Earth and environmental sciences articles within Nature

Featured

  • Editorial |

    The integrity of climate research has taken a very public battering in recent months. Scientists must now emphasize the science, while acknowledging that they are in a street fight.

  • Books & Arts |

    In Country Driving, the final book in his China trilogy, Peter Hessler recounts his 11,000-kilometre drive across China to see at first hand the effects of rapid industrialization. The New Yorker journalist explains how mass migration to cities brings out people's resourcefulness, but also how the speed of social and environmental change leads them to seek meaning in their lives.

    • Jane Qiu

  • News & Views |

    Unexpected chlorine chemistry in the lowest part of the atmosphere can affect the cycling of nitrogen oxides and the production of ozone, and reduce the lifetime of the greenhouse gas methane.

    • Roland von Glasow

  • News |

    Attack sparks memories of McCarthy witch-hunt.

    • Jeff Tollefson

  • News |

    Experts debate how much emergency-response planners should rely on tsunami forecasts.

    • Quirin Schiermeier

  • Letter |

    Palaeoclimate data show that 3–5 million years ago in the early Pliocene the equatorial Pacific experienced persistent warm, El Niño conditions. Here a hurricane model and a coupled climate model show a feedback between sea surface temperature and frequent hurricanes that could account for such conditions.

    • Alexey V. Fedorov
    • , Christopher M. Brierley
    •  & Kerry Emanuel

  • News Feature |

    A new generation of sophisticated Earth models is gearing up for its first major test. But added complexity may lead to greater uncertainty about the future climate, finds Olive Heffernan.

    • Olive Heffernan

  • News & Views |

    What was responsible for the unusual climatic conditions that prevailed during the early Pliocene, 5 million to 3 million years ago? Modelling studies point to intense tropical-cyclone activity as a possible answer.

    • Ryan L. Sriver

  • News & Views |

    Redox reactions in widely spatially separated layers of marine sediments are coupled to each other. This suggests that bacteria mediate the flow of electrons between the layers — an idea that would previously have been dismissed.

    • Kenneth H. Nealson

  • News |

    Nanowires growing from bacteria might link up distant chemical reactions in sediments.

    • Katharine Sanderson

  • Letter |

    For the first billion years or so of the Earth's history, there may have been whole-mantle convection, but after this period differentiation of the Earth's mantle has been controlled by solid-state convection. Many trace elements — known as 'incompatible elements' — preferentially partition into low-density melts and are concentrated into the crust, but half of these incompatible elements should be hidden in the Earth's interior. It is now suggested that a by-product of whole-mantle convection is deep and hot melting, resulting in the generation of dense liquids that sank into the lower mantle.

    • Cin-Ty A. Lee
    • , Peter Luffi
    •  & John Hernlund

  • Editorial |

    Exploding the myths surrounding how and why we select our research papers.

  • Editorial |

    Transparency and quality control are essential in the highly uncertain business of assessing the impact of climate change on a regional scale.

  • News Feature |

    Protesters saying "no to CO2" are just one roadblock facing carbon sequestration — a strategy that could help prevent dangerous climate change. Richard Van Noorden investigates.

    • Richard Van Noorden

  • Opinion |

    Roger Bilham, one of the first seismologists to visit Haiti after last month's earthquake, calls for UN enforcement of resistant construction in cities with a history of violent tremors.

    • Roger Bilham

  • News & Views |

    When environmental temperatures rise, plants seek help from their core molecular mechanisms to adapt. The chromatin protein H2A.Z, which regulates gene expression, is one such rescue molecule.

    • Roger B. Deal
    •  & Steven Henikoff

  • Letter |

    Zonal jets are common in nature and are spontaneously generated in turbulent systems. Because the Earth's outer core is believed to be in a turbulent state, it is possible that there is zonal flow in the liquid iron of the outer core. By investigating numerical simulations of the geodynamo with lower viscosities than most previous simulations have been able to use, a convection regime of the outer core is now found that has a dual structure comprising inner, sheet-like radial plumes and an outer, westward cylindrical zonal flow.

    • Takehiro Miyagoshi
    • , Akira Kageyama
    •  & Tetsuya Sato

  • Books & Arts |

    Roger Bilham enjoys a history of a potentially useful field in which spectacular failures can win accolades.

    • Roger Bilham

  • News |

    An expensive recovery plan to save the ivory-billed woodpecker from extinction may come decades too late.

    • Rex Dalton

  • News Feature |

    Eske Willerslev combines Arctic escapades with meticulous lab work in his quest to pull ancient DNA from the ice. Rex Dalton talks to the adventurer about extracting the first ancient human genome.

    • Rex Dalton

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