Phys.org: Earth science

The ocean is saturated with microplastics. While we know the location of the great garbage patches, where plastic particles may accumulate below the ocean surface remains unknown. The vastness of the ocean means particle sampling data are sparse, but modeling how particles aggregate in 3D fluid flows can help determine where to look.

Wildfires pose a significant threat across the southwestern United States, due to the region's unique topography and weather conditions. Accurately identifying locations at the highest risk of a severe wildfire is critical for implementing preventive measures.

Dozens of bushfires raged over the weekend as far afield as the mid-north coast of New South Wales and Tasmania's east coast. A NSW firefighter tragically lost his life, 16 homes burned down in the NSW town of Koolewong and four in Bulahdelah, and another 19 burned down in Tasmania's Dolphin Sands.

After years of little snow across the Chicago area, recent record-breaking snowfall and below-freezing temperatures might seem to contradict scientific reports of winters getting warmer. But climate change is still transforming how locals experience the changing seasons, including this fall, one of the top 10 warmest recorded in Illinois.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Ottawa provides a series of highly detailed 3D models of the Earth's temperature beneath Greenland and northeastern Canada, providing insights into the region's geological history and the response of the ice sheet to past and future climate change.

In the coming decades, climate change is likely to lead to a loss of sea ice in and an influx of warmer water to the Arctic Ocean, affecting the ocean's vertical circulation. Brown and colleagues recently investigated the forces that drive the Arctic Ocean's vertical circulation to gain insight into how the circulation might change in the future.

Rising greenhouse gas emissions could see the size of extreme floods in the Central Himalayas increase by between as much as 73% and 84% by the end of this century.

A robotic float has measured the temperature and salinity from parts of the ocean never sampled before—underneath massive floating ice shelves in East Antarctica.

If you ever find yourself on Macquarie Island—a narrow, wind-lashed ridge halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica—the first thing you'll notice is the wildlife. Elephant seals sprawl across dark beaches. King penguins march up mossy slopes. Albatrosses circle over vast, treeless uplands.

How much the planet warms with each ton of carbon dioxide remains one of the most important questions in climate science, but there is uncertainty in predicting it. This uncertainty hinders governments, businesses and communities from setting clear emission-reduction targets and preparing for the impacts of climate change.

The carbon cycle in our oceans is critical to the balance of life in ocean waters and for reducing carbon in the atmosphere, a significant process to curbing climate change or global warming.

A new study led by researchers from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has uncovered the first observational evidence of lateral negative re-discharges occurring on negative leader channels. Published recently in Geophysical Research Letters, the findings offer new insights into how lightning channels remain electrically active and how their structures evolve before and after a return stroke.

A new study led by Prof. Duan Weili from the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography (XIEG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences emphasizes the importance of selecting appropriate datasets for global soil moisture research. The study was published in the Science Bulletin on Oct. 31.

In the middle of a chilly October night in 2025, my two friends and I suited up at the Cottonwood Creek trailhead and started a trek into the Sangre de Cristo mountains of Colorado. It was a little below freezing as we got moving at 1:30 a.m., and the moon illuminated the snowy mountaintops above us.

Clues contained in tree rings have identified mid-14th-century volcanic activity as the first domino to fall in a sequence that led to the devastation of the Black Death in Europe.

A common misconception about research is that it takes place in climate-controlled labs with microscopes, beakers, and Bunsen burners. While that is true for many fields, obtaining geoscience data can demand fieldwork in remote, rugged terrain with potentially extreme weather conditions. These investigations may require flying across the world, hiking for days above 14,000 feet of elevation in the Himalayan mountain range during all kinds of weather, and even sacrificing personal hygiene.

The speed at which glaciers move changes predictably each year, according to the first-ever global map of how glacier and ice sheet speeds vary with the seasons. Knowing this yearly rhythm could help us better predict sea-level rise driven by long-term climate change.

Dr. Magali Nehemy stood on the banks of the Tapajós River in the Amazon rainforest when the community's chief—a man in his seventies who had lived there his whole life—looked out over the bare shoreline and shook his head.

K'gari is the world's largest sand island and known for its world-famous lakes, but research from the University of Adelaide has discovered its largest lakes could be vulnerable to drying.

A study led by researchers at the University of South Florida's College of Marine Science has found that certain populations of the seaweed sargassum have experienced a significant decline over the past decade, even as increased abundance of sargassum in the tropical Atlantic has caused large mats of the seaweed to inundate beaches across the Caribbean and Gulf regions.