Phys.org: Earth science

Biochar can store carbon in the soil and reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—yet we still know too little about how long the biochar will persist. Now, researchers from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences have found a new way to measure this, using wood from the 1960s that was affected by nuclear weapons testing. The paper is published in the journal Radiocarbon.

Can protecting elephants and whales help mitigate climate change?

New research from the University of Aberdeen has revealed that periods of global warming can trigger long-lasting increases in wildfire activity, with ecosystems taking far longer to recover than previously thought. The study, recently published in Scientific Reports, provides the first detailed evidence of how wildfires responded to a major natural warming event around 65 million years ago, the Danian hyperthermal. This work offers important insights into the risks facing today's world as climate change drives more frequent and severe fires.

Rivers provide water for everything from growing crops and running factories to the taps in our homes, but droughts can leave them struggling to meet all these demands. A new study, published in Water Resources Research, suggests that changing how water is shared could help make limited supplies go further.

During Oct. 2026, the research vessel SONNE set sail from San Diego into the Pacific Ocean for expedition SO322. Its destination: the Clarion-Clipperton Zone north of the equator—the area that harbors the largest known deposits of polymetallic nodules on the seafloor. Germany, among others, holds an exploration license in this region.

As climate change is expected to increase the risks associated with extreme rainfall and flooding, managing floods requires approaches beyond conventional infrastructure such as dams and reservoirs.

A new study, led by IIASA researchers and coauthored by UNEP colleagues, finds that if governments fully implement their methane reduction plans, they could reduce global emissions by 11% between 2020 and 2030. This would reverse the current trend of increasing methane emissions, but would not be sufficient to achieve the goal of the Global Methane Pledge.

When Earth formed billions of years ago, its metallic core was wrapped in a global ocean of molten rock, which eventually cooled and crystallized to form the mantle. Today, when deep-rooted mantle plumes rise toward the surface and produce volcanic eruptions, the resulting lava can contain hydrogen from deep inside the planet.

Groundwater in many areas of the U.S. and across the globe is being depleted as pumping for drinking water and agriculture outpaces nature's ability to refill aquifers. In the most severe cases, this could lead to a point of no return, where an aquifer's physical structure collapses and it cannot be refilled.

A new study led by researchers at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) reveals that glaciers worldwide could lose ice faster than previously projected. Published in Nature Communications, the research shows that accounting for daily weather variability leads to more realistic simulations of glacier melt and results in greater projected ice loss by the end of the century. The findings highlight the importance of short-lived weather events, such as the exceptional heat waves and extreme melt seasons recently observed in several glacierized regions around the globe.

The world's oceans help slow climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere, but how much they take up can vary throughout the year. New research, published in Geophysical Research Letters, suggests these seasonal patterns are changing across the Indian Ocean, potentially affecting how it helps to regulate Earth's climate.

When a massive environmental disaster strikes, do societies simply collapse and disappear? Or do people find a way to adapt, rebuild and recover?

Most natural gas leakage in Indianapolis likely originates from homes and other buildings, not exterior pipelines and large-scale distribution infrastructure that deliver the fossil fuel, according to Penn State researchers who assessed nearly a decade of data.

Most studies of how clouds are responding to climate change focus on clouds over the oceans, rather than over mountains. Those that do focus on mountain clouds tend to explore cloud microphysics rather than long-term trends in cloud phase. But understanding cloud behavior over regions such as the Tibetan Plateau, which supplies water to hundreds of millions of people, is critical—especially as diminishing snowpack and altered precipitation patterns threaten this critical water source.

The writer Malcolm Gladwell popularized the term "tipping points" to refer to the moment when a trend or social behavior crosses a threshold and rapidly spreads everywhere. In physics, tipping points occur when systems—say, Earth's climate—reach an unstable point and topple over into a sea of change that is sometimes irreversible. Examples include global warming or the melting of polar ice caps.

A research team has found that molten rock can carry more oxygen than its chemical composition would seem to allow. Their study is published in National Science Review.

A phenomenon rarer than a solar eclipse and more powerful than any single storm system is unfolding this fall, and NASA is tracking it closely.

Future Arctic winter sea ice is likely to shrink by around 1 million square kilometers (386,000 square miles) more than previously thought, after researchers used clues from a warm period 6,000 years ago to improve the reliability of climate models.

Expanded excavations at White Sands National Park in New Mexico have provided researchers an opportunity to refine the age of the oldest human footprints in North America and establish a deeper understanding of the landscape and environmental conditions at the time humans were present there.

Humanity's ongoing disruption of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations, temperatures, and global nutrient cycles is starving the oceans of oxygen. Although we can measure ongoing changes to ocean circulation and marine life, we still don't know how far the oxygen loss and the damage to ocean ecosystems could go. One way to foresee the oceans' future is to look back at how our seas and their inhabitants responded to higher CO₂ levels and warmer climates in the past.