Phys.org: Earth science

Sophisticated new chemical analysis of gases trapped in rocks for millions of years has cast new light on the origin of the gold deposits beneath Scotland and Ireland. The finding, made by team of scientists led by Professor Fin Stuart from the University of Glasgow, could help pinpoint the location of buried deposits of the treasured metal in the future.

As part of the EU project ECOTIP, an international team of researchers, including the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon, has analyzed the sea off Greenland more comprehensively than ever before. The key question: How is the area developing in the face of climate change and environmental pollution? Most of the samples were examined in the Hereon laboratories.

Recent fieldwork by Griffith University researchers has highlighted an African country that is facing a rapidly escalating environmental crisis as severe gully erosion—locally termed "mega gullies"—advances across valuable agricultural landscapes.

Some wildfires are so intense, they create their own weather—thunderstorms driven by heat that hurtle smoke as high as 10 miles into the sky like giant chimneys.

Asier Madarieta, a researcher in the EHU's HGI (Water Environmental Processes) group, has analyzed how the Earth's crust is being compressed and deformed in the field where Eurasia and Africa meet in the Western Mediterranean. His work contributes towards understanding this complex contact field better as well as opening the door to identifying the faults and structures that could lead to earthquakes or deformations on the peninsula.

For the first time, scientists have resolved extremely intense tropical cyclones and their effect on the ocean carbon cycle in a global Earth system model. Using two category-4 hurricanes in the North Atlantic as examples, the study reveals a cascade of physical-biogeochemical effects including uptake of carbon dioxide and regional-scale phytoplankton bloom. The results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Amazon rainforest is slowly transitioning to a new, hotter climate with more frequent and intense droughts—conditions that haven't been seen on Earth for tens of millions of years.

An international research team may have found an explanation for seismic anomalies, the noticeable deviations in the behavior of earthquake waves, in Earth's inner core.

The March 28, 2025, Myanmar earthquake is giving scientists a rare look into how some of the world's most dangerous fault systems behave, including California's San Andreas Fault. Earthquakes are notoriously messy and complex, but this one struck along an unusually straight and geologically "mature" fault, creating near-ideal conditions for researchers to observe how Earth releases energy during a major continental rupture.

New Jersey is parched top to bottom.

New research reveals how the speed of ocean currents and the shape of the seabed influence the amount of heat flowing underneath Antarctic ice shelves, contributing to melting.

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are highly vulnerable to global warming and scientists are being increasingly worried about the possibility of large parts of the ice sheets collapsing, if global temperatures keep on rising.

Galápagos is a living laboratory where every environmental decision matters. On Santa Cruz, the most populated island of the archipelago, freshwater is a limited and increasingly vulnerable resource due to urban growth, agricultural pressure, saltwater intrusion, and climate change. In this context, understanding how water behaves across the landscape becomes essential for water security.

What if it were possible to take a very slow geological process, one that takes thousands of years in nature, and speed it up so that it happens within hours, in order to slow the rate of global warming?