The roofs of Spanish horticulture hothouses are reflecting so much sunlight that local temperatures have dropped in recent decades

Researchers are developing a method for creating an accurate picture of Greenland's shrinking ice cap. On the strength of this method, it is now estimated that Greenland is accountable for a half millimetre-rise in the global sea level per year.

Chalk up another environmental benefit for shade-grown Latin American coffee: university of Michigan researchers say the technique will provide a buffer against the ravages of climate change in the coming decades.

The sudden thinning in 1997 of Jakobshavn Isbræ, one of Greenland's largest glaciers, was caused by subsurface ocean warming, according to research in the journal Nature Geoscience. The research team traces these oceanic shifts back to changes in the atmospheric circulation in the North Atlantic region.

The first ecosystem with only a single biological species has been discovered and its genome analyzed by a multi-institutional and multidisciplinary team. Living 2.8 km beneath the surface of the earth in the Mponeng gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa, the rod-shaped bacterium Desulforudis audaxviator exists in complete isolation, total darkness, a lack of oxygen, and 60-degree-Celsius heat.

New research argues in favor of a "sick earth" mechanism for most extinctions, rather than external event like an asteroid strike.

A report scheduled to be published this week in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the national academy of Sciences suggests that maintaining the proper balance of herbivorous fishes may be critical to restoring coral reefs, which are declining dramatically worldwide.

The northern part of the Greenland ice sheet experienced extreme snowmelt during the summer of 2008, with large portions of the area subject to record melting days. This conclusion is based on an analysis of microwave brightness temperature recorded by the Special Sensor Microwave Imager onboard the F13 satellite.

Californian fires in 2007 pushed levels of the pollutant way past what is considered safe ? the effects may have been felt as far as Nevada