Phys.org: Earth science

Five well-publicized polar geoengineering ideas are highly unlikely to help the polar regions and could harm ecosystems, communities, international relations, and our chances of reaching net zero by 2050.

A new study has uncovered the Levant Basin as one of the world's most concentrated graveyards for plastic packaging and the mechanisms that help the plastic sink down to the seafloor.

Antarctic ice is melting. But exactly which forces are causing it to melt and how melting will influence sea level rise are areas of active research. Understanding the decay of ice shelves, which extend off the edges of the continent, is particularly pressing because these shelves act as barriers between ocean water and land. Without ice shelves, the continent's glaciers would flow freely into the ocean, hastening sea level rise.

Scientists have confirmed that East Antarctica's interior is warming faster than its coastal areas and identified the cause. A 30-year study, published in Nature Communications and led by Nagoya University's Naoyuki Kurita, has traced this warming to increased warm air flow triggered by temperature changes in the Southern Indian Ocean.

A common problem with oil wells is that they can run dry even when sound-based measurements say there's still oil there. A team from Penn State University used Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's (PSC's) flagship Bridges-2 supercomputer to add a time dimension to these seismic measurements, as well as to analyze how oil damps down the loudness of sound traveling through it. Their preliminary analysis suggests that hidden rock structures in oil reserves prevent all the oil from being pumped out. They're now scaling up their work to tackle realistically sized oil fields.

Resilience is a term often discussed in the face of a natural disaster such as a major earthquake, but the attributes of resilience and how they interact are rarely analyzed, researchers say in a new study published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.