Phys.org: Earth science

New research finds that not only will climate change make heat waves hotter and longer, but the lengthening of heat waves will accelerate with each additional fraction of a degree of warming.

A large increase in atmospheric methane between 2020 and 2022 raised concerns that tropical wetland emissions had surged in response to a changing climate, but a study led by the University of Michigan shows that this was not the case. The methane must have come from somewhere else.

A daily mismatch between temperature and humidity, observed in certain mountain and waterside regions, helps regulate atmospheric dryness. According to a new study published in Science Advances, this protective effect may weaken under global warming.

Over the past two centuries, humans have locked up enough water in dams to shift Earth's poles slightly away from the planet's axis of rotation, according to recent research.

Forests are a crucial resource for carbon mitigation, currently offsetting around 20% of North American carbon emissions. As temperatures continue to rise, scientists are rushing to understand how climate change is affecting forests and their carbon sequestering abilities. A new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides some valuable insight into how warmer winters might hinder the ability of trees to store carbon—despite warmer summers encouraging their growth.

The ocean absorbs carbon from the atmosphere, but exactly how much is uncertain. For instance, estimates from the 2023 Global Carbon Budget ranged from 2.2 billion to 4 billion metric tons of carbon per year. One source of this uncertainty may be that the effects of bubbles have not been incorporated into air-sea carbon flux estimates, according to a new study by P. Rustogi and colleagues published in Global Biogeochemical Cycles.

Existing sea level rise models for coastal cities often overlook the impacts of rainfall on infrastructure. Researchers at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa discovered that by 2050, large rain events combined with sea level rise could cause flooding severe enough to disrupt transportation and contaminate stormwater inlets across 70% of Waikīkī on O'ahu, Hawai'i, due to interactions with water in the Ala Wai Canal.

The devastating floods that killed nearly 200 people in Germany four years ago could have been even more damaging, new research suggests. The floods in July 2021 were among the worst disasters in German history. At least 196 people died in Germany, 43 people died in Belgium and the total damage to Central Europe amounted to €46 billion.

Any home gardener knows they have to tailor their watering regime for different plants. Forgetting to water their flowerbed over the weekend could spell disaster, but the trees will likely be fine. Plants have evolved different strategies to manage their water use, but soil moisture models have mostly neglected this until now.

Melting glaciers may be silently setting the stage for more explosive and frequent volcanic eruptions in the future, according to research on six volcanoes in the Chilean Andes.

A joint project which saw two boreholes drilled in northern Singapore has revealed subsurface temperatures reaching up to 122°C at a depth of 1.76 km in Sembawang, significantly higher than earlier findings recorded in Admiralty, where 70°C was measured at a depth of 1.12 km.

A new study conducted at Reichman University's School of Sustainability presents an innovative tool to help decision-makers better understand the condition of streams and thereby advance their restoration and rehabilitation. The tool, called SESBI—the Stream Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity Index—is designed to measure what is called "stream health," meaning the degree to which a stream functions ecologically and contributes to public welfare.

Sea level on Earth has been rising and falling ever since there was water on the planet. Scientists were already able to use sediments and fossils to roughly reconstruct how sea levels changed over time steps of a million years or more.

Due to the radiative thermal conductivity of the mineral olivine, only oceanic plates over 60 million years old and subducting at more than 10 centimeters per year remain sufficiently cold to transport water into Earth's deep mantle. This was found by scientists from the University of Potsdam and from the Helmholtz Center for Geosciences (GFZ) Potsdam, together with international colleagues, by measuring the transparency of olivine under conditions in Earth's mantle for the first time. Their results are published in the journal Nature Communications.

A new autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) imaged a previously unexplored portion of the seafloor in ultra-deep waters near the Mariana Trench. Operationalizing this technology for the first time was part of a mission led by the Ocean Exploration Cooperative Institute (OECI), based at the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography, with support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

We are going back 55 million years. That was when Greenland and Norway began to drift apart, causing the Atlantic Ocean to open up. The Earth's crust between them became thinner and thinner, and enormous amounts of lava poured forth.

Peak water flows in parts of India's largest river basin have been falling by more than one-sixth every decade, according to a study published in npj Natural Hazards that highlights a similar trend across the country, impacting irrigation, domestic water, and hydropower in the world's most populous nation.

Solar Maximum 2025 is the expected peak of solar activity in Solar Cycle 25, characterized by heightened sunspots, solar flares, and coronal mass ejections. This peak is anticipated around mid to late 2025, coinciding with the sun's magnetic field flip. Such solar activity may influence Canadian climate patterns by potentially affecting weather systems.

New research from a Southampton scientist has identified the causes of changes affecting river deltas around the world—warning of an urgent need to tackle them through climate adaptation.

Earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago, during the geological eon known as the Hadean. The name "Hadean" comes from the Greek god of the underworld, reflecting the extreme heat that likely characterized the planet at the time.