Center for Climate and Fellow Billy D’Andrea is trying to understand Easter Island’s climate history over the last few thousand years and how communities dealt with past climate change.

Center for Climate and Life Fellow Pratigya Polissar is developing new tools to look at the history of plants and ecosystems on Earth over the past 20 million years.

A reporter from National Geographic joined paleoclimatologist Billy D’Andrea and his colleagues for an expedition to gather vital climate data in the Norwegian Arctic.

The landlocked are surrounding the Dead Sea suffered long megadroughts in the past. Now, climate change threatens to inflict such conditions again on this already sere, volatile region.

Humans migrated out of Africa to escape a drying climate, about 60,000 years ago, according to a new study in the journal Geology.

Billy D’Andrea’s research on the experiences of the Vikings may provide a kind of object lesson on how changing climate can affect civilizations.

Self-pity is a luxury we can’t afford right now. We need science to inform our actions in a fast-changing world, and we need to keep asking questions.

As the world warms due to climate change, shifts in global distribution of rainfall can be expected, impacting water resources across the planet.

Billy D’Andrea is investigating the relationship between environmental change and characteristics of early settlements in Arctic Norway.

Pratigya Polissar, a paleoclimatologist and Center for Climate and Life Fellow, talks about his research, and what inspired him to go into his field.

A new coral salinity record shows that the most significant hydroclimatic feature in the Southern Hemisphere influences a major Pacific Ocean current.

Rainfall patterns in the Sahara during the six-thousand-year “Green Sahara” period have been revealed by analyzing marine sediments.

A close-up of a Litsea calicarioides leaf’s stomata, through which leaves take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen, speaks to atmospheric CO2 levels 23 million years ago.

Figuring out how far sea level rose during past warm periods in Earth’s history starts with a walk on the beach, a keen eye for evidence of ancient shorelines, and a highly accurate GPS system.

A new study supplies the longest and most complete record of ancient plant life in much of what is now Ethiopia and Kenya, the assumed birthplace of humanity.

As excess carbon dioxide is absorbed into the oceans, it is starting to have profound effects on marine life, from oysters to tiny snails at the base of the food chain.

Much of the modern understanding of climate has been shaped by pioneering studies done at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Using tree rings, a new drought atlas maps the reach and severity of dry and wet periods across Europe and the Mediterranean over the past 2,000 years.

As global temperatures rise, knowing just how far Greenland’s ice sheet shrank in the past could help scientists predict sea level rise in the future.

A new study finds that the Horn of Africa is drying at a rate that is both unusual in the context of the past 2,000 years and in step with human-influenced warming.

Ancient pollen is providing new insights into historic droughts in Southern California, including how a series of mega-droughts that changed the ecological landscape.

A new study of tree rings from Mongolia dating back more than 1,000 years confirms that recent warming in central Asia has no parallel in any known record.

During the second half of the 21st century, the U.S. Southwest and Great Plains will face drought worse than anything seen in times ancient or modern, a new study says.