News by Subject Earth Science

Rice University and Georgia Tech scientists use data from ancient coral to build a record of temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean over the last millennium. The data question previous links between volcanic eruptions and El Niño events.

For the first time, researchers have documented seasonal migrations of fishes across the deep seafloor, revealing an important insight that will further scientific understanding of the nature of our planet.

If circulation of deep waters in the Atlantic stops or slows due to climate change, it could cause cooling in northern North America and Europe - a scenario that has occurred during past cold glacial periods. Now, a Rutgers coauthored study suggests that short-term disruptions of deep ocean circulation occurred during warm interglacial periods in the last 450,000 years, and may happen again.

Years of cloud data over a shipping route between Europe and South Africa shows that pollution from ships has significantly increased the reflectivity of the clouds. More generally, the results suggest that industrial pollution's effect on clouds has masked about a third of the warming due to fossil fuel burning since the late 1800s.

If artificial light shines into the Arctic Ocean during the polar night, does it matter? A new paper in Communications Biology says the answer to this is a strong yes.

Dr Celia Schunter from the School of Biological Sciences at The University of Hong Kong and a team of international scientists conducted a study to understand the molecular response of five species to the 2016 heatwave conditions that killed a third of the Great Barrier Reef corals. This is the world-first study tracking how wild fish populations respond to a severe marine heatwave. The results of the study were published in Science Advances.