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The south pole of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus is anomalously warm, geologically youthful and cryovolcanically active. Episodic convective overturn explains how the moon's modest sources of internal heat can be channelled into intense geological activity.
Hydrologists have thought of soil as a kind of giant sponge that soaks up precipitation and slowly releases it to streams. But according to new evidence the soil water used by vegetation may be largely decoupled from the water that flows through soils to streams.
Arsenic levels in shallow groundwater in the Bengal Basin exceed thresholds for safe drinking water. Groundwater modelling indicates that deep wells that reach safe water below 150 m could remain safe for centuries if used for domestic water only, whereas the intensive use of deep groundwater for irrigation could contaminate this resource within decades.
The sequence of events during the collision between India and Eurasia has long been contested. Numerical simulations imply that the key to the puzzle could lie in the subduction of continental lithosphere.
Arsenic occurs naturally in the groundwater of southern Asia. Analyses of an agricultural site in Bangladesh suggest that human activities, including widespread farming practices, can dictate where elevated arsenic is found.
The effect of rising greenhouse-gas emissions on climate is not uniform across the globe. An analysis of the mechanisms behind model-projected changes in ocean temperature gives greater confidence in the pattern of tropical warming and its potential impacts.
Where the Pacific and Australian tectonic plates collide under the South Island of New Zealand large quantities of aqueous fluid are produced. But how does this happen? Geophysical and petrological data indicate that it may not be as we thought.