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Animal diversification coincided with increasing oxygenation of the Baltoscandian continental shelf from the Early to Middle Ordovician, according to iodine and calcium records.
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.
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.
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.
From a stalagmite that grew 14,000–8,500 years ago, isotopic data provide a detailed history of groundwater infiltration associated with a strengthening North American monsoon, as the climate transitioned from a cool dry late-glacial period into a warmer and wetter Early Holocene.
Accurate estimates of the land carbon sink are vital for informing climate projections and net-zero policies. Application of a strict filtering method to microwave satellite data enabled the evaluation of global vegetation biomass carbon dynamics for 2010–2019. The results highlight the role of demography in driving forest carbon gains and losses.
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.
Exoenzymes produced by heterotrophic microorganisms early in Earth history helped unlock previously unavailable organic matter and transformed ocean geochemistry.
Enhanced soil carbon mineralization due to additional organic matter inputs, a phenomenon called priming, diminishes within a few years as soils adapt to the higher carbon inputs.
A decade of satellite observations suggests that old, degraded and deforested tropical forests are almost carbon neutral whereas northern young forests are the biggest contributor to the rising amount of carbon stored globally in vegetation.
The widespread occurrence of young grabens associated with larger compressional structures on Mercury’s surface suggests contractional tectonism has continued on the planet into geologically recent times.
Early Holocene groundwater recharge rates were higher than modern in the Grand Canyon region, probably due to an expanded North American Monsoon, according to a speleothem record and isotope-enabled palaeoclimate modelling.
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.
The Earth may become inhospitable to land mammals in about 250 Myr owing to climate warming and drying associated with the assembly of the next supercontinent, Pangaea-Ultima, according to combined tectonic, climate and mammal habitability modelling.