Volume 15 Issue 10, October 2022

Controversy pervaded the June 2022 UN Ocean Conference, with partisan alliances forming around burgeoning environmental and social issues. Yet, out of the talks, emerged strong aspirations across UN states and other stakeholders to restore and protect the ocean.

Enhanced formation of clay in marine sediments in the lead up to the end-Permian mass extinction likely pulled the Earth back into a hot, high-CO₂ state similar to that of the Precambrian.

Cellular modelling and geochemical analyses reveal that a dominant group of phytoplankton changed their carbonate production as atmospheric CO₂ levels declined from peak levels in the warm early Eocene, hinting at a positive feedback in the global carbon cycle.

Covering nearly 2,000 years of history, Ele Willoughby traces the glass etching ability of hydrofluoric acid back to its fluorspar origins and explores the modern optics of fluorite.

Seismometers on the NASA InSight lander have identified unusual signals from meteoroid impacts on Mars. Impact locations were confirmed by satellite images of new craters at these sites and directly constrain the martian interior, confirming its crustal structure and ground-truthing the scaling of impact-induced seismicity.

Melting of the edges of the Greenland ice sheet by the ocean since 1979 is — counterintuitively — controlled almost as much by air temperature as by ocean temperature.

Enhancing natural subsurface hydrogen production through water injection could make a substantial contribution to achieving the low-carbon energy transition that is required to limit global warming.

Iodine chemistry plays a more important role than bromine chemistry in tropospheric ozone losses in the Arctic, according to ship-based observations of halogen oxides from March to October 2020.

Impact-induced acoustic and seismic wave events on Mars recorded by the InSight lander’s seismometer have been traced to fresh craters observed in spacecraft imagery.

A combination of theory, reanalysis and model simulations suggests that tropospheric temperature and cloud cover are strongly influenced by vapour buoyancy, an effect currently neglected in some leading global climate models.

Ensemble forecasts from a dynamical model suggest that fluctuations in atmospheric angular momentum and the length of day can be predicted over a year in advance, thereby providing a source of long-range climate predictability.

Atmospheric variability can amplify ocean-driven submarine melting of marine-terminating glaciers in Greenland, according to an analysis of observations and models from 1979 to 2018.

Tree species diversity promotes drought resistance in nearly half of global forests, according to a global analysis of the relationship between species richness and drought-induced changes in forest productivity.

Over the past 620,000 years, three distinct phases of climate variability in eastern Africa coincided with shifts in hominin evolution and dispersal, according to an analysis of environmental proxy records from a core collected in the Chew Bahir basin of Ethiopia.

Modern decadal scale sea surface temperature variability in the eastern Mediterranean is within the range reported from a Last Interglacial alkenone proxy temperature record. However, future warming could outpace Last Interglacial variability.

Retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet during the late Oligocene was caused primarily by a tectonically driven marine transgression, according to a compilation of Ross Sea surface temperature estimates throughout the Cenozoic.

Highly calcifying, larger coccolithophores emerged as CO₂ generally declined through the Eocene, despite cooling leading to lower organic-matter fixation rates, according to size-dependent coccolith carbon isotope analyses and cell-scale modelling

Warm greenhouse conditions spanning the end-Permian mass extinction event are linked to increased rates of reverse weathering, according to lithium and strontium isotope records as well as geochemical modelling.

The first pulse of the Permian–Triassic mass extinction was driven by intense weathering, suppressing CO₂, while food web collapse and prolonged warming drove the second pulse, according to a high-resolution record from the Shangsi section, China

Bathymetric surveys of the submarine Congo Canyon show damming by canyon-flank landslides led to the temporary storage of substantial masses of sediment and organic carbon, interrupting their transport to the deep sea.