The Irminger Sea off southeastern Greenland is where warm waters that transport heat northwards from the Southern Hemisphere sink and then return south along the bottom of the ocean. As such, this region plays a critical role in powering the ocean conveyor belt known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

"The key finding of this study is that the Irminger Basin (eastern Greenland) plays a crucial role in driving changes in the AMOC, a conclusion supported by recent observations," study lead author Qiyun Ma, a postdoctoral researcher at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, told Live Science in an email. The work highlights the urgent need for better monitoring in this particular location, he said.

The AMOC, which includes the Gulf Stream, maintains a temperate climate in the Northern Hemisphere and regulates weather patterns across the globe. But due to climate change, the AMOC may not keep temperatures stable for much longer.

Research shows that Arctic meltwater gushing into the North Atlantic is reducing the density of surface waters and preventing them from sinking to form bottom currents, thus slowing the machine that powers the AMOC.

And it turns out the Irminger Sea is particularly important for keeping these bottom currents flowing.

Related: Earth is racing toward climate conditions that collapsed key Atlantic currents before the last ice age, study finds

"Freshwater release in this region not only directly inhibits deep-water formation — essential for maintaining the strength of the AMOC — but also alters atmospheric circulation patterns," Ma said. A reduction in the amount of water sinking in the Irminger Sea likely has greater impacts on the global climate than reductions of the same kind in other northern seas, Ma said.

The Irminger Sea has a disproportionate influence on the strength of the AMOC because it regulates the amount of water sinking to form deep currents in nearby seas through atmospheric processes, Ma said. Freshwater input into the Irminger Sea enhances freshwater flow into the Labrador Sea between southwestern Greenland and the coast of Canada, for example, so a reduction in deep-current formation in the Irminger Sea has knock-on effects for deep-current formation across the entire North Atlantic.

Ma and his colleagues examined the impact of meltwater on the AMOC using a climate model that simulated an increase in freshwater input in four regions — the Irminger Sea, the Labrador Sea, the Nordic Seas and the Northeast Atlantic. The researchers were able to tease out the sensitivity of the AMOC to meltwater in each region, then identified specific changes in the global climate linked to each scenario. The team published its findings Wednesday (Nov. 20) in the journal Science Advances.

The role of the Irminger Sea for the AMOC outweighed that of the three other regions in the model and triggered stronger climate responses. Reduced deep-water formation led to widespread cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, as well as Arctic sea ice expansion, because warm water wasn't being brought up from the south.

The simulation also showed slight warming in the Southern Hemisphere and bolstered previous findings that a weaker AMOC would throw tropical monsoon systems into chaos.

The model confirmed findings from previous research, but it also held surprises, Ma said. Hidden within hemisphere-scale climate shifts, the researchers discovered climate extremes at much more localized scales. These included seasonal extremes in precipitation across North America and the Amazon Basin that varied depending on which region of the North Atlantic meltwater was added into.

"While the general climate impacts … were broadly anticipated, the behavior of climate extremes was not," Ma said. Incorporating these extremes into climate models and recognizing that the location of meltwater input matters could help scientists better predict the impacts of a weakened AMOC, he said.

Forecasting AMOC behavior is becoming increasingly urgent as scientists warn we are nearing a tipping point. "These insights are critical for informing policy makers and climate experts in developing targeted strategies to mitigate and adapt to climate impacts," Ma said.

Claudia Steffensen was walking behind her husband in the Valtellina Orobie Mountains Park in Lombardy in 2023 when she stepped on a rock that looked like a slab of cement, The Guardian reported. "I then noticed these strange circular designs with wavy lines," Steffensen told the newspaper. "I took a closer look and realized they were footprints."

Scientists analyzed the rock and found that the footprints belong to a prehistoric reptile, raising questions about what other clues beyond Steffensen's "rock zero" were hiding in these Alpine heights.

Experts subsequently visited the site multiple times and found evidence of an entire ecosystem dating back to the Permian period (299 million to 252 million years ago). The Permian was characterized by a fast-warming climate and culminated in an extinction event known as the "Great Dying," which wiped out 90% of Earth's species.

