Climate Change

By the end of the most recent ice age 10,000 years ago, a huge ice sheet melted in North America, in the same way that the ice in Greenland is melting today. Its meltwater had a massive impact on the climate in northwest Europe and northwest Africa.

During the Ordovician period, the concentration of CO2 in the earth's atmosphere was about eight times higher than today. It has been hard to explain why the climate cooled and why the Ordovician glaciations took place. A new study, published in Nature Communications, shows that the weathering of rock caused by early non-vascular plants had the potential to cause such a global cooling effect.

Environmental records obtained from archaeological sites suggest climate may not have been directly linked to cultural and technological innovations of Middle Stone Age humans in southern Africa.

A major climate event millions of years ago that caused substantial change to the ocean's ecological systems may hold clues as to how the Earth will respond to future climate change, a Florida State University researcher said.

Giant Ice Age species including elephant-sized sloths and powerful sabre-toothed cats that once roamed the windswept plains of Patagonia, southern South America, were finally felled by a perfect storm of a rapidly warming climate and humans, a new study has shown.

The history of Greenland's snowfall is chronicled in an unlikely place: the remains of aquatic plants that died long ago, collecting at the bottom of lakes in horizontal layers that document the passing years.

During the construction of a new underground line, archaeological excavations were carried out in the ancient, long-buried port of Naples.

Earth scientists from Rice University, Yale University and the University of Tokyo are offering a new answer to the long-standing question of how our planet acquired its oxygenated atmosphere.

An international team of researchers headed by scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute has gained new insights into the carbon dioxide exchange between ocean and atmosphere, thus making a significant contribution to solving one of the great scientific mysteries of the ice ages.

The idea that the young Earth had a thicker atmosphere turns out to be wrong. New research from the University of Washington uses bubbles trapped in 2.7 billion-year-old rocks to show that air at that time exerted at most half the pressure of today's atmosphere.

Part of the Middle East and North Africa may become uninhabitable due to climate change

An international team of scientists led by the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) have managed to open a new window into the climate history of the Arctic Ocean. Using unique sediment samples from the Lomonosov Ridge, the researchers found that six to ten million years ago the central Arctic was completely ice-free during summer and sea-surface temperature reached values of 4 to 9 degrees Celsius.

North Atlantic played pivotal role in last great climate tipping point, research shows.

Climate is not constant on Earth. Consider ice ages coming and going as an example. Parallel to ice age cycles, atmospheric carbon dioxide reduces during glacial periods and increases during warmer times, although modern fossil fuel-related carbon dioxide emission broke this natural cyclicity. With the proper proxy measurements, scientists can look into these past cycles to determine how exactly climate systems were naturally governed.

The combination of erosion and melting ice caps led to a massive increase in volcanic activity at the end of the last ice age, according to new research.