Showing posts with the label
Palaeoclimate
Hydrologists are looking centuries into the past to better understand an increasingly uncertain water future. Hydrologists at USU have demonstrated that monthly streamflow data can be reconstructed …
One of the key effects of the end-Permian mass extinction, 252 million years ago, was rapid heating of tropical waters and atmospheres. How this affected life on land has been uncertain until now. Th…
Sixty-five million years ago, clouds of ash choked the skies over Earth. Dinosaurs, along with about half of all the species on Earth, staggered and died. UChicago scientists examined how species (in…
There's a new way to measure the average temperature of the ocean thanks to researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. In an article published i…
We and all other animals wouldn't be here today if our planet didn't have a lot of oxygen in its atmosphere and oceans. But how crucial were high oxygen levels to the transition from simple, …
For the first time scientists have directly observed living bacteria in polar ice and snow -- an environment once considered sterile. The new evidence has the potential to alter perceptions about whi…
A breakthrough in the understanding of how cosmic rays from supernovae can influence Earth's cloud cover and therefore its climate is published today in the journal Nature Communications . The st…
Today our world is visually dominated by animals and plants, but this world would not have been possible without fungi, say University of Leeds scientists. Rhynie Chert in Scotland, where many prehis…
The oldest ice core ever drilled outside the polar regions may contain ice that formed during the Stone Age -- more than 600,000 years ago, long before modern humans appeared. Lonnie Thompson cuts an…
The East Antarctic Ice Sheet locks away enough water to raise sea level an estimated 53 meters (174 feet), more than any other ice sheet on the planet. It's also thought to be among the most stab…
A whopping 252 million years ago, Earth was crawling with bizarre animals, including dinosaur cousins resembling Komodo dragons and bulky early mammal-relatives, a million years before dinosaurs even…
A scientific analysis of fossilised tree resin has caused a rethink of Australia’s prehistoric ecosystem, and could pave the way to recovering more preserved palaeobiological artefacts from the time …
A team of investigators from the University of Kansas currently is stationed at Antarctica's Shackleton Glacier to collect the remains of plants that once thrived there during the boundary betwee…
A decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels led to a fundamental shift in the behaviour of the Earth's climate system around one million years ago, according to new research led by the U…
Samples of sediment taken from the ocean floor of the North Atlantic Ocean have given researchers an unprecedented insight into the reasons why Europe's climate has changed over the past 3000 yea…