Traces of this ecosystem consist of fossilized footprints from reptiles, amphibians, insects and arthropods that often align to form "tracks," according to a translated statement. Alongside these tracks, researchers found ancient traces of seeds, leaves and stems, as well as imprints of raindrops and waves that lapped at the shores of a prehistoric lake. Evidence of this ancient ecosystem was found up to 9,850 feet (3,000 meters) high in the mountains and down in the bottom of valleys, where landslides have deposited fossil-bearing rocks over the eons.

Related: Fossils from Greenland's icy heart reveal it was a green tundra covered in flowers less than 1 million years ago

The ecosystem, which is captured in fine-grained sandstone, owes its amazing preservation to its past proximity to water. "The footprints were made when these sandstones and shales were still sand and mud soaked in water at margins of rivers and lakes, which periodically, according to the seasons, dried up," Ausonio Ronchi, a paleontologist at the University of Pavia in Italy who examined the fossils, said in the statement. "The summer sun, drying out those surfaces, hardened them to the point that the return of new water did not erase the footprints but, on the contrary, covered them with new clay, forming a protective layer."

The fine grain of this sand and mud preserved the finest details, including claw marks and patterns from the underbellies of animals, according to the statement. The researchers said the imprints come from at least five different animal species, some of which may have reached the size of modern-day Komodo dragons (Varanus komodoensis), growing to between 6.5 and 10 feet (2 to 3 m) long.

"At that time, dinosaurs did not yet exist, but the animals responsible for the largest footprints found here must still have been of a considerable size," Cristiano Dal Sasso, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Milan who was the first expert contacted about the discovery, said in the statement.

The fossils offer a window into a fascinating, long-gone world whose inhabitants went extinct at the end of the Permian — but they can also teach us about the times we live in now, the researchers said in the statement.

Many of the prehistoric imprints uncovered would have remained hidden were it not for climate change, which is rapidly reducing the ice and snow cover in the Alps. "These fossils … testify to a distant geological period, but with a global warming trend completely similar to that of today," the researchers said. "The past has a lot to teach us about what we risk getting the world into now."

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-West satellite captured the images of the oncoming weather system on Tuesday (Nov. 19) morning.

The storm is set to lash northern California, Oregon and Washington with powerful winds, flash floods and heavy rain and snowfall as it rapidly intensifies through a process known as "bombogenesis."

The cyclone's rate of intensification means it could be "one of the strongest low-pressure systems on record in the region," Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote on the social platform X. "This very strong low will generate hurricane-force sustained winds well offshore,” generating waves up to 60 feet (18 meters) in height, he added.

Related: Hurricane Milton is tied for the fastest-forming Category 5 hurricane on record. It could become the new normal.

Bomb cyclones form when warm and cold air masses collide head-on, causing pressures to drop and storms to rapidly intensify. These low-pressure zones also pull tropical moisture northward via atmospheric rivers, leading to intense rainfall.

It's unclear what role climate change plays in the intensification of storms such as this one, but scientists said that warming oceans are increasing the moisture drawn up into the atmosphere and giving weather systems increased boosts of energy.

"There's more moisture in the atmosphere, so there's more moisture that falls out of it," Chris Brierley, a professor of climate science at University College London, told Newsweek. "The [increased] severity is something we have projected for quite a while, and is something that we're seeing across the board with storms — that when it rains, it rains more, just purely from a thermodynamic response of a warmer atmosphere and a higher saturation of vapor pressure."

This striking satellite image shows the snow-capped peak of a "sacred" volcano in New Zealand, poking through an eerily circular forest containing thousands of warped, goblin-like trees.

Mount Taranaki, which was originally named Mount Egmont by British explorer James Cook in the 18th century, is an active stratovolcano located on the west coast of New Zealand's North Island. It stands at around 8,261 feet (2,518 meters) above sea level, making it the country's second-tallest peak behind Mount Ruapehu — a 9,177-foot-tall (2,797 m) volcano that acted as the movie double for Mount Doom in the "Lord of the Rings" movies.

