Earth

Warming from greenhouse gases has trumped the Arctic's millennia-long natural cooling cycle, suggests new research. Although the Arctic has been receiving less energy from the summer sun for the past 8,000 years, Arctic summer temperatures began climbing in 1900 and accelerated after 1950.

The decade from 1999 to 2008 was the warmest in the Arctic in two millennia, scientists report in the journal Science. Arctic temperatures are now 2.2 F (1.2 C) warmer than in 1900.

Trichoderma reesei's change from moldy best to industrial staple is due, in part, to scientific explorations that led to the development of mutant fungal strains that produce large quantities of biomass-degrading enzymes.

After more than a decade of inquiry, a Princeton-led team of scientists has turned the tables on a long-standing controversy to re-establish an old truth about nitrogen mixing in the oceans.

For decades, scientists thought they had a handle on the workings of an intricate natural mechanism known as the nitrogen cycle, essential to maintaining life on Earth. This process, one of nature's most elegant sleights-of-hand, shuttles nitrogen from the soils to the oceans to the atmosphere and back.

Ruben Juanes, MIT explains that some of the naturally occurring underground methane exists not as gas but as methane hydrate. In the hydrate phase, a methane gas molecule is locked inside a crystalline cage of frozen water molecules. These hydrates exist in a layer of underground rock or oceanic sediments called the hydrate stability zone or HSZ. Methane hydrates will remain stable as long as the external pressure remains high and the temperature low.

Persistent winds and a weakened current in the Mid-Atlantic contributed to higher than normal sea levels along the Eastern Seaboard in June and July, according to a new NOAA technical report.

After observing water levels six inches to two feet higher than originally predicted, NOAA scientists began analyzing data from select tide stations and buoys from Maine to Florida and found that a weakening of the Florida Current Transport—an oceanic current that feeds into the Gulf Stream—in addition to steady and persistent Northeast winds, contributed to this anomaly.

The team, led by scientists from the University of Edinburgh, says that the new method, which uses data collected from earthquakes, potentially allows the Earth's seismic activity to be mapped more comprehensively.

Scientists currently monitor underground movements, such as earthquakes and nuclear tests, using seismometers – instruments that measure the motion of those events at the Earth's surface. This helps to indicate where they took place.

A new study finds that large-scale farming projects can erode theEarth's surface at rates comparable to those of the world's largestrivers and glaciers.

Published online in the journal Nature Geoscience, the research offersstark evidence of how humans are reshaping the planet. It also findsthat - contrary to previous scholarship - rivers are as powerful asglaciers at eroding landscapes.

As much as half of California could be occupied by new bird communities by 2070 according to a new study by PRBO Conservation Science (PRBO) and partners. The publication entitled "Reshuffling of species with climate disruption: A no-analog future for California birds?" is to be released in the open access peer reviewed journal PLoS ONE on September 2nd.

It's unusual to see towering clouds that are created from smoke and fires, but that's what showed up in the latest satellite imagery from NASA, when capturing powerful Hurricane Jimena and Tropical Depression Kevin in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. Jimena's outer rainbands were already spreading over southern Baja California at 11 a.m. EDT.

In the paper, The Boundless Carbon Cycle, published in Nature Geoscience, scientists from the University of Vienna, Uppsala University in Sweden, University of Antwerp, and the U.S. based Stroud™ Water Research Center argue that current international strategies to mitigate man made carbon emissions and address climate change have overlooked a critical player - inland waterways. Streams, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and wetlands play an important role in the carbon cycle that is unaccounted for in conventional carbon cycling models.

Hot on the heels of the Royal Society's Geoengineering the Climate report, September's Physics World contains feature comment from UK experts stressing the need to start taking geoengineering – deliberate interventions in the climate system to counteract man-made global warming – more seriously.

Like most invasive plants introduced to the U.S. from Europe and other places, garlic mustard first found it easy to dominate the natives. A new study indicates that eventually, however, its primary weapon – a fungus-killing toxin injected into the soil – becomes less potent.

The study, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that evolutionary forces can alter the very attributes that give an invasive plant its advantage. In fact, the study suggests the plant's defenses are undermined by its own success.

The future of the Earth could rest on potentially dangerous and unproven geoengineering technologies unless emissions of carbon dioxide can be greatly reduced, a new study has found.

The report found that unless future efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are much more successful than they have been so far, additional action in the form of geoengineering will be necessary to cool the planet. However, the report identified major uncertainties regarding the effectiveness, costs, and environmental impacts of geoengineering technologies.

In the open ocean, species of large predatory fish will swim and hunt for food at various depths, which leads to unique diets in these fish. Oceanographers and geologists in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (UHM) and colleagues have found that those fish that hunt deeper in the open ocean have higher mercury concentrations than those that feed near the surface of the ocean because their deep water food has higher mercury. This research was detailed in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Travelers to the neotropics —— the tropical lands of the Americas——might be forgiven for thinking that all of the colorful insects flittering over sunny puddles or among dense forest understory are butterflies. However, many are not. Some are moths that have reinvented themselves as butterflies, converging on the daytime niche typically dominated by their less hairy relatives. Now, a new revision of the taxonomic relationships among one such group of insects, the subfamily Dioptinae, sheds light on the diversity of tropical moth species and presents a unique story of parallel evolution.