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Categories: Geoscience: Earth Science, Space: The Solar System

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Approximately 700,000 years ago, a 'warm ice age' permanently changed the climate cycles on Earth. During this exceptionally warm and moist period, the polar glaciers greatly expanded. A research team identified this seemingly paradoxical connection. The shift in the Earth's climate represents a critical step in our planet's later climate development.

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A research team, composed of climatologists and an astronomer, have used an improved computer model to reproduce the cycle of ice ages (glacial periods) 1.6 to 1.2 million years ago. The results show that the glacial cycle was driven primarily by astronomical forces in quite a different way than it works in the modern age. These results will help us to better understand the past, present, and future of ice sheets and the Earth's climate.

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Astronomers have described the first radiation belt observed outside our solar system, using a coordinated array of 39 radio dishes from Hawaii to Germany to obtain high-resolution images. The images of persistent, intense radio emissions from an ultracool dwarf reveal the presence of a cloud of high-energy electrons trapped in the object's powerful magnetic field, forming a double-lobed structure analogous to radio images of Jupiter's radiation belts.

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Physicists measured the flux of interplanetary dust around Saturn. The researchers concluded that the planet's rings formed less than 400 million years ago, making them much younger than Saturn itself.

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Astronomers have uncovered the largest cosmic explosion ever witnessed. The explosion is more than ten times brighter than any known supernova and three times brighter than the brightest tidal disruption event, where a star falls into a supermassive black hole.

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An international team has reconstructed the evolution of groundwater in the Great Basin, USA -- one of the driest regions on Earth -- up to 350,000 years into the past with unprecedented accuracy. The results shed new light on the effects of climate change on water supply and provide important insights for the sustainable use of groundwater resources.

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A new study shows that sand dunes can serve as repositories of fire history and aid in expanding scientific understanding of fire regimes around the world.

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Scalloped hammerhead sharks hold their breath to keep their bodies warm during deep dives into cold water where they hunt prey such as deep sea squids. This discovery provides important new insights into the physiology and ecology of a species that serves as an important link between the deep and shallow water habitats.

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Scientists analyzed over a decade's worth of data about 16 young supermassive stars orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Supermassive stars typically are formed in pairs, but the new study found that all 16 of the stars were singletons. The findings support a scenario in which the supermassive black hole drives nearby stars to either merge or be disrupted, with one of the pair being ejected from the system.

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Our industrialized society releases many and various pollutants into the world. Combustion in particular produces aerosol mass including black carbon. Although this only accounts for a few percent of aerosol particles, black carbon is especially problematic due to its ability to absorb heat and impede the heat reflection capabilities of surfaces such as snow. So, it's essential to know how black carbon interacts with sunlight. Researchers have quantified the refractive index of black carbon to the most accurate degree yet which might impact climate models.

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Boreal wetlands are a significant source of isoprene and terpenes, a class of highly reactive organic compounds that have a substantial impact on the Earth's climate, according to a new study.

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Around 500 million years ago life in the oceans rapidly diversified. In the blink of an eye -- at least in geological terms -- life transformed from simple, soft-bodied creatures to complex multicellular organisms with shells and skeletons. Now, research has shown that the diversification of life at this time also led to a drastic change in the chemistry of Earth's crust -- the uppermost layer we walk on and, crucially, the layer which provides many of the nutrients essential to life.

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Researchers observed exoplanet GJ 1214b's atmosphere by measuring the heat it emits while orbiting its host star. Astronomers directly detected the light emitted by a sub-Neptune exoplanet -- a category of planets that are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

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Living organisms are exposed to nanoparticles through different products and air pollution every day. After examining hundreds of exposures, researchers revealed how various species share a specific epigenetic molecular response to particulate matter. They have now explained the mechanism through which cells and organisms adapt to long-term exposures to nano-sized materials.

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Even without body parts that allowed for movement, new research shows -- for the first time -- that some of Earth's earliest animals managed to be picky about where they lived.

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For three years at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of students spent an estimated 56,000 hours analyzing the behavior of hundreds of solar flares. Their results could help astrophysicists understand how the sun's corona reaches temperatures of millions of degrees Fahrenheit.

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New research provides clear evidence of a human 'fingerprint' on climate change and shows that specific signals from human activities have altered the temperature structure of Earth's atmosphere.

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While conducting a study of Petermann Glacier in northwest Greenland, researchers uncovered a previously unseen way in which the ice and ocean interact. The glaciologists said their findings could mean that the climate community has been vastly underestimating the magnitude of future sea level rise caused by polar ice deterioration.

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Astronomers used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to image the warm dust around a nearby young star, Fomalhaut, in order to study the first asteroid belt ever seen outside of our solar system in infrared light. But to their surprise, the dusty structures are much more complex than the asteroid and Kuiper dust belts of our solar system. Overall, there are three nested belts extending out to 14 billion miles (23 billion kilometers) from the star; that's 150 times the distance of Earth from the Sun. The scale of the outermost belt is roughly twice the scale of our solar system's Kuiper Belt of small bodies and cold dust beyond Neptune. The inner belts -- which had never been seen before -- were revealed by Webb for the first time.

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A new study provides the first observational evidence of the stabilization of the anti-cyclonic Beaufort Gyre, which is the dominant circulation of the Canada Basin and the largest freshwater reservoir in the Arctic Ocean.