Volume 14 Issue 7, July 2021

Working spaces and cultures in the geosciences need to change in order to attract, safeguard and retain people with disabilities.

Globally, land- and fire-management policies have counterproductively caused cascading ecosystem changes that exacerbate, rather than mitigate, wildfires. Given rapidly changing climate and land-use conditions that amplify wildfire risk, a policy shift to adaptive management of fire regimes is urgently needed.

Reforestation of agricultural lands in Europe increases local and downwind summer rainfall, according to a new analysis of rain-gauge measurements from across the continent. Realistic levels of tree planting could therefore mitigate future droughts expected with climate change.

The combined effects of decades-long warming and particularly vigorous injections of atmospheric heat from lower latitudes were the likely culprits for sharp declines in sea-ice extent around Antarctica starting in 2016.

Forestation over Europe triggers substantial local and downwind precipitation changes, according to results from an observation-based continental-scale statistical model.

Fire exacerbates forest degradation in the forest edge zones in Africa, increasing the carbon deficit caused by forest fragmentation, according to analyses of high-resolution satellite data on forest cover and biomass.

During a period of drought, an intact tropical peatland in Indonesia released half the amount of greenhouse gases as was released from a degraded site, according to a direct comparison of eddy covariance measurements at a pair of peatland sites in Sumatra.

Wind stress controls annual variations in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation at mid-latitudes, while surface buoyancy also matters at subpolar latitudes, according to an attribution analysis using a numerical model constrained by observational array data.

Meltwaters from the southwestern margin of the Greenland Ice Sheet contain exceptionally high concentrations of mercury, exporting up to more than 200 kmol of dissolved mercury every year, suggest mercury measurements from three glacial catchments.

Spatially varying uplift rates strongly influence the concavity of river profiles worldwide, with smaller contributions from hydrological factors, according to a comparison of river profile, tectonic and climatic datasets.

Sedimentary carbon is subducted to, and returned from, mantle depths in less than 27 million years, according strontium isotope analysis and geochronology of lavas from southern Afghanistan.

Asymmetric rotation of faults in the Eastern California Shear Zone may result from simple shear, according to an analysis of deformation in the area of the 2019 Ridgecrest earthquake sequence in combination with regional geological data.

Earthquakes in the lower crust may be facilitated by overpressure of frictional melts, according to pressure estimates from an analysis of quartz inclusions in garnets from pseudotachylytes in the Bergen Arcs.

Transformation kinetics of olivine may be a cause of deep-focus earthquakes even in wet slabs, according to water-partitioning experiments, which show that olivine remains relatively dry even under wet subducting slab conditions.

The inner core underwent preferential equatorial growth and translation after nucleation ~0.5–1.5 billion years ago, according to an analysis of its seismic anisotropy and self-consistent geodynamic simulations.