Phys.org: Earth science

When combined with data from tree-ring records, stalagmites can open up a unique archive to study natural climate fluctuations across hundreds of years, a research team including geoscientists from Heidelberg University and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have demonstrated.

In Japan, the summer season is characterized by stagnant rain fronts, causing persistent heavy rainfall. This phenomenon is reportedly associated with global-scale atmospheric and oceanic anomalies. Remote influences from the tropical and extratropical regions have been identified as the main causes, respectively. However, the link between the two causes remains unclear.

On September 4, 2022, Hayato Ueda, a geologist at Niigata University, boarded a submarine vehicle with pilot, Chris May, and took a dive into the Japan Trench within the epicenter area of the 2011 Tohoku-oki megaquake, which caused the devastating tsunami disaster.

Humans store water in huge metal towers and deep concrete reservoirs. But nature's water storage is much more scenic—the snowpack that tops majestic mountains. Even if we don't realize it, humans rely on those natural water towers just as much if not more than the ones we build. When the spring rains and summer sun melt this snowpack, it flows downhill to thirsty landscapes and humans. It provides water when precipitation is at its lowest and refills natural and built reservoirs. About a quarter of the world relies on the water stored in mountains.

Some of Africa's dry areas face serious water shortages due to minimal rainfall. An ancient system of drawing water from aquifers, the "qanat system," could help. Gaathier Mahed, an environmental scientist and expert on the management of groundwater, has studied the feasibility of these systems. He tells us more.

The laws of thermodynamics dictate that a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, but new research has found that atmospheric moisture has not increased as expected over arid and semi-arid regions of the world as the climate has warmed.

Climate change has caused Greenland's ice sheet to lose 20 percent more ice than previously thought, according to research published Wednesday that used satellite imagery to track the retreat of glaciers over the past four decades.

Sea-level rise—along with increasing temperatures—is one of the clearest signals of man-made global warming. Yet exactly how rising water levels affect the coast is often misunderstood.

Three to five billion people—or up to two-thirds of the world's population—are set to be affected by projected rainfall changes by the end of the century unless the world rapidly ramps up emissions reduction efforts, according to new research by myself and colleagues.

Sustainable water management is an increasing concern in arid regions around the world, and scientists and regulators are turning to remote sensing tools like OpenET to help track and manage water resources. OpenET uses publicly available data produced by NASA and USGS Landsat and other satellite systems to calculate evapotranspiration (ET), or the amount of water lost to the atmosphere through soil evaporation and plant transpiration, at the level of individual fields.

As the threat of global warming looms, researchers are racing to understand how complex, interconnected weather systems affect one another. Unprecedented changes to weather patterns, sometimes in defiance of models and predictions, point to the need for a global perspective.

New insights from artificial intelligence about permafrost coverage in the Arctic may soon give policymakers and land managers the high-resolution view they need to predict climate-change-driven threats to infrastructure such as oil pipelines, roads and national security facilities.

Nearly 75% of the U.S. could experience damaging earthquake shaking, according to a recent U.S. Geological Survey-led team of more than 50 scientists and engineers.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have upgraded a highly precise technology designed to monitor emissions of methane, a critical greenhouse gas, and other trace gases, even in harsh field conditions. Measuring methane emissions and pinpointing their source is an important step toward reducing them—the goal of the Global Methane Pledge recently signed by more than 150 nations at the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

A team of oceanographers, geologists and Earth scientists affiliated with multiple institutions in the U.S. and Germany has learned more about the history of the Melanesian Border Plateau by studying rocks they retrieved from the ocean floor in 2013 along with seismic data. Their paper is published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

A new AI program can train neural networks using just a handful of images to rapidly characterize in satellite and drone data new objects such as ocean debris, deforestation zones, urban areas and more.

The disaster near the small town of Brumadinho in southeastern Brazil occurred shortly after midday on 25 January 2019. At a nearby iron ore mine, the tailings dam—a storage area for the sludgy, fine-grained residues from ore processing, or "tailings"—collapsed.

Climate change is reshaping forests differently across the United States, according to a new analysis of U.S. Forest Service data. With rising temperatures, escalating droughts, wildfires, and disease outbreaks taking a toll on trees, researchers warn that forests across the American West are bearing the brunt of the consequences.

For a study published in the Journal of Remote Sensing, a team of scientists led by Xihan Mu from Beijing Normal University has made a leap forward in environmental monitoring and ecological research. They have created seamless maps of Fractional Vegetation Cover (FVC) over China at 30-meter resolution and semimonthly intervals, covering the years 2010-2020.

Between the record-breaking global heat and extreme downpours, it's hard to ignore that something unusual is going on with the weather in 2023.