Phys.org: Earth science

Lightning is a phenomenon that has fascinated humanity since time immemorial, providing a stark example of the power and unpredictability of the natural world. Although the study of lightning can be challenging, scientists have, in recent years, made great strides in developing our understanding of this extreme spectacle.

To reach the goals of the Paris Agreement, we not only have to reduce CO2 emissions, but also remove CO₂ from the atmosphere (carbon dioxide removal, CDR) on a large scale. This can involve both land- and ocean-based methods.

Analysis has shown a boulder weighing almost 1,200 tons in Tonga is one of the largest known wave-transported rocks in the world, providing new insights into the Pacific region's history and risk of tsunamis.

The Chesapeake Bay is the continental United States' largest estuary, spanning approximately 320 kilometers (200 miles) between northeastern Maryland and Virginia Beach. Like many coastal ecosystems, its water chemistry is affected by agricultural runoff, chemical weathering, and increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.

On our planet, the cycle and balance of carbon from reservoir to reservoir is a matter of life or death. Carbon moves from the atmosphere to the ocean, to carbon-based life forms, to rocks or sediments, and it can be tied up in any of these reservoirs throughout the process.

A team of atmospheric scientists at the University of Washington has found evidence that weather forecasters may be able to look ahead for up to 30 days when making predictions. In their study, posted on the arXiv preprint server, the group tested Google's GraphCast AI-based weather modeling and predicting system using a technique to improve initial weather conditions to improve its accuracy.

A mysterious and highly active undersea volcano off the Pacific Coast could erupt by the end of this year, scientists say.

As wildfires continue to ravage regions from Los Angeles to South Korea, a new study featured on the cover of Advances in Atmospheric Sciences sheds light on the large-scale climate patterns influencing these devastating global extreme events.

The Arctic is one of the coldest places on Earth, but in recent decades, the region has been rapidly warming, at a rate three to four times faster than the global average. However, current climate models have been unable to account for this increased pace.

Efforts to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5°C under the Paris Climate Agreement may not go far enough to save the world's ice sheets, according to a study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

The Amazon Basin lost about 27,000 square kilometers of forest each year from 2001 to 2016. By 2021, about 17% of the basin had been deforested.

The near-bottom water in the U.S. Northeast continental shelf provides a critical cold-water habitat for the rich regional marine ecosystem. This "cold pool" preserves winter temperatures, even when waters become too warm or salty elsewhere during the summer.

Swathes of South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia are in the grip of drought as they experience some of the lowest rainfall totals on record.

A team of geophysicists and atmospheric scientists at Princeton's NOAA/Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science has found evidence that a warming planet over the past 15 to 20 years has impacted the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and led to an increase in the number of flooding events along parts of the U.S. Northeast Coast (USNEC).

New research reveals mountain glaciers across the globe will not recover for centuries—even if human intervention cools the planet back to the 1.5°C limit, having exceeded it.

In high-latitude Arctic fjords, warming seas and reduced sea ice are boosting seaweed growth. This expansion of seaweed "forests" could alter the storage and cycling of carbon in coastal Arctic ecosystems, but few studies have explored these potential effects.

As ocean levels rise, coastal communities face an ever-increasing risk of severe flooding. The existing infrastructure protecting many of these communities was not built to withstand the combined threat of rising seas and severe storms seen in this century.

Climate change is melting glaciers and permafrost in the mountains outside of Boulder, Colorado, exposing rocks and freeing up minerals containing sulfate, a form of sulfur, to flow downstream into local watersheds.

New research suggests that the negative effects of the ozone hole on the carbon uptake of the Southern Ocean are reversible, but only if greenhouse gas emissions rapidly decrease.

New research from an international group looking at ancient sediment cores in the North Atlantic has for the first time shown a strong correlation between sediment changes and a marked period of global cooling that occurred in the Northern Hemisphere some 3.6 million years ago. The changes in sediments imply that profound changes in the circulation of deep water currents occurred at this time.