NOAA Releases New Views of Earth’s Ocean Floor

NOAA has made sea floor maps and other data on the world’s coasts, continental shelves and deep ocean available for easy viewing online. These are critical data for modeling coastal flooding, from tsunami to hurricane storm surge.

The State of Glaciers

Glaciers are one of the natural environments most often used to illustrate the impacts of climate change. It is fairly indisputable that in a warming world, glaciers melt faster. Yet two recent studies suggest that in the Himalayas the rate of mass loss has been small and that further west, in the Karakoram range, the glaciers are actually slightly gaining mass. Is there a conflict between these studies and the wider body of research indicating that, worldwide, glaciers have been receding for several decades?