Environmental proxies, as methods, refer to indirect measurement techniques that infer past or present environmental conditions from quantifiable properties of natural archives or materials. These methods utilize calibrated relationships between proxy variables (e.g., stable isotope ratios, elemental compositions, microfossil assemblages, growth rings, or sedimentological characteristics) and target environmental parameters such as temperature, salinity, precipitation, or biogeochemical cycles. Environmental proxy methods involve rigorous sampling protocols, laboratory analyses, statistical calibration against instrumental or observational datasets, and uncertainty quantification, enabling reconstruction, monitoring, or comparison of environmental states where direct measurements are unavailable or impractical.
Penguins living along the Patagonian coast of Argentina can serve as living monitors of their environment by using small, chemical-detecting leg bands, according to a study from the University of California, Davis, and the ...
Environment
19 hours ago
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A new paper investigates how raptors, or birds of prey like hawks and eagles, act as a sentinel species that can reveal the level of forever chemicals in the local environment. The forever chemicals, or PFAS, are especially ...
Environment
Mar 26, 2026
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Ice cores taken from glaciers reveal the air pollution of the past, using atmospheric particles incorporated in snow that fell on the glacier and became ice. Now, scientists have extracted a record of thousands of years' ...
Earth Sciences
Mar 13, 2026
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Every morning, people fasten their watch, slip on a bracelet and head out the door without thinking much about what they might encounter along the way. The air they breathe, the dust on their hands and the surfaces they touch ...
Environment
Mar 9, 2026
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The house sparrow is a highly invasive pest in North Carolina, and bluebird enthusiasts frequently throw their eggs out and remove their nests to keep them from overtaking the nestboxes that bluebirds call home. A new study ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 2, 2026
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Current global climate models (GCMs) support with high confidence the view that rising greenhouse gases and other anthropogenic forcings account for nearly all observed global surface warming—slightly above 1 °C—since the ...
Prior to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, Americans lived in communities awash with lead from industrial sources, paint, water supply pipes and, most significantly, tailpipe emissions. A dangerous ...
Environment
Feb 2, 2026
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Beginning in the early 2000s, some of the most common and well-studied PFAS were phased out through a combination of industry shifts and international regulations. A new study from Harvard has found that since that phaseout, ...
Environment
Jan 26, 2026
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Global leaders have committed to halting and reversing the ongoing degradation of nature within the next few decades. But with tight public budgets, governments around the world are looking toward nature markets as one way ...
Environment
Jan 26, 2026
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Reliable predictions of how the Earth's climate will respond as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increase are based on climate models. These models, in turn, are based on data from past geological times in which the CO2 ...
Earth Sciences
Jan 16, 2026
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