Sediments of the Ahr river show recurring high-magnitude flood events

The extreme summer flood of 2021 in the Ahr Valley caused catastrophic damage.   
Photo Credit: Physical Geography working group, Leipzig University

Sedimentary archives provide evidence of four extreme flood events in the last 1,500 years 

Recurring high-energy flood events are not the exception but the rule in the Ahr Valley in western Germany – and this occurs over periods of centuries to millennia. This is shown in a study published in the journal Earth Surface Processes and Landforms and led by Leipzig University, in which researchers from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), among others, were also involved. The examined river sediments document the extreme summer flood of 2021 as well as at least three other flood events in the past 1,500 years, which – measured by sedimentological parameters – exhibited comparable intensity. The Ahr floodplain is characterized by high-energy flood deposits. Flood events of low to moderate intensity are not detectable there. 

Ancient Antarctica reveals a ’one–two punch’ behind ice sheet collapse

An image of Antarctica as seen from space.
Image Credit: NASA.

When we think of global warming, what first comes to mind is the air: crushing heatwaves that are felt rather than seen, except through the haziness of humid air. But when it comes to melting ice sheets, rising ocean temperatures may play more of a role — with the worst effects experienced on the other side of the globe.

While Binghamton University Associate Professor of Earth Sciences Molly Patterson is the first author, the 43 co-authors include several Binghamton alumni, such as Christiana Rosenberg, MS ’20; Harold Jones ’18; and William Arnuk, PhD ’24. The study’s results directly address one of the main goals of the International Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Expedition 374: to identify the sensitivity of the Antarctic ice sheet to Earth’s orbital configuration under a variety of climate boundary conditions. Because of this, all shipboard science team members are included as co-authors because of their contributions to the data sets used in the article, Patterson explained.

New research may help scientists predict when a humid heat wave will break

Caption:MIT scientists have identified a key atmospheric condition that determines how hot and humid midlatitude regions like the Midwest can become — and how intense related storms may be.
Image Credit: Scientific Frontline / stock image

A long stretch of humid heat followed by intense thunderstorms is a weather pattern historically seen mostly in and around the tropics. But climate change is making humid heat waves and extreme storms more common in traditionally temperate midlatitude regions such as the midwestern U.S., which has seen episodes of unusually high heat and humidity in recent summers.

Now, MIT scientists have identified a key condition in the atmosphere that determines how hot and humid a midlatitude region can get, and how intense related storms can become. The results may help climate scientists gauge a region’s risk for humid heat waves and extreme storms as the world continues to warm.

In a study appearing this week in the journal Science Advances, the MIT team reports that a region’s maximum humid heat and storm intensity are limited by the strength of an “atmospheric inversion”— a weather condition in which a layer of warm air settles over cooler air.

Scientists discover what drives California's worst fire years

Two natural resource specialists walk through an area of Redwood Mountain Grove burned in the KNP Complex Fire in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains to evaluate fire effects.
Photo Credit: National Park Service

What makes one fire season worse than another in fire-prone parts of the world like California is poorly understood, but in a new study, scientists at the University of California, Irvine reveal how clusters of lightning-ignited fires called fire complexes are the chief drivers of the most destructive fire years. It’s a finding that could help agencies better manage such fires when they occur.

“Nobody has ever looked into these kinds of fires before,” said Rebecca Scholten, a postdoctoral fellow in Earth system science and lead author of the Science Advances study. “We theorized that when two or more fires in a fire complex merge, they would just burn themselves out. But we found the opposite – the fires grow worse.”

What Is: The Anthropocene

Image Credit: Scientific Frontline / stock image

The Definition of a New Reality

The term "Anthropocene" has transcended its origins in the quiet corridors of stratigraphy to become the defining cultural, philosophical, and scientific concept of the twenty-first century. It proposes a fundamental rupture in Earth history; the moment when human activity ceased to be a mere biological presence on the surface of the planet and became a geological force capable of determining the trajectory of the Earth system itself. This concept suggests that the Holocene—the geological epoch that began approximately 11,700 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age and provided the stable climatic conditions necessary for the development of agriculture and human civilization—has ended. In its place, we have entered a new, volatile interval characterized by the pervasive alteration of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere by a single species.  

