Ten years ago, the sea and sky rallied to unleash one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history. During the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, the most active season on record, 27 named storms —from Arlene to Zeta — swirled into existence. By far the most destructive was Hurricane Katrina.
There’s gold in them thar volcanoes. Geoscientists have uncovered a mother lode of gold- and silver-enriched water in reservoirs inside a series of New Zealand volcanoes.
U.S. agriculture could reap big benefits from curbed carbon emissions. Such cuts would reduce the frequency and severity of future crop-parching droughts, saving American farmers billions of dollars annually by 2100, researchers calculate in the July issue of Weather, Climate and Society.
The April 25 Nepal earthquake killed more than 8,000 people and caused several billion dollars in damage, but new research suggests the toll could have been a lot worse.
A washed-up wing fragment near Madagascar could help narrow the search area for the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 crash site, new ocean current simulations suggest.
Santa Claus could be treading water sooner than thought. An improved forecast of Arctic sea ice coverage predicts that the region will have its first ice-free summer almost a decade earlier than previously projected.
The wet undersides of deserts may stash as much as a trillion metric tons of climate-altering carbon, more than stored in all land-based plants, new research suggests.
Adapted for Science News for Students. Featured in the Sacramento Bee.
Rapid climate change put mega-sized Ice Age mammals on the ropes before ancient humans delivered the final blow, new research indicates.
The accuracy of carbon dating may soon be a thing of the past. Carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels threaten the method’s ability to definitively pinpoint the age of organic materials, new research suggests. The extra carbon flooding the atmosphere dilutes the relative number of radioactive carbon atoms that are vital to the dating method. By 2050, the age of fresh organic matter will appear indistinguishable from material created in A.D. 1050, predicts Heather Graven, an atmospheric scientist at Imperial College London.
Climate’s “little boy” is back in a big way. El Niño, a weather disruption caused by unusually warm seawater in the eastern Pacific, kicked off in March and could become a whopper, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center reported July 9. The agency predicts that El Niño conditions have a more than 90 percent chance of continuing through the Northern Hemisphere winter and around an 80 percent chance of sticking around through spring.
Adapted for Science News for Students.