Phys.org: Earth science

Climate change is significantly altering bioclimatic environments in China's dry–wet transition zones, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Hydrology.

Landslides are one of the most destructive natural disasters on the planet, causing billions of dollars of damage and devastating loss of life every year. By introducing a new paradigm for studying landslide shapes and failure types, a global team of researchers has provided help for those who work to predict landslides and risk evaluations.

Water erosion is the most active process controlling soil formation and evolution, which can affect the redistribution of carbon between terrestrial, aquatic, and atmospheric ecosystems. Erosion-induced organic carbon dynamic process should not be missing in terrestrial carbon cycle simulations.

In the ongoing quest to track the progression of climate change, scientists frequently examine the state of our planet's vegetation—forests, grasslands, agricultural lands, and beyond.

Just as water moves through a river, rivers themselves move across the landscape. They carve valleys and canyons, create floodplains and deltas, and transport sediment from the uplands to the ocean.

Arctic riverbanks are typically resilient, thanks to the power of permafrost. This permanently frozen soil locks in sediment, leading to low erosion rates. But as Arctic river water warms due to climate change, some researchers worry that riverbanks in the region will thaw and crumble. This, in turn, could cause problems, including the release of stored soil carbon and damage to infrastructure near rivers.

Climate change is a global phenomenon, but its impacts are felt at a very local level. Take, for example, dust. Dust can have a huge impact on local air quality, food security, energy supply and public health. Yet, little is known about how global climate change is impacting dust levels.

A study published in Environmental Science & Technology Letters has shed light on the long-range transboundary transport of radioactive iodine-129 (129I) from the Indian nuclear fuel reprocessing plants (NFRPs) to the Southern Tibetan Plateau (STP).

Groundwater withdrawals are expected to peak in about one-third of the world's basins by 2050, potentially triggering significant trade and agriculture shifts, a new analysis finds.

One might think that snow, of all things, is easy to describe: it is cold, white and covers the landscape like a blanket. What else is there to say about it?

Researchers in North Carolina have created a simulation model to analyze how coastal management activities meant to protect barrier islands from sea-level rise can disrupt the natural processes that are keeping barrier islands above water.

Little is known about the nature and evolution of Earth's continental crust before a few billion years ago because cratons, or stable swaths of the lithosphere more than 2–3 billion years old, are relatively rare.

Early on Tuesday (April 23), Taiwan was hit by a series of earthquakes with the highest magnitude at 6.3. The latest tremor came less than three weeks after a magnitude 7.4 quake hit the island, damaging more than 100 buildings and trapping dozens of people in collapsed tunnels.

A team led by atmospheric scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory has demonstrated the first-ever remote observations of the fine-scale structure at the base of clouds. The results, just published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science, show that the air-cloud interface is not a perfect boundary but rather is a transition zone where aerosol particles suspended in Earth's atmosphere give rise to the droplets that ultimately form clouds.

As a massive heat dome lingered over the Pacific Northwest three years ago, swaths of North America simmered—and then burned. Wildfires charred more than 18.5 million acres across the continent, with the most land burned in Canada and California.

Powerful monsoon winds, strengthened by a warming climate, are lofting unexpectedly large quantities of ozone-depleting substances high into the atmosphere over East Asia, new research shows.

As wildfires in Siberia become more common, global climate modeling estimates significant impacts on climate, air quality, health, and economies in East Asia and across the northern hemisphere.

Nature-based climate solutions can help mitigate climate change, especially in forested regions capable of storing and sequestering vast amounts of carbon. New research published in Global Change Biology indicates that a single hurricane in New England, one of the most heavily forested regions in the United States, can down 4.6–9.4% of the total above-ground forest carbon, an amount much greater than the carbon sequestered annually by New England's forests.

Warming temperatures are causing a steady rise in copper, zinc, and sulfate in the waters of Colorado mountain streams affected by acid rock drainage. Concentrations of these metals have roughly doubled in these alpine streams over the past 30 years, a new study finds, presenting a concern for ecosystems, downstream water quality, and mining remediation.

In a recent publication in Science Bulletin, a multidisciplinary team of authors from Tongji University, the Second Institute of Oceanography (Ministry of Natural Resources), the Institute of Earth Environment (Chinese Academy of Sciences), and Utrecht University reports for the first time that massive carbon inputs from volcanism and seafloor spreading have impacted the orbital phase relationships between carbon cycle and climate change.