Bernhard Staehli/Shutterstock
Water is very heavy – and it can move. Until now, changes to water on land have actually offset much of the rising sea level from ice melt. How? Gravity
Thomas Traasdahl/EPA/AAP
We don’t yet fully understand what global climate tipping points mean for Australia. But we know enough to conclude the impacts of passing one or more tipping points must now be considered.
Rock carving of an elephant at the Tassili N'Ajjer National Park, Tadrart Rouge, in Algeria.
Eric Lafforgue/Getty Images
The Sahara Desert is green and vegetated every 21,000 years. A climate model shows why.
Ice on the Antarctic peninsula flowing along a channel into an ice shelf in the ocean.
Hilmar Gudmundsson
Pine Island Glacier passed a tipping point decades ago, and it could do again in the future.
YanaBu, Shutterstock
Back when there were Arctic alligators and turtles, ‘polar stratospheric clouds’ kept their world warm. Research suggests these clouds contribute to the ‘missing warming’ in climate models.
Water and sediment pour off the melting margin of the Greenland ice sheet.
Jason Edwards/Photodisc via Getty Images
The soil was extracted during the Cold War from beneath one of the U.S military’s most unusual bases, then forgotten for decades.
Richard Bates and Alun Hubbard kayak a meltwater stream on Greenland’s Petermann Glacier, towing an ice radar that reveals it’s riddled with fractures.
Nick Cobbing.
Glaciologists are discovering new ways surface meltwater alters the internal structure of ice sheets, and raising an alarm that sea level rise could be much more abrupt than current models forecast.
Icebergs in Disko Bay, western Greenland.
Chris Christophersen/Shutterstock
Icebergs don’t just pose a risk to ships – they have a profound impact on the natural world and human societies.
A glacier in Paradise Bay, Antarctica.
jet 67/Shutterstock
Seafloor landforms reveal that ice sheets can collapse at 600 metres per day.
Nasa’s new ‘Blue Marble’ photograph, taken on December 8 2022.
DSCOVR/NASA
A new image has been taken of the whole Earth 50 years after the first - revealing noticeable changes to its surface.
Transantarctic Mountains peaks are some of the only parts of the continent not buried beneath ice.
Matt Makes Photos / shutterstock
Scientists used satellites to map tens of thousands of glacial landforms in Antarctica’s highest mountains.
A turbulent melt-river pours a million tons of water a day into a moulin, where it flows down through the ice to ultimately reach the ocean.
Ted Giffords
A field glaciologist explains the changes scientists are now seeing.
titoOnz / shutterstock
But new research offers some hope if we are able to keep climate change under control.
During ice ages, ice sheets like the one in Greenland have covered much of Earth’s surface.
Thor Wegner/DeFodi Images via Getty Images
The Earth has had at least five major ice ages, and humans showed up in time for the most recent one. In fact, we’re still in it.
Co-author Chloe Gustafson and mountaineer Meghan Seifert install measuring equipment on an ice stream.
Kerry Key/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Liquid water below the ice determines how fast an ice stream flows. As the ice sheet gets thinner, more of that salty groundwater could rise.
Layered ice sheets can be vulnerable to fracturing.
Eli Duke/Flickr
Melting lakes on ice shelves can widen cracks within them - new research shows how these lakes change across the world’s largest sheet.
Tidal flooding is creeping farther into coastal towns like Alexandria, Virginia.
Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images
A sea level scientist explains the two main ways climate change is threatening the coasts.
Shutterstock
Climate change doesn’t just affect the atmosphere and the oceans, it affects the Earth’s crust as well.
Community members from Utqiagvik, Alaska, look to open water from the edge of shorefast sea ice.
Matthew Druckenmiller
Sea ice is thinning at an alarming rate. Snow is shifting to rain. And humans worldwide are increasingly feeling the impact of what happens in the seemingly distant Arctic.
People walked down a flood sidewalk in Annapolis, Maryland, on Oct. 29, 2021.
AP Photo/Susan Walsh
Climate change is making ocean levels rise in two ways. It’s a problem that will endure even after the world stabilizes and slashes greenhouse gas pollution.