Phys.org: Earth science

The Antarctic coastal zone is not simply the edge of the continent. It is a tightly coupled system where ice from the ice sheet extends over the seabed, initially resting on it and farther out floating as ice shelves. Here, mass, heat and nutrients are exchanged with the ocean through various processes. Even the smallest changes can have outsized consequences.

The fact that the ocean gets colder as you go deeper is fairly intuitive, but a similar gradient exists along the surface of the ocean, even at scales of 1 kilometer to tens of kilometers. A new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that this horizontal gradient significantly contributes to the intensity of tropical cyclones, providing a potential tool for better storm warning systems.

Inside a lab at the University of Texas at Dallas, researchers have re-created a small-scale ocean environment where they can make waves build, break and crash into one another.

Urban heat adaptation will gain in importance as climate change progresses. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have analyzed how sociodemographic factors (nationality, age, and rent) correlate with heat exposure throughout Germany.

Recently, heavy rains have caused flooding in Grand Canyon and Zion National Parks, resulting in the loss of at least two lives. In U.S. national parks, maintaining visitor safety can be complicated because it is difficult to measure who is in a park and where they are, much less what hazards they will face as extreme weather events become more common, according to Bing Pan, professor of recreation, park and tourism management at Penn State.

Have you ever walked across a salt flat so expansive it feels like another planet? That's what it's like standing in Egypt's coastal sabkhas—those otherworldly landscapes where the ground crunches beneath your feet and the air shimmers with heat. These aren't just barren wastelands; they're living laboratories that record the pulse of our changing climate.

The Labrador Shelf is a shallow marine area on the margin of the Labrador Sea in the North Atlantic off the east coast of Canada. During the last ice age, this region was covered by the Laurentide Ice Sheet, one of the largest ice masses in Earth's history, which once covered vast parts of North America.

Extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts and torrential rains, affect water quality in lakes, rivers and coastal areas. This creates significant challenges for ecosystems and water supplies because pesticides bound in soil can quickly leach into water sources. Now, researchers want to monitor this in a new way.

On Nov. 11, 2025, Earth experienced a severe geomagnetic storm triggered by solar flares and coronal mass ejections from an active sunspot region. While this kind of storm brings beautiful auroras admired in many areas around the world, it can also cause ionospheric disturbances that disrupt radio waves and affect crucial technologies. A new study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, found that disruptions caused by this storm scrambled GPS signals in areas where such disruptions have never been reported.

In computer simulations of the Big One—a large-magnitude earthquake that may occur along the San Andreas Fault in California—seismic waves ripple from the epicenter of a magnitude 7.8 earthquake near the Salton Sea into the Los Angeles Basin.

Erosion rates on parts of the Kaikōura Peninsula more than doubled after the 2016 earthquake, showing major quakes can "rapidly alter" the way coastlines evolve, an Otago researcher says.

Data from many sources, including NASA, have shown a significant decrease in Arctic sea ice since 1979. However, the processes driving the melting and freezing of sea ice are complex, and fluctuations occur throughout the year. Short-term variations in temperature, winds, ocean convection and water salinity within a certain region can also affect how much ice can reform or melt.

Whakaari/White Island's sudden eruption in December 2019, which killed 22 people and severely injured 25 others, was New Zealand's deadliest volcanic disaster in recent history.

New research is dismantling the longstanding myth of the "pristine" Amazon. A reconstruction of 10,000 years of Amazonian pyrogeography, based on 1,361 radiocarbon (¹⁴C) dates across 303 sites—including soil charcoal and burned archaeological material—shows that fire in the rainforest is almost exclusively a human-driven phenomenon, not a natural one.

Europe is no stranger to powerful windstorms, but some storms capable of causing serious damage have an unusual origin. Tropical cyclones can occasionally travel north from lower latitudes and reach Europe, where they can bring damaging winds and heavy rain even after losing some of their tropical characteristics.

When high or low tide occurs, the water does not necessarily rise and fall uniformly along the entire coastline. In fact, the height of the tide in a bay can vary by up to one meter (3 feet) from one location to another just a few kilometers away.

A new study suggests that El Ninos—the natural climatic chaos agent that pops up periodically and spikes global temperatures—are getting stronger because of human-caused climate change.

Fracking, the injection of high-pressure fluid to fracture rock and release oil or gas, can trigger earthquakes. While some sites generate small tremors beforehand that may provide an early warning, others produce few or none.

The devastating floods that have swept through the Nepal–Tibet border region are first and foremost a human tragedy. Hundreds of people have died or remain missing. But as scientists begin to reconstruct what happened, the event also exposes something fundamental about the way we understand natural hazards in high mountain regions. Mountains and rivers do not reset after an extreme event.

Rock weathering, the breakdown and dissolving of rocks and minerals caused by their exposure to water, air and biological life, is a major regulator of Earth's atmospheric CO2 levels and climate. Throughout Earth's history, rock weathering has been faster during warm periods with increased atmospheric CO2 levels.