Volume 14 Issue 10, October 2021

A more comprehensive understanding of the role of irrigation in coupled natural–human systems is needed to minimize the negative consequences for climate, ecosystems and public health.

We chat with Vincent Ialenti, a University of Southern California Berggruen Fellow, about thinking on geological timescales. Ialenti’s recent book, Deep Time Reckoning (MIT Press, 2020), chronicles his anthropological work on the institution responsible for the long-term safety of a Finnish nuclear waste repository.

Northern autumns and winters are getting warmer, and their weather is also getting blander. Observations and climate model simulations reveal that human activities have managed to make today’s weather measurably different than it was only a generation ago.

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for the observed decrease in subseasonal temperature variability in the northern extratropics, according to an attribution analysis using a large ensemble of climate model simulations.

Southern Ocean deep convection governs the magnitude of long-term warming in response to greenhouse gases, according to an analysis of Earth system models.

The zonal wave 3 circulation pattern in the Southern Hemisphere is driven by tropical convection, according to results from an atmospheric general circulation model.

Cold ENSO states can lead to the simultaneous occurrence of megadroughts in southwestern North and South America, according to a hydroclimate reconstruction of the last thousand years assimilating palaeoclimate records with climate model constraints.

Carbon fluxes in the central Himalaya did not change after the 2015 Gorkha earthquake and its accompanying landslides, according to observations of riverine sediment and carbon fluxes over four monsoon seasons spanning the event.

Greenland’s groundwater system responds rapidly to ice-sheet change, according to borehole observations from underneath the ice-sheet margin.

Coastal west Greenland ice caps fluctuated strongly compared to the interior in response to rapid Common Era changes in snow accumulation, according to modelling of proxy records developed from a Nuussuaq Peninsula ice core covering the last 2,000 years.

A mid-Holocene expansion of coastal sea ice led to phytoplankton blooms’ becoming less frequent off East Antarctica, according to a suite of annually resolved physical and geochemical analyses performed on a marine sediment core.

Argo measurements provide a constrained estimate of net primary productivity of the global ocean of 53 Pg C y^–1, according to a global analysis of diel oxygen variations.

Faster sinking rates can enhance bacterial degradation of organic particles in the ocean due to flow-induced removal of waste products, according to laboratory experiments and modelling of the marine carbon pump.

The effusive or explosive nature of a volcanic eruption may be determined by the crystallinity, water content and presence of exsolved volatiles in subvolcanic chambers, according to analysis of the pre-eruptive storage conditions of global volcanoes.

An ~5 km³ volcanic edifice offshore Mayotte formed between May 2018 and May 2019 by rapid magma intrusion through the entire lithosphere, according to an analysis of marine observations and geophysical data.

The Philippine Sea/Pacific boundary megathrust is another possible source of seismic hazard in the Tokyo Region and tsunamis in the Pacific, according to an assessment of 1,000 years of tsunami deposits along the Japanese coastline.