Volume 13 Issue 2, February 2020

The biomass of some of the smallest ocean organisms may be stable or even increase in a warming world, suggests a data analysis based on machine-learning techniques.

Direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions from mining for green technologies need to be accurately and transparently accounted for, as highlighted by a case study of Chilean copper mining.

A discrete block of thick ancient crust revealed by a crustal reconstruction suggests a complex geologic history for the southern highlands of Mars.

Changes in the atmospheric absorption of shortwave radiation, probably through cloud and aerosol effects, is the main reason for the dimming and brightening over China and Europe in past decades, according to co-located surface and space observations.

Picophytoplankton are partitioned into niches, globally, and their abundance may increase as ocean temperatures rise, suggest analyses of a global abundance dataset with a neural-network-based niche model.

Compensation of the effects of salt and temperature changes on water density in the Labrador Sea can explain the minimal response of the Atlantic overturning circulation to convection, according to analyses of observations and reanalysis data.

Thinning rates of Pine Island Glacier, Antarctica’s largest glacier, are now highest in slowly flowing regions, suggesting that future changes in the grounding line may be more modest than thought, according to high-resolution satellite data.

A high-resolution update of Antarctic bed topography using mass conservation reveals broad stabilizing ridges for glaciers flowing across the Transantarctic Mountains, and stabilizing slopes beneath Moscow University, Totten and Lambert glacier system.

Analyses of inventory models under two climate change projection scenarios suggest that carbon emissions from abrupt thaw of permafrost through ground collapse, erosion and landslides could contribute significantly to the overall permafrost carbon balance.

Methane release rate from Arctic Ocean sediments in winter is significantly lower than in summer, according to surveys of cold-seep activity along the shelf break offshore Svalbard.

Subsurface iron-oxidizing bacteria are sustained by intermittent oxygen delivery through rock fracture networks, according to biological and geochemical analyses of borehole fluids combined with a fluid mixing model.

Dunes in the world’s big rivers are dominated by lee-side slopes with angles of less than 10°, according to a bedform analysis of high-resolution bathymetric datasets.

The chemical diversity of Earth’s early continental building blocks can be explained by differentiation of a single melt, without complex geodynamic settings, according to petrological and geochemical analysis of samples from South Africa.

In relatively cold subducted slabs, olivine may transform to finer-grained, weaker ringwoodite than in warm slabs, according to deformation experiments under conditions analogous to those in the mantle transition zone and scaling analysis.