The vast amount of carbon stored in the Arctic and boreal regions of the world is more than double previous estimates, according to a study published this week. (Global Carbon Project press release)

An international team of scientists warns that accelerating losses of seagrasses across the globe threaten the immediate health and long-term sustainability of coastal ecosystems. (University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science press release)

Researchers have found that wind speeds across the country have decreased by an average of 0.5 percent to 1 percent per year since 1973. (Iowa State University press release)

The recent increase in area burned by wildfires in the Western United States is a product not of higher temperatures or longer fire seasons alone, but a complex relationship between climate and fuels that varies among different ecosystems, according to a study conducted by US Forest Service and university scientists. (USDA Forest Service press release)

Global warming will likely mean more unpredictable weather, scientists say, and a new study pins down, possibly for the first time, how drought conditions in an area's fall and winter may effect tornado activity the following spring. (University of Georgia press release)

Some of the substances that are helping to avert the destruction of the ozone layer could increasingly contribute to climate warming, according to a new study. (NOAA Headquarters press release)

Scientists have reconstructed sea-level fluctuations over the last 520,000 years, and comparison of this record with data on global climate and CO2 levels from Antarctic ice cores suggests that even stabilization at today's CO2 levels may commit us to much greater sea-level rise over the next couple of millennia than previously thought. (National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (UK) press release)

An international oceanographic research expedition to the middle of the South Pacific Gyre found so few organisms beneath the seafloor that it may be the least inhabited sediment ever explored for evidence of life. (University of Rhode Island press release)

Modern glaciers, such as those making up the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, are capable of undergoing periods of rapid shrinkage or retreat, according to new findings by paleoclimatologists at the University at Buffalo. (University at Buffalo press release)

Researchers have reconstructed atmospheric carbon dioxide levels over the past 2.1 million years in the sharpest detail yet, shedding new light on its role in the Earth's cycles of cooling and warming. (The Earth Institute at Columbia University press release)

An international team of researchers now provides some of the very first detailed answers as to what exactly was happening on land, in northern latitudes, during the Late Eocene and Early Oligocene. (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council press release)

Geologists at the University of Leicester have shown that an ancient ice age, once regarded as a brief "blip," in fact lasted for 30 million years. (University of Leicester press release)

Emergency plans to counteract global warming by artificially shading the Earth from incoming sunlight might lower the planet's temperature a few degrees, but such "geoengineering" solutions would do little to stop the acidification of the world oceans that threatens coral reefs and other marine life, report the authors of a new study. (Carnegie Institution press release)

A national report that details risks from warming, as well as ways to adapt to future conditions. (University of Arizona press release)

Reefs appear to be more resistant to one potential menace -- seaweed -- than previously thought, according to new research by a team of marine scientists. (Ecological Society of America press release)