News & Comment

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.

Sample return missions to asteroids provide critical pristine materials lacking from meteorite collections.

Recording 4.3 billion years of Earth’s history, Jesse Reimink explores the many ways that zircon allows geologists to keep track of the past.

From pressure indicator to paint brightener, Alicia Cruz-Uribe examines the many uses of rutile.

Climate change together with the recent onset of El Niño this year has led to widespread heatwaves. As these events become increasingly commonplace, cities around the world urgently need to build resilience to heat.

Tackling plastic pollution not only requires improved understanding of environmental dynamics of plastics, but also needs turning scientific insights into actions.

Admission to doctoral study is a crucial step in the academic pipeline, but discriminatory procedures can disproportionately impact students from ethnic minority backgrounds. We show how these policies contribute to inequity in the geosciences and propose strategies for change.

One journal’s reject may be another journal’s gem. Our editors aim to direct rejected manuscripts towards a more suitable destination journal in our transfer network.

More than just a gemstone, Jon Pownall and Kathryn Cutts explore the history and future directions of garnet as a recorder of pressure, temperature, and time.

Extreme rainfall events are often linked to climate change based on simple thermodynamic arguments, but complex dynamic processes also play a role. Scientists have a responsibility to ensure they provide accurate information to the media and public.

Research on the energy transition needs to involve all communities and requires breaking the paradigm of traditional industry-funded research, argues Jef Caers from his personal story.

Temporarily overshooting climate targets is a distinct possibility given our current emissions trajectory. It is crucial that we understand which of the associated impacts are reversible, and to what extent.

Inspired by the mineralogist Shulamit Gross’s studies of one of the world’s unique mineral factories, Michael Anenburg discusses the pyrometamorphic minerals formed by fire in the Dead Sea desert.

Nature Geoscience spoke with Dr Shlomit Sharoni, an ocean biogeochemist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dr Kelly Andersen, a tropical ecologist at Nanyang Technological University about the interplay between phosphorous cycling and the ecosystems they study.

From Dutch painters to ocean sediments, Caroline Slomp discusses the role vivianite plays in the distribution of phosphorus, an essential nutrient for life.

Ecosystems have long been shaped by phosphorus limitation. We need to better understand how natural and human-caused shifts in the phosphorus cycle disrupt the Earth system.

There is much science to extract from mission data if China’s growing planetary science community is supported.

Night-time chemistry has an important contribution to air pollution over China and India. Understanding the chemical evolution of pollution in the atmosphere at night is needed for effective solutions to improve air quality.