Atmospheric chemistry articles within Nature Geoscience

Featured

  • Research Highlights |

    • Anna Armstrong

  • News & Views |

    Models predict that mercury undergoes rapid oxidation in the upper atmosphere. Aircraft measurements support this prediction and provide evidence for a previously unrecognized sink for stratospheric mercury.

    • Christopher D. Holmes

  • Feature |

    The Late Ordovician period, ending 444 million years ago, was marked by the onset of glaciations. The expansion of non-vascular land plants accelerated chemical weathering and may have drawn down enough atmospheric carbon dioxide to trigger the growth of ice sheets.

    • Timothy M. Lenton
    • , Michael Crouch
    •  & Liam Dolan

  • Article |

    Wetlands cover more than 6% of the global ice-free land area, and represent an important arsenic sink. Laboratory experiments suggest that natural organic matter plays an active role in the immobilization of arsenic in anoxic wetlands.

    • Peggy Langner
    • , Christian Mikutta
    •  & Ruben Kretzschmar

  • Article |

    Peatlands store vast amounts of organic carbon, owing to anoxic conditions, which prevent decay. Laboratory and field experiments suggest that drought-induced increases in oxygen stimulate microbial growth and the breakdown of peatland carbon.

    • Nathalie Fenner
    •  & Chris Freeman

  • Article |

    Atmospheric aerosols can both suppress and foster the development of clouds and precipitation, depending on meteorological conditions. Ten years of observations, together with model simulations, suggest that aerosols stimulate the vertical development of warm-base mixed-phase clouds.

    • Zhanqing Li
    • , Feng Niu
    •  & Yanni Ding

  • News & Views |

    Naturally produced hydrocarbons such as isoprene influence air quality and climate. Accounting for circadian control of isoprene emissions helps to bring model simulations of ground-level ozone into closer agreement with observations.

    • Alexander T. Archibald

  • Letter |

    The volatile organic compound isoprene — a precursor to the air pollutant ozone — is produced by many plant species. Canopy-scale measurements in Malaysia, combined with model simulations, suggest that isoprene emissions are under circadian control.

    • C. N. Hewitt
    • , K. Ashworth
    •  & O. Wild

  • News & Views |

    Atmospheric aerosols strongly influence Earth's climate, but how they form has remained a mystery. According to cloud chamber experiments, a mixture of vapours, as well as ions formed by galactic cosmic rays, contribute to the particle formation recipe.

    • Jeffrey Pierce

  • Commentary |

    Reconstructions of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the past 65 million years are heading towards consensus. It is time for systematic testing of the proxies, against measurements and against each other.

    • David J. Beerling
    •  & Dana L. Royer

  • Letter |

    Water has been found in many lunar rock samples, but its sources are unknown. Isotopic analyses of Apollo samples of lunar mare basalts and highlands rocks suggest that a significant volume of water was delivered to the Moon by comets shortly after its formation by giant impact.

    • James P. Greenwood
    • , Shoichi Itoh
    •  & Hisayoshi Yurimoto

  • News & Views |

    Bromine facilitates the oxidation of elemental mercury in the lower atmosphere in polar and subpolar regions. Measurements over the Dead Sea suggest that bromine also generates large quantities of oxidized mercury in the mid-latitudes.

    • Parisa A. Ariya

  • Letter |

    In the polar atmosphere, non-reactive gaseous elemental mercury is converted to a highly reactive form of mercury by halogens such as bromine. Measurements over the Dead Sea suggest that bromine also triggers reactive mercury formation over the mid-latitude ocean.

    • Daniel Obrist
    • , Eran Tas
    •  & Menachem Luria

  • News & Views |

    The Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago was triggered by the sudden release of carbon to the ocean–atmosphere system. The carbon may have been removed almost as abruptly 100,000 years later, in the form of organic carbon.

    • David Archer

  • Commentary |

    Short-lived greenhouse gases and black-carbon aerosols have contributed to past climate warming. Curbing their emissions and quantifying the forcing by all short-lived components could both mitigate climate change in the short term and help to refine projections of global warming.

    • Joyce E. Penner
    • , Michael J. Prather
    •  & David S. Stevenson

  • News & Views |

    Reconstructions of atmospheric chemistry and microbial life early in the Earth's history have been contentious. Observations increasingly point to the evolution of complex and variable environments earlier in time.

    • Andrew D. Czaja

  • News & Views |

    Low atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations during glacial periods must have been accompanied by changes in surface-ocean carbonate chemistry. But it is unclear whether concurrent changes in the deep sea contributed to the glacial carbon dioxide decline.

    • Richard E. Zeebe
    •  & Thomas M. Marchitto Jr

  • Letter |

    The sedimentary deposits at Meridiani Planum on Mars were formed in acidic surface waters. Geochemical calculations show that the oxidation of dissolved iron and the precipitation of oxidized iron minerals in the surface waters could be sufficient to generate the inferred acidity.

    • Joel A. Hurowitz
    • , Woodward W. Fischer
    •  & Ralph E. Milliken

  • Letter |

    Ice clouds in the tropical tropopause layer have a key role in dehydrating air that is entering the stratosphere. Cloud-chamber measurements suggest that their high humidity can be explained if heterogeneous ice nucleation on glassy aerosols is a significant nucleation mechanism in this region.

    • Benjamin J. Murray
    • , Theodore W. Wilson
    •  & Bernd Kärcher

  • Letter |

    The rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum has been attributed to the release of carbon dioxide from the deep Southern Ocean. However, reconstructions of the radiocarbon signature of Chilean margin intermediate waters during the glacial termination do not reflect the influence of such a release.

    • Ricardo De Pol-Holz
    • , Lloyd Keigwin
    •  & Mahyar Mohtadi

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