News & Comment

Tim Bartholomaus and Suzanne and Bob Anderson hauled 25 kilograms of equipment over 25 kilometres in 25 hours to get a handle on glacier flow — without breaking the bank.

Using sophisticated multibeam imaging equipment aboard a French Navy vessel, Marc Fournier and colleagues mapped the structure of the enigmatic Owen fracture zone underneath the Arabian Sea.

Crumpling of the crust above a sinking dense mantle layer, which is underneath central Europe, triggered the formation of the eastern Alps and the Carpathian mountains, and its surroundings were stretched to form the Pannonian Basin.

In each of the three main ocean basins, dense water from around Antarctica circulates in the bottom layers, and in the Atlantic ocean, an upper circulation cell that is driven from the north caps the bottom loop.

The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change has convinced the public that climate change is real. To tackle it, the panel needs complementary climate services that provide continuous climate information for all regions and the globe.

Thanks to global carbon-cycle feedbacks, the Earth may have escaped global glaciation during the Neoproterozoic era, enabling photosynthesis to continue.

Forests in northern Asia had fewer trees at the peak of the last Ice Age compared with their modern counterparts.

The shift of autumnal colouring of leaves to later in the year is due to high ambient atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and is independent of temperature.

Although the climate on Venus is very different from that on Earth, many features of the two planets' atmospheric circulations and their lightning regimes are more similar than we thought.

The peak flow of glacier lake outburst floods — and consequently their potential for devastation — depends on air temperature.

Both the continued bulldozing by India and the collapse of the thicker parts of the Eurasian plate towards the circum-Asiatic oceanic plates contribute to the ongoing deformation of the Asian continental interior.

The iron-rich dust entering the subtropical northeast Atlantic Ocean comes from the Anti-Atlas Mountain belt in Morocco.

Diamond-bearing rocks from the Dharwar Craton in India were probably sourced from deeper parts of the Earth's mantle than previously thought.

Shrub encroachment into the Arctic tundra could cause early snowmelts and warmer springtime temperatures.

Melting glaciers in Greenland cause uplift of the underlying crust.

By slowing down the rate of river incision, large landslides govern a river's response to climatic or tectonic changes and significantly influence landscape evolution.

Amazonian fires and the associated emissions of smoke particles to the atmosphere have been much lower in 2006 than was expected from previous years, thanks to a successful international agreement.