Solid Earth sciences articles within Nature

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  • News |

    Experts debate how much emergency-response planners should rely on tsunami forecasts.

    • Quirin Schiermeier

  • Letter |

    Palaeoclimate data show that 3–5 million years ago in the early Pliocene the equatorial Pacific experienced persistent warm, El Niño conditions. Here a hurricane model and a coupled climate model show a feedback between sea surface temperature and frequent hurricanes that could account for such conditions.

    • Alexey V. Fedorov
    • , Christopher M. Brierley
    •  & Kerry Emanuel

  • News Feature |

    A new generation of sophisticated Earth models is gearing up for its first major test. But added complexity may lead to greater uncertainty about the future climate, finds Olive Heffernan.

    • Olive Heffernan

  • Letter |

    For the first billion years or so of the Earth's history, there may have been whole-mantle convection, but after this period differentiation of the Earth's mantle has been controlled by solid-state convection. Many trace elements — known as 'incompatible elements' — preferentially partition into low-density melts and are concentrated into the crust, but half of these incompatible elements should be hidden in the Earth's interior. It is now suggested that a by-product of whole-mantle convection is deep and hot melting, resulting in the generation of dense liquids that sank into the lower mantle.

    • Cin-Ty A. Lee
    • , Peter Luffi
    •  & John Hernlund

  • Opinion |

    Roger Bilham, one of the first seismologists to visit Haiti after last month's earthquake, calls for UN enforcement of resistant construction in cities with a history of violent tremors.

    • Roger Bilham

  • Letter |

    Zonal jets are common in nature and are spontaneously generated in turbulent systems. Because the Earth's outer core is believed to be in a turbulent state, it is possible that there is zonal flow in the liquid iron of the outer core. By investigating numerical simulations of the geodynamo with lower viscosities than most previous simulations have been able to use, a convection regime of the outer core is now found that has a dual structure comprising inner, sheet-like radial plumes and an outer, westward cylindrical zonal flow.

    • Takehiro Miyagoshi
    • , Akira Kageyama
    •  & Tetsuya Sato

  • Books & Arts |

    Roger Bilham enjoys a history of a potentially useful field in which spectacular failures can win accolades.

    • Roger Bilham

  • News Feature |

    Eske Willerslev combines Arctic escapades with meticulous lab work in his quest to pull ancient DNA from the ice. Rex Dalton talks to the adventurer about extracting the first ancient human genome.

    • Rex Dalton

  • Letter |

    Claims that life existed on Earth in the early Archaean eon (3.2 billion years ago) are often controversial, as non-biological processes can produce life-like microstructures and chemical signatures that mimic those of the remains of living organisms. Now, however, the discovery of relatively large, carbonaceous spheroidal microstructures — interpreted as organic-walled microfossils — in early Archaean deposits adds further evidence that life existed, thrived and survived on Earth at a very early date.

    • Emmanuelle J. Javaux
    • , Craig P. Marshall
    •  & Andrey Bekker

  • Letter |

    Despite extensive study of the San Andreas fault, its physical character and deformation mode beneath the relatively shallow earthquake-generating portion remain largely unconstrained. Here, continuous seismic data from mid-2001 to 2008 is examined, using an approach that allows differentiation between activities from nearby patches of the deep fault and begins to unveil rich and complex patterns of tremor occurrence, in particular, constant motion of the tremor source.

    • David R. Shelly

  • Opinion |

    Geoengineering studies of solar-radiation management should begin urgently, argue David W. Keith, Edward Parson and M. Granger Morgan — before a rogue state decides to act alone.

    • David W. Keith
    • , Edward Parson
    •  & M. Granger Morgan

  • Opinion |

    There are mathematically advanced ways to weigh and pool scientific advice. They should be used more to quantify uncertainty and improve decision-making, says Willy Aspinall.

    • Willy Aspinall

  • News & Views |

    Asteroids are weakly bound piles of rubble, and if one comes close to Earth, tides can cause the object to undergo landslides and structural rearrangement. The outcome of this encounter is a body with meteorite-like colours.

    • Clark R. Chapman

  • Books & Arts |

    Floods and fires aside, the tricky science of prediction is explained in a book that treads a careful line between analysis and anecdotes of awful events, says Andrew Robinson.

    • Andrew Robinson

  • Column |

    Science should focus more on understanding the present and less on predicting the future, argues Daniel Sarewitz.

    • Daniel Sarewitz

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