Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Seafloor vents spewing mineral-rich plumes of hydrothermal fluid — termed black smokers — can persist at mid-ocean ridges for decades or longer. Earthquake data indicate that ongoing magma injection may determine their locations.
Some components of the climate system continue to adjust long after atmospheric greenhouse-gas levels have stopped changing. A coupled climate–vegetation model shows that forests can be committed to die-back or expansion before change is observed.
The Netherlands has a long and varied history of coastal and river flood management. The anticipation of sea-level rise during the twenty-first century has renewed the push for sustainable solutions to coastal vulnerability.
Understanding millennial-scale climate variability provides context for present and future climate change. It now emerges that temperatures were spatially and seasonally more heterogeneous over the past 1,000 years than previously thought.
Large and rapid global sea-level changes indicate that polar ice sheets may have ephemerally existed during the Cretaceous greenhouse climate. Two oxygen isotopic studies provide evidence for and against this conclusion.
Ammonia is a significant atmospheric pollutant whose global distribution is poorly understood. Satellite measurements highlight ammonia hotspots across the globe and indicate that current inventories may underestimate emissions in the Northern Hemisphere.
Changes in continental water stores, largely human-induced, affect sea level. Better hydrological models and observations could clarify the land's role in sea-level variations.
Homer's Ithaca had been viewed as a work of poetic licence and imprecise geography. However, as recent research shows the island's form may have been disguised over the past two millennia by catastrophic rockfalls, co-seismic uplift events and relative sea-level change.
William Wilcock and a team of scientists and engineers drilled holes in the sea floor, and inadvertently provided a breeding ground for octopuses, in their attempt to understand deep-ocean hydrothermal venting.
Paolo Gabrielli and colleagues dug deeply — and extremely cautiously — into Antarctic ice, to see whether the poles acted as a sink for mercury in the geological past.
Global sea-level rise, reduced sediment supply and subsidence threaten the stability of the Mississippi Delta. Calculations of riverine sediment load and storage indicate that 10,000–13,500 km2 of the delta could be submerged by AD 2100.
Some aspects of the Earth system—such as global mean temperatures, and sea-level rise due to thermal expansion or melting of large ice sheets—continue to respond to climate change long after the stabilization of radiative forcing. Simulations with a coupled climate–vegetation model show that similarly ecosystems may be committed to significant change after climate stabilization.
Seasonal changes in tropical rainfall patterns are associated with changes in the position of the intertropical convergence zone. Microbiological, molecular and hydrogen isotopic evidence from island lake sediments shows that the Pacific intertropical convergence zone was south of its modern position by as much as 500 km during the Little Ice Age.
Marine-terminating outlet glaciers control the stability of ice sheets. Exposure ages and radiocarbon dates show that an Arctic outlet glacier of the Laurentide ice sheet rapidly retreated about 9,500 years ago, and imply strong feedbacks between bathymetry and ice movement.
Ammonia is a significant atmospheric pollutant, accelerating the formation of particulate matter and damaging aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Infrared measurements of ammonia concentrations, obtained by the IASI/MetOp satellite, suggest that ammonia emissions in the Northern Hemisphere have been markedly underestimated.
Sea level has varied by over one hundred metres across glacial–interglacial cycles over the past 520,000 years. An extended sea-level reconstruction shows a strong coupling between these sea-level changes and Antarctic surface temperatures over the past five glacial cycles.
The mechanisms for localization of black-smoker systems at mid-ocean ridges remain to be fully understood. Seismic data for a segment of the Juan de Fuca ridge with long-lived black-smoker vents reveal ongoing magma recharge into the crustal magma chamber, thereby providing an explanation for the localization.
