Photo: Felipe Dana (AP)
Jars of dirt taken from a Cold War-era military caper and lost in a freezer for decades could hold crucial new information about climate change and sea level rise. A study published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists says that plant fossils found in a sample of dirt collected from a mile beneath the ice in the mid-1960s suggest that the world’s pre-human climate was at one point warm enough to completely melt the Greenland ice sheet.
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The dirt researchers inspected is a sediment sample from the bottom of an ice core, retrieved by drilling down into the ice sheet that covers the majority of Greenland. It’s pretty hard to actually reach all the way down to bedrock when taking samples due to the incredible pressure from the ice, explained Drew Christ, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vermont. There are only a few expeditions that have actually gotten sediment from the bottom o
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Photo: Vasily Bogoyavlensky (Getty Images)
The Siberian tundra is still out here exploding. A new study from the Woodwell Climate Research Center has identified three new craters in the region’s increasingly volatile permafrost, and the climate crisis is to blame.
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Researchers have been seeing giant holes form in western Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula for years. The first, discovered by workers back in 2014, measured 262 feet (80 meters) in diameter. Since then, scientists have found another six craters on Yamal and the nearby Gydan peninsula, most recently discovering a crater as deep as half a football field last year. While researchers have suspected explosive methane gas has welled up into the tundra as it thaws and caused the explosions, it’s been an area of active research.
four hiroshima atomic bombs per second. there s no ice off the coast of alaska. that was the first shot. fish stocks like are moving to colder waters around the world. coral reefs are really in danger. when it coms to the ice on land, this cryosphere, snowy glaciers are expected to lose their mass by 2100. especially the lower elevation resorts you know about. you just can t make snow at a certain temperature. but these are the water towers for a billion people. all that ice pack goes into rivers which keep cities like los angeles in existence and waters all of our crops. hydropower is threatened as all of that ice melt decreases. then in the end, the triple whammy is sea level rise. it is accelerating twice as fast as the 20th century right now. this is that glacier i showed you up in alaska. the land based glaciers are
a u.n. panel of more than a hundred scientists just release a major report. the findings are dire unless action is taken now. bill wier joins us with more. good morning. yeah. this is the third in three big seismic year-long investigations telling us kind of what we already know but just cementing in the earth is melting. it s looked at the oceans and the cryosphere. if you ever tried to heat up a cold bathtub one kettle at a time, it takes some time. but thanks to the blanket of heat trapping pollutions, the oceans are absorbing three to