climate change

A woman in a dark coat and pants stands on the deck of a boat, with a view of the ocean in the background.

What ancient sediments at the bottom of the ocean can teach us about climate change

Archives 2025, Global warming, Oceans, Slider Stories, Top Stories / By

By Rachel Duckett, Dec. 20, 2025 Columbia University researchers are using grains of sediment left behind on the ocean floor millions of years ago to track the movement of icebergs through the Southern Ocean’s “Iceberg Alley,” just east of the Drake Passage between the southern tip of South America and Antarctica. As icebergs broke off …

What ancient sediments at the bottom of the ocean can teach us about climate change Read More »

Vince Cooper points to a graph during his poster presentation at the Comer Climate Conference.

From Wall Street to climate modeling: MIT scientist applies market economics and math to predict accelerating climate change

Energy, Featured Coverage, Global warming, Health and Environment, Slider Stories / By

By Emma Conkle and Kimberly ​​Henrickson Dec. 28, 2025 After honing his analytical skills in the finance industry on Wall Street, Vince Cooper now applies his talents to help predict abrupt climate change in a warming world. But that’s not the only superpower he brings to climate science – he credits optimism and resilience for …

From Wall Street to climate modeling: MIT scientist applies market economics and math to predict accelerating climate change Read More »

Climate scientist wearing cap studies rock for clues about past climate change while conducting field research on Wyoming landscape.

Climate scientist Zander Roman reads the rocks

Global warming, Health and Environment, Slider Stories, Top Stories / By

By Kimberly Henrickson Dec. 10, 2025 Climate scientist Alexzander “Zander” Roman knows his rocks.  Roman, a Ph.D. candidate in Earth and climate sciences at the University of Maine, is hunting rocks for clues to construct a timeline of the Little Ice Age. The Little Ice Age is estimated to have lasted from the 1300s through …

Climate scientist Zander Roman reads the rocks Read More »

How drilling into Norwegian boulders reveals the story of climate change

Featured Coverage, Global warming, Health and Environment / By

By Emma Conkle Nov. 28, 2025 To an onlooker, it may have seemed like Tricia Hall Collins and her research partner, Katie Westbrook, were blasting into the surfaces of boulders in a rainy Norwegian field, but what they were actually doing could change the way we understand climate change.  “That our glacier records are showing …

How drilling into Norwegian boulders reveals the story of climate change Read More »

A photo of two students, seated at a desk, engaged in conversation.

Creativity and community: Chicago teens redefine climate activism through art, science, and storytelling

Featured Coverage, Health and Environment, Innovation / By

By Jack Austin, Nov. 18, 2025 At Teens Take On Climate (TTOC), a Chicago-based environmental mentorship organization, youth climate activism doesn’t begin with lectures about melting glaciers — it starts with conversations about identity, creativity, and opportunity, and how young people’s passions connect to the future of the planet. “We make climate personal” is the …

Creativity and community: Chicago teens redefine climate activism through art, science, and storytelling Read More »

Diagram showing how floating robot instruments track metrics in the sea.

Oceanographer Lynne Talley sounds alarm on rising seas

Extreme weather, Global warming, Health and Environment, Oceans, Top Stories / By

By Jack Austin and Kimberly Henrickson, Nov. 12, 2025 As global temperatures climb and seas continue to rise, oceanographer Lynne Talley warns that the accelerating melt of Antarctic ice threatens to erase entire island nations within decades. From her long-term research in the Southern Ocean, Talley has traced how warming waters and shifting circulation patterns …

Oceanographer Lynne Talley sounds alarm on rising seas Read More »

Oceanographer discovers how warming waters thousands of miles away increase melting across West Antarctic ice shelf

Archives 2023, Global warming, Oceans / By

By Ananya Chandhok Medill Reports, Feb. 20, 2024 How ocean currents circulate heat over thousands of miles is critical for University of Washington oceanographer Channing Prend to understand ice melt in Antarctica.  Prend’s research on the West Antarctic ice sheet revealed that heat from water thousands of miles to the north can lead to ice …

Oceanographer discovers how warming waters thousands of miles away increase melting across West Antarctic ice shelf Read More »

University of Innsbruck scientists discover climate change clues in pollen from hundreds of thousands of years ago

Archives 2023, Default, Global warming, Slider Stories, Top Stories / By

By Louise Kim and Jessica Savage   Medill Reports, Dec. 15, 2023     Gina Moseley scales mountains and explores remote lands all in the name of understanding how the climate has been changing across hundreds of thousands of years and how that impacts current accelerating change. “It’s really important to understand what the climate’s doing, what …

University of Innsbruck scientists discover climate change clues in pollen from hundreds of thousands of years ago Read More »

Scientists track the tipping points of climate change

Archives 2022, Default, Oceans / By

Crystal Rao, a geoscience graduate student at Princeton University, bases her research on the environmental changes and climate impacts on the species in clues from nitrogen isotopes in fossils.

Rao uses the ratio of two common forms of nitrogen as a standard, and compares it with the nitrogen inside the tooth of the megalodon shark. She has reconstructed a picture of when and where megalodon sharks topped the food chain in Arctic waters. Rao said this fierce predator could “basically eat anything in the ocean”.

Climate change threatens El Niño crop and rainfall boosts with severe disruptions

Archives 2021, Extreme weather, Oceans / By

Columbia University Ph.D. student Celeste Pallone devotes her research time observing Eastern Equatorial Pacific dwelling planktonic foraminifera – very tiny creatures that can give huge clues into the pace of ocean climate change.

“Marine sediment cores act as an archive of sea surface temperatures, past environments, including past temperatures, and general environmental factors, such as past global ice volume,” she said of the single-celled, shelled organisms she studies at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory high in the Palisades outside New York City. “I examine these proxies, which can be biological or chemical or physical, and then using them I reconstruct oceanographic conditions in the past helping craft record of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation [ENSO].”

Scroll to Top