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Climate change affects lakes worldwide and is predicted to continue to alter lake ice cover, surface temperature, evaporation rates, water levels and mixing regimes. This Review discusses recent and expected lake responses to climate change and looks towards future research opportunities in lake monitoring and modelling.
Permafrost-affected soils are an unappreciated but potentially substantial source of nitrous oxide, a powerful greenhouse gas. This Review outlines the global importance of nitrous oxide dynamics in permafrost-affected soils, examines what drives nitrous oxide fluxes and discusses the impact of climate change on these greenhouse gas emissions.
Pyroclastic density currents are complex multiphase flows originating from volcanic eruptions and account for almost a third of volcanic fatalities globally. This Review discusses recent advances in understanding of the complex internal processes within pyroclastic density currents and how these influence the flow dynamics and hazard footprints.
The efforts of early career researchers are many and varied, but how they are acknowledged requires improvement. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment is now part of a peer-review trial to include, train and acknowledge early career referees.
Contamination of agricultural soils by heavy metals and metalloids has severe consequences on human and ecosystem health. This Review discusses the sources of heavy metal(loid) contamination, the mechanisms by which these contaminants interact with biological and geochemical soil elements, and plant-based and microorganism-based remediation strategies.
The Carbon Neutrality Challenge is an initiative to mitigate climate change, in which individuals estimate their CO2 footprint and then plant enough trees to offset it. Thousands of trees have been planted by volunteers in Hawaii who took the Carbon Neutrality Challenge.
Research on compound events has increased vastly in the last several years, yet, a typology was absent. This Review proposes a comprehensive classification scheme, incorporating compound events that are preconditioned, multivariate, temporally compounding and spatially compounding events.
By increasing erosion, mountain building can steer the evolution of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and global climate. This Review expands from the canonical focus on silicate weathering to consider the net carbon budget of erosion, including both CO2 sinks (silicate weathering, organic-carbon burial) and CO2 sources (oxidative weathering).
Mesoscale convective systems are an important source of precipitation in many tropical and mid-latitude regions, but can also produce hazardous weather, such as extreme rain, derechos and tornadoes. This Review discusses the formation of mesoscale convective systems, their hazardous weather, predictive capabilities and projected changes with anthropogenic warming.
Traditional methods for ocean observation are often inadequate for detecting large-scale biogeochemical processes. This Perspective discusses the advantages of implementing autonomous observation platforms in complementing traditional observation methods and generating global biogeochemical data sets.
