Planetary science articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Earth’s largest dune fields are set to become less dynamic on average over this century due to anthropogenic climate change, with no future action able to mitigate this effect, as predicted by the newest iteration of CMIP models.

    • Andrew Gunn
    • , Amy East
    •  & Douglas J. Jerolmack

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Habitability of exoplanet’s deepest oceans could be limited by the presence of high-pressure ices at their base. New work demonstrates that efficient chemical transport within deep planetary ice mantles is possible through significant salt incorporation within the high-pressure ice.

    • Baptiste Journaux

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Giant dunes—stunning landforms that grow in patterns as wind blows sand grains over thousands of years—are measured across the entire planet for the first time. With this data, it’s shown the dunes can, in principle, grow in scale indefinitely.

    • Andrew Gunn
    • , Giampietro Casasanta
    •  & Douglas J. Jerolmack

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Formation of the Haumea family, the only collisional group of icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt, is debated. Here, the authors show that Haumea family can be explained as a results of binary merging near the end of Neptune’s orbital migration.

    • Benjamin Proudfoot
    •  & Darin Ragozzine

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dunes may form on Jupiter’s moon Io. Despite a tenuous atmosphere, interactions between widespread lava and sulfur dioxide frost may produce vapor flows dense enough to mobilize sand grains. Ridge-like features may be evidence of this phenomenon.

    • George D. McDonald
    • , Joshua Méndez Harper
    •  & Laura Kerber

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The formation of double ridges on Europa is poorly understood. Here the authors analyze airborne radar observations of an analog feature on the Greenland Ice Sheet to show that the refreezing of shallow water sills may produce such ridges.

    • Riley Culberg
    • , Dustin M. Schroeder
    •  & Gregor Steinbrügge

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors detect 47 hitherto unreported low-frequency marsquakes originating from Cerberus Fossae at all times of the Martian day. The matched filter technique confirms repetitive events implying that the Martian mantle is dynamically active.

    • Weijia Sun
    •  & Hrvoje Tkalčić

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Giant icy volcanos (cryovolcanos) on Pluto are unique in the imaged solar system and provide evidence for unexpected, active geology late in Pluto’s history.

    • Kelsi N. Singer
    • , Oliver L. White
    •  & Kimberly Ennico-Smith

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors report the discovery of salts and fresh organic-rich exposures in the Urvara basin, possibly linked to a late resurfacing of the crater floor. These results are consistent with a deep-seated brine/salt reservoir in the crust of Ceres.

    • A. Nathues
    • , M. Hoffmann
    •  & J. H. Pasckert

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The pyroclast properties and features can provide insights into the dynamics of explosive eruptions of low viscosity magma. Here, the authors show how lava droplets, or pyroclasts are subject to melt removal and melt addition during transport in a gas jet and present a method to reconstruct eruption conditions from the pyroclast textures.

    • Thomas J. Jones
    • , James K. Russell
    •  & Lea Hollendonner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The co-evolution of oxygenation of the Earth’s atmosphere and lithosphere is still poorly constrained. However, the oxidation state of manganese minerals reveals that the redox state of Earth’s crust responds to changes in atmospheric oxygen following a ~66 million-year time lag.

    • Daniel R. Hummer
    • , Joshua J. Golden
    •  & Robert M. Hazen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ring currents have been observed in the magnetospheres of Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn. Here, the authors show observational evidence of Mercury’s ring current that is bifurcated because of the dayside off-equatorial magnetic minima.

    • J.-T. Zhao
    • , Q.-G. Zong
    •  & Y. Wei

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Yokoo et al. find the liquid immiscibility between H-rich and S-rich liquids Fe above 20 GPa. The separation of immiscible liquids could explain the disappearance of Mars’ magnetic field and the formation of low-velocity layer atop the Earth’s core.

    • Shunpei Yokoo
    • , Kei Hirose
    •  & Yasuo Ohishi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Delayed Antarctic sea-ice decline is linked to Southern Ocean eddies - and their explicit treatment in models is crucial. New multi-resolution climate change projections give a possible reason for low confidence in IPCC’s current 21st-century Antarctic sea-ice projections.

    • Thomas Rackow
    • , Sergey Danilov
    •  & Thomas Jung

  • Article
    | Open Access

    This study finds that the Moon accreted from an initially liquid-rich silicate disk and that rocky and icy exoplanets whose radii are smaller than 1.6 Earth radii are ideal candidates for hosting large exomoons.

    • Miki Nakajima
    • , Hidenori Genda
    •  & Shigeru Ida

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The iron-silicon phase diagram has been established at the conditions of Mercury’s core. The resulting phase diagram is remarkably complex, and presents an array of new mechanisms which may power Mercury’s inner dynamo.