The near-perfect ring of dark green surrounding Mount Taranaki's slopes is Egmont National Park, which is around 12 miles (19 kilometers) across at its widest point. The park's forest is largely made up of two species of large evergreen trees, rimu (Dacrydium cupressinum) and kāmahi (Pterophylla racemosa), according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

A section of kāmahi trees near the volcano's summit is known as the "Goblin Forest" because the trees there are extremely twisted and deformed as a result of having to grow over and around the fossilized remains of trees that were destroyed in past eruptions. These trees are also covered in hanging mosses and liverworts, which adds to their creepy appearance.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

In 2017, the New Zealand government granted Mount Taranaki the "same legal rights as a person" due to its sacred status among local Māori tribes, who consider the volcano to be an ancestor and a family member, The Guardian reported at the time.

"The status is an acknowledgment of the Indigenous Māori people's relationship to the mountain and means that harming the mountain has the same legal implications as harming the tribe," Earth Observatory representatives wrote.

Mount Taranaki is renowned for having a near-perfect cone shape, aside from the smaller remains of two extinct volcanoes located on its northeast flank (which are visible in the satellite photo). As a result, the volcano was used as a double for the equally symmetrical Mount Fuji in Japan during the filming of the 2003 film "The Last Samurai," according to NewZealand.com.

However, despite its uniform appearance, the volcano's shape has changed often and dramatically over time. A 2021 study estimated that Mount Taranaki's edifice — the part of the volcano that forms above ground — has undergone at least 16 significant deformations from past eruptions since it first formed around 135,000 years ago.

Mount Taranaki experienced its last major eruption around 200 years ago but is still considered active and sporadically spits out volcanic mudflows, or lahars. Researchers currently predict that there is a 30% to 50% chance of another major eruption in the next 50 years, which could potentially impact more than 100,000 people who live near the volcano, according to the Taranaki Emergency Management Office.

According to WeatherNation, the storm system is forecasted to go through a rapid pressure drop from over 1,000 millibars of pressure on Monday (Nov. 18) night to less than 950 mb on Tuesday night.

A drop of more than 24 mb in 24 hours at these latitudes is known as "bombogenesis," transforming a storm into a so-called bomb cyclone, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Bomb cyclones happen when warm and cold air masses collide. They undergo rapid intensification as their pressure drops. The low-pressure zone is expected to bring an atmospheric river to Northern California and southern Oregon, pulling moisture from the tropics northward.

The heaviest impacts, classified by the University of California, San Diego as "extreme," will be between the San Francisco Bay area and Eureka, California, according to WeatherNation. Strong impacts from the storm are expected as far north as central Oregon and as far south as Salinas, California. These include high winds, heavy rain, and the potential for flash flooding.

Gusts of wind may reach 70 mph (113 km/hour) in exposed areas, and rain could fall at a rate of 2 to 4 inches a day (5 to 10 centimeters), according to Fox Weather. Mountains of over 3,500 feet (1,067 meters) elevation could get up to 2 feet (0.6 m) of snow.

Atmospheric rivers threaten both property and lives, but they also bring much-needed water to the West Coast. According to NOAA, 30% to 50% of annual precipitation in West Coast states comes via a handful of atmospheric river events each year.

Under climate change, atmospheric river patterns are expected to shift, bringing heavy low-elevation precipitation events but less snow to higher elevations, according to a 2021 NOAA study. This is problematic for water supplies in the West, because snowpack offers a slow-melting, year-round source of water, while short-term heavy rainfall brings more immediate negative impacts, such as mudslides and floods, and isn't as easily stored for later use.

The answer has to do with Earth's tilt and how our planet retains heat.

Earth's axis — the imaginary line connecting the North and South poles — is tilted at about a 23.4-degree angle from the path the planet takes around the sun. This means that one day every year on Earth, the North Pole points to its greatest extent away from the sun. On another day, it's the South Pole that aims as far from the sun as possible. These days are the northern and southern winter solstices, respectively, explained Christopher Baird, an associate professor of physics at West Texas A&M University.

The more Earth's surface is tilted away from the sun, the less time it spends in daylight. The northern winter solstice, the shortest day in the Northern Hemisphere, occurs on Dec. 21, 22 or 23 each year, and the southern winter solstice happens annually on June 20, 21 or 22.

