Volume 16 Issue 9, September 2023

Measurements from a yearlong drift in sea ice across the Central Arctic show that large amounts of fine sea salt particles are produced during blowing snow events, affecting cloud properties and warming the surface.

Improving air quality by reducing atmospheric aerosols can bring valuable health benefits, but also generally leads to warming. Now, research suggests that in cleaner air the local cooling effect of planting trees may be stronger in middle and low latitude regions.

Two decades of measurements across large Arctic rivers reveal unexpectedly divergent biogeochemical changes that have important implications for the Arctic Ocean. This calls for an improved understanding of current disruptions over the boundless Arctic landscape.

The chemical signatures of granitic continental crust from the earliest Archean are consistent with formation during subduction, indicating some form of plate tectonics was active at the time.

From pressure indicator to paint brightener, Alicia Cruz-Uribe examines the many uses of rutile.

The post-garnet transition has been found to have a curved phase boundary, with negative slopes in cold regions and positive slopes in hot regions of the Earth’s mantle. This varying slope could be a reason for the puzzling dynamics of subducting slabs and upwelling plumes observed seismically in the upper part of the lower mantle.

Fine sea salt aerosols produced by blowing snow in the Arctic impact cloud properties and warm the surface, according to observations from the MOSAiC expedition.

The temporal evolution of the net global climate feedback in recent decades has been governed by sea surface temperature patterns in the Southern Ocean, according to climate model simulations.

Climate model simulations suggest that reducing aerosol pollution enhances the cooling effects of afforestation, which could partially counteract the warming effect of air quality measures.

Divergent trends in biogeochemical constituents of the six largest rivers in the Arctic from 2003 to 2019 support multi-faceted changes on the Arctic landscape under global environmental change.

While generally tracking Northern Hemisphere summer insolation, the Earth gained energy during cold millennial scale events throughout the past 150,000 years, according to an analysis of benthic oxygen isotopes.

Widespread shallow-water hydrothermal venting in the North Atlantic, probably a source of methane, coincided with the onset of the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, according to borehole proxy records and seismic imaging.

The triple oxygen isotope composition of quartz veins indicates that the southern Tibetan Plateau was already around 3.5 km high by 60 million years ago, showing that substantial surface uplift started before collision of the Eurasian and Indian plates.

Early continental crust formed at depth, implying some type of plate tectonics operating as long as 4 billion years ago, according to high-pressure and temperature melting experiments of an analogue material.

Fluids at the plate interface are sourced from the dehydrating slab mantle beneath the Shumagin Gap in Alaska, and contribute to regional seismic risk by influencing rupture propagation, according to magnetotelluric observations and electrical resistivity modelling.

Experimental determination of how the post-garnet phase transition pressure varies with temperature suggests a downward-convex phase boundary with potential implications for mantle dynamics.