    • E. Edmund
    • , G. Morard
    •  & D. Antonangeli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Pluto’s haze is revealed to have two types of particles: small spherical organic haze particles and micron-size fluffy aggregates. The persistence of these two populations has important implications for haze formation and properties on icy worlds.

    • Siteng Fan
    • , Peter Gao
    •  & Yuk L. Yung

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Megaripples are sand landforms found in wind-blown environments. A newly identified characteristic signature of the underlying bimodal sand transport process is found in the grain-size distribution on megaripples and could lend insight into transport conditions on Earth and other planetary bodies.

    • Katharina Tholen
    • , Thomas Pähtz
    •  & Klaus Kroy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fine particle air pollution causes premature death, but the role of different fine particle components in mortality is not well characterized. Here, the authors show the secondary organic aerosol component of fine particle mass is associated with significant cardiorespiratory mortality in the U.S.

    • Havala O. T. Pye
    • , Cavin K. Ward-Caviness
    •  & Karl M. Seltzer

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Though the lunar samples returned by the Apollo and Luna missions have been studied for more than 50 years, scientists are discovering new clues into the early evolution of the Moon by looking through the lens of modern analytical techniques.

    • Tabb C. Prissel
    •  & Kelsey B. Prissel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Chemical heterogeneities in Apollo sample 76535 constrain the magmatic cooling history of the lunar Mg-suite to <~ 20 My. Such rapid cooling is inconsistent with a large intrusive magma body and suggests formation by reactive melt infiltration.

    • William S. Nelson
    • , Julia E. Hammer
    •  & G. Jeffrey Taylor

  • Article
    | Open Access

    We invert Rayleigh wave ellipticity curves extracted from ambient seismic vibrations at the InSight landing site to resolve, for the first time on Mars, the shallow subsurface to around 200 m depth. While our seismic velocity model is largely consistent with the expected stacks of lava flows, we find a seismic low velocity zone at about 30 to 75 m depth that we interpret as a sedimentary layer sandwiched between layers of basalt flows.

    • M. Hobiger
    • , M. Hallo
    •  & W. B. Banerdt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Thermodynamically, rainfall events are expected to become stronger in a warming climate. Here, the authors demonstrate the importance of dynamical aspects to the temperature-rainfall scaling by quantifying the influence of cyclonic activity that leads to negative scaling over large parts of the tropical oceans.

    • Dominik Traxl
    • , Niklas Boers
    •  & Bodo Bookhagen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The ejection sites of the martian meteorites are still unknown. Here, the authors build a database of 90 million craters and show that Tharsis region is the most likely source of depleted shergottites ejected 1.1 Ma ago, thus confirming that some portions of the mantle were recently anomalously hot.

    • A. Lagain
    • , G. K. Benedix
    •  & K. Miljković

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Platinum group elements are used as tracers for planetary and PGE sulfide deposit formation. Here, the authors, through the measurements of Pt and Pd partition coefficients between sulfide liquid and basaltic melt, demonstrate that the partitioning of Pt and Pd does not obey Henry’s law.

    • Mingdong Zhang
    •  & Yuan Li

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Both poles of asteroid Ryugu, the target of space mission Hayabusa2, preserve the least processed material by space weathering. Here, the authors show detection of 700 nm absorption band in the polar spectra of Ryugu, that allows to constrain the hydrothermal history of its spectrally blue parent body.

    • Eri Tatsumi
    • , Naoya Sakatani
    •  & Seiji Sugita

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Some regions on the Moon are permanently covered in shadow and are therefore extremely difficult to see into. We develop a deep learning driven algorithm which enhances images of these regions, allowing us to see inside them with high resolution for the first time.

    • V. T. Bickel
    • , B. Moseley
    •  & M. Shirley

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ultramafic olivine-rich achondrites provide insight into the missing mantle problem in the asteroid belt. The petrology and geochemistry of these samples suggests they are related to Vesta or the Vestoids.

    • Zoltan Vaci
    • , James M. D. Day
    •  & Andreas Pack

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Lunar impact basins formed during the magma ocean solidification should have formed almost unidentifiable topographic and crustal thickness signatures, thus may escape detection. This result allows for a higher impact flux in the earliest epoch of Earth-Moon evolution.

    • K. Miljković
    • , M. A. Wieczorek
    •  & M. T. Zuber

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How early photosynthesizers managed oxidative stress remains relatively unresolved. Analyses of enzymes dealing with reactive oxygen species traces the evolutionary history of superoxide dismutases and finds evidence of CuZnSOD in the ancestor of all cyanobacteria, dating back to the Archaean.

    • Joanne S. Boden
    • , Kurt O. Konhauser
    •  & Patricia Sánchez-Baracaldo

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