Earth gets most of its warmth from the sun, which might lead you to guess that the winter solstices are the coldest days of the year in their respective hemispheres, Baird noted. However, the coldest temperatures in each hemisphere "tend to be offset by roughly one month from these solstices," Nick Bassill, director of the State Weather Risk Communications Center at the University at Albany in New York, told Live Science. In the Northern Hemisphere, this is about the middle of January.

Related: Which is colder: The North or South Pole?

The reverse holds true as well. The summer solstice, the longest day of the year — which occurs on June 20, 21 or 22 in the Northern Hemisphere and Dec. 21, 22 or 23 in the Southern Hemisphere — is often not the warmest day of the year, Jason Steffen, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told Live Science.

For instance, "the Mojave is hottest at the end of July, long after the solstice," Steffen said. "The Gulf Coast of Florida is hottest in August."

This delay between the solstices and the coldest or warmest temperatures of the year, an effect called "seasonal lag," "is because physical objects — the lakes and oceans, the ground, concrete, and so on — don't immediately respond to warmer or colder temperatures," Bassill explained. "In the winter, this means that physical objects hold on to their warmth from fall and summer longer than the air does."

The closer a location is to the ocean, the greater these seasonal variations in temperature are muted, because "it takes four times as much energy to raise the temperature of water by one degree as it does rock," Steffen said. In addition, "the oceans circulate," he added. This means that even when nights are long, heat flowing in the ocean can help keep those locations warm.

"For areas immediately downwind of a large water body, such as places on the Pacific Coast of the U.S., their coldest temperatures in winter tend to be warmer than other places at a similar latitude due to this effect," Bassill said. "It can also mean that their seasonal lag might be larger than other locations, meaning the time difference between their solstice and coldest or warmest time of year can be greater than other places in the world that are further away from a large water body."

It's existed for almost 80 years, beginning in 1946 as a filing cabinet stuffed with paper forms at the New Zealand Geological Survey. The project was the initiative of Harold Wellman — the pioneering geologist who famously discovered New Zealand's 370-mile-long Alpine Fault — and a few others working on the first geological mapping of the country.

"They wanted ready access to all this information in a standardized, accessible way," said James Crampton, a paleontologist at Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington. "It was a brilliant idea."

The forms assigned a map reference and a serial number to locations, and recorded the fossils seen or collected there, as well as notes on stratigraphy and the rocks' grain size, weathering, and color.

Because it began so early in New Zealand's scientific history, pulling the few existing records into the database "was doable in a way that wasn't doable anywhere else in the world," Crampton said.

Roughly similar databases do exist in other countries, and some, like the global Paleobiology Database, contain more records. But none has such density of coverage of an entire region, said GNS Science's Chris Clowes, the current custodian of the Fossil Record Electronic Database — dubbed FRED.

The fossil record is an extremely partial chronicle of life on Earth, he's careful to point out. But New Zealand has an extremely rich trove of fossils, especially from the Late Cretaceous and later periods, and the database represents "a very complete coverage of the incomplete record that we have. Of the fossils we have, a huge proportion of them have been captured," Clowes said.

Related: 1.6-billion-year-old fossils push back origin of multicellular life by tens of millions of years

Over the decades, the records moved from physical to digital and the maps were recalibrated from imperial to metric. FRED now contains more than 100,000 location entries, mainly from New Zealand, but also from the southeastern Pacific islands and the Ross Sea region of Antarctica.

The database is considered "an icon of New Zealand geological literature," according to an article published in 2020 by Clowes and others.

Open to All

Anyone can sign up to access FRED's online portal and make an entry. Four curators from different universities review the entries and fix obvious errors. "We have all sorts of people contributing data, from rank amateurs to professional paleontologists," Clowes said.

In the years since its inception, the database and the spirit of trust and collaboration it embodies have become an important part of New Zealand's geological and paleontological culture — and the envy of international colleagues, said Daphne Lee, a paleontologist at the University of Otago who has been using the database for many decades.

It's long been an expectation — even a requirement — that any newly discovered New Zealand fossil site will be entered into the file, she said. "For scientific papers to pass peer review or students' theses to be accepted, they must have the FRED serial number included."

