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Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data science will play a crucial role in improving environmental sustainability, but the energy requirements of these methods will have an increasingly negative effect on the environment without sustainable design and use.
Information on past environmental conditions stored within high-altitude glaciers is being lost due to accelerated melting associated with climate change, according to ice core analysis from a Swiss glacier.
Noble gas concentrations in the deep North Pacific indicate that sea-level pressure in Antarctic Bottom Water formation regions has changed over the past 2,000 years.
Ocean sediment records suggest that the modern Antarctic Circumpolar Current did not exist before the late Miocene cooling, indicating its origin is linked to the expansion of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Petrological reaction experiments and magnesium isotope data suggest that reactive flow with mantle cumulates can explain the composition of Ti-rich basaltic magmas.
Magnetite is found throughout the Earth system and has many uses, explains Barbara Maher. It is a tracer of plate tectonic movements, a sub-cellular navigation aid and an economic resource, but also a pollutant.
Early Mars did not experience a single wet-to-dry transition, but seven such shifts in its palaeoclimatic history, as argued based on the planet’s stratigraphy, mineralogy and geomorphology.
The amount of secondary organic aerosol produced from wildfire emissions is much higher than previously thought, according to model simulations of evolution of individual species of organic aerosol over time.
Wind tunnel experiments and numerical modelling reveal the existence of two distinct ripples on Earth: centimetre-scale impact ripples and decimetre-scale hydrodynamic ripples, akin to those in water and on Mars.
Mobilization of in-use rare-earth element stocks in regions of high consumption can ease dependence on regions of rare-earth extraction, according to dynamic integrated modelling combining material flow and scenario analysis.
Soil moisture is the primary driver of variability in dryland carbon and water cycling, according to a synthesis of eddy covariance, remote sensing and land surface model data from the western United States.
Organic carbon in the top layer of mineral soils in cold regions is dominated by the particulate fraction, according to analyses in Arctic and alpine ecosystems.
Soil carbon substrates affect how methane and CO2 emissions from global wetlands change in response to climate warming, according to global analyses of temperature sensitivity of wetland carbon emissions.
An integrated model of mineral weathering and carbon cycling reveals the substantial influence that clay minerals originating from the weathering of magnesium-rich rocks have on Earth’s climate. This research indicates that this clay-forming process contributed to each Palaeozoic glaciation.
The atmosphere has dried across most regions of Europe in recent decades, a trend that can be attributed primarily to human impacts, according to tree ring records spanning 400 years and Earth system model simulations.