Phys.org: Earth science

Bushfires are strongly driven by weather: hot, dry and windy conditions can combine to create the perfect environment for flames to spread across the landscape.

Winter weather took hold across the Indo-Gangetic Plain in early January 2026, bringing dense fog and cold temperatures to much of the flat, fertile lands that span from Pakistan and northern India to Bangladesh.

To understand how global warming could influence future climate, scientists look to the Paleogene Period that began 66 million years ago, covering a time when Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were two to four times higher than they are today.

The world's oceans absorbed a record amount of heat in 2025, an international team of scientists said Friday, further priming conditions for sea level rise, violent storms, and coral death.

Heat waves are becoming commonplace, and so too is high humidity, which can strain the electrical grid, hurt the economy, and endanger human health. But the global prevalence of record-breaking humidity events, some of which approach the physiological limit of what humans can safely handle—and all of which go beyond local expectations and adaptations—has not been widely studied.

Extreme weather events have become significantly more common in the Arctic over recent decades, posing a threat to vital polar ecosystems, according to new research by an international team of scientists.