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 } 2026-04-24. The effects of a constructed closure of the Bering Strait on AMOC tipping behavior. By Jelle Soons and Henk A. Dijkstra, Science. Abstract: The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is a major tipping element in the present-day climate and could potentially collapse under sufficient freshwater or CO2 forcing […]
LC9C. Stay Current—What Happened to the Dinosaurs?
Staying current for Chapter 9 { Life and Climate Contents } 2026-07-29. Dinosaurs May Have Been Literally Charbroiled After the Asteroid Impact. By Jake Currie, Nautilus. Excerpt: We know why the dinosaurs died—a massive asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula forming the Chicxulub crater—but how they died is still the subject of debate. To paraphrase Robert Frost, […]
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 } 2026-07-30. Witness to ocean acidification. By R. Mark Leckie, Science. Excerpt: Foraminifera inhabit coastal and deep-sea marine environments. These microscopic, single-celled organisms are widely used as proxies for relative age determination and reconstructing past climates. The ratio of […]
LC7C. Stay Current—Earth’s Shifting Crust
Stay current for chapter 7 { Life and Climate Contents } 2026-07-08. In a First, Scientists Observe Creation of New Seafloor. By K. R. Callaway, The New York Times. Excerpt: Far down on the ocean floor, Earth is recycling its own skin. At certain boundaries, the huge plates of rock that make up the planet’s […]
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 } 2026-07-31. What triggered one of the most dramatic changes in Earth’s history? By Paul Voosen, Science. Excerpt: For its first 2 billion years, Earth had almost no free oxygen in its air or oceans. Then, some 2.45 billion years ago, the ancestors of photosynthetic […]
LC4C. Stay Current—The Beginning of Life on Earth
Stay current for chapter 4 { Life and Climate Contents } 2026-06-12. Metal-driven chemical reaction in deep sea may explain origin of life. By Viviane Callier, Science. Excerpt: The chemistry of life has an unlikely participant: phosphate. This simple molecule of phosphorus and four oxygen atoms cements nucleotides together to form the backbone of DNA […]
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 […]