She admitted that scientists aren't always so prompt at submitting a record for every single fossil they find. But overall, the file is a way of "passing on information from one scientific generation to the next," she said. "You might find a place you thought was new, but you'll find, my goodness, in 1957 someone already found a fossil there, and you didn't know about it." Much more detailed data are preserved than tend to make it into scientific papers, she added, meaning knowledge amassed by paleontologists over their lifetimes doesn't die with them.

And now, other scientists around the world can analyze those decades of data to make new discoveries. In 2018, for instance, researchers based in the United States delved into FRED's fossil records to calculate mollusk extinction rates, and found that New Zealand (alongside the Caribbean) is a present-day extinction hot spot for bivalves.

Some scientists fear that FRED's heyday may be behind us. New Zealand's science funding has been slashed, and job losses are rife in both universities and government-funded institutions.

When it comes to paleontology, "we're struggling to keep critical mass in several of our universities, and we've lost it entirely in a couple," said Clowes. "I think that probably we're going to enter a phase where there's not an awful lot of new data being entered [into the database]. I'm hoping that at some point, the pendulum will swing back, and we'll start doing more fundamental research again."

Crampton said he hopes FRED will be around for at least another 80 years. "It's a remarkable data set, and it's served New Zealand incredibly well," he said. "It allows us to interrogate what we know of New Zealand's fossil history in a way that no one else can."

This article was originally published on Eos.org. Read the original article.

Plants started using seeds to reproduce toward the end of the Devonian period (419 million to 359 million years ago). Scientists are still studying the exact evolutionary origins of seeds, but the earliest confirmed seeding-plant fossils are from the Famennian age, which began around 372 million years ago.

For example, Famennian fossils of the plant Elkinsia polymorpha discovered in West Virginia reveal seed-bearing shoots, according to the University of California, Berkeley Museum of Paleontology. Researchers have also found other examples of ancient seeds in Europe and China.

Gerhard Leubner, a plant biochemistry professor whose team focuses on seed science research at Royal Holloway, University of London, said plants likely evolved seeds soon after they started growing on land.

"They emerged from the sea about 450 million years ago," Leubner told Live Science. "A bit later, there is a phase where ferns dominated the world, and they had spores, and from these spores, it is believed plant seeds evolved."

Related: How do plants with seedless fruit reproduce?

Some plants — including mosses, algae and ferns — continue to use spores, rather than seeds, to reproduce, according to a 2019 article in The Conversation by Marjorie Lundgren, a senior research fellow in plant environmental physiology at Lancaster University in the U.K.

A spore is made up of a single cell with the DNA of one parent plant, while a seed is a more complex multicellular organism that typically requires two parents. A single-parent spore must first develop into a kind of pre-plant stage called a gametophyte, only becoming a plant when two of these gametophytes join for fertilization. Seeds, by contrast, skip this stage because a female plant produces seeds from a male plant's pollen after fertilization.

Leubner explained that seeds have lots of advantages over spores. They can be much larger and have hard, protective shells, making them more resilient. They can also store food to provide the new plant with an immediate energy source.

Spores also typically require a lot of moisture to prevent them from drying out, while seeds are capable of adapting to lots of different environments, which is likely what drove their evolution, Leubner noted. "It's not that spores are not adapted, but seeds became more sophisticated," Leubner said.

Both spores and seeds can enter a state called dormancy, which involves delaying their germination — development into a plant — until conditions are optimal. Leubner noted that seeds' ability to survive in different habitats, combined with dormancy, allowed them to be flexible and diversify.

Dormancy was a huge advantage to plants and made seeds capable of a kind of "multidimensional travel," said Charles Knight, a plant evolutionary biologist at California Polytechnic State University.

Seeds are "multidimensional in that they can travel long distances with their adaptations to be hooked on fur or to be carried by the wind," Knight told Live Science. "But they can also travel through time. They can travel through generations because they can remain dormant in the soil and then germinate hundreds, if not thousands, of years later."

Amber is fossilized resin, or tree sap, that can trap plants, insects, small animals or other organic matter with it as it hardens. The golden-yellow casing is airtight and mostly see-through, meaning it both perfectly preserves and displays whatever is inside it, like a transparent time capsule.

