Alaska sees record temperatures in heatwave
An "all-time high" temperature record has been set in the US state of Alaska, despite much of the country sitting in the Arctic circle. Temperatures peaked at 32.22 Celsius (90F) on 4 July at an airport
Glacial Melt
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Snowballs from the past
Martin Kennedy and colleagues searched the Australian outback for clues to the transition out of Snowball Earth. The answer, as it turns out, was much closer to home.
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Fjord insertion into continental margins driven by topographic steering of ice
Fjords line mountainous continental margins where icesheets and glaciers once stood. A two-dimensional model simulation suggests that fjords can be eroded within one million years, primarily in response to topographic ice steering and erosion from ice discharge. Subsequent glaciers that form on these landscapes are smaller and exhibit greater responses to climate change.
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Marinoan meltdown
The termination of the Marinoan glaciation 635 million years ago is one of the most spectacular climate change events ever recorded. Methane release from equatorial permafrost might have triggered this global meltdown.
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Loosing North Pole
FIGURE
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Life feels the effects of a changing climate
Climate change is already altering our planet's biology, with only life in Antarctica so far spared its influence. That's the conclusion from an analysis of tens of thousands of individual local studies covering shrinking glaciers, changing river flows, melting permafrost, increased coastal erosion, and warming lakes and rivers. The study, published in Nature (DOI: 10.1038/nature06937) this week, is based on more comprehensive data than any previous investigation of the biological effects of climate change.
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Human behaviour raises global warming fasterx: NASA study
Houston, May 15 Climatic changes induced by humans have affected the flora and fauna, along with the physical environment of the world at a much faster pace than previously thought, scientists have said. A new NASA-led study, noting changes in the physical system, such as glaciers shrinking, permafrost melting and lakes and rivers warming, has linked physical and biological impacts since 1970 with increase in temperatures during that period.
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Gangotri glacier receding at slower pace
Amidst a hue and cry of global warming causing glaciers to melt at a rapid pace, there's some soothing news for environment enthusiasts. A recent study by the National Institute of Hydrology (NIH) says that the receding pace of Gangotri glacier, one of the largest glaciers of the Himalayas, has slowed down during the last two years.
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Attributing physical and biological impacts to anthropogenic climate change
Significant changes in physical and biological systems are occurring on all continents and in most oceans, with a concentration of available data in Europe and North America. Most of these changes are in the direction expected with warming temperature. Here the authors show that these changes in natural systems since at least 1970 are occurring in regions of observed temperature increases, and that these temperature increases at continental scales cannot be explained by natural climate variations alone.
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We're becoming active choreographers of nature'
New York: His new book, Physics of the Impossible, has been on the New York Times Best Seller's list for more than four weeks now. Michio Kaku, co-founder of string field theory and professor of theoretical physics at City University, New York, talks to Narayani Ganesh about the future potential of cutting-edge science: Why do you say we're in transition between the Age of Discovery and the Age of Mastery?
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Seasonal speedup along the western flank of the Greenland ice sheet
It has been widely hypothesized that a warmer climate in Greenland would increase the volume of lubricating surface meltwater reaching the ice-bedrock interface, accelerating ice flow and increasing mass loss. We have assembled a data set that provides a synoptic-scale view, spanning ice-sheet to outlet-glacier flow, with which to evaluate this hypothesis.