https://phys.org/earth-news/earth-sciences/ en-us The latest news on earth sciences and the environment About 20,000 years ago, an enormous, floating ice shelf more than a mile (1.6 kilometers) thick helped lock in three of the largest ice sheets in northern Canada and Greenland. When that ice shelf disappeared, it helped unlock part of these ice sheets, which contributed to hundreds of feet of sea level rise, establishing modern coastlines as we know them. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-massive-ice-shelf-buttressed-age.html Earth Sciences Wed, 21 Oct 2026 17:20:08 EDT news711807181 Salt marsh sediment and vegetation can remain largely intact even during extreme storm surges. This was demonstrated in a large-scale experiment in which researchers transported sections of salt marsh to an experimental facility capable of producing the world's largest artificial waves. The results show how salt marshes can contribute to natural coastal protection, both in the Netherlands and beyond. The results were published in the journals Nature and Communications Sustainability. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-salt-marshes-powerful-allies-climate.html Earth Sciences Wed, 21 Oct 2026 16:40:01 EDT news711807002 Researchers at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) have reconstructed approximately 16,000 years of summer temperature changes from sediments collected at Lake Prokoško in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The findings show how the Western Balkans responded to rapid climate changes at the end of the last glacial period, how warmer and cooler phases unfolded during the Holocene, and how the impact of human land use became increasingly pronounced. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-reconstructing-years-summer-temperature-western.html Earth Sciences Wed, 21 Oct 2026 16:30:02 EDT news711818342 Climate change can look very different at the scale of a forest, field or hillside. A new review shows how changes in vegetation and atmospheric conditions can cause local microclimates to warm at very different rates from the regional climate—and why this matters for understanding how biodiversity will respond to climate change. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-life-earth-climate.html Earth Sciences Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:20:23 EDT news711798782 The site of a former U.S. military base in Greenland was ice-free at a time when summers were a few degrees warmer than today, according to a new University at Buffalo–led study of ancient sediment recovered from beneath the site in the 1960s. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-forgotten-samples-greenland-cold-war.html Earth Sciences Tue, 20 Oct 2026 19:40:01 EDT news711727681 The polar vortex, a swirling mass of cold air encircling the North Pole, is sometimes disrupted by sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) events, unleashing waves of frigid air that penetrate farther south than usual. Temperatures across North America and Europe drop precipitously when this happens, but such events remain hard to predict, meaning we can't easily warn people when SSW is imminent. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-machine-reveals-potential-polar-vortex.html Earth Sciences Tue, 20 Oct 2026 17:40:16 EDT news711721201 For scientists studying the ocean, finding the right data can sometimes be as challenging as figuring out what to do with it. Want to know seafloor depth, the location of underwater mountains or sea surface temperatures? The information exists, but it can take considerable time and computer coding to pull it together from different sources and get it into the proper format. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-seafloor-depths-fishing-free-software.html Earth Sciences Tue, 20 Oct 2026 16:40:12 EDT news711719279 Fishers in the Northeast began noticing an unusual shift in the summer of 2023. Some familiar catches, including shortfin and longfin squid, declined, while cold-water species such as mackerel bounced back from years of decline. A new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans finds that a pulse of cold, fresh water brought unusually cold conditions to the region, disrupting fisheries from New England to the Mid-Atlantic. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-cold-pulse-northwest-atlantic-reshaped.html Earth Sciences Tue, 20 Oct 2026 15:40:15 EDT news711718141 Biochar can store carbon in the soil and reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—yet we still know too little about how long the biochar will persist. Now, researchers from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences have found a new way to measure this, using wood from the 1960s that was affected by nuclear weapons testing. The paper is published in the journal Radiocarbon. