Earth & Space
Life after death? Fossil survival strategy rediscovered in living corals
Water warming is killing corals, but not only in tropical seas as most people know. In temperate seas like the Mediterranean summer heatwaves are causing mass mortalities in many marine organisms, corals included. The Mediterranean Sea hosts a single reef-builder coral: Cladocora caespitosa. In the past,... click to read more
Climatic Changes for Earths in Sun-like Stellar Binaries
The mild oscillation of Earth's axial tilt, or obliquity, over time is less than a few degrees and is one of the reasons that complex lifeforms prospered on our planet. Will this be true if the giant planets are replaced by a Sun-like star? Alpha... click to read more
Groundwater pumping poses worldwide threat to riverine ecosystems
We pump too much water out of the ground, impacting our rivers worldwide. In our study, we estimate that almost 20% of the catchments where groundwater is pumped for drinking water or to grow food suffer from low flows that are too low to sustain... click to read more
Of pig-tails and palm oil: How rat-eating macaques increase oil palm sustainability
African oil palm is the world's most efficient oil crop yielding 5-10 times more oil per hectare than other oil crops. However, the establishment of large monocultures has driven deforestation and habitat loss for local wildlife in producer countries. Malaysia supplies ca. 30% for the... click to read more
Pliocene sea level snapshots
How much are the seas ultimately going to rise is a question scientists are still struggling to answer. To understand the polar ice sheets' sensitivity to current global warming, we draw on evidence from periods in the geologic record when Earth's climate was warmer than... click to read more
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