Throughout its long history, Earth has warmed and cooled time and again. Climate has changed when the planet received more or less sunlight due to subtle shifts in its orbit, as the atmosphere or ...

Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The January 2025 puzzler is shown above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us where it is, what we are looking at ...

Earth has experienced climate change in the past without help from humanity. We know about past climates because of evidence left in tree rings, layers of ice in glaciers, ocean sediments, coral reefs ...

Though blizzards and cold snaps may have made you forget the news from last week, 2015 was the warmest year in NASA’s global temperature record, which dates back to 1880. During a January 2016 press ...

If you follow Earth and climate science closely, you may have noticed that the media is abuzz every December and January with stories about how the past year ranked in terms of global temperatures.

A new fissure opened on the Reykjanes peninsula in southwestern Iceland near Grindavík in December 2023 and continued erupting throughout 2024. Whether sparked by lightning, intentional land-clearing, ...

Examine the set of graphs below for a given city. Read carefully the temperature and precipitation scales on the graphs. Review the biome information. Two biome choices are given for each set of ...

The time it takes carbon to move through the fast carbon cycle is measured in a lifespan. The fast carbon cycle is largely the movement of carbon through life forms on Earth, or the biosphere. Between ...

Air temperatures on Earth have been rising since the Industrial Revolution. While natural variability plays some part, the preponderance of evidence indicates that human activities—particularly ...

Just as the incoming and outgoing energy at the Earth’s surface must balance, the flow of energy into the atmosphere must be balanced by an equal flow of energy out of the atmosphere and back to space ...

The most valuable fossils found in sediment cores are from tiny animals with a calcium carbonate shell, called foraminifera. One species of foraminifera lives in the icy waters of the Arctic above ...