Oceanography

The ice sheet on West Antarctica just got a little older - 20 million years or so. The findings indicate that ice sheets first grew on the West Antarctic subcontinent at the start of a global…

By analyzing a 150-year-old moss bank on the Antarctic Peninsula, researchers describe an unprecedented rate of ecological change since the 1960s, driven by warming temperatures.  The…

The annual melting of sea ice in the Arctic is approaching its yearly "minimum," the time when the floating ice cap covers less of the Arctic Ocean than at any other period during the year, and there…

A recent review of research on the response of plants, marine life and animals to declining sea ice in the Arctic found that sea ice decline and warming trends are changing the vegetation in nearby…

The Earth has periodic ice ages - every 100,000 years, give or take, and the ice ages last far longer than the warm periods. In the last century, scientists determined that Earth's ice ages were…

A year-round ice-free Arctic Ocean surface could explain why the Earth of the Pliocene Epoch had the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that we have today, but we remain 3 to 9 degrees cooler…

A new projection estimates that by the middle of this century there could be an average 56 percent drop in the amount of water stored in peak snowpack in the McKenzie River watershed of the Oregon…

Scientists using tracking data from Garwood Valley in the McMurdo Dry Valleys region of Antarctica have documented an acceleration in the melt rate of permafrost - ground ice - in a section of…

Shrinking sea ice cover in the North Atlantic - baby harp seals impacted most. A new paper says satellite images have allowed researchers to gauge the relative roles that genetic, environmental and…

A potential barrier to deep Antarctic circumpolar flow until the late Miocene? Scientists have found geologic evidence which casts doubt on one of the conventional explanations for how Antarctica's…