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-carbon-wood-stability-biochar-soil.html Earth Sciences Tue, 20 Oct 2026 13:20:30 EDT news711713461 Can protecting elephants and whales help mitigate climate change? https://phys.org/news/2026-10-large-animals-mitigate-climate-complicated.html Earth Sciences Tue, 20 Oct 2026 11:40:09 EDT news711708181 New research from the University of Aberdeen has revealed that periods of global warming can trigger long-lasting increases in wildfire activity, with ecosystems taking far longer to recover than previously thought. The study, recently published in Scientific Reports, provides the first detailed evidence of how wildfires responded to a major natural warming event around 65 million years ago, the Danian hyperthermal. This work offers important insights into the risks facing today's world as climate change drives more frequent and severe fires. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-ancient-wildfire-world.html Earth Sciences Tue, 20 Oct 2026 11:20:10 EDT news711708061 Rivers provide water for everything from growing crops and running factories to the taps in our homes, but droughts can leave them struggling to meet all these demands. A new study, published in Water Resources Research, suggests that changing how water is shared could help make limited supplies go further. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-river-reveals-ease-drought-unequal.html Earth Sciences Tue, 20 Oct 2026 09:00:16 EDT news711638259 A new study, led by IIASA researchers and coauthored by UNEP colleagues, finds that if governments fully implement their methane reduction plans, they could reduce global emissions by 11% between 2020 and 2030. This would reverse the current trend of increasing methane emissions, but would not be sufficient to achieve the goal of the Global Methane Pledge. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-fully-methane-reverse-emissions-growth.html Earth Sciences Mon, 19 Oct 2026 16:40:01 EDT news711643141 When Earth formed billions of years ago, its metallic core was wrapped in a global ocean of molten rock, which eventually cooled and crystallized to form the mantle. Today, when deep-rooted mantle plumes rise toward the surface and produce volcanic eruptions, the resulting lava can contain hydrogen from deep inside the planet. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-earth-core-leaking-hydrogen-billions.html Earth Sciences Mon, 19 Oct 2026 13:30:01 EDT news711633802 A new study led by researchers at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) reveals that glaciers worldwide could lose ice faster than previously projected. Published in Nature Communications, the research shows that accounting for daily weather variability leads to more realistic simulations of glacier melt and results in greater projected ice loss by the end of the century. The findings highlight the importance of short-lived weather events, such as the exceptional heat waves and extreme melt seasons recently observed in several glacierized regions around the globe. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-factoring-daily-weather-extremes-glacier.html Earth Sciences Mon, 19 Oct 2026 05:00:01 EDT news711375361 The world's oceans help slow climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere, but how much they take up can vary throughout the year. New research, published in Geophysical Research Letters, suggests these seasonal patterns are changing across the Indian Ocean, potentially affecting how it helps to regulate Earth's climate. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-indian-ocean-stronger-climate-buffer.html Earth Sciences Sun, 18 Oct 2026 11:20:01 EDT news711033430 When a massive environmental disaster strikes, do societies simply collapse and disappear? Or do people find a way to adapt, rebuild and recover? https://phys.org/news/2026-10-ancient-volcanic-eruption-resilience-today.html Earth Sciences Sat, 17 Oct 2026 13:00:05 EDT news711298328 Most natural gas leakage in Indianapolis likely originates from homes and other buildings, not exterior pipelines and large-scale distribution infrastructure that deliver the fossil fuel, according to Penn State researchers who assessed nearly a decade of data. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-natural-gas-midwest-city-leaks.html Earth Sciences Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:30:02 EDT news711377822 Most studies of how clouds are responding to climate change focus on clouds over the oceans, rather than over mountains. Those that do focus on mountain clouds tend to explore cloud microphysics rather than long-term trends in cloud phase. But understanding cloud behavior over regions such as the Tibetan Plateau, which supplies water to hundreds of millions of people, is critical—especially as diminishing snowpack and altered precipitation patterns threaten this critical water source. