Phys.org: Earth science

Antarctic ice is melting. But exactly which forces are causing it to melt and how melting will influence sea level rise are areas of active research. Understanding the decay of ice shelves, which extend off the edges of the continent, is particularly pressing because these shelves act as barriers between ocean water and land. Without ice shelves, the continent's glaciers would flow freely into the ocean, hastening sea level rise.

Scientists have confirmed that East Antarctica's interior is warming faster than its coastal areas and identified the cause. A 30-year study, published in Nature Communications and led by Nagoya University's Naoyuki Kurita, has traced this warming to increased warm air flow triggered by temperature changes in the Southern Indian Ocean.

A common problem with oil wells is that they can run dry even when sound-based measurements say there's still oil there. A team from Penn State University used Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's (PSC's) flagship Bridges-2 supercomputer to add a time dimension to these seismic measurements, as well as to analyze how oil damps down the loudness of sound traveling through it. Their preliminary analysis suggests that hidden rock structures in oil reserves prevent all the oil from being pumped out. They're now scaling up their work to tackle realistically sized oil fields.

Resilience is a term often discussed in the face of a natural disaster such as a major earthquake, but the attributes of resilience and how they interact are rarely analyzed, researchers say in a new study published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the solar system. As a source of clean energy, hydrogen is well-suited for sustainable development, and Earth is a natural hydrogen factory. However, most hydrogen vents reported to date are small, and the geological processes responsible for hydrogen formation—as well as the quantities that can be preserved in geological settings—remain unclear.

A study published in the journal Science Advances, indicates how the heating in North America can trigger remote effects in Asia—this could be further exacerbated by anthropogenic global warming and human modification of the North American land surface.

The Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event (T-OAE), a major environmental upheaval occurring approximately 183 million years ago during the Mesozoic Era, stands as one of the most severe perturbations to Earth's carbon cycle in geological history.

In 2023, the Amazon rainforest experienced its worst recorded drought since records began. River levels dropped dramatically and vegetation at all levels deteriorated due to intense heat and water shortages. In such conditions, plants release increased amounts of monoterpenes—small, volatile organic compounds that act as a defense mechanism and help communication with their environment. Some molecules, such as α-pinene, which smells like pine, occur as mirror-image pairs, known as enantiomers.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is an enormous loop of ocean current in the Atlantic Ocean that carries warmer waters north and colder waters south, helping to regulate the climate in many regions. The collapse of this critical circulation system has the potential to cause drastic global and regional climate impacts, like droughts and colder winters, especially in Northwestern Europe.

Scientists are using artificial intelligence to understand escalating unrest in Italy's Campi Flegrei, a volcanic area that is home to hundreds of thousands of people.

The seas have long sustained human life, but a new UC Santa Barbara study shows that rising climate and human pressures are pushing the oceans toward a dangerous threshold.

Dr. Seunghak Lee, Jaeshik Chung, and Sang Hyun Kim of the Water Resources Cycle Research Center at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) observed how oil and water interact in porous media under various conditions using a microfluidic system that allows precise observation of microscopic fluid flows.

The explosion of animal life in Earth's oceans half a billion years ago during and after the Cambrian Period is commonly attributed to a substantial and sustained rise of free oxygen (O2) in seawater. Some researchers even argue for near-modern levels of ocean oxygenation at this time.

Abiotic organic synthesis during geological processes has long drawn scientific interest, as it is believed to have laid both the material and energetic groundwork for the emergence of early life on Earth.

El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the strongest interannual variability signal in Earth's climate system. The shifts between its warm and cold phases profoundly impact global extreme weather, ecosystems, and economic development. However, current climate models show large discrepancies in their future projections of ENSO sea surface temperature (SST) variability.

Cranfield University experts have developed a new method to precisely identify soil erosion hotspots along waterways, allowing for preemptive mitigation measures to be put in place that protect land and water systems.

A study by researchers at the University of Oxford, University of Leeds, and University College London has identified a new constraint on the chemistry of Earth's core, by showing how it was able to crystallize millions of years ago. The study is published in Nature Communications.

A recent study reveals how a major global climate pattern influences the African weather systems that help seed Atlantic hurricanes. The findings, published in the Journal of Climate, could lead to better seasonal forecasts of rainfall, drought, and tropical cyclone activity across the Atlantic basin.

Deep, gigantic cracks in the Earth known as gullies are tearing through African cities, swallowing up houses and streets, destroying infrastructure and displacing tens of thousands of people. Left unchecked, this new geological hazard could force millions of people to abandon their homes in the coming decades.

Billions upon billions of soot particles enter Earth's atmosphere each second, totaling about 5.8 million metric tons a year—posing a climate-warming impact previously estimated at almost one-third that of carbon dioxide.