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India is currently one of the most polluted regions in the world. Dr Chandra Venkataraman, an expert in climate change and air pollution at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, speaks to Nature Geoscience about challenges and opportunities facing air pollution control in India.

Carbonates are key minerals for understanding fluids and their interactions with near-surface environments. Ashley King explores their significance on Earth, and beyond.

Africa’s worsening air pollution has received too little attention. We argue that actions are needed in energy transition management, transport emission regulation and waste management to protect Africa’s air quality.

H₂, which is formed by the oxidation of iron in rocks, was likely a critical source of energy for early life. Analysis of natural rock samples from 3.5–2.7 billion-year-old komatiites, combined with geochemical data from a global database, quantifies the amount of H₂ likely to have been produced in Earth’s ancient oceans.

The United States currently has modest levels of air pollution after decades of clean air actions. Dr Colette Heald, an atmospheric chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, speaks to Nature Geoscience about air pollution control in the US, and the challenges and opportunities faced under global environmental change.

Air pollution is a leading cause of death globally. Efforts to clean the air will not only save lives but contribute to addressing broader environmental and socioeconomic challenges.

Indirect forcing by low regional orography and high atmospheric methane levels contributed to the amplified Arctic temperatures in the early Eocene by enhancing polar stratospheric cloud formation, according to an atmospheric model with interactive chemistry.

The CLOUD experiment provides important insights into new particle formation in different atmospheric environments.

Megafloods are rare and hence difficult to predict. However, using a collation of historical flood observations across Europe, it is now shown that recent megafloods could have been anticipated — local surprises are in fact not surprising at the continental scale.

The rapid spread of solar power plants onto cropland is having increasingly detrimental impacts. Targeted policy and technological solutions are urgently needed to resolve the tension between renewable energy and food production.

Discrepancies between model simulations and proxy reconstructions of regional multidecadal to centennial climate variability are primarily due to climate model deficiencies, which might also impact future projections, according to a synthesis of recent work.

Serpentinization of komatiites produced large quantities of H₂ in the Archaean, which has implications for the start of early chemosynthetic life, according to petrologic and bulk rock chemical analyses.

European river discharge observations suggest that catchments with similar flood generation processes produce similar extremes, enabling better predictability of megafloods using a continental scale perspective.

Global temperature fluctuations during the last 2,000 years caused consistent changes in ocean evaporation and atmospheric moisture condensation processes, reflected in coherent water isotope signals in a large compilation of proxy records.

Fine silicate dust generated by the Chicxulub impact had a dominant role in the global cooling and disruption of photosynthesis that followed, according to palaeoclimate simulations constrained by grain-size analysis of Cretaceous-Palaeogene boundary sediments.

Increasing soil organic carbon can, under optimum management only, enhance global production of maize, wheat and rice by up to 0.7% with important regional differences, according to 13,662 field trials across a broad range of soils, climates and management practices.

Tectonic and ecological factors controlled spatially contrasting marine redox changes through the Phanerozoic, a pattern that was in turn linked to background extinction rates, according to a machine learning-based analysis of shale geochemical data.

The variable intensity of Southern Ocean as well as North Atlantic deep-water ventilation explains differences in atmospheric CO₂ trends and magnitudes during cold stadials over the past 150,000 years, according to a record of deep-ocean acidity.

Chemical analyses show permafrost soils on the Tibetan Plateau contain large amounts of halogenated organic chemicals that could be remobilized in a changing climate.

Varying monsoon extent and intensity since the expansive megamonsoon on the Pangaea supercontinent was controlled by the position and fragmentation of continental land masses, according to climate simulations and atmospheric energetic analyses.