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-supercooled-clouds-highest-mountains-differently.html Earth Sciences Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:10:01 EDT news711376981 The writer Malcolm Gladwell popularized the term "tipping points" to refer to the moment when a trend or social behavior crosses a threshold and rapidly spreads everywhere. In physics, tipping points occur when systems—say, Earth's climate—reach an unstable point and topple over into a sea of change that is sometimes irreversible. Examples include global warming or the melting of polar ice caps. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-ai-climate-simulation.html Earth Sciences Fri, 16 Oct 2026 13:40:01 EDT news711366961 A phenomenon rarer than a solar eclipse and more powerful than any single storm system is unfolding this fall, and NASA is tracking it closely. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-nasa-satellites-historic-el-nio.html Earth Sciences Fri, 16 Oct 2026 12:44:08 EDT news711373385 Future Arctic winter sea ice is likely to shrink by around 1 million square kilometers (386,000 square miles) more than previously thought, after researchers used clues from a warm period 6,000 years ago to improve the reliability of climate models. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-winter-sea-ice-loss-underestimated.html Earth Sciences Fri, 16 Oct 2026 05:00:04 EDT news711273481 Expanded excavations at White Sands National Park in New Mexico have provided researchers an opportunity to refine the age of the oldest human footprints in North America and establish a deeper understanding of the landscape and environmental conditions at the time humans were present there. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-white-sands-footprints-humans-experienced.html Earth Sciences Thu, 15 Oct 2026 19:20:08 EDT news711297661 Humanity's ongoing disruption of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations, temperatures, and global nutrient cycles is starving the oceans of oxygen. Although we can measure ongoing changes to ocean circulation and marine life, we still don't know how far the oxygen loss and the damage to ocean ecosystems could go. One way to foresee the oceans' future is to look back at how our seas and their inhabitants responded to higher CO₂ levels and warmer climates in the past. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-deep-ocean-oxygen-microscopic-magnetic.html Earth Sciences Thu, 15 Oct 2026 17:40:06 EDT news711294001 When a marine heat wave strikes, scientists often turn to satellites to see how the ocean is responding. From space, changes in ocean color can reveal shifts in phytoplankton, microscopic organisms that form the foundation of marine food webs and play a crucial role in the global carbon cycle. But satellites have a fundamental limitation: they can only see the ocean's surface. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-north-sea-fueled-underwater-plankton.html Earth Sciences Thu, 15 Oct 2026 16:00:07 EDT news711292632 The University of Bristol–led study, published in Nature Communications, could help millions of people living in earthquake-prone countries make better-informed decisions about seismic risk, particularly during ongoing periods of increased earthquake activity. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-california-earthquakes-validate-day-seismic.html Earth Sciences Thu, 15 Oct 2026 14:40:01 EDT news711292441 A new study led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) provides the most comprehensive observational analysis yet of the towering ice cliffs that fringe Earth's ice sheets, giving scientists new evidence to evaluate a long-debated process that could influence future sea level rise. Improving these projections is increasingly important as rising seas threaten coastal communities and infrastructure worldwide. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-global-ice-cliff-survey-disputed.html Earth Sciences Thu, 15 Oct 2026 14:00:20 EDT news711201735 A new study examining how tropical cyclone activity near Hawai'i could change in a warmer future finds a shift toward stronger storms, even though substantial uncertainty remains about whether the total number of storms near the islands will increase. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-warmer-climate-reshape-hurricane-relationship.html Earth Sciences Wed, 14 Oct 2026 17:20:17 EDT news711207661 The western U.S. is facing parallel and escalating hazards in the form of ongoing drought and increasingly frequent wildfires. Although the region's ecosystems have evolved with wildfires, the intensity and frequency of blazes where people live and recreate remain a persistent challenge for communities. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-wide-scale-cropland-loss-consequences.html Earth Sciences Wed, 14 Oct 2026 16:40:02 EDT news711206386 Why is there life on Earth? It's one of the oldest questions humans have asked, and as far as we know, our planet is the only one that holds the answer. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-earth-mantle-oxygen-billion-years.html Earth Sciences Wed, 14 Oct 2026 15:20:01 EDT news711197461