Climate-change impacts articles within Nature Geoscience

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  • Letter |

    The glaciers in western Canada are experiencing rapid mass loss. Projections of their fate with a model that couples physics-based ice dynamics with a surface mass balance model suggest that glacier volume will shrink by 70% by 2100.

    • Garry K. C. Clarke
    • , Alexander H. Jarosch
    •  & Brian Menounos

  • Commentary |

    200 years after the eruption of Mount Tambora, the eruption volume remains poorly known, as is true for other volcanic eruptions over past millennia. We need better records of size and occurrence if we are to predict future large eruptions more accurately.

    • Stephen Self
    •  & Ralf Gertisser

  • Commentary |

    The impact of a volcanic eruption depends on more than just its size. We need more interdisciplinary research to understand the global societal consequences of past and future volcanic eruptions.

    • Clive Oppenheimer

  • Letter |

    Forests may be vulnerable to future droughts. A tree mortality threshold based on plant hydraulics suggests that increased drought may trigger widespread dieback in the southwestern United States by mid-century.

    • William R. L. Anderegg
    • , Alan Flint
    •  & Christopher B. Field

  • Progress Article |

    The amount of carbon stored in peats exceeds that stored in vegetation. A synthesis of the literature suggests that smouldering fires in peatlands could become more common as the climate warms, and release old carbon to the air.

    • Merritt R. Turetsky
    • , Brian Benscoter
    •  & Adam Watts

  • News & Views |

    Freshwater deficits and heavy rainfall have been projected to intensify in a warming climate. An analysis of hydrological data suggests that past changes in wet and dry extremes were more complex than a simple amplification of existing patterns.

    • Richard P. Allan

  • Commentary |

    Water availability and use are inherently regional concerns. However, a global-scale approach to evaluating strategies to reduce water stress can help maximize mitigation.

    • Yoshihide Wada
    • , Tom Gleeson
    •  & Laurent Esnault

  • Review Article |

    The Arctic has warmed more than twice as fast as the global average. A literature synthesis discusses mechanisms how the associated decline in sea ice and snow cover could potentially alter mid-latitude weather, but uncertainties are profound.

    • Judah Cohen
    • , James A. Screen
    •  & Justin Jones

  • News & Views |

    • Helene Schulze
    •  & Heike Langenberg

  • Letter |

    The bed topography beneath the Greenland ice sheet controls the flow of ice and its discharge into the ocean. A combination of sparse radar soundings of ice thickness and high-resolution ice motion data suggest that many submarine ice-covered valleys extend significantly deeper below sea level and farther inland than thought.

    • M. Morlighem
    • , E. Rignot
    •  & E. Larour

  • Letter |

    Bioavailable iron is released from anoxic sediments, such as those that underlie the Peruvian upwelling zone. Analyses of iron levels in sediments from this region suggest that iron release occurs in a relatively narrow range of redox conditions, and that the amount of iron released to the upwelling waters has varied over the past 140,000 years.

    • Florian Scholz
    • , James McManus
    •  & Ralph R. Schneider

  • Editorial |

    Climate change could compromise food security over the coming century. Scientists working towards mitigation and adaptation have to win over those who work on the land.

  • News & Views |

    Record-breaking heatwaves in 2003 and 2010 surprised both the public and experts. Observations provide new insights into how temperatures escalated to unprecedented values through the interaction of boundary-layer dynamics and land surface drying.

    • Erich M. Fischer

  • Letter |

    The tropical belt has expanded by several degrees latitude over the past 30 years, following an earlier period of contraction. Climate simulations indicate that tropical belt width is controlled by multidecadal sea surface temperature variability associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and anthropogenic aerosols.

    • Robert J. Allen
    • , Joel R. Norris
    •  & Mahesh Kovilakam

  • Commentary |

    Decadal climate variability has long received limited attention. With the slow-down in surface warming since the late 1990s, the decadal scale has rightly become a focus of attention: for assessing climate change and its impacts, it is of critical importance.