Until now, amber fossils had been found on every one of Earth's continents, except for Antarctica. But in the new study, published Tuesday (Nov. 12) in the journal Antarctic Science, researchers identified a tiny piece of amber, around 0.002 inch (70 micrometers) across, in sediment cores collected beneath the seafloor at a depth of around 3,100 feet (950 meters) off the coast of Pine Island Glacier on Antarctica's west coast.

The tiny fragment dates back to around 90 million years ago during the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago). At this time, large parts of Antarctica were covered by a temperate rainforest, similar to those found in New Zealand today, that thrived in warmer climatic conditions — and a tiny part of that lost ecosystem is trapped within the amber.

"This discovery allows a journey to the past in yet another more direct way," study lead author Johann Klages, a sedimentologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, said in a statement. "Our goal now is to learn more about the forest ecosystem."

Related: Wildfires burned Antarctica 75 million years ago, charcoal remnants reveal

The sediment cores used in the study were first collected in 2017 and were later revealed to contain fossils of roots, pollen, spores and other remains from flowering plants, which represent some of the best evidence of Antarctica's Cretaceous-era rainforest.

The amber fragment was only recently discovered as researchers broke up the remaining materials into thousands of tiny pieces and painstakingly scanned each one using fluorescent microscopy. Further analysis revealed that it contained "micro-inclusions" from bark that would have likely once lined a conifer-like tree that lived in the ancient forest.

The bark also shows some signs of "pathological resin flow" — a strategy used by trees to seal up damage done to their woody shielding by parasites or wildfires, by creating a chemical and physical barrier with resin.

While the new fragment is small, it is unusually well-preserved despite it being buried under the seafloor.

"Considering its solid, transparent and translucent particles, the amber is of high quality," study co-author Henny Gerschel, a consultant at the Saxony State Office for the Environment, Agriculture and Geology in Dresden, Germany, said in the statement. The fragment must have spent most of the last 90 million years near the seafloor's surface, "as amber would [normally] dissipate under increasing thermal stress and burial depth," she added.

The researchers believe that their findings could open the door to finding more Antarctic amber, which could unlock even more secrets about this ancient rainforest and the dinosaurs that lived in it.

"Our discovery is another piece of the puzzle," Gerschel said.

El Ojo is a mysterious, uninhabited floating island in Argentina's swampy Paraná Delta. Its name, meaning "the eye," comes from the island's striking resemblance to a perfectly round oculus when seen from above.

Filmmakers drew attention to El Ojo in 2016 after researching material for a documentary in the river delta. The crew, led by Argentinian director Sergio Neuspiller, flew over the island and was struck by its appearance amid the delta's cropped vegetation.

"We found the perfect circle, as seen from the air," Neuspiller told the newspaper El Observador at the time in a translated article. "The water looked black but in reality it was completely transparent water, something that is almost impossible to find in the delta [because the waters are generally muddy], but it had a black earth bottom."

Related: Eye of the Sahara: Mauritania's giant rock dome that towers over the desert

El Ojo floats in a crystal-clear lake that is just as perfectly circular as the island itself. According to El Observador, the island and the lakeshore have mutually created each other's smooth outlines, thanks to the slow, grinding process of erosion.

The island, which is 387 feet (118 meters) in diameter and made of plant matter, floats on a current that circles the lake, causing the circle to rotate on its axis and grate against the banks. This constant motion means El Ojo has widened the lake and shaved its sides into a perfect disk.

The phenomenon is similar to a process observed in the Presumpscot River near Westbrook, Maine, where a large ice disk has formed several times since 2019 through the action of a circular current beneath the surface.

El Ojo moves in a clockwise direction, according to the Argentinian daily newspaper El Cronista. It remains unclear how and when the island originally broke off from the land, but it first appeared in satellite images almost 20 years ago.

While researching the region, Neuspiller and his crew discovered that local residents knew about El Ojo, but that some people feared the island due to beliefs that an ancient deity lives there. Other theories about the island suggest it attracts unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and harbors a Nazi base, according to El Cronista, but there is no evidence to support these claims.

Discover more incredible places, where we highlight the fantastic history and science behind some of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth.