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Amphibians, Reptiles, & Natural History
Amphibians, Reptiles, & Natural History
Plans to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels depend on reaching net-zero emissions and, in many cases, actively removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air. While this helps limit extreme weather, sea level rise, ecosystem loss and the risk of triggering irreversible climate tipping points, a new study, published in Science Advances, finds that reducing CO2 levels may have an unexpected effect. Climate simulations used in the study suggest that the Southern Ocean around Antarctica may switch from being an important carbon sink to being a prolific source of carbon.
When will the glacier in your valley disappear? Will the glacier you visited as a child still exist in 2050? And how much difference would limiting global warming make?
For the first time, important features of the Antarctic coastal zone have been mapped at high resolution around the continent by training an artificial intelligence tool to accurately recognize grounded icebergs in satellite radar images.
Northern India experiences some of the world’s worst winter air pollution, with dangerous episodes often prompting emergency control efforts. In major cities like Delhi, the Air Quality Index has reached levels above 999—over 30 times the World Health Organization’s safety limit.
Switching to a more sustainable diet could halve food-related emissions in cities such as Amsterdam, while in cities such as Dhaka and Delhi, the focus should be more on making food production more sustainable as they widen food access. A new database by Leiden researchers shows that different cities need different approaches to achieve a more sustainable food system.
Historical records of the deadliest storms and heat waves may be a poor indicator of the scale and impact future weather disasters could have, scientists at King’s College London warn.
Dozens of glacial lakes have formed across northern India in the last three decades, while existing lakes have expanded rapidly, highlighting the need to monitor a landscape reshaped by climate change.
The historic droughts of 2023 and 2024 in the Amazon reduced river flows and altered the region’s rainfall composition. Daily monitoring in Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, revealed these changes through the use of isotopes, which act as a kind of water “fingerprint.” This method demonstrated how El Niño and warming in the North Atlantic affected the origin of moisture and precipitation dynamics.
Peatlands store large amounts of carbon. However, when they are drained, they can become substantial sources of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO₂).
In early 2017 and 2023, California experienced two catastrophic and record-breaking floods that caused billions of dollars in damage, triggered mudslides and forced thousands of people to evacuate. Why this happened left scientists scratching their heads. Both disasters struck during La Niña conditions, which normally bring drier-than-normal weather to California.
Extreme heat has become more common—both research and lived experience document this—but when it arrives is a different question. A new study finds that, rather than occurring only during warm seasons, extreme heat events have become more frequent in the months before and after, too.
New research shows that warming-induced emissions—greenhouse gas emissions from natural sources driven by rising temperatures—could amplify global warming by approximately 20%–30% and add an estimated 0.2°C–0.4°C of warming this century on top of anthropogenic warming under different scenarios. These major additional drivers of warming are largely unaccounted for in current climate projections and policies.
Estuaries across the United States are facing the same trends of warming waters, algal growth and declining oxygen concentrations that threaten water quality and fish populations, regardless of geographic location, according to new research led by a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) faculty member.
The Anthropocene became part of the zeitgeist after Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen launched the idea in 2000. This is the notion that a crescendo of human impacts has recently propelled Earth out of the relatively stable climatic conditions of the Holocene epoch, during which human civilization developed and flourished, to produce a new kind of planet.
Canada’s last epishelf lake drained into the Arctic Ocean following the 2020 breakup of the Milne Ice Shelf and will not recover, a new study confirms.
UC Riverside environmental engineers have identified key chemical reactions that occur when ultraviolet light is used to destroy “forever chemical” pollutants in water, providing a roadmap for developing more effective cleanup technologies.
Carbon emissions from the petrochemical industry could increase by 50% by 2050, according to new research from the University of Sheffield. The study, published in Nature Sustainability, provides the most detailed data to date on emissions from one of the world’s biggest emitters of carbon dioxide.
Today’s best weather computers would still have struggled to accurately predict the weather for the D-Day landings, University of Reading research shows. The new research, published in the journal Weather ahead of the release of the D-Day film “Pressure,” used AI models to produce 50 different forecasts of the storm that famously pushed back the Allies’ invasion of Normandy in June 1944.
Researchers have developed a method for extrapolating sea surface temperatures from sparse data that is significantly more accurate than other commonly used computational methods and slightly more accurate than the best-performing AI model, while taking a fraction of the time to train. The work has implications for both short-term weather forecasting and longer-term climate predictions.
Radiation from space is constantly entering Earth’s atmosphere, but how much of it reaches the altitudes used by commercial aircraft depends not only on height and location, but also on the activity of the sun. A new study based on high-altitude balloon measurements over southern Israel has mapped these changes through the atmosphere and found that radiation levels at aviation altitudes rise as solar activity falls.
Researchers at The University of Manchester have developed a new physics-based artificial intelligence approach that, for the first time, enables accurate global-scale predictions of how dissolved organic carbon moves between seawater and marine sediments, a crucial but previously unquantifiable component of the planet’s carbon cycle.
Climate change is driving rapid declines in seaweed forests globally, outpacing restoration efforts and undermining seaweed restoration as a viable carbon dioxide removal strategy, according to an essay by Karen Filbee-Dexter at the University of Western Australia and colleagues, published Sept. 8 in the journal PLOS Biology.
How will global access to food, water and energy evolve in coming decades? A new study coauthored by MIT researchers suggests the answers could be very different depending on region, resource and income.
Drylands are defined as regions where rainfall is low relative to the atmosphere’s ability to draw water from soil and plants. Expanding boundaries of these regions are frequent concerns in climate change considerations. While they can support large populations and ecosystems, dryland expansion can worsen water scarcity, land degradation and desertification.
Marine heat waves are a consequence of climate change and are increasingly altering marine and coastal regions worldwide. An international study led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon now shows that many coastal seas absorb more CO₂ from the atmosphere during these extreme events than under normal conditions. The effect is particularly pronounced in polar and subpolar shelf seas of the Northern Hemisphere, where sea ice is declining as temperatures rise.
Meltwater rivers flowing from Svalbard glaciers are carrying ancient methane from rocks beneath the ice into the open air, new research published in Nature Communications shows.
A new study reveals that microbial life deep within Earth has persisted and repeatedly flourished through hundreds of millions of years of mountain-building and erosion. By analyzing minerals, fluids and gases from a 2.3-kilometer-deep (1.4-mile-deep) borehole in central Sweden, researchers have uncovered episodic bursts of methane-producing life linked to major geological events that shaped Scandinavia. The paper is published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.