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Maintaining good water quality is vital for healthy ecosystems and human water use, yet water quality responses to hydroclimatic extremes and changing climate are poorly understood. This Review explores river water quality under climate change and extremes.
Cotton is a water-intensive crop with many environmental impacts before and after it is processed into consumer goods. This Review summarizes the environmental impacts across the life cycle of cotton, compares the impacts to alternative fibres and discusses options for mitigation.
Reports of stark declines in invertebrate biomass prompted attention-grabbing news headlines about an ‘insect apocalypse’, fuelling public and scientific interest in the insect biodiversity crisis. However, substantial discussion has ensued regarding the magnitude and generality of these losses. In this Viewpoint, five researchers offer their views on the insect decline debate.
An article in Science Advances uses Si and O isotopes of Earth’s oldest rocks to identify the onset of crustal recycling, with potential implications for the onset of subduction-like tectonics.
The mantle of the Earth influences many dynamic processes such as crust formation, recycling and mantle convection. This Review describes modern isotopic methods used to characterize plume-derived basalts and gain insight into the composition of the mantle.
Coupled Fe–C cycles are important considerations for carbon sequestration, soil fertility and ecosystem functions. This Review explores the role of Fe minerals in stabilizing and degrading organic matter and the role of organic matter in enhancing reactivity of Fe minerals under different conditions.
Evapotranspiration (ET) is a key process connecting the land to the atmosphere. This Review details the characteristics and drivers of ET changes since the 1980s, noting a positive and accelerating ET trend arising from global greening.
Biogeochemistry is controlled by a small set of microbial-encoded proteins containing redox-sensitive transition metals as their core catalytic centre. Understanding how the environmental distribution and availability of these metals influences microbial functional diversity will unlock fundamental knowledge into Earth and life coevolution.
Seafloor turbidity currents form Earth’s largest sediment accumulations, deepest canyons and longest channels, but their destructive nature makes them notoriously difficult to measure in action. This Review explores how insights from detailed direct measurements have advanced understanding of turbidity currents.
The rapid emergence of deep learning is attracting growing private interest in the traditionally public enterprise of numerical weather and climate prediction. A public–private partnership would be a pioneering step to bridge between physics- and data-based methods, and necessary to effectively address future societal challenges.
Integrating impacts and cascading hazards to drought monitoring could improve prediction and mitigation of drought events. This Perspective discusses the limitations of existing indicators, the cascading hazards associated with drought and the importance of assessing drought impacts.
An article in Sustainable Cities and Society finds that urban tree cover tends to lower surface temperatures across 44 cities in the USA, with an even larger magnitude of cooling in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
Digital twins — virtual replicas of natural systems — are emerging as promising tools for assessing seismic hazard and for aiding disaster decision-making and earthquake rapid response. However, to truly harness their potential, the challenges of exascale computing must be tackled to create systems that are capable of adapting to ever-evolving earthquake dynamics.
The terrestrial biosphere stores carbon in a land carbon sink, offsetting emissions of carbon into the atmosphere. This Review demonstrates that the magnitude of the land carbon sink has increased over time, but that its stability in the future is less clear and depends on climate impacts and effective implementation of nature-based solutions.
Increasing temperatures in the seas around China have a range of physical, biogeochemical and biological impacts. This Review outlines historical and projected changes in these seas and the implications of these changes for marine ecosystems.
