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Soils are essential to life on Earth but are rapidly degrading worldwide due to unsustainable human activities. We argue that soil degradation constitutes a key Earth system process that should be added to the planetary boundaries framework.
The pandemic has badly affected the most diverse career stage in UK Earth sciences: early career researchers. Disrupted careers must be rescued with contingency plans, remote networks, a focus on mental health and mentor support if we are to retain diversity and talent.
Adaptation to climate change must be ramped up urgently. This Comment proposes three avenues to transform ambition to action: improve tracking of actions and progress, upscale investment especially in critical areas, and accelerate learning through practice.
About 74,000 years ago Earth’s climate abruptly transitioned to particularly severe cold and dry conditions, which lasted for several millennia. An incomplete eruption record may be why volcanic eruptions were dismissed as the trigger.
Devastating disasters that are predicted but ignored are known as Black Elephants—a cross between a Black Swan event and the proverbial elephant in the room. It’s time we acknowledged the looming natural hazard risks that no one wants to talk about.
Media attention to an article on Greenland’s dynamic ice loss provided a Comms Earth author with a way out of pandemic isolation, a broader perspective of her work, and a heavy responsibility to communicate accurately. She found the experience time-consuming, but rewarding.
Greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution have changed the composition of the atmosphere, and thereby initiated global warming and reduced air quality. Our editorial board members note the need for a deeper understanding of atmospheric fluxes and processes to tackle climate and human health issues.
Our relationship with the landscape has developed through time and more and more the environment is responding to human-driven changes. Now is the time to steer this relationship towards a sustainable future, suggest our Editorial Board Members.
Oceans and cryosphere are immediately affected by human-induced climate change. Our Editorial Board members present viewpoints on the most pressing and fruitful avenues of research on frozen and liquid water, and the transition from one to the other.
Processes within the Earth shape and influence the surface environment and the emergence and evolution of life. Our Editorial board members outline recent advances and future directions in our attempt to understand the history of our planet and its environment.
The ocean is mitigating global warming by absorbing large amounts of excess carbon dioxide from human activities. To quantify and monitor the ocean carbon sink, we need a state-of-the-art data resource that makes data submission and retrieval machine-compatible and efficient.
Over the past 20 years, the proportion of US geoscience undergraduate degree recipients from marginalized racial groups has increased about threefold, more than for graduate degrees. Much of this progress currently is concentrated at relatively few universities.
In a world where humans can push the climate system out of kilter, climate scientists must come from, consider and work for societies around the world.
Perceived risks from carbon dioxide removal have led to calls for net zero targets to be split into separate goals for removals and emissions. A better approach is to accompany net targets with ambitious near-term action, disclose measures to achieve them and closely monitor and manage carbon sinks.
