Antarctica is headed for a climate tipping point by 2060, with catastrophic melting if carbon emissions aren’t cut quickly

Julie Brigham-Grette, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Andrea Dutton, University of Wisconsin-Madison

While U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken draws attention to climate change in the Arctic at meetings with other national officials this week in Iceland, an even greater threat looms on the other side of the planet.

Water wells are at risk of going dry in the US and worldwide

Debra Perrone, University of California Santa Barbara and Scott Jasechko, University of California Santa Barbara

As the drought outlook for the Western U.S. becomes increasingly bleak, attention is turning once again to groundwater – literally, water stored in the ground. It is Earth’s most widespread and reliable source of fresh water, but it’s not limitless.

Warming is clearly visible in new US ‘climate normal’ datasets

Russ Schumacher, Colorado State University and Becky Bolinger, Colorado State University

Anyone who listens to weather reports has heard meteorologists comment that yesterday’s temperature was 3 degrees above normal, or last month was much drier than normal. But what does “normal” mean in this context – and in a world in which the climate is changing?

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released updated “climate normals” – datasets that the agency produces every 10 years to give forecasters and the public baseline measurements of average temperature, rainfall and other conditions across the U.S. As the state climatologist and assistant state climatologist for Colorado, we work with this information all the time. Here’s what climate normals are, how they’ve changed, and how you can best make sense of them.

As extreme fires transform Alaska’s boreal forest, more aspen are coming in – that has an impact on future fires and the climate

Jill Johnstone, University of Saskatchewan; Heather Dawn Alexander, Auburn University; Michelle C. Mack, Northern Arizona University, and Xanthe Walker, Northern Arizona University

Fire is a hot topic these days, particularly when it comes to the boreal forest, the vast expanse of trees that stretches across Alaska, Canada and other cold northern regions. Large fires have been burning more frequently and severely in these remote landscapes, driven by longer seasons of hot, dry weather and more lightning strikes as the climate warms.