In late December 2015, Ed Lyman started getting calls from whale watching companies on the island of Hawai‘i. “Ed, how are the whales off Maui?” tour operators were asking. “We’ve never seen them arrive this late.”

At least 80 U.S. Geological Survey scientists are in the field in the Carolinas and Virginia, working to ensure that vital information about river flooding continues to reach emergency managers, forecasters and others threatened by the catastrophic flooding that has been linked to 32 deaths.

A recent study of more than 100 years of river level records from the Amazon shows a significant increase in frequency and severity of floods.

Imagine an enormous volcano erupting in the Pacific Northwest, pouring lava across Washington, Oregon and Idaho.

Diversity is strength, even among forests. In a paper published in Nature, researchers led by University of Utah biologist William Anderegg report that forests with trees that employ a high diversity of traits related to water use suffer less of an impact from drought. The results, which expand on previous work that looked at individual tree species’ resilience based on hydraulic traits, lead to new research directions on forest resilience and inform forest managers working to rebuild forests after logging or wildfire.

New research on Antarctic sediment layers has shown that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS), also known as Antarctica’s ‘sleeping giant’, retreated during extended warm periods in the past - when temperatures were like those predicted for this century.

In the last few years, the Vavilov Ice Cap in the Russian High Arctic has dramatically accelerated, sliding as much as 82 feet a day in 2015, according to a new multi-national, multi-institute study led by CIRES Fellow Mike Willis, an assistant professor of Geology at CU Boulder. That dwarfs the ice's previous average speed of about 2 inches per day and has challenged scientists' assumptions about the stability of the cold ice caps dotting Earth's high latitudes.

The amount of carbon dioxide released from thawing permafrost might be greater than previously thought because of a process called mineral weathering, according to a new study by University of Alberta ecologists.

In February 2018, Donald Trump signed into law new tax credits that reward oil companies for capturing carbon dioxide and preventing it from entering the atmosphere – either by burying the gas underground or by pumping it into wells to boost production. These tax credits, which have bipartisan support, are encouraging for those who believe that trapping CO2 from the fossil fuel industry – though no substitute for deploying cleaner energy sources – could help combat runaway climate change while society remains reliant on oil, gas and coal.

NASA’s Aqua satellite provided an infrared look at fading Post-Tropical Cyclone Florence’s clouds, revealing where the strongest thunderstorms were located. Those strong thunderstorms stretched from the Mid-Atlantic to New England.