Taxonomy term

In 1903, a skeleton was found in a limestone cave in Cheddar Gorge, near Somerset, England. Radiocarbon dating in the 1970s revealed the remains to be more than 10,000 years old, making it the oldest near-complete human skeleton found in Britain. Now, as yet unpublished research suggests Cheddar Man’s genome reveals a surprisingly different appearance for the Mesolithic man from what’s long been thought, according to researchers who analyzed DNA from the skeleton.

Rainfall can trigger landslides, and it can also cause slow-moving slides to speed up. But researchers have observed that rain also appears to cause landslides composed of clay-rich material to take longer to start moving, and to move slower than expected.

Twenty years ago, the 1997–98 El Niño surpassed the 1982–83 event to become the strongest El Niño ever recorded, contributing to famine and drought in Southeast Asia, devastating floods in Southern California, and other natural disasters. By many metrics, the 2015–16 El Niño bested both to claim the title of the strongest El Niño on record. This most recent event, nicknamed the “Godzilla El Niño,” did contribute to extreme weather in parts of the world, including disastrous fires in Indonesia and the longest, global coral-bleaching event on record. However, it did not have the anticipated effect on California, which, at the time, was in the midst of a severe multi-year drought. In a recent study, researchers suggest the 2015–16 El Niño was the wrong “flavor” to bring heavy precipitation to the state.

Earth’s rock record preserves evidence of numerous natural processes, from evolution and extinction to catastrophes and climate change, and sometimes even planetary configurations. In a new study, a well-preserved sequence of Triassic lake sediments bearing evidence of cyclical patterns of climate change in the Newark Basin confirms the existence of a Milankovitch cycle — a periodic change in the shape of Earth’s orbit caused by, in this case, Earth’s gravitational interactions with Jupiter and Venus. The finding can be used to precisely date other events in the geological record, and inform climate and astronomical models.