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The Athabasca Basin, Canada, is home to some of the world’s largest uranium deposits. Analysis of preserved ore-forming fluids and experimental measurement of uranium solubility in analogous solutions show that the giant deposits could have formed relatively rapidly from extremely uranium-rich brines under acidic conditions.
The formal detection of climate warming and its attribution to human influence has so far relied on the differences between natural and anthropogenic warming patterns. An alternative and entirely independent attribution method that relies on the principle of conservation of energy instead, confirms greenhouse gas warming by 0.85 °C since the mid-twentieth century, half of which was offset by aerosol cooling.
Mantle dynamics drive the formation of ocean islands and seamounts in the interior of oceanic plates. Yet the mechanisms for generating these volcanic edifices differ from chain to chain, and their material can be generated at a variety of depths.
The ocean floor is littered with hundreds of thousands of mostly extinct volcanoes. The origin of at least some of these seamounts seems to rest with mantle plumes.
The influence of aerosols on climate is one of the greatest uncertainties in projections of future climate. A long-term observational study suggests that aerosols increase the frequency of rainfall events in convective clouds.
Inland waters are increasingly recognized as important to the global carbon cycle. Detailed measurements in the United States suggest that significant amounts of carbon dioxide are released from streams and rivers, particularly the smaller ones.
The mechanisms for forming the abundant volcanic islands on ocean floors are debated. The geochemical signature of volcanic rocks from the northeast Indian Ocean suggests that seamounts there formed from melting recycled ancient continental rocks.
The ancient Central Asian Orogenic Belt formed during a period of extensive continental crust formation. Comparison with modern continent-building systems suggests that the processes that operate today were already active at that time.
East Asian summer monsoon precipitation varied on millennial timescales during the last glacial period. Sediment records and climate modelling suggest that the winter monsoon was also affected by millenial scale variability, and that the abrupt changes were driven by changes in the strength of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.
The origin of the Christmas Island Seamount Province in the northeast Indian Ocean is enigmatic. Radiometric dating and isotopic analysis of volcanic rocks from the seamounts imply that they were derived from the recycling of continental lithosphere and brought to the surface at a mid-ocean ridge.
Volcanoes formed above the Hawaiian mantle plume exhibit a striking contrast in the geochemical characteristics of the lavas erupted at the northern Kea compared with the southern Loa volcanoes. Isotopic data show that these trends have persisted for more than 5 million years and may mirror compositional heterogeneities in the deep mantle.
Wetlands cover more than 6% of the global ice-free land area, and represent an important arsenic sink. Laboratory experiments suggest that natural organic matter plays an active role in the immobilization of arsenic in anoxic wetlands.
