Himalayan glaciers lost 28% of ice in last 40 years

A new study of ice mass loss of 650 Himalayan glaciers over the past 40 years has revealed that of the total ice mass in 1975, only 72% remained in 2016. Futhermore the average rate of ice loss was found to be twice as rapid in 2000-2016 compared to 1975-2000.

Read more.
Beaver expansion into Arctic tundra resulting from and accelerating permafrost thawing

A recent study uses remote sensing to document the range expansion of North American beaver into the Arctic region of northwest Alaska which suggests that permafrost thawing may be expanding. Beaver ponds and associated hydrologic changes are resulting from and contributing to thawing permafrost as pond formation increases winter water temperatures ponds and downstream.

Read more.
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.

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.

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.

Global warming “hiatus” not supported by new analysis

In this new study an analysis of new global ocean and land temperature data with corrections to older shipboard measurements reveals that the temperature trend over the period 2000-2014 does not differ from the temperature trend over the period 1950-1999. It is concluded that the “hiatus” reported in IPCC AR5 is most likely an artifact of older measurement techniques.

Temperature, CO2 and CH4 from Dome C ice core

Rising CO2 lagged Southern Hemisphere warming at the beginning of the last deglaciation

A new analysis of Antarctic ice cores shows that at the beginning of the last deglaciation, the start of rising CO2 lagged rising temperature by about 800 years which is consistent with the Southern Hemisphere playing a dominant role in the rise in atmospheric CO2. The concomitant rise in methane appears to be governed by Northern Hemisphere processes.

See a complete list of articles