Phys.org: Earth science

Las Vegas locals began a project in the 1990s to protect a geological marvel at the edge of town. They made educational signs and were joined by politicians including late Sen. Harry Reid and then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, but the area was vandalized soon after.

Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent as a result of climate change. River floods such as those along the Ahr and Meuse valleys in 2021, the Central European floods of last September and the recent floods in Valencia, Spain, are caused by so-called cut-off lows. The Wegener Center at the University of Graz has now for the first time investigated how these storms could change with climate change.

Imagine a world filled only with daisies. Light-colored daisies reflect sunlight, cooling down the planet, while darker daisies absorb sunlight, warming it up. Together, these two types of daisies work to regulate the planet's temperature, making the world more habitable for all of them.

Militaries that have taken power in Africa's Sahel region—notably Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger—have put pressure on western mining firms for a fairer distribution of revenue from the lucrative mining sector.

Because trees can cool cities by providing shade and evaporating water into the atmosphere, greening city streets is an often-touted strategy for climate change adaptation. But trees provide benefits only if they're healthy, and physical variations in urban environments mean that not all trees have the same chance to thrive.

From late July to October 2022, residents of the Manu'a Islands in American Samoa felt the earth shake several times a day, raising concerns of an imminent volcanic eruption or tsunami.

The cool conditions which have allowed ice caps to form on Earth are rare events in the planet's history and require many complex processes working at once, according to new research.

El Niño and La Niña are climate phenomena that are generally associated with wetter and drier winter conditions in the Southwestern United States, respectively. In 2023, however, a La Niña year proved extremely wet in the Southwest instead of dry.

While most look for ways to avoid the steady rain falling from atmospheric rivers, some take advantage of the unwieldy weather patterns to improve forecasts and to help control, and ultimately modernize, the complex labyrinth of waterways hydrating California.

In the race to combat global climate change, much attention has been given to natural carbon sinks: those primarily terrestrial areas of the globe that absorb and sequester more carbon than they release. While scientists have long known that coastal salt marshes are just such a sink for "blue carbon," or carbon stored in the ocean and coastal ecosystems, it has been difficult to get an accurate estimate of just how much they store, and so most of the focus has been on terrestrial sinks such as forests and grasslands.

The greater Los Angeles area has long been the subject of intense seismographic monitoring. A network of highly sensitive seismometers peppers the region on a constant vigil for earthquakes.

Regional pollution is speeding up snow melt in the Indian Himalayas. That's according to a new study from an international group of scientists including Indian Institute of Technology Madras civil engineering Ph.D. student Amit Singh Chandel and Karl Rittger, research associate at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado Boulder.

A volcano near Alaska's most populous city is showing signs it could be headed toward an eruption, officials said.

Extreme fire seasons in recent years highlight the urgent need to better understand wildfires within the broader context of climate change. Under climate change, many drivers of wildfires are expected to change, such as the amount of carbon stored in vegetation, rainfall, and lightning strikes.

A new study published in Communications Earth & Environment gives possible insight into the underprediction of sea ice depletion and the formation of Arctic cyclones. Led by Steven Cavallo, a professor in the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, the study could lead to more accurate weather and climate models and better forecasting of Arctic cyclones.

A research team led by Prof. An Zhisheng and Prof. Zhou Weijian from the Institute of Earth Environment of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) developed an innovative approach to examining the contrasting hydroclimate impacts of summer monsoons and westerly circulation in the hyper-arid Asian interior since the middle Holocene.

Fewer wildfires burn in North American forests today than in previous centuries, increasing the risk of more severe wildfires, according to research published in Nature Communications. The findings may seem counterintuitive, but frequent low-lying surface fires often maintain balance in forests by reducing fuel sources across large areas.

A research team from the Aerospace Information Research Institute (AIR) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a new framework to evaluate soil moisture stations' spatial representativeness globally. Their study found that about 63% of existing soil moisture observation stations reliably reflect conditions at the satellite pixel scale.

Researchers have generated the first dataset of water flow beneath the entire Antarctic Ice Sheet, which will lead to more accurate projections of sea level rise. The findings are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

A team of geologists and mineral physicists at Harvard University, the University of California, Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago has found evidence via lab experiments that show the Earth's mantle is far more complex than previously known.