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Blue jets, gigantic jets, cloud-to-cloud discharges and cloud-to-ground lightning are all electrical discharges from thunderclouds. An analysis of numerical simulations and observations of these phenomena places them all in a unifying framework.
At nanometre scales, organic matter forms in soil are spatially, rather than chemically, complex, according to X-ray spectromicroscopy studies of thin sections of entire and intact free microaggregates. Organic matter forms detected at this spatial scale have no similarity to organic carbon forms of total soil.
Black carbon in soot is an efficient absorbing agent of solar irradiation that is preferentially emitted in the tropics and can form atmospheric brown clouds in mixture with other aerosols. These factors combine to make black carbon emissions the second most important contribution to anthropogenic climate warming, after carbon dioxide emissions.
Numerical simulations suggest that lobate scarps on the surface of Mercury could have resulted from compressive stresses induced by convection within the planet’s mantle, in addition to those generated by global contraction.
Attaching a ‘floating’ tree-ring chronology to ice core records that cover the abrupt Younger Dryas cold interval during the last glacial termination provides a better estimate of the onset and duration of the radiocarbon anomaly. The chronology suggests that marine records may be biased by changes in the concentration of radiocarbon in the ocean, which may affect the accuracy of a popular radiocarbon calibration program during this interval.
In the year AD 365, an earthquake and tsunami destroyed much of the eastern Mediterranean coastal regions. The distribution of uplift at the time suggests that the earthquake occurred on a fault within the overriding plate at the subduction zone beneath Crete, and not on the subduction interface itself.
Torbjörn Törnqvist and several teams of students ventured into the wilds of the Louisiana coast to investigate Mississippi Delta sediments, armed with only a hand-corer and a fifteen-year-old station wagon.
Patrick Lajeunesse and colleagues enjoyed the picturesque environment of Hudson Bay while mapping its floor in order to understand the nature of the catastrophic outburst flood of Lake Agassiz-Ojibway.
International Polar Year is drawing attention to the poles. But if more people are entering this pristine environment as a result, any negative impacts must be justified with commensurate benefits.
Whether convection in the Earth's mantle extends through its entire depth or if the mantle is layered has long been debated. Recent research suggests that spatially and temporally intermittent or partial layering is the most likely solution.
Earthquake data seem to reveal a huge sausage-shaped slab of material detaching itself from the material subducting as two plates meet beneath the Hindu Kush. This largest-ever 'boudin' could tell us more about what happens when continents collide.
Numerous long, wall-like ridges can be observed in the Valles Marineris region of Mars. They probably represent fault zones cemented by water-deposited minerals and are indicative of ancient groundwater flow.
Deltas are among the most valuable coastal ecosystems, but they are very dynamic and the factors that influence their health are complex. The rate of compaction of underlying sediments might be a more significant factor than was thought.
Lakes dammed by ice will commonly spill in catastrophic outbursts. Lake Agassiz-Ojibway, at the margin of the Laurentide ice sheet, burst 8,470 years ago in a subglacial flood whose marks have been scratched into the seafloor of Hudson Bay.
