Ice cliffs in Pine Island Bay

‘Scars’ left by icebergs record West Antarctic ice retreat

25 October 2017

Thousands of marks on the Antarctic seafloor, caused by icebergs which broke free from glaciers more than ten thousand years ago, show how part of the Antarctic Ice Sheet retreated rapidly at the end of the last ice age as it balanced precariously on sloping ground and became unstable. Today, as the global climate continues to warm, rapid and sustained retreat may be close to happening again and could trigger runaway ice retreat into the interior of the continent, which in turn would cause sea levels to rise even faster than currently projected. 

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Archaeology shows there's more to millet than birdseed

24 July 2017

Archaeological research shows that our prehistoric ancestors built resilience into their food supply. Now archaeologists say ‘forgotten’ millet – a cereal familiar today as birdseed – has a role to play in modern crop diversity and in helping to feed the world’s population.

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Kulindadromeus, a small bipedal ornithischian dinosaur that is now part of the new grouping Ornithoscelida and identified as more obviously sharing an ancestry with living birds

New study shakes the roots of the dinosaur family tree

22 March 2017

More than a century of theory about the evolutionary history of dinosaurs has been turned on its head following the publication of new research from scientists at the University of Cambridge and Natural History Museum in London. Their work suggests that the family groupings need to be rearranged, re-defined and re-named and also that dinosaurs may have originated in the northern hemisphere rather than the southern, as current thinking goes.

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Foraminifera "Star sand" Hatoma Island - Japan

Super-slow circulation allowed world’s oceans to store huge amounts of carbon during the last ice age

27 June 2016

The way the ocean transported heat, nutrients and carbon dioxide at the peak of the last ice age, about 20,000 years ago, is significantly different than what has previously been suggested, according to two new studies. The findings suggest that the colder ocean circulated at a very slow rate, which enabled it to store much more carbon for much longer than the modern ocean.

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Minecraft tree “probably” the tallest tree in the Tropics

08 June 2016

A tree the height of 20 London double-decker buses has been discovered in Malaysia by conservation scientists monitoring the impact of human activity on the biodiversity of a pristine rainforest. The tree, a Yellow  Meranti, is one of the species that can be grown in the computer game Minecraft.

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The city of Muzafarabad, Pakistan lays in ruins after the 2005 Kashmir earthquake that hit the region.

Earthquakes without frontiers

26 October 2015

The Alpine–Himalayan belt, which stretches from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, is one of the world’s most seismically active regions. Now, a combination of earth science, social science and education is being used to help the region become more resilient to earthquakes, protecting lives and property.

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