Phys.org: Earth science

The summers of recent years have been hot, but not unusual from a meteorological perspective. According to researchers at Leipzig University, though, the next extreme summer would far exceed anything we have experienced so far.

Massive storms like Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which caused more than $100 billion in damage, were once considered lifetime events. Increasingly, however, they are becoming the norm: a direct result of climate change, which has made large storms more frequent, intense and slower-moving, deepening their impact.

A current system in the Atlantic Ocean that shapes regional climates and distributes ocean nutrients also serves as a control knob to help regulate temperatures across the planet, new research has found.

Researchers from Cornell University have pinpointed the source of oxygen that sustains deep-sea life in the North Atlantic Ocean: the churning waters in the Labrador Sea.

A new review led by professor Emese Bordy at the University of Cape Town (UCT) Department of Geological Sciences brings together more than two decades of research on the Karoo Supergroup, revealing how scientific understanding of this iconic geological archive has changed since 2000.

When it comes to the cost of a bad forecast, researchers have gone beyond damaged buildings and vehicles to calculate the cost of injuries, evacuations and the long-term loss of public trust.

Over 4 million hectares (9.9 million acres) of protected tropical forest—an area double the size of Wales—have been lost to wildfires since 2001.

According to a new study led by researchers from Brazil and Germany, the main system that transports heat from one end of the Atlantic Ocean to the other may undergo sudden changes in intensity driven by climate change similar to what we are experiencing now, even when it is already weakened.

When it comes to compounding natural hazards like landslides, wildfires, flooding and extreme heat, where you live makes all the difference. New research from Portland State University underscores this disproportionate reality, finding that in Portland, the areas most vulnerable to multiple climate hazards are historically underinvested neighborhoods marked by lower median incomes, lower levels of education and greater racial diversity.

Salt and sugar from the sea can rise as far as the free troposphere, thereby influencing both cloud formation and the Arctic climate. This is the finding of balloon measurements carried out by a team of researchers on Spitsbergen in autumn 2021 and spring 2022.

Salt marshes are coastal wetlands that are alternately inundated and exposed by tides. These marshes, like other coastal ecosystems, are hotspots of carbon cycling.

Locals and officials in Colombia have begun a massive search and rescue effort to find survivors of a powerful earthquake that struck near San José del Palmar in Chocó, with major damage observed in the cities of Cali, Manizales and Pereira.

Prediction is the goal and test of all science, one might argue. Meteorologists have been curious about the inherent limits of weather forecasting ever since the dawn of numerical weather prediction in the late 1950s.

Every monsoon, India's rivers turn brown. To most of us, that color simply means muddy water. But hidden within it is the material that builds fertile floodplains, creates river islands, nourishes deltas and even shapes coastlines: sediment.

A study led by Professor Jimmy Jiujiu Jiao from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) and Professor Meng Li from Shenzhen University has identified microbial fermentation as the likely main pathway for ammonium production in sediments beneath the Pearl River Delta, helping to explain the region's exceptionally high natural groundwater ammonium levels.

El Niños and La Niñas are the third-most dominant influences on Earth's climate, after the sun and the greenhouse effect. But they haven't been easy to decipher or to predict in terms of when they will happen and what exact effects they will have on the global climate.

Roughly 2.5–2 billion years ago, Earth's surface experienced the biggest chemical change in its history when oxygen became abundant in the atmosphere, eventually leading to the evolution of complex life forms such as plants and animals that emerged half a billion years ago.

This summer, millions of people across the country have been digging out sunscreen to protect themselves from a record-breaking series of heat waves.

How much ice is stored in the world's glaciers? And where exactly is it located? A new study led by Ca' Foscari University of Venice, in collaboration with the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR-ISP), provides an updated global map of glacier ice volume.

The initiation of rain in clouds without ice remains one of the largest unsolved mysteries in atmospheric science.