It's not about the Black Death or the dinosaurs dying out. "The Great Dying" is an event in the geological perspective. The largest of all mass extinctions on Earth. We are at the end of the Permian Period, 252 million years ago.
– We need to understand how glaciers are shrinking in order to better adapt to climate change impacts such as changes to water supply, landslides and avalanches, says Prof. Andreas Kääb, a glacier expert from the University of Oslo in Norway.
A new methodology to combine heaps of satellite images allows researchers from University of Oslo with colleagues to create a complete time series of glacier movement. To demonstrate the methodology, they created a map of ice flow every month, over several years, covering several mountain ranges in Southern Alaska and Canada. Once created, the dataset revealed several sudden glacier speed-ups and slow-downs.
The permafrost in the Arctic is thawing. Now a new study find that seventy percent of the current infrastructure in the Arctic in the next 30 years has a high potential to be affected by thawing permafrost. This despite if the climate change targets of the Paris Agreement is meet.
Volcanic activity primarily focuses at plate boundaries on Earth. But volcanoes can also form far away from plate boundaries due to plumes of hot material rising from the Earth’s deep interior. Eventually this material reaches the surface and breaks through the Earth’s crust to form a volcano – a so-called “hotspot”. Scientists now present a theory of how this type of hotspot activity can explain massive, past volcanic eruptions in Greenland and in the North Atlantic.