British and American scientists have discovered a previously unknown sub-glacial basin nearly the size of New Jersey beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) – and say it puts this area of the ice sheet at risk of collapse. The team discovered the basin Using ice-penetrating radar instruments flown on aircraft, and say its location,…
Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why it was so troubling to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.” If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it…
Not long ago, the story was simple. A vanguard of modern humans left their African birthplace 50,000–60,000 years ago and quickly conquered Asia. They turned left into Europe some 40,000 years ago, later crossing the Bering Strait and marching southward into the Americas. With their advance, Neanderthals and other earlier peoples dwindled and vanished. But…
Giant dinosaurs could have warmed the planet with their flatulence, researchers said. British scientists have calculated the methane output of sauropods, including the species known as Brontosaurus. By scaling up the digestive wind of cows, they estimate that the population of dinosaurs – as a whole – produced 520 million tonnes of gas annually. The…
In the clammy depths of a southern Illinois coal mine lies the largest fossil forest ever discovered, at least 50 times as extensive as the previous contender. Scientists are exploring dripping passages by the light of headlamps, mapping out an ecosystem from 307 million years ago, just before the world’s first great forests were wiped…
The ability of U.S. scientists to monitor changes in the planet’s climate, natural hazards, and land surface continues to deteriorate, warns a report from the U.S. National Academies’ National Research Council (NRC). Aging satellites are being replaced too slowly, the report concludes, and by 2020 the country may have only 25% of its current observing…
Locked in frozen vaults on Antarctica and Greenland, a lost world of ancient creatures awaits another chance at life. Like a time-capsule from the distant past, the polar ice sheets offer a glimpse of tiny organisms that may have been trapped there longer than modern humans have walked the planet, biding their time until conditions…
The Greenland Ice Sheet is accelerating in its slide into the ocean, like snow sliding off a roof on a sunny day. According to the University of Colorado Boulder, massive releases of meltwater from surface lakes are speeding up sea level rise. During summer, meltwater pools into lakes on the ice sheet’s surface. When the…
The second-largest mass extinction in Earth’s history coincided with a short but intense ice age during which enormous glaciers grew and sea levels dropped. Although it has long been agreed that the so-called Late Ordovician mass extinction — which occurred about 450 million years ago — was related to climate change, exactly how the climate…
Fifty-five million years ago, the world abruptly warmed by a scorching 5 degrees Celsius, the oceans turned acidic, and life ran a gantlet of extinction. Sound familiar? That was the closest nature ever came to foreshadowing the fossil-fuel-fed warming that is just getting underway now. But for 15 years, climate scientists have puzzled over how…