrubs’ efficiency increases are unprecedented and heroic, they may not be enough to adapt to the long-term drying trend in the West.

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Increasing adoption of certain agricultural practices can help combat climate change, according to a new report by researchers from Rutgers and the University of Maine. The study explores how New Jersey’s plants and soils can help to absorb and store carbon dioxide from greenhouse gas emissions.

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An international team of researchers including faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York will drill into the ocean floor to discover the West Antarctic Ice Sheet's sensitivity to global warming.

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In California’s Sierra Nevada, western pine beetle infestations amped up by global warming were found to kill 30% more ponderosa pine trees than the beetles do under drought alone.

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A new study from WCS and multiple partners that modeled changes in the world’s 45 different “life zones” from climate change revealed that climate impacts may soon triple over these areas if the earth continues “business-as-usual” emissions.

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The study, “U.S. Catholic bishops’ silence and denialism on climate change,” examined more than 12,000 columns published from June 2014 to June 2019 by bishops in official publications for 171 of the 178 U.S. Catholic dioceses.

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This is the result of a new study by researchers from DTU Space at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who have traced the consequences of eruptions on the Sun on clouds and Earth's energy balance.

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University of Utah researchers compared every U.S. state’s CO2 emissions with their investment in the two solutions from 2009 to 2016. State governments’ policies aimed at helping consumers improve energy efficiency had no effect on CO2 emission. Investment in renewable energy sources led to more CO2 emissions in the residential sector.

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Research by scientists at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS) reveals that climate velocity is affecting where large marine mammals are distributed relative to their prey species, which could have important implications for marine food web dynamics.

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The capacity of coral reefs to provide ecosystem services relied on by millions of people worldwide has declined by half since the 1950s, according to a new University of British Columbia-led study.