Phys.org: Earth science

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?

In a first, researchers from NASA and Virginia Tech have used satellite data to measure the height and speed of potentially hazardous flood waves traveling down U.S. rivers. The three waves they tracked were likely caused by extreme rainfall and by a loosened ice jam.

Lake Tahoe is experiencing large-scale shifts in ultraviolet radiation (UV) as climate change intensifies wet and dry extremes in the region. That is according to a study led by the University of California, Davis's Tahoe Environmental Research Center and co-leading collaborator Miami University in Ohio.

Gully erosion is the most severe form of soil erosion, and it can seriously impact agricultural fields, contributing to sediment loss and severe nutrient runoff into waterways. Gullies can be triggered suddenly by a single heavy rainfall event, creating deep channels that are difficult to rehabilitate even with heavy machinery. Accurately predicting where gully erosion is likely to occur allows agricultural producers and land managers to target their conservation efforts more effectively.

A new study published in Science Advances by researchers from the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (GIG-CAS), along with international collaborators, reveals that deeply subducted carbonates can cause significant variations in the redox states of Earth's mantle. This process influences the formation of sublithospheric diamonds and plays a role in the long-term evolution of cratons—ancient stable parts of the continental lithosphere.

When a volcano erupts, it can spew ash high into the atmosphere—inserting aerosols right where clouds typically form. How exactly these aerosols impact cloud formation has long been a mystery to atmospheric scientists.