Climate Change

The last piece of the ice sheet that once blanketed much of North America is doomed to disappear in the next several centuries, says a new study by researchers at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and the University of Colorado Boulder.

The annual summer monsoon that drops rain onto East Asia, an area with about a billion people, has shifted dramatically in the distant past, at times moving northward by as much as 400 kilometers and doubling rainfall in that northern reach. The monsoon's changes over the past 10,000 years likely altered the course of early human cultures in China, say the authors of a new study.

A low level of atmospheric oxygen in Earth's middle ages held back evolution for 2 billion years, raising fresh questions about the origins of life on this planet.

Rainfall patterns in the Sahara during the 6,000-year "Green Sahara" period have been pinpointed by analyzing marine sediments, according to new research.

About 15,000 years ago, the ocean around Antarctica has seen an abrupt sea level rise of several meters. It could happen again. An international team of scientists with the participation of the University of Bonn is now reporting its findings in the magazine Nature Scientific Reports.

For the development of animals, nothing -- with the exception of DNA -- may be more important than oxygen in the atmosphere.

An international team of researchers has found that the Antarctic Ice Sheet plays a major role in regional and global climate variability - a discovery that may also help explain why sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere has been increasing despite the warming of the rest of the Earth.

Following Earth's last ice age, which peaked 20,000 years ago, the Antarctic warmed between two and three times the average temperature increase worldwide, according to a new study by a team of American geophysicists.

While searching through historical archives to find out more about the 15th-century climate of what is now Belgium, northern France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, Chantal Camenisch noticed something odd. "I realised that there was something extraordinary going on regarding the climate during the 1430s," says the historian from the University of Bern in Switzerland.

The dramatic decline of Iran's Lake Urmia--once the second-largest hypersaline lake in the world--has both direct human and climatic causes, according to a new study published in the Journal of Great Lakes Research. The study was the first to compare the relative impact of climate and water management on the water flowing into the lake.

Serendipity, expertise, foresight and the equivalent of an Earth observation data archaeological dig have led to recovery of almost-40-year-old satellite imagery - thought lost forever - which will significantly add to understanding of our planet’s climate.

Experts from Cardiff University have offered up an explanation as to why our planet began to move in and out of ice ages every 100,000 years.

A new study based on GPS measurements of the Earth’s crust suggests that previous calculations of past and present-day mass loss in the Greenland...

This is the news of a ground-breaking study recently published in the open access journal PLOS ONE. Professor Christopher S. Henshilwood and Postdoctoral Fellow Karen L. van Niekerk from the Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion at the University of Bergen (UiB) are among the co-authors of the paper. The lead author is Patrick Roberts, from the University of Oxford.

"The Arctic sea ice responded very rapidly to past climate changes. During the coldest periods of the past 90,000 years the sea ice edge spread relatively quickly to the Greenland-Scotland Ridge, and probably far into the Atlantic Ocean." says first author Ulrike Hoff, a researcher at Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Environment and Climate (CAGE).