Phys.org: Earth science

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.