Climate Change

Tiny balls of fungus and feces may disprove the theory that a huge space rock exploded over North America about 12,900 years ago, triggering a thousand-year cold snap, according to a new study.

The ancient temperature drop, called the Younger Dryas, has been well documented in the geologic record, including soil and ice core samples.

The cool-down also coincides with the extinction of mammoths and other Ice Age mammals in North America, and it’s thought to have spurred our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the Middle East to adopt an agricultural lifestyle.

Climate change, coastal development and overfishing have effectively wiped out nearly a fifth of the world’s coral reefs, and by the end of this century they “are unlikely to look much like the reefs that we are familiar with today,” said Peter Mumby, a marine biologist at the University of Queensland in Australia, who envisions smaller and weaker reefs that harbor fewer fish.

“But there will still be reefs and they will still be very important,” he said. “And so what we really have to do is take all the steps we can locally to

Check out seven ways scientists and conservationists are pushing to preserve reefs for future generations.

2009 saw vast patches of the planet protected and world leaders pledge to fight global warming, but the climate continued to change dramatically–putting it in the “loss” column for the environment this year, according to experts who spoke to National Geographic.

A decade ago, global climate change was largely considered a problem for the distant future. But it seems that future has come sooner than predicted.

One of the most remarkable, and alarming, environmental changes to occur over the last decade is the melting of Antarctic ice sheets and the recession of Arctic glaciers at speeds much faster than climate change models had predicted, according to environment experts.

A newly detected 19th-century volcanic eruption may solve the mystery of a strangely cool decade in the early 1800s, researchers say—but the location of the volcano itself remains a puzzle.

Scientists have long blamed the 1815 eruption of an Indonesian volcano, Tambora, for a worldwide cold snap the following year—the so-called year without a summer.

Ernest Hemingway must be reaching for a bottle of grappa in his grave. The snows of Kilimanjaro—inspirations for a Hemingway story of the same name—could be gone by 2022, a new study confirms.

The ice atop Kilimanjaro “continues to diminish right on schedule for disappearing, unfortunately, in the next couple of decades,” said glaciologist Lonnie Thompson at Ohio State University in Columbus.

Hundreds of birds are washing up on the shores of the U.S. Pacific Northwest coated with a foamy sea slime, scientists say.

The slime, which comes from algae blooms in the ocean, saps the waterproofing ability of the birds’ feathers, experts say.