Early Climate News

June 3, 2025

Top Headlines

Scientists Say Next Few Years Vital to Securing the Future of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet

June 3, 2025 — Collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could be triggered with very little ocean warming above present-day, leading to a devastating four meters of global sea level rise to play out over hundreds ...

Geological Time Capsule Highlights Great Barrier Reef's Resilience

June 2, 2025 — New research adds to our understanding of how rapidly rising sea levels due to climate change foreshadow the end of the Great Barrier Reef as we know it. The findings suggest the reef can withstand rising sea levels in isolation but is vulnerable to ...

Anthropologists Spotlight Human Toll of Glacier Loss

May 29, 2025 — Anthropologists have examined the societal consequences of global glacier loss. This article appears alongside new research that estimates that more than three-quarters of the world's glacier mass could disappear by the end of the century under ...

Does Planting Trees Really Help Cool the Planet?

May 29, 2025 — Replanting forests can help cool the planet even more than some scientists once believed, especially in the tropics. But even if every tree lost since the mid-19th century is replanted, the total effect won't cancel out human-generated ...

Latest Headlines

updated 10:51pm EDT

Different Phases of Evolution During Ice Age

May 23, 2025 — Cold-adapted animals started to evolve 2.6 million years ago when the permanent ice at the poles became more prevalent. There followed a time when the continental ice sheets expanded and contracted ...

Tapping Into the World's Largest Gold Reserves

May 22, 2025 — Earth's largest gold reserves are not kept inside Fort Knox, the United States Bullion Depository. In fact, they are hidden much deeper in the ground than one would expect. More than 99.999% of ...

Climate Change Poses Severe Threat to Bowhead Whale Habitat

May 22, 2025 — New research examining 11,700 years of bowhead whale persistence throughout the Arctic projects that sea ice loss due to climate change will cause their habitat to severely contract by up to 75 per ...

Glaciers Will Take Centuries to Recover Even If Global Warming Is Reversed, Scientists Warn

May 19, 2025 — New research reveals mountain glaciers across the globe will not recover for centuries -- even if human intervention cools the planet back to the 1.5 ...

Ancient Ocean Sediments Link Changes in Currents to Cooling of Northern Hemisphere 3.6 Million Years Ago

May 16, 2025 — New research from an international group looking at ancient sediment cores in the North Atlantic has for the first time shown a strong correlation ...

How Mid-Cretaceous Events Affected Marine Top Predators

May 2, 2025 — The highest trophic niches in Mesozoic oceans were filled by diverse marine reptiles, including ichthyosaurians, plesiosaurians, and thalattosuchians, dominating food webs during the Jurassic and ...

Elephant Instead of Wild Boar? What Could Have Been in Europe

Apr. 28, 2025 — Even under today's climatic conditions, the long-extinct straight-tusked elephant could still live in Europe. This is the conclusion of a recent study. For this finding, the research group combined ...

Pioneering Research Reveals Arctic Matter Pathways Poised for Major Shifts Amidst Climate Change

Apr. 14, 2025 — A new study has shed unprecedented light on the highly variable and climate-sensitive routes that substances from Siberian rivers use to travel ...

Ancient Tools from a South African Cave Reveal Connections Between Prehistoric People

Apr. 9, 2025 — In a cave overlooking the ocean on the southern coast of South Africa, archaeologists discovered thousands of stone tools, created by ancient humans ...

Life Recovered Rapidly at Site of Dino-Killing Asteroid: A Hydrothermal System May Have Helped

Apr. 8, 2025 — About 66 million years ago, an asteroid slammed into the planet, wiping out all non-avian dinosaurs and about 70% of all marine species. But the ...

Climate Change and Prehistoric Human Populations: Eastward Shift of Settlement Areas at the End of the Last Ice Age

Apr. 3, 2025 — An archaeological study of human settlement during the Final Palaeolithic revealed that populations in Europe did not decrease homogenously during the last cold phase of the Ice Age. Significant ...

Early Earth's First Crust Composition Discovery Rewrites Geological Timeline

Apr. 2, 2025 — Modern continental rocks carry chemical signatures from the very start of our planet's history, challenging current theories about plate ...

Melting Ice, More Rain Drive Southern Ocean Cooling

Mar. 27, 2025 — Researchers found increased meltwater and rain explain 60% of a decades-long mismatch between predicted and observed temperatures in the ocean around ...

