Phys.org: Earth science

Earth's climate has undergone dramatic changes throughout its history, but new research suggests those changes may not have been as random as previously thought. A study led by an international team of researchers, including University of New Mexico paleobiologist Corinne "Cori" Myers, found that Earth's climate over the past 539 million years tended to remain within a small number of recurring climate states. The research also found that periods of elevated extinction, including the five major mass extinction events in Earth's history, frequently occurred as the planet transitioned between those states.

When ocean waves reach shallow water, their complex interactions can produce lower-frequency infragravity waves. These waves strongly affect—and are affected by—the shape of coastlines, linking them to erosion, sediment deposition and the degradation of coastal ice.

If someone leaves the faucet running in your bathroom and the house floods, it's easy to assign responsibility for the damage. But for other disasters—bigger, more complicated and costlier ones—the link between cause and effect isn't as clear.

The seafloor is more than just the ground beneath the sea. Two-thirds of Earth's surface is covered by oceans, which have an average depth of almost 4 kilometers (2.5 miles). For a long time, the seafloor's remoteness protected it from widespread human disturbance. But that is changing: Bottom trawling now reaches depths of around 4,000 meters (13,100 feet) and already disturbs up to 2% of the global seafloor each year.

In a discovery as broad and far-reaching as the Big Muddy itself, a new Yale–led study says farmers in the Mississippi River Basin are storing more carbon dioxide (CO2) in the soil than they emit when they add limestone to their fields, an agricultural practice known as "liming."

Tiny plantlike organisms called phytoplankton that form the base of marine food webs topped by orcas, whales and sharks usually get eaten or slowly sink to the seafloor, carrying carbon as they go. Across most of the ocean, the descent from sunlit surface layers takes weeks. But in the Arctic's Chukchi Sea, scientists have found that a convergence of currents pushes phytoplankton from under the ice to the seafloor at four times the usual speed.

Heat waves over land worldwide are beginning earlier, ending later and occurring over longer seasons, while the first heat wave of the season has recently shifted toward faster onset, according to a new study published in Nature Climate Change.

To better assess the spatial extent of mining facilities and their environmental impact, a research team at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has developed a satellite-based remote sensing tool.

The origins of the earliest life on Earth, prior to the rise of oxygen and photosynthesis, remain a mystery. Graveyards in brine pools at the bottom of the Red Sea may hold some answers.

The fall equinox is Tuesday, when light and darkness split the day evenly. It marks the beginning of fall for the Northern Hemisphere and the beginning of spring in the Southern Hemisphere.

Recent heat waves in Europe have been intensified by the greenhouse gases emitted since nations committed to limiting global warming under the 2015 Paris Agreement, according to a Sep. 22 study published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Ph.D. candidate Natalia Seliutina has followed gemstones from the -30° temperatures of Siberia to the carving studios of Ōtepoti and the particle accelerators of Taiwan in her quest to discover why pounamu is one of the toughest natural materials on Earth. Fresh from the publication of Natalia's paper in the New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics, Kathryn van Beek catches up with her to find out how understanding the properties of pounamu might one day help us explore space.

Beneath the vast frozen wastes of Antarctica lie the remains of ancient mountains that have long since eroded. Even though they're no longer standing, they can still reveal a few lost secrets. New research published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters suggests that these vanished peaks may have played a fundamental role in the evolution of complex life on this planet.

For decades, Arctic sea ice has been melting earlier in spring and freezing later in fall, extending the melt season and contributing to widespread ice loss. A new NASA-led study published in Communications Earth & Environment has found that while the Arctic melt season has lengthened dramatically since satellite records began, that trend unexpectedly stabilized around 2010.

In 2024 alone, flood-related disasters around the world caused more than 8,700 deaths and economic losses exceeding 450 billion euros, with cumulative global losses of about 2.7 trillion euros over the previous decade. Against this backdrop, Europe's recent floods—from riverine events in large basins to flash floods in dense urban areas—have exposed the limits of existing protection systems and emergency responses.

Around 631,000 years ago—a geological blink of an eye—catastrophe unfolded in what is now northwestern Wyoming, U.S. During what is thought to have been a series of immense volcanic eruptions, life within hundreds of kilometers of the blasts was shattered. Ash was dispersed across much of North America, and the effects were felt worldwide. This was a super-eruption of the massive volcanic system located in what is now Yellowstone National Park.

Seven breached Planetary Boundaries continue to worsen as record ocean heat, droughts, floods, wildfires and extreme heat reveal an Earth system under strain, according to the latest Planetary Health Check. The annual update is authored by more than 60 scientists and produced by the Planetary Boundaries Science Lab at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).

Smoke from African agricultural fires brightens clouds over the southeast Atlantic—but new research from scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science shows that the same weather pattern carrying the smoke also thins clouds and reduces cloud cover, effectively offsetting its cooling effect.

Stand on the damp sand on a California beach and chances are you're standing on top of an active earthworks site. Sand hoppers (Megalorchestia spp.), the tiny, shrimp-like creatures commonly found eating away at kelp on the shore, have been found to move massive amounts of sand, excavating up to 50 kg (110 pounds) of sand per meter (3.3 feet) of shoreline per day.

In 2024, D. Sarah Stamps' team detected and tracked a short-lived bulge in the land around a volcano in Tanzania. In a paper published Sep. 18, Stamps identified the cause of the uplift: 1 million cubic meters of magma pouring into an existing magma reservoir about 1.8 miles (2.9 kilometers) underground.