Houses on stilts, small scale energy generation and recycling our dishwater are just some of the measures that are being proposed to prepare our cities for the effects of global warming. A three-year project led by Newcastle University for the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research has outlined how our major cities must respond if they are to continue to grow in the face of climate change.

With satellites, they have discovered that more than 1.2 billion lightning flashes occur around the world every year. (Rwanda has the most flashes per square kilometer, while flashes are rare in polar regions.) Laboratory and field experiments have revealed that the core of some lightning bolts reaches 30,000 Kelvin (53,540 F), a temperature hot enough to instantly melt sand and break oxygen and nitrogen molecules into individual atoms. And then there is this: each of those billion lightning flashes produces a puff of nitrogen oxide gas (NOx) that reacts with sunlight and other gases in the atmosphere to produce ozone. Near Earth's surface, ozone can harm human and plant health; higher in the atmosphere, it is a potent greenhouse gas; and in the stratosphere, its blocks cancer-causing ultraviolet radiation.

With land degradation in dryland regions continuing to worsen, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification has agreed on scientist-recommended indicators for monitoring and assessing desertification that signatory countries must report on. The landmark agreement was reached after two weeks of negotiations involving hundreds of scientists and government ministers attending the Ninth Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 9) of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from 21 September to 2 October.

A little melting ice can touch off a firestorm. As ice sheets thawed toward the end of the last ice age, Earth responded with a fit of volcanic eruptions that spewed CO2 into the air and created the balmy climate we know today, according to a new study.

U.S. satellite measurements show Arctic sea ice extent in 2009. The area of the Arctic Ocean covered by floating ice was the third lowest since satellite measurements were first made in 1979. The ice area at minimum was an increase from the past two years, but still well below the average for the past 30 years.

The windswept deserts of northern China might seem an odd destination for studying the heavy monsoon rains that routinely drench the more tropical regions of Southeast Asia. But the sandy dunefields that mark the desert margin between greener pastures to the south and the Gobi Desert to the north are a rich source of information about past climates in Asia, says University of Wisconsin-Madison geographer Joseph Mason.

Climate change wreaked havoc on the Earth's first rainforests but they quickly bounced back, scientists reveal today (1 October). The findings of the research team, led by Dr Howard Falcon-Lang from Royal Holloway, University of London, are based on spectacular discoveries of 300-million-year-old rainforests in coal mines in Illinois, USA.

For Sophie Warny, LSU assistant professor of geology and geophysics and curator at the LSU Museum of Natural Science, years of patience in analyzing Antarctic samples with low fossil recovery finally led to a scientific breakthrough. She and colleagues from around the world now have proof of a sudden, remarkably warm period in Antarctica that occurred about 15.7 million years ago and lasted for a few thousand years. Last year, as Warny was studying samples sent to her from the latest Antarctic Geologic Drilling Program, or ANDRILL AND-2A, a multinational collaboration between the Antarctic Programs of the United States (funded by the National Science Foundation), New Zealand, Italy and Germany, one sample stood out as a complete anomaly.

Past Earth Science and Climate Change News

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