In the past 50 years, the amount of water in the open ocean with zero oxygen has gone up more than fourfold. In coastal water bodies, including estuaries and seas, low-oxygen sites have increased more than 10-fold since 1950. Scientists expect oxygen to continue dropping even outside these zones as Earth warms.

For the first time, scientists have shown through direct satellite observations of the ozone hole that levels of ozone-destroying chlorine are declining, resulting in less ozone depletion.

Solving the world’s food, feed and bioenergy challenges requires integration of multiple approaches and diverse skills. Andrea Eveland, Ph.D., assistant member at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, and her team identified a genetic mechanism that controls developmental traits related to grain production in cereals. The work was performed in Setaria viridis, an emerging model system for grasses that is closely related to economically important cereal crops and bioenergy feed stocks such as maize, sorghum, switchgrass and sugarcane.

We also need to share our data. So says world’s most prominent geoscientist, professor Markku Kulmala.

Environmental challenges, climate change, water and food security and urban air pollution, they are all interlinked, yet each is studied as such, separately. This is not a sustainable situation, for anybody anymore. To tackle this, professor Markku Kulmala calls for a continuous, comprehensive monitoring of interactions between the planet’s surface and atmosphere in his article “Build a global Earth observatory” published in Nature, January 4, 2018.

Severe snowy weather in winter or extreme rains in summer in the UK might be influenced by warming trends in the Arctic, according to new findings. 

Last year was the second hottest year on record worldwide, behind 2016, according to a European Union climate monitoring program. Global temperatures averaged 14.7 degrees Celsius (58.46°F) — 1.2 degrees C (2.2°F) above pre-industrial times.

Scientists have found surprising evidence of rapid climate change in the Arctic: In the middle of the Arctic Ocean near the North Pole, they discovered that the levels of radium-228 have almost doubled over the last decade.

There is a new way to measure the average temperature of the ocean thanks to researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. In an article published in the Jan. 4, 2018, issue of the journal Nature, geoscientist Jeff Severinghaus and colleagues at Scripps Oceanography and institutions in Switzerland and Japan detailed their ground-breaking approach.

Large areas of the Earth’s surface are experiencing rising maximum temperatures, which affect virtually every ecosystem on the planet, including ice sheets and tropical forests that play major roles in regulating the biosphere, scientists have reported.

NASA’s Aqua satellite passed over the South China Sea and obtained a visible light image of the first depression of the Northwestern Pacific Ocean basin’s 2018 tropical cyclone season. Vertical wind shear can be deadly to tropical cyclones and satellite data showed Tropical Depression Bolaven, formerly known as 01W, was being adversely affected by it.