University of Southern California scientists have proven that the Earth’s inner core is backtracking—slowing down—in relation to the planet’s surface, as shown in new research published in Nature. Movement of the inner core has been debated by the scientific community for two decades, with some research indicating that the inner core rotates faster than the … Read more
By taking a close look at the geometrical makeup of rocks where earthquakes originate, researchers at Brown University are adding a new wrinkle to a long-held belief about what causes seismic quakes in the first place. The work, described in the journal Nature, reveals that the way fault networks are aligned plays a critical role in determining … Read more
One of Earth’s most consequential bursts of biodiversity—a 30-million-year period of explosive evolutionary changes spawning innumerable new species—may have the most modest of creatures to thank for the vital stage in life’s history: worms. The digging and burrowing of prehistoric worms and other invertebrates along ocean bottoms sparked a chain of events that released oxygen … Read more
In order to understand the Earth’s resilience, researchers at ETH Zurich are modeling climate changes from times long past. And they show that plants are not simply victims of circumstances, but have helped to shape climate conditions on Earth. Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, Earth has lived through a series of … Read more
A recent study published in the PNAS shows that western Central Asia has experienced a long-term drying trend over the past 7,800 years. This discovery, based on the analysis of a stalagmite from the Fergana Valley in Kyrgyzstan, adds a critical piece to the understanding of westerly-influenced hydroclimatic patterns in Central Asia. Central Asia is … Read more
A heavy snowpack is fun for skiers and sledders, and it also acts like an open-air storage tank that melts away to provide water for drinking, irrigation and other purposes during dry months. But exactly how much water is held in snowpacks, and for how long? That information, critical to water managers around the globe, … Read more
Arctic sea ice is shrinking as the world continues to warm, and a new study led by researchers at Penn State may provide a better understanding of how the loss of this ice may impact daily weather in the middle latitudes, including the United States. The researchers used climate models and a machine learning approach … Read more
A new study led by UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography postdoctoral scholar Jennifer Bowen finds that canals used to drain soggy peatlands in Southeast Asia are likely hotspots for greenhouse gas emissions. The results, published March 8 in Nature Geoscience, identify a previously unaccounted for source of emissions from these threatened, carbon-rich landscapes. Findings from the … Read more
Of all the ways that humans consume water, there is no practice that uses more water than irrigation, which accounts for more than 90% of humanity’s water consumption. While irrigation is necessary to help increase global crop production, it can simultaneously lead to stress on freshwater resources if it is not done in a sustainable … Read more
The meltdown of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant, caused by the devastating earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, represents the most severe nuclear power accident of the 21st century so far. However, a new study highlights how the decision by the Japanese government to begin releasing the radioactive water stored within it—a decision approved by … Read more
Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently combined satellite data, field observations, and sophisticated numerical modeling to paint a picture of how 22.45 million square kilometers of the Arctic will change over the next 80 years. As expected, the overall region will be warmer and wetter, but the details—up to 25% more runoff, 30% … Read more
Will ice floating in the Arctic Ocean move faster or slower over the coming decades? The answer to this question will tell us whether marine transportation can be expected to get more or less hazardous. It might also have important implications for the rate of ice cover loss, which is hugely consequential for Northern Indigenous … Read more
A team of researchers from The University of New Mexico’s Museum of Southwestern Biology (MSB) have reported unexpectedly high levels of chemical contamination in wild birds and mammals at Holloman Air Force Base, near Alamogordo, N.M. in new research published in Environmental Research. The research found that animals were heavily contaminated with several harmful compounds … Read more
Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are filaments of intense moisture transport in the atmosphere. These weather systems drive a large fraction of the extreme precipitation events over coastal regions. Detecting ARs in satellite observations has long been a challenging task due to the lack of wind information. In a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: … Read more
Anoxic marine basins may be among the most viable places to conduct large-scale carbon sequestration in the deep ocean, while minimizing negative impacts on marine life. So say UC Santa Barbara researchers in a paper published in the journal AGU Advances. As we explore ways to actively draw down the levels of carbon in the … Read more
Do climate change deniers bend the facts to avoid having to modify their environmentally harmful behavior? Researchers from the University of Bonn and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ran an online experiment involving 4,000 US adults, and found no evidence to support this idea. The authors of the study were themselves surprised by the … Read more
New research from Dartmouth College provides the first evidence that the Arctic’s frozen soil is the dominant force shaping Earth’s northernmost rivers. Permafrost, the thick layer of soil that stays frozen for two or more years at a time, is the reason that Arctic rivers are uniformly confined to smaller areas and shallower valleys than … Read more
Researchers from the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Fribourg, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and the Institute of Polar Sciences of the Italian National Research Council (CNR), undertook an analysis of ice cores extracted in 2018 and 2020 from the Corbassière glacier located at Grand Combin in the … Read more
They are among the most productive and biodiverse areas of the world’s oceans: coastal upwelling regions along the eastern boundaries of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. There, equatorward winds cause near-surface water to move away from the coast. This brings cold, nutrient-rich water from the depths to the surface, inducing the growth of phytoplankton and … Read more
The booming offset category in the global carbon market, aimed at subsidizing efficient cookstove distribution in developing nations to curb greenhouse gas emissions, faces a significant setback. A new study reveals that the credits associated with this initiative substantially overstate the carbon savings of the stoves by a factor of 10. This overestimation poses a … Read more