About 2.5 billion years ago, free oxygen, or O2, first started to accumulate to meaningful levels in Earth’s atmosphere, setting the stage for the rise of complex life on our evolving planet. Scientists refers to this phenomenon as the Great Oxidation Event, or GOE for short. But the initial accumulation of O2 on Earth was […]
Imagine you’re standing near the edge of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, gazing out over the ocean, when the ice near you starts to melt very rapidly. A surge of meltwater flows into the ocean. Surprisingly, you watch the sea level fall – not rise. But why? When we think of sea level rise, we picture […]
The geologists of the International Commission on Stratigraphy’s Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) made a substantial decision on March 4, 2024 , by rejecting the proposal to formally acknowledge the beginning of the Anthropocene—a new geological epoch attributing humanity’s emergence as the primary force shaping the Earth’s strata. This proposal, led by the Anthropocene Working […]
Human beings first disturbed moon dust on Sept. 13, 1959, when the USSR’s unmanned spacecraft Luna 2 alighted on the lunar surface. In the following decades, more than a hundred other spacecraft have touched the moon — both crewed and uncrewed, sometimes landing and sometimes crashing. The most famous of these were NASA’s Apollo Lunar […]
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 […]