By Robert M. Thorson When Americans quote writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, they often reach for his assertion that “In Wildness is the preservation of the world.” This phrase elicited little response when Thoreau first read it during a lecture in 1851. A century later, however, it had become a guiding mantra for the […]
Deep inside the Apuseni Mountains you’ll find the Scărișoara Ice Cave in Transylvania, the oldest cave glacier in the world. You’ll also find some pretty incredible climate data from the last 10,000 years. An international team of scientists from several institutions, including the University of South Florida, University of Belfast and Stockholm University, reconstructed winter […]
In an effort to understand how climate change is altering the carbon cycle, a project between the University of Oklahoma and NASA is headed to space. Orbiting 22,000 miles above Earth’s surface, this host of instruments will track carbon as it flows through the Earth delivering real-time data and helping scientists quantify just how much […]
The planet, as we know it, has been given a deadline: 10 years. According to the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, if humans don’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions drastically and maintain carbon sinks, like forests, then the results will be catastrophic for the climate. But the researchers have developed a model that they believe […]
By Robin Scher It is impossible to predict the future. What we can do is extrapolate a vision from our current body of scientific knowledge, mixed with a bit of good old-fashioned imagination. The result is a sort of trailer, which offers us a glimpse of what may be in store. At the moment, our […]
By Nika Knight As the Trump administration and Republicans in power in Congress set to work destroying environmental regulations, scientists have added urgency to the resistance with a simple new equation that shows the staggering effect human activity has had on the climate. Their findings? Humans have altered the climate 170 times faster than natural […]
By Nadia Prupis Another day, another dire warning about the global climate emergency. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) top climate scientist announced Tuesday that the Earth is warming at a pace not seen in at least the past 1,000 years, making it “very unlikely” that global temperatures will stay below the 1.5 C […]
By Deirdre Fulton The Anthropocene Epoch has begun, according to a group of experts assembled at the International Geological Congress in Cape Town, South Africa this week. After seven years of deliberation, members of an international working group voted unanimously on Monday to acknowledge that the Anthropocene—a geologic time interval so-dubbed by chemists Paul Crutzen […]
Globaïa International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme Water in the Anthropocene is a three minute film charting the global impact of humans on the water cycle. Evidence is growing that our global footprint is now so significant we have driven Earth into a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene. Human activities such as damming and agriculture are changing the global […]