Articles in 2010

Climate change has increased the area affected by forest fires in boreal North America. An analysis of the depth of burning in forests and peatlands in Alaska indicates that ground-layer combustion has accelerated regional carbon losses.

Pieter Vermeesch enjoyed training for a marathon in an empty two-dimensional space, with his eyes closed, in-between sampling aeolian dunes in the Namib Sand Sea.

Mitigation of climate change is increasingly being portrayed as technologically feasible, if only political support was adequate. But there are good reasons to be unsure.

Controversy has surrounded projections of tropical temperatures aloft in a changing climate. An analysis of sea surface temperatures and rainfall over the past decades suggests amplified warming in the upper atmosphere, consistent with theory and models.

Sea-level rise is progressively changing coastlines. The legal implications for the seaward boundaries between neighbouring coastal states are neither straightforward nor foreseeable.

Marine sediments contain large quantities of carbon, primarily in the form of gas hydrate. Isotopic analyses suggest that carbon derived from fossil methane accounts for up to 28% of the dissolved organic carbon in sea water overlying hydrate-bearing seeps in the northeastern Pacific Ocean.

In the polar atmosphere, non-reactive gaseous elemental mercury is converted to a highly reactive form of mercury by halogens such as bromine. Measurements over the Dead Sea suggest that bromine also triggers reactive mercury formation over the mid-latitude ocean.

Hydrothermal fluids circulate through the upper portion of the oceanic crust. Isotopic analyses suggest that chemosynthetic microbial communities in the crust synthesize dissolved organic carbon in hydrothermal ridge-flank fluids.

Earth's topography is attributed to the interactions of the tectonic plates, but flow within the mantle also contributes to surface uplift and subsidence. An overview of recent research indicates that mantle-induced dynamic topography can be reconstructed by integrating the geological record with models of mantle flow.

The Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago was triggered by the sudden release of carbon to the ocean–atmosphere system. The carbon may have been removed almost as abruptly 100,000 years later, in the form of organic carbon.

Climate change could potentially destabilize marine ice sheets such as the West Antarctic ice sheet. A suite of predictions of sea-level change following grounding-line migration suggests that the gravitational effects of melting on local sea levels can exert a stabilizing influence on marine ice sheets on a reverse slope.

The Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum warm event about 56 million years ago was caused by the release of large amounts of carbon to the ocean and atmosphere. Estimates of the rate of recovery from the event suggest that about 2,000 Pg of the carbon released was sequestered as organic carbon.

Northern South America experienced significant changes in drainage patterns during the opening of the South Atlantic. Numerical modelling of the influence of mantle processes on the South American continent indicates that mantle convection was partly responsible for the formation of the Amazon River, the largest river on Earth.

Model projections of future climate are highly sensitive to the assumed response of organic matter decomposition to changes in temperature. Incubation experiments on North American soils suggest that the decisive factors lie at the molecular level.