Scientists have discovered that summer sea ice (*) in the Weddell Sea area of Antarctica has decreased by one million square kilometres – an area twice the size of Spain – in the last five years, with implications for the marine ecosystem. The findings are published this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The attorney general for the District of Columbia on Thursday filed a lawsuit against Exxon Mobil, BP, Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell for systematically and intentionally misleading consumers about the role their products play in causing climate change, the latest action by a US attorney general against the oil and gas industry.
Scientists have found bits of polystyrene in the guts of tiny, soil-dwelling organisms in the Antarctic, raising concern that micro-plastics pollution has already deeply entered the world's most remote land-based food systems.
On World Oceans Day we recall that life underwater is essential to life on land. The ocean produces half of the oxygen we breathe. As a major heat and carbon sink, the ocean plays a fundamental role in mitigating climate change. The ocean also provides food for billions around the world.
Antarctica conjures images of an unbroken white wilderness but blooms of algae are giving parts of the frozen continent an increasingly green tinge. Warming temperatures due to climate change are helping the formation and spread of “green snow” and it is becoming so prolific in places that it is even visible from space, according to new research.
The largest hole ever observed in the ozone layer over the Arctic has closed, says Copernicus' Atmospheric Monitoring Service. Scientists spotted signs in late March of a rare hole forming and it was thought to be the result of low temperatures at the north pole.
Last year was the hottest in history across Europe as temperature records were shattered by several extreme heatwaves, the European Union's satellite monitoring surface said. In its annual report on the state of the climate, the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said that 11 of the continent's 12 warmest years on record have been since 2000 as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.
United Nations chief Antonio Guterres urged governments to use their economic responses to the coronavirus pandemic to tackle the even deeper emergency of climate change, in a message for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.
March 2020 was the driest March on record according to data from the Met Office at Mount Pleasant Airport in the Falkland Islands, with rainfall less than a third of the monthly average.
Air pollution has decreased in urban areas across Europe during lockdowns to combat the corona-virus, new satellite images showed on Monday, but campaigners warned city-dwellers were still more vulnerable to the epidemic. Cities including Brussels, Paris, Madrid, Milan and Frankfurt showed a reduction in average levels of noxious nitrogen dioxide over Mar 5-25, compared with the same period last year, according to the Sentinel-5 satellite images.