Phys.org: Earth science

Late at night on 26 September 2024, Hurricane Helene made landfall on Florida's big bend. The physical damage was devastating and well-documented, but an additional, unseen potential impact lurked underfoot.

Madagascar's landscape tells a story of deep time: ancient rifting and geological tilting sculpted the island's dramatic topography and steered its rivers, setting the stage for the evolution of its extraordinary biodiversity.

Salt is an essential nutrient for the human body. But hundreds of millions of years before the first humans, salt minerals once shaped entire landscapes. They even determined where early life on Earth could thrive.

Scientists from the Department of Geography and Environmental Science at Queen Mary University of London have developed a simple model to show how buoyant plastic can settle through the water column and they predict it could take over 100 years to remove plastic waste from the ocean's surface.

Located on the island of Sicily, in Italy, Mount Etna is one of the world's most active volcanoes. Documentation of its many eruptions stretches back as far as 2,700 years ago, with the most recent occurring in June 2025. The robust seismic, geological, geophysical, and geochemical data from the region are a scientific goldmine for the study of volcanoes.

Pink granite boulders scattered across the dark volcanic peaks of the Hudson Mountains in West Antarctica, have revealed the presence of a vast buried granite body—almost 100 km across and 7 km thick, about half the size of Wales in the UK—beneath Pine Island Glacier.

Nearly 600 years ago, a massive volcanic eruption sent clouds of sulfurous gas and ash high into the atmosphere. The blast known as the 1458/59 CE event was so huge that it triggered decades of cooling, especially in the Northern Hemisphere.

The cloudy, sediment-laden meltwater from glaciers is a key source of nutrients for ocean life, but a new study suggests that as climate change causes many glaciers to shrink and retreat, their meltwater may become less nutritious.

For decades, researchers seeking to understand global climate change have analyzed ice cores drilled deep within the Antarctic ice sheet. This ice traps chemicals and bubbles of ancient air that tell the story of how Earth's climate has changed over time.

Thailand's northern regions, characterized by complex geology and active fault systems, experience frequent landslides that threaten both lives and critical infrastructure. In 2022, a slope failure occurred along Highway No. 1088 in Chiang Mai Province, northern Thailand. When a research team led by Professor Shinya Inazumi from Shibaura Institute of Technology conducted geotechnical investigations to determine the collapse's cause, they encountered a critical limitation.

By evaluating historical climate records, observational and projection data, an international team of researchers found a "pushing and triggering" mechanism that has driven the Arctic climate system to a new state, which will likely see consistently increased frequency and intensity of extreme events across all system components—the atmosphere, ocean and cryosphere—this century.

In some parts of Earth's interior, seismic waves travel at different speeds depending on the direction in which they are moving through the layers of rock in Earth's interior. This property is known as seismic anisotropy, and it can offer important information about how the silicate rock of the mantle—particularly at the mantle's lowermost depths—deforms. In contrast, areas through which seismic waves travel at the same speed regardless of direction are considered isotropic.

In a remote cave in northern Greenland, a research team led by geologists Gina Moseley, Gabriella Koltai, and Jonathan Baker from the University of Innsbruck has discovered evidence of a significantly warmer Arctic. The cave deposits show that the region was free of permafrost millions of years ago and responded sensitively to rising temperatures.

About 15% of Italy's energy is produced by its nearly 5,000 hydroelectric power plants. In the Valle dei Laghi region, water flowing from the surrounding mountains supports local agriculture and the Santa Massenza hydroelectric plant, which powers the entire Trentino province. But as climate change accelerates, this delicate equilibrium is shifting.

Scientists from The Australian National University (ANU) have analyzed signals generated by the vibrations of traffic along the Federal Highway to learn more about the seismic nature of Lake George, situated north-east of Canberra.

Once considered a fringe idea, the prospect of offsetting global warming by releasing massive quantities of sunlight-reflecting particles into Earth's atmosphere is now a matter of serious scientific consideration. Hundreds of studies have modeled how this form of solar geoengineering, known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), might work.

Gully washer. Duck drownder. Toad strangler. Cob floater. Sod soaker. Whatever their names, summer in the Midwest isn't summer without strong, sudden storms with towering clouds. While the Indian subcontinent is famous for its monsoon season, what many people don't know is that the midwestern United States has its own monsoon season, very nearly as strong.

For years, we believed the Himalayas were a climatic sanctuary—untouched, pristine, and resilient to the turbulence of modernization. But what happens when mountain cities begin to mimic the dynamics of megacities in the plains?

Burning fossil fuels has elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide, causing massive changes in the global climate including extreme temperatures and weather events here in the Midwest. Meanwhile, human activities have increased the amount of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus in grasslands and forests. These are the elements in fertilizer that make lawns greener and farmland more productive.

The ocean has helped mitigate global warming by absorbing about a quarter of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, along with more than 90% of the excess heat those emissions generate.