News by Subject Earth Science

University of Washington glaciologists are co-authors on two papers that analyzed Antarctic ice cores to understand the continent's air temperatures during the most recent glacial period. The results help understand how the region behaves during a major climate transition.

If you're wearing gold jewelry right now, there's a good chance it came from an illegal mining operation in the tropics and surfaced only after some rainforest was sacrificed, according to a team of University of Wisconsin researchers who studied regulatory efforts to curb some of these environmentally damaging activities.

An international team of researchers, led by the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, has now succeeded in reconstructing changes in rainfall in Central Asia over the past five million years. The information preserved within the sedimentary succession provides the missing link for understanding land-water feedbacks for global climate.

Small-scale mixed-use agriculture that avoids synthetic fertilizers in favor of manure could eliminate agricultural greenhouse gas emissions if established across the United States' 100 million hectares of lush high quality cropland, according to a study by Gidon Eshel, publishing 3rd June 2021 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology. The minor catch: beef consumption would need to decrease, but by only 20%.

Launching the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, a new UN report says that to address climate change, loss of nature and pollution, the world must deliver on existing commitments to restore at least 1 billion degraded hectares of land -- an area comparable to China - in the next decade and add similar commitments for oceans. The report documents the urgent need for restoration, the financial investment required, and the potential returns for people and nature.

A large group of iconic fossils widely believed to shed light on the origins of many of Earth's animals and the communities they lived in may be hiding a secret. Scientists, led by two from the University of Portsmouth, UK, are the first to model how exceptionally well preserved fossils that record the largest and most intense burst of evolution ever seen could have been moved by mudflows.