Tag: climate
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PBS Eons: When a Tiny Land Bridge Triggered an Ice Age
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about the origin of Panama and how it changed the world. On land, the Isthmus of Panama kicked off possibly the greatest natural experiment in the history of life on Earth. In the water, this narrow strip of land did something completely different: it divided.…
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PBS Eons: How the Himalayas Changed the World
There's a new episode of PBS Eons. This one explains how the Himalayan orogeny has affected the whole Earth over the last 50 million years. The rise of the Himalayas affected more than just the immediate area. Turns out, we may have them to thank for everything from the rise of giant flightless birds in…
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6 feet of snow in Buffalo: What causes lake-effect storms like this?
Is the weather considered Earth Science? Sure, of course! The Conversation has an interesting post that discusses the hows and whys of “lake-effect snow”. Remember the huge snowstorm in Buffalo in mid-November 2022? Well… there are reasons why this happens so often for western New York. Six foot snowstorms are not rare in Buffalo and…
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A Fossil Museum Uses the Past to Reimagine Climate’s Future
The New York Times has a story about the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum. Climate change is at the center of many of the extinctions in Earth’s past. The La Brea Tar Pit Museum in Las Angeles is researching what happened to megaspecies like mastodons, mammoths dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, and…
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Cretaceous Dinosaurs Lived in Warm and Variable Greenhouse Climate, Study
SciNews has a piece about the climate during the end of the Cretaceous Period. Researchers looked at various data, including oyster and rudist shells, to reconstruct a picture of the paleo climate during the Campanian (late Cretaceous Period) about 78 million years ago in what is now modern day Sweden. They found that the climate…
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Video: ESCONI February 2021 General Meeting – “Assessing the Early Mars Hydroclimate Using Paleolake Geometries”
Did rainfall and snowmelt fill rivers and lakes on Mars? GETTY Our February 2021 speaker via Zoom will be Dr. Gaia Stucky de Quay from the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin. The topic of her talk will be evidence for water and its effect on the geomorphology of early…
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Eos: A Little-Known Mass Extinction and the “Dawn of the Modern World”
Eos has a story about a little known mass extinction that led to the rise of the dinosaurs. New research published in the journal Science Advances shows that climate change driven by volcanic eruptions in western Canada brought about the dinosaurs and eventually the modern world. The event is called Carnian Pluvial Episode. It occurred…
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PBS Eons: How Plants Caused the First Mass Extinction
PBS Eons has a new episode. Climate change has been a large part of all the mass extinctions. The arrival of land plants has a huge impact on the climate and was quite likely a driving event. In the middle of the Cambrian, life on land was about to get a little more crowded.…
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NYT: The ‘Profoundly Radical’ Message of Earth Day’s First Organizer
The New York Times has an article about the founder of Earth Day. The first event was held on April 22nd, 1970 and was very popular. New York City shut down parts of Fifth Avenue and 14th Street. It was created to get attention for environmentalism. I vaguely remember the event and was a member…
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PBS Eons: When the Sahara Was Green
There’s a new PBS Eons episode. This one is about the “Green Sahara” only a few thousand years ago. The climate of the Sahara was completely different thousands of years ago. And we’re not talking about just a few years of extra rain. We’re talking about a climate that was so wet for so…
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Did a million years of rain jump-start dinosaur evolution?
Nature has an interesting post about a spell of wet weather in the middle Triassic that may have spurred the evolution of the dinosaurs. This wet spell occurred for about a million years about 232 million years ago. The evidence for the very wet period (pluvial episode) is contained in Triassic rocks from the Carnian…
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PBS Eons: The History of Climate Cycles (and the Woolly Rhino) Explained
PBS Eons has a great video about climate cycles and what caused ebb and flow of the ice ages. Milankovitch cycles are front and center, with good explanation of how we are affecting the climate today. Throughout the Pleistocene Epoch, the range of the woolly rhino grew and shrank in sync with global climate.…
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BBC: America colonization ‘cooled Earth’s climate’
The BBC has a post about the effect of the colonization of America on the environment. A study by scientists from the University College London, UK claim that the colonization at the end of the 15th century killed so many native Americans, it disturbed Earth’s climate. The paper by Alexander Koch and colleagues was…
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Five New Fossil Forests Found in Antarctica
National Geographic has a story about multiple new fossil forests which were recently found in Antarctica. Back in the Permian, Antarctica was covered in prehistoric greenery. The team of scientists, which included Erik Gulbranson from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, that discovered these forests were there to look for clues to what caused the Permian Mass…
