Volume 11 Issue 10, October 2018

Droughts lead to enhanced water-use efficiency and reduced carbon uptake by plants. Global analyses of atmospheric CO₂ monitoring data suggest that the scale of the trade-off between water and carbon extends to a biome level.

Ice buried deep within the ice sheet on Antarctica preserves clues to past climatic change dating back more than a million years. A recent workshop discussed the challenges — and hopes — of drilling to these buried treasures.

The abundance of microorganisms in the continental subsurface may have been overestimated, according to a review compilation of data from subsurface localities around the globe.

Species richness in mountain environments is linked to mountain-building and climatic processes, an integration of geological, climatic, and biological datasets reveals.

Saturn’s moon Titan may have an active dust cycle in equatorial regions driven by storm winds, Cassini observations consistent with dust suspension in Titan’s atmosphere suggest.

Episodic melting of some Antarctic ice shelves is linked to ocean temperature cycles, according to new observations collected over 17 years near the Dotson Ice Shelf.

Accelerated storage of terrestrial carbon during the slow warming period (1998–2012) can be predominantly attributed to lower land-use emissions due to decreased tropical forest loss and increased afforestation in the northern temperate regions.

Droughts can lead to large-scale decline in net CO₂ uptake and increased water-use efficiency by plants, according to global analyses of atmospheric carbon isotope data from 2001 to 2011. This suggests that current climate models may underestimate carbon–drought feedbacks.

Enhanced overturning in the Pacific Ocean flushed carbon from the abyssal ocean to the atmosphere during the last deglaciation, according to authigenic neodymium isotope data.

The amount of nitrate in the surface of the Southern Ocean has increased during the Holocene, weakening the biological pump and potentially contributing to the rise in atmospheric CO₂ concentrations.

A Cenozoic reconstruction of the δ³⁴S of marine sulfate suggests a shift in the locus of pyrite burial from shallow seas to the open ocean during the early Eocene.

Mean annual temperatures in the mid-latitudes were between 23 and 29 °C during the early Palaeogene, a peat-based temperature record suggests.

Large earthquakes export significant carbon from mountain forests over millennia, according to analyses of sediments mobilized by earthquake-triggered landslides in New Zealand.

A pair of closely spaced intraplate earthquakes in Japan can be explained by postseismic deformation associated with the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake.

The onset of seafloor spreading in the northern South China Sea was marked by the rapid onset of magmatism and mantle upwelling, suggests an analysis of International Ocean Discovery Program core material.

Arc volcanism emits higher metal fluxes to Earth’s atmosphere than hotspot volcanism. The systems’ unique gas compositions are controlled by magmatic water content and redox state, as shown by a compilation of volcanic gas and aerosol metal data.

Earth’s oldest known felsic rocks formed by partial melting at low pressures and high temperatures caused by impact melting of mafic Hadean crust, according to phase equilibria and trace element modelling.