Thanks to climate change, high-elevation forests in the Central Cascade mountains of the Pacific Northwest are burning more frequently and expansively than in the recent past, prompting researchers and fire managers to question whether forests will be able to recover from these emerging fire patterns and whether they will require human assistance to do so.

The features of the ocean floor help determine how water masses and ocean currents move and how they affect our climate. 

Investments in the environment are paying off for a California county where projects designed to restore the natural environment are also buffering the impacts of sea-level rise, according to a new study by Stanford researchers.

NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have released a guide which provides resources for adapting to and mitigating impacts of climate change.

Research led by the University of Southampton has revealed that an abrupt change in climate conditions in the North Atlantic around 800 years ago played a role in a decline in Atlantic salmon populations returning to rivers. 

How do coastal channels form and what are their stable configurations? 

The emergence of a mysterious area in the South Atlantic where the geomagnetic field strength is decreasing rapidly, has led to speculation that Earth is heading towards a magnetic polarity reversal. 

Carbon dioxide measured at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory peaked for 2022 at 421 parts per million in May, pushing the atmosphere further into territory not seen for millions of years, scientists from NOAA and Scripps Institution of Oceanography offsite link at the University of California San Diego announced today.

The Gulf of Maine is growing increasingly warm and salty, due to ocean currents pushing warm water into the gulf from the Northwest Atlantic, according to a new NASA-funded study.

After sustaining seemingly catastrophic hurricane damage, a primordial groundcover vital to sustaining a multitude of coastal lifeforms bounced back to life in a matter of months.

The finding, co-led by a Johns Hopkins University geochemist and published in Science Advances, offers rare optimism for the fate of one of Earth's most critical ecosystems as climate change alters the global pattern of intense storms.

"The good news is that in these types of environments, there are these mechanisms that can play an important role in stabilizing the ecosystem because they recover so quickly," said Maya Gomes, a Johns Hopkins assistant professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences. "What we saw is that they just started growing again and that means that, as we continue to have more hurricanes because of climate change, these ecosystems will be relatively resilient."

The team, co-led by California Institute of Technology and University of Colorado, Boulder, researchers, had been studying microbial mats in Little Ambergris Cay, an uninhabited island in Turks and Caicos. Microbial mats are squishy, spongey ecosystems that for eons have sustained a diverse array of life from the microscopic organisms that make a home in the upper oxygenated layers to the mangroves it helps root and stabilize. Mats in turn provide habitats for even more species and can be found all over the world in wildly different environments. The variety this team studied are commonly found in tropical, saltwater-oriented places—exactly the coastal locations most vulnerable to severe storms.

Read more at: Johns Hopkins University

Photo Credit: janeb13 via Pixabay