5,700-Year Storm Archive Shows Rise in Tropical Storms and Hurricanes in the Caribbean

Mar. 24, 2025 — A storm, even once it has passed, can leave traces in the ocean that last for thousands of years. These consist of sediment layers composed of coarse particles, which are different from the finer ...

Earth's Orbital Rhythms Link Timing of Giant Eruptions and Climate Change

Mar. 7, 2025 — An international team of scientists has synchronized key climate records from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to unravel the sequence of events during the last million years before the extinction of ...

Plants Struggled for Millions of Years After the World's Worst Climate Catastrophe

Mar. 6, 2025 — Scientists have uncovered how plants responded to catastrophic climate changes 250 million years ago. Their findings reveal the long, drawn-out process of ecosystem recovery following one of the most ...

Giant Ice Bulldozers: How Ancient Glaciers Helped Life Evolve

Feb. 25, 2025 — New research has revealed how massive ancient glaciers acted like giant bulldozers, reshaping Earth's surface and paving the way for complex life to flourish. By chemically analyzing crystals in ...

The Galactic Journey of Our Solar System

Feb. 25, 2025 — Astronomers have discovered that the Solar System traversed the Orion star-forming complex, a component of the Radcliffe Wave galactic structure, approximately 14 million years ago. This journey ...

Mega-Iceberg from Antarctica on Collision Course With South Georgia: Harbinger of Things to Come?

Feb. 24, 2025 — It is no strange sight to see icebergs break off of the Antarctic ice cap and drift away, like the gigantic sheet of ice that is currently heading for the island of South Georgia. But climate change ...

Research Reveals How Earth Got Its Ice Caps

Feb. 14, 2025 — The cool conditions which have allowed ice caps to form on Earth are rare events in the planet's history and require many complex processes working at once, according to new ...

Global Warming and Mass Extinctions: What We Can Learn from Plants from the Last Ice Age

Feb. 12, 2025 — Global warming is producing a rapid loss of plant species -- according to estimates, roughly 600 plant species have died out since 1750 -- twice the number of animal species lost. But which species ...

Model of Antarctica's Water Enhances Sea Level Forecasts

Feb. 11, 2025 — Researchers have generated the first dataset of water flow beneath the entire Antarctic Ice Sheet, which will lead to more accurate projections of sea level rise. The team modeled Antarctica's ...

Earth's Inner Core Is Undergoing a Transformation

Feb. 10, 2025 — Earth's inner core is undergoing structural transformation. Located 3,000 miles below the Earth's surface, the inner core is anchored by gravity within the molten liquid outer core. Until ...

Sharks and Rays Benefit from Global Warming, but Not from CO2 in the Oceans

Jan. 30, 2025 — Sharks and rays have populated the world's oceans for around 450 million years, but more than a third of the species living today are severely threatened by overfishing and the loss of their ...

Lead Contamination in Ancient Greece Points to Societal Change

Jan. 30, 2025 — Studies of sediment cores from the sea floor and the coastal regions surrounding the Aegean Sea show that humans contaminated the environment with lead early on in antiquity. Geoscientists conducted ...

Research on Past Hurricanes Aims to Reduce Future Risk

Jan. 17, 2025 — New research emphasizes that studying the impacts of past tropical storms can help communities better prepare for future storms. A key part of the study is analyzing the types and quantities of ...

Volcanic Eruption Caused Neolithic People to Sacrifice Unique 'Sun Stones'

Jan. 16, 2025 — 4,900 years ago, a Neolithic people on the Danish island Bornholm sacrificed hundreds of stones engraved with sun and field motifs. Archaeologists and climate scientists can now show that these ...

Asteroid Impact Sulfur Release Less Lethal in Dinosaur Extinction

Jan. 16, 2025 — Previous studies have posited that the mass extinction that wiped the dinosaurs off the face of the Earth was caused by the release of large volumes of sulfur from rocks within the Chicxulub impact ...

Speleothem and Ice Cores: Natural Climate Archives Offer New Insights Into the Climate History of Central Europe

Jan. 16, 2025 — The synchronization of data from two natural climate archives -- a speleothem from the Herbstlabyrinth Cave in Hesse (Germany) and ice cores from Greenland -- offers new insights into the chronology ...

Pioneering Research Exposes Huge Loss of Glaciers in One of the Fastest-Warming Places on Earth

Jan. 16, 2025 — A new study has revealed the alarming extent glaciers have shrunk over the past 40 years in a global warming hotspot -- and the biggest retreat has occurred in recent ...