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Humans have altered their environment ever since they first appeared. Updates on three frameworks of thinking about the scale of twenty-first-century human influence on the Earth are invigorating the global change debate.
The 2011 Tohoku-oki earthquake released stress within a subduction zone. Analysis of seismic data shows that stresses returned to pre-quake levels within a few years, implying that large quakes could occur more often than previously thought.
The Witwatersrand Basin in South Africa contains extraordinary amounts of gold. Thermodynamic calculations suggest that the gold may have accumulated there in response to a perfect storm of conditions available only during the Archaean.
Boreal forest fires tend to be more intense and lethal in North America than Eurasia. Differences in tree species composition explain these differences in fire regime, and lead to contrasting feedbacks to climate.
The Witwatersrand gold deposit is the largest in the world. Thermodynamic calculations show that such rich accumulations of gold could be linked to abundant volcanism, primitive life and the oxygen-free atmosphere of the Archaean.
Boreal forest wildfires in North America are more intense and destructive than in Eurasia. Differences in species-level adaptations to fire are primary drivers of these differences in fire regimes.
The Sahara was more humid and habitable thousands of years ago. Reconstructions of North African hydroclimate show that the onset of aridity started in the north, with the monsoon rains weakening progressively later at lower latitudes.
Holocene temperature trends in the Arctic are unclear. An isotope record from ice wedges in Siberia suggests that winters have warmed since the mid-Holocene, whereas summer temperatures have cooled.
The spatial pattern of climate change is uncertain. Analyses of a simple model suggest that uncertainty in tropical feedbacks induces a global response, but the impact of uncertainty in polar feedbacks tends to be limited to the region.
During the early to mid-Holocene, Africa was more humid than today. Precipitation reconstructions from across Africa suggest that the termination of humidity was spatially variable, moving towards progressively lower latitudes.
Carbon dioxide emissions from lakes contribute to the continental carbon balance. Water chemistry analyses of reservoirs in Spain suggest that carbonate weathering causes CO2 supersaturation in lakes above a threshold alkalinity.
Glaciers and polar ice sheets store and release a small but important pool of organic carbon. The changing climate is making glaciers an increasingly important driver of carbon dynamics in aquatic ecosystems.
Earth’s nitrogen isotopic composition has been linked to an unknown primordial reservoir. Macroscopic analyses of mineral inclusions in meteorites suggest that ices in the Sun’s protoplanetary disk could be the source of Earth’s nitrogen.
The atmospheric circulation controls the regional expression of global climate change. An analysis of aquaplanet climate simulations suggests that the radiative effects of clouds and water vapour are key to the circulation response to global warming.
The Tibetan Plateau is extending. Numerical simulations suggest that regional-scale extension is caused by gravitational collapse of the plateau, whereas rapid extension in the south is caused by underthrusting of the Indian slab.
Earth’s initial oxygenation took several hundred million years. Experiments and geochemical modelling suggest that early photosynthetic marine microbes may have been repeatedly stressed by Fe(II) delivered by submarine volcanism.
Seismic tremors can be used to distinguish plate boundaries. Analysis of tremors occurring deep beneath the San Andreas Fault may identify the boundary between the North American Plate and the preserved remnant of a subducted slab.