New NASA-funded research has discovered that Arctic permafrost’s expected gradual thawing and the associated release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere may actually be sped up by instances of a relatively little known process called abrupt thawing. Abrupt thawing takes place under a certain type of Arctic lake, known as a thermokarst lake that forms […]
A new study shows that as those fires scorched a region of boreal forest the size of Maryland, they released half as much carbon back into the atmosphere as all the plants, shrubs and trees in Canada typically store in an entire year. The Arctic is warming faster than any other region on Earth, and […]
A new NASA study provides space-based evidence that Earth’s tropical regions were the cause of the largest annual increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration seen in at least 2,000 years. Scientists suspected the 2015-16 El Nino — one of the largest on record — was responsible, but exactly how has been a subject of ongoing […]
A team of researchers from the University of Bristol have recently shown that ecosystems created by melting glaciers in the Arctic are sensitive to climate change and human activity. Melting ice is exposing vast landscapes that are colonised by simple forms of microbial life. These microbes in Arctic soils must cope with short […]