Phys.org: Earth science

A researcher from the University of Southampton (UK) has found evidence that the treeless, rugged, grassland landscape of the Falkland Islands was home to a lush, diverse rainforest up to 30 million years ago.

Summer 2024 was officially the Northern Hemisphere's hottest on record. In the United States, fierce heat waves seemed to hit somewhere almost every day.

Recent satellite data reveal that the Konya Basin in the Central Anatolian Plateau of Türkiye is continually being reshaped over millions of years, according to a new analysis led by Earth scientists at the University of Toronto.

A team of researchers from the CNRS and the Paris Institute of Planetary Physics has developed an innovative imaging method that can probe the bowels of a volcano with unparalleled resolution and depth. This new method is based on the deployment of a network of geophones that capture not only the powerful shaking of earthquakes, but also the seismic noise caused by wind, the ocean, and human activity.

The average longest periods of drought could be ten days longer by the end of the century than previously predicted by climate models, according to research published in Nature. The findings suggest that the hazards droughts pose to societies and ecosystems in the coming decades may be greater than expected.

Research, published in the journal Scientific Reports, highlights the substantial advantages of using AI models over conventional drought indices in predicting the causes and onslaught of conditions leading to scarcity of rain and water.

As urban centers in mountainous regions grow, more people are driven to build on steeper slopes prone to slow-moving landslides, a new study finds. Slow-moving landslides are frequently excluded from estimates of landslide risk, but they could threaten hundreds of thousands of people globally, the researchers conclude.

New research led by the University of Pittsburgh shows that state and federal appropriations allowing Pennsylvania to treat abandoned mine drainage works to both successfully and cost effectively clean up the acidic water—particularly to the benefit of affected vulnerable communities. But their research also shows that current appropriations to the state are insufficient for long-term treatment of all mine drainage while also needing to address other abandoned mine hazards such as sinkholes.

Like many natural phenomena, precipitation can be both a blessing and a scourge to human life. On the one hand, it supplies our rivers and fields with water; on the other hand, it can cause floods, landslides, and other natural disasters. Either way, understanding and predicting the different types of precipitation is essential.

A study published in the journal Earthquake Research Advances sheds light on the relationship between the 2024 magnitude 7.6 Noto Hanto earthquake and a sizable earthquake swarm that began beneath Japan's Noto Peninsula in November 2020.

The Southern Annular Mode (SAM), with an iconic dipolar zonal wind pattern centered around the axis of the storm track, is the most dominant mode of variability orchestrating the weather and wind from the subtropics to the poles. Its origin, maintenance and feedback have been one of the central themes of atmospheric dynamics. But what role the clouds play in the life cycle of the annular mode remains largely unknown until now, while the wind pattern associated with SAM has long been observed to organize the distribution of cloud in the storm track.

Around 252 million years ago, the world suddenly heated up. Over a geologically brief period of tens of thousands of years, 90% of species were wiped out. Even insects, which are rarely touched by such events, suffered catastrophic losses. The Permian-Triassic mass extinction, as it's known, was the greatest of the "big five" mass extinctions in Earth's history.

Stanford researchers have developed an artificial intelligence-based tool—dubbed SandAI—that can reveal the history of quartz sand grains going back hundreds of millions of years. With SandAI, researchers can tell with high accuracy if wind, rivers, waves, or glacial movements shaped and deposited motes of sand.

The atmospheric lidar ATLID, the last of four instruments on board the EarthCARE satellite launched in May, has now been successfully put into operation. The joint mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) is designed to measure clouds, aerosols and radiation more accurately than ever before.

The core-mantle boundary (CMB) is a crucial interface within the Earth, marking the boundary between the outer core and the lower mantle. For the past two decades, seismological studies have identified anomalous low-velocity zones above the CMB, such as the large low-shear-velocity provinces (LLSVPs) beneath Africa and the Pacific. Smaller ultralow-velocity zones (ULVZs) have been detected in these regions, characterized by significantly lower seismic wave speeds and higher densities compared to the surrounding mantle.

A pioneering method for soil moisture retrieval using satellite navigation systems has been introduced, significantly boosting the accuracy and efficiency of global data collection. The research, published in the journal Satellite Navigation, tackles the challenges posed by geographical disparities in soil moisture assessment, providing a critical advancement for monitoring a key parameter in climate, agriculture, and environmental applications.

You're a hotshot working to contain a wildfire. The conflagration jumps the fire line, forcing your crew to flee using pre-determined escape routes. At the start of the day, the crew boss estimated how long it should take to get to the safety zone. With the flames at your back, you check your watch and hope they were right.

Products that we depend on and use every day arrive by way of massive container ships to ports around the world. But the maritime shipping industry is also responsible for polluting the air and oceans with sulfur dioxide, which can negatively affect human health, cause ocean acidification, and oxidize to form sulfate aerosols.

Dr. Souran Chatterjee, from the University of Plymouth, has made a major contribution to a second United Nations report exploring the best ways of harnessing climate change and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) synergies.

A new study allays fears that rerouting flights to avoid forming climate-warming contrails could result in inadvertently making climate warming worse.