Physics articles within Nature Geoscience

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  • Letter |

    Fluids flowing through cavities in Earth’s crust can deposit gold. Thermo-mechanical modelling of a fluid-filled cavity that expands suddenly during an earthquake shows that the drop in pressure would cause the fluid to vaporize and deposit the gold almost instantaneously.

    • Dion K. Weatherley
    •  & Richard W. Henley

  • Letter |

    The electric discharge of a thundercloud in the troposphere is often accompanied by upper-atmospheric electric discharges such as sprites or halos. Numerical simulations of the electric response of the mesosphere to lightning suggest that the process of electron associative detachment is fundamental to upper-atmospheric electrodynamics.

    • A. Luque
    •  & F. J. Gordillo-Vázquez

  • Letter |

    Ocean eddies generated through instability of the mean flow are a vital component of the energy budget of the global ocean. Modelling combined with satellite altimetry data suggests that the energy from westward-propagating eddies is scattered and eventually dispersed when they reach the western boundary of an ocean basin.

    • Xiaoming Zhai
    • , Helen L. Johnson
    •  & David P. Marshall

  • Letter |

    Vertical motions of the rocky margins of Greenland and Antarctica respond to mass changes of their respective ice sheets, but these motions can be obscured by ancient episodes of glacial advance or retreat. An analysis of the acceleration of vertical motion indicates that accelerated ice loss in western Greenland started in the late 1990s.

    • Yan Jiang
    • , Timothy H. Dixon
    •  & Shimon Wdowinski

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