Hannah Bird

Droughts are a serious consequence of climate change, devastating ecosystems, along with the organisms and communities who inhabit them. Understanding the impact of this upon agricultural productivity is vital to ensure sustainable ...

Earth's climate changed dramatically during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene 130,000 to 7,000 years ago, when cold glacial cycles transitioned into the current warmer interglacial. Such a climatic evolution had considerable ...

Mars has northern and southern hemispheres like Earth, but their defining characteristics are markedly different, a phenomenon known as Martian dichotomy. The Southern Highlands are older, higher in elevation and more cratered ...

Mars's atmosphere and climate are impacted by interactions with solar wind, a stream of plasma comprised of protons and electrons that flows from the sun's outermost atmosphere (corona), traveling at speeds of 400–1,000 kilometers ...

The Little Ice Age was a period of significant cooling from the early 14th to mid-19th centuries, which saw mean temperatures across the northern hemisphere drop by up to 2°C and the advancement of glaciers.

Melting ice sheets are often considered synonymous with climate change in the media, with evocative images of lone polar bears floating on ever-shrinking rafts of ice. While impacts such as sea level rise and salinity changes ...

Patagonia's fjords are home to spectacular biodiversity, with many endemic and endangered aquatic species. They are also an environment suitable for thriving fisheries that support food security and local economies, being ...

Sea level rise is an ever-pressing concern as climate change melts ice sheets. Coastal flooding is an unfortunate consequence, which can have a devastating impact on the local environment, including an unexpected toll on ...

Interglacials are, as the name suggests, warm periods between planetary glaciations when the expanse of ice on Earth shrinks. Currently, we are in an 11,000 year-long interglacial period known as the Holocene. Prior to this, ...

Chondritic meteorites (chondrites) are some of the oldest rocks in our solar system, forming 4.5 billion years ago. Therefore, their primitive composition means that they offer a window into the origins of planet formation, ...

Snowball Earth defines periods of our planet's history when ice spanned the globe, even reaching the equator. The planetary-scale freeze is thought to have been driven by ice sheet expansion triggering a climatic tipping ...

China's dynastic history spans 13 periods of rule from 2070 BC until the last emperor abdicated in 1912. While factors leading to the transitions between dynasties are a complex mixture of environmental, social and economic ...

Rice is a food staple for billions of people worldwide, with demand doubling over the past 50 years, and is predominantly grown in Asia before being exported globally. This crop is sensitive to weather conditions and, as ...

Asteroids are remnants of the formation of our solar system, and while many can be found within the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, some cannot. One such object is asteroid (162173) Ryugu, a 1 km-wide ...

Earth's continents are slowly moving across the planet's surface due to plate tectonics, culminating in regions of crustal expansion and collision. In the latter case, high temperatures and pressures lead to the reworking ...