News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
The lowly Bramble Cay melomys, a small Australian rodent, wasn’t the kind of animal that often made the news. But in 2019, it splashed across headlines. The reason? It was the first mammal to go extinct because of climate change. Named for the island where it used to live, the little rodent had been declining … Read more
The searing “megadrought” that has gripped the southwest U.S. for more than two decades is the driest 22-year period in at least 1,200 years. The region hasn’t seen a more severe drought since the start of the scientific record around the year 800, according to new research published yesterday. An exceptionally dry year in 2021 helped break … Read more
Colorado’s Marshall Fire, which incinerated over a half-billion dollars’ worth of homes near Boulder in December, is likely to become the most investigated wildfire in U.S. history. One reason for that is the blaze hit close to home for fire experts. As many as 100 scientists studying wildfires, smoke, air pollution and climate change lived … Read more
Many of the world’s glaciers contain significantly less ice than scientists previously estimated. That means some mountain communities that rely on melting ice may run out of fresh water faster, according to new research. Glaciers in the Andes Mountains of South America, in particular, may contain far less ice than previous studies suggested. That means … Read more
Oceans are heating up at breakneck speed, and the warming waters are threatening marine animals all over the world. That’s the alarming takeaway from a pair of new studies on marine warming published this week in the journal PLOS Climate. The first study looks back in time to find out how the oceans have changed since the Industrial … Read more
For more than 200 years, scientists have documented the changing seasons across the British Isles. Now, these long-term records have revealed a concerning trend. Spring—defined by the blooming of flowers after a long winter—is arriving nearly a full month earlier than it used to. The findings were published yesterday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, … Read more
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Climate change is raising flood risks in neighborhoods across the U.S. much faster than many people realize. Over the next three decades, the cost of flood damage is on pace to rise 26% due to climate change alone, an … Read more
As a record-breaking heat wave roasted the Pacific Northwest last summer, anxiety rose with the temperatures. Surveys of residents in British Columbia—where the heat in some places soared above 120 degrees Fahrenheit—suggest the disaster caused a spike in negative mental health related to climate change. The results of the surveys, recently published in The Journal of Climate Change … Read more
Whether we are in a new geological epoch is still up for debate, but geologists have almost decided where on Earth should be the official birthplace of the Anthropocene Earth 25 January 2022 By Adam Vaughan Crawford Lake in Ontario, one of the candidate sites to mark the dawn of the Anthropocene wildnerdpix / Alamy … Read more
The warming that humans cause today may have ripple effects far into the future, scientists warned in a study yesterday that finds the vast Greenland ice sheet could continue melting for centuries after greenhouse gases are stabilized. Greenland has a delayed response to changes in the Earth’s climate, and even if the planet stopped warming … Read more