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A 700-year-long flood of glacial meltwater, ice and sediment from the Mackenzie River preceded the freshening of the Beaufort Sea prior to the Younger Dryas climate event, according to sediment analyses.
Climate feedbacks associated with wetland methane emissions and permafrost-thaw carbon release substantially reduce available carbon budgets to achieve temperature targets, suggest simulations with a climate–land-surface model system.
Particulate black carbon in rivers can have ages of up to 17,000 14C years before it is sequestered in the oceans, according to an inventory of particulate black carbon in 18 rivers across the globe.
Tectonic loading in the direction of propagation exerts an important control on the propagation of continental break-up, according to three-dimensional simulations of the South China Sea.
The decline in China’s CO2 emissions in the past few years is largely due to changes in industrial structure and a decline in the share of coal for energy production, according to a quantitative analysis of the drivers of CO2 emissions.
Gulf Stream rings may carry substantial amounts of iron to the North Atlantic subtropical gyre, according to measurements of iron concentrations in a ring and satellite data on ring activity.
Soil weathering, rather than short-term warming, controls microbial community composition, nutrient availability and soil carbon content, according to observations from a 3-Myr-old soil chronosequence preserved in river terraces in California.
Cultivated areas have expanded at the expense of forests, including primary and protected forests, in Southeast Asian highlands, according to an analysis of satellite imagery of the region.
A substantial amount of secondary aerosols form within hours of biomass burning in southern African savannah and grassland fires, according to analyses of 5.5 years of continuous field measurements.
Atmospheric simulations of Venus show that gravity waves generated in the afternoon over mountains can influence the planet’s rotation rate and explain a planetary-scale perturbation of the Venusian atmosphere observed by the Akatsuki spacecraft.
A combination of the level and rate of human-induced warming allows estimation of remaining emission budgets to peak warming across a broad range of scenarios, suggests an analysis of emissions budgets expressed in terms of CO2-forcing-equivalent emissions.
Slow-slip events on the central San Andreas Fault are localized creep bursts that aseismically rupture isolated fault compartments, according to analyses of satellite deformation data.
Terrestrial carbon sources in the Southern Hemisphere and sinks in the Northern Hemisphere may be smaller than thought, according to a recalculation that accounts for the oceanic redistribution of carbon.
Enhanced algal productivity during the Late Ordovician may have led to carbon drawdown and the inception of the Hirnantian glaciation, according to sediment geochemistry and carbon cycle modelling.
Seismic images of giant crustal-collapse structures preserved in the Yilgarn Craton, Australia, reveal that these structures may have formed over 2.5 billion years ago when the cores of continents were hot and weak.
The magnitude 7.6 Izmit earthquake that struck Turkey in 1999 was nucleated by an eastward-migrating cascade of foreshocks, according to high-resolution analyses of seismic data.
Earthquake activity in East Antarctica is similar to that of other stable cratons, according to analyses of seismic data. Thus, the weight of the overlying Antarctic polar ice sheet does not suppress seismicity, as was previously thought.
A strike-slip fault zone in central Alaska exhibits a range of earthquake slip processes, including very-low-frequency earthquakes, some of which transition into regular, fast earthquakes.
Pyroxenite—recycled, subducted material—beneath mid-ocean ridges cools the mantle, suppressing melt extraction and crust formation, according to geochemical analyses of samples taken from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
Tall trees are less sensitive to variation in precipitation than short trees, according to analyses of photosynthetic sensitivity to drought in tall and short Amazon forests. The results demonstrate higher resilience of tall trees to drought.