News & Views |
Featured
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Letter |
High-resolution mapping of global surface water and its long-term changes
A freely available dataset produced from three million Landsat satellite images reveals substantial changes in the distribution of global surface water over the past 32 years and their causes, from climate change to human actions.
- Jean-François Pekel
- , Andrew Cottam
- & Alan S. Belward
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Letter |
Fluvial sediment supply to a mega-delta reduced by shifting tropical-cyclone activity
About a third of the sediment delivery of the Mekong River is shown to be associated with rainfall generated by tropical cyclones, suggesting that future delta stability will be strongly moderated by changes to tropical cyclone intensity, frequency and track.
- Stephen E. Darby
- , Christopher R. Hackney
- & Rolf Aalto
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Research Highlights |
Megadroughts loom large
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News & Views |
Megafloods downsized
A fresh look at the Channeled Scablands of North America shows that the ancient floods that scarred that landscape were smaller than is commonly assumed. This result could revise estimates of similar floods on Mars. See Letter p.229
- J. Taylor Perron
- & Jeremy G. Venditti
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Letter |
Progressive incision of the Channeled Scablands by outburst floods
Simulations of water flow and erosion in Moses Coulee suggest that the floods that carved this canyon only partially filled it, implying much lower flood discharges than previously thought.
- Isaac J. Larsen
- & Michael P. Lamb
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News & Views |
Long-term effects of permafrost thaw
Carbon emissions from the Arctic tundra could increase drastically as global warming thaws permafrost. Clues now obtained about the long-term effects of such thawing on carbon dioxide emissions highlight the need for more data.
- Donatella Zona
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News |
Arctic river flood plains are home to hidden carbon
Research reveals an overlooked role for rivers in northern ecosystems.
- Alexandra Witze
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Research Highlights |
South Asia water supplies at risk
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Brief Communications Arising |
Isotopic composition of plant water sources
- Mathieu Javaux
- , Youri Rothfuss
- & Nicolas Brüggemann
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Books & Arts |
China: A hydrological history
Andrea Janku enjoys a study of the nation-building role of China's great rivers, the Yellow and the Yangtze.
- Andrea Janku
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Research Highlights |
UK food imports use scarce water
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News & Views |
Water's past revisited to predict its future
A reconstruction of 1,200 years of water's history in the Northern Hemisphere, based on proxy data, fuels the debate about whether anthropogenic climate change affected twentieth-century precipitation. See Letter p.94
- Matthew E. Kirby
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News |
Snow-sensing fleet to unlock water's icy secrets
Airborne experiments aim to fill in the blanks of global water resources as the climate changes.
- Alexandra Witze
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Letter |
Northern Hemisphere hydroclimate variability over the past twelve centuries
A very large set of proxy data is used to reconstruct Northern Hemisphere hydroclimate variability over the past twelve centuries, to benchmark climate model simulations of hydroclimate; the twentieth-century intensification of hydroclimate extremes seen in the model simulations is not supported by the proxy reconstruction.
- Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist
- , Paul J. Krusic
- & David Frank
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Outlook |
Flooding: Water potential
Water is a necessity for any city, but too much of it can threaten lives and infrastructure. As climate change looms, new approaches can help to turn a threat into a resource.
- James M. Gaines
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Research Highlights |
Climate risks of low-carbon power
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Research Highlights |
Stored water slows rising seas
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News |
'Water scarcity' affects four billion people each year
Global map charts locations that use more water than is available in at least one month each year.
- Emma Marris
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Research Highlights |
Electricity at risk in a warmer world
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News |
Lakes warm worldwide
Temperature rise outpaces warming of atmosphere, and threatens aquatic ecosystems.
- Alexandra Witze
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Research Highlights |
Snow-fed water supply threatened
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Books & Arts |
Books in brief
Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks.
- Barbara Kiser
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Research Highlights |
Volcanoes change river flow
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News |
Why hunting for life in Martian water will be a tricky task
The risk of microbial contamination could prevent humans and even robots from visiting the most promising parts of the red planet.
- Lee Billings
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News |
California snowpack lowest in past 500 years
Tree rings help to put the state's historic drought in context.
- Chris Cesare
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News & Views |
The diversified economics of soil water
Soil water that evaporates or is tapped by plants is largely separate from that which runs into streams and recharges groundwater. This finding has big implications for our understanding of water cycling. See Letter p.91
- Gabriel Bowen
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Letter |
Global separation of plant transpiration from groundwater and streamflow
Soil water is usually assumed to be equally available for all purposes, supplying plant transpiration as well as groundwater and streamflow; however, a study of hydrogen and oxygen isotopes from 47 globally distributed sites shows that in fact the water used by plants tends to be isotopically distinct from the water that feeds streamflow.
