Phys.org: Earth science

A new review led by the MARUM—Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen—highlights how hydrothermal vents on the seafloor shape iron availability and influence the global oceanic element cycles. The review study, titled "Iron's Irony," has been published in Communications Earth & Environment.

Ten years ago, close to 200 nations signed the Paris Agreement, an international treaty designed to cut greenhouse gas emissions and curtail global warming. Under the treaty, most nations made a 15-year promise to reduce emissions.

Tropical inland waters don't produce as many greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as previously estimated, according to the results of an international research collaboration led by Charles Darwin University (CDU).

Climate models suggest that climate change could reduce the Southern Ocean's ability to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2). However, observational data actually shows that this ability has seen no significant decline in recent decades.

Ocean color satellites provide essential insights into water quality and ecosystem dynamics by estimating chlorophyll, suspended matter, and dissolved organic material. Atmospheric correction, the process of removing scattering and absorption from satellite signals, is central to these analyses.

Accurate land cover mapping underpins biodiversity protection, climate adaptation, and sustainable land use. Despite advances in remote sensing, satellite-only approaches remain limited by cloud cover, revisit intervals, and the lack of ground-truth data. Dynamic products such as Dynamic World have improved timeliness but still struggle to capture sudden transitions or validate their results.

Rocks store information from long ago. For instance, their composition can reveal the environmental conditions during their formation. This makes them extremely important in climate research. This led a research team at the University of Göttingen and the GFZ Helmholtz Center for Geosciences to investigate the following: do "cherts"—sedimentary rocks that form when silica-rich sediment mud is buried hundreds of meters deep—reveal anything about the climate of the past?

A study led by University of Arizona researchers shows that decades of groundwater pumping by humans has depleted Tucson-area aquifers far more than natural climate variation. Published in the journal Water Resources Research, the study provides the first multi-millennial reconstruction for the region that places human impacts on groundwater into long-term context.

Sea ice coverage in the Arctic Ocean is at one of its lowest levels on record, yet there's no unanimity on when that ice will disappear completely during summer months.

Sometime between 1381 and 1391, an earthquake exceeding magnitude 8.0 rocked the northeastern Caribbean and sent a tsunami barreling toward the island of Anegada.