While the term implies a new geological "epoch" following the Holocene, its formal status remains a subject of intense scientific adjudication and controversy. In March 2024, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) officially rejected the proposal to formalize the Anthropocene as a chronostratigraphic unit within the Geological Time Scale. However, this rejection has not diminished the concept's utility or its permeation into global discourse; rather, it has reoriented the scientific community toward viewing the Anthropocene as a diachronous, unfolding geological "Event" rather than a strictly defined epoch with a singular start date. This distinction is profound, shifting the focus from a search for a "golden spike" on a timeline to a broader recognition of a transformation comparable to the Great Oxidation Event of deep time.  

Water’s Age and What It Can Tell Us

PhD student Joshua Snarski is using stable water isotopes to study how water is stored and released from soil in agricultural settings.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of University of Connecticut

When it rains, what happens to the water once it enters the soil? Does the new precipitation mix with all of the water that was already there? In their recent paper in Water Resources Research, Department of Natural Resources and the Environment Ph.D. student Joshua Snarski and assistant professor James Knighton show the answer is more complicated than previously assumed, but knowing the age of water gives a more accurate picture.

Hydrologists use models to simulate what is happening in natural systems. Since hydrologic processes are complex, researchers need to make assumptions about some aspects, such as how water mixes within the soil profile. Though previous hydrologic research is focused on the amount and timing of precipitation, Snarski says shifting the focus to the age of water within the soil profile can reveal more about what is happening beneath the surface.

Scientists Crack Ancient Salt Crystals to Unlock Secrets of 1.4 Billion-Year-Old Air

Microscopic image of fluid inclusions in 1.4-billion-year-old halite crystals, which preserve ancient air and brine.
Image Credit: Justin Park/RPI

More than a billion years ago, in a shallow basin across what is now northern Ontario, a subtropical lake much like modern-day Death Valley evaporated under the sun’s gentle heat, leaving behind crystals of halite — rock salt.

It was a very different world than the one we know today. Bacteria were the dominant form of life. Red algae had only just appeared on the evolutionary scene. Complex multicellular life like animals and plants wouldn’t show up for another 800 million years. 

As the water evaporated into brine, some of it became trapped in tiny pockets within the crystals, effectively frozen in time. Those trapped fluid inclusions contained air bubbles revealing, in fine detail, the composition of the early Earth’s atmosphere. The crystals were buried in sediment, effectively sealed off from the rest of the world for 1.4 billion years, their secrets unknown. Until now. 

Ultra-high-resolution Lidar Reveals Hidden Cloud Structures

This experimental setup at Michigan Technological University allows researchers to create and study clouds under carefully controlled conditions. Researchers from Brookhaven National Laboratory used it to demonstrate the capabilities of a new ultra-high-resolution lidar, a laser-based remote sensing instrument for studying cloud properties.
Photo Credit: Michigan Technological University

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators have developed a new type of lidar — a laser-based remote-sensing instrument — that can observe cloud structures at the scale of a single centimeter. The scientists used this high-resolution lidar to directly observe fine cloud structures in the uppermost portion of laboratory-generated clouds. This capability for studying cloud tops with resolution that is 100 to 1,000 times higher than traditional atmospheric science lidars enables pairing with measurements in well-controlled chamber experiments in a way that has not been possible before.

The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide some of the first experimental data showing of how cloud droplet properties near the tops of clouds differ from those in the cloud interior. These differences are crucial to understanding how clouds evolve, form precipitation, and affect Earth’s energy balance.

“This is the first time we’ve been able to see these cloud-top microstructures directly and non-invasively,” said Fan Yang, an atmospheric scientist at Brookhaven Lab and the lead author of the study. “These structures occur on scales smaller than those used in most atmospheric models, yet they can strongly affect cloud brightness and how likely clouds are to produce rain.”

