Volume 16 Issue 11, November 2023

Africa’s worsening air pollution has received too little attention. We argue that actions are needed in energy transition management, transport emission regulation and waste management to protect Africa’s air quality.

The rapid spread of solar power plants onto cropland is having increasingly detrimental impacts. Targeted policy and technological solutions are urgently needed to resolve the tension between renewable energy and food production.

The United States currently has modest levels of air pollution after decades of clean air actions. Dr Colette Heald, an atmospheric chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, speaks to Nature Geoscience about air pollution control in the US, and the challenges and opportunities faced under global environmental change.

India is currently one of the most polluted regions in the world. Dr Chandra Venkataraman, an expert in climate change and air pollution at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, speaks to Nature Geoscience about challenges and opportunities facing air pollution control in India.

China has made progress in improving air quality, but current levels of air pollution still have great health impacts. Dr Qiang Zhang, an atmospheric chemist at Tsinghua University, speaks to Nature Geoscience about air pollution control in China, and the challenges and opportunities faced under global environmental change.

Carbonates are key minerals for understanding fluids and their interactions with near-surface environments. Ashley King explores their significance on Earth, and beyond.

Megafloods are rare and hence difficult to predict. However, using a collation of historical flood observations across Europe, it is now shown that recent megafloods could have been anticipated — local surprises are in fact not surprising at the continental scale.

There are two competing hypotheses for the origin of oceanic plateaus: plume versus plate. Thermodynamic modelling of magmatism at Shatsky Rise, in the Pacific Ocean, now suggests that neither mechanism is adequate on its own and in fact plume–ridge interaction is required to explain the formation of this ocean plateau.

Swath radar maps of the subglacial landscape reveal how Antarctica’s geologic history has influenced the evolution of the ice sheet. The findings indicate the role of past interior ice streams in shaping ice-sheet growth and flow from Hercules Dome.

The CLOUD experiment provides important insights into new particle formation in different atmospheric environments.

Discrepancies between model simulations and proxy reconstructions of regional multidecadal to centennial climate variability are primarily due to climate model deficiencies, which might also impact future projections, according to a synthesis of recent work.

Sustained emission reductions have altered the prevailing regime for ozone formation over China, weakening the trade-off in pollution control between aerosols and ozone, according to analyses of ozone pollution chemistry between 2013 and 2021.

Analyses of atmospheric nitrogen chemistry in Beijing’s air pollution during the COVID-19 lockdown suggest an increasing role of nighttime nitrogen chemistry in haze formation above the city.

European river discharge observations suggest that catchments with similar flood generation processes produce similar extremes, enabling better predictability of megafloods using a continental scale perspective.

Chemical analyses show permafrost soils on the Tibetan Plateau contain large amounts of halogenated organic chemicals that could be remobilized in a changing climate.

Global temperature fluctuations during the last 2,000 years caused consistent changes in ocean evaporation and atmospheric moisture condensation processes, reflected in coherent water isotope signals in a large compilation of proxy records.

Alpine valleys and lineated bedforms imaged with swath radar suggest that ice flowed quickly into a fault-bounded basin during the initial nucleation of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet near Hercules Dome.

Deep-ocean oxygenation patterns consistent with an active Atlantic meridional overturning circulation emerged following the Eocene-Oligocene transition about 34 million years ago, according to biomarker records from the northwest North Atlantic.

Tectonic and ecological factors controlled spatially contrasting marine redox changes through the Phanerozoic, a pattern that was in turn linked to background extinction rates, according to a machine learning-based analysis of shale geochemical data.

Indirect forcing by low regional orography and high atmospheric methane levels contributed to the amplified Arctic temperatures in the early Eocene by enhancing polar stratospheric cloud formation, according to an atmospheric model with interactive chemistry.

Fine silicate dust generated by the Chicxulub impact had a dominant role in the global cooling and disruption of photosynthesis that followed, according to palaeoclimate simulations constrained by grain-size analysis of Cretaceous-Palaeogene boundary sediments.

Varying monsoon extent and intensity since the expansive megamonsoon on the Pangaea supercontinent was controlled by the position and fragmentation of continental land masses, according to climate simulations and atmospheric energetic analyses.

Animal diversification coincided with increasing oxygenation of the Baltoscandian continental shelf from the Early to Middle Ordovician, according to iodine and calcium records.

Analysis of remote-sensing and seismological observations from the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquake doublet reveals how fault geometry can control fault slip distribution and rupture kinematics, including the occurrence of supershear rupture.

Thermodynamic simulations suggest that Shatsky Rise magmatism is controlled by the interaction between mantle plume and mid-ocean ridge.