Phys.org: Earth science

The seafloor plays an important ecological and societal role. Understanding the processes that shape this environment will help guide conservation policy and decision-making about underwater infrastructure and geohazards.

New research from the University of St Andrews has found that metal production carbon footprints could be more than 10 times higher than previously estimated, with serious implications for the ambition to reach net zero.

About 90% of the Aral Sea has dried up. The exposed sediments have already released enormous amounts of carbon dioxide (748 megatons) since 1960. However, through restoration, the lake could once again become a carbon sink. This is shown by a study by the Centre for Advanced Studies of Blanes (CEAB-CSIC), published in Science, in which the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) participated. Hydrological restoration of the desiccated sediments would prevent emissions equivalent to Spain's total emissions over three years—namely, around 605 megatons, according to the research team's calculations.

A pioneering study has revealed that by the turn of the next century, at least half a million more people in the UK will be at risk of coastal flooding—a 25% increase compared with now. The research, led by the Met Office and the University of Bristol, quantifies for the first time the scale of the UK population at risk from coastal flooding under future sea level rise projections.

Sustained supershear earthquake ruptures produce distinct ground-motion characteristics compared with subshear earthquakes, according to a study published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, with potential implications for current building codes and ground-motion models.

A team of Virginia Tech geoscientists has found a new way to examine the widespread effects of dams on river temperatures: using Landsat thermal infrared imagery to gather data on rivers across the United States. By using satellite imagery instead of site-specific, on-the-ground measurements, researchers can draw from a much larger pool of data.

In much of Asia, the effects of climate change are felt through an increased frequency of extreme weather events, especially water-related ones. Droughts are becoming more common in mainland Southeast Asia, while periods with unusually large amounts of rainfall are increasing in Central Asia. Rice University's Na Wang and Sylvia Dee were interested in understanding whether these two extremes were related, despite being geographically distant. The researchers' findings were recently published in Nature Geoscience.

Cardiff University leads a multidisciplinary research collaboration representing academia and multiple nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to explore Somalia's 2023 El Niño floods and lessons learned from a similar event in 1997. The research, which has yet to undergo peer review, was released as a preprint on Earth ArXiv because academics believe the situation ahead of this year's Deyr season—the secondary, shorter rainy season in the Horn of Africa, typically running from October to December—could be much more serious, and the findings have urgent implications for planning now.

A recent study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, combines historical satellite observations with atmospheric reanalysis data to construct a multidecade record of low-cloud cover in the hope of improving current climate models.

Natural hydrogen is considered a potential low-carbon energy source. But how much is generated underground—and how quickly? An international research team led by the LIAG Institute for Applied Geophysics in Hannover has published the first process-based estimates for the Western Pyrenees and Northern California in Nature Communications. The calculated production rates are lower than earlier theoretical estimates. The study's new evaluation method, through the open-source tool PoNHy, allows more realistic assessments and can be applied to other regions to identify promising geological systems more precisely and evaluate their potential.

The end-Triassic mass extinction, 201 million years ago, is linked to volcanism that resulted from the break-up of Pangea and which pumped out vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, causing extreme global warming of 5 to 10 degrees Celsius. As a result, tree-dominated vegetation collapsed and the highly disturbed landscapes were colonized by ferns that formed savannahs across large swaths of what is now Northwest Europe.

New analysis shows that a "pause" in Arctic winter sea ice decline seen in the early 2020s has ended following record lows in 2025 and early 2026. The study, led by the University of Southampton in collaboration with the National Oceanography Center (NOC), adds the most recent satellite observations to sea ice coverage trends during the winter growth and peak phases of the Arctic sea ice cycle.

Researchers have copied massive quantities of publicly available climate and environmental data from NASA onto a Swiss supercomputer to train artificial intelligence models—and for safekeeping amid U.S. funding cuts.

Some of the most extraordinary gems ever found belong to a rare class of diamonds known as CLIPPIRs (Cullinan-like, Large, Inclusion-Poor, Pure, Irregular, Resorbed). They make up less than 1% of all diamonds on Earth and include three of the largest diamonds ever recovered: the Cullinan, at 3,106 carats (1.4 pounds), found at the Premier mine in South Africa; the 1,111-carat Lesedi La Rona, discovered at the Karowe mine in Botswana in 2015 and sold for $53 million in 2017; and the 2,492-carat Motswedi (1.1 pounds), recovered from the Karowe mine in 2024.

The Great Salt Lake is separated by a 20-mile (32-kilometer) causeway into a super-salty north arm and a less-salty south arm, with each hosting distinct communities of extremophiles. These organisms mingle at a gap in the causeway, designed to regulate salinity, that has provided microbiologists with an unusual and rich opportunity to study how human activities and weather disturbances affect microbial communities in extreme environments.

AI companies increasingly want to move their operations into space. Elon Musk's SpaceX has applied to launch over a million AI data center satellites and ultimately build them on the moon.

Africa is home to around 70% of the world's burned area—the total area of land scorched by wildfires each year—making it the planet's biggest wildfire hotspot. Yet despite this, satellite observations have revealed an unexpected trend over the past two decades: The amount of land burned across the continent has been steadily falling.

A floating research station resembling a giant aluminum igloo on Sunday set out from France to begin a long-term mission in the Arctic that will see it drift with the polar ice in one of the most hostile environments.

A new review in Limnology and Oceanography led by scientists at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography warns that the rapid loss of oxygen from the ocean and other aquatic ecosystems is pushing Earth toward an "unsafe space," with consequences that could be irreversible on human timescales.

Alberto Borges, oceanographer at the University of Liège, has conducted a comparative study in Belgium and Africa on the microbial oxidation of methane in rivers, a natural process in which certain bacteria consume this powerful greenhouse gas before it is released into the atmosphere. His research reveals that this biological filter, which is more active in African rivers than in Belgian rivers, remains insufficient to offset the rise in methane emissions expected because of global warming and nitrate pollution.