Peer-reviewed journal published by Nature Portfolio covering Earth science research, including climate, oceans, geology, and planetary science.
Researchers at Cambridge and CIMAT used 6,000-year-old algae records to project Arctic winter sea ice about 1 million km2 below earlier estimates. They say the weighting narrows the uncertainty range by as much as 85%.
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Geoscientists report a Papua New Guinea rock that reached about 700 degrees C at 45 km depth and gained only about 100 degrees more by 90 km. A sample from one island cannot yet say whether the models or this zone is unusual.
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Portsmouth-led researchers found the mantle recorded surface oxygen 3.4 to 3 billion years ago, up to 1.1 billion years before the Great Oxidation Event. Sulfur chemistry in apatite sealed inside zircon indicates oxidized surface material was already being carried down by some form of subduction, according to the Nature Geoscience study.
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Researchers using Mars Express report that the 1,800 km Arsia Mons cloud appears in simulations only when water vapour freezes without dust seeds. If that holds, the air there reaches humidities long treated as theoretical, a conclusion that rests on a model's fit to one cloud.
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Researchers found that a Papua New Guinea rock reached about 800 degrees C at 45 km deep, then cooled by about 100 degrees beyond 90 km. The evidence is a single rock, and a co-author offers two explanations that imply different changes to subduction heat models.
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Chinese researchers grew a diatom for 880 days and found high CO2 cut its phosphorus per unit carbon by about 26% when phosphate was scarce. The cells still grew faster, so in this species extra CO2 changed what the plankton are made of as well as how fast they multiply.
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Researchers writing in Nature Geoscience give at least 89% odds that the strictest Paris path costs Antarctica less ice by 2100 than very high emissions. For coastal planners, that puts part of Antarctica's future contribution to sea level within reach of emissions policy.
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Researchers screening hundreds of thousands of simulated futures in Nature Geoscience find Antarctica loses ice on net this century, even at 1.5C of warming. In the runs that survive, extra snowfall does not outweigh the loss, so Antarctica adds to sea-level rise this century.
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Chinese Academy of Sciences researchers project warming will cut the South Asian monsoon's share of Mediterranean summer rain variance from 14.2% to 5.1%. The high-emissions projection is about what causes rain to swing from one summer to the next, and it does not say whether the region's summers will get wetter.
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Researchers publishing in Nature Geoscience found that two iron oxyhydroxides holding up to 15% water by weight stay stable at core-mantle boundary conditions. That makes the deepest mantle a plausible store of Earth's original water, pending evidence that the minerals exist there.
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Anna Mittelholz of ETH Zurich and colleagues say a 60-km volcanic body under the Moon's Dewar swirl cooled in a field of at least 11.4 microteslas. They credit a core dynamo like Earth's, since the site's location makes an impact origin unlikely.
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Science Tokyo's group put a voltage across iron hydride at up to 110 gigapascals and watched hydrogen migrate. By their own numbers it would travel 0.1 micrometres in 10,000 years.
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New work in Nature Geoscience finds past Atlantic slowdowns raised the heat stored by the global ocean, an effect the authors size at about 25 ppm of carbon dioxide.
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A Nature Geoscience paper puts the Labrador Sea's oxygen export at more than 27 teramoles a year, enough to cover respiration across the deep North Atlantic. AMOC strength alone will not track it.
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