A new study out of Harvard University reveals that the protective stratospheric ozone layer above the central United States is vulnerable to erosion during the summer months from ozone-depleting chemical reactions, exposing people, livestock and crops to the harmful effects of UV radiation.

Powerful storm systems common to the Great Plains inject water vapor that, with observed temperature variations, can trigger the same chemical reactions over the central United States that are the cause of ozone loss over the polar regions, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Michigan State University scientists have pinpointed a new source of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that’s more potent than carbon dioxide. The culprit?

Tiny bits of decomposing leaves in soil.

This new discovery is featured in the current issue of Nature Geoscience, could help refine nitrous oxide emission predictions as well as guide future agriculture and soil management practices.

“Most nitrous oxide is produced within teaspoon-sized volumes of soil, and these so-called hot spots can emit a lot of nitrous oxide quickly,” said Sasha Kravchenko, MSU plant, soil and microbial scientist and lead author of the study. “But the reason for occurrence of these hot spots has mystified soil microbiologists since it was discovered several decades ago.”

The rift in the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica has grown by 17km in the last few days and is now only 13km from the ice front, indicating that calving of an iceberg is probably very close, Swansea University researchers revealed after studying the latest satellite data.

Stony corals may be more resilient to ocean acidification than once thought, according to a Rutgers University study that shows they rely on proteins to help create their rock-hard skeletons.

The future of the world’s coral reefs hangs in the balance, but it is not too late to save them, according to a major study published today in the prestigious journal, Nature.

During the last glacial period – when the ice in the Antarctic was far thicker and extended further offshore than it does today – it has been speculated that subglacial lakes existed beneath it. An international team of researchers has now successfully sampled the metre-thick sediment layers left behind by these lakes contemporary on the seafloor. This is the outcome of a study by Gerhard Kuhn and colleagues, which was published today in the journal Nature Communications.

As Earth warms due to human-caused climate change, extreme climatic events like heat waves, droughts, and spikes in ocean temperatures have increased and are projected to become even more common by the end of this century.

A recent study led by researchers from the University of Eastern Finland reveals that permafrost thaw may greatly increase emissions of nitrous oxide (N2O) from northern permafrost peatlands. Nitrous oxide is a strong greenhouse gas: 300 times more powerful per unit mass in warming the climate than CO2. It is known that thawing of permafrost may enhance climate warming by releasing the vast carbon stocks locked in Arctic soils as the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). The role of N2O for permafrost–climate feedbacks, however, is not yet well understood.

Researchers from the Coral Reef Ecology Lab at the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology documented the third global bleaching event as it occurred from 2014 to 2016 at the Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve (HBNP) on the island of O‘ahu, Hawai‘i.

The Amazon forest stores about half of the global tropical forest carbon and accounts for about a quarter of carbon absorption from the atmosphere by global forests each year. As a result, large losses of Amazonian forest cover could make global climate change worse.

In the past, researchers have found that a large part of the Amazon forest is susceptible to a tipping point. The tell-tail sign is satellite data showing areas of savannah and rainforest coexisting under the same environmental conditions. Theories from nonlinear dynamics would then suggest that both states are alternative stable outcomes. This so called bistability means that shocks such as forest clearance or drought could lead to a dramatic increase of fire occurrence and tip an area of rainforest into savannah. Areas that have experienced this transition would then remain locked into this savannah state until large enough increases of rainfall and release of human pressures allow forests to regrow faster than they are lost by intermittent fires.