With sea level rise and extreme weather threatening coastal communities, it's no longer a question of whether they are going to retreat; it's where, when and how. In a new paper, researchers advocate for a managed and planned retreat, not a short-term spur of the moment reaction to a massive storm.
Marine heatwaves are a much bigger threat to coral reefs than previously thought, research revealing a previously unrecognized impact of climate change on coral reefs has shown.
Northern Arizona University climate scientists led an international team in completing new reconstructions of Earth’s temperature over the past 2,000 years, placing the exceptional 20th-century warming into a longer-term context.
Why did a giant hole appear in the sea ice off Antarctica in 2016 and 2017, after decades of more typical sea ice cover? Years of Southern Ocean data have explained the phenomenon, helping oceanographers to better predict these features and study their role in global ocean cycles.
Irvine, Calif., June 3, 2019 – After conducting a comprehensive, seven-year survey of Patagonia, glaciologists from the University of California, Irvine and partner institutions in Argentina and Chile have concluded that the ice sheets in this vast region of South America are considerably more massive than expected. Through a combination of ground observations and airborne gravity and radar sounding methods, the scientists created the most complete ice density map of the area to date and found that some glaciers are as much as a mile (1,600 meters) thick.
A mass die-off of seabirds in the Bering Sea may be partially attributable to climate change, according to a new study publishing May 29 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE
Saltwater intrusion changes coastal vegetation that provides bird habitat. Researchers found that the transition from forests to marshes along the North Carolina coast due to climate change could benefit some bird species of concern for conservation.
As more rain falls on a warming planet, a new computer model shows that it may not take a downpour to cause widespread disruption of road networks. The model combined data on road networks with the hills and valleys of topography to reveal “tipping points” at which even small localized increases in rain cause widespread road outages.
New research in Nature Communications reports that immediate, dramatic cuts in carbon emissions – aggressive enough to meet the Paris Climate Agreement – are economically sound if human health benefits are factored in.
Observations and climate reconstructions using data from tree rings confirm that human activity was affecting the worldwide drought risk as far back as the early 20th century.
Global warming has caused twice as many ocean-dwelling species as land-dwelling species to disappear from their habitats, a unique Rutgers-led study found. The greater vulnerability of sea creatures may significantly impact human communities that rely on fish and shellfish for food and economic activity, according to the study published in the journal Nature.
The shade of a single tree can provide welcome relief from the hot summer sun. But when that single tree is part of a small forest, it creates a profound cooling effect. According to a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, trees play a big role in keeping our towns and cities cool.
New University of Montana research suggests climate change makes it increasingly difficult for tree seedlings to regenerate following wildfires in low-elevation forests, which could contribute to abrupt forest loss.
Climate change could contribute to the demographic collapse of the painted turtle, a species that undergoes temperature-dependent sex determination. An Iowa State University scientist is sounding the alarm about the painted turtle’s future in a new study.
A new comprehensive study of climate change has painted over 5 million pictures of humanity’s potential future, and few foretell an Earth that has not severely warmed. But with immediate action and some luck, there are pathways to a tolerable climate future, according to a research team led by Tufts University
Washington, DC--Strategies for limiting climate change must take into account their potential impact on water quality through nutrient overload, according to a new study from Carnegie's Eva Sinha and Anna Michalak published by Nature Communications. Some efforts at reducing carbon emissions could actually increase the risk of water quality impairments, they found.
Fossil fuel combustion is the main contributor to black carbon collected at five sites around the Arctic, which has implications for global warming, according to a study by an international group of scientists that included a team from Baylor University.
China, already the world’s leading emitter of human-caused greenhouse gases, continues to pump increasing amounts of climate-changing methane into the atmosphere despite tough new regulations on gas releases from its coal mines, a new Johns Hopkins study shows.
Researchers examined the daily diets of more than 16,000 people to compare the climate impact and nutritional value of what America eats in a day. They found that diets that were more climate-friendly were also healthier.
Greenland is melting faster than scientists previously thought—and will likely lead to faster sea level rise—thanks to the continued, accelerating warming of the Earth’s atmosphere, a new study has found.
A new study in Environmental Geosciences is the first to predict, with up to 87% accuracy, which oil and natural wells are most likely to be leaking methane. Research published in Science estimated that natural gas wells are leaking 60% more methane than the EPA estimates.
Researchers from FSU’s Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science suggest that projected increases in air temperatures, rainfall inundation and blistering solar radiation could significantly reduce hawksbill hatching success at a selection of major nesting beaches.
In a study published Nov. 22 in Nature Communications, scientists at the University of Washington Bothell, Pennsylvania State University and Oregon State University report that coral bacteria are surprisingly diverse and that different sections of the coral body host unique communities of bacteria.
Smoke from widespread fires in Indonesia in the summer and fall of 2015 hung heavily over major urban centers in Southeast Asia, causing adverse health effects for millions of people. The afflicted could not have known that the polluted air they were breathing contained carbon from plants that were alive during the Middle Ages.
Christopher Doughty and a team of researchers studied more than 4,000 leaves in the tropics of Peru. Not only did they find that climate change will likely cause leaves to become thinner, but these leaves will become darker and absorb more of the sun’s energy as the planet warms.
New computer model shows for the first time how the changing climate in Asia, from 5,000 to 1,000 years ago, transformed people’s ability to produce food in particular places. Simulating the probability of crop failures enables the co-authors to get at the causes of some dramatic cultural changes.
