News & Comment

The necessity of establishing boundaries between nationally and internationally administered areas of the sea floor has long been recognized. The UN-approved demarcation line must be scientifically inevitable to gain practical importance.

In the 2008 Ilulissat Declaration, the five central Arctic states committed themselves to an orderly settlement of any overlapping claims in the Arctic. Nevertheless, the situation in the high north remains a crucial test for the functionality of the law of the sea.

Fabrizio Antonioli, Andrea Dutton and their colleagues prised a stalagmite out of an underwater cave to learn about sea levels during the penultimate interglacial period.

Verena Tunnicliffe, Robert W. Embley and their colleagues sank their remotely operated vehicle into a boiling pool of molten sulphur in their vigour to sample the deep ocean floor.

Daniel Cziczo and colleagues experimented with electronics at over 3,000-m altitude to reduce the uncertainty in aerosol–cloud interactions.

The exploration of the Solar System is an expensive endeavour. The greater the number of nations that engage in peaceful planetary research the better.

Presubmission enquiries have only rarely resolved the question of whether a paper is suitable for Nature Geoscience. We are now removing this option from our online submission system.

Mars exploration has been guided by the search for water. The more complex quest by Mars Science Laboratory for habitable environments should illuminate the Martian environmental history, and possibly deliver insights into extraterrestrial life.

Since the end of the Apollo era, the Moon has received relatively little attention from planetary scientists. Fresh interest from a new range of nations could lead to insights into our satellite's evolution and resources.

Susanne Straub and colleagues examined teaspoons of 42-million-year-old volcanic ash to elucidate the impact of plate tectonics on arc magmatism.

Andrew Moy and colleagues studied foraminifera in sediments, and made their own contributions to the sea, in their attempt to understand calcification in the Southern Ocean.

Emily Sekula-Wood and colleagues held their breath as they waited for results to rise up from the depths of the coastal ocean off California.