Climate sciences articles within Nature Geoscience

Featured

  • Research Briefing |

    Modelling of the effect of reservoirs on the climate through time (1900 to 2060) revealed that although carbon emissions peaked in 1987, reservoir-induced radiative forcing will continue to rise for the next decades. Over time, reservoir emissions are shifting from carbon dioxide to methane-dominated pathways, on which knowledge is largely lacking.

  • News & Views |

    Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is losing mass and has the potential to cause substantial sea level rise. New seabed imagery indicates that the glacier previously retreated at double its current rate, implying that mass loss could accelerate in the near future.

    • Andrew Mackintosh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Thwaites Glacier grounding zone has experienced sustained pulses of rapid retreat over the past two centuries, according to sea floor observations obtained by an autonomous underwater vehicle.

    • Alastair G. C. Graham
    • , Anna Wåhlin
    •  & Robert D. Larter

  • News & Views |

    Modelling indicates that a return to fully normal marine conditions in the Mediterranean following the flooding that ended the Messinian Salinity Crisis was delayed by salt transfers and temporarily enhanced stratification.

    • Angelo Camerlenghi

  • Comment |

    Rocket emissions and debris from spacecraft falling out of orbit are having increasingly detrimental effects on global atmospheric chemistry. Improved monitoring and regulation are urgently needed to create an environmentally sustainable space industry.

    • Jamie D. Shutler
    • , Xiaoyu Yan
    •  & Hitoshi Nasu

  • News & Views |

    Sea level rise causes barrier islands to migrate landward. Coastal evolution modelling reveals a centennial-scale lag in island response time and suggests migration rates will increase by 50% within the next century, even if sea level were to stabilize.

    • Laura J. Moore
    •  & A. Brad Murray

  • News & Views |

    Analyses of the 2014 Iceland–Holuhraun volcanic eruption revealed the emitted aerosols induced a 10% increase in cloud coverage above the region, suggesting anthropogenic aerosols might strongly cool the Earth’s climate by increasing the cloud coverage.

    • Velle Toll

  • Research Briefing |

    Ozone depletion is not only a serious health threat but can also affect the climate. Atmospheric chemistry models reveal that springtime Arctic ozone depletion can have major consequences for the seasonal climate in the Northern Hemisphere, including warming over Eurasia and drying across central Europe.

  • News & Views |

    Shrubs act as thermal bridges to conduct heat through the tundra snowpack, fostering heat loss from the ground in winter and heat gain in the spring.

    • Michael M. Loranty

  • News & Views |

    For decades, ozone pollution mitigation efforts relied on two chemical regimes. A global modelling analysis has revealed a third regime involving aerosols that would help with the concurrent control of both ozone and particulate pollution.

    • Audrey Gaudel

  • Article |

    Coastal evolution simulations suggest that the modern retreat of coastal barrier islands is controlled by cumulative sea-level rise over the past several centuries and will accelerate by 50% within a century, even if sea-level rise remains at present rates.

    • Giulio Mariotti
    •  & Christopher J. Hein

  • Article |

    The Azores High over the North Atlantic has expanded due to anthropogenic climate change, disrupting precipitation patterns in western Europe, according to climate modelling and precipitation proxy records spanning the past millennium.

    • Nathaniel Cresswell-Clay
    • , Caroline C. Ummenhofer
    •  & Victor J. Polyak

  • Research Briefing |

    Monitoring of the daily global CO2 emissions in 2020 reveals the spatial–temporal pattern of the drop in emissions due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The daily CO2 emission changes also reveal different patterns of human activities and fossil CO2 emissions across countries, sectors and periods.

  • Research Briefing |

    In a simulation with a state-of-the-art climate model, obstruction of the ocean gateways in the Canadian archipelago due to ice-sheet growth reroutes currents and alters North Atlantic Ocean conditions, permitting glacial inception in Scandinavia. This mechanism could help to explain periods of rapid ice-sheet growth in Earth’s history.

  • Research Briefing |

    This study shows that by stabilizing the soil, biological soil crusts reduce global atmospheric dust emissions by 60%, corresponding to ~700 Tg of dust per year. According to models of biocrust cover loss, this effect will be reduced in the future, leading to increases in not only dust emissions but also global radiative cooling.

  • Editorial |

    Meeting climate targets will require considerable carbon dioxide removal in addition to emission cuts. To achieve this sustainably, a range of methods are needed to avoid adverse effects and match co-benefits with local needs.

  • Article |

    Pulses of silicic arc magmatism—and associated volatile emissions—helped set the timing and magnitude of the environmental disruptions that caused the end-Permian mass extinction, according to U–Pb zircon dating of silicic volcanic and related tephra sequences in eastern Australia.

    • Timothy Chapman
    • , Luke A. Milan
    •  & Jim Crowley

  • Article |

    Continental flood basalt emplacement is facilitated by basaltic intrusions, which crystalize and release carbon dioxide leading to pre-eruptive global warming, according to numerical models and a comparison with Deccan Traps and Columbia River Basalt records.

    • Xiaochuan Tian
    •  & W. Roger Buck

  • Article |

    Observations suggest early twentieth-century human activities, in the form of canal construction, increased groundwater availability in northwest India and Pakistan, in contrast to recent depletion driven by tubewell development and low rainfall.

    • D. J. MacAllister
    • , G. Krishan
    •  & A. M. MacDonald

  • Article |

    Spontaneous, rapid climate fluctuations occur when atmospheric CO2 is between 190 and 225 ppm, helping explain short-term warm–cool transitions during glacial climate states, according to combined Earth system and dynamical systems model simulations.

    • Guido Vettoretti
    • , Peter Ditlevsen
    •  & Sune Olander Rasmussen

  • Article |

    Very small aerosols from sea spray make up a larger proportion of cloud condensation nuclei than previously recognized, according to an analysis of five years of aerosol ground-based measurement data from over the Atlantic Ocean.

    • Wei Xu
    • , Jurgita Ovadnevaite
    •  & Colin O’Dowd

Browse broader subjects

Browse narrower subjects

Browse Climate sciences across other nature.com journals