What Is: The Phanerozoic Eon

Defining the Eon of Complex Life
Image Credit: Scientific Frontline / AI generated

The Phanerozoic Eon constitutes the current and most biologically dynamic division of the geological time scale. Spanning the interval from approximately 538.8 million years ago (Ma) to the present day, it represents roughly the last 12% of Earth's 4.54-billion-year history. Despite its relatively short duration compared to the preceding Precambrian supereon—which encompasses the Hadean, Archean, and Proterozoic eons—the Phanerozoic contains the overwhelming majority of the known fossil record and the entirety of the history of complex, macroscopic animal life.  

Storms in the Southern Ocean mitigates global warming

Visible satellite image showing storms sweeping across the Southern Ocean on 4 January 2019.
Photo Credit: NASA Worldview Snapshot

Intense storms that sweep over the Southern Ocean enable the ocean to absorb more heat from the atmosphere. New research from the University of Gothenburg shows that today’s climate models underestimate how storms mix the ocean and thereby give less reliable future projections of our climate. 

The Southern Ocean is a vast expanse of ocean encircling the Antarctic continent, regulating Earth’s climate by moving heat, carbon, and nutrients out in the world’s oceans. 

It provides a critical climate service by absorbing over 75 per cent of the excess heat generated by humans globally. The Southern Ocean’s capacity to reduce climate warming depends on how efficiently it can absorb heat from our atmosphere.  

Farmers boosted Europe's biodiversity over the last 12,000 years

Standing stones in Carnac, France. Built between 6,500 - 5,300 years ago by Europe's first farmers.
 Photo Credit: Jonny Gordon.

Although humans are to blame for nature’s recent decline, a new study shows that for millennia, European farming practices drove biodiversity gains, not losses. 

Standing stones in Carnac, France. Built between 6,500 - 5,300 years ago by Europe's first farmers. Picture by Jonny Gordon. 

A team of researchers at the University of York analyzed fossil pollen records from Europe to track vegetation changes stretching back 12,000 years. They discovered that as new populations of farmers from Turkey moved into Europe 9,000 years ago, far from destroying plant diversity, they enriched it. 

Dr Jonny Gordon is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity and lead author of the new paper, Increased Holocene diversity in Europe linked to human-associated vegetation change, which has been published in Global Ecology and Biogeography. 

Island-wide field surveys illuminate land-sea connections in Mo‘orea

Mo'orea, French Polynesia, is surrounded by a diverse and vibrant coral reef ecosystem.
Photo Credit: Christian John

A massive, multi-year scientific expedition led by researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara and collaborating institutions, including the University of Hawai‘i (UH) at Mānoa, determined that land use on tropical islands can shape water quality in lagoons and that rainfall can be an important mediator for connections between land and lagoon waters. These findings provide vital information for ecosystem stewards facing global reef decline. Their findings were published recently in Limnology and Oceanography.

“This study is pretty groundbreaking in terms of its scale,” said Christian John, lead author of the study and postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “We looked at algal tissue nutrients, water chemistry, and microbial communities at almost 200 sites around the island of Mo‘orea, French Polynesia, and we repeated this sampling over multiple years.”

“The links between land and sea are dynamic and complex, so it’s a topic that has remained elusive to science,” said Mary Donovan, co-author and faculty at the Hawai‘i Institute of Marine Biology in the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. “It took a dream team to pierce through that complexity. We brought together a group of interdisciplinary thinkers, from students to senior investigators, across at least five major institutions to tackle this immense challenge.”

A new study reveals how oxygen first reached Earth’s oceans

WHOI Geochemist Andy Heard uses precise measurements of isotope ratios in sedimentary rocks to learn about the history of oxygen in Earth’s ocean.
Photo Credit: Daniel Hentz, ©Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

For roughly two billion years of Earth’s early history, the atmosphere contained no oxygen, the essential ingredient required for complex life. Oxygen began building up during the period known as the Great Oxidation Event (GOE), but when and how it first entered the oceans has remained uncertain.

A new study published in Nature Communications shows that oxygen was absorbed from the atmosphere into the shallow oceans within just a few million years—a geological blink of an eye. Led by researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), the work provides new insight into one of the most important environmental shifts in Earth’s history.

