Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here. As polar ice has melted and moved mass towards the Equator, it has slowed Earth’s rotation.Credit: Alessandro Dahan/Getty Melting ice caps are slowing the rotation of the Earth and could delay the next leap second by … Read more
Climate change is starting to alter how humans keep time. An analysis1 published in Nature on 27 March has predicted that melting ice caps are slowing Earth’s rotation to such an extent that the next leap second — the mechanism used since 1972 to reconcile official time from atomic clocks with that based on Earth’s … Read more
After 15 years of discussion and exploration, a committee of researchers has decided that the Anthropocene — generally understood to be the age of irreversible human impacts on the planet — will not become an official epoch in Earth’s geological timeline. The ruling, first reported by The New York Times, is meant to be final, … Read more
The oldest fossilised forest known on Earth — dating from 390 million years ago — has been found in the high sandstone cliffs along the Devon and Somerset coast of South West England. The fossils, discovered and identified by researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and Cardiff, are the oldest fossilised trees ever found in … Read more