The climate is getting warmer, the ice sheets are melting and sea levels are rising – but how much? The report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2013 was based on the best available estimates of future sea levels, but the panel was not able to come up with an upper limit for sea level rise within this century.
Using a first-of-its-kind, high-resolution numerical model to describe ocean circulation during the last ice age about 21,000 year ago, oceanographer Alan Condron of the University of Massachusetts Amherst has shown that icebergs and meltwater from the North American ice sheet would have regularly reached South Carolina and even southern Florida. The models are supported by the discovery of iceberg scour marks on the sea floor along the entire continental shelf.
An unexpectedly high amount of the climate-changing gas methane, the main component of natural gas, is escaping from the Four Corners region in the U.S. Southwest, according to a new study by the University of Michigan and NASA.
Certain types of corals, invertebrates of the sea that have been on Earth for millions of years, appear to have found a way to survive some of their most destructive threats by attaching to and growing under mangrove roots.
If more of the world’s climate becomes like that in tropical zones, it could potentially affect crops, insects, malaria transmission, and even confuse migration patterns of birds and mammals worldwide. George Wang, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, is part of a research tandem that has found that the daily and nightly differences in temperatures worldwide are fast approaching yearly differences between summer and winter temperatures.
The Centre for Carbon Measurement at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is a partner of Climate-KIC, which has just launched a new online CO2 meter to highlight current CO2 levels in the atmosphere and emphasise the urgent need to reduce harmful emissions.
Because of the deforestation of tropical rainforests in Brazil, significantly more carbon has been lost than was previously assumed. As scientists of the Hemholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) write in the scientific journal Nature Communications, the effect of the degradation has been underestimated in fragmented forest areas, since it was hitherto not possible to calculate the loss of the biomass at the forest edges and the higher emission of carbon dioxide.
Due to climate change, parts of the world will face droughts that will affect forest health. Scientists from INRA, in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL and European colleagues, studied the resistance of forests to drought according to the diversity of tree species.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA are funding three demonstration projects that will lay the foundation for the first national network to monitor marine biodiversity at scales ranging from microbes to whales. The U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) also plans to contribute.
Using satellite observations and a large suite of climate models, Lawrence Livermore scientists have found that long-term ocean warming in the upper 700 meters of Southern Hemisphere oceans has likely been underestimated.
Terms
While we only use edited and approved content for Azthena
answers, it may on occasions provide incorrect responses.
Please confirm any data provided with the related suppliers or
authors. We do not provide medical advice, if you search for
medical information you must always consult a medical
professional before acting on any information provided.
Your questions, but not your email details will be shared with
OpenAI and retained for 30 days in accordance with their
privacy principles.
Please do not ask questions that use sensitive or confidential
information.
Read the full Terms & Conditions.