An international team of scientists, including a senior researcher at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, has uncovered new evidence of ancient wildfires that reshapes our understanding of Earth’s turbulent Early Triassic epoch, about 250 million years ago.

In the summer of 2022, 20 islands in the Maldives were flooded when a distant swell event in the Indian Ocean coincided with an extremely high tide level. Now researchers from the University of Plymouth (UK) and Deltares, a not-for-profit applied research institute in the Netherlands, have warned that future predicted rises in sea levels - coupled with an increase in extreme weather events and wave conditions - could result in such flooding becoming far more common, perhaps happening every two to three years by around 2050.

Emissions of the greenhouse gas methane from lakes and reservoirs risk doubling by the end of the century due to climate change according to a new study from Linköping University, Sweden, and NASA Ames Research Center in the US. This in turn could raise Earth’s temperature more than suggested by the UN climate panel IPCC’s current worst-case scenario.