Phys.org: Earth science

Australia has a long history of bushfires. The 2019-2020 Black Summer was the worst in recorded history. But was that the worst it could get?

When it comes to the ocean's response to global warming, we're not in entirely uncharted waters. A UC Riverside study shows that episodes of extreme heat in Earth's past caused the exchange of waters from the surface to the deep ocean to decline.

During a 2017 research field trip to the Ichinokawa Mine (Ehime prefecture), which is famous for beautiful, sword-shaped stibnite crystals, Noriyoshi Tsuchiya found something unexpected. Although most would be entranced by the glittering crystals, it was a sedimentary rock bundle called breccia that caught his eye.

Climate changes, but not always for the same reason. Today's rapid climate change is due entirely to man. The Holocene—the last 12,000 years—has been seen as having a stable climate, with a lack of chaos that allowed humans to settle down, develop agriculture, build civilizations and thrive.

Taylor Swift fans literally made the earth move as the US singer-songwriter began her UK tour, the British Geological Survey said on Thursday, with seismic activity recorded six kilometers (nearly four miles) away.

When Hurricane Sally slammed coastal Florida in 2020, US pilot Dean Legidakes was aboard a scientific aircraft flying directly into the storm's core.

Earthquakes may betray their impending presence much earlier than previously thought through a variety of anomalies present in the ground, atmosphere and ionosphere that can be detected using satellites, a recent study in the Journal of Applied Geodesy suggests.

Edinburgh, no stranger to an occasional haze, experienced an unprecedented atmospheric event on 31 May, unlike any seen over the past 30 years. While sea haar from the North Sea often blankets Scotland's capital, the haze observed that Friday felt distinctively different. UKCEH researchers are currently investigating if this haze can be attributed to a volcanic plume that transited the UK following an eruption in Iceland.

The Western U.S. is heavily reliant on mountain snowpacks and their gradual melt for water storage and supply, and climate change is expected to upend the reliability of this natural process. Many agricultural communities in this part of the country are examining ways to adapt to a future with less water, and new research shows that a focus on supplementing water supply by expanding reservoir capacity won't be enough to avert future water crises.

University of Southern California scientists have proven that the Earth's inner core is backtracking—slowing down—in relation to the planet's surface, as shown in new research published in Nature.

May 2024 was the warmest May on the books, marking a full year of record-high monthly temperatures, NASA scientists found. Average global temperatures for the past 12 months hit record highs for each respective month—an unprecedented streak—according to scientists from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

When old satellites fall into Earth's atmosphere and burn up, they leave behind tiny particles of aluminum oxide, which eat away at Earth's protective ozone layer. A new study finds that these oxides have increased 8-fold between 2016 and 2022 and will continue to accumulate as the number of low-Earth-orbit satellites skyrockets.

Deposits of deep-pink sand washing up on South Australian shores shed new light on when the Australian tectonic plate began to subduct beneath the Pacific plate, as well as the presence of previously unknown ancient Antarctic mountains.

A class of Iowa State University storm chasers abandoned a remote ridge near Carbon, Iowa, and started driving south to get out of the way of an approaching tornado.

About 2.5 billion years ago, free oxygen, or O2, first started to accumulate to meaningful levels in Earth's atmosphere, setting the stage for the rise of complex life on our evolving planet.

A key to improving climate prediction is to improve understanding of the impact of aerosol on clouds, commonly known as the aerosol-cloud-interaction, according to a new study led by Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC) researchers published in Science Advances.

Global warming is an omnipresent issue, with widespread initiatives to draw down emissions and mitigate against the International Panel on Climate Change's worse-case scenario predictions of 3.2°C of warming by 2100 (relative to pre-Industrial levels). Current measurements stand at 1.1°C of warming across Earth, but polar regions are experiencing enhanced surface warming compared to the rest of the planet.

Emissions of nitrous oxide—a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide or methane—continued unabated between 1980 and 2020, a year when more than 10-million metric tons were released into the atmosphere primarily through farming practices, according to a new report by the Global Carbon Project.

Climate models are a key technology in predicting the impacts of climate change. By running simulations of the Earth's climate, scientists and policymakers can estimate conditions like sea level rise, flooding, and rising temperatures, and make decisions about how to appropriately respond. But current climate models struggle to provide this information quickly or affordably enough to be useful on smaller scales, such as the size of a city.

Coastal Alaska communities from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta northward will see more of their buildings exposed to flooding by 2100 if they continue developing at the same location, according to new research.