    • Martin Visbeck

  • Review Article |

    Feedbacks between the terrestrial carbon cycle and climate change could affect many ecosystem functions and services. A synthesis of global air temperature data reveals non-uniform rates of climate warming on diurnal and seasonal timescales, and heterogeneous impacts on ecosystem carbon cycling.

    • Jianyang Xia
    • , Jiquan Chen
    •  & Shiqiang Wan

  • News & Views |

    Despite reports of no trends in snow- and rainfall, rivers in the northwest USA have run lower and lower in recent decades. A closer look at high- and low-altitude precipitation suggests that observational networks have missed a decline in mountain rain and snow that can explain the discrepancy.

    • Michael Dettinger

  • Letter |

    Surface melt water from the Greenland ice sheet can become trapped in firn, delaying its journey to the sea. Radar and ice-core observations provide direct evidence of a perennial aquifer in the firn layer in southern Greenland that represents a potentially significant contribution to the Greenland mass budget.

    • Richard R. Forster
    • , Jason E. Box
    •  & Joseph R. McConnell

  • Review Article |

    The Indian Ocean Dipole is a key mode of interannual climate variability influencing much of Asia and Australia. A Review suggests that in response to greenhouse warming, mean conditions of the Indian Ocean will shift toward a positive dipole state, but with no overall shift in the frequency of positive and negative events as defined relative to the mean climate state.

    • Wenju Cai
    • , Xiao-Tong Zheng
    •  & Toshio Yamagata

  • Letter |

    Palaeoclimate records indicate lower El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variance during the middle Holocene compared with today, but the mechanisms leading to this muted variability are not clear. A 175-year oxygen isotope record from a Porites coral microatoll in the NINO3.4 region records persistently reduced ENSO variance about 4,300 years ago, and season-specific analyses of the record suggest that insolation played an important role in this change.

    • H. V. McGregor
    • , M. J. Fischer
    •  & C. D. Woodroffe

  • Letter |

    Altimeter data suggest that sea level rose by about 2.4 mm per year from 2005 to 2011, but estimates of the relative contributions of ocean warming and increased ocean mass are equivocal. An analysis of ocean temperature and satellite gravity data suggests that the delivery of meltwater from ice sheets and mountain glaciers contributed 75% of the observed sea-level rise.

    • J. L. Chen
    • , C. R. Wilson
    •  & B. D. Tapley

  • Commentary |

    In areas of the developing world that have benefited only marginally from the intensification of agriculture, foreign investments can enhance productivity. This could represent a step towards greater food security, but only if we ensure that malnourished people in the host countries benefit.

    • Paolo D'Odorico
    •  & Maria Cristina Rulli

  • Letter |

    The formal detection of climate warming and its attribution to human influence has so far relied on the differences between natural and anthropogenic warming patterns. An alternative and entirely independent attribution method that relies on the principle of conservation of energy instead, confirms greenhouse gas warming by 0.85 °C since the mid-twentieth century, half of which was offset by aerosol cooling.

    • Markus Huber
    •  & Reto Knutti

  • Review Article |

    Anthropogenic emissions of ozone-depleting gases cause marked changes in surface climate, in addition to rising levels of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. A Review of the influence of the Antarctic ozone hole on Southern Hemisphere surface climate finds that its signature closely resembles the negative phase of the southern annular mode.

    • David W. J. Thompson
    • , Susan Solomon
    •  & David J. Karoly

  • News & Views |

    Gaseous pollutants such as ozone and carbon monoxide from Asia are lifted to altitudes of more than 10 km during the summer monsoon season. Satellite observations show that aerosol particles, too, can rise high and spread across thousands of kilometres.

    • Mark G. Lawrence

  • Commentary |

    Research into the biological threat of reduced ocean pH has yielded many insights over the past decade. Further progress requires a better understanding of how the interplay between ocean acidification and other anthropogenic stresses impacts marine biota.

    • Philip W. Boyd

  • News & Views |

    Extreme climate events can cause widespread damage and have been projected to become more frequent as the world warms. Yet as discussed at an interdisciplinary workshop, it is often not clear which extremes matter the most, and how and why they are changing.

    • Gabriele C. Hegerl
    • , Helen Hanlon
    •  & Carl Beierkuhnlein

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