Latest Holocene Stories

Researchers show how world has changed Geologists from the University of Leicester are among four scientists- including a Nobel prize-winner "“ who suggest that the Earth has entered a new age of geological time.The Age of Aquarius? Not quite - It's the Anthropocene Epoch, say the scientists writing in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. (web issue March 29; print issue April 1)And they add that the dawning of this new epoch may include the sixth largest mass extinction...

Archaeologists study the challenges faced by ancients in a warming worldSince 2004, University at Buffalo anthropologist Ezra Zubrow has worked intensively with teams of scientists in the Arctic regions of St. James Bay, Quebec, northern Finland and Kamchatka to understand how humans living 4,000 to 6,000 years ago reacted to climate changes."The circumpolar north is widely seen as an observatory for changing relations between human societies and their environment," Zubrow explains,...

Researchers evaluate climate fluctuations from 115,000 years agoAt the end of the last interglacial epoch, around 115,000 years ago, there were significant climate fluctuations. In Central and Eastern Europe, the slow transition from the Eemian Interglacial to the Weichselian Glacial was marked by a growing instability in vegetation trends with possibly at least two warming events. This is the finding of German and Russian climate researchers who have evaluated geochemical and pollen analyses...

If Earth is headed for a mass extinction like the previous five, in which more than 75 percent of all species were wiped out, then North American mammals are one-fifth to one-half the way there, according to a University of California, Berkeley, and Pennsylvania State University analysis.Many scientists warn that the perfect storm of global warming and environmental degradation - both the result of human activity - is leading to a sixth mass extinction equal to the "Big Five" that...

The seriousness of current global warming is underlined by a reconstruction of climate at Maxwell Bay in the South Shetland Islands of the Antarctic Peninsula over approximately the last 14,000 years, which appears to show that the current warming and widespread loss of glacial ice are unprecedented."At no time during the last 14 thousand years was there a period of climate warming and loss of ice as large and regionally synchronous as that we are now witnessing in the Antarctic...

A new 2,000-year-long reconstruction of sea surface temperatures (SST) from the Indo-Pacific warm pool (IPWP) suggests that temperatures in the region may have been as warm during the Medieval Warm Period as they are today.The IPWP is the largest body of warm water in the world, and, as a result, it is the largest source of heat and moisture to the global atmosphere, and an important component of the planet's climate. Climate models suggest that global mean temperatures are particularly...

Two abrupt and drastic climate events, 700 years apart and more than 45 centuries ago, are teasing  scientists who are now trying to use ancient records to predict future world climate.The events "“ one, a massive, long-lived drought believed to have dried large portions of Africa and Asia, and the other, a rapid cooling that accelerated the growth of tropical glaciers "“ left signals in ice cores and other geologic records from around the world.Lonnie Thompson, University...

In 1996, an international team of scientists led by the University of Zaragoza (UNIZAR) started to carry out a paleontological survey in the cave of El Mirón. Since then they have focused on analysing the fossil remains of the bones and teeth of small vertebrates that lived in the Cantabrian region over the past 41,000 years, at the end of the Quaternary. The richness, great diversity and good conservation status of the fossils have enabled the researchers to carry out a paleoclimatic...

U.S. scientists say that while the majority of the world's glaciers are retreating as the planet becomes warmer, glaciers south of the equator are growing. The researchers at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory said they discovered glaciers in South America and New Zealand are inching forward, pointing to strong regional variations in climate. Conventional wisdom holds that during the era of human civilization, climate has been relatively stable. The scientists said their...

According to a paper in this week's issue of the journal Science, the vast majority of the world's glaciers are retreating as the planet gets warmer.  For the last 7,000 years, New Zealand's largest glaciers have moved out of step with glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere, showing strong regional variations in climate, the paper reported. "This research should provide much more accurate reconstructions of glacial advances worldwide, allowing us in turn to make climate models more...