Humanity’s emissions of greenhouse gases have caused rapid global warming at a rate unprecedented in at least the past 2,000 years. Rapid global warming has been accompanied by increases in the frequency and intensity of heat extremes over most land regions in the past 70 years. While human activities cause emissions of a number of […]
In the largest survey of its kind ever conducted researchers from the University of Copenhagen firmly established a fivefold increase in the melting of Greenland ‘s glaciers over the last 20 years. Using both satellite imagery and old aerial photos from the Danish National Archives, researchers from the University of Copenhagen firmly establish that Greenland’s […]
The strength of the wind has an important influence on ocean circulation. This is particularly true for extreme events such as storm fronts, tropical storms and cyclones. These weather patterns, which last from a few days to a few weeks, will change in the future due to climate change. In particular, the average energy input […]
Throughout the past 500 million years, our planet has experienced a total of five mass extinctions. One of these – the Permo-Triassic mass extinction event – led to the demise of roughly 90% of Earth’s species. Most of these events have coincided with the formation of a supercontinent, where Earth’s tectonic plates slowly come together […]
Sahara Author: Evgenii Krestianinov, PhD candidate, Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University In May 2020, some unusual rocks containing distinctive greenish crystals were found in the Erg Chech sand sea, a dune-filled region of the Sahara Desert in southern Algeria. On close inspection, the rocks turned out to be from outer space: lumps […]
Niño Author: David Armstrong McKay, Researcher in Earth System Resilience, Stockholm University The UN World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has confirmed it: El Niño conditions have arrived and are expected to become moderate to strong as they develop over the coming year. El Niño is the hot phase of a natural fluctuation in the Earth’s climate […]
meltwater Author: Alun Hubbard, Professor of Glaciology, Arctic Five Chair, University of Tromsø I’m striding along the steep bank of a raging white-water torrent, and even though the canyon is only about the width of a highway, the river’s flow is greater than that of London’s Thames. The deafening roar and rumble of the cascading […]
How close can a rocky planet be to a star, and still sustain water and life? Where is the edge of habitability? A recently discovered exoplanet may be key to solving that mystery, providing important insights about conditions at the inner edge of a star’s habitable zone and why Earth and Venus developed so differently […]
According to a recent study , humans have displaced a significant volume of water from the ground and relocated it, resulting in an Earth shift of approximately 80 centimetres (31.5 inches) eastward solely between 1993 and 2010. According to prior climate models, researchers had initially estimated that humans extracted around 2,150 gigatons of groundwater between […]
methane Author: Rubén Soussé Villa is pursuing a PhD in atmospheric chemistry at Barcelona Supercompting Center / Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya Methane (CH4) is the most powerful greenhouse gas (GHG) after CO2. It is widely used but also feared, because a single tonne of CH4 emitted today can heat up the atmosphere up to 30 […]