Phys.org: Earth science

Growing up, many of us were taught to drop, cover and hold on during an earthquake. The guidance is straightforward, but how people actually respond when the ground starts shaking can be far more complicated. Now, UC Berkeley researchers are studying what happens in those critical moments and how fear and risk perception influence people's actions.

Earth may have been pushed deeper into a global deep freeze by something surprisingly ordinary: salt. Around 700 million years ago, Earth entered periods of extreme glaciation known as Snowball Earth, when ice is thought to have spread across much or potentially all of the planet's surface. Scientists have long known that expanding ice could have helped drive this transition: As bright ice replaces darker ocean water, more sunlight is reflected back into space, causing the planet to cool further and allowing even more ice to form.

Weather forecasts rely on many different kinds of data, including temperature, humidity and wind. For the first time, researchers, including those at the University of Tokyo, have demonstrated that a long-theorized improvement to weather models—adding data on water isotopes in the atmosphere—does work. They showed that incorporating satellite measurements of water vapor isotopes into weather models improves forecasts of atmospheric conditions for up to five days, including predictions of heavy rainfall in many regions.

Two powerful hurricanes and a strengthening tropical storm on Wednesday were churning through the Pacific Ocean, where waters were being warmed by a historically strong El Niño climate episode.

Climate change is altering patterns of wildfire activity in Alaska, making fires larger and more common in some areas with historically low fire activity. Wildfires can be difficult to predict because they are affected by intricate interactions among factors including climate, ecology and weather. But a better idea of which fire pathways are more likely is important for future fire forecasting, adaptation and management strategies.

The Antarctic coastal zone is not simply the edge of the continent. It is a tightly coupled system where ice from the ice sheet extends over the seabed, initially resting on it and farther out floating as ice shelves. Here, mass, heat and nutrients are exchanged with the ocean through various processes. Even the smallest changes can have outsized consequences.

The fact that the ocean gets colder as you go deeper is fairly intuitive, but a similar gradient exists along the surface of the ocean, even at scales of 1 kilometer to tens of kilometers. A new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that this horizontal gradient significantly contributes to the intensity of tropical cyclones, providing a potential tool for better storm warning systems.

Inside a lab at the University of Texas at Dallas, researchers have re-created a small-scale ocean environment where they can make waves build, break and crash into one another.

Urban heat adaptation will gain in importance as climate change progresses. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have analyzed how sociodemographic factors (nationality, age, and rent) correlate with heat exposure throughout Germany.

Recently, heavy rains have caused flooding in Grand Canyon and Zion National Parks, resulting in the loss of at least two lives. In U.S. national parks, maintaining visitor safety can be complicated because it is difficult to measure who is in a park and where they are, much less what hazards they will face as extreme weather events become more common, according to Bing Pan, professor of recreation, park and tourism management at Penn State.

Have you ever walked across a salt flat so expansive it feels like another planet? That's what it's like standing in Egypt's coastal sabkhas—those otherworldly landscapes where the ground crunches beneath your feet and the air shimmers with heat. These aren't just barren wastelands; they're living laboratories that record the pulse of our changing climate.

The Labrador Shelf is a shallow marine area on the margin of the Labrador Sea in the North Atlantic off the east coast of Canada. During the last ice age, this region was covered by the Laurentide Ice Sheet, one of the largest ice masses in Earth's history, which once covered vast parts of North America.

Extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts and torrential rains, affect water quality in lakes, rivers and coastal areas. This creates significant challenges for ecosystems and water supplies because pesticides bound in soil can quickly leach into water sources. Now, researchers want to monitor this in a new way.

On Nov. 11, 2025, Earth experienced a severe geomagnetic storm triggered by solar flares and coronal mass ejections from an active sunspot region. While this kind of storm brings beautiful auroras admired in many areas around the world, it can also cause ionospheric disturbances that disrupt radio waves and affect crucial technologies. A new study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, found that disruptions caused by this storm scrambled GPS signals in areas where such disruptions have never been reported.

In computer simulations of the Big One—a large-magnitude earthquake that may occur along the San Andreas Fault in California—seismic waves ripple from the epicenter of a magnitude 7.8 earthquake near the Salton Sea into the Los Angeles Basin.

Erosion rates on parts of the Kaikōura Peninsula more than doubled after the 2016 earthquake, showing major quakes can "rapidly alter" the way coastlines evolve, an Otago researcher says.

Data from many sources, including NASA, have shown a significant decrease in Arctic sea ice since 1979. However, the processes driving the melting and freezing of sea ice are complex, and fluctuations occur throughout the year. Short-term variations in temperature, winds, ocean convection and water salinity within a certain region can also affect how much ice can reform or melt.

Whakaari/White Island's sudden eruption in December 2019, which killed 22 people and severely injured 25 others, was New Zealand's deadliest volcanic disaster in recent history.

New research is dismantling the longstanding myth of the "pristine" Amazon. A reconstruction of 10,000 years of Amazonian pyrogeography, based on 1,361 radiocarbon (¹⁴C) dates across 303 sites—including soil charcoal and burned archaeological material—shows that fire in the rainforest is almost exclusively a human-driven phenomenon, not a natural one.

Europe is no stranger to powerful windstorms, but some storms capable of causing serious damage have an unusual origin. Tropical cyclones can occasionally travel north from lower latitudes and reach Europe, where they can bring damaging winds and heavy rain even after losing some of their tropical characteristics.