Volume 16 Issue 1, January 2023

Venus and Earth have remarkably different surface conditions, yet the lithospheric thickness and heat flow on Venus may be Earth-like. This finding supports a tectonic regime with limited surface mobility and dominated by intrusive magmatism.

Some coastal marshes may have a hard time building soil elevation under future climate conditions, although this may reduce methane emissions, according to four years of field manipulation of warming and elevated CO₂ in a coastal wetland.

Widespread injection of deep water from the Barents Sea into the Nansen Basin makes a substantial contribution to carbon sequestration in the Arctic Ocean, and feeds the deep sea community.

The environmental sensors aboard the Perseverance rover on Mars are gathering meteorological data at Jezero crater. These data capture an active atmospheric surface layer that responds to multiple dynamical phenomena, ranging in spatial and temporal scales from metres to thousands of kilometres and from seconds to a Martian year, respectively.

Regional recovery from microplastic pollution-induced marine deoxygenation may take hundreds of years, according to a combination of biogeochemical and microplastic modelling.

An analysis of elastic lithospheric thickness suggests most coronae on Venus form on thin lithosphere with heat flow similar to that of rift zones on Earth, supporting a planet with active rifting and a squishy-lid convective regime.

Meteorology measurements from NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars reveal a diversity of processes at work in the atmospheric boundary layer at Jezero crater over a range of temporal scales.

Substantial nitrous oxide production in the epipelagic zone of the subtropical ocean partially offsets carbon sequestration by the marine biological pump, according to observations from the South China Sea and subtropical northwest Pacific.

Observations and modelling of the Thwaites Glacier Ice Tongue link episodic changes in ice speed to fracturing between 2015 and 2021 and show these changes to be reversible over one- to two-year timescales.

The advance and retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet were primarily paced by 41,000-year-long obliquity cycles, not longer eccentricity cycles, until 400,000 years ago, according to sedimentological and palaeomagnetic records from the Ross Embayment.

East Antarctic surface temperature co-varied with local insolation in the Early Pleistocene, leading to the cancellation of global orbital ice sheet forcing from precession, according to temperature proxies and insolation-related gas ratios in ice cores.

Carbon sequestration by Siberian forests has been low over the past decade due to disturbances that have decreased live biomass and increased dead wood, according to passive microwave observations.

Elevated atmospheric CO₂ reduces soil carbon accumulation and methane emissions from wetlands by changing soil redox potential resulting from increased oxygen fluxes produced by plants, according to a four-year field experiment.

About half of the current available phosphorus in agricultural soil globally is derived from anthropogenic sources, according to country-scale simulations of phosphorus dynamics between 1950 and 2017.

Marine phosphate levels and biological productivity were lowest during the early Phanerozoic when seafloor weathering rates were high and continental weathering rates were muted, according to a statistical model of coupled elemental cycles.

Accounting for deep, cross-shelf carbon export into the Nansen Basin increases the carbon sequestration of the Barents Sea region of the Arctic Ocean by some 30%, according to numerical modelling supported by observational data.

Mixing dynamics at river confluences where shallow flows merge in rivers consist of switching between wake and mixing-layer modes, as shown in theoretical and field-scale physical modelling.

Simulated earthquakes on metre-scale laboratory faults reveal that fault surfaces with more heterogeneous topography are stronger, and rupture at a wider range of propagation speeds, than those that are less heterogeneous.