Phys.org: Earth science

Recent heat waves in the United States underscore a growing public health threat: Extreme heat events are growing longer, hotter, and more frequent. Soaring temperatures raise the risk of various health problems, such as heat stroke and cardiovascular disease—particularly for older people, people with preexisting conditions, and people who work outdoors.

Global climate models are software behemoths, often containing more than a million lines of code.

Most of Earth's fresh water is locked in the ice that covers Antarctica. As the ocean and atmosphere grow warmer, that ice is melting at a startling pace with sea levels and global currents changing in response. To understand the potential implications, researchers need to know just how fast the ice is disappearing, and what is driving it back.

Farmers near Meeker, in northwestern Colorado, have been diverting water from the White River to flood their fields for irrigation for more than 100 years.

Researchers at Diamond Light Source have used advanced imaging to look at microscopic crystals, called nanolites, to see what they can tell us about volcanic eruptions.

The University of Texas at Arlington is far from California earthquake country, yet its researchers are helping pinpoint which sections of the San Andreas Fault are most active.

The Polarstern recently ended a two-month expedition in the central Arctic in Longyearbyen, Svalbard. The international and interdisciplinary research team, led by the Alfred Wegener Institute, focused on the summer melting of Arctic sea ice in three different regimes.

Earth's tropical regions drive some of the most powerful weather and climate variability globally. Among these, the Madden–Julian Oscillation (MJO) is a dominant intraseasonal climate signal, characterized by large clusters of clouds and rainfall that slowly move eastward across the warm tropical oceans. In doing so, the MJO shapes rainfall patterns, influences tropical cyclones, modulates monsoons, and even impacts weather far beyond the tropics. Understanding the factors that govern its speed and intensity is therefore essential for improving subseasonal to seasonal climate forecasts.

Measuring mountain snowpack at strategically selected hotspots consistently outperforms broader, basin-wide mapping in predicting water supply in the western United States, a new study has found.

The global demand for wood-based products is constantly increasing, creating a challenge for the logging industry. In an attempt to keep up in a sustainable manner, the industry replaces logged areas with tree farms and nurseries to eventually replenish supplies. This use and regrowth of wood has also been thought to help maintain a carbon sink. While this may be true to some extent, a new study has found that an important source of carbon loss is often being left out of the equation.

Thorsten Becker, a professor at The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences, is the author of a new textbook, "Tectonic Geodynamics." The book is co-authored with Claudio Faccenna, who was formerly at UT, and is now a professor at the Helmholtz Center for Geosciences in Potsdam and at Roma TRE University.

In Alaska's Brooks Range, rivers once clear enough to drink now run orange and hazy with toxic metals. As warming thaws formerly frozen ground, it sets off a chemical chain reaction that is poisoning fish and wreaking havoc on ecosystems.

Five well-publicized polar geoengineering ideas are highly unlikely to help the polar regions and could harm ecosystems, communities, international relations, and our chances of reaching net zero by 2050.

A new study has uncovered the Levant Basin as one of the world's most concentrated graveyards for plastic packaging and the mechanisms that help the plastic sink down to the seafloor.

Antarctic ice is melting. But exactly which forces are causing it to melt and how melting will influence sea level rise are areas of active research. Understanding the decay of ice shelves, which extend off the edges of the continent, is particularly pressing because these shelves act as barriers between ocean water and land. Without ice shelves, the continent's glaciers would flow freely into the ocean, hastening sea level rise.

Scientists have confirmed that East Antarctica's interior is warming faster than its coastal areas and identified the cause. A 30-year study, published in Nature Communications and led by Nagoya University's Naoyuki Kurita, has traced this warming to increased warm air flow triggered by temperature changes in the Southern Indian Ocean.

A common problem with oil wells is that they can run dry even when sound-based measurements say there's still oil there. A team from Penn State University used Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's (PSC's) flagship Bridges-2 supercomputer to add a time dimension to these seismic measurements, as well as to analyze how oil damps down the loudness of sound traveling through it. Their preliminary analysis suggests that hidden rock structures in oil reserves prevent all the oil from being pumped out. They're now scaling up their work to tackle realistically sized oil fields.

Resilience is a term often discussed in the face of a natural disaster such as a major earthquake, but the attributes of resilience and how they interact are rarely analyzed, researchers say in a new study published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the solar system. As a source of clean energy, hydrogen is well-suited for sustainable development, and Earth is a natural hydrogen factory. However, most hydrogen vents reported to date are small, and the geological processes responsible for hydrogen formation—as well as the quantities that can be preserved in geological settings—remain unclear.

A study published in the journal Science Advances, indicates how the heating in North America can trigger remote effects in Asia—this could be further exacerbated by anthropogenic global warming and human modification of the North American land surface.