Carbon Cycle

Billions of years ago Mars "had a warm, habitable climate with liquid water in lakes and flowing rivers," writes Ars Technica. But "In order for Mars to be warm enough to host liquid water, there must have been a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," says Benjamin Tutolo, a researcher at the U...

The hidden way commercial fishing adds to climate change.

In Denmark, E.ON and the intermunicipal waste company ARC have signed an agreement on the project CopenCapture in Copenhagen. The project aims to capture a total of 400,000 tons of CO2 annually from the stack at CopenHill and store it underground. At the top of the chimney at the world-renowned Danish waste-to-energy plant CopenHill, E.ON […]

This ancient ice core could help explain why humans were not wiped out in the Pleistocene.

The abundant phytoplankton Prochlorococcus shed extra compounds into their surroundings, which are then taken up by other organisms, MIT researchers have found. This "cross-feeding" may play a large role in the ocean's capacity to cycle and store carbon.

NOAA report: Thanks in part to wildfires, the Arctic tundra is no longer absorbing carbon. Now it's emitting it.

Soil is full of an uncountable number of viruses, and scientists are only beginning to understand just how substantial their role in the carbon cycle may be

Rain has so far been ignored in calculations of the ocean's capacity to take up carbon, but a new estimate shows it enhances the ocean sink by 5% to 7%.

At the end of the Paleocene and beginning of the Eocene epochs, between 59 to 51 million years ago, Earth experienced dramatic warming periods, both gradual periods stretching millions of years and sudden warming events known as hyperthermals.

A recent study has pinpointed the top-performing solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) products for precise global monitoring of photosynthesis and vegetation dynamics. By thoroughly evaluating eight widely-used SIF datasets, the research team identified Global OCO-2 SIF (GOSIF) and Contiguous Solar-Induced Fluorescence (CSIF) as leading tools for estimating gross primary productivity (GPP) and forecasting…

When local law enforcement are unable to identify skeletal remains, they may seek out external resources and capabilities like those at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL) Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (CAMS). That's exactly what happened in 2007 when police from Newfoundland, Canada, were six years into an investigation with nothing but dead ends.

In the wet, muddy places where America's rivers and lands meet the sea, scientists from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are unearthing clues to better understand how these vital landscapes are evolving under climate change.

While there are already multiple satellites monitoring greenhouse gases from space, Carbon-I's resolution would be unprecedented.

Two groups of dinosaurs moved to cooler climes during a period of climate change.

NASA scientists have discovered signs of an impending flash drought months before the onset by observing the brightness of "glowing" plants from space.

In the effort to combat the catastrophic impacts of global warming, we must accelerate carbon emissions reduction efforts and rapidly scale strategies to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and the oceans. The technologies for reducing our carbon emissions are mature; those for removing carbon from the environment are not, and need robust support from governments and the private sector.

Permafrost underlies a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere. A comprehensive analysis shows that the area may have shifted from a sink to a source of greenhouse gases, bringing a longtime prediction to fruition.

NASA is now publicly distributing science-quality data from its newest Earth-observing satellite, providing first-of-their-kind measurements of ocean

In the effort to combat the catastrophic impacts of global warming, we must accelerate carbon emissions reduction efforts and rapidly scale strategies to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and the oceans. The technologies for reducing our carbon emissions are mature; those for removing carbon from the environment are not, and need robust support from governments and the private sector.

Global melting is prying the lid off methane stocks, the extent of which we do not know. A young researcher from the University of Copenhagen has discovered high concentrations of the powerful greenhouse gas in meltwater from three Canadian mountain glaciers, where it was not thought to exist—adding new unknowns to the understanding of methane emissions from Earth's glaciated regions