The destruction of atmospheric ozone can take place within newly forming Polar Stratospheric Clouds (PSCs), which serve as the battleground for manmade chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) to attack and destroy ozone.
In the years after Columbus' voyage, burning of New World forests and fields diminished significantly – a phenomenon some have attributed to decimation of native populations by European diseases. But a new University of Utah-led study suggests global cooling resulted in fewer fires because both preceded Columbus in many regions worldwide.
The chronic drought that hit western North America from 2000 to 2004 left dying forests and depleted river basins in its wake and was the strongest in 800 years, scientists have concluded, but they say those conditions will become the "new normal" for most of the coming century.
Laboratory instrumentation manufacturer Fluid Imaging Technologies, Yarmouth, Maine (www.fluidimaging.com) has awarded its 2012 FlowCAM® Student Equipment and Travel Grant to Amanda Wenczel, a Ph. D. candidate in Ecology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
While experts debate whether extreme weather conditions such as this summer’s record rainfall can be explained by climate change, University of Leicester geographers are investigating whether the opposite is true – does extreme weather impact on climate change?
North Carolina’s Waccamaw River watershed will benefit from a $1 million restitution order from a federal court, funding environmental projects to acquire and preserve wetlands in an area damaged by illegal releases of wastewater from a corporate hog farm.
For decades, scientists have known that the effects of global climate change could have a potentially devastating impact across the globe, but Harvard researchers say there is now evidence that it may also have a dramatic impact on public health.
Local weather patterns temporarily influence people's beliefs about evidence for global warming, according to research by political scientists at New York University and Temple University.
In a new study, University of Pennsylvania biologist Daniel Janzen joins more than 200 colleagues to report that protected areas are still vulnerable to damaging encroachment, and many are suffering from biodiversity loss.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has completed its sampling of private drinking water wells in Dimock, Pa.
Experts from the University of Aberdeen and British Antarctic Survey (BAS) made the discovery below Ferrigno Ice Stream, a region visited only once previously, over fifty years ago, in 1961, and one that is remote even by Antarctic standards.
The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) today initiated the first ever drill designed to deploy critical pieces of state-of-the-art well control equipment to the ultra-deep seabed of the Gulf of Mexico in an effort to exercise the oil and gas industry’s response to a potential subsea blowout.
A new versatile measurement system devised by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) accurately and quickly measures the electric power output of solar energy devices, capabilities useful to researchers and manufacturers working to develop and make next-generation solar energy cells.
Researchers have found a way to use GPS to measure short-term changes in the rate of ice loss on Greenland -- and reveal a surprising link between the ice and the atmosphere above it.
A new student project at Carnegie Mellon University offers filtered fun for city neighborhoods.
For the first time, scientists have identified tropical and subtropical species of marine protozoa living in the Arctic Ocean.
Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Energy Star program launched the 2012 National Building Competition: Battle of the Buildings with a record 3,200 buildings across the country going head to head to improve energy efficiency, lower utility costs and protect health and the environment.
For several days this month, Greenland's surface ice cover melted over a larger area than at any time in more than 30 years of satellite observations.
The greatest climate change the world has seen in the last 100,000 years was the transition from the ice age to the warm interglacial period.
The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission’s first and California’s largest ultraviolet (UV) water disinfection facility, the Tesla Treatment Facility, has earned its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification.