Phys.org: Earth science

The Anthropocene became part of the zeitgeist after Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen launched the idea in 2000. This is the notion that a crescendo of human impacts has recently propelled Earth out of the relatively stable climatic conditions of the Holocene epoch, during which human civilization developed and flourished, to produce a new kind of planet.

Canada's last epishelf lake drained into the Arctic Ocean following the 2020 breakup of the Milne Ice Shelf and will not recover, a new study confirms.

Indonesia's Mount Anak Krakatau has erupted again this week, sending plumes of volcanic ash high into the sky and disrupting hundreds of flights. More than 300,000 passengers have been affected.

Southeast Asia has spent decades trying to tackle haze from forest fires. Yet every few years, the region finds itself breathing it again. The transboundary environmental problem has become a recurrent phenomenon in the region.

Since the 1950s, the Tibetan Plateau has experienced pronounced warming and wetting. However, an overall shift toward wetter conditions does not necessarily mean that drought risk has diminished. On the contrary, against the backdrop of continued warming, compound hot-dry events—characterized by the simultaneous occurrence of high temperatures and drought—have become an increasingly important climate risk across the plateau.

Researchers have developed a method for extrapolating sea surface temperatures from sparse data that is significantly more accurate than other commonly used computational methods and slightly more accurate than the best-performing AI model, while taking a fraction of the time to train. The work has implications for both short-term weather forecasting and longer-term climate predictions.

Across southern Europe, increasingly extreme heat, wildfire and intense rainfall are forcing planners to consider how one event can alter the risk of the next. Portugal's exceptionally wet winter and another summer of wildfire risk are an example of this. As a professor of architecture and climate change adaptation who has been following the cyclical nature of weather extremes in the Pinhal Interior region since the deadly 2017 fires, I explain why prevention must connect forests, settlements, slopes and waterways.

Radiation from space is constantly entering Earth's atmosphere, but how much of it reaches the altitudes used by commercial aircraft depends not only on height and location, but also on the activity of the sun. A new study based on high-altitude balloon measurements over southern Israel has mapped these changes through the atmosphere and found that radiation levels at aviation altitudes rise as solar activity falls.

Researchers at The University of Manchester have developed a new physics-based artificial intelligence approach that, for the first time, enables accurate global-scale predictions of how dissolved organic carbon moves between seawater and marine sediments, a crucial but previously unquantifiable component of the planet's carbon cycle.

Geochemical studies of volcanic rocks from Baffin Island, Canada, and Iceland suggest that some of the water dating back to Earth's formation may still be preserved deep within the planet. However, it has remained unclear which minerals could store such quantities of water under the extreme conditions of Earth's interior.

How will global access to food, water and energy evolve in coming decades? A new study coauthored by MIT researchers suggests the answers could be very different depending on region, resource and income.

Drylands are defined as regions where rainfall is low relative to the atmosphere's ability to draw water from soil and plants. Expanding boundaries of these regions are frequent concerns in climate change considerations. While they can support large populations and ecosystems, dryland expansion can worsen water scarcity, land degradation and desertification.

The year is 2060. London shudders through months of Nordic winter freezes. Across northern Europe, oak and beech forests wither under severe frost and drought, while cereal yields collapse from temperatures plunging as low as 27 degrees Fahrenheit below today's averages. In U.S. coastal cities such as Miami and Charleston, South Carolina, sea levels have risen three feet (about 0.9 meters), with routine tidal flooding washing away streets. Meanwhile, in the North Atlantic, deep-sea nutrients remain trapped on the ocean floor, starving plankton blooms and triggering a cascade of die-offs from cod to migrating whales. The ocean's engine has stalled.

The mountain section whose collapse triggered fatal floods in Nepal and China on Aug. 26 had experienced unprecedented heat for the time of year, meteorological data analyzed by a researcher show.

Marine heat waves are a consequence of climate change and are increasingly altering marine and coastal regions worldwide. An international study led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon now shows that many coastal seas absorb more CO₂ from the atmosphere during these extreme events than under normal conditions. The effect is particularly pronounced in polar and subpolar shelf seas of the Northern Hemisphere, where sea ice is declining as temperatures rise.

The first national map of Ireland's exposure to climate hazards, including rising sea levels and storm surges, has identified the stretches of coastline facing the greatest pressures, providing critical new evidence to support coastal management and climate adaptation.

Meltwater rivers flowing from Svalbard glaciers are carrying ancient methane from rocks beneath the ice into the open air, new research published in Nature Communications shows.

A new study reveals that microbial life deep within Earth has persisted and repeatedly flourished through hundreds of millions of years of mountain-building and erosion. By analyzing minerals, fluids and gases from a 2.3-kilometer-deep (1.4-mile-deep) borehole in central Sweden, researchers have uncovered episodic bursts of methane-producing life linked to major geological events that shaped Scandinavia. The paper is published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Permafrost refers to permanently frozen ground. The rock is held together by ice, much like cement binds concrete. However, when the ice thaws, the ground becomes weak and unstable. During an earthquake, this can trigger a series of natural hazards. An international research team investigated precisely such an event.

The news has been full of headlines about findings from a United Nations report: The world is set to exceed the 1.5°C global warming target set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement. The report has raised concerns and questions about what a 1.5°C increase could mean for our world.