Before the year has even come to a close, climate experts are certain that 2023 will be the hottest year in recorded history. And while several factors are impacting this year’s record heat, researchers say human-caused climate change is overwhelmingly responsible. On Dec. 6, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) — part of the European … Read more
Earth is being choked by a thick, curling fog of carbon dioxide that coats the planet as the months go by, a series of NASA videos shows. The newly released animations visualize the astonishing scale of human carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions over a year by coloring the invisible greenhouse gas. The animations were produced by … Read more
Locked away in frigid Arctic soils and riverbeds is a world teeming with ancient microbes. Bacteria and viruses that existed thousands of years ago are frozen in time inside prehistoric layers of permafrost. Warming temperatures could cause much of the ice to melt and unleash these microbes from their frosty prisons. Once free, unknown pathogens … Read more
The combined weight of New York City’s buildings may be causing the metropolis to sink, researchers have said. However, there may be other reasons why the city is sinking — including the way the earth continues to shift after the end of the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago, scientists added. Understanding how … Read more
Global warming has trapped an explosive amount of energy in Earth’s atmosphere in the past half century — the equivalent of about 25 billion atomic bombs, a new study finds. In the paper, published April 17 in the journal Earth System Science Data, an international group of researchers estimated that, between 1971 and 2020, around … Read more
Deserts can take many forms — including sweeping sand dunes, rocky canyons, sagebrush steppes and polar ice fields. But they’re united by one thing: a lack of rainfall. Generally speaking, anywhere that gets less than 10 inches (25 centimeters) of rain a year counts as a desert, said Lynn Fenstermaker, an ecologist at the Desert … Read more
What would Bill Nye the Science Guy get our home planet for Earth Day? The ultimate gift: fusion energy. “We need electricity,” Nye told Live Science in an exclusive interview on Thursday (April 20). “We need not only what we can get right now with existing technologies — with wind, and solar and geothermal energy … Read more
The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs did not trigger a long-lasting impact winter, scientists have found — a discovery that raises new questions about what happened on Earth just after it hit. One spring day 66 million years ago, a 6-mile-wide (10 kilometers) asteroid smashed into the Yucatán Peninsula and upended life on Earth. … Read more
For the past three days, from Monday through Wednesday (July 3-5), global temperatures have either broken or matched records for the hottest day on Earth since at least 1979, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, a tool that compiles data and models to measure the global atmosphere. Monday’s average worldwide temperature climbed to … Read more
Depleting oxygen and rising hydrogen sulfide levels in the oceans may have been responsible for one of Earth’s most significant mass extinctions more than 350 million years ago, a new study finds. The changes were likely driven by rising sea levels and have some spooky parallels to conditions seen today. Researchers studied samples of black … Read more
