News by Subject Atmospheric Science

In 2014, a team of researchers led by a paleobiologist from the University of Missouri found that clams from the Holocene Epoch (that began 11,700 years ago) contained clues about how sea level rise due to climate change could foreshadow a rise in parasitic trematodes. Now, an international team from Mizzou and the Universities of Bologna and Florida has found that rising seas could be detrimental to human health on a much shorter time scale.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers found that they could slow deforestation and preserve endangered chimpanzee habitats by paying poor landowners in Uganda not to cut down trees on their property. The system of small payments effectively cut deforestation in half, keeping the average equivalent of 3,000 metric tons of CO2 out of the air for every village who participated. The program was also cost-effective: it was 10 to 50 times cheaper than many pollution-fighting measures in the US.

Remote Saharan dust influences the earth's radiation budget and tropical North Atlantic ocean-atmosphere temperature variability that might even attenuate Hurricane activity. In a new research study an international team of geoscientists reconstructed the history of Saharan dust storms during the last 12,000 years. The researchers identified several millennial-scale phases of enhanced Saharan dust supplies during the transition of the former 'green Sahara' to the present-day hyper-arid desert. The results were published in Quaternary Science Reviews.

The presence of carbonates in the Earth's mantle is known from diamond inclusions, but how carbon is transported there remains a mystery. An international team has shed light on this mystery thanks to high-pressure experiments carried out at the European Synchrotron. The scientists revealed two new iron carbonate compounds and found that self-oxidation-reduction reactions could preserve carbonates in the mantle, hence becoming a potential carbon carrier down to the top of the Earth's core.

In a new study, scientists found that aerosol particles released into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels are a primary driver of changes in rainfall patterns across the globe.

By using supercomputers such as the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's Titan, a large multidisciplinary team of scientists developed a new integrated climate model designed to reduce uncertainties in future climate predictions as it bridges Earth systems with energy and economic models and large-scale human impact data.

Reducing greenhouse-gas emissions is not enough to limit global warming to a level that wouldn't risk young people's future, according to a new study published in Earth System Dynamics by a team of scientists who say we need negative emissions. Measures such as reforestation could accomplish much of the needed CO2 removal from the atmosphere, but continued high fossil fuel emissions would demand expensive technological solutions to extract CO2 and prevent dangerous warming.

Scientists identify the slow part of a chemical reaction that allows carbon to be sequestered in the ocean, and demonstrate how to speed it up with a common enzyme.