Category: Related Articles
LC11C. Stay Current—Climate and Human Evolution
Staying current for Chapter 11 { Life and Climate Contents } 2025-06-18. When Humans Learned to Live Everywhere. By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times. Excerpt: Our closest living relatives — chimpanzees and bonobos — are confined to a belt of Central African forests. But humans have spread across every continent, even remote islands. Our […]
LC10C. Stay Current—The Ice Ages
Staying current for Chapter 10 { Life and Climate Contents } 2025-08-04. Cave Deposits Reveal a Permafrost-Free Arctic. By Kaja Šeruga, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: About 15% of the land area in the Northern Hemisphere is currently covered by perennially frozen soil known as permafrost. But that has not always been the case. As global temperatures fluctuated in Earth’s […]
LC9C. Stay Current—What Happened to the Dinosaurs?
Staying current for Chapter 9 { Life and Climate Contents } 2025-05-15. An Ancient Warming Event May Have Lasted Longer Than We Thought. By Rebecca Owen, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Fifty-six million years ago, during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), global temperatures rose by more than 5°C over 100,000 or more years. Between 3,000 and 20,000 petagrams of carbon […]
LC8C. Stay Current—Highs and Lows Over the Past 750 Million Years
Staying current for Chapter 8 See non-chronological resources (bottom of this page) { Life and Climate Contents } 2025-07-15. Molecular fossils offer first glimpse of how life survived Snowball Earth. By Elise Cutts, Science. Excerpt: Several times in Earth’s history, the planet froze over. Ice blanketed the world from pole to equator, and temperatures plummeted as […]
LC7C. Stay Current—Earth’s Shifting Crust
Stay current for chapter 7 { Life and Climate Contents } 2024-11-07. A New View of Deep Earth’s Carbon Emissions. By Saima May Sidik, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: From time to time, when Earth’s tectonic plates shift, the planet emits a long, slow belch of carbon dioxide. In a new modeling study, Müller et al. show how this gas […]
LC6C. Stay Current—How and When Did Complex Life Begin?
Stay current for chapter 6 { Life and Climate Contents } Understanding Evolution – a one-stop source for information on evolution. 2019-11-14. Alien genes from bacteria helped plants conquer the land. By Elizabeth Pennisi, Science Magazine. 2024-11-13. Best evidence yet that “Snowball Earth” saw ice cover the entire globe. By Evrim Yazgin, COSMOS. Excerpt: More than 700 million […]
LC5C. Stay Current—The Origin of Our Oxygen-Rich Atmosphere
Stay current for chapter 5 { Life and Climate Contents } 2025-04-08. Bacteria ‘breathed’ oxygen nearly a billion years before it became abundant. By ScinecAdviser. Excerpt: Aerobic respiration—using oxygen to power the process of producing cellular fuel—was a huge development for life on Earth. After some microbes figured out photosynthesis, levels of oxygen in the […]
LC4C. Stay Current—The Beginning of Life on Earth
Stay current for chapter 4 { Life and Climate Contents } 2025-08-27. Here’s how the first proteins might have assembled, sparking life. By Robert F. Service, Science. Excerpt: Life today depends on proteins, cellular workhorses that do everything from flex muscles to ferry oxygen. And proteins, in turn, depend on RNA, which carries the recipes […]
LC3C. Stay Current—How Do Scientists Play the Dating Game?
Stay current for chapter 3 { Life and Climate Contents } 2009 June 7. Early rocks to reveal their ages. By Jennifer Carpenter, BBC News. Excerpt: A new technique has been helping scientists piece together how the Earth’s continents were arranged 2.5 billion years ago. The novel method allows scientists to recover rare minerals from rocks. By […]
LC2C. Stay Current—Where Does Earth’s Atmosphere Come From?
Staying current with chapter 2 { Life and Climate Contents } 2016-05-09. Earth’s ancient atmosphere was half as thick as it is today. By Roland Pease, Science. Excerpt: …very little is known about how thick Earth’s ancient atmosphere once was. Now, a new study suggests that Earth’s atmosphere 2.7 billion years ago was between a quarter to […]