About 10% of Iceland is still covered by glaciers — what Icelanders call their “white diamonds.” Now, a mysterious patch of cold water in the North Atlantic Ocean, known as the “Blue Blob,” is helping slow down the rate at which these glaciers are melting. But scientists are concerned about how long this will last.
On Nantucket, homeowners are funding an extensive engineering project to save their houses from sliding into the sea. But no one knows how long the homes and the entire island can resist the forces of the sea and climate change.
While it's been unusually cold and snowy in much of Europe, the Arctic has been seeing record warm temperatures and a huge loss of ice. Here's how the two are linked, and what they might have to do with climate change.
There have been a record 18 deaths and zero births of the species over the past year.
The Beaufort Gyre, a key Arctic Ocean current that traps huge amounts of ice and cold freshwater, is behaving strangely. When it eventually discharges its contents, the event could begin a period of sharply lower temperatures in northern Europe.
About a decade ago, several of Greenland's biggest glaciers suddenly began melting. A decade later, two groups of scientists are trying to unlock the secrets behind a scientific mystery story with potentially big consequences for the future of the island's rapidly-melting ice sheet.
Greenland is melting fast, and that's bad news for sea level rise and other impacts of climate change. But The World's Ari Daniel, on assignment with scientists studying a rapidly melting Greenland glacier, says all that bad news doesn't make the world's biggest island any less of a wondrous place.
It's her ocean — we're just swimming in it. A Great White Shark named Lydia had a tracking device attached to her dorsal fin last year. Since then, she's logged over 27,000 miles and now she even has her own Twitter account.
When most people hear the term "global warming," they naturally think of air temperature. In reality, more than 90 percent of the warming caused by greenhouse gases happens in the oceans. Much of this warming takes place in the waters in and around the Arctic Ocean, leading to increasingly rapid melting of sea ice. A new study links this melting to cold, harsh winters that are becoming more common in parts of the world.
A pair of researchers in Florida developed a startling hypothesis over a round of golf: Tracking fish could tell us more about meteorological patterns around the world. Two years later, that hypothesis is bearing out, with great impacts for science.
In the spring, humpback whales begin their annual migration north to various parts the cold and food-rich waters of the North Atlantic. But the entire population cozies up during winter in the warm waters of the Dominican Republic.