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.
David Rubin and Patrick Hesp spent a night in a labour camp come hotel while trying to uncover the factors that shape sand dunes in the Qaidam Basin, China.
Mike Gagan, Michael Griffiths and colleagues negotiated knee-deep mud while up to their neck in water in an Indonesian cave, all to reconstruct Australasian monsoon rainfall over the past 12,000 years.
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.
John West and colleagues struggled with widely held misconceptions and computer hackers in their attempt to explain mantle processes beneath the Great Basin in the United States.
Fabrizio Antonioli, Andrea Dutton and their colleagues prised a stalagmite out of an underwater cave to learn about sea levels during the penultimate interglacial period.
Verena Tunnicliffe, Robert W. Embley and their colleagues sank their remotely operated vehicle into a boiling pool of molten sulphur in their vigour to sample the deep ocean floor.
Andrew Moy and colleagues studied foraminifera in sediments, and made their own contributions to the sea, in their attempt to understand calcification in the Southern Ocean.