Earth and environmental sciences articles within Nature

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  • Opinion |

    As tree habitats shift towards the poles in response to climate change, we must study the neglected, trailing edges of forests, warns Csaba Mátyás — they are economically and ecologically important.

    • Csaba Mátyás

  • Letter |

    The accumulation of nitrate in freshwater and coastal marine ecosystems is one of the consequences of the worldwide production of artificial fertilizers. Here it is shown that nitrate accumulation in ecosystems shows consistent and negative nonlinear correlations with organic carbon availability, along a continuum from soils, through freshwater systems and coastal margins, to the open ocean. This pattern can be explained by carbon:nitrate ratios, which influence nitrate accumulation by regulating microbial processes.

    • Philip G. Taylor
    •  & Alan R. Townsend

  • News Feature |

    A conduit from the Red Sea could restore the disappearing Dead Sea and slake the region's thirst. But such a massive engineering project could have untold effects, reports Josie Glausiusz.

    • Josie Glausiusz

  • Opinion |

    Current national emissions targets can't limit global warming to 2 °C, calculate Joeri Rogelj, Malte Meinshausen and colleagues — they might even lock the world into exceeding 3 °C warming.

    • Joeri Rogelj
    • , Julia Nabel
    •  & Niklas Höhne

  • News and Views Q&A |

    The ability to perceive Earth's magnetic field, which at one time was dismissed as a physical impossibility, is now known to exist in diverse animals. The receptors for the magnetic sense remain elusive. But it seems that at least two underlying mechanisms exist — sometimes in the same organism.

    • Kenneth J. Lohmann

  • Letter |

    Here a method of seismic wave imaging known as 'ambient noise' tomography is used to generate high-resolution images of seismic wave speeds in the crust and uppermost mantle. The observations reveal strong and uniform anisotropy — where waves travel through rock at different speeds depending on direction — in the deep crust in areas of the western United States that have undergone significant extension during the past 65 million years.

    • M. P. Moschetti
    • , M. H. Ritzwoller
    •  & Y. Yang

  • Letter |

    To examine the effect of increased livestock numbers on nitrous oxide emissions the authors report year-round nitrous oxide flux measurements at ten steppe grassland sites in Inner Mongolia. They find that nitrous oxide emission is much higher during spring thaw and is highest in ungrazed steppe, decreasing with increasing stocking rate, which suggests that grazing decreases rather than increases nitrous oxide emissions.

    • Benjamin Wolf
    • , Xunhua Zheng
    •  & Klaus Butterbach-Bahl

  • Opinion |

    China and South Korea have invested heavily in environmental stimulus projects. Other G20 countries need to deliver on their sustainability promises to save both the planet and the economy, says Edward Barbier.

    • Edward Barbier

  • 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

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