Climate history

A Microsoft logo is displayed at the MWC (Mobile World Congress) in Barcelona on March 2, 2022.Photo: JOSEP LAGO/AFP (Getty Images)Microsoft president and vice chair Brad Smith wants thousands of companies to shift from pledging to help solve climate challenges to actually making good on those promises. These companies can’t rise to meet the challenge unless their workers are trained in sustainability, he wrote in a company statement this week.“Employers must move quickly to upskill their workforce through learning…

A dinosaur skeleton at auction.Photo: ANGELA WEISS / AFP (Getty Images)A team modeling the aftermath of the asteroid impact that doomed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago say that the collision also created a global tsunami that devastated coastlines from North America to New Zealand.The researchers studied ancient sediments from over 100 sites around the world, to see how extreme waves resulting from the impact may have disrupted the geological record. Their workwas presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical…

Pakistan’s 2022 monsoon season has been devastating, with 1,545 people dead, including 552 children, according to the latest update from the country’s National Disaster Management Authority. Tens of millions more have been displaced by the resulting floods, which at one point covered more than a third of the country.It’s a disaster of immense scale. And though Pakistan has faced destructive, widespread rains and floods before, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has called the ongoing inundation “the worst in the history of…

Icebergs which calved from the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier float in the Ilulissat Icefjord, September 2021 in Greenland. Photo: Mario Tama (Getty Images)Rapid sea level rise, mass die-offs in coral reefs, and quickly melting glaciers are closer to occurring than we think. The planet needs to stay within 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming if we want to avoid triggering some of these events, but anew study published in Science on Thursday finds that we’re already in the danger zone for several irreversible changes to some climate…

A Gorgosaurus (a Late Cretaceous theropod) skeleton at auction.Photo: ANGELA WEISS/AFP (Getty Images)Researchers say they’ve discovered a large impact crater on the Atlantic seafloor that appears to be 66 million years old. That means whatever made this crater hit Earth around the same time as the rock that famously slammed into the Yucatán Peninsula, ending the reign of the dinosaurs.The newly discovered geological feature—off the coast of Guinea and Guinea-Bissau in West Africa—is called the Nadir crater; it is well…