Oceanography

For the first time, scientists have mapped elevation changes of Greenlandic and Antarctic glaciers. For the new digital maps, the researchers evaluated all data by the CryoSat-2 altimeter SIRAL.…

During the last ice age, a large part of North America was covered with a massive ice sheet up to 3 kilometers thick and that is a key reason why the sea level was then about 120 meters lower than it…

By Raquel Vaquer-Sunyer, Lund University The world’s oceans are plagued with the problem of “dead zones”, areas of high nutrients (such as nitrogen and phosphorus) in which plankton blooms cause a…

Interpreting snow depth records from past decades is as much art as science. Even into the 1990s, Soviets on Arctic drifting sea ice used meter sticks and handwritten logs to record snow depth.…

Between Greenland and Spitsbergen, scientists have found the scours on the sea bed left behind by gigantic icebergs - about three times the height of the Empire State Building. The five lineaments,…

As the complex story of climate change unfolds, many of the forecasts are grim, but there are exceptions - the lowest-oxygen environments in the ocean would get now get worse, they may improve if…

Mercury is a naturally occurring element and a part of human enterprises like burning coal and making cement and compact fluorescent light bulbs. Knowing how much of both natural and unnatural…

Warming temperatures are causing Arctic lakes to release methane, a greenhouse gas that has 23X the short term warming effect of CO2, it has been said. A new paper in Nature found that Siberian lakes…

As the climate warms and sea ice retreats, the North is changing. An ice-covered expanse now has a season of increasingly open water which is predicted to extend across the whole Arctic Ocean before…

Two new papers postulate that there will be a water crisis by 2040. Not because of population, but because of current energy and power solutions.  And they believe solar and wind power is the…