More Icebergs Scouring Antarctic Seabed
July 18 — Shrinking sea ice is significantly increasing the rate at which icebergs scour the Antarctic seabed, new research suggests, crushing animals and plants living up to 1,640 feet beneath the surface. (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Sea Die-Out Blamed on Volcanoes
July 16 — Undersea volcanic activity has been blamed for a mass extinction in the seas 93 million years ago, when the ocean depths became starved of oxygen, wiping out swathes of marine organisms. (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Middle Earth Mountains: Steep and Strong
July 16 — It's the composition of the rocks that makes New Zealand's mountains some of the steepest on Earth, without being particularly prone to landslides, according to a new survey of the mountain ranges. (Discovery News)

Calif. Firefighters Get Backup From NASA Drone
July 15 — Fire crews battling nearly 300 blazes burning across California are getting help from a pilotless plane that transmits real-time images of hot spots and flare-ups to commanders in the field. (Discovery News)

U.S. Floods to Create Record Dead Zone
July 15 — Researchers say that the floods which devastated the Midwest in June could play a part in boosting a "dead zone" which annually emerges in the Gulf of Mexico. (New Scientist)

New Maps to Help Tap Ocean Winds
July 14 — The power of winds roaring over Earth's oceans has now been mapped, thanks to eight years of global wind data from NASA's QuikSCAT satellite. (Discovery News)

Tainted African Dust Clouds Harm U.S., Caribbean Reefs
July 14 — Scientists say tons of dust from Africa's arid Sahara and Sahel regions could be polluting oceans in the Caribbean and southeastern U.S. with contaminants like metals, pesticides and microorganisms – potentially disastrous news for coral reefs and other marine animals already stressed by warming waters. (National Geographic News)

Little Yellow Sub Studies Ocean
July 12 — The unmanned sub is nearing the halfway mark in its effort to travel from New Jersey to Spain, collecting scientific data along the way in an effort to show that an undersea glider can take its place in a global ocean-observing system. (Associated Press)

Antarctic Ice Shelf Hanging On by a Thread
July 11 — New satellite photos show the Wilkins Ice Shelf is even closer to breaking from the peninsula, and experts say the effects of warming there now look irreversible. (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Russian Ice Camp in Rapid Shrink
July 11 — Twenty Russian scientists are to be evacuated from their camp on a drifting ice floe in the Arctic after it started disintegrating sooner than expected. (BBC News)

La Niña Fizzling Out, Could Reduce Hurricane Risk
July 10 — The climate phenomena known as La Niña is ending and neutral conditions are expected into the fall, government forecasters said, and the transition could be beneficial along the East and Gulf coasts with hurricane season under way, given that the chances for the continental U.S. and the Caribbean Islands to experience a hurricane are higher during La Niña. (ABC News)

South Australia Drought Worsens
July 10 — A long-running drought in Australia's main food-growing region, the Murray-Darling river basin, has worsened, a new report says, following three months of dry weather and the driest June on record. (BBC News)

At Antarctic Peninsula, Fast Change
July 10 — Three researchers who have spent decades studying Antarctica's inhabitants paint a picture of interconnected changes at the bottom of the Earth that are changing the ecology over just decades after some 30 million years of relative isolation. (Discovery News)

Ancient Indian Basin Beat the Cold
July 10 — Scientists in the U.S. and India appear to have kicked back the age of a prominent feature in India – the Vindhyan Basin – by half a billion years, and in the process, may have removed one of the stumbling blocks to the so-called "snowball Earth" theory. (The Christian Science Monitor)

Rare Argentina Winter Ice Break
July 10 — A recently formed tunnel in Argentina's Perito Moreno glacier collapsed on July 9 – the first time in decades such an event has occurred during the Southern Hemisphere's winter. (National Geographic News)

Cleaner Skies Explain Surprise Rate of Warming
July 9 — Cleaning up the skies has allowed more of the sun's rays to pierce the atmosphere, contributing to at least half the warming that has occurred, according to research that compared aerosol concentrations with solar-radiation measurements collected since 1986. (New Scientist)

Extreme Rain Grows Mountains
July 8 — The more it rains on some mountains the faster they grow, say geologists studying the fault-riddled, intensely rainy Eastern Cordillera of Colombia, South America. (Discovery News)

Grasslands Hold Up to Climate Change
July 8 — One of the longest-running experiments to predict the effects of climate change on plants offers some good news: After more than 13 seasons of applying typical global warming influences, a grassland ecosystem showed very little change. (Discovery News)

Hurricane Bertha's Burst of Strength Stumps Experts
July 8 — As powerful Hurricane Bertha churns far out in the Atlantic Ocean, meteorologists are wondering why the storm suddenly gathered strength and escalated from a minimal hurricane to a major one in only a few hours. (National Geographic News)

Glaciers on California's Mt. Shasta Keep Growing
July 8 — With global warming causing the retreat of glaciers in the Sierra Nevada, the Rocky Mountains and elsewhere in the Cascades, glaciers on Mt. Shasta are actually benefiting from changing weather patterns over the Pacific Ocean. (Associated Press)

Life in the Balance: Coral Reefs are Declining
July 7 — Coral reefs – a key element in ocean ecosystems that provide not only coastline protection but billions of dollars in benefits from tourism, as well as ingredients used in cutting-edge medicines – are increasingly threatened from the effects of global warming and other hazards, according to a new U.S. government report. (ABC News)

Greenland Meltwater Will Take Slow Wave Around Globe
July 7 — Europe and North America could be at much greater risk of floods than previously appreciated, according to the first systematic analysis of what will happen to the water from melting Greenland ice. (New Scientist)

Greenland Ice Sheet Slams the Brakes On
July 5 — Since 1991, the western edge of Greenland's ice sheet has actually slowed its ocean-bound progress by 10 percent, according to researchers, who have studied the longest available record of ice and water flow in the region. (ABC News)

Glacier Bay Park's Gravity Shifts as Ice Melts
July 3 — The ice sheet in Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska has receded so much that the Earth's crust is rebounding, and Alaskans who live in the area have grown used to their properties expanding as a result. (National Public Radio)

Scientists Say Ailing Penguins Signal Sea Problems
July 1 — Penguins may be the tuxedo-clad version of a canary in a coal mine, with populations ailing in general from a combination of global warming, ocean oil pollution, depleted fisheries, and tourism and development, according to a new scientific review paper. (ABC News)

Ancient Ice Sheets Fell like Dominoes
July 1 — New research suggests that tens of thousands of years ago, ice synchronously crumbled off ice sheets thousands of miles apart, connected by a long-distance domino effect – a discovery that may be useful in understanding the behavior of ice today. (Discovery News)

Springy Sediments May Amplify Tsunamis
July 1 — The devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 may have been made worse by springy sediment on the seabed, which can amplify the movement of bedrock, generating a larger wave than would otherwise occur. (New Scientist)

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