“At that point in Earth’s history, nearly all life was in the oceans. For complex life to develop, organisms first had to learn not only to use oxygen, but simply to tolerate it,” said Andy Heard, lead author of the study and assistant scientist at WHOI. “Understanding when oxygen first accumulated in Earth’s atmosphere and oceans is essential to tracing the evolution of life. And because ocean oxygenation appears to have followed atmospheric oxygen surprisingly quickly, it suggests that if we detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a distant exoplanet, there’s a strong chance its oceans also contain oxygen.”

What Is: An Ecosystem

The Holocoenotic Nature of the Biosphere
Image Credit: Scientific Frontline / stock image

The Genesis of a Paradigm 

The concept of the ecosystem represents one of the most significant intellectual leaps in the history of biological science. It is not merely a label for a collection of living things, but a sophisticated framework that integrates the chaotic multiplicity of the natural world into a coherent, functional unit. To understand the ecosystem is to understand the fundamental architecture of life on Earth. This report provides an exhaustive analysis of the ecosystem concept, tracing its historical lineage, dissecting its thermodynamic and biogeochemical engines, exploring its diverse manifestations across the globe, and evaluating its resilience in the face of unprecedented anthropogenic pressure. 

Over half of global coastal settlements are retreating inland due to intensifying climate risks

Hurricane Florence moved toward the U.S. East Coast as it intensified to a Category 4 storm, with one-minute sustained winds of 130 mph Monday September 10, 2018. This image, captured by the GOES East satellite at 10:00 am ET, showed Florence in the western Atlantic, about 600 miles southeast of Bermuda, at Category 3 intensity. The storm had developed a small but well-defined eye and a symmetrical appearance typical of major hurricanes that are rapidly intensifying.
Image Credit: NOAA

For centuries, coastlines have attracted dense human settlement and economic activity. Today, more than 40 percent of the global population lives within 100 kilometers of the coast, facing accelerating sea-level rise, coastal erosion, flooding, and tropical cyclones. 

Although moving away from the coast - known as “retreat” - is often viewed as an adaptive strategy, its global extent and drivers have remained unclear. A new study published in Nature Climate Change fills this gap by providing the first global evidence that coastal retreat is driven more by social and infrastructural vulnerability than by historical exposure to hazards. 

The study was conducted by an international team led by researchers from Sichuan University and included remote sensing experts from the University of Copenhagen (Alexander Prishchepov and Shengping Ding, IGN). It maps settlement movements across 1,071 coastal regions in 155 countries. By integrating nighttime light observations with global socioeconomic datasets, the researchers found that 56% of coastal regions have retreated from the coast from 1992 to 2019, and 16% of regions, including the Copenhagen area in Denmark, have moved closer to the coast, while 28% have remained stable. 

The seamounts of Cape Verde: a biodiversity hotspot and a priority for marine conservation in the central-eastern Atlantic

Image Credit: Projecte Luso/iMirabilis2/iAtlantic

An international team led by Covadonga Orejas, a researcher at the Gijón Oceanographic Centre of the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (IEO-CSIC); Veerle Huvenne, a researcher at the UK National Oceanography Centre (NOC); and Jacob González-Solís, professor at the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) of the University of Barcelona, has published the first comprehensive study on the seamounts of the Cape Verde archipelago, their biodiversity, ecological functionality and socio-economic relevance in the journal Progress in Oceanography.

These volcanic formations — at least 14 large mountains and numerous smaller elevations — act as veritable oases of life in the deep ocean, concentrating nutrients and modifying the circulation of underwater currents. This supports exceptional biodiversity, ranging from microorganisms to communities of deep-sea corals and sponges, as well as sharks, turtles, seabirds and cetaceans. Their position between the temperate waters of the North Atlantic and the tropical waters of the South, further enhances their productivity and ecological connectivity. 

