Phys.org: Earth science

A new study, led by Carbon Mapper scientists alongside researchers from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Arizona State University, University of Arizona, Scientific Aviation, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, provides the largest comprehensive assessment of hundreds of U.S. landfills using direct observations through airborne surveys.

An international subcommittee of geologists recently voted to reject a proposal to make the Anthropocene an official new geological epoch, defined by humanity's enormous impact on the planet. Assuming some protests do not overturn the ruling, it will now take another decade for the decision to be reviewed.

In some parts of Australia, coastal dunes are retreating from the ocean at an alarming rate, as waves carve up the beach and wind blows the sand inland. But coastal communities are largely oblivious to the changes.

Irrigation for agriculture uses more than half of the Colorado River's total annual water flow, reports a paper published in Communications Earth & Environment. This finding is part of a new comprehensive assessment of how the Colorado River's water is consumed—including both human usage and natural losses—and provides a more complete understanding of how the river's water is used along its over 2,300 km (almost 1,500-mile) length.

The interaction between the oceans and the atmosphere plays a vital role in shaping the Earth's climate. Changing sea surface temperatures can heat or cool the atmosphere, and changes in the atmosphere can do the same to the ocean surface. This exchange in energy is known as "ocean-atmosphere coupling."

In a recent development in geology published in Science Bulletin, an international research team, including scientists from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Missouri, and Guilin University of Technology, has provided crucial insights into the dynamics of the India-Eurasia collision and the Himalayan orogeny.

A new study greatly reduces uncertainty in climate change predictions, a move economists say could save the world trillions in adaptations for a hotter future. The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, considers dozens of climate models from different countries that differ in the magnitude of global warming they predict to occur by the end of the century.

Fukushima is now notorious for the nuclear disaster that took place in March 2011, the second worst of its kind after the Chernobyl catastrophe of 1986. An earthquake-triggered tsunami off the Japanese coast damaged backup generators at the Fukushima nuclear plant, leading to failure of the reactors' cooling systems. The residual heat partially melted a number of the fuel rods in three reactors, causing the release of nuclear radiation. A series of explosions further damaged containment buildings and released additional radiation to the surrounding area, leading to a 30 km radius of evacuation.

The quantitative reconstruction of the length of the rainy season and precipitation on the Tibetan Plateau (TP) is crucial for revealing the spatiotemporal evolution of the Westerlies and South Asian monsoon, as well as its ecological and environmental effects.

In a paper published in Science China Earth Sciences, a team of scientists proposes a comprehensive summary of the main fossil sequences and lithostratigraphy of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) during the Triassic time.

Extreme climatic events such as droughts, heat waves, and cold spells not only modify hydro-meteorological conditions but also alter the underlying characteristics (e.g., wildfires due to droughts changing the vegetation cover). Intense human activities, such as river channel modifications, afforestation, deforestation, industrialization, and urbanization, further amplify the variability of watershed system components.

Elevated surface ozone concentrations in China are posing a significant threat to both human health and crop yields. Extreme heat can greatly exacerbate ozone pollution through both complex chemical and physical processes. For example, extreme heat is often accompanied by stagnant weather conditions, which can lead to the accumulation and subsequent elevation of ozone.

There are several factors that play an important role in the development of floods: air temperature, soil moisture, snow depth, and the daily precipitation in the days before a flood. In order to better understand how individual factors contribute to flooding, UFZ researchers examined more than 3,500 river basins worldwide and analyzed flood events between 1981 and 2020 for each of them.

Forest regeneration projects that have received tens of millions of carbon credits and dominate Australia's carbon offset scheme have had negligible impact on woody vegetation cover and carbon sequestration, new research from The Australian National University (ANU) has found.

Floods affect more people worldwide than any other natural hazard, causing enormous damage that is expected to increase in a warming world. However, people and decision-makers in vulnerable regions are often unwilling to prepare for exceptionally severe events because they are difficult to imagine and beyond their experience.

It carries more than 100 times as much water as all the world's rivers combined. It reaches from the ocean's surface to its bottom, and measures as much as 2,000 kilometers across. It connects the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and plays a key role in regulating global climate. Continuously swirling around the southernmost continent, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current is by far the world's most powerful and consequential mover of water.

Has the Holocene epoch of the past 11,700 years been supplanted by the proposed Anthropocene epoch of today? Although it's broadly accepted that planetary systems have changed as a result of human influence, a panel of experts at the International Union of Geological Sciences answered a firm "no" when they recently voted down recognizing the start of the new epoch.

The pace of discovery in the oceans leaped forward thanks to teamwork between a deep-sea robot and a human occupied submarine leading to the discovery of five new hydrothermal vents in the eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean.

The Greater Caucasus mountain range stretches between the Black and Caspian Seas across parts of Russia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. These formidable peaks are the result of the subduction of the Arabian plate beneath the Eurasian plate.

Yale researchers are delving deep beneath the Himalayas to investigate dynamic geological processes near the boundary of Earth's core and mantle.