Moths in mud can uncover prehistoric secrets
Moth scales, preserved in the mud of a coniferous forest lake, have been used to identify outbreaks of these insects over the past 10,000 years. This groundbreaking new technique, reported in the ope…
Showing posts with the label Palaeoclimate
Extinct lakes of the American desert west
The vestiges of lakes long extinct dot the landscape of the American desert west. These fossilized landforms provide clues of how dynamic climate has been over the past few million years. Erosional P…
Evidence links volcanoes to Earth's largest mass extinction 252 million years ago
Pine trees become temporarily sterile when exposed to ultraviolet radiation as intense as some scientists believe Earth experienced 252 million years ago during the planet's largest mass extincti…
Sea floor uplift after last ice age causes methane release in the Arctic today
Hundreds of methane flares observed offshore Western Svalbard in the Arctic are caused by a process that started at the end of the last ice age, according to the study. The methane release happens be…
Iberian Peninsula rodents migrated due to climate change 12 million years ago
The oldest studied rodent fauna in this work, which inhabited the Iberian Peninsula from twelve million years ago, progressively shifted north looking for humid environments to survive climate change…
Rainforest collapse 307 million years ago impacted the evolution of early land vertebrates
Researchers at the University of Birmingham have discovered that the mass extinction seen in plant species caused by the onset of a drier climate 307 million years ago led to extinctions of some grou…
No volcanic winter in East Africa from ancient Toba eruption
The massive Toba volcanic eruption on the island of Sumatra about 74,000 years ago did not cause a six-year-long "volcanic winter" in East Africa and thereby cause the human population in t…
North American ice sheet decay changed Antarctic climate
New research led by the University of Colorado Boulder shows that the changing topography of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere during the last Ice Age forced changes in the climate of Antarctica,…
Climate variability - past and future
On the basis of a unique global comparison of data from core samples extracted from the ocean floor and the polar ice sheets, AWI researchers have now demonstrated that, though climate changes have i…
Most of last 11,000 years cooler than past decade in North America, Europe
University of Wyoming researchers led a climate study that determined recent temperatures across Europe and North America appear to have few, if any, precedent in the past 11,000 years. Little Pond, …
Research finds link between rainfall and ocean circulation in past and present
Research conducted at The University of Texas at Austin has found that changes in ocean currents in the Atlantic Ocean influence rainfall in the Western Hemisphere, and that these two systems have be…
New Eocene fossil data suggest climate models may underestimate future polar warming
A new international analysis of marine fossils shows that warming of the polar oceans during the Eocene, a greenhouse period that provides a glimpse of Earth's potential future climate, was great…
Rocking the cradle of humankind
In the peaceful grasslands of northern Tanzania, a frenzy of research is occurring. The Olduvai area (from the Maasai name "Oldupai," for a native succulent plant) came to fame through the …