Scientists continue to refine techniques for understanding present-day changes in Earth’s environmental systems, but the planet’s distant past also offers crucial information to deepen that understanding.

Missouri is home to an array of natural resources, with forests among the state’s most valuable ecosystems. 

Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists set out to address one of the biggest uncertainties about how carbon-rich permafrost will respond to gradual sinking of the land surface as temperatures rise. 

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020 with associated travel restrictions, Matthew Long thought his students could shift their overseas research projects to instead study the seagrass meadow ecosystem in Waquoit Bay.

Climate change is aggravating the impact of droughts —one of the factors that only affect plant physiology— on all plant ecosystems worldwide. 

Imagine using an online banking app to deposit money into your account.

Scientists from Sandia National Laboratories are studying ship tracks — clouds that reflect sunlight and are formed by moving ships, similar to contrails from planes — to help inform decision-makers of the benefits and risks of one technology being considered to slow climate change.

UConn Department of Natural Resources and the Environment researcher Wei Ren sees the interconnections between the systems in nature and how each component impacts the others. 

The trawling of thousands of satellite measurements using artificial intelligence has shown researchers from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland and University of Copenhagen that meltwater in tunnels beneath Greenland’s ice sheet causes it to change speed, and in some places, accelerate greatly towards the ocean. 

A study published in Nature Communications by an international team of scientists shows that an irreversible loss of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, and a corresponding rapid acceleration of sea level rise, may be imminent if global temperature change cannot be stabilized below 1.8°C, relative to the preindustrial levels.