Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, discussed recent developments in climate litigation and the questions they raise for the future....

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A great recent talk by Dr. Stefan Rahmstorf on what is going on with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Surfaced on Bluesky through The Ocean Commotion feed....

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Plate tectonics is a part of mantle convection. However, planetary evolution includes both thermal and compositional effects. During seafloor spreading, for example, the upper mantle material is fractionated into basaltic crust and a harzburgite layer. Recent seismological studies and geodynamic models suggest that when oceanic plates are recycled back into the mantle, the associated depth-dependent density differences can cause chemical layering around the 660 kilometers phase transition.

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A comment on the last post mentioned that if the world is warming at 3.5°C per century (another way of saying 0.035°C/yr), then we'll hit 4°C by the end of this century. Are we really warming the planet that fast? ... Continue reading ??'...

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Palynologists traditionally use the software Tilia by late Eric Grimm to plot their data, which is also used by micropaleontologists. Here is a MATLAB script to create a diagram that is similar to the typical Tilia graphics. The history of the develo...

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Every month on Earth Matters, we offer a puzzling satellite image. The November 2024 puzzler is shown above. Your challenge is to use the comments section to tell us where it is, what we are looking at, and why it is interesting. How t...

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Global temperatures have soared in recent years and climate scientists are trying to understand why. Read More......

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As an informal learning assignment, I have my students use social media to follow ocean science and conservation experts for the semester. Each week, they're asked to check social media for a few minutes, and report on something interesting they le...

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What will happen to the SEC's March 2024 climate disclosure rule under the new federal administration? A paper published by Columbia University's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI) seeks to contribute to the upcoming debates on this question.

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In AGU's 2024 biennial election, which concluded on 29 October, members elected 62 new leaders to serve two-year terms from 2025 to 2026.

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Climate change is altering a centuries-old Shinto ritual in Japan, highlighting the importance of addressing the less visible signs of a changing planet....

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It only takes a few basic tips to start exploring the night sky....

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Starting in 2015, an increasing number of salinity sensors on Argo floats, a key component of the ocean observing system, have shown a tendency to drift towards higher salinity levels. Although the affected salinity data are flagged with quality control markers, analyses that fail to exclude these raw data may lead to biased and elevated salinity estimates.

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The volcano's first snow of the season fell in early November 2024--the latest in a 130-year record--only to apparently vanish within a few days. Read More......

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Sometimes it is hard to compare the eruptions of remote volcano to potential blasts at more well-known volcanoes. I try to put the common explosive eruptions at Shiveluch in the context of US volcanoes....

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This picture is of an Acantherpestes (Meek & Worthen) millipede fossil. Genus may now be Myriacantherpestes (Burke, 1979). It existed during the Carboniferous period. The fossil was found in Ný?any Czech Republic. Fossil was on display at the Natu...

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I'm delighted that today I have a new paper out with a really exciting new pterosaur, that I think adds an awful lot to our understanding of pterosaur evolution, as well as the animal itself being rather interesting. It's often fairly easy to say that a new find 'fills a gap in the fossil record' but some gaps are much bigger than others, or a situation is rather complex that can be clearly resolved with the right fine (or at least, provide an interesting new hypothesis). To follow through this new find and its implications, we need to start with a short bit of pterosaur history and evolution.

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Antarctic tourism is increasing each year, the vast majority by ship. Though this allows people to enjoy the continent's stunning landscapes, a new study reveals how this rise combined with forest fires in the Southern Hemisphere causes seasonal changes in black carbon levels.

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Today's ELI is 'Scary scorpions; make your own scorpion and imagine how it lived' This ELI is an introduction to fossil aquatic scorpions; bringing the animal back to life and investigating the Silurian seas.Many fossil-related activities can be f...

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The news is not good on the climate-change front. President-elect Trump intends to expand fossil-fuel extraction as rapidly as possible, and vows the U.S. will drop out of the Paris agreement. His motto seems to be "Burn, baby, burn." I ... Conti...

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Hawai'i is a marvellous place for a seismograph. There is something to see every day. HVO has been at the forefront of this, and had as many as 7 seismometers already in the 1940's.Their network has been expanding ever since. The instruments are ...

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Rising seas have redistributed cyanobacterial mats blanketing part of Andros Island and restructured the island's marshes and mudflats. Read More......

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Last's night's DJ John Show in the HF living room traced the history of Mas Que Nada, the '60s pop hit by Sergio Mendes and Brasil 66. Its roots in my pantheon of beloved music stem from its moment - KFI, the mid-1960s pop radio that ran as the background soundtrack of my childhood home. There was a bunch of Brazilian pop making the crossover to our hi-fi back then - Antonio Carlos Jobim's Wave, Astrud Gilberto's breathy Girl from Ipanema, though I'm pretty sure it was Herb Alpert's Girl that I first heard. Alpert's South of the Border was the handful of LP's the Fleck family owned.

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This year likely will end as warmest on record, and new findings show Earth's icy places are suffering. Meanwhile, CO2 emissions continue rising -- and efforts to turn the climatic tide are increasingly threatened....

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