Recent 'highlights'

These are just a few of the findings published in the major scientific journals during the past three months.

These are just a few of the findings published in the major scientific journals during the past three months.

• Arctic sea ice is melting fast. There was 20 per cent less of it than normal this summer. As Dr Mark Serreze, one of the researchers from Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center, told reporters, "the feeling is we are reaching a tipping point or threshold beyond which sea ice will not recover". That is particularly bad news because it creates a potent feedback effect: instead of blinding white ice that bounces sunlight back into space, there is now open blue water that soaks up the sun's heat, amplifying the melting process.

• In the tundra of Siberia, other researchers report that permafrost has begun to melt rapidly, and, as it does, formerly-frozen methane – which, like the more prevalent carbon dioxide, acts as a heat-trapping "greenhouse gas" – is escaping into the atmosphere. In some places last winter, the methane bubbled up so steadily that puddles of standing water couldn't freeze even in the depths of the Russian winter.

• British researchers, examining almost 6,000 soil borings across the UK, found another feedback effect. Warmer temperatures (growing seasons now last eleven days longer at that latitude) meant that microbial activity had increased dramatically in the soil. This, in turn, meant that much of the carbon long stored in the soil was now being released into the atmosphere. The quantities were large enough to negate all the work that Britain had done to switch away from coal to reduce carbon in the atmosphere.

Such findings – and there are more like them in virtually every issue of the leading journals Science and Nature – came against the backdrop of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the now record-breaking Atlantic storm season.