News
Why Marshlands Are the Perfect Lab for Studying Climate Change
The tempest began at 7 o’clock one morning this past June. It hadn’t rained for days, and by late afternoon, the forest floor had been drenched with 70,000 gallons of precipitation. Floods of salt water from the nearby Rhode River soaked the roots of the maples, beeches and tulip poplars.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
State of Play
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.