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Global temperature fluctuations during the last 2,000 years caused consistent changes in ocean evaporation and atmospheric moisture condensation processes, reflected in coherent water isotope signals in a large compilation of proxy records.

Fine silicate dust generated by the Chicxulub impact had a dominant role in the global cooling and disruption of photosynthesis that followed, according to palaeoclimate simulations constrained by grain-size analysis of Cretaceous-Palaeogene boundary sediments.

Increasing soil organic carbon can, under optimum management only, enhance global production of maize, wheat and rice by up to 0.7% with important regional differences, according to 13,662 field trials across a broad range of soils, climates and management practices.

Tectonic and ecological factors controlled spatially contrasting marine redox changes through the Phanerozoic, a pattern that was in turn linked to background extinction rates, according to a machine learning-based analysis of shale geochemical data.

The variable intensity of Southern Ocean as well as North Atlantic deep-water ventilation explains differences in atmospheric CO₂ trends and magnitudes during cold stadials over the past 150,000 years, according to a record of deep-ocean acidity.

Chemical analyses show permafrost soils on the Tibetan Plateau contain large amounts of halogenated organic chemicals that could be remobilized in a changing climate.

Varying monsoon extent and intensity since the expansive megamonsoon on the Pangaea supercontinent was controlled by the position and fragmentation of continental land masses, according to climate simulations and atmospheric energetic analyses.

Deep-ocean oxygenation patterns consistent with an active Atlantic meridional overturning circulation emerged following the Eocene-Oligocene transition about 34 million years ago, according to biomarker records from the northwest North Atlantic.

Swath radar maps of the subglacial landscape reveal how Antarctica’s geologic history has influenced the evolution of the ice sheet. The findings indicate the role of past interior ice streams in shaping ice-sheet growth and flow from Hercules Dome.

Animal diversification coincided with increasing oxygenation of the Baltoscandian continental shelf from the Early to Middle Ordovician, according to iodine and calcium records.

Analyses of atmospheric nitrogen chemistry in Beijing’s air pollution during the COVID-19 lockdown suggest an increasing role of nighttime nitrogen chemistry in haze formation above the city.

Analysis of remote-sensing and seismological observations from the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquake doublet reveals how fault geometry can control fault slip distribution and rupture kinematics, including the occurrence of supershear rupture.

Alpine valleys and lineated bedforms imaged with swath radar suggest that ice flowed quickly into a fault-bounded basin during the initial nucleation of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet near Hercules Dome.

Sample return missions to asteroids provide critical pristine materials lacking from meteorite collections.

Recording 4.3 billion years of Earth’s history, Jesse Reimink explores the many ways that zircon allows geologists to keep track of the past.

From a stalagmite that grew 14,000–8,500 years ago, isotopic data provide a detailed history of groundwater infiltration associated with a strengthening North American monsoon, as the climate transitioned from a cool dry late-glacial period into a warmer and wetter Early Holocene.

Accurate estimates of the land carbon sink are vital for informing climate projections and net-zero policies. Application of a strict filtering method to microwave satellite data enabled the evaluation of global vegetation biomass carbon dynamics for 2010–2019. The results highlight the role of demography in driving forest carbon gains and losses.

There are two competing hypotheses for the origin of oceanic plateaus: plume versus plate. Thermodynamic modelling of magmatism at Shatsky Rise, in the Pacific Ocean, now suggests that neither mechanism is adequate on its own and in fact plume–ridge interaction is required to explain the formation of this ocean plateau.

Exoenzymes produced by heterotrophic microorganisms early in Earth history helped unlock previously unavailable organic matter and transformed ocean geochemistry.