Phys.org: Earth science

Our planet has experienced dramatic climate shifts throughout its history, oscillating between freezing "icehouse" periods and warm "greenhouse" states.

New UBC Okanagan research shows that wildfire can change how much water remains in streams during the driest months of the year.

In early January, a giant sinkhole formed at an intersection in the West Oak Lane neighborhood of North Philadelphia after a water main break. Just two weeks earlier, the city reopened a section of the Schuylkill River Trail in Center City that had been shut down for two months due to a sinkhole. Last summer, some residents of Point Breeze in South Philly also waited two months for a sinkhole on their block to be repaired.

The ocean is continuously ventilated when surface waters sink and transport, for example, oxygen and carbon to greater depths. The efficiency of this process can be estimated using the so-called water age, which describes the time elapsed since a water mass last was in contact with the atmosphere.

A new analysis of air quality data from the past 70 years shows that Canada's record wildfire smoke in 2023 is part of a broader, continent-wide trend toward smokier skies across North America.

A team of scientists announced Tuesday they have developed new deep-sea landers specifically to test their contentious discovery that metallic rocks at the bottom of the ocean are producing "dark oxygen".

Cuts in sulfur emissions from oceangoing vessels have been tied to a reduction in lightning stroke density along heavily trafficked shipping routes in the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea, according to new research from the University of Kansas.

An atmospheric scientist at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), a part of The University of Alabama System, has helped uncover a previously unknown chemical pathway that plays a major role in the formation of air pollution particles in environments influenced by both natural and human-made emissions—an advance that could reshape how scientists understand air quality and climate impacts.

Amid chronic groundwater depletion, water overallocation, land and soil degradation, deforestation, and pollution, all compounded by global heating, a UN report today declared the dawn of an era of global water bankruptcy, inviting world leaders to facilitate "honest, science-based adaptation to a new reality."

No one ever thought the birth of the Rocky Mountains was a simple process, but we now know it was far more complex than even geophysicists had assumed.

Carbon released from Earth's spreading tectonic plates, not volcanoes, may have triggered major transitions between ancient ice ages and warm climates, new research finds.

The remnants of ice attached to the coast offer astounding insights into the climate history of past millennia. An international research team led by the CNR Institute of Polar Sciences (Italy) and involving the University of Bonn has applied a new method of analyzing sediment drill cores to show the climate history of the past 3,700 years in Antarctica. Surprisingly, it is connected to the natural fluctuations in solar activity. The study has now been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Soils store more carbon than the atmosphere and vegetation combined, with soil microorganisms playing the main role. As a result, the global soil carbon cycle—by which carbon enters, moves through, and leaves soils worldwide—exerts a significant impact on climate change feedback.

The climate warmed up almost as quickly 56 million years ago as it is doing now. When a huge amount of CO2 entered the atmosphere in a short period of time, it led to large-scale forest fires and erosion. Mei Nelissen, Ph.D. candidate at NIOZ and UU, and her colleagues were able to see this very clearly in the layers of sediment drilled off the Norwegian coast. The research was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on January 19.

Marine turbidites are layers of mud and sand deposited on the deep ocean floor by massive underwater landslides and are often used as a historical record for reconstructing earthquake histories.

Researchers at the University of Tsukuba conducted a three-year observational study (January 2019–December 2021) using a network of live cameras to monitor characteristic clouds around Mount Fuji.

According to researchers from Science Tokyo, a new three-dimensional model of the fault beneath the Marmara Sea in Turkey reveals where a future major earthquake could take place. Using electromagnetic measurements, the team mapped hidden structures that help explain how earthquakes initiate and where ruptures could occur in this region.

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have studied how polymer-coated fertilizer (PCF) applied to fields ends up on beaches and in the sea. They studied PCF deposits on beaches around Japan, finding that only 0.2% of used PCFs are washed into rivers and returned to the coastline. When there are canals connecting fields to the sea, this rises to 28%.

New research by Monash University and the ARC Center of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century analyzed close to three decades of weather data during the coral bleaching season and identified the prevalence of "doldrum days," and the absence of the trade winds, as a key factor in the mass bleaching events threatening the Great Barrier Reef.

Geologists from Heriot-Watt are part of an international research team that has confirmed why the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake off northeast Japan behaved in such an extreme and destructive way.