By Robert McSweeney Arctic sea ice has experienced its maximum extent for the year, reaching 14.48 million square kilometers (approximately 5.59 million square miles) on March 17—the second smallest in the 39-year satellite record. The provisional data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows the 2018 winter peak only narrowly avoided taking […]
By Douglas McCauley and Paul DeSalles (The views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily Mongabay.) 1. U.S. Drops Out of Paris In our 2015 ocean top 10 list, we celebrated the adoption of the Paris agreement as a monumental achievement for slowing the warming, acidification and deoxygenation of our global oceans. In 2017, […]
By Tim Radford New research has confirmed one of the worst nightmares of climate science: the instability of the East Antarctic ice sheet. This vast mass holds enough water to raise sea levels by 53 meters (approximately 174 feet) worldwide. And researchers have confirmed that one stretch of the southern polar coastline has melted many […]
By Alex Kirby For all of us, as 2017 proves to be one of the three warmest years on record, climate change presents a greater risk of sickness or death than it did four decades ago, the United Nations says. And for some of the world’s poorest people, the consequences of unpredictable weather caused by […]
By Tim Radford Deep in the last Ice Age, 17,700 years ago, the ancient Antarctic suddenly began to warm. Climate change, unexpectedly, made itself felt in the Southern Hemisphere. Glaciers in Patagonia and in New Zealand began to retreat. Lakes in the Bolivian Andes began to swell with meltwater. Rain fell in the desert of […]
By Tim Radford New York City—hit by Superstorm Sandy five years ago at a cost of $50 billion—could be under water again soon. What 200 years ago would have been regarded as the kind of flood that happened only once in 500 years could, by 2030, bring superstorms every five years or so. It won’t […]
Greenpeace has launched a global campaign for an Antarctic sanctuary, covering 1.8 million square kilometers (approximately .7 million square miles) of ocean, to protect whales, penguins and other wildlife. Following a failure to agree on strong marine protection in the East Antarctic, Greenpeace has called for governments to show “greater vision and ambition” in the […]
By Alex Kirby Tropical storm Harvey is by any standard off the scale. Some parts of Texas have received in just over a week the rainfall they would normally expect in an entire year, and the storm is described as generating as much rain as would normally be seen only once in more than 1,000 […]
Antarctica, the coldest place on Earth, may now be home to the densest concentration of volcanoes, according to a first-of-its-kind study. The discovery isn’t something to get too excited about. The researchers warned that if these volcanoes were to erupt, it could cause more ice sheets to melt and contribute to sea level rise. Scientists […]
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