Global warming

Much of the modern understanding of climate change is underpinned by pioneering studies done at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Here’s a timeline of significant studies.

The discovery of fossil plants below a mile of Greenland ice indicates that the ice sheet completely melted in the past, and suggests it could rapidly do so again.

Large numbers of icebergs that drifted unusually far from Antarctica before melting into ocean waters have been key to initiating ice ages of the past, says a new study.

An international team suggests that research centers around the world using numerical models to predict future climate change should include simulations of past climates.

An international team of polar researchers says that the Greenland ice sheet experienced record loss in 2019.

A new primer lays out the basics of climate science in compact form.

Driven by changing climate, a uniquely resilient organism is taking over the Arabian Sea, disrupting food chains, fisheries, oil refineries, and water desalination plants.

For about the last 10 years, environmental law professor Karl Coplan has been trying to winnow down his direct footprint of carbon-dioxide emissions.

On a peninsula within sight of New York City, researchers are studying trees dating as far back as the early 1800s. Rising seas and more powerful storms, both fueled by climate change, could eventually spell their end.

A new book, the second in a series of primers with the Earth Institute imprint, provides an interdisciplinary overview drought, bringing together many fields including climate science, hydrology and ecology.

Scientists are sailing to remote areas of the Southern Ocean to drill cores from the bottom that they hope will contain clues to past rapid changes in the Antarctic ice, and how it may react to warming climate today.

Measurements of stable isotopes in tree rings may expand the climate information that scientists can get from old trees.

Wallace Broecker, a geochemist who initiated key research into the history of earth’s climate and humans’ influence upon it, died Feb. 18 in New York. He was 87.

Since the late 1990s, global warming has stabilized, even as greenhouse gases have risen. That defies simple models that say the temperature should keep going up. Many scientists think the so-called “hiatus” is taking place in part because much of the heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases is being soaked up and stored by the oceans–at least for now. The Pacific is believed to play an especially powerful role, with winds in its eastern regions sweeping heat into its depths, like dirt getting swept under the rug. The problem is, scientists checking under the rug by measuring subsurface temperatures have not necessarily found the predicted increases in heat. This has come to be known as the riddle of the “missing heat.” A team of oceanographers now says they know where it went: It has been exported from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean. Their study, out this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, finds that this movement may account for more than 70 percent of all heat absorbed by the entire upper world ocean in the past decade.

Every day since Jan. 1, 1896, an observer has hiked up a grey outcrop of rock to a spot at The Mohonk Preserve, a resort and nature area some 90 miles north of New York City, to record daily temperature and other conditions there.

A new study adds evidence that climate swings in Europe and North America during the last ice age were closely linked to changes in the tropics. The study, published this week in the journal Science, suggests that a prolonged cold spell...

U.S. scientists working on a research vessel in the Gulf of Mexico have made the most promising discovery so far of marine gas hydrate, a possible new energy source.

Potential Alternative Fuel, Usually Too Thinly Spread to Exploit

A power plant in Iceland is set to become the first in the world to try turning carbon dioxide emissions into solid minerals underground, starting this September.

In an $11 million pilot project, Reykjavik Energy will capture CO2 from its plant, dissolve the gas in water and inject it deep into volcanic basalt nearby. Over the nine-month study, some 2,000 tons of greenhouse gas will be treated.

Warming Climate Drives Plankton and Penguins Poleward   

Adélie penguins are flocking closer to the South Pole. A new study in the leading journal Science explains why: they’re following the food supply, which is moving southward with changing climate.

But Global Warming May Have Helped Override Some Recent Eruptions

Climate researchers have shown that big volcanic eruptions over the past 450 years have temporarily cooled weather in the tropics—but suggest that such effects may have been masked in the 20^th century by rising global temperatures

Nutrients washed out of the Amazon River are powering huge amounts of previously unexpected plant life far out to sea, thus trapping atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study.