Kennedy predicts hot and dry conditions from the west will shift eastward later this week, allowing for a noticeable warm-up and shift towards spring-like conditions.
When light shines through water, colors with longer wavelengths are absorbed by the water, with the longest wavelengths absorbed first. Blue and violet have the shortest wavelengths of visible light, so they are able to penetrate the deepest.
We created Earth in Action to provide a lens into what's happening on our planet, as it happens. Whether it's something typical, like the current air temperature, or an extreme event like a major dust storm, we wanted to provide an opportunity for people to see them.
Along coastlines, where tides are typically magnified, they profoundly affect navigation, commerce, coastal flooding, water properties and sediment transport. Tides impact the flooding of rivers and, thus, influence the extent of their floodplain, which has cascading effects on biogeochemical and ecological processes.
Britain is about to be hit with showers of 'blood rain', according to experts from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). This is thanks to a plume of red Saharan dust, which is currently sweeping over Europe towards the UK. When this dust mixes with Britain's persistent rain, the precipitation will take on a distinctive reddish colour - creating a phenomenon known as 'blood rain'.
"So whenever people think about hot weather, they always talk about the temperature," he says. "There's two issues with that. First of all, most people don't realise that the temperature is measured in the shade. So if you're in direct solar radiation, the amount of heat stress you're exposed to is much greater as it will stress your body out a lot more."
Because we're homeotherms, we assume all mammals work the way we do. But in recent years, as improvements in technology allowed researchers to more easily track small animals and their metabolisms in the wild, we're starting to find a lot more weirdness.
Over time, the water evaporated to form the smaller, brinier Owens Lake. Indigenous Paiute people call the Owens Valley Payahuunadü, 'the land of the flowing water'. Today, Owens Lake is a 'Dusty Vestige of the Old West', as NASA described a photograph of the lake taken from space.
That seemingly paradoxical dynamic results from several factors. Foremost among them is the rebound of land beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet, a mile-thick body of glacial ice that covers 80 percent of the island and is being lost to melting at a rate of roughly 200 billion tons each year. As the ice sheet loses mass, the land beneath rises.
The reason we can gracefully glide on an ice-skating rink or clumsily slip on an icy sidewalk is that the surface of ice is coated by a thin watery layer. Scientists generally agree that this lubricating, liquidlike layer is what makes ice slippery. They disagree, though, about why the layer forms. Three main theories about the phenomenon have been debated over the past two centuries. Last year, researchers in Germany put forward a fourth hypothesis that they say solves the puzzle.
Green iguanas (Iguana iguana) are not native to the U.S. but were brought to Florida in the 1960s, where they have, for the most part, flourishedexcept, that is, when temperatures have dropped below 50 degrees F (10 degrees C). These chilly conditions can cause a cold shock in the lizards. And because the iguanas tend to sleep in trees, getting cold shocked can sometimes cause the animals to fall from the skies in an infamous Florida phenomenon.
In this photo, I'm preparing drifting buoys for deployment. This was my main responsibility aboard the RV Falkor (too), during a 27-day research expedition in October 2025 exploring the Malvinas Current, an ocean current that runs alongside Argentina. The expedition included biologists, geologists and physical oceanographers such as myself; I'm a PhD candidate at the Sea and Atmosphere Research Center (CIMA) in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Warwick, N., Griffiths, P., Keeble, J., Archibald, A., & Pyle, J. Atmospheric implications of increased Hydrogen use. GOV.UK https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/atmospheric-implications-of-increased-hydrogen-use (2022).
During a rare break in the weather, the NYT says helicopters airlifted the researchers and their equipment 19 miles to their planned outpost site on top of the glacier. The two helicopters involved flew a dozen total loads of cargo from the icebreaker ship to the camp site, while glacial scientists and engineers erected a small tent city, complete with bathrooms, generators, and a mess hall.
Ice-sheet retreat lined up with low algae growth over the past ~500,000 years, implying less CO₂ uptake in parts of the Southern Ocean during warm periods. The study points to iceberg-delivered, iron-rich sediments from West Antarctica during warm intervals, not windblown dust. The iron-bearing minerals in these sediments were highly weathered and not readily bioavailable to marine algae. If WAIS keeps shrinking, similar sediment delivery could weaken Southern Ocean carbon uptake, creating feedback that could amplify climate change.
An extraordinarily warm and mostly sunny January has left the snowpack across California's Sierra Nevada far smaller than usual - 59% of average for this time of year, state water officials announced Friday as they held the season's second snow survey. "We are now about halfway through the typically wettest part of the year," said Andy Reising, manager of snow surveys for the California Department of Water Resources.