Publishing original research in a top-tier academic journal has been an ambition of Arsalaan Ahmad's since he enrolled in an undergraduate computer science program at Cardiff University.
Arctic sea ice reached its annual minimum extent on Sept. 12, according to NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado Boulder. The ice covered an estimated 1.78 million square miles (4.6 million square kilometers), tying 2008, 2010 and 2025 for the 10th-lowest minimum in the satellite record.
In August 2026, an iceberg the size of Manhattan broke away from the Petermann Ice Shelf in northern Greenland. It was the glacier's largest calving event since 2020. Long before the breakup, CIRES scientists were developing a new method to understand the planet's first known ice shelf estuary on the Petermann Ice Shelf.
In 2022, the eruption and collapse of an underwater volcano in Tonga caused a devastating tsunami that killed four people, disrupted seafloor ecosystems and damaged critical seafloor telecommunications cables. It was one of the most powerful volcanic events this century.
You might think the length of a day never varies—exactly 24 hours. You'd be wrong, at least if you count days in milliseconds, as physicists do.
The bright orange plumes of water scientists first noticed billowing across a river in Alaska's Brooks Range in 2018 were even more acidic and metallic than water leached from metal mines, despite their pristine surroundings. That's according to a new University of California, Davis, study of six affected watersheds.
Solar farms built around China's Gobi Desert could have the unexpected benefit of reducing the dust pollution reaching cities across northern China.
In some parts of the world, the sea barely rises and falls with the tides. In others, the difference between high and low tide is dramatic. Along Western Australia's Kimberley coast, for example, it can exceed 10 meters (33 feet)—roughly the height of a three-story building.
Author(s): Mariami Kavtaradze, George Mamatsashvili, George Chagelishvili, and Elene Uchava
We investigate magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence in plane shear flows with a streamwise background magnetic field in the super-Alfvénic regime, i.e., when the flow velocity is larger than the local Alfvén speed. In this regime, turbulence is energetically supplied by large-scale shear of the flow…
[Phys. Rev. E 114, 035214] Published Thu Sep 24, 2026
Magma moving beneath a volcano can make the ground rise, sink or shift sideways. Measuring these changes gives scientists clues about where magma is stored and how it travels. A study published in Geodesy and Geodynamics used satellite radar to examine the November 2025 eruption of Hayli Gubbi in Ethiopia's Afar Depression. Hayli Gubbi and nearby Erta Ale are separate volcanoes within the same volcanic zone, where three tectonic plates are pulling apart.
New research from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in collaboration with other institutions, highlights the fragmented and staggered timing of warming increases across the planet, providing a nuanced perspective on the debate over global-warming acceleration.
Earth's climate has undergone dramatic changes throughout its history, but new research suggests those changes may not have been as random as previously thought. A study led by an international team of researchers, including University of New Mexico paleobiologist Corinne "Cori" Myers, found that Earth's climate over the past 539 million years tended to remain within a small number of recurring climate states. The research also found that periods of elevated extinction, including the five major mass extinction events in Earth's history, frequently occurred as the planet transitioned between those states.
When ocean waves reach shallow water, their complex interactions can produce lower-frequency infragravity waves. These waves strongly affect—and are affected by—the shape of coastlines, linking them to erosion, sediment deposition and the degradation of coastal ice.
If someone leaves the faucet running in your bathroom and the house floods, it's easy to assign responsibility for the damage. But for other disasters—bigger, more complicated and costlier ones—the link between cause and effect isn't as clear.
The seafloor is more than just the ground beneath the sea. Two-thirds of Earth's surface is covered by oceans, which have an average depth of almost 4 kilometers (2.5 miles). For a long time, the seafloor's remoteness protected it from widespread human disturbance. But that is changing: Bottom trawling now reaches depths of around 4,000 meters (13,100 feet) and already disturbs up to 2% of the global seafloor each year.
In a discovery as broad and far-reaching as the Big Muddy itself, a new Yale–led study says farmers in the Mississippi River Basin are storing more carbon dioxide (CO2) in the soil than they emit when they add limestone to their fields, an agricultural practice known as "liming."
Tiny plantlike organisms called phytoplankton that form the base of marine food webs topped by orcas, whales and sharks usually get eaten or slowly sink to the seafloor, carrying carbon as they go. Across most of the ocean, the descent from sunlit surface layers takes weeks. But in the Arctic's Chukchi Sea, scientists have found that a convergence of currents pushes phytoplankton from under the ice to the seafloor at four times the usual speed.
Author(s): Yao-Li Liu and Yasuhiro Kuramitsu
Nonthermal power-law spectra with index −2 are ubiquitously observed in turbulent wakefield acceleration, yet their statistical origin remains unresolved. Using one-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations with particle tracking, we analyze the stochastic energy evolution of electrons accelerated by…
[Phys. Rev. E 114, 035213] Published Wed Sep 23, 2026
Heat waves over land worldwide are beginning earlier, ending later and occurring over longer seasons, while the first heat wave of the season has recently shifted toward faster onset, according to a new study published in Nature Climate Change.
To better assess the spatial extent of mining facilities and their environmental impact, a research team at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has developed a satellite-based remote sensing tool.
