Phys.org: Earth science

As climate change drives increasingly severe hurricanes, U.S. coastal communities are bearing the brunt of mounting losses. With regulations failing to curb the damage, homeowners have become the front line of defense—but their efforts often fall short, a recent study reveals.

Ecological warning lights have blinked on across the Arctic over the last 40 years, according to new research, and many of the fastest-changing areas are clustered in Siberia, the Canadian Northwest Territories, and Alaska.

The Little Ice Age was a period of significant cooling from the early 14th to mid-19th centuries, which saw mean temperatures across the northern hemisphere drop by up to 2°C and the advancement of glaciers.

McGill University researchers have discovered that changes in clouds are slightly mitigating global warming. While greenhouse gases continue to cause temperatures to rise, a reduction in low-cloud cover over land has brought about a modest reduction of the amount of heat being trapped close to ground level.

Methane from the destroyed Nord Stream pipelines spread over a large part of the southern Baltic Sea and remained for several months. This is according to a study by researchers from the University of Gothenburg and the Voice of the Ocean research foundation.

With the increase in climate change, global precipitation estimates have become a necessity for predicting water-related disasters like floods and droughts, as well as for managing water resources. The most accurate data that can be used for these predictions are ground rain gauge observations, but it is often challenging due to limited locations and sparse rain gauge data.

Earth, being 71% covered in water, is influenced by the ocean and its movements. In the Atlantic Ocean, a system of connected currents, called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), moves water throughout the world's oceans powered by a combination of winds and ocean density. It not only distributes the ocean's heat, moisture, and nutrients, but regulates the Earth's climate and weather.

As the atmosphere continues to fill with greenhouse gases from human activities, many proposals have surfaced to "geoengineer" climate-saving solutions, that is, alter the atmosphere at a global scale to either reduce the concentrations of carbon or mute its warming effect.

A hidden world teeming with life lies below beach sands. New Stanford-led research sheds light on how microbial communities in coastal groundwater respond to infiltrating seawater.

New research has tracked the evolution of a glacier lake dammed by a glacier surge using satellite images, to help better understand its life cycle and the hazard it presents to nearby communities.

The Indiana Geological and Water Survey at Indiana University has been publishing critical research that addresses landslide risks across the Hoosier state. New high-resolution imagery and digital elevation measurements being collected by the Indiana Geographic Information Office will aid this work.

Five wildfires—the biggest of which are the Palisades and the Eaton fires—are still currently burning (as of 10 January 2025) in areas of north Los Angeles. At least 10 people are known to have lost their lives and many more properties have been burnt to the ground.

Oregon's Cascade Range mountains might not hold gold, but they store another precious resource in abundance: water. Scientists from the University of Oregon and their partners have mapped the amount of water stored beneath volcanic rocks at the crest of the central Oregon Cascades and found an aquifer many times larger than previously estimated—at least 81 cubic kilometers.

Researchers from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, alongside mainland collaborators, have uncovered an unexpected phenomenon: severe wintertime ozone (O3) pollution in Lanzhou, China, driven primarily by alkene emissions from local petrochemical industries.

Plates at subduction zones typically move just a few centimeters per year. But when accumulated stress at these convergent plate boundaries releases suddenly, the plates can slip several meters and cause some of Earth's largest earthquakes. The timing and location of such megathrust earthquakes depend on factors such as the shape, roughness, composition, and fluid content of the fault.

Melting ice sheets are often considered synonymous with climate change in the media, with evocative images of lone polar bears floating on ever-shrinking rafts of ice. While impacts such as sea level rise and salinity changes are commonly reported, one lesser-known consequence is the effect on volcanoes.

From the persistent droughts of southern Africa and Central America in the early part of the year to the more recent devastating extreme rainfall in Spain and the deadly Hurricane Helene along America's east coast, 2024 has been a year of climate events that affected the lives of billions of people.

Two of the ten most damaging earthquakes in recorded history happened on January 17th. This year is the thirtieth anniversary of Japan's Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake. The Northridge Earthquake in Southern California happened just one year earlier, in 1994. The two events killed 6,400 people, injured 45,000, and left a half million people homeless.

A new study led by scientists in the Schmid College of Science and Technology at Chapman University provides the first comprehensive global estimates of the amount of water stored in Earth's plants and the amount of time it takes for that water to flow through them. The information is a missing piece of the puzzle in understanding the global water cycle and how that cycle is being altered by changes in land use and climate.

A study based on the sampling and analysis of volcanic ash at Cumbre Vieja volcano in the Canary Islands, located off Africa's northwest coast, suggests that the composition of magma could drive tremors during volcanic eruptions.