Ground penetrating radar isn’t something from the latest sci-fi movie. It’s actually a tool used by soil scientists to measure the amount of moisture in soil quickly and easily.

When NASA’s Aqua satellite passed over the Eastern Pacific Ocean on Oct. 16 the MODIS instrument aboard analyzed water vapor within Tropical Storm Tara.

Winds blowing across snow dunes on Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf cause the massive ice slab’s surface to vibrate, producing a near-constant set of seismic “tones” scientists could potentially use to monitor changes in the ice shelf from afar, according to new research.

It may be a small correction, but it is far from negligible as far as forest ecologists and carbon cycle specialists are concerned. The error lay in a formula established almost 50 years ago (in 1971) for calculating basic wood density. Given that basic density is used to assess the amount of carbon stored in a tree, the fact that the formula had to be corrected meant that forest carbon stocks may have been overestimated by 4 to 5%. "This new formula should enable us to determine more accurately the role of forests in the carbon cycle and the impact of deforestation on climate change" , says Ghislain Vieilledent, an ecologist with CIRAD who was the corresponding author of the work published in the journal American Journal of Botany on 16 October.

If you think that sustainable forest management can be a major contributor to mitigating climate change, then you had better not hold your breath. At least not according to the findings in a recent study published in Nature by an international team of scientists led by Vrije University Amsterdam. The team included postdoc Sylvestre Njakou Djomo from the Department of Agroecology at Aarhus University in Denmark. 

Flash drought is a rapidly intensifying water deficit process accompanied by high temperatures in a short period of time. Recently, heat extremes have become more frequent in a warming climate, and substantially increased the occurrence of flash drought, which has severely threatened crop yields and water supply.

Climatologists may be unable to accurately predict regional climate change over the North Atlantic because computer model simulations have failed to accurately include  air pressure changes that have taken place in the Greenland region over the last three decades.

Phytoplankton blooms that form the base of the marine food web are expanding northward into ice-free waters where they have never been seen before, according to new research.

Air pollution can have a “huge” negative effect on cognitive intelligence – especially amongst older men – according to a study released this past August.

Stanford scientists have revealed the presence of water stored within a glacier in Greenland, where the rapidly changing ice sheet is a major contributor to the sea-level rise North America will experience in the next 100 years. This observation – which came out of a new way of looking at existing data – has been a missing component for models aiming to predict how melting glaciers will impact the planet.