Tag Archives: earth

The ozone layer had been thinning since the late 1970s. Scientists raised the alarm and ozone-depleting chemicals were phased out worldwide. As a result, the upper ozone layer above the northern hemisphere should be completely repaired in the 2030s and the gaping Antarctic ozone hole should disappear in the 2060s, ... Read More »

A typical desk globe is designed to be a geometric sphere and to rotate smoothly when you spin it. Our actual planet is far less perfect — in both shape and in rotation. Earth is not a perfect sphere. When it rotates on its spin axis — an imaginary line ... Read More »

A time-honoured theory into why conditions on Earth have remained stable enough for life to evolve over billions of years has been given a new, innovative twist. For around half a century, the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis has provided a unique way of understanding how life has persisted on Earth. It champions ... Read More »

Millennia ago, ancient farmers cleared land to plant wheat and maize, potatoes and squash. They flooded fields to grow rice. They began to raise livestock. And unknowingly, they may have been fundamentally altering the climate of Earth. A study published in the journal Scientific Reports provides new evidence that ancient ... Read More »

More than an eon ago, the sun shone dimmer than it does today, but the Earth stayed warm due to a strong greenhouse gas effect, geoscience theory holds. Astronomer Carl Sagan coined this “the Faint Young Sun Paradox,” and for decades, researchers have searched for the right balance of atmospheric ... Read More »

Injecting particles into the atmosphere to cool the planet and counter the warming effects of climate change would do nothing to offset the crop damage from rising global temperatures, according to a new analysis by University of California, Berkeley, researchers. By analyzing the past effects of Earth-cooling volcanic eruptions, and ... Read More »

Keeping global warming to within 1.5-2°C may be more difficult than previously assessed, according to researchers. An international team of scientists has published a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) showing that even if the carbon emission reductions called for in the Paris Agreement are met, ... Read More »