Phys.org: Earth science

The nightmare scenario of Atlantic Ocean currents collapsing, with weather running amok and putting Europe in a deep freeze, looks unlikely this century, a new study concludes.

Imagine floating in space, gazing on a frozen white orb. The ball hangs in the void, lonely and gleaming in the light from its star. From pole to equator, the sphere is covered in a thick crust of ice. In orbit around the white planet is a single cratered moon.

A century of fire suppression, combined with global warming and drought, has led to increasingly destructive wildfires in the Western United States. Forest managers use tools like prescribed burns, thinning, mastication, and piling and burning to reduce fuel—live and dead trees, needles and leaves, and downed branches—that can feed intense wildfires. These methods aim to lower fuel levels, reduce crown density, and protect fire-resistant trees, fostering healthier, more resilient forests.

A new tool created using AI could help forecast volcanic eruptions around the world, following breakthrough research from a University of Canterbury-led team. The data-driven models developed by the team could become part of early warning systems used to predict future eruptions, with the potential to save lives and prevent damage to critical infrastructure.

Researchers from Japan and Taiwan reveal for the first time that helium, usually considered chemically inert, can bond with iron under high pressures. They used a laser-heated diamond anvil cell to find this, and the discovery suggests there could be huge amounts of helium in the Earth's core. This could challenge long-standing ideas about the planet's internal structure and history, and may even reveal details of the nebula our solar system coalesced from.

New Curtin University research has revealed how massive ancient glaciers acted like giant bulldozers, reshaping Earth's surface and paving the way for complex life to flourish.

The Walker circulation, an atmospheric circulation pattern in the tropics, has accelerated in recent years, puzzling climate scientists who had anticipated the opposite. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and the University of Tokyo have found out why by revealing the competing effects between global warming and the sea surface temperature pattern effect.

Turbidity currents are an important natural process that often goes unnoticed: these powerful currents beneath the ocean surface carve deep submarine canyons, create huge sediment deposits and can damage submarine cables and pipelines. Although the phenomenon has been known for about 100 years, its high-energy nature has made it almost impossible to measure directly—any instruments placed in its path would be destroyed by its immense force, much like avalanches on land.

Long after tectonic plate movement has created mountains, forces such as weather and river erosion can continue to shape a landscape. One such landscape is the Colorado Plateau, which spans more than 336,000 square kilometers (83 million acres) across four states and encompasses iconic sites such as the Grand Canyon and Arches National Park.

Deep beneath the barren landscape of Antarctica lies secrets to the climatic history of the world. Frozen in the ice are chemical markers which, when studied by scientists, can help reveal a historical record of key climate events.

Determining the degree to which shifting drought conditions around the world are attributable to natural hydroclimatic variability and how much they are caused by climate change is a complicated task. Scientists often use complex computer models to simulate past climate variability and to identify unprecedented drought conditions.

It is no strange sight to see icebergs break off of the Antarctic ice cap and drift away, like the gigantic sheet of ice that is currently heading for the island of South Georgia. But climate change is making it happen more frequently, with ever-larger icebergs in the waters around Antarctica.

Each summer, more and more lake beaches are forced to close due to toxic algae blooms. While climate change is often blamed, new research suggests a more complex story: climate interacts with human activities like agriculture and urban runoff, which funnel excess nutrients into the water.

Today we are witnessing rapid global sea level rise attributable mostly to climate change–driven melting of ice sheets and glaciers and thermal expansion of seawater. However, sea level change also occurs over millions of years as geological processes gradually reshape Earth's ocean basins and change their total storage volume.

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have carried out an unprecedentedly detailed survey of pumice rafts in the aftermath of the 2021 Fukutoku-Oka-no-Ba volcanic eruption in Japan. Using samples from 213 different locations, they considered raft density, the size and roundness of individual pumice, and biological species attached.

A team of astrophysicists, geoscientists, chemists and life scientists affiliated with a host of institutions in Japan has found evidence that billions of years ago, the Earth's oceans were green. In their study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, the group used a variety of environmental factors to create a simulation of Earth several billion years ago.

A new study introduces the Community Land Active Passive Microwave Radiative Transfer Modeling platform (CLAP)—a unified multi-frequency microwave scattering and emission model designed to revolutionize land surface monitoring. This cutting-edge platform combines active and passive microwave signals to offer potentially accurate simulations of soil moisture and vegetation conditions.

In the delicate balancing act between human development and protecting the fragile natural world, sand is weighing down the scales on the human side.

The impending loss of the Amazon rainforest due to deforestation has concerned scientists, activists, and citizens all over the globe. Natural habitats sustaining the region's incomparable biodiversity and important carbon stores are at stake, with far-reaching implications for the global climate.

A new USC study reveals a dramatic surge in building collapses in the ancient Egyptian port city of Alexandria, directly linked to rising sea levels and seawater intrusion.