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 } 2025-06-25. Finding Consensus on Arctic Ocean Climate History. By Jochen Knies, Matt O’Regan and Claude Hillaire Marcel, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: The Arctic…average temperatures…rise up to 4 times faster than on the rest of the planet. Among the many environmental effects of this warming, the Arctic Ocean, critically, is moving toward a […]

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 } 2024-11-25. Large Igneous Provinces May Have Leaked Cryptic Carbon. By Skyler Ware, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Massive volcanic eruptions have reshaped Earth and its climate at several points in history. New research suggests that long after these surface eruptions […]

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 } 2024-07-12. Our last common ancestor lived 4.2 billion years ago—perhaps hundreds of millions of years earlier than thought. By ROBERT F. SERVICE, Science. Excerpt: The last ancestor shared by all living organisms was a microbe that lived 4.2 billion years ago, had a fairly […]

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 […]