Solid Earth sciences articles within Nature Geoscience

Featured

  • Perspective |

    Continuous and discoverable observations of water potential could vastly improve understanding of biophysical processes throughout the soil–plant–atmosphere continuum and are achievable thanks to recent technological advances.

    • Kimberly A. Novick
    • , Darren L. Ficklin
    •  & Jeffrey D. Wood

  • Article |

    Drainage divides between coastal plain channel networks can be constructed through depositional, rather than erosional, processes according to a lidar-based topographic analysis of the Gulf of Mexico coastal plain.

    • John M. Swartz
    • , Benjamin T. Cardenas
    •  & Paola Passalacqua

  • Article |

    Two regions of fine-scale heterogeneity in Earth’s inner core may be due to the random alignment of fast-freezing crystals associated with downwelling in the mantle and outer core, according to a 3D map of inner-core seismic data.

    • Wei Wang
    •  & John E. Vidale

  • Article |

    Fracture density decays continuously with distance from the fault resulting in regionally widespread damage over multiple earthquake cycles, according to combined maps of fracture, strain and aftershocks from the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes.

    • Alba M. Rodriguez Padilla
    • , Michael E. Oskin
    •  & Andreas Plesch

  • News & Views |

    Subduction zone formation may be both horizontally and then vertically driven, according to a 4D evolution model of the Puysegur margin, New Zealand. This suggests that the current endmember classification of subduction initiation must be expanded.

    • Fabio Crameri

  • News & Views |

    The structure of the overriding plate may control bending and water ingress into the subducting plate based on an exceptional 3D velocity model of the Nankai subduction zone.

    • Donna J. Shillington

  • Article |

    Oceanic crust subduction sequesters substantial amounts of argon in the Earth’s mantle, while atmosphere-derived argon affects only the isotopic composition and not the overall budget, according to geodynamic–geochemical models of mantle convection.

    • Jonathan M. Tucker
    • , Peter E. van Keken
    •  & Chris J. Ballentine

  • Brief Communication |

    Rupture depth helps explain variations in the size of tsunamis produced by earthquakes, according to numerical modelling and an array of observations.

    • Kwok Fai Cheung
    • , Thorne Lay
    •  & Yoshiki Yamazaki

  • News & Views |

    Evaporative loss of sulfur from molten planetesimals can explain the sub-chondritic sulfur isotope composition of the bulk silicate mantle, suggesting an important role for planetesimal evaporation in establishing Earth’s volatile budget.

    • Yuan Li

  • Article |

    The Philippine Sea/Pacific boundary megathrust is another possible source of seismic hazard in the Tokyo Region and tsunamis in the Pacific, according to an assessment of 1,000 years of tsunami deposits along the Japanese coastline.

    • Jessica E. Pilarczyk
    • , Yuki Sawai
    •  & Christopher H. Vane

  • Article |

    The carbon concentration of Earth’s upper mantle increases with depth, indicating a role for carbon in melt formation, according to data on magmatic gases and volcanic rocks from ocean island and continental rift settings around the world.

    • Alessandro Aiuppa
    • , Federico Casetta
    •  & Giancarlo Tamburello

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rotational deceleration has increased daylength on Earth, potentially linking the increased burial of organic carbon by cyanobacterial mats and planetary oxygenation, according to experiments and modelling of Precambrian benthic ecosystems.

    • J. M. Klatt
    • , A. Chennu
    •  & G. J. Dick

  • Article |

    Frequent and dispersed small earthquakes may contribute substantially to uplift of subduction margins, according to an analysis of such seismicity in the Peru–Chile and Japan margins.

    • Andrea Madella
    •  & Todd A. Ehlers

  • Article |

    Indo-African mantle upwellings are arranged in a tree-like structure, which might reflect linear staggered detachment of proto-plumes from the lowermost mantle, according to seismic tomographic imaging.

    • Maria Tsekhmistrenko
    • , Karin Sigloch
    •  & Guilhem Barruol

  • Article |

    The inner core underwent preferential equatorial growth and translation after nucleation ~0.5–1.5 billion years ago, according to an analysis of its seismic anisotropy and self-consistent geodynamic simulations.

    • Daniel A. Frost
    • , Marine Lasbleis
    •  & Barbara Romanowicz

  • Article |

    Transformation kinetics of olivine may be a cause of deep-focus earthquakes even in wet slabs, according to water-partitioning experiments, which show that olivine remains relatively dry even under wet subducting slab conditions.

    • Takayuki Ishii
    •  & Eiji Ohtani

  • Article |

    Viscous deformation is a potentially prevalent mechanism of fault lubrication during earthquakes, according to laboratory experiments that simulate seismic faulting of various rock-forming minerals.

    • Giacomo Pozzi
    • , Nicola De Paola
    •  & Sylvie Demouchy

  • Editorial |

    Plate boundary faults in subduction zones can generate large earthquakes and tsunamis. Recent studies have revealed that these faults slip in various ways and may be influenced by many factors. Better understanding them should improve hazard assessments.

  • News & Views |

    Corals reveal that part of the plate-boundary fault near Sumatra slipped slowly and quietly for three decades before a large earthquake in 1861. The exceptional duration of this slip event has implications for interpreting deformation to assess seismic hazard.

    • Daniel Melnick

  • Article |

    Shallow parts of megathrusts up-dip of locked patches generally have a high slip rate deficit, which could mean tsunami hazard has been underestimated, according to a stress-constrained inversion of geodetic data.

    • Eric O. Lindsey
    • , Rishav Mallick
    •  & Emma M. Hill

  • Article |

    A 32-year-long slow-slip event occurred on a shallow part of the Sunda megathrust, perhaps because of stress accumulation after fluid expulsion, according to an analysis of the deformation history of the area and physics-based simulations.

    • Rishav Mallick
    • , Aron J. Meltzner
    •  & Emma M. Hill

  • News & Views |

    Near-surface stress patterns, influenced by topography, control the size and location of the largest landslides — but not necessarily smaller ones — according to a study of mountains at the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau.

    • Peter van der Beek

  • Article |

    Stress from tectonics and topography may be the primary control on the size of bedrock landslides, according to a comparison of a stress model with landslide inventories for a mountainous area in eastern Tibet.

    • Gen K. Li
    •  & Seulgi Moon

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