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Fire exacerbates forest degradation in the forest edge zones in Africa, increasing the carbon deficit caused by forest fragmentation, according to analyses of high-resolution satellite data on forest cover and biomass.
During a period of drought, an intact tropical peatland in Indonesia released half the amount of greenhouse gases as was released from a degraded site, according to a direct comparison of eddy covariance measurements at a pair of peatland sites in Sumatra.
Forestation over Europe triggers substantial local and downwind precipitation changes, according to results from an observation-based continental-scale statistical model.
Sedimentary carbon is subducted to, and returned from, mantle depths in less than 27 million years, according strontium isotope analysis and geochronology of lavas from southern Afghanistan.
Frequent and dispersed small earthquakes may contribute substantially to uplift of subduction margins, according to an analysis of such seismicity in the Peru–Chile and Japan margins.
Iceberg gouging of continental slopes can initiate submarine landslides, potentially far from the iceberg source region, according to observations and geotechnical analysis of an event in a Baffin Island fjord.
Indo-African mantle upwellings are arranged in a tree-like structure, which might reflect linear staggered detachment of proto-plumes from the lowermost mantle, according to seismic tomographic imaging.
Earthquakes in the lower crust may be facilitated by overpressure of frictional melts, according to pressure estimates from an analysis of quartz inclusions in garnets from pseudotachylytes in the Bergen Arcs.
Asymmetric rotation of faults in the Eastern California Shear Zone may result from simple shear, according to an analysis of deformation in the area of the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence in combination with regional geological data.
The inner core underwent preferential equatorial growth and translation after nucleation ~0.5–1.5 billion years ago, according to an analysis of its seismic anisotropy and self-consistent geodynamic simulations.
Wind stress controls annual variations in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation at mid-latitudes, while surface buoyancy also matters at subpolar latitudes, according to an attribution analysis using a numerical model constrained by observational array data.
Transformation kinetics of olivine may be a cause of deep-focus earthquakes even in wet slabs, according to water-partitioning experiments, which show that olivine remains relatively dry even under wet subducting slab conditions.
Meltwaters from the southwestern margin of the Greenland Ice Sheet contain exceptionally high concentrations of mercury, exporting up to more than 200 kmol of dissolved mercury every year, suggest mercury measurements from three glacial catchments.
Viscous deformation is a potentially prevalent mechanism of fault lubrication during earthquakes, according to laboratory experiments that simulate seismic faulting of various rock-forming minerals.
Globally, reservoirs are net emitters of carbon when drawdown areas are taken into account, according to an analysis of satellite observations of reservoir surface area.
New particles can form rapidly in Antarctica through the reactions of sulfuric acid and amines, suggest ship and station measurements around the Antarctic Peninsula.