Madeleine Cuff

3 weeks ago | newscientist.com | Madeleine Cuff

A team of scientists and engineers will head to Greenland next month to test fly drones in the Arctic, in the hope of pioneering a new low-cost surveillance system that will transform monitoring of ice sheets. Currently most data on the state of the Greenland ice sheet comes from satellite monitoring and crewed flights. Drones could provide a cheaper, more accurate solution, say researchers, unlocking near real-time monitoring of the rapidly melting feature.

3 weeks ago | newscientist.com | Madeleine Cuff

A recent surge in the rate of global warming has been largely driven by China’s efforts to reduce air pollution, raising questions about how air pollution regulations are influencing the climate and whether we fully understand the impact of removing aerosols from the atmosphere. This extra warming, which was being masked by the aerosols, accounts for 5 per cent of the global temperature increase since 1850.

4 weeks ago | newscientist.com | Madeleine Cuff

Microbes in carbon-rich soils ramp up their rate of photosynthesis in warmer conditions, suggesting current climate models may be overestimating the total emissions expected from degrading landscapes as the climate warms. As the world warms, natural ecosystems like peatlands and permafrost are expected to start rapidly releasing stored carbon dioxide as microbial activity shifts in their soils.

1 month ago | newscientist.com | Madeleine Cuff

Rising temperatures in the Arctic are causing melting glaciers that once terminated in open ocean to retreat onto land, revealing thousands of kilometres of newly exposed coastline in Greenland and other areas – with potential geopolitical consequences. Jan Kavan at University of South Bohemia in the Czech Republic and his colleagues used satellite imagery from 2000 and 2020 to track changes to marine-terminating glaciers across the northern hemisphere.

1 month ago | newscientist.com | Madeleine Cuff

There is almost no ecosystem on Earth left untouched by human activity, according to new research that suggests widespread change from pollution, wildlife extinctions and disruption to plant life is pushing the planet into uncharted territory. “We have shifted the system to conditions that we have not seen before,” says Alejandro Ordonez at Aarhus University in Denmark. Ordonez and his colleagues have mapped the land’s exposure to three key drivers of ecosystem “novelty” around…