Carolyn Gramling
Earth & Climate Writer, Science News
Carolyn is the Earth & Climate writer at Science News. Previously she worked at Science magazine for six years, both as a reporter covering paleontology and polar science and as the editor of the news in brief section. Before that she was a reporter and editor at EARTH magazine. She has bachelor’s degrees in Geology and European History and a Ph.D. in marine geochemistry from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She’s also a former Science News intern.
All Stories by Carolyn Gramling
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Environment
Fossil fuels appear to release far more methane than we thought
Ice cores reveal less methane than expected. This suggests today’s fossil fuel industry is responsible for nearly all of the methane emissions from natural sources today.
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Science & Society
CO2 emissions have nosedived as COVID-19 keeps people home
The COVID-19 pandemic restricted travel that can pollute the air. By April, travel-related daily emissions of greenhouse gases was back to 2006 levels.
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Earth
A rainforest once grew near the South Pole
A forest flourished within 1,000 kilometers of the South Pole. That was a while ago, as in millions of years ago.
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Climate
Climate change drove Australian wildfires to extremes
Australia’s devastating 2019–2020 wildfires were at least 30 percent more likely because of human-caused climate change.
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Fossils
This dinosaur was no bigger than a hummingbird
The skull of one of these ancient birds — the tiniest yet known — was discovered encased in a chunk of amber originally found in Myanmar.
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Earth
Study appears to rule out volcanic burps as causing dino die-offs
New data on when massive volcanic eruptions happened do not match when the dinosaur mass extinction took place.
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Animals
Blood vessels in their heads kept big dinos from overheating
Giant dinosaurs evolved several ways to cool their blood and avoid heatstroke.
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Earth
Powerful storms may be causing ‘stormquakes’ offshore
A perfect-storm mixture of hurricane, ocean and seafloor structures can create distinct seismic signals that have now been named ‘stormquakes.’
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Oceans
Cool Job: This ecologist is studying an ocean of changes
A young marine ecologist is studying how warming is changing the oceans and what people can do to minimize the harm.
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Climate
Record heat is burning the Arctic and melting Greenland’s ice
High temperatures are melting Greenland’s ice. They’re also fueling Arctic wildfires that are pumping record amounts of carbon dioxide into the air.
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Climate
Today’s global warming is unlike the last 2,000 years of climate shifts
Temperatures at the end of the 20th century were hotter almost everywhere on the planet than in the previous two millennia. And it’s only gotten hotter.
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Climate
Slow hurricanes, like Dorian, become dangerous and hard to predict
The warming seas associated with climate change may be fueling powerful but sluggish hurricanes, the type that 2019’s Dorian exemplifies. A climate scientist explains why.