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Atmospheric levels of chloroform, an ozone-depleting substance not part of the Montreal Protocol, have risen. The increase may be attributable to industrial emissions in Eastern China.
Mangrove canopy heights vary around the world in response to rain, storms and human activities, suggests a global analysis of mangrove canopy height. How tall the trees are matters for estimating global mangrove carbon storage.
Seismic data during the time interval between larger earthquakes could contain information about fault displacements and potential for future failure, suggest analyses of data from laboratory and real-world slow-slip earthquakes using machine-learning techniques.
Most of the net water transferred over the past 15 years from non-glaciated land to the oceans has originated from landlocked basins, according to satellite data. This source of sea-level rise is often overlooked.
Extreme temperature swings and deteriorating environments are perhaps what killed most life in the end-Permian extinction, suggest climate model simulations. Siberian Traps volcanism probably triggered the events.
During flat subduction, material is scraped off the base of the continental mantle lithosphere, building a migrating keel. This testable mechanism for flat subduction recreates features of the Laramide orogeny.
Ice buried deep within the ice sheet on Antarctica preserves clues to past climatic change dating back more than a million years. A recent workshop discussed the challenges — and hopes — of drilling to these buried treasures.
While anthropogenic influence on global climate is clear, human impact on the Southern Ocean has been difficult to pin down. A new detection and attribution study achieves just that.
The Laurentide Ice Sheet sapped the strength of the North American monsoon during the last ice age, but the ice sheet’s grip on the monsoon weakened as it retreated northwards.
Droughts lead to enhanced water-use efficiency and reduced carbon uptake by plants. Global analyses of atmospheric CO2 monitoring data suggest that the scale of the trade-off between water and carbon extends to a biome level.
Rainfall interception by vegetation is an underappreciated part of the terrestrial hydrological cycle. Numerical modelling shows that non-vascular plants, such as lichens, substantially increase the interception capacity of the land surface.
Plants influence geomorphology. Research on salt marshes suggests that feedbacks between geomorphic processes and life-history traits of plants produce species-specific signatures in the organization of biogeomorphic landscapes.
There was minimal cooling in the North Atlantic Ocean during the Oligocene inception of the Antarctic ice sheet, according to a sediment record. This finding suggests asynchronous climate changes in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
Much of the carbon in rivers originates from wildfires and is ultimately buried in the oceanic carbon sink, suggest measurements from 18 rivers globally. Rivers transport almost a gigaton of carbon to the oceans every year.
