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Accelerating progress in land-climate science requires a renewed focus on developing theory to complement and underpin Earth system models and observations.

Centennial-scale releases of atmospheric CO₂ occurred during periods of high obliquity over the past 500,000, suggesting a link between external forcing and atmospheric CO₂ variations, according to a record from an Antarctic ice core.

Nitrogen fixation by diazotrophs within North Atlantic eddies, especially near the edges of the mesoscale structures, is a key component of the North Atlantic marine nitrogen cycle, according to an analysis of genetic and past eddy activity data.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly enabling geoscience research. Ensuring community trust in its outcomes requires education and transparency.

Emerging evidence indicates that groundwater flow significantly impacts the distribution and characteristics of subsea permafrost, as well as the geomorphology of the subarctic seafloor.

Olivine is stable and abundant in the Earth’s upper mantle, and its transformations may drive large earthquakes deeper in the mantle, as Tomohiro Ohuchi explains.

Nature Geoscience spoke with Dr Mariana Clare, a machine learning scientist at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts; Prof. Haifeng Qian, an environmental scientist at Zhejiang University of Technology; and Dr Theresa Sawi, a seismologist at the US Geological Survey, about using artificial intelligence (AI) in their research and in geoscience generally.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly being integrated into Earth science, but how Earth science may benefit artificial intelligence has been overlooked. We call for mutual balancing between the two disciplines and improving cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Laboratory experiments show that Fe(II) oxidizing phototrophic bacteria, or photoferrotrophs, thought to be a major depositor of Archean and Palaeoproterozoic iron formations, are inhibited by toxic intermediates produced during denitrification in iron-rich systems. This identifies a previously overlooked stressor impacting mineral formation by photoferrotrophs during early Earth history.

The amount of water transported southwards by the Deep Western Boundary Current shows a 26% decline since 2014 in mooring array monitoring data, despite the strength of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation remaining stable.

Banded iron formation deposition by photoferrotrophic organisms in the early Earth’s oceans may have been inhibited by competition for iron and toxicity from nitrate-reducing microorganisms, according to a microbial incubation and numerical modelling study.

Emerging weather patterns over recent decades are exacerbating extreme precipitation and heatwaves in the tropical Indo-Pacific region, according to a computation of trends in reanalysis data.

Analyses of satellite observations from 1986 to 2021 suggest that the Antarctic Peninsula is greening at an accelerated rate.

As climate change accelerates, fire regimes are increasingly disrupting ecosystems and carbon storage. A modelling study reveals that fire is already acting to substantially weaken global carbon sinks, potentially undermining efforts to limit warming.

Only about 1.07 °C of climate warming above the pre-industrial level is required for fire to substantially diminish the effectiveness of global carbon sinks, suggesting that climate change has already been weakening carbon storage through fire, according to integrated model simulations that consider the interaction between fire and vegetation.

Modelling of the evolution of the Kosi drainage basin near Chomolungma suggests that a river capture event occurred approximately 89 ka ago. Isostatic rebound due to this capture event could contribute 10–50% of the total rock uplift rate in the Chomolungma region and might partly explain Chomolungma’s renewed uplift rate and anomalous elevation.

The recent uptick in surface uplift of Chomolungma (Mount Everest) can be partly attributed to isostatic rebound due to increased erosion following a river capture event, according to river evolution and flexural modelling.

The biological pump may dominate ocean carbon uptake under net-negative CO₂ emissions, according to Earth system model simulations of temperature-overshoot scenarios.

A seismic tomographic model shows that the directional dependence of the travel time of seismic waves through Earth’s inner core can be explained by a spatially varying orientation of the transverse isotropy symmetry axis, which is simpler than other proposed structures.