Stanford researchers have developed a rechargeable battery that uses freshwater and seawater to create electricity. Aided by nanotechnology, the battery employs the difference in salinity between fresh and saltwater to generate a current. A power stati...

Unusually low temperatures in the Arctic ozone layer have recently initiated massive ozone depletion. The Arctic appears to be heading for a record loss of this trace gas that protects the Earth's surface against ultraviolet radiation from the sun.

Scientists working in the remotest part of Antarctica have discovered that liquid water locked deep under the continent’s coat of ice regularly thaws and refreezes to the bottom, creating as much as half the thickness of the ice in places, and ac...

Many Americans are skeptical about whether the world's weather is changing, but apparently the degree of skepticism varies systematically depending on what that change is called.

A Purdue Univ. researcher is leading an effort to create a new scientific field that will use sound as a way to understand the ecological characteristics of a landscape and to reconnect people with the importance of natural sounds.

Recently, Rhode Island-sized chunks of ice have separated from Greenland and Antarctica, garnering worldwide attention. And, although ice sheet models are already used, the models are not easily adapted for use in global climate models. To help with th...

With a view to UN World Water Day, March 22, experts convening in Ottawa Feb. 28 to March 3 say water-rich Canada and water management experts have growing importance as countries elsewhere brace for more frequent drought, flood and unsafe water proble...

“Reefs at Risk Revisited” report presents comprehensive analysis threats to coral reefs.

New nanomaterials research from the Univ. at Buffalo could lead to new solutions for an age-old public health problem: how to separate bacteria from drinking water.

A $28 million University of Colorado Boulder instrument developed to study changes in the sun's brightness and its impact on Earth's climate is one of two primary payloads on NASA's Glory mission set to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Californ...

Rising sea levels could threaten an average of 9 percent of the land within 180 US coastal cities by 2100, according to new research led by University of Arizona scientists. The research is the first analysis of vulnerability to sea-level rise that inc...

Physicists, led by a researcher at the University of Warwick, studying new images of clouds of material exploding from the sun have spotted instabilities forming in that exploding cloud that are similar to those seen in clouds in Earth's atmosphere.

Earth is gradually warming, but not evenly. Efforts to pin down regional climate impacts of this warming have been hampered by biased wind observations over the oceans. Developing a new technique to remove the bias, scientists at the International Paci...

Danish scientists, in a study published in American Chemical Society's journal, Chemical Research in Toxicology, found that the invisible particles inhaled into the lungs from breathing wood smoke from fireplaces have multiple adverse effects.

On Friday, Jan. 28 in Antarctica, a research team investigating the last 100,000 years of Earth's climate history reached an important milestone completing the main ice core to a depth of 3,331 meters (10,928 feet) at West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide. T...

A study led by the University of Zaragoza has studied precipitation trends in Spain's 10 hydrological basins over the 1946 to 2005 period. The results show that precipitation has declined overall between the months of March and June, reducing the lengt...

Five days before intense monsoonal deluges unleashed vast floods across Pakistan last July, computer models at a European weather-forecasting center were giving clear indications that the downpours were imminent. Now, a new scientific study that retros...

Engineers have created a new type of "stereo vision" to use in studying ocean waves as they pound against the shore, providing a better way to understand and monitor this violent, ever-changing environment.

An international research team working with NIST scientists has suggested for the first time that mercury cycling in the flora and fauna of the Arctic may be linked to the amount of ice cover present.

A new analysis of the Northern Hemisphere's "albedo feedback" over a 30-year period concludes that the region's loss of reflectivity due to snow and sea ice decline is more than double what state-of-the-art climate models estimate.