Articles

The Azores High over the North Atlantic has expanded due to anthropogenic climate change, disrupting precipitation patterns in western Europe, according to climate modelling and precipitation proxy records spanning the past millennium.

Observed daily changes in CO₂ emissions from across the globe reveal the sectors and countries where pandemic-related emissions declines were most pronounced in 2020.

Direct measurements of carbon fixation rates in groundwater suggest a substantial contribution of in situ primary production to subsurface ecosystem processes.

Using magma inflow rate improves eruption forecasting on timescales of weeks to months for basaltic caldera systems, compared with using surface deformation alone, according to analysis of 45 unrest case studies and viscoelastic modelling.

A change in the style of rifting in the North Atlantic led to carbon fluxes from subcrustal melting that helped trigger the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, according to geochemical analyses of volcanic sequences as well as melting and tectonic modelling.

A reduction in olivine grain size can cause weakening of mantle lithosphere, facilitating continental rifting, according to coupled grain-size-evolution thermo-mechanical modelling of a mantle dynamics.

The lower oceanic crust forms through the accretion of injected melt that cools and crystallizes in situ over hundreds of thousands of years, according to seismic data from the slow-spreading equatorial Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Seismicity close to the rupture surface can shut down for centuries following a megathrust earthquake, while a much larger area surrounding it is activated for decades, according to numerical modelling of the 2011 Tohoku and other megathrust earthquakes.

The Pine Island Glacier, a locus of ice loss from the modern West Antarctic Ice Sheet, had previously been stable since at least the mid-Holocene, according to records tracking ice extent based on radiocarbon and cosmogenic exposure dating.

Infilling of Canadian Arctic ocean gateways by the Laurentide Ice Sheet probably triggered Scandinavian glaciation during the last glacial inception by increasing North Atlantic freshwater inputs, according to coupled ice-sheet–climate-model simulations.

The ocean during Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth episodes did not have an ice-free belt in the tropics when likely cloud conditions are taken into account, according to climate and energy-balance modelling.

Temperature observations from across Alaska show widespread talik formation in the discontinuous permafrost zone due to higher air temperatures and above-average snowfall in recent years.

Tropical Pacific islands enhance phytoplankton biomass, productivity and biodiversity at both local and basin scales, according to ocean colour satellite observations used to identify island-enriched waters.

Lakes preferentially retain phosphorous over nitrogen, amplifying the imbalance of nutrient cycles caused by anthropogenic inputs, according to analyses of more than 5,000 lakes globally.

The water content of arc magmas in the lower crust can reach up to 20 wt% during crystallization, according to geochemical analyses of minerals from the Kohistan palaeo-arc, Pakistan, underscoring the role of water in porphyry deposits formation.

Observations of deposits associated with a crater on the rubble-pile asteroid Bennu indicate a surface with low strength that is readily reworked by impact processes.

Fractures on the asteroid Bennu imaged by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft are consistent with cracking induced by diurnal temperature variations over geologically rapid timescales.

Biocrusts reduce global atmospheric dust emission by 60%, and future biocrust losses due to climate and land-use changes will exacerbate this effect, according to global models of dust cycling.

Global tree restoration could cause substantial and regionally variable changes in water availability, according to an ensemble of Budyko models and moisture recycling data.

Mass spectrometry measurements show that the concentration of helium in the atmosphere has risen over the past five decades due to fossil fuel emissions.