- Jaivime Evaristo
- , Scott Jasechko
- & Jeffrey J. McDonnell
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Comment |
Water and climate: Recognize anthropogenic drought
California's current extreme drought must be a lesson for managing water in a warmer, more densely populated world, say Amir AghaKouchak and colleagues.
- Amir AghaKouchak
- , David Feldman
- & Jay Lund
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Research Highlights |
Floods used as defensive weapons
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Letter |
Greenland supraglacial lake drainages triggered by hydrologically induced basal slip
A dense network of GPS observations shows that rapid lake drainage events on the western Greenland Ice Sheet are preceded by period of ice-sheet uplift and/or enhanced basal slip.
- Laura A. Stevens
- , Mark D. Behn
- & Matt A. King
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Research Highlights |
Groundwater under Antarctica
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News Q&A |
How California can survive the drought
Groundwater expert Leon Szeptycki explains how the state’s ineffectual water-management system is trying to come to grips with harsh, dry reality.
- Danielle Venton
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Letter |
Increases in tropical rainfall driven by changes in frequency of organized deep convection
An increase in the frequency of organized deep convection—essentially a large aggregation of heavily precipitating and largely stratiform clouds—is behind most of the recent increases in tropical precipitation.
- Jackson Tan
- , Christian Jakob
- & George Tselioudis
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News |
Europe sounds alarm over freshwater pollution
Environment agency review also charts gloomy news on biodiversity.
- Natasha Gilbert
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News |
Slick idea proposed to stretch water supplies
In drought-ridden US, water managers consider using a coating one molecule thick to reduce evaporation from reservoirs.
- Matthew Wald
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Research Highlights |
Drying lakes linked to extinctions
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Letter |
Direct observations of evolving subglacial drainage beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet
Simultaneous observations of moulins and boreholes in western Greenland show that water delivery to the base of the ice sheet via moulins affects short-term ice velocity fluctuations, but not late-season ice velocity decelerations.
- Lauren C. Andrews
- , Ginny A. Catania
- & Thomas A. Neumann
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Letter |
Hybrid shallow on-axis and deep off-axis hydrothermal circulation at fast-spreading ridges
High-resolution three-dimensional simulations of hydrothermal flow beneath fast-spreading ridges predict two interacting flow components — shallow on-axis flow and deeper off-axis flow — that merge to feed axial vent sites, reconciling previously incompatible models favouring only one flow component.
- Jörg Hasenclever
- , Sonja Theissen-Krah
- & Colin W. Devey
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Brief Communications Arising |
Uncertainties in transpiration estimates
- A. M. J. Coenders-Gerrits
- , R. J. van der Ent
- & H. H. G. Savenije
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Brief Communications Arising |
Jasechko et al. reply
- Scott Jasechko
- , Zachary D. Sharp
- & Peter J. Fawcett
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Outlook |
The dry facts
Drought has wreaked havoc throughout history, destroying crops and causing famine and conflict. And it could be getting worse.
- Olive Heffernan
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Outlook |
Water: The flow of technology
Farmers must develop new approaches if they are to keep producing crops as water supplies dwindle.
- Katherine Bourzac
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Outlook |
Perspectives: Legislating change
What should governments do to enhance sustainable agriculture and mitigate droughts?
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Letter |
Climatic control of bedrock river incision
Topographic analyses and numerical modelling of canyon formation across the Hawaiian island of Kaua‘i show that rivers erode into bedrock more efficiently where precipitation rates are higher.
- Ken L. Ferrier
- , Kimberly L. Huppert
- & J. Taylor Perron
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Letter |
Terrestrial water fluxes dominated by transpiration
An analysis of the relative effects of transpiration and evaporation, which can be distinguished by how they affect isotope ratios in water, shows that transpiration is by far the largest water flux from Earth’s continents, representing 80 to 90 per cent of terrestrial evapotranspiration and using half of all solar energy absorbed by land surfaces.
- Scott Jasechko
- , Zachary D. Sharp
- & Peter J. Fawcett
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Letter |
Little change in global drought over the past 60 years
A physically based approach to drought modelling shows that there has been little change in drought from 1950 to 2008, contradicting previous work that suggested an increase in recent years.
- Justin Sheffield
- , Eric F. Wood
- & Michael L. Roderick
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News |
Snow survey hopes for avalanche of data
More accurate snowfall measurements could improve climate models and estimates of water resources.
- Jane Qiu