The West Antarctic Ice Sheet — one of the world’s major ice sheets, could collapse if global warming continues, scientists have warned after analysing the genetic evidence from an Antarctic octopus.

An international team, led by Dr Jan Strugnell from La Trobe University, has analysed genes of the Turquet’s octopus, which lives in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica, the Molecular Ecology journal reported.

University of California, Berkeley, scientists are drilling into ancient sediments at the bottom of Northern California's Clear Lake for clues that could help them better predict how today's plants and animals will adapt to climate change and increasing population.

The lake sediments are among the world's oldest, containing records of biological change stretching back as far as 500,000 years.

Plants are leafing out and flowering sooner each year than predicted by results from controlled environmental warming experiments, according to data from a major new archive of historical observations assembled with the help of a NASA researcher.

Norway on Monday launched the world's largest facility of its kind to develop carbon capture and storage (CCS), the so-far commercially unproven technology that would allow greenhouse gases from power plants to be buried safely underground.

Sauropod dinosaurs could in principle have produced enough of the greenhouse gas methane to warm the climate many millions of years ago, at a time when Earth was warm and wet. That's according to calculations reported in the May 8th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

A modeling study from the European Alps suggests that population declines to be observed during the upcoming decades will probably underestimate the long-term effects of recent climate warming on mountain plants. A European team of ecologists around Stefan Dullinger from the Department of Conservation Biology, Vegetation and Landscape Ecology of the University of Vienna presents a new modeling tool to predict migration of mountain plants which explicitly takes population dynamic processes into account. Their results are published in "Nature Climate Change".

A British scientist argues that global warming could lead to a future of more intense volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. And while some dismiss his views as preposterous, he points to a body of recent research that shows a troubling link between climate change and the Earth’s most destructive geological events.

Britain's government should force large companies to provide annual information on their carbon emissions in addition to reporting profits and executive pay, an alliance of businesses and environmental groups said, backed by public opinion.

NEWCOMB, N.Y. — Wolf Lake in the Adirondack High Peaks region is considered a "heritage lake," one of the most pristine freshwater bodies in the northeastern United States.

It remains as it was when European settlers arrived in North America. As part of a private preserve bordering the state-owned 300-square-mile High Peaks Wilderness Area, it has escaped pollution and the ravages of invasive plants and animals. It's one of a dwindling number of lakes with heritage brook trout and calcium-rich soils buffering its water from fish-killing acid rain.

Sea-level rises are unlikely to be as high as worst-case scenarios have forecasted, suggests new research which shows that Greenland's glaciers are slipping into the sea more slowly than was previously thought. But the scientists warned that ice loss still sped up by 30% and is driving rises in sea levels that endanger low-lying coasts around the world.