Assembling a detailed timeline surrounding the Antarctic ice sheet’s inception around 34 million years ago, scientists have identified a carbon dioxide “danger zone” for the ice sheet’s demise.
The early emergence of flowers and leaves due to climate change amplifies springtime heat waves in Europe, new climate simulations suggest. While not as deadly as their summertime counterparts, spring heat waves can disrupt ecosystems and damage crops.
Using records of ships wrecked by Atlantic hurricanes dating as far back as the days of Christopher Columbus, researchers have extended the hurricane record by hundreds of years. The work reveals that hurricane frequency plummeted 75 percent between 1645 and 1715, a time called the Maunder Minimum when the sun dimmed to its lowest recorded brightness.
High-voltage electricity surging through undersea power cables doesn’t bother local sea life, three new studies suggest. The work eases concerns that planned offshore power production from wind turbines and tidal generators would disrupt marine communities.
Hard corals may need a dose of vitamin C when building their stony skeletons. New research finds that when free-floating coral larvae settle down and calcify their skeletons, genes associated with the transport of vitamin C get busy. Without enough of the vitamin, corals might even get scurvy.
Lingering oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill could hasten the destruction of historical shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico. Tracking the activities of metal-corroding microbes, researchers found that oil mixed into seawater roughly doubled the amount of observed metal corrosion. The scientists reported their findings February 22 at the American Geophysical Union’s Ocean Sciences Meeting.
Adapted for Science News for Students.
Sea levels rose faster last century than during any time since Rome was founded around 2,800 years ago. Reconstructing past rises and falls in global sea level, researchers estimate that more than half of the 13.8 centimeters of sea level rise recorded in the 1900s resulted from global warming effects, such as glacial melt. The new work will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Adapted for Science News for Students.
If you need to detect earthquakes, there’s an app for that. Seismologists have harnessed the motion-sensing accelerometers built into smartphones to detect tremors. The app, called MyShake, could eventually provide early warning of approaching quakes in regions lacking sophisticated seismometer networks, Richard Allen, a seismologist at the University of California, Berkeley, said February 11 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Environmentalists hoping that micromanaging Europe’s forests will help curb climate change may be barking up the wrong tree.
The supervolcano lurking under Yellowstone National Park may not have resulted from a rising plume of hot rock from the planet’s depths as previously suggested.