The 2017 hurricane season is one for the record books. A seemingly relentless line of storms tore, one after another, across the Caribbean and into the Gulf Coast. Seventeen of them were strong enough to be named, with the strongest – Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, and Nate – conspiring to inflict an estimated 350 deaths and some $400 billion in property damage.

There’s no doubt that Toronto and much of the eastern North America rang in a very cold New Year. But with global temperatures on the rise, what accounts for the frigid conditions we experienced?

Greenland’s vast ice sheet has long been home to Project Iceworm, an abandoned Cold War-era U.S. Army initiative designed to deploy ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads against the Soviet Union. When the project was shuttered in 1967, military planners expected that any materials left on site would be safely frozen in ice and snow in perpetuity.

On the basis of a unique global comparison of data from core samples extracted from the ocean floor and the polar ice sheets, AWI researchers have now demonstrated that, though climate changes have indeed decreased around the globe from glacial to interglacial periods, the difference is by no means as pronounced as previously assumed. Until now, it was believed that glacial periods were characterised by extreme temperature variability, while interglacial periods were relatively stable. The researchers publish their findings advanced online in the journal Nature.

New research led by CU Boulder shows that the changing topography of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere during the last Ice Age forced changes in the climate of Antarctica, a previously undocumented inter-polar climate change mechanism.

Michigan Tech researchers contend that tobacco farmers could increase profits by converting their land to solar farms, which in turn provides renewable energy generation.

In Gobbler's Knob, Pennsylvania, at the crack of dawn today, the nation's most famous groundhog Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadowoffsite link and, as the legend has it, six more weeks of winter.

Tropical forests all over the world are at risk. Two of the main threats are the deforestation for arable land and climate change. Scientists from Technical University of Munich (TUM) and Thünen-Institute compared the losses due to deforestation with those that would result in extreme climate change scenarios in Ecuador. Although global warming is likely to change the distribution of species, deforestation will result in the loss of more dry forests than predicted by climate change damage.

The remnants of Tropical Cyclone Fehi brought rain to New Zealand before it fizzled out. NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s GPM core satellite provided a look at the rainfall from its vantage point in space.

Some of the smallest creatures on the planet — zooplankton — make the most widespread vertical migration of biomass on Earth. Billions of these animals move deeper into the ocean and away from the light during the day to avoid predators, and migrate up again in the dark of night to feed.