Phys.org: Earth science

Since 6 November 2025, Belém has become the center of attention for the entire planet for two weeks. COP30 is bringing together a record number of delegations, dozens of heads of state and intense public participation. President Lula transferred the government to the capital of Pará, symbolizing Brazil's commitment to the Amazon and the future of the global climate.

Twelve million people in Myanmar's Ayeyarwady Delta face serious long-term health risks from the harmful substance, arsenic, in their drinking water.

US budget cuts risk creating blind spots in Earth monitoring systems that would imperil weather forecasting and climate research for years to come, the deputy chair of a key UN-backed climate monitoring body warned in an AFP interview.

Beryllium-7 is a radioactive isotope of beryllium produced by cosmic rays in the atmosphere. A Japanese research team has explored, over space and time, how the beryllium-7 is transported from the atmosphere to Earth's surface. Their goal was to better understand the mechanisms of atmospheric mixing on Earth. Their research is published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres on October 14, 2025.

For decades, scientists have been baffled by two enormous, enigmatic structures buried deep inside Earth with features so vast and unusual that they defy conventional models of planetary evolution.

Water levels are creeping upward on shorelines across the world, and decision-making systems are not keeping up. One barrier to including sea level rise projections in adaptation plans is limited information on the full range of possible outcomes.

The massive 2018 eruption of Kīlauea Volcano on Hawai'i Island lasted for months, destroyed neighborhoods, and was associated with 60,000 earthquakes.

In light of the ongoing fifteen-year megadrought in Chile, an international team of researchers, including Francesca Pellicciotti from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), addressed a bold future scenario. Their findings: by the end of the century, the considerably worn-out glaciers will not be able to buffer a similar megadrought. They call for coordinated global climate policies to develop effective water management strategies. The results are published in Communications Earth & Environment.

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have identified stormlike circulation patterns beneath the Antarctic ice shelves that are causing aggressive melting, with major implications for global sea level rise projections.

The weather patterns that produced some of Europe's most extreme heat waves over the past three decades could prove far more lethal if they strike in today's hotter climate, pushing weekly deaths toward levels seen during the COVID pandemic, according to a study in Nature Climate Change.

An international team of scientists, including a senior researcher at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, has uncovered new evidence of ancient wildfires that reshapes our understanding of Earth's turbulent Early Triassic epoch, about 250 million years ago.

The first-ever audited account of the actual amounts of CO2 stored underground by CCS projects globally has been released. It was created by a new international consortium of scientists and industrial partners, including NTNU.

Two new studies from researchers at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography provide encouraging news about California's beaches at both local and statewide scales.

A research team has found that summer rainfall in the Arctic would increase by about 17% under 2°C global warming, approximately 16% of which is attributed to sea ice retreat. Their findings were published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Arctic coastlines are falling into the sea. Wave action, rising sea levels, and thawing permafrost are all contributing to the massive erosion that has forced whole towns to move farther from the water's edge.

The oceans have to play a role in helping humanity remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to curb dangerous climate warming. But are we ready to scale up the technologies that will do the job?

Satellite-based Earth observation provides a unique and powerful tool in tracking climate adaptation, an international study involving University of Galway researchers has shown.

Mangrove ecosystems rank among the most efficient "blue carbon" systems on Earth, capable of absorbing and storing vast quantities of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). However, mangroves also release methane (CH4), a potent greenhouse gas, potentially offsetting a portion of their climate mitigation benefits.

Currently, scientists struggle to forecast volcano eruption events, as no universally reliable, real-time eruption forecasting framework is available. Instead, researchers often rely on retrospective analysis to evaluate eruptions. And although much has been learned from doing this, it can sometimes introduce biases, such as data snooping, hindsight reinterpretation, and post-eruption model adjustment.

Groundwater rise as a result of climate change poses a significant threat to coastal cities, says University of Rhode Island assistant professor of geosciences Christopher Russoniello. Russoniello and colleagues recently published a commentary piece highlighting hazards that are often overlooked in urban infrastructure.