Using data gathered from a specially equipped jet that spent a month flying through and studying wildfire plumes, scientists have a better understanding now of how wildfire smoke impacts air quality.

While climate change is the primary driver of permafrost degradation in Arctic Alaska, a new analysis of 70 years of data reveals that tundra fires are accelerating that decline, contributing disproportionately to a phenomenon known as “thermokarst,” the abrupt collapse of ice-rich permafrost as a result of thawing.

Across the U.S., road crews dump around 25 million metric tons of sodium chloride — much like table salt — to unfreeze roads each year and make them safe for travel.

There is growing public awareness that climate change will impact society not only through changes in mean temperatures and precipitation over the 21st century, but also in the occurrence of more pronounced extreme events, and more generally in natural variability in the Earth system.

Because plants take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into food, forests and other similar ecosystems are considered to be some of the planet’s most important carbon sinks.

Not to pile on, but winter is coming and the COVID-19 pandemic is about to get worse.

Methane, which produces more warming than other greenhouse gases and is the subject of newly announced U.S. emission restrictions, is hard to break down and keep out of the atmosphere.

This past hurricane season was a pretty nasty one. With 21 storms from June 1 to November 30, for the second year in a row the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ran out of names on their official list and had to swap over to a backup. 

The coastal zone is home to over a billion people. Rising sea levels are already impacting coastal residents and aggravating existing coastal hazards, such as flooding during high tides and storm surges.

Climate change and warmer conditions have altered snow-driven extremes and previous studies predict less and slower snowmelt in the northern United States and Canada.