Scientific community and society articles within Nature Geoscience

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  • News & Views |

    Global surface warming has slowed since the start of the twenty-first century, while Pacific heat uptake was enhanced. Analyses of ocean heat content suggest that the warm water was transferred to the Indian Ocean, through the Indonesian straits.

    • Jérôme Vialard

  • News & Views |

    Analyses of ice-core carbon isotopes show that variations in atmospheric CO2 levels during the past millennium are controlled by changes in land reservoirs. But whether climate variations or human activity were mainly responsible is uncertain.

    • Jed O. Kaplan

  • 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 |

    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

  • Editorial |

    The eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 has been linked to climate change and social unrest. Such historical eruptions could serve as test cases for models used to assess future climate changes.

  • 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 1815 eruption of Tambora caused an unusually cold summer in much of Europe in 1816. The extreme weather led to poor harvests and malnutrition, but also demonstrated the capability of humans to adapt and help others in worse conditions.

    • J. Luterbacher
    •  & C. Pfister

  • Commentary |

    The status of sea floors is an important part of healthy marine ecosystems and intact coastlines. We need laws and a sea-floor management regime to make the exploitation of marine resources sustainable.

    • Till Markus
    • , Katrin Huhn
    •  & Kai Bischof

  • Editorial |

    Humans have altered their environment ever since they first appeared. Updates on three frameworks of thinking about the scale of twenty-first-century human influence on the Earth are invigorating the global change debate.

  • Editorial |

    Many insights of Russian scientists are unknown or long-forgotten outside of Russia. Making the Russian literature accessible to the international scientific community could stimulate new lines of research.

  • Editorial |

    Sharing data is key for efficient scientific progress. More open code would be beneficial too.

  • Commentary |

    Journals and funders increasingly require public archiving of the data that support publications. We argue that this mandate is necessary, but not sufficient: more incentives for data sharing are needed.

    • Jens Kattge
    • , Sandra Díaz
    •  & Christian Wirth

  • Commentary |

    Open source software is often seen as a path to reproducibility in computational science. In practice there are many obstacles, even when the code is freely available, but open source policies should at least lead to better quality code.

    • Steve M. Easterbrook

  • Editorial |

    Guidance for mitigation action should come from the insights that global mean temperatures respond to cumulative carbon emissions and that there are risks beyond warming alone. Momentum for the negotiations requires a sense of opportunity.

  • Editorial |

    At Nature Publishing Group we offer a transfer system that allows authors to move papers between our journals at the click of a button if their first-choice journal declined. We encourage authors to use that service.

  • 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

  • News & Views |

    Particles of smoke from natural and human-made fires absorb sunlight and contribute to global warming. Laboratory experiments suggest that smoke is often more absorbing than current numerical models of global climate assume.

    • Nicolas Bellouin

  • Editorial |

    The successful launch of a carbon-observing satellite could make a start on tracking emissions shifts around the globe.

  • Editorial |

    Solar energy is undoubtedly renewable. We must make sure it is also as sustainable as possible.

  • News & Views |

    • Helene Schulze
    •  & Heike Langenberg

  • News & Views |

    Southwest Australia has become increasingly dry over the past century. Simulations with a high-resolution global climate model show that this trend is linked to greenhouse gas emissions and ozone depletion — and that it is likely to continue.

    • David J. Karoly

  • Commentary |

    Expansion of geothermal energy use across the globe is restricted by out-of-date prejudices. It is time for geothermal exploration to be extended to a broader range of environments and rejuvenated with the latest insights from relevant geoscience disciplines.

    • Paul L. Younger

  • Commentary |

    As well as being a milestone in technology, the Chang'e lunar exploration programme establishes China as a contributor to space science. With much still to learn about the Moon, fieldwork beyond Earth's orbit must be an international effort.

    • Long Xiao

  • 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.

  • Article |

    Ethanol-based vehicles are thought to generate less pollution than gasoline-based vehicles. An analysis of pollutant concentrations in the subtropical megacity of São Paulo, Brazil, reveals that levels of ozone pollution fell, but levels of nitric oxide and carbon monoxide rose, during periods of prevailing gasoline use relative to ethanol use.

    • Alberto Salvo
    •  & Franz M. Geiger

  • 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

  • Commentary |

    Climate models projected stronger warming over the past 15 years than has been seen in observations. Conspiring factors of errors in volcanic and solar inputs, representations of aerosols, and El Niño evolution, may explain most of the discrepancy.

    • Gavin A. Schmidt
    • , Drew T. Shindell
    •  & Kostas Tsigaridis

  • Editorial |

    What happens to manuscripts after they are submitted to our online manuscript tracking system is a source of much speculation. To learn how we decide what is published in Nature Geoscience, read on.

  • Commentary |

    Scientific climate information can save lives and livelihoods, yet its application is not always straightforward. Much of the available information does not describe the risk of threshold events, and misunderstandings can leave society less resilient to climate shocks.

    • Erin Coughlan de Perez
    • , Fleur Monasso
    •  & Pablo Suarez

  • Editorial |

    In our trial of a double-blind procedure for peer review, authors' awareness of their peer-review choices in the early stages of writing a paper is key for their decision to opt in or out.

  • Editorial |

    The deaths of 11 rescue workers that set out to help a research boat in stormy Arctic waters highlights the perils of collecting data at sea.

  • News & Views |

    The metal content of magmas erupted at subduction zone arcs is thought to be derived from the mantle. A correlation between crustal thickness and copper content in arc magmas worldwide, however, reveals an important role for the crust in the upper plate.

    • Cin-Ty A. Lee

  • Editorial |

    Mineral exploration is pushing new frontiers. Given a poor track record on land, mining practises should be honed on home soil before venturing into the oceans.

  • Commentary |

    Access to metals and minerals is restricted mostly by geopolitical constraints, and not by a shortage of mineable deposits. In the face of rising demand, a full inventory of these commodities — in the Earth's crust as well as in recyclable waste — is urgently required.

    • Richard Herrington

  • Commentary |

    Renewable energy requires infrastructures built with metals whose extraction requires more and more energy. More mining is unavoidable, but increased recycling, substitution and careful design of new high-tech devices will help meet the growing demand.

    • Olivier Vidal
    • , Bruno Goffé
    •  & Nicholas Arndt

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