Paleoclimate

Groundwater extraction is driving land in northern China down by 15.1 millimeters a year, against a natural geological baseline of between -0.5 and 0.5 millimeters a year, according to a sea-level…

A reconstruction of tropical Indian and Pacific Ocean climate back to the early 1600s finds the two basins moved largely in step until a run of volcanic eruptions in the early 19th century disrupted…

Somewhere off northern Israel, under a few hundred meters of water, the seabed has a step in it roughly 30 meters high. By rights, it should be gone. Sediment carried up from the Nile settles along…

A museum drawer of songbird skeletons does not look like a story. It looks like a lot of small, pale, similar bones. Sparrows, finches, warblers, thrushes: the group biologists call Passeriformes…

Two hundred and fifty-two million years ago, the oceans nearly emptied. The Permian-Triassic extinction (geologists call it the Great Dying, and the name is not hyperbole) erased something like 96…

A team led by Ohio State University's Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center has published a 2,000-year record of atmospheric methane extracted from ice drilled on a tropical mountain in Peru.…

A fire needs three things: heat, oxygen and fuel. Cut off any one and it dies. What made the end-Triassic so catastrophic, a new study argues, is that the landscape kept regrowing its own fuel, fast…

You cannot drill into the thing you want to study. The brine that feeds Blood Falls sits somewhere under hundreds of meters of Taylor Glacier, and what reaches the surface is an intermittent…

Every so often a meteorite punches through the dust of the Martian midlatitudes and leaves something startling behind: a splash of bright white ice at the bottom of a fresh crater, visible from orbit…