Earth and environmental sciences articles within Nature

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  • News & Views |

    Most emissions of nitrous oxide from semi-arid, temperate grasslands usually occur during the spring thaw. The effects that grazing has on plant litter and snow cover dramatically reduce these seasonal emissions.

    • Stephen J. Del Grosso

  • News |

    Philanthropic support for climate-change issues tripled in 2008.

    • Laura Thompson Osuri

  • Summer Books |

    David Orr explains how two environmentalists' manifestos bracket the debate on climate change — one favouring technological solutions, the other local interventions.

    • David Orr

  • News & Views |

    The asteroid belt is classically considered the domain of rocky bodies, being too close to the Sun for ice to survive. Or so we thought — not only is ice present, but at least one asteroid is covered in it.

    • Henry H. Hsieh

  • Letter |

    Climate change does not occur symmetrically; instead, in a process called polar amplification, polar areas warm faster than the tropics. Recent work indicated that transport processes in the upper atmosphere account for much of the recent polar amplification, but this conclusion proved controversial. Here, updated reanalysis data have been used to show that reductions in sea ice are instead responsible.

    • James A. Screen
    •  & Ian Simmonds

  • Letter |

    Our current concepts of abrupt climate change are influenced by palaeoclimate evidence for events such as the Younger Dryas cold interval, in which massive climate changes occurred essentially instantaneously. It is thought that an injection of fresh water from the retreating Laurentide Ice Sheet altered the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation and triggered the Younger Dryas, but convincing geological evidence has been elusive. Here, a major flood event that is chronologically consistent with the Younger Dryas has been identified—through the MacKenzie River into the Arctic Ocean.

    • Julian B. Murton
    • , Mark D. Bateman
    •  & Zhirong Yang

  • Letter |

    Recent evidence has blurred the line between comets and asteroids, although until now neither ice nor organic material had been detected on the surface of an asteroid. Here, the spectroscopic detection of water ice and organic material on the asteroid 24 Themis is reported. Water ice thus seems to be more common on asteroids than previously thought, and may be widespread in asteroidal interiors at smaller heliocentric distances than expected.

    • Andrew S. Rivkin
    •  & Joshua P. Emery

  • Letter |

    A major pursuit in the chemical community involves the search for efficient and inexpensive catalysts that can produce large quantities of hydrogen gas from water. Here, a molybdenum-oxo complex has been identified that can catalytically generate hydrogen gas either from pure water at neutral pH, or from sea water. The work has implications for the design of 'green' chemistry cycles.

    • Hemamala I. Karunadasa
    • , Christopher J. Chang
    •  & Jeffrey R. Long

  • Letter |

    It has been inferred that, during the Archaean eon, there must have been a high concentration of atmospheric CO2 and/or CH4, causing a greenhouse effect that would have compensated for the lower solar luminosity at the time and allowed liquid water to be stable in the hydrosphere. Here it is shown, however, that the mineralogy of Archaean sediments is inconsistent with such high concentrations of greenhouse gases. Instead it is proposed that a lower albedo on the Earth helped to moderate surface temperature.

    • Minik T. Rosing
    • , Dennis K. Bird
    •  & Christian J. Bjerrum

  • News & Views |

    Given that the Sun was dimmer in its youth, our planet should have been frozen over for much of its early history. That it evidently wasn't is a puzzle that continues to engage the attention of Earth scientists.

    • James F. Kasting

  • Column |

    The US defence department should be at the centre of the nation's energy policy, says Daniel Sarewitz.

    • Daniel Sarewitz

  • News |

    Researchers fail to come up with clear guidelines for experiments that change the planet's climate.

    • Jeff Tollefson

  • Letter |

    Soil respiration (RS) is the flux of microbial- and plant-respired carbon dioxide from the soil surface to the atmosphere, and constitutes the second-largest terrestrial carbon flux. It has been suggested that RS should change with climate, but this has been difficult to confirm observationally. It is shown here, however, that the air temperature anomaly (the deviation from the 1961–1990 mean) correlates significantly and positively with changes in RS.

    • Ben Bond-Lamberty
    •  & Allison Thomson

  • News & Views |

    The flux of carbon from soils to the atmosphere has apparently increased with climate warming. But does this reflect a net loss of carbon to the atmosphere that could exacerbate climate change?

    • Pete Smith
    •  & Changming Fang

  • Letter |

    The physics of thermal diffusion — mass diffusion driven by a temperature gradient — is poorly understood. One obstacle has been that the Soret coefficient (ST, which describes the steady-state result of thermal diffusion) is sensitive to many factors. It is now shown that the difference in ST between isotopes of diffusing elements that are network modifiers is independent of composition and temperature. The findings suggest a theoretical approach for describing thermal diffusion in silicate melts and other complex solutions.

    • F. Huang
    • , P. Chakraborty
    •  & C. E. Lesher

  • Books & Arts |

    Four books by prominent global-warming pundits illustrate that exhortation and authority are not enough to solve the climate crisis — it is time for some humility, concludes Roger Pielke Jr.

    • Roger Pielke Jr

  • News Feature |

    Last year, functional magnetic resonance imaging made its debut in court. Virginia Hughes asks whether the technique is ready to weigh in on the fate of murderers.

    • Virginia Hughes

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