Uncertain source of accelerating atmospheric methane

In 2007 after a seven year plateau atmospheric methane concentration began rising while at the same time the fraction of carbon-13 in methane has been decreasing. Plausible causes of the increasing methane include higher temperatures in tropical wetlands, more livestock, biomass being replaced by fossil fuel burning, or changes in atmospheric chemistry.

Read more.
Warm/cool epochs over past 2000 years were regional until 20th century warming

Recent research has found no evidence that warm and cool periods recorded in Europe over the last 2000 years including the Little Ice Age (1300 and 1850 CE), the Mediaeval Warm Period (800–1200 CE), the Dark Ages Cold Period (400–800 CE) and the Roman Warm Period (250 BCE to 400 CE) extended over the entire globe. By contrast, the warm period during the twentieth century covered more than 98 per cent of the globe.

Read more.
First forest canopy heights from NASA’s ICESat mission

Launched in September 2018, ICESat-2 (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2) has just begun making its first data available. Data from ICESat-2 will provide global terrain elevation and canopy height estimates as well as showing potential for estimation of forest biomass.

Read more.
Reconstructing Earth’s temperature for the past 500 million years

The Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., has charted swings in Earth’s average surface temperature over the past 500 million years to show ancient temperature extremes. To extend the record to 500 million years a new dating technique “clumped isotopes” that measures the abundance of two or more rare isotopes has been used.

Read more.
Plan to capture Antarctica ice core reaching back 1.5 million years

A new international drilling program in Antarctica is expected to capture data up to 1.5 million years ago when Earth’s glacial/deglacial cycles were about 41,000 years which corresponds to the Earth’s obliquity cycle as predicted by Malinkovitch. It may also shed light on why the climate switched to the 100,000 year cycle.

Read more.
Depopulation of the Americas by European colonization may have initiated the Little Ice Age

In a new study the removal by 1600 due to European introduced epidemics of 90% of the estimated pre-1492 population of 60.5 million in the Americas resulted in widespread landuse change which may have been the primary cause of lowered atmospheric CO2 decline which initiated the Little Ice Age.

Read more.
Europe’s Sentinel-3 global ocean-monitoring constellation in orbit

Sentinel-3B joins Sentinel-3A in Earth orbit. This constellation of satellites carry instruments to measure the temperature, colour and height of the sea surface as well as the thickness of sea ice.

Read more.
Rising seas will inundate coastal internet as soon as 2033

A recent analysis suggests that by the year 2033 more than 4,000 miles of buried fiber optic conduit will be underwater and more than 1,100 internet hubs will be surrounded by water.

Read more.
Latest research confirms methane leakages erase natural gas carbon advantage

Latest research supports the work many years ago of Robert Howarth at Cornell who argued that leakages and other abnormal emissions of methane during fracking and other oil and gas operations erased the carbon advantage of natural gas over coal.

Read more.
Major North Atlantic current is weakest in 1500 years

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is an ocean current that redistributes heat globally and is the source of much of the ocean’s deep water. A recent study provides palaeo-oceanographic evidence that the AMOC has been anomalously weak since approximately 1850 CE compared with the preceding 1,500 years.

Read more.

Protected: Contact Us

From Our Files

Empirical evidence for orbital forcing initiating glacial/deglacial cycles from marine sediments

In 1997 Raymo was the first to provide observations supporting the orbital forcing hypothesis for glacial/deglacial cycles that did not rely on orbital tuning. The research also suggested that ice sheet dynamics needed to be considered in addition to orbital forcing to explain the observed 100,000 year glacial/deglacial cycles.

Increase in extreme weather events confirmed by latest U.S. government report

There is strong evidence of marked changes in temperature extremes across the contiguous United States – extreme cold waves have become less common while extreme heat waves have become more common and heavy precipitation events in most parts of the United States have increased in both intensity and frequency. That is the conclusion of a report prepared by scientists from NOAA, NASA and other agencies.

Temperature and atmospheric CO2 from Dome C for 800 000 years

Antarctic ice cores reveals close temperature and carbon dioxide correlation for eight glacial-interglacial cycles

A recent study of ice cores from Antarctica provides a climate record for the past 800,000 years. The analysis reveals that atmospheric carbon dioxide was strongly correlated with Antarctic temperature throughout eight glacial cycles.

Global deep ocean temperature 60 million years ago to present

New evidence that CO2 may have driven cooling 50-30 million years ago

New evidence from analyzing fossil plankton shells has revealed that CO2 concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere was about triple current levels around 52 million years ago. It then declined to levels close to current atmospheric CO2 concentration 34 million years ago when Antarctica began to glaciate.

See a complete list of articles