https://phys.org/earth-news/environment/ en-us The latest news on the environment, environmental issues, earth science and space exploration. Ozone pollution caused by Amazon wildfires is significantly reducing the rainforest's ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, new research reveals. Ground-level ozone is formed when pollutants from sources such as wildfires react in the presence of sunlight. This harms human health and interferes with plants' ability to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-amazon-wildfires-generating-ozone-weakens.html Earth Sciences Wed, 07 Oct 2026 05:00:01 EDT news710524502 A new study shows that the world's oyster reefs are a precious resource that's vastly underestimated and underutilized. The authors set out to calculate the reefs' potential gross ecosystem product (GEP), the ecological counterpart of the gross economic product, and arrived at trillions of dollars in ecosystem goods and services delivered each year to different aspects of planetary health, including human well-being. But for their full potential to be realized, oyster reefs around the world will need to be restored and protected. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-world-oyster-reefs-trillion-planetary.html Earth Sciences Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:01 EDT news710524261 "Is there enough water? What's happening with climate change? How do I operate my hydro plant? In a world of water problems, there are problems that we need a good model to solve," says Colin Gleason, a hydrologist in the Riccio College of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. But the models are only as good as the math that they're based on, and short of measuring every river in the world, there is no way to check this on a global scale. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-newly-satellite-flawed-river.html Earth Sciences Tue, 06 Oct 2026 17:40:01 EDT news710508841 A flash flood can devastate a community for years in a matter of minutes. These disasters account for roughly 85% of floods and cause thousands of deaths annually worldwide, with water levels capable of shooting up 30 feet (9 meters) and receding to normal levels in the span of a single, unpredictable day, according to the National Weather Service. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-ai-techniques-image-creation-river.html Earth Sciences Tue, 06 Oct 2026 17:30:01 EDT news710525041 Many outdoor enthusiasts have spent hours in front of a computer, racing to reserve a campsite, backpacking permit or national park entrance ticket. A recent study suggests that the way these reservation systems are designed can favor higher-income visitors. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-richer-people-edge-national.html Environment Tue, 06 Oct 2026 16:10:01 EDT news710520661 In January 2013, Lake Michigan reached its lowest water level on record. Seven years later, in the summer of 2020, it broke the opposite record with widespread flooding, eroded shorelines and closed lakeside roads. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-ai-great-lakes.html Earth Sciences Tue, 06 Oct 2026 15:10:01 EDT news710515621 El Niño and warming in the tropical Atlantic could help provide advance warning of extreme heat in the Amazon, with some signals appearing as much as seven months earlier, new research has found. Researchers from the ARC Center of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century and the National Institute of Space Research in Brazil studied how major patterns of natural climate variability influence temperature and rainfall extremes across the Amazon Basin. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-el-nio-tropical-atlantic-early.html Earth Sciences Tue, 06 Oct 2026 14:00:06 EDT news710503141 The weather over the North Atlantic affects hundreds of millions of people. From winter storms over Europe to cold spells in eastern North America, many of these impacts are shaped by large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns that recur. Climate scientists refer to these preferred patterns as atmospheric regimes. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-anthropogenic-north-atlantic-atmospheric-circulation.html Earth Sciences Tue, 06 Oct 2026 11:40:06 EDT news710499169 A new study finds that coastal forest loss in North Carolina's Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula began accelerating after 2010 and may still be speeding up. The study also found that North Carolina lost more than 20% of its coastal forest between 1985 and 2021. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-forests-dying-north-carolina-coast.html Environment Mon, 05 Oct 2026 18:00:10 EDT news710438881 Forest soils store an estimated 40% of the world's terrestrial carbon, but estimates suggest that around 15–30% of that soil carbon is lost when a forest is harvested. Tracking such losses can be tricky: wildfires, insects, disease and past forest management can all affect forest soil carbon stores, and tree type, climate and harvesting method can all affect how much carbon is lost. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-term-reveals-forest-floor-soil.html Earth Sciences Mon, 05 Oct 2026 17:20:15 EDT news710429701 When a prairie river carries more water in one year than another, the obvious place to look for an explanation is the sky. A year with more snow and rain should have more water in rivers. That was also how I initially thought about year-to-year changes in river flow. But while studying the Prairie Pothole Region, I learned that this is only part of the story. What happens after water reaches the ground can be just as important as how much falls from the sky. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-great-plains-rivers-wetlands-climate.html Earth Sciences Mon, 05 Oct 2026 14:00:01 EDT news710416727 Water does not flow only through rivers on the ground. Vast quantities of water also move through the atmosphere, carried by winds from oceans and land before eventually falling as precipitation hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away. These persistent pathways of atmospheric moisture are often referred to as "aerial rivers" or "flying rivers." https://phys.org/news/2026-10-flying-rivers-south-america-drainage.html Earth Sciences Mon, 05 Oct 2