Volume 6 Issue 1, January 2013

The current assessment of climate change is nearing completion. It is now time to consider how best to provide increasingly complex climate information to policymakers, suggests Thomas F. Stocker.

People have changed the world irrevocably. Jan Zalasiewicz discusses whether formalization of the Anthropocene as an epoch in geological time will help us understand our place in Earth history.

Readily available O₂ is vital to life as we know it. James Kasting looks at how and when the first whiffs of oxygen began to reach the Earth's atmosphere.

Record minima in Arctic summer sea ice have been trumping each other. Marika Holland reflects on the likely fate of the northern sea ice cap.

Numerous earthquakes have occurred at subduction zones in the past 5 years, and some were devastating. Kelin Wang describes what we have learned about the seismicity of the shallow zone.

Ocean acidification, caused by the uptake of anthropogenic carbon dioxide, is a significant stressor to marine life. Ulf Riebesell charts the rapid rise in ocean acidification research, from the discovery of its adverse effects to its entry into the political consciousness.

A surprising fraction of Earth's element cycling takes place in inland waters. Jonathan Cole suggests that interactions between these water bodies and the terrestrial biosphere are more extensive and interesting than previously thought.

The last five years have seen a boom in exploration of the Solar System. Barbara Cohen explains that the biggest gains have been right here on Earth.

Questions about the sensitivity of Earth's climate to greenhouse gas forcing challenge our understanding of climate change. Matthew Huber looks at what we can learn from past greenhouse periods.

Great Himalayan earthquakes were thought to rarely rupture the surface. Field analyses in Nepal, however, reveal large surface displacements along the main fault bounding India and Asia during at least two historical earthquakes, in 1255 and 1934.

Thirty years ago, the spacecraft Pioneer Venus observed the peak and decline of sulphur dioxide levels above Venus's clouds. Similar observations by Venus Express reveal a surprisingly variable venusian atmosphere.

Large-scale ecological disturbances are expected to alter climate by disrupting ecosystem function, but the climatic perturbation can be hard to detect. An analysis of forests in British Columbia reveals a warmer, drier summer following pine-beetle tree kill.

Sea surface temperatures in the eastern equatorial Atlantic Ocean are subject to year-to-year variations. Reanalysis data and model simulations suggest that advection of warm water from north of the Equator can drive some of the warm events.

A pulse of sulphur dioxide in Venus’s upper atmosphere was observed by the Pioneer Venus spacecraft in the 1970s and 1980s and attributed to volcanism. Recent sulphur dioxide measurements from Venus Express indicate decadal-scale fluctuations in sulphur dioxide above Venus’s cloud tops in an atmosphere that is more dynamic than expected.

Tropospheric thunderstorms have been reported to disturb the lower ionosphere, at altitudes of 65–90 km. The use of lightning signals from a distant mesoscale storm to probe the lower ionosphere above a small tropospheric thunderstorm reveals a reduction in ionospheric electron density in response to lightning discharges in the small storm.

Every year, thousands of mesoscale storms (termed polar lows) cross the climatically sensitive subpolar North Atlantic Ocean. High-resolution numerical simulations of the ocean circulation, taking into account the effect of these storms on deep-water formation, suggest that polar lows significantly affect the global ocean circulation.

Changes in continental water storage have been difficult to constrain from space-borne gravity data in regions experiencing both ice melting and glacial isostatic adjustment. Separation of the hydrologic and isostatic signals reveals increases in water storage in both North America and Scandinavia over the past decade.

The tropical Atlantic Ocean shows sea surface temperature variability on interannual timescales. Observational and model data suggest that some of this variability can be attributed to the advection of anomalously warm northern subtropical waters toward the Equator.

Wind power inputs at the surface ocean are dissipated through smaller-scale processes in the ocean interior and turbulent boundary layer. Simulations suggest that seafloor topography enhances turbulent mixing and energy dissipation in the ocean interior.

Over 90% of marine species were lost during the end-Permian extinction. Fossil data show that the crisis in China was marked by two distinct phases of marine extinction separated by a 180,000-year recovery period.

The recovery from the end-Permian mass extinction was slow and prolonged. A temperature reconstruction shows that further biotic crises during the recovery were associated with extreme warmth.

Sulphate concentrations in the ocean prior to 2.4 Gyr ago were lower than today. The sulphur isotope systematics of 2.7-Gyr-old sulphide deposits suggests that these low concentrations were maintained by a balance between hydrothermal sources and microbial sulphate reduction.

The current mountain pine beetle infestation in forests in British Columbia ranks among the largest ecological disturbances recorded to date. An analysis of remote sensing data suggests that the resultant forest loss has led to a 1 °C rise in summertime surface temperatures.

The recurrence times of great Himalayan earthquakes are difficult to assess because they rarely rupture the surface. Field mapping and ¹⁴C dating of offset fluvial deposits are used to identify two great Himalayan quakes that ruptured the surface along the main plate boundary fault in AD 1255 and 1934.

Nature Geoscienceis now five years old. To celebrate, we look back on some numbers regarding the publication process in our editorial. We have asked nine scientists to look back on events and insights of the past five years. Finally, we present a selection of ten of our favourite articles in the journal, across disciplines and across our opinion, review and primary research sections.