Volume 14 Issue 5, May 2021

Geoscientists will play key roles in the grand challenges of the twenty-first century, but this requires our field to address its past when it comes to diversity and inclusion. Considering the bleak picture of racial diversity in the UK, we put forward steps institutions can take to break down barriers and make the geosciences equitable.

Corals reveal that part of the plate-boundary fault near Sumatra slipped slowly and quietly for three decades before a large earthquake in 1861. The exceptional duration of this slip event has implications for interpreting deformation to assess seismic hazard.

Near-surface stress patterns, influenced by topography, control the size and location of the largest landslides — but not necessarily smaller ones — according to a study of mountains at the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau.

European mineral soils may lose less organic carbon due to climate change than previously suggested, according to analyses of climate responses from two physical fractions of soil carbon.

Highly redox-active compounds play an important role in biogeochemical element cycles in aquatic systems that are exposed to frequent hydrological disturbances.

Recent strengthening of the Equatorial Undercurrent counteracts warming-induced deoxygenation in the equatorial Atlantic, according to an analysis of long-term moored observations.

The loss of Arctic sea-ice enhances evaporation and fuels extreme European winter snowfall, according to an analysis of atmospheric water vapour isotope measurements.

Failing to account for emission differences between day and night will lead to an underestimate of global CO₂ emissions from rivers by up to 0.55 PgC yr^–1, according to analyses of high-frequency CO₂ measurements.

Particulate and mineral-associated soil organic carbon have different climate sensitivity and distributions in Europe, according to analyses of measurements of soil carbon fractions from 352 topsoils.

The subsurface biosphere across a convergent margin may reflect tectonic processes and reduce carbon transfer to the mantle, according to bacterial and geochemical correlations from hot springs across the Costa Rican margin.

Stress from tectonics and topography may be the primary control on the size of bedrock landslides, according to a comparison of a stress model with landslide inventories for a mountainous area in eastern Tibet.

The rupture mode between major and great earthquakes is controlled by transform fault geometry, according to simulations of a reconstructed record of 20 palaeoearthquakes along the Alpine Fault, New Zealand.

Shallow parts of megathrusts up-dip of locked patches generally have a high slip rate deficit, which could mean tsunami hazard has been underestimated, according to a stress-constrained inversion of geodetic data.

A 32-year-long slow-slip event occurred on a shallow part of the Sunda megathrust, perhaps because of stress accumulation after fluid expulsion, according to an analysis of the deformation history of the area and physics-based simulations.

A shallow slow-slip source region has laterally variable elastic properties and pore pressure, and near-velocity-neutral frictional properties, according to seismic imaging of part of the Hikurangi subduction margin and data-constrained modelling.

The transition between the locked and slowly slipping regions of the southern Cascadia megathrust has a lower porosity than these regions, according to seismic imaging. This suggests that the transition area is ductile, which may limit rupture propogation.

Mantle heterogeneity beneath subducting plates may influence giant megathrust earthquakes, according to seismic tomography of the subslab structure beneath six megathrusts that have ruptured in M ≥ 9.0 earthquakes.