Phys.org: Earth science

As the Colorado River's giant reservoirs have declined during the last two decades, even larger amounts of water have been pumped and drained from underground, according to new research based on data from NASA satellites.

Below ocean wind farms, oil rigs and other offshore installations are mammoth networks of underwater structures, including pipelines, anchors, risers and cables, that are essential to harnessing the energy source. But much like terrestrial structures, these subsea constructions are also vulnerable to natural events, like submarine landslides, that can hamper the productivity of installations below the sea.

Marine life plays a pivotal role in Earth's carbon cycle. Phytoplankton at the base of the aquatic food web take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, convert it to organic carbon, and move it around as they become food for other organisms. Much of this carbon eventually returns to the atmosphere, but some ends up sequestered in the deep ocean via a process called carbon export.

Predicting the extent of Arctic sea ice in September has significant implications for climate change and shipping in the Arctic. However, seasonal forecasts for September sea ice often encounter a challenge known as the "spring predictability barrier."

Ozone pollution is a global environmental concern that not only threatens human health and crop production, but also worsens global warming. While the formation of ozone is often attributed to anthropogenic pollutants, soil emissions are revealed to be another important source.

Is climate action a lost cause? The United States is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement for the second time, while heat records over land and sea have toppled and extreme weather events have multiplied.

A UC Riverside-led study has found that a smartphone app that tracks household water use and alerts users to leaks or excessive consumption offers a promising tool for helping California water agencies meet state-mandated conservation goals.

The Arctic is warming almost four times faster than the rest of the planet. High temperatures are already causing the permanently frozen ground, known as permafrost, to thaw. The carbon contained in this soil is then released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide or methane, further exacerbating global warming.

A new study published in the journal Climatic Change highlights significant shifts in wind patterns across the Middle East due to climate change, with critical implications for the region's wind energy potential. The research, led by Melissa Latt from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, and Dr. Assaf Hochman from the Fredy and Nadine Herrmann Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, utilizes high-resolution climate modeling to project changes in summer wind fields up to the year 2070.

Rising seas will severely test humanity's resilience in the second half of the 21st century and beyond, even if nations defy the odds and cap global warming at the ambitious 1.5 degrees Celsius target, researchers said Tuesday.

Much of the world's lithium occurs in salty waters with fundamentally different chemistry than other naturally saline waters like the ocean, according to a study published on May 23 in Science Advances. The finding has implications for lithium mining technologies and wastewater assessment and management.

As sea levels climb and weather grows more extreme, coastal regions everywhere are facing a creeping threat: salt.

Soil moisture is a key regulator of temperature and humidity, one that's positioned to be affected substantially by climate change. But despite the importance of soil moisture, efforts to model it involve dozens of poorly constrained parameters, and different models tend to disagree about how soil moisture levels will change in a warming world.

A little-known ocean current surrounds Antarctica, shielding it from warm water farther north. But our new research published in Geophysical Research Letters shows Antarctica's melting ice is disrupting this current, putting the continent's last line of defense at risk.

A new international study led by researchers at Tulane University shows that the El Niño and La Niña climate patterns affect nearly half of the world's mangrove forests, underscoring the vulnerability of these vital coastal ecosystems to climatic shifts. Mangroves are shrubs or trees that grow in dense thickets mainly in coastal saline or brackish water.

Understanding how Earth's climate has naturally fluctuated during the Holocene—the current geological epoch spanning the last 11,700 years—is crucial for contextualizing modern human-driven warming and improving future climate projections. However, the climate history of tropical Australasia has remained unclear, with scientists often divided over interpretations of paleoclimate records.

Earth's largest gold reserves are not kept inside Fort Knox, the United States Bullion Depository. In fact, they are hidden much deeper in the ground than one would expect. More than 99.999% of Earth's stores of gold and other precious metals lie buried under 3,000 km of solid rock, locked away within Earth's metallic core and far beyond the reaches of humankind.

Forests once hailed as reliable carbon sinks are rapidly becoming "super‑emitters" as record‑breaking wildfires sweep boreal, Amazonian, and Australian landscapes. Today's climate policies and voluntary carbon markets seldom account for the sharp rise in fire‑driven emissions.

Global warming will likely hinder our future ability to control ground-level ozone, a harmful air pollutant that is a primary component of smog, according to a new MIT study.

Increasingly powerful AI models can make short-term weather forecasts with surprising accuracy. But neural networks only predict based on patterns from the past—what happens when the weather does something that's unprecedented in recorded history?