Phys.org: Earth science

Hidden beneath the biggest ice mass on Earth, hundreds of subglacial lakes form a crucial part of Antarctica's icy structure, affecting the movement and stability of glaciers, and consequentially influencing global sea level rise.

Earlier in 2025, UNSW Sydney Ph.D. candidate Christina Schmidt submitted her thesis—from the deck of Australia's multi-billion-dollar icebreaker, just off the East Antarctic coast.

As a late-summer monsoon spread across California in recent weeks, it delivered hundreds of thousands of lightning strikes—record numbers in August and the first week of September. Those sparked hundreds of wildfires and, for many hikers, sheer terror.

Between a third and half of all soil carbon on Earth is stored in peatlands, says Tom and Marie Patton Distinguished Professor Joel Kostka. These wetlands—formed from layers and layers of decaying plant matter—span from the Arctic to the tropics, supporting biodiversity and regulating global climate.

If it feels like headlines reporting 100 or 1,000-year floods and megafires seem more frequent these days, it's not your imagination.

As I walked out onto the frozen Arctic water off Utqiagvik, Alaska, for the first time, I was mesmerized by the icescape.

The water cycle has become increasingly erratic and extreme, swinging between deluge and drought, according to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). It highlights the cascading impacts of too much or too little water on economies and society.

Streamflow drought—when substantially less water than usual moves through rivers—can seriously disrupt the welfare of nearby communities, agriculture, and economies. Synchronous drought, in which multiple river basins experience drought simultaneously, can be even more severe and far-reaching.

In May, a landslide above Blatten in the canton of Valais buried most of the village under a mass of ice, mud and rock, an event that has prompted in-depth research. At a recent conference in Innsbruck, UZH researcher Christian Huggel presented his findings on the link between the landslide and climate change.

Permafrost, ground frozen for at least two years underlying the cold Arctic and alpine regions of the Northern Hemisphere, covers about 17% of the global land surface and stores an estimated one-third of the world's soil organic carbon.

A research team led by Prof. Wu Qingbai from the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources (NIEER) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has identified important non-temperature environmental factors contributing to permafrost degradation on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

The 2,175-mile system of interconnected, man-made canals crisscrossing Florida, from Orlando to the Keys, has a particularly important role when a hurricane happens to be pinwheeling toward the peninsula: Flood control.

One of the biggest obstacles on the road to a low-carbon energy future is caused by the rare-earth element lithium, a critical component for the batteries that can store the abundant and sustainable energy from renewable sources.

Throughout the planet, there are only a handful of known tektite strewn fields, which are large swaths of land where natural glass (tektite) was strewn about after forming from terrestrial material and being ejected from a meteorite impact. The tektite glass can be ejected extremely long distances, placing strewn fields far from their origins.

Scientists may be a step closer to solving the mystery of Siberia's giant exploding craters. First spotted in the Yamal and Gydan peninsulas of Western Siberia in 2012, these massive holes, known as giant gas emission craters (GECs) can be up to 164 feet deep. They seem to appear randomly in the permafrost and are formed when powerful explosions blast soil and ice hundreds of feet into the air.

With CO2 emissions continuing unabated, an increasing number of policymakers, scientists and environmentalists are considering geoengineering to avert a climate catastrophe. Such interventions could influence everything from rainfall to global food supplies, making the stakes enormous.

On 16 September, the world marks the international day for the preservation of the ozone layer—a day of action initiated by the United Nations. This year's theme is "from science to global action"—a reference to the fact that scientific findings have underpinned successful political action to protect the ozone layer for decades.

The Ordovician Period stands as a critical chapter in Earth's geological history, with carbon isotope records serving as both a key tool for stratigraphic correlation and a vital archive to unravel the coevolution of ancient climates and biospheres. For decades, however, prior research has largely focused on carbonate carbon isotope (δ13Ccarb) data, leaving organic carbon isotope (δ13Corg) records significantly understudied.

A new study led by the U.S. Forest Service, with Chapman University as a key senior collaborator, published in Nature Communications, suggests Earth's own tropical soils may contribute to climate change as global warming continues, releasing vast amounts of carbon dioxide (CO₂) as they warm and potentially accelerating a dangerous feedback loop.

The ground-shaking that an earthquake generates is only a fraction of the total energy that a quake releases. A quake can also generate a flash of heat, along with a domino-like fracturing of underground rocks. But exactly how much energy goes into each of these three processes is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to measure in the field.