Phys.org: Earth science

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.

In mountain regions like the Rockies, headwater streams make up more than 70% of the river network and support the downstream waterways and communities. These headwaters are also home to many forms of aquatic life. While these sources are crucial, very few are monitored, and aspects of their hydrology are not well understood.

Soils release approximately 40–60 petagrams (Pg) of carbon annually into the atmosphere through microbial metabolism. Climate warming is projected to further enhance soil microbial respiration, intensifying positive carbon–climate feedback loops. However, it remains unclear whether this feedback might weaken over several years.

Scientists have developed a new way to represent the world's cities in global climate and Earth system models (GCM & ESMs), offering a more accurate picture of how urban areas are being affected by—and contributing to—climate change.

In the summer of 2022, 20 islands in the Maldives were flooded when a distant swell event in the Indian Ocean coincided with an extremely high tide level.

As global climate talks at COP30 shift from setting lofty targets to transforming the systems that will get us there, Australia has been quietly strengthening its climate resilience rulebook.

"The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5°C in the next few years," UN Secretary-General António Guterres recently admitted ahead of the COP30 UN Climate Change Conference.