Four years ago, torrential rains battered the Southern US, mudslides struck in Peru – and the inhabitants of Canada`s west coast saved up to 30% on their winter heating bills. The cause? El Niño, a huge temperature shift in the Pacific Ocean which spawns climate changes globally. Today, using satellite Earth observation data, scientists are detecting the early warning signs of a new El Niño event and predicting that it will develop over the next 3 to 6 months, bringing climate changes to countries th

A study carried out by researchers at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelonashows that protecting natural spaces does not prevent invasion by foreign vegetation species. Montserrat Vilà and Jordi Pujadas, researchers at the CREAF, have published the study, the first to quantify the relationship between species invasions and human activity on a regional scale, in Biological Conservation.

The introduction of foreign species is a global phenomenon which has negative effects on the conservation o

The Scotia Sea, located between the Antarctic and the tip of South America, acts like a ‘blender’ on the very cold ocean waters that influence global ocean circulation patterns and ultimately climate, according to new research from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and published today (28 February) in the international journal Nature.

The research, carried out by Dr Karen Heywood, Dr David Stevens and Dr Alberto Naveira Garabato, shows that the dense, cold waters formed in the Weddell Sea

Europe’s showpiece in climate monitoring is called Envisat. Fully equipped, the largest, most complex, and most powerful Earth observation satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA) is 25 meters high, ten meters wide and weighs over eight tons, scheduled for launch in the night of 28 February /1st March on an Ariane 5 launcher.

Europe’s flying behemoth is on the trail of climate change. It will deliver data about global warming, ozone depletion and climate change for at least five

Satellites see through snow to steer safely across Antarctica.

Satellite images that expose perilous crevasses now reveal safe overland routes to the South Pole. Carolyn Merry of Ohio State University in Columbus has pieced together high-resolution satellite pictures that see through the snow, to map the passable Pole 1 .

Since a snow tractor, floundered into a hidden fissure in 1991, all supplies have been flown into the US South Pole research station. Safe t

Coral reefs older than the Pyramids are being smashed to bits by fishing boats trawling deep water off the UK coast

European countries are constantly pleading with developing nations to protect coral reefs in tropical countries. But it turns out that their own fishing boats are trashing equally important reefs in their own waters.

Jason Hall-Spencer of the University of Glasgow has found pieces of coral at least 4,500 years old in the nets of trawlers operating off Ireland and Sco

Using tiny bone fragments from fossilized fish, scientists have traced the roots of the climate phenomenon known as El Niño, the intermittent warming of ocean waters off the coast of Peru that can affect weather worldwide. According to a report published in the current issue of the journal Science, modern El Niño conditions arose around 5,000 years ago.

Previous research based on fossilized mollusk remains had suggested that El Niño conditions did not exist thousands of years ago, but those

Africa’s malaria resurgence isn’t down to global warming

Climate change cannot explain the growth of malaria in the highlands of East Africa, say researchers. Drawing simplistic links between global warming and local disease patterns could lead to mistaken policy decisions, they warn.

Drug resistance, or the failure of the health-care system to keep pace with population growth, are more likely culprits for malaria’s rise, say Simon Hay, of the University of Oxf

The number of species of large herbivores that can live in a nature reserve can be easily calculated using just rainfall and soil fertility data. The Wageningen ecologist Dr Han Olff can use this to indicate on a worldwide basis where nature reserves that protect large mammals are needed.

On a map of the world, the researcher from Wageningen University has marked the areas in which the greatest diversity of large game can live. For species-rich nature reserves in East Africa and on the Argen

There are always oil spots near the petrol stations. Rainwater washes them away, polluting the environment. Researchers from Perm have developed a refining unit for cleaning rainwater sewage from petrol stations. It was successfully tested in Moscow and Perm.

The unit base is a new filter – “Kombi” – made of fibrous carbon sorbent, which is produced by coagulation of chemical cellulose fibres in a special way. The filtering process consists of three stages – settling, refinement through the

Bleak forecast for sea level in 2100.

Sea level could rise by up to 30 centimetres over the next century, a new estimate predicts. That’s almost twice as much as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected last year.

“My grandchildren will almost certainly be affected,” says Mark Meier of the University of Colorado, Boulder, who made the revised estimate. Such a rise could push shorelines back by 30 metres, he said, flooding coasts and submerging islands.

Conservation-oriented parks and reserves are fairly common on land, but comparatively few marine regions receive protection from human activities. This situation has, for the most part, elicited little concern, owing to the widely held belief that the large geographic ranges of most marine species would ensure their survival. But new research on restricted-range marine life—that is, species limited to small areas—challenges that idea, identifying 10 regions where further damage to coral reefs could l

Atmospheric carbon dioxide is lower at the weekend.

The climate-monitoring station on Mauna Loa volcano on Hawaii, 3,400 metres above sea level, could hardly be farther away from it all. Yet even here there is no escaping the weekly rhythm of modern life. The observatory records lower concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the weekend than during the week.

Because there is no known natural cause of such a seven-day cycle, Randall Cerveny of Arizona State Univer

The world`s oldest fossilised vomit, believed to have come from a large marine reptile that lived 160 million years ago, has been discovered in a clay quarry in Peterborough by the University of Greenwich`s Professor Peter Doyle and Dr Jason Wood of the Open University.

The vomit contains the remains of dozens of belemnites – squid-like shellfish that lived in abundance in the seas around what is now Britain. The belemnites were eaten in great numbers by ichthyosaurs, large marine reptiles (

These days our supermarket shelves are filled with more and more so-called “functional foods” foods with special health-promoting properties. These products often represent a “high-tech” product line, in the twilight zone between food and medicine. Agricultural researcher Cecilia Mark-Herbert from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, SLU, has now studied the market for these products. Her doctoral dissertation shows that developing these foods requires not only new products, but also new

For several days last week, the protective ozone layer over Europe thinned considerably. Scientists monitoring ozone coverage using a rapid mapping technique based on data from the GOME (Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment) instrument aboard ESA`s ERS-2 satellite detected finger-like ozone thinning over Europe.

“From 28-30 January, we observed a pronounced `streamer event`,” explains DLR`s Thilo Erbertseder, “where streamers of tropical air pushing up from the equatorial regions spread over s