Phys.org: Earth science

Some 550 million years ago, Earth looked very different than it does today. The Southern Hemisphere was dominated by an enormous single continent known as Gondwana.

A University of the Basque Country-EHU research group has determined the causes of a 255 m (837 feet) crustal uplift of the Atlantic slope and a 167 m (548 feet) uplift of the Mediterranean slope, as well as the development of rivers in these areas.

Peatlands store large amounts of carbon. However, when they are drained, they can become substantial sources of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO₂).

In early 2017 and 2023, California experienced two catastrophic and record-breaking floods that caused billions of dollars in damage, triggered mudslides and forced thousands of people to evacuate. Why this happened left scientists scratching their heads. Both disasters struck during La Niña conditions, which normally bring drier-than-normal weather to California.

Extreme heat has become more common—both research and lived experience document this—but when it arrives is a different question. A new study finds that, rather than occurring only during warm seasons, extreme heat events have become more frequent in the months before and after, too.

In November 2025, NASA and its European partners launched the Sentinel-6B satellite to improve hurricane forecasts, help protect infrastructure and benefit commercial industries, including shipping. The satellite is now flying 30 seconds behind its predecessor, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich. Both satellites are providing precise sea level height measurements during what oceanographers expect to be a historic El Niño, a naturally occurring oceanic phenomenon in which warmer-than-usual Pacific waters shift global weather patterns.

Fieldwork is a vital part of geoscience research, allowing scientists and students to directly observe, interact with and collect data about Earth processes that cannot be replicated in the lab.

Rising sea levels and storm surges could cost $855 billion in economic losses across Australia by the end of the century, according to new research, the first of its kind in Australia.

From the Vredefort Dome in South Africa (the world's oldest and largest known meteorite impact structure) to the volcanic lakes of the Great Rift Valley in Kenya, Africa's landscapes hold some of Earth's oldest stories. Morocco's M'Goun UNESCO Global Geopark records more than 200 million years of geological history, while Tanzania's Ngorongoro-Lengai landscape brings together a vast caldera, an active volcano and the fossil record of Olduvai Gorge.

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.