ScienceDaily: Fossils & Ruins News

The Greenland Ice Sheet is the second largest ice body in the world, and it has the potential to contribute significantly to global sea-level rise in a warming global climate. Understanding the long-term record of the Greenland Ice Sheet, including both records of glacial advance and retreat, is critical in validating approaches that model future ice-sheet scenarios. However, this reconstruction can be extremely challenging. A new study has reconstructed the advance of one of the largest tidewater glaciers in Greenland to provide a better understanding of long-term glacial dynamics.

Tropical peatlands are one of the most efficient carbon sinks. The flipside is that they can become massive emitters of carbon if they are damaged, for instance by land use change, degradation or fire. This can lead to faster climate warming. Researchers now show how peatland in the coastal areas in Sumatra and Borneo in Indonesia developed over thousands of years and how climate and sea level influenced their dynamics throughout.

Biologists have developed a new method to measure the extent to which regional geographic features -- including barriers between regions, like mountains or water -- affect local rates of speciation, extinction and dispersal for species. Distances over water have a much greater effect on limiting movement than distances over land, the scientists discovered. They tested their model with neotropical anole lizards and found that distances over water have three times the effect of equivalent distances over land.