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Indicators of environmental and social footprints of international trade must inform assessments of progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals, suggests a synthesis of studies on the geospatial separation of consumption and production.
The Cassini mission revealed the complex workings of Titan’s methane-based hydrologic cycle over a range of timescales, providing a potential window into the future of Earth and its water cycle.
Enhanced upwelling and CO2 degassing from the subpolar North Pacific during a warm event 14,000 years ago may have helped keep atmospheric CO2 levels high enough to propel the Earth out of the last ice age.
Deformation of the Indian Ocean floor over the past 8 million years was caused by a change in plate motions linked to flow of the Reunion mantle plume, according to analyses of forces upon plates.
Geoscientists are training computers to learn from a wide range of geologic data and, in the process, the machines are teaching geoscientists about the workings of Earth.
The oxygenation of deeper continental shelf waters during the Mesoproterozoic coincided with the appearance of multicellular eukaryotes, according to geochemical and sedimentological analyses of the Yanliao Basin, China.
A regional oxygenation event 1.6 billion years ago coincided with the appearance of large fossils, but whether the availability of oxygen was the primary driver of the diversification of multicellular organisms remains to be seen.
Microbe-mediated oxidation may account for at least 5% of the global dissolved organic carbon loss from the deep ocean, according to carbon isotope analyses on cool crustal fluids circulating through the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
The upwelling of carbon- and nutrient-rich waters in the subpolar North Pacific during the Bølling–Allerød supported high productivity and CO2 outgassing, as well as contributing to regional hypoxia, marine sediment analyses suggest.
Farmland management promotes tree cover around villages in the semi-arid Sahel of West Africa, according to analyses of satellite imagery. This implies that a higher population density does not always lead to reduced tree cover.
The oldest stable crust on Earth may have formed during pulsed growth cycles, according to geochemical analyses of rocks preserved in the Pilbara Craton, Western Australia.
Deformation migrated from depth towards the surface in the months leading up to the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake, according to analyses of satellite gravity data.
Slow slip events may cause fluids to drain from the plate boundary into the overlying plate at subduction zones, according to seismic analyses of events recorded in Kanto, Japan.
Rocky planets dominated by intrusive magmatism can cool more efficiently than those dominated by extrusive volcanism, according to numerical simulations of mantle convection.
Whether the climate of early Mars was warm and wet or cold and dry remains unclear, but the debate is overheated. With a growing toolbox and increasing data to tackle the open questions, progress is possible if there is openness to bridging the divide.
A warm and semi-arid climate may be most consistent with geological evidence for flowing water on the surface of early Mars, despite the challenges of warming Mars under a faint young Sun.
