British Antarctic Survey has captured dramatic satellite and video images of an Antarctic ice shelf that looks set to be the latest to break out from the Antarctic Peninsula. A large part of the Wilkins Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula is now supported only by a thin strip of ice hanging between two islands. It is another identifiable impact of climate change on the Antarctic environment.
Black carbon, a form of particulate air pollution most often produced from biomass burning, cooking with solid fuels and diesel exhaust, has a warming effect in the atmosphere three to four times greater than prevailing estimates, according to scientists in an upcoming review article in the journal Nature Geoscience.
A new UC Davis study predicts that climate change will irreversibly alter water circulation in Lake Tahoe, radically changing the conditions for plants and fish in the lake -- and it could happen in 10 years.
An earthquake of M6.8 or greater on the Hayward Fault, in the heart of the San Francisco Bay area, is increasingly likely. The last major earthquake on the Hayward Fault was in 1868, 140 years ago: research by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and others indicate the past five such earthquakes have been 140 years apart on average.
Using the latest satellite observations, NASA researchers and others report that the Arctic is still on "thin ice" when it comes to the condition of sea ice cover in the region. A colder-than-average winter in some regions of the Arctic this year has yielded an increase in the area of new sea ice, while the older sea ice that lasts for several years has continued to decline.
Nowhere is the principle of "strength in numbers" more apparent than in the collective power of microbes: despite their simplicity, these one-cell organisms--which number about 5 million trillion trillion strong (no, that is not a typo) on Earth--affect virtually every ecological process, from the decay of organic material to the production of oxygen.
A recent study at the University of Illinois created a bit of a mystery for soil scientist Michelle Wander – increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was expected to increase plant growth, increase plant biomass and ultimately beef up the organic matter in the soil – but it didn't. What researchers found instead was that organic matter decay increased along with residue inputs when carbon dioxide levels were increased and they think the accelerated decay was due to increased moisture in the soil.
Interactions between the stratospheric ozone chemistry and atmospheric air flow lead to significant changes of airflow patterns from the ground up to the stratosphere. This is the result of climate simulations, which have just been published in the journal "Geophysical Research Letters" (Brand et al, Geophys. Res. Lett.). Scientists at the Research Unit Potsdam of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, which is a member of the Helmholtz Association, have investigated a fundamental process for climate interactions in the Arctic. So far it is not known what causes natural variations of atmospheric air flow patterns which have been playing an important role for climate changes in the last decades. This basic knowledge is necessary to improve climate models that still hold much uncertainty.
Earth scientists are in the business of backing into history -- extrapolating what happened millions of years ago based on what they can observe now. Using this method, a team of Cornell researchers has created a mathematical computer model of the formation of granulite, a fine-grained metamorphic rock, in the Earth's crust.
Scientists recently developed a new modeling approach to estimate sea ice thickness. This is the only model based entirely on historical observations. The model was developed by scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey and the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow.
Widespread damage to plants from a sudden freeze that occurred across the Eastern United States from 5 April to 9 April 2007 was made worse because it had been preceded by two weeks of unusual warmth, according to an analysis published in the March 2008 issue of BioScience. The authors of the report, Lianhong Gu and his colleagues at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and collaborators at NASA, the University of Missouri, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found that the freeze killed new leaves, shoots, flowers, and fruit of natural vegetation, caused crown dieback of trees, and led to severe damage to crops in an area encompassing Nebraska, Maryland, South Carolina, and Texas. Subsequent drought limited regrowth.
NOAA scientists are reviewing unusual environmental conditions in the Pacific Ocean as
the likely culprit for the dramatically low returns of Chinook and coho salmon to rivers and streams along the West Coast of the United States in 2007.
To the list of threats to tropical rain forests you can add a new one — trees. It might seem that for a rain forest the more trees the merrier, but a new study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution warns that non-native trees invading a rain forest can change its basic ecological structure — rendering it less hospitable to the myriad plant and animal species that depend on its resources.
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