News by Subject Earth Science

An analysis of sediment carried by glaciers in both South America and East Africa indicates that tropical glaciers not just in South America but across the tropics began to melt earlier than expected at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (26,000-19,000 years ago), before atmospheric carbon dioxide levels began to rise. The study's authors suggest that the early melting.

The Arctic region is heating up faster than any other place on Earth, and as more and more sea ice is lost every year, we are already feeling the impacts. IIASA researchers explored strategies for cooling down the oceans in a world without this important cooling mechanism.

The last remaining tropical glaciers between the Himalayas and the Andes will disappear in the next decade -- and possibly sooner -- due to climate change, a new study has found. The glaciers in Papua, Indonesia, are "the canaries in the coal mine" for other mountaintop glaciers around the world, said Lonnie Thompson, one of the senior authors of the study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists from around the world have assessed the planet's 78 mountain glacier-based water systems. For the first time, they ranked them in order of their importance to adjacent lowland communities, as well as their vulnerability to future environmental and socioeconomic changes.

There are picturesque but poorly studied blue lakes situated in Western Siberia. They are named so because of their color. To understand how such ecosystems function, scientists from Tyumen analyzed the chemical composition of water and studied the invertebrates' species living in them. These lakes are good model objects for studying the laws of geological history and the formation of the earth's surface, features of the natural and technogenic geo-and hydrochemical background of the region.