Climate science

Today! Ars Live: What’s up with the sudden surge in temperatures?

At 1pm on Thursday, we encourage you to join us for a live chat with Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and researcher at Berkeley Earth. We’ll talk a bit about how he got into climate science and ended up at Berkeley Earth and the role that organization plays in the world of climate science. It was launched by a physicist who was somewhat skeptical of the work being done by climate scientists, but it has evolved into one of the key groups that does the math needed to track the planet’s temperatures.

For the past couple of years, those temperatures have seen a remarkable rise to record highs, at one point setting a yearlong string where every month set a record for the warmest instance of that month on record. The rise leaves us at risk of exceeding key climate targets much earlier than expected and has left the climate science community scrambling to explain the intensity of the heat. So we plan to ask Zeke a bit about what scientists are thinking about the dramatic nature of these changes, attempts to explore the relationship between temperatures, and things like tipping points and individual weather events.

And all that leads to the key question: What does this tell us about where our climate is likely to go over the rest of this century?

After that, we’d like to turn things over to your questions. Is there anything you’ve always wanted to know about climate science but didn’t know who to ask? Zeke may be your guy—and if not, then he almost certainly knows who is. So please join us for this discussion, happening Thursday, June 26, at 1 pm US Eastern Time.

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Rover finds hints of an ancient Martian carbon cycle

carbon cycle, Climate science, Curiosity rover, greenhouse gasses, Mars, minerals, Science / Mike M. / April 19, 2025

The Curiosity mission started near the bottom of the crater, at the base of a formation called Aeolis Mons, or Mount Sharp, where NASA expected to find the earliest geological samples. The idea then was to climb up Mount Sharp and collect samples from later and later geological periods at increasing elevations, tracing the history of habitability and the great drying up of Mars. On the way, the carbon missed by the satellites was finally found.

An imperfect cycle

Tutolo’s team focused their attention on four sediment samples Curiosity drilled after climbing over a kilometer up Mount Sharp. The samples were examined with the rover’s Chemistry and Mineralogy instrument, which uses X-ray diffraction to determine their composition. It turned out the samples contained roughly between 5 and 10 percent of siderite. “It was an iron carbonate, directly analogous to a mineral called calcite found in sedimentary rocks like limestone. The difference is it has iron in its cation site rather than calcium,” Tutolo explained. “We expected that because Mars is much richer in iron—that’s why it is the red planet.”

The siderite found in the samples was also pure, which Tutolo thinks indicates it has formed through an evaporation process akin to what we see in evaporated lakes on Earth. This, in turn, was the first evidence we’ve found of the ancient Martian carbon cycle. “Now we have evidence that confirms the models,” Tutolo claims. The carbon from the atmosphere was being sequestered in the rocks on Mars just as it is on Earth. The problem was, unlike on Earth, it couldn’t get out of these rocks.

“On Earth, whenever oceanic plates get subducted into the mantle, all of the limestone that was formed before gets cooked off, and the carbon dioxide gets back to the atmosphere through volcanoes,” Tutolo explains. Mars, on the other hand, has never had efficient plate tectonics. A large portion of carbon that got trapped in Martian rocks stayed in those rocks forever, thinning out the atmosphere. While it’s likely the red planet had its own carbon cycle, it was an imperfect one that eventually turned it into the lifeless desert it is today.

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