Volume 12 Issue 1, January 2019

Mangrove canopy heights vary around the world in response to rain, storms and human activities, suggests a global analysis of mangrove canopy height. How tall the trees are matters for estimating global mangrove carbon storage.

Seismic data during the time interval between larger earthquakes could contain information about fault displacements and potential for future failure, suggest analyses of data from laboratory and real-world slow-slip earthquakes using machine-learning techniques.

Stressors such as large-scale damming, hydrological change, pollution, the introduction of non-native species and sediment mining are challenging the integrity and future of large rivers, according to a synthesis of the literature on the 32 biggest rivers.

Changes in glacier speed in High Mountain Asia are closely linked to mass balance through gravitational driving stress, and largely insensitive to basal conditions, according to satellite-derived ice-flow observations.

Internal low-frequency variability in the Arctic atmosphere can explain about half the summer sea ice decline over the past decades, according to an analysis of large ensembles of fully coupled climate model simulations.

Glacial meltwater from the Greenland Ice Sheet causes buoyancy-driven upwelling of nutrient-rich, subtropical waters from depth to the continental shelf. This nutrient transport may exceed the direct ice sheet inputs, according to geochemical analyses of transect samples from Sermilik Fjord.

Mangrove canopy height varies strongly around the globe in response to climatic factors, according to a global analysis of remote sensing and field data.

Belowground carbon inputs form stable soil carbon more efficiently through microbial formation than carbon addition aboveground, according to soil microcosm experiments that quantitatively compare soil carbon formation efficiencies from different mechanistic pathways.

Delivery of fossil carbon to the oceans strongly increased about 15 kyr after the onset of the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum as a result of oxidation of sedimentary carbon, suggests an analysis of geochemical measurements with a biomarker mixing model.

Volcanism across the North Atlantic region 62 million years ago is consistent with an Iceland plume source, despite the absence of a classic hotspot track, suggest tomographic images and geodynamic models.

Both fast and slow earthquakes are preceded by micro-failure events that radiate energy. According to machine learning, these events can foretell catastrophic failure in laboratory experiment earthquakes.

Continuous seismic signal, filtered out by machine-learning methods, could help infer fault displacement in the Cascadia subduction zone.