Permafrost zones extend over 50% of Canada’s land area. Warming or thawing of permafrost due to climate change could significantly impact existing infrastructure and future development in Canada’s north. Researchers Jennifer Throop and Antoni Lewkowicz at the University of Ottawa, along with Sharon Smith with the Geological Survey of Canada, have published a new study,…

The swirling flows of tens of thousands of ocean currents were captured in this scientific visualization created by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The visualization covers the period June 2005 to December 2007 and is based on a synthesis of a numerical model with observational data, created by a NASA project called…

Elevated carbon dioxide concentrations can increase carbon storage in the soil, according to results from a 12-year carbon dioxide-enrichment experiment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The increased storage of carbon in soil could help to slow down rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. The Department of Energy-sponsored free-air carbon dioxide-enrichment, or FACE, experiment officially ended in…

La Niña, “the diva of drought,” is peaking, increasing the odds that the Pacific Northwest will have more stormy weather this winter and spring, while the southwestern and southern United States will be dry. Sea surface height data from NASA’s Jason-1 and -2 satellites show that the milder repeat of last year’s strong La Niña…

ScienceDaily (Dec. 8, 2011) — Scientists have used satellite data from NASA-built Landsat missions to confirm that more than 20 years of warming temperatures in northern Quebec, Canada, have resulted in an increase in the amount and extent of shrubs and grasses.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 17, 2011) — It’s well known that Earth’s most severe mass extinction occurred about 250 million years ago. What’s not well known is the specific time when the extinctions occurred. A team of researchers from North America and China have published a paper in Science which explicitly provides the date and rate of…

ScienceDaily (Nov. 2, 2011) — Did climate change or humans cause the extinctions of the large-bodied Ice Age mammals (commonly called megafauna) such as the woolly rhinoceros and woolly mammoth? Scientists have for years debated the reasons behind the Ice Age mass extinctions, which caused the loss of a third of the large mammals in…

ScienceDaily (Oct. 27, 2011) — New research from the University of Missouri indicates that Atlantic Ocean temperatures during the greenhouse climate of the Late Cretaceous Epoch were influenced by circulation in the deep ocean. These changes in circulation patterns 70 million years ago could help scientists understand the consequences of modern increases in greenhouse gases.

ScienceDaily (Oct. 6, 2011) — In recent decades, Arctic sea ice has suffered a dramatic decline that exceeds climate model predictions. The unexpected rate of ice shrinkage has now been explained by researchers at CNRS, Université Joseph Fourier and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They argue that climate models underestimate the rate of ice thinning, which…

ScienceDaily (Sep. 15, 2011) — According to a new study published in Biological Conservation the abundance of songbirds with relatively large brains in Eastern Germany and the Czech Republic has increased since 1989 / 1990. Researchers from German Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F) and Czech Charles University in collaboration with “Dachverband Deutscher Avifaunisten” (Federation…