Science Daily: Climate News

Following high-severity fire, scientists have found forest recovery may increasingly be compromised by lack of tree seed sources, warmer and drier post-fire climate and more frequent reburning.

After several years of experimentation, scientists have engineered thale cress, or Arabidopsis thaliana, to behave like a succulent, improving water-use efficiency, salinity tolerance and reducing the effects of drought. The tissue succulence engineering method devised for this small flowering plant can be used in other plants to improve drought and salinity tolerance with the goal of moving this approach into food and bioenergy crops.

The South Pole has been warming at more than three times the global average over the past 30 years, according to recent research.

Over the past 150 years, global warming has more than undone the global cooling that occurred over the past six millennia, according to a major new study. The findings show that the millennial-scale global cooling began approximately 6,500 years ago when the long-term average global temperature topped out at around 0.7°C warmer than the mid-19th century.

New research has shown that Drax power station in North Yorkshire is the optimal site for the carbon capture and storage facilities that will be needed reduce carbon emissions and achieve the targets of 2016 Paris Climate Agreement.

Alaska's beavers are profiting from climate change, and spreading rapidly. In just a few years' time, they have not only expanded into many tundra regions where they'd never been seen before; they're also building more and more dams in their new homes, creating a host of new water bodies.

Modelling of the Chicxulub asteroid impact 66 million years ago shows it created a world largely unsuitable for dinosaurs to live in.

Scientists ran a series of simulations to produce the most elaborate set of projections to date that illustrates possible changes in nine monsoon regions across five continents.

The history of our planet has been written, among other things, in the periodic reversal of its magnetic poles. Scientists propose a new means of reading this historic record: in ice. Their findings could lead to a refined probing ice cores and, in the future, might be applied to understanding the magnetic history of other bodies in our solar system, including Mars and Jupiter's moon Europa.

The study of sub-Saharan Africa finds that a relatively small increase in airborne particles significantly increase infant mortality rates. A cost-effective solution may lie in an exotic-sounding proposal.

New research suggests that as the Earth warms natural ecosystems such as freshwaters will release more methane than expected from predictions based on temperature increases alone.

Explosive volcanic eruptions are possible deep down in the sea -- although the water masses exert enormous pressure there.

Environmental destruction may make pandemics more likely and less manageable, new research suggests.

Dust storms from Africa's Saharan Desert traveling across the Atlantic Ocean are nothing new, but the current dust storm has been quite expansive and NASA satellites have provided a look at the massive June plume. NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite showed the blanket of dust had moved over the Gulf of Mexico and extended into Central America and over part of the eastern Pacific Ocean.

A new study describes the proliferation of alien invasive species and the dangers they pose.

Ancestors of a distinctive pollinating bee found across Australia probably originated in tropical Asian countries, islands in the south-west Pacific or greater Oceania region, ecology researchers claim. Describing the likely dispersal corridor for the ancestral lineage of the bee genus Homalictus will help understand the social evolution of the vibrant halictine bees, researchers say.

Scientists have measured the density of liquid iron -- the main component of rocky planet cores -- under conditions similar to Earth's liquid core: 1,000,000 atmospheres and 4,000 degrees Celsius. Accurate density measurements of liquid iron under such extreme conditions are very important for understanding the chemical make-up of our planet's core.

Using state-of-the-art ocean robots and scientific sensors attached to seals, researchers have for the first time observed small and energetic ocean currents in the Southern Ocean. The currents are critical at controlling the amount of heat and carbon moving between the ocean and the atmosphere -- information vital for understanding our global climate and how it may change in the future.

Over the past year, researchers have been refining their unconventional desalination approach for hypersaline brines -- temperature swing solvent extraction (TSSE) -- that shows great promise for widespread use. The team now reports that their method has enabled them to attain energy-efficient zero-liquid discharge of ultrahigh salinity brines -- the first demonstration of TSSE for ZLD desalination of hypersaline brines.

Using recent satellite observations, ground monitoring and computational modeling, researchers have released a survey of global pollution rates. There are a couple of surprises, for worse, but also, for better.