Enlarge / The Cumbre Vieja volcano’s eruption was complicated and not entirely what experts expected. (credit: Andreas Weibel ) Last fall’s Cumbre Vieja volcanic eruption in the Canary Islands was surprising for several reasons. Most predominantly, the eruption did not cause tsunamis to spread across the Atlantic Ocean, as some experts had predicted. But for […]
Enlarge / We’d like to replace you with a forest. (credit: Peter Cade ) By shifting to more plant-rich diets, wealthy nations could cut their agricultural emissions by 61 percent— and sequester nearly 100 gigatons of CO 2 equivalent if the surplus farmland is left to rewild. The global food system is the second-biggest source […]
Enlarge (credit: Jason Persoff / Getty Images) Recently, a network of climate modeling groups showed that it will cost more to overshoot the Paris Agreement temperature goals than it will to stay on a low-temperature trajectory. On the same day, that collaboration also published work showing that additional risks of overshooting come in part via […]
Enlarge / Capturing carbon, as this algae-growing plant does, may not be the most economical way to reach our climate targets. (credit: Santiago Urquijo / Getty Images ) What will it cost if the climate exceeds the Paris Agreement temperature goals this century—even if we later remove co2 dioxide from the air and manage to […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Aurich Lawson) Thanks to unbridled greenhouse gas emissions, our planet is stitching together a climate version of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. We still have ice from the warmer parts of the Pleistocene even as our temperature approaches the warmer Pliocene levels of 3 million years ago. Meanwhile, our CO 2 level […]
Enlarge / The Gulf Stream, as imaged from space. (credit: NASA images courtesy Norman Kuring, MODIS Ocean Team.) The major currents in the Atlantic Ocean help control the climate by moving warm surface waters north and south from the equator, with colder deep water pushing back toward the equator from the poles. The presence of […]
Enlarge / The massive trunk of a kauri tree can remain intact for tens of thousands of years. (credit: W. Bulach / Wikimedia) The Earth’s magnetic field helps protect life from energetic particles that would otherwise arrive from space. Mars now lacks a strong magnetic field, and the conditions on its surface are considered so […]
Enlarge (credit: NOAA) People tend to think of seismic waves as little more than signals of tectonic events, like an earthquake or lava shifting under a volcano. But these vibrations are also our best way of getting a clear picture of our planet’s internal structure. By watching how the vibrations’ paths shift as they encounter […]
Enlarge / Intense wildfires were one of the climate impacts linked to the recent string of very hot years. (credit: Bloomberg/Getty Images) Today, NASA and NOAA are announcing that 2020 was one for the record books, tying with 2016 for the warmest year since we’ve been tracking temperatures. NASA rates 2020 as the warmest ever, […]
1 notable storyline from the climate system within the last couple of years has been the attempt to generate sense of the most recent generation of climate variations. In support of the upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, the planet’s climate models have filed their own simulations to the most recent database, called […]