Chemical analysis of hot springs in the Himalaya suggest that the carbon released from mountain forming regions may warm Earth.

The poles were once covered by lakes and forests instead of ice. Anil Ananthaswamy finds out what the world was like in the last great warming.

When Ernest Shackleton and his men marched towards the South Pole in December 1908, they came across something entirely unexpected. After scaling the vast Beardmore glacier on the edge of the polar plateau, they found seams of coal amid the snow and ice. They also found impressions of leaves in sandstone boulders nearby and even fossilised wood from a coniferous tree.

The response of the Greenland ice sheet to global warming is a source of concern notably because of its potential contribution to changes in the sea level. We demonstrated the natural vulnerability of the ice sheet by using pollen records from marine sediment off southwest Greenland that indicate important changes of the vegetation in Greenland over the past million years.

Antarctic Ice Sheet elevation changes, which are used to estimate changes in the mass of the interior regions, are caused by variations in the depth of the firn layer. We quantified the effects of temperature and accumulation variability on firn layer thickness by simulating the 1980

Estimating ice sheet mass changes from elevation surveys requires adjustments for snow density variations at the ice sheet surface.

Pollen data suggest that the Greenland ice sheet was much smaller during previous warm periods.