Volume 14 Issue 12, December 2021

Colonial relationships with Indigenous land and knowledge in geoscience disciplines must be acknowledged to address harm and change how science is done, argues Max Liboiron.

Leveraging advances in artificial intelligence could revolutionize the Earth and environmental sciences. We must ensure that our research funding and training choices give the next generation of geoscientists the capacity to realize this potential.

Storm surge barriers can protect against coastal flooding. Observations from the Venice Lagoon in Italy show that the operation of these types of barriers must be carefully tuned to avoid inhibiting sedimentation and compromising marsh resilience to sea-level rise.

Climate change mitigation strategies based on biochar generation—and its application to agricultural soils—can effectively sequester carbon, although biogeochemical and economic trade-offs must be considered.

Observations from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Ionospheric Connection Explorer confirm the link between thermospheric winds and ionospheric plasma variability.

Ice-shelf surface rivers can form estuaries that promote fracturing and enhance calving, according to observations from the Petermann and Ryder ice shelves in Greenland.

Sediment supply to the Venice Lagoon is substantially reduced by flood barriers inhibiting storm-related sediment reworking and transport, according to observations through multiple storm events before and after barrier installation.

Shifts in the seasonal timing of land surface warming set the severity of storm systems in the southern Great Plains since the last glacial, according to a hydroclimate proxy record from Texas and palaeoclimate modelling.

Interglacial temperature coupling between East Antarctica and the Southern Ocean was set by the position of moisture source regions, according to an 800,000-year-long deuterium-excess ice-core record from East Antarctica.

Increased volcanism-related phosphorus delivery to the Late Ordovician ocean helps explain widespread cooling and eutrophication-driven extinctions, as shown by a biogeochemical model incorporating volcanic ash phosphorus and carbon isotope records.

Heat stored in the deep ocean due to salinity stratification contributed to rapid Antarctic warming during middle and late Pleistocene glacial terminations, according to coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation model simulations.

The influence of meltwater pulse events on Asian monsoon systems varied in line with the degree of AMOC weakening, according to a multi-proxy analysis of speleothems from China covering the penultimate glacial termination.

Long-period seismicity at volcanoes may be generated by deformation of weak material in the subsurface, not solely by fluid movement, according to rock deformation experiments.

The mantle transition zone is poorly, mechanically mixed, and acts to impede mantle flow, according to seismic observations integrated with detailed mineral-physics models.