Reviews & Analysis

Continental stability may be linked to a shallow, buoyant mantle layer, and the deepest craton roots can be destabilized and removed by mantle plumes.

Changes in Northern Hemisphere atmospheric temperature, pressure patterns and winds emerge as a consistent response to Arctic sea-ice loss in six coupled climate models.

Earth experienced a lull in magmatic and tectonic activity about 2.3 billion years ago, followed by a flare-up of magmatism, according to a compilation of existing geologic data. These events might mark the transition to the supercontinent cycle.

Land management with the aim of reducing incoming solar radiation could help with regional-scale climate adaptation and mitigation as well as ecosystem services, and avoids several shortcomings of global geoengineering.

Experimental data reveal that Earth’s mantle melts more readily than previously thought, and may have remained mushy until two to three billion years ago.

The first of two stepwise increases in atmospheric oxygen occurred at the end of the Archaean eon. Analyses of sulfur and iron isotopes in pyrite reveal a near-shore environment that hosted locally oxygenated conditions in the Mesoarchaean era.

Advances in high-precision isotopic analysis have provided key constraints on the origin and early evolution of the Earth and Moon. Measurements of the isotopes of tungsten provide the most stringent constraints on this history.

The slowdown in surface warming in the early twenty-first century has been traced to strengthening of the Pacific trade winds. The search for the causes identifies a planetary-scale see-saw of atmosphere and ocean between the Atlantic and Pacific basins.

The composition of the oceans is altered by hydrothermal circulation. These chemical factories sustain microbial life, which in turn alters the chemistry of the fluids that enter the ocean. A decade of research details this complex interchange.

The elemental ratios of marine phytoplankton and organic matter vary widely across ocean biomes, according to a catalogue of biogeochemical data, suggesting that climate change may have complex effects on the ocean’s elemental cycles.

Tectonic controls on atmospheric oxygenation are frequently invoked — but whether geochemical records support these ties is an unsettled question.

A compilation of hundreds of palaeoclimate records highlighted the extent of regional variability during the past 2,000 years, and therein the uniqueness of recent warming.