Climate and Environment
26 June 2019
During an expedition, a team of researchers from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks found that the unusually hot summer has quickly softened the upper layers of the massive underground ice blocks, which had been frozen for thousands of years.
“It’s an indication that the climate is now warmer than at any time in the last 5,000 or more years,” Vladimir E. Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the university, told Reuters by telephone. Their research results were published in the science journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The study was based on the data that Romanovsky and his colleagues had been analysing since their last expedition to the area in 2016. The group of researchers accessed the remote area by plane and found that the landscape had changed beyond recognition in the approximately ten years since the first time they had seen it.
Scientists are alarmed by the instability of permafrost because fast melting could release great quantities of greenhouse gases, which may accelerate global warming further.
For the first time ever, living polyps were discovered in Mediterranean coral colonies that were previously thought to be completely dead by researchers who published their finding in the periodical Science Advances.
The oceans play a very important role in controlling Earth’s climate. New research has shown that the planet’s five oceans absorb much more carbon dioxide, one of the gases responsible for the greenhouse effect, than previously thought.
According to a study published in the International Journal of Climatology, Israel’s average temperature has been rising continuously since the proclamation of the Middle Eastern state in 1948, but over the last thirty years the rate of warming has also increased.
Temperatures are rising much faster than the global average in the region of the Mediterranean Sea, and this represents a threat to the food and water resources of the region, researchers have warned in a new study.
The news about climate refugees are alternating sequences of frightening numbers and apocalyptic landscapes that obscure the real face of the problem: the disfigured human fates.
More than a quarter of all mammals are threatened with extinction.
Between 1 May and 30 August, higher than ever temperatures have been measured in 29 countries, on almost 400 occasions in the Northern Hemisphere.
The French falconer Jacques-Olivier Travers has surveyed the glaciers of the Alps using a camera attached to a white-tailed eagle.
The ice floe that the German research boat will be attached to as it drifts around the Arctic for almost a year on the most important Arctic expedition ever has been selected.
Data from European climate researchers indicates that this year’s was the warmest September since the Copernicus Climate Change Service began keeping regular records of meteorological data in 1981.
