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In comparison to geological timescales, human documentation of geological events only extends back into a mere fraction of the Earth’s past: the oldest-known depiction of a volcanic eruption is found in Turkey, in a mural dating back to 6,600 BCE. But according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE, that date may have just been pushed back even further, by a scene painted in France’s Chauvet-Pont D’Arc cave.

Discovered in 1994, Chauvet-Pont D’Arc cave is the home to an extensive gallery of Paleolithic cave art, created over a number of periods between 23,000 and 36,000 years ago. The illustrations in this cave are the earliest known examples of human art, documenting the evolution of mankind’s artistic expression.
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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released their year-end report on the planet’s average temperatures, and 2015 has proven to the warmest year since record keeping began in 1880 — by a wide margin. The year also left a trail of multiple broken temperature records in it’s wake, for both yearly and monthly records over land, sea, and combined averages.

2015’s global average temperature was a full 1.62ºF (0.90ºC) above the 20th century average, and it beat 2014’s record temperature by 0.29ºF (0.16ºC). This margin is also a record, in-of-itself, being the widest observed margin on record.
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In an unprecedented event, two hurricanes have formed at the same time in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in the month of January, with the Pacific storm, breaking a record as such, and also exhibiting an unusual proximity to the equator. This is also the first time on record that off-season hurricanes have formed in both the Atlantic and Pacific in the same year; to have both form in the same month adds to the extreme unusuality of the event.
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