Climate Archives

July 10, 2019July 10, 2019 by Matt Williams

New Study Shows How Breaching “Carbon Threshold” Could Trigger Mass Extinction in Earth’s Oceans

This view of Earth’s horizon was taken by an Expedition 7 crewmember onboard the International Space Station, using a wide-angle lens while the Station was over the Pacific Ocean. A new study suggests that Earth's water didn't all come from comets, but likely also came from water-rich planetesimals. Credit: NASA

Between the scientific community, governments, humanitarian organizations, and even military planners, climate change is considered to be the single greatest threat facing humanity today. Between the increases in famine, disease, flooding, displacement, extreme weather, and chaos that result, it is clear that the way we are causing our planet to get warmer is having dire consequences.

But there a number of scenarios where the harm being done now could result in a runaway effect leading to mass extinctions. This possibility was illustrated in a recent study conducted by MIT professor Daniel Rothman with the support of NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF). According to Rothman, we are in danger of breaching a “carbon threshold” that could lead to a runaway effect with Earth’s oceans.

July 2, 2019July 2, 2019 by Evan Gough

Airplane Contrails are Contributing to Global Warming Too

A commercial airliner produces a condensation trail in the skies over California. Credit: Mick West

To the scientifically uninitiated, it might seem like a frivolous idea: That those slight, wispy clouds that trail behind jet aircraft at such high altitudes could contribute to climate change. But they do.

Scientists love to measure things, and when they measured these contrails, which is short for condensation trails, they found bad news. Though they look kind of beautiful and ephemeral on a summer day, they pack an oversize punch when it comes to their warming effect.

June 21, 2019June 21, 2019 by Evan Gough

NASA Model Shows Greenland’s Ice Sheet Will Disappear Over the Next 1000 Years, Raising Sea Levels by 7 Meters

The Greenland ice sheet could be gone in a thousand years. Don't buy waterfront property. Image Credit: NASA

Great news! Humankind’s greatest-ever engineering project is nearing completion. Soon we will have warmed the Earth enough to get rid of all those pesky ice sheets and other frozen areas. The finish line is in sight.

If we all work together for the next thousand years, we’ll finally reach our goal!

June 18, 2019June 18, 2019 by Evan Gough

Martian Clouds Might Start with Meteor Trails Through the Atmosphere

Mars, as it was observed shortly before opposition in 2016 by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA/ESA/HST

On Earth, clouds form when enough droplets of water condense out of the air. And those droplets require a tiny speck of dust or sea salt, called a condensation nuclei, to form. In Earth’s atmosphere, those tiny specks of dust are lofted high into the atmosphere where they trigger cloud formation. But on Mars?

Mars has something else going on.

May 27, 2019May 27, 2019 by Evan Gough

NASA’s Long-Term Climate Predictions have Proven to be Very Accurate, Within 1/20th of a Degree Celsius

The map shows temperature changes for the last decade—January 2000 to December 2009—relative to the 1951-1980 mean. Credit: NASA

There are a handful of major science institutions around the world that keep track of the Earth’s temperature. They all clearly show that the world’s temperature has risen in the past few decades. One of those institutions is NASA.

May 16, 2019May 16, 2019 by Evan Gough

Today is the Highest Concentration of Atmospheric CO2 in Human History. 415 Parts Per Million. Last Time it Was This High, There Were Trees at the South Pole

Think about this for a minute: We humans and our emissions are helping turn back the climatological clock by 2 or 3 million years, possibly more. Not since that time, called the Pliocene Epoch, has the CO2 ppm risen above 400.

Way back then, the CO2 helped keep the Earth’s temperature 2 to 3 degrees C warmer than it is now. And the Earth was a much different place back then.

May 6, 2019May 6, 2019 by Nancy Atkinson

Climate Change Q & A with Bear Grylls

Bear Grylls isn’t a climate scientist, but in his travels around the world as an adventurer, survivalist and host of numerous nature shows, he has witnessed firsthand our planet’s changing climate.

This is especially true in a new series Grylls hosts and narrates on the National Geographic channel called “Hostile Planet.” While the show does not focus on climate change per se, it doesn’t shy away from portraying how our world is rapidly changing and how those changes affect various animal species.

April 1, 2019April 1, 2019 by Evan Gough

Rivers on Mars Flowed for More Than a Billion Years

A photo of a preserved river channel on Mars. The color is overlaid to show elevation, with blue being low and yellow being high elevation. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Univ. Arizona/UChicago

The ancient climate of Mars is a mystery to scientists. Even with all we’ve learned about Mars, it’s still difficult to explain how lakes and rivers existed. A new study shows that Martian rivers were swollen with runoff and that they flowed far later into the planet’s history than previously thought.

The question is, how did the Martian climate create these conditions?

February 21, 2019February 21, 2019 by Evan Gough

Antarctica is About to Unleash an Iceberg Twice the Size of New York City

The Brunt Ice Shelf is about to calve an ice berg more than twice as large as New York City. Image: British Antarctic Survey.

An ice shelf in Antarctica is about to give birth to a baby. This baby is a giant, spawned by growing cracks in the Brunt Ice Shelf. It’s not clear what this’ll mean to the scientific infrastructure in the area, and to the human presence, which were both established in the 1950s.

December 13, 2018 by Evan Gough

There’s a Surprising Amount of Life Deep Inside the Earth. Hundreds of Times More Mass than All of Humanity

A nematode (eukaryote) in a biofilm of microorganisms. This unidentified nematode (Poikilolaimus sp.) from Kopanang gold mine in South Africa, lives 1.4 km below the surface. Image courtesy of Gaetan Borgonie (Extreme Life Isyensya, Belgium).

Scientists with the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) are transforming our understanding of life deep inside the Earth, and maybe on other worlds. Their discoveries suggest that abundant life could exist in the sub-surface of other planets and moons, even where temperatures are extreme, and energy and nutrients are scarce. They’ve also discovered that all of the life hidden in the deep Earth contains hundreds of times more carbon than all of humanity, and that the deep biosphere is almost twice the volume of all Earth’s oceans.

“Existing models of the carbon cycle … are still a work in progress.” – Dr. Mark Lever, DCO Deep Life Community Steering Committee.”

The DCO is not a facility, but a group of over 1,000 scientist from 52 countries, including geologists, chemists, physicists, and biologists. They’re nearing the end of a 10-year project to investigate how the Deep Carbon Cycle affects Earth. 90 % of Earth’s carbon is inside the planet, and the DCO is our first effort to really understand it.

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