Phys.org: Earth science

The world's oceans help slow climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere, but how much they take up can vary throughout the year. New research, published in Geophysical Research Letters, suggests these seasonal patterns are changing across the Indian Ocean, potentially affecting how it helps to regulate Earth's climate.

When a massive environmental disaster strikes, do societies simply collapse and disappear? Or do people find a way to adapt, rebuild and recover?

Most natural gas leakage in Indianapolis likely originates from homes and other buildings, not exterior pipelines and large-scale distribution infrastructure that deliver the fossil fuel, according to Penn State researchers who assessed nearly a decade of data.

Most studies of how clouds are responding to climate change focus on clouds over the oceans, rather than over mountains. Those that do focus on mountain clouds tend to explore cloud microphysics rather than long-term trends in cloud phase. But understanding cloud behavior over regions such as the Tibetan Plateau, which supplies water to hundreds of millions of people, is critical—especially as diminishing snowpack and altered precipitation patterns threaten this critical water source.

The writer Malcolm Gladwell popularized the term "tipping points" to refer to the moment when a trend or social behavior crosses a threshold and rapidly spreads everywhere. In physics, tipping points occur when systems—say, Earth's climate—reach an unstable point and topple over into a sea of change that is sometimes irreversible. Examples include global warming or the melting of polar ice caps.

A research team has found that molten rock can carry more oxygen than its chemical composition would seem to allow. Their study is published in National Science Review.

A phenomenon rarer than a solar eclipse and more powerful than any single storm system is unfolding this fall, and NASA is tracking it closely.

Future Arctic winter sea ice is likely to shrink by around 1 million square kilometers (386,000 square miles) more than previously thought, after researchers used clues from a warm period 6,000 years ago to improve the reliability of climate models.

Expanded excavations at White Sands National Park in New Mexico have provided researchers an opportunity to refine the age of the oldest human footprints in North America and establish a deeper understanding of the landscape and environmental conditions at the time humans were present there.

Humanity's ongoing disruption of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations, temperatures, and global nutrient cycles is starving the oceans of oxygen. Although we can measure ongoing changes to ocean circulation and marine life, we still don't know how far the oxygen loss and the damage to ocean ecosystems could go. One way to foresee the oceans' future is to look back at how our seas and their inhabitants responded to higher CO₂ levels and warmer climates in the past.

When a marine heat wave strikes, scientists often turn to satellites to see how the ocean is responding. From space, changes in ocean color can reveal shifts in phytoplankton, microscopic organisms that form the foundation of marine food webs and play a crucial role in the global carbon cycle. But satellites have a fundamental limitation: they can only see the ocean's surface.

The University of Bristol–led study, published in Nature Communications, could help millions of people living in earthquake-prone countries make better-informed decisions about seismic risk, particularly during ongoing periods of increased earthquake activity.

A new study led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) provides the most comprehensive observational analysis yet of the towering ice cliffs that fringe Earth's ice sheets, giving scientists new evidence to evaluate a long-debated process that could influence future sea level rise. Improving these projections is increasingly important as rising seas threaten coastal communities and infrastructure worldwide.

By 2025, 143 of 154 developing countries had a National Adaptation Plan process in place, yet implementation has not kept pace. Many countries still lack the institutional capacity, project preparation and finance needed to turn their priorities into strategies, bankable projects and results on the ground.

A new study examining how tropical cyclone activity near Hawai'i could change in a warmer future finds a shift toward stronger storms, even though substantial uncertainty remains about whether the total number of storms near the islands will increase.

The western U.S. is facing parallel and escalating hazards in the form of ongoing drought and increasingly frequent wildfires. Although the region's ecosystems have evolved with wildfires, the intensity and frequency of blazes where people live and recreate remain a persistent challenge for communities.

The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the globe, and scientists are racing to understand how that fact affects the region's landscapes and ecosystems. Permafrost thaw is one of the most visible signs of climate change, with whole hillslopes of previously frozen ground slumping off and coastlines falling into the ocean. It's disrupting ecosystems, releasing carbon, and threatening Indigenous communities in the far north.

Why is there life on Earth? It's one of the oldest questions humans have asked, and as far as we know, our planet is the only one that holds the answer.

A research team at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) has found that the area affected by tropical cyclone (TC) rainfall is extending inland along Northern Hemisphere coasts at an average rate of approximately 3.8 kilometers (2.4 miles) per decade. Driven by rising nearshore sea surface temperature (SST), this shift is increasing disaster risks for inland regions. The work is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Just minutes into a planned research flight from Colorado to Oregon in August to study massive storm clouds fueled by intense wildfires, scientists discovered that a fire in Utah offered a more promising target. The mission support staff on the ground scrambled to draw up a new flight plan, and the pilots of the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR) Gulfstream V worked to get the green light from air traffic controllers to fly toward the wildfire-generated thunderstorm.