Antarctic mountains could boost ocean carbon absorption

Glaciers transport sediments from Antarctica to the coast.
Photo Credit: Dr Kate Winter, Northumbria University

Research involving scientists from Newcastle University has revealed new hope in natural environmental systems found in Antarctica which could help mitigate the overall rise of carbon dioxide. 

As Antarctica's ice sheets thin due to climate change, newly exposed mountain peaks could significantly increase the supply of vital nutrients to the Southern Ocean which surrounds the continent, potentially enhancing its ability to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide over long timescales, according to the research published in Nature Communications. 

Led by Northumbria University, a team of scientists looked at analysis of sediment samples from East Antarctica's Sør Rondane Mountains. They discovered that weathered rocks exposed above the ice surface contain iron concentrations up to ten times higher than previously reported from the Antarctic continent. This bioavailable iron is transported to the ocean by glaciers and icebergs, where it fuels the growth of phytoplankton – microscopic marine organisms that absorb CO₂ through photosynthesis. 

Rocks on Faults Can Heal Following Seismic Movement

At the Cascadia subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest, one tectonic plate is moving underneath another. New experimental work at UC Davis shows how rocks on faults deep in the Earth can cement themselves back together after a seismic movement, adding to our knowledge of how these faults behave.
Photo Credit: of Otter Rock, Oregon by USGS

Earthquake faults deep in the Earth can glue themselves back together following a seismic event, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of California, Davis. The work, published in Science Advances and supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, adds a new factor to our understanding of the behavior of faults that can give rise to major earthquakes. 

“We discovered that deep faults can heal themselves within hours,” said Amanda Thomas, professor of earth and planetary sciences at UC Davis and corresponding author on the paper. “This prompts us to reevaluate fault rheological behavior, and if we have been neglecting something very important.” 

Researchers link Antarctic ice loss to ‘storms' at the ocean's subsurface

Mattia Poinelli, a UC Irvine postdoctoral scholar in Earth system science and NASA JPL research affiliate, outlines in a newly published study the impact of submesoscale events – small, subsurface ocean eddies and vortices – on Antarctica’s ice sheets. “Despite being largely overlooked in the context of ice-ocean interactions,” he says, “[they] are among the primary drivers of ice loss.”
Photo Credit: Steve Zylius / UC Irvine

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have identified stormlike circulation patterns beneath Antarctic ice shelves that are causing aggressive melting, with major implications for global sea level rise projections.

In a paper published recently in Nature Geoscience, the scientists say their study is the first to examine ocean-induced ice shelf melting events from a weather timescale of just days versus seasonal or annual timeframes. This enabled them to match “ocean storm” activity with intense ice melt at Thwaites Glacier and Pine Island Glacier in the climate change-threatened Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica.

The research team relied on climate simulation modeling and moored observation tools to gain 200-meter-resolution pictures of submesoscale ocean features between 1 and 10 kilometers across, tiny in the context of the vast ocean and huge slabs of floating ice in Antarctica.

Destination: Mars. First Stop: Iceland?

This picturesque vista is the watershed in southwest Iceland, where researchers collected mars rock analog samples.
Image Credit: Michael Thorpe/NASA Goddard

To say that a trip from Earth to Mars is merely a long one would be a massive understatement. On July 30, 2020, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sent its Mars rover “Perseverance” atop an Atlas V rocket to the red planet to collect rock samples, it took the rover nearly seven months to reach its destination. This was only one step in a complex process that will take at least a decade to bring home these samples from Mars. While this is an unusually long wait for a sample shipment, it gives scientists ample time to find the best approach to study these rare and precious rocks.

In preparation, an international collaboration of scientists has started investigating sedimentary rock samples found in Iceland, a country whose terrain shares some compositional similarities and whose climate may be similar to ancient climates in certain Martian regions. Their results, published today in American Mineralogist, shed light on how high-resolution analyses of these complex, natural minerals can give scientists a deeper understanding of their geological history, both at home on Earth and 194 million miles away on Mars, though this requires careful interpretation. This collaboration is made up of researchers from the University of Maryland, NASA Goddard, Johnson Space Center, University of Göttingen, Chungbuk National University, and the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.