Determining the composition of Earth's current atmosphere is relatively straightforward, using direct measurements, remote sensing via satellites, and sampling by aircraft. It is far more complicated to determine the composition of Earth's past atmosphere, going as far back as 4.6 billion years ago. Bubbles in... click to read more

Sea-level rise will expose coastal communities around the world to increasingly destructive coastal erosion and flooding. This is especially true for coral reef islands, which are low elevation accumulations of loose sand and gravel that have become populated throughout the tropics. For atoll nations like... click to read more

On hearing the term climate change, very often, what comes first to mind is rising temperatures, sea-level rise, or ice melting in Greenland and Antarctica. Only after catastrophic weather hazards, such as those associated with severe storms, the debate turns into the impact of climate... click to read more

Galaxy clusters are the biggest gravitationally-bound objects in the Universe, millions of light years across, some as massive as a quadrillion (10^15) suns. They contain thousands of galaxies and are filled with 100-million-degree plasma, so tenuous it is a million times less dense than the... click to read more

Climate change poses a concrete threat to arid ecosystems, in which water is limited (it rains less than 65% of what is evaporated). These dry ecosystems cover almost half of the terrestrial surface and are predicted to go through increased aridification, which endangers the plants... click to read more