Columbia Engineers show for the first time that runoff extremes have dramatically increased in response to climate and human-induced changes. Their findings demonstrate a large increase in precipitation and runoff extremes driven by human activity and climate change.
Stony Brook University researchers are trying to determine key links between economic development, technology, politics and human decision making in the context of climate change. Their research published in two peer-reviewed journals helps shed light on the complex topic.
Sea lettuce, a fast-growing seaweed that spawns massive “green tides,” is a prolific thief, according to research that for the first time sequenced the genome of a green seaweed
When levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rise, most plants do something unusual: They thicken their leaves. Now two University of Washington scientists have shown that this reaction by plants will actually worsen climate change by making the global "carbon sink" contributed by plants was less productive.
In a paper published in Nature, researchers led by University of Utah biologist William Anderegg report that forests with trees that employ a high diversity of traits related to water use suffer less of an impact from drought. The results, which expand on previous work that looked at individual tree species’ resilience based on hydraulic traits, lead to new research directions on forest resilience and inform forest managers working to rebuild forests after logging or wildfire.
LIVERMORE, Calif. — Insights from experiments at Sandia National Laboratories designed to push chemical systems far from equilibrium allowed an international group of researchers to discover a new major source of formic acid over the Pacific and Indian oceans.The discovery was published in the July 3 issue of Nature Communications and featured on the “Editors’ Highlights” webpage.
Scientists have released the most accurate, high-resolution terrain map of Antarctica ever created. The new map has a resolution of 2 to 8 meters, compared to 1,000 meters, which was typical for previous maps. “It is the highest-resolution terrain map by far of any continent,” said Ian Howat, professor of earth sciences at The Ohio State University.
In a paper published Aug. 31 in the journal Science, a team led by scientists at the University of Washington reports that insect activity in today's temperate, crop-growing regions will rise along with temperatures. Researchers project that this activity, in turn, will boost worldwide losses of rice, corn and wheat by 10-25 percent for each degree Celsius that global mean surface temperatures rise.
A new study led by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and the Coral Reef Research Foundation (CRRF) in Palau describes a novel approach for predicting warm temperature-induced stress on corals from the sea surface through a deeper expanse ranging from 30-150 meters (100-500 feet) known as the mesophotic zone.
A study led by Indiana University suggests that computer models used to predict the spread of epidemics from climate change -- such as crop blights or disease outbreaks -- may not take into account an important factor in predicting their severity.
Dry months are getting hotter in large parts of the United States, another sign that human-caused climate change is forcing people to encounter new extremes.
Under warming conditions, arctic wolf spiders’ tastes in prey might be changing, according to new research from Washington University in St. Louis, initiating a new cascade of food web interactions that could potentially alleviate some impacts of global warming.
In a study that challenges scientists preconceptions about the global carbon cycle, researchers find that tiny organisms deep in the ocean's twilight zone may play an outsize part in the circulation of carbon.
A team of scientists is the first to confirm the movement patterns and seasonal migrations of baby white sharks in the north Atlantic Ocean. They put the New York Bight shark nursery theory to test by deploying satellite and acoustic tags on 10 baby white sharks (less than 1 year old) off Long Island’s coast. Results provide novel insights into the distribution of this vulnerable early stage of life that complements recent work on larger white sharks.
Fish that ‘farm’ their own patches of seaweed alter their ‘cropping’ practices under high CO2 conditions, researchers at the University of Adelaide in Australia have found.
Areas of the Arctic seas are becoming ice-free in late summer and early fall. A new study considers impacts on all the marine mammals that use this region and finds narwhals will be the most vulnerable.
Ecologists from the University of Michigan and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science are forecasting a larger-than-average Chesapeake Bay "dead zone" in 2018, due to increased rainfall in the watershed this spring.
A new University of Washington-led paper pinpoints starvation as the cause of death for hundreds of thousands of Cassin's auklet seabirds in late 2014 to early 2015.
Researchers discovered that honey bees alter their diet by the season. A spike in calcium consumption in the fall, and high intake of potassium, help prepare the bees for colder months when they likely need those minerals to generate warmth. Limitations in nutrient availability can have implications for the health of both managed and wild colonies.
A study in Science offers an explanation for a mysterious and sometimes deadly weather pattern in which the jet stream, the global air currents that circle the Earth, stalls out over a region. Much like highways, the jet stream has a capacity, researchers said, and when it’s exceeded, blockages form that are remarkably similar to traffic jams—and climate forecasters can use the same math to model them both.
The disappearance of a whole forest has ricocheting effects in the atmosphere that can affect vegetation on the other side of the country.
Every 405,000 years, gravitational tugs from Jupiter and Venus slightly elongate Earth’s orbit, an amazingly consistent pattern that has influenced our planet’s climate for at least 215 million years and allows scientists to more precisely date geological events like the spread of dinosaurs, according to a Rutgers-led study. The findings are published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A Dutch-Texan team found that most Houston-area drowning deaths from Hurricane Harvey occurred outside the zones designated by government as being at higher risk of flooding: the 100- and 500-year floodplains. Harvey, one of the costliest storms in US history, hit southeast Texas on 25 August 2017 causing unprecedented flooding and killing dozens. Researchers at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and Rice University in Texas published their results today in the European Geosciences Union journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences.
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