The transportation sector is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and a lot of attention has been devoted to electric passenger vehicles and their potential to help reduce those emissions.

Plant material that lies to rot in soil isn’t just valuable as compost.

Snowmelt – the surface runoff from melting snow – is an essential water resource for communities and ecosystems. But extreme snow melt, which occurs when snow melts too rapidly over a short amount of time, can be destructive and deadly, causing floods, landslides and dam failures.

To better understand the processes that drive such rapid melting, researchers set out to map extreme snowmelt events over the last 30 years. Their findings are published in a new paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

"When we talk about snowmelt, people want to know the basic numbers, just like the weather, but no one has ever provided anything like that before. It's like if nobody told you the maximum and minimum temperature or record temperature in your city," said study co-author Xubin Zeng, director of the UArizona Climate Dynamics and Hydrometeorology Center and a professor of atmospheric sciences. "We are the first to create a map that characterizes snowmelt across the U.S. Now, people can talk about the record snowmelt events over each small area of 2.5 miles by 2.5 miles."

Read more at: University of Arizona

Photo Credit: grbaker via Pixabay

Rather than waiting for certainty in sea-level rise projections, policymakers can plan now for future coastal flooding by addressing existing inequities among the most vulnerable communities in flood zones, according to Stanford research.

Satellites can “see” Antarctica’s surface deform as basins fill and empty on, within, and under the ice.

Seismic waves passing through the ground near Longyearbyen in the Adventdalen valley, Svalbard, Norway have been slowing down steadily over the past three years, most likely due to permafrost warming in the Arctic valley.

As the world continues to warm, many arid regions that already have marginal conditions for agriculture will be increasingly under stress, potentially leading to severe food shortages. 

Hundreds of millions of years ago, in the middle of what would eventually become Canada’s Yukon Territory, an ocean swirled with armored trilobites, clam-like brachiopods and soft, squishy creatures akin to slugs and squid.

What happens when climate change affects the abundance and distribution of fish? 

Conditions in the tropical ocean affect weather patterns worldwide. The most well-known examples are El Niño or La Niña events, but scientists believe other key elements of the tropical climate remain undiscovered.