Climate Change

The temporary breakdown of Earth's magnetic field 42,000 years ago sparked major climate shifts that led to global environmental change and mass extinctions, a new international study co-led by UNSW Sydney and the South Australian Museum shows.

The temperature of a planet is linked with the diversity of life that it can support. MIT geologists have now reconstructed a timeline of the Earth's temperature during the early Paleozoic era, between 510 and 440 million years ago -- a pivotal period when animals became abundant in a previously microbe-dominated world.

Large parts of today's Sahara Desert were green thousands of years ago. Prehistoric engravings of giraffes and crocodiles testify to this, as does a stone-age cave painting in the desert that even shows swimming humans.

The absence of monsoon rains at the source of the Nile was the cause of migrations and the demise of entire settlements in the late Roman province of Egypt.

The transition from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age was apparently accompanied by severe droughts between 1302 and 1307 in Europe; this preceded the wet and cold phase of the 1310s and the resulting great famine of 1315-21.

Around 120 million years ago, the earth experienced an extreme environmental disruption that choked oxygen from its oceans.

A new study challenges the long-held view that the destruction of Central Asia's medieval river civilizations was a direct result of the Mongol invasion in the early 13th century AD.

Despite decades of investigation, Tibet's ancient topography and its role in climatic and biotic evolution remain speculative due to a paucity of quantitative surface height measurements through time and space, and sparse fossil records.

Water and air are highly mutable resources that exist in a myriad of physical states and dimensions, and due to their affectivity, these entities participate in a multitude of interactions capable of sustaining life, transforming environments, and shaping human behavior.

Doggerland, dubbed “Britain’s Atlantis” is a submerged landmass beneath what is now the North Sea, that once connected Britain to continental Europe.

The transition from tribal to feudal living, which occurred throughout the 14th century in Lagow, Poland had a significant impact on the local ecosystem, according to a study published in Scientific Reports.

Earth's history knows catastrophes which are unimaginable for humans. For example, around 66 million years ago an asteroid impact marked the end of the dinosaur era.

Researchers have found that the loss of these grasslands was instrumental in the extinction of many of the region's megafauna, and probably of ancient humans too.

Repeated catastrophic ice discharges from western North America into the North Pacific contributed to, and perhaps triggered, hemispheric-scale changes in the Earth's climate during the last ice age, new research published online today in Science reveals.

Researchers have shown that over the past two thousand years, volcanoes have played a larger role in natural temperature variability than previously thought, and their climatic effects may have contributed to past societal and economic change.