Phys.org: Earth science

A new study has uncovered a surprising and concerning paradox: although Earth's vegetation cover has expanded dramatically over the past four decades, this widespread "greening" trend is often associated with a decline in soil moisture, particularly in water-scarce regions. The study is published in Communications Earth & Environment.

New research shows that isotopic signatures of the EASM (East Asian Summer Monsoon) during Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) events are not uniform but rather reflect diverse changes in response to subtle variations of the Westerlies' position.

Worldwide, an estimated 440 million people were exposed to a wildfire encroaching on their home at some point between 2002 and 2021, new research shows. That's roughly equivalent to the entire population of the European Union, and the number has been steadily rising—up 40% over those two decades.

The wetlands found across the Rocky Mountains of Colorado just below tree line are magical places. Dripping with mosses and deep green sedges, these open expanses flanked by evergreens are a breathtaking sight for passing hikers. Moose graze there, and elk gather during their mating season.

Global sea-level change has now been measured by satellites for more than 30 years, and a comparison with climate projections from the mid-1990s shows that they were remarkably accurate, according to two Tulane University researchers whose findings were published in Earth's Future.

Phytoplankton—microscopic algae that form the base of ocean food webs—have long been viewed as transient players in the global carbon cycle: They bloom, die, and the carbon they contain is quickly recycled back into the ecosystem.

The power of a tornado can inflict tremendous damage on residential property, but the impact is also felt by nearby homeowners, even when their property is unscathed.

All the critical minerals the U.S. needs annually for energy, defense and technology applications are already being mined at existing U.S. facilities, according to a new analysis published in the journal Science.

A team of Johns Hopkins researchers is using an innovative X-ray imaging approach to reveal how compression reshapes the tiny spaces and stresses within sandstone—findings that could predict how this common rock used for fuel reservoirs behaves under deep subterranean pressure. The results appear in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth.

New research from Purdue University reveals how moisture influences atmospheric blocking, a phenomenon that often drives heat waves, droughts, cold outbreaks and floods, helping solve a mystery in climate science and improving future extreme weather predictions.

Last summer, Stephanie McNamara got her first glimpse of Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in southern Colorado. The park is a monument to sand, where dunes stretch across 30 square miles and tower nearly 750 feet high, making them the tallest such formations in North America.

A research team has developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can automatically identify and track tropical easterly waves (TEWs)—clusters of clouds and wind that often develop into hurricanes—and separate them from two major tropical wind patterns: the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and the monsoon trough (MT).

A new Stanford study challenges the decades-old view that the rise of land plants half a billion years ago dramatically changed the shapes of rivers.

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions have spotted a contradiction in worldwide wildfire trends: Despite a 26% decline in total burned area from 2002 to 2021, the number of people exposed to wildfires has surged by nearly 40%.

Lib4RI has completed the digitization of more than 700 historical snow and avalanche reports from the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF. These reports, published between 1938 and 2005, document decades of avalanche observations and snow research by researchers from Switzerland and around the world. These reports are now accessible to all in the institutional repository DORA.

Heat-stressed Victorian mountain ash forests are thinning fast, turning from carbon sinks to carbon sources, new research reveals.

A recent study led by Prof. Zeng Fanjiang from the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has revealed concerning trends in soil organic carbon (SOC) loss due to prolonged human disturbance in hyper-arid desert ecosystems.

Beneath Australia's soils lie ancient aquifers which supply 30% of the water consumed across the country. The groundwater they hold can be some of the oldest water on the planet, dating back as far as two million years.

Large earthquakes along some of New Zealand's major faults are commonly clustered in time and place, according to recent research.

Deep beneath the ocean's surface lies Earth's largest carbon reservoir: marine sediments that have accumulated organic matter over millions of years. Long assumed to be permanently "locked away," this vast carbon pool is far more dynamic than scientists previously believed, according to a new international study.