Feel warmer? Maybe not everywhere but global temperatures were the fifth highest on record for October. Meanwhile arctic sea ice doubles from last month yet remains second lowest on record for October. The globally-averaged temperature for October 2012 was the fifth warmest October since record keeping began in 1880. October 2012 also marks the 36th…

The Planck (European Space Agency or ESA) space telescope has made the first conclusive detection of a bridge of hot gas connecting a pair of galaxy clusters across 10 million light-years of intergalactic space. In the early Universe, filaments of gaseous matter pervaded the cosmos in a giant web, with clusters eventually forming in the…

A network of integrated greenhouse gas measurements in the UK and Ireland – the first of its kind in Europe – has been established by researchers at the University of Bristol. The UK DECC (Deriving Emissions linked to Climate Change) Network consists of a network of four stations in the UK and Ireland which make…

Hurricane Sandy was a monster. It changed lives and changed the actual land shapes along the coasts affected. The USGS has released a series of aerial photographs showing before-and-after images of Hurricane Sandy’s impacts on the Atlantic Coast. Among the latest photo pairs to be published are images showing the extent of coastal change in…

Bat echolocation is a perceptual system where ultrasonic sounds are emitted specifically to produce echoes. By comparing the outgoing pulse with the returning echoes, the brain and auditory nervous system can produce detailed images of the bat’s surroundings. This allows bats to detect, localize and even classify their prey in complete darkness. Humans cannot do…

Scientists from the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM) published a study today in Nature Climate Change showing that besides marine inundation (flooding), low-lying coastal areas may also be vulnerable to groundwater inundation, a factor largely unrecognized in earlier predictions on the effects of sea level rise. Ground-water flooding or inundation occurs in low-lying areas…

Global warming only decrease the extent off the ice in polar regions, right. Well maybe not so. The first direct evidence that marked changes to Antarctic sea ice drift have occurred over the last 20 years, in response to changing winds, is published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience. Scientists from NERC’s British Antarctic…

Just look up into the night sky and see all of the stars and then imagine all that you cannot see that is still up there. There are lots of mysteries up there and some we know of , some we suspect, and some we do not know. Every six seconds, for millions of years,…

The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef system composed of over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands stretching for over 1,600 miles over an area of approximately 133,000 sq miles. The reef is located in the Coral Sea, off the coast of Queensland, Australia. It is a fragile and immense ecosystem subject…

Icebergs start as ice sheets attached to the land or a glacier. They are large monsters of solid ice but they do break off the ice sheet before they float out to sea. How do they break up afterwards at sea? An international team of scientists has discovered a previously unknown mechanism by which large…