The World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Climate in Asia 2024 report warns that the region is warming nearly twice as fast as the global average, driving more extreme weather and posing serious threats to lives, ecosystems, and economies. In 2024, Asia experienced its warmest or second warmest year on …
The effects of global warming over the coming decades will be modified by shorter-term climate variability. Finding ways to incorporate these variations will give us a better grip on what kind of climate change to expect.
On geological timescales, carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere through volcanism and organic matter oxidation and is removed through mineral weathering and carbonate burial. An analysis of ice-core CO2 records and marine carbonate chemistry indicates a tight coupling between these processes during the past 610,000 years, which suggests that a weathering …
Oxygen-poor waters occupy large volumes of the intermediate-depth eastern tropical oceans. Oxygen-poor conditions have far-reaching impacts on ecosystems because important mobile microorganisms avoid or cannot survive in hypoxic zones. Climate models predict declines in oceanic dissolved oxygen produced by global warming. The researchers constructed a 50-year time series of dissolved-oxygen …
The generally warm and ice-free conditions of the Eocene epoch rapidly declined to the cold and glaciated state of the Oligocene epoch. Geochemical evidence from deep-sea sediments resolves in detail the climatic events surrounding this transition.
In densely populated coastal areas, reactions of polluted air with sea salt aerosol from the ocean can lead to high surface ozone levels that affect air quality.
There may be more to global warming than we thought. On top of the effect of human-made carbon emissions, natural changes in the warm ocean currents travelling to the icy north may be helping to heat up the entire northern hemisphere.
Contrary to expectations, a microscopic plant that lives in oceans around the world may thrive in the changing ocean conditions of the coming decades, a team of scientists reported on Thursday. The main threat to many marine organisms is not global warming but ocean acidification, as carbon dioxide from the …
They call it flammable ice, and it could be the world's last great source of carbon-based fuel - assuming we can mine methane hydrates, crystal lattices of ice that trap methane beneath ocean beds and permafrost. One problem with extracting this methane is that you have to melt the ice …
Ocean acidification in response to rising atmospheric CO2 partial pressures is widely expected to reduce calcification by marine organisms. From the mid-Mesozoic, coccolithophores have been major calcium carbonate producers in the world's oceans, today accounting for about a third of the total marine CaCO3 production. Here, the researchers present laboratory …
Washington: The world's beaches and shores are anything but pristine. Volunteers scoured 33,000 miles of shoreline worldwide and found 6 million pounds (3m kg) of debris from cigarette butts and food wrappers to abandoned fishing lines and plastic bags that threaten seabirds and marine mammals. A report by the Ocean …
This report presents a wide-ranging review of arctic climate impact science. It spans the width of subject areas, covering impacts on physical and biological systems, as well as on humanity. The report presents the scientific evidence for arctic climate change impacts in review sections, each of which targets a particular …
Attaching a 'floating' tree-ring chronology to ice core records that cover the abrupt Younger Dryas cold interval during the last glacial termination provides a better estimate of the onset and duration of the radiocarbon anomaly. The chronology suggests that marine records may be biased by changes in the concentration of …
Destruction of the Earth's ozone shield due to the release of hydrogen sulphide and methane has been suggested as a cause of mass extinctions during periods of ocean anoxia over the past two billion years. This mechanism does not explain the end-Permian mass extinction, according to simulations with a two-dimensional …
The Gulf Stream transports large amounts of heat from the tropics to middle and high latitudes, and thereby affects weather phenomena such as cyclogenesis and low cloud formation. Here the researchers consider the Gulf Stream's influence on the troposphere, using a combination of operational weather analyses, satellite observations and an …
Anthropogenic addition of bioavailable nitrogen to the biosphere is increasing and terrestrial ecosystems are becoming increasingly nitrogen-saturated, causing more bioavailable nitrogen to enter groundwater and surface waters. Large-scale nitrogen budgets show that an average of about 20
Denitrifying bacteria and hungry plants do sterling work in disposing of the nitrates that we pump into rivers and streams. But as the excess influx goes up and up, the efficiency of removal goes down and down.
There is no shortage of scientific studies documenting the degradation of the world's oceans, the decline of marine ecosystems and the collapse of important fish species. Several have appeared in the last month. What is in short supply is a sustained effort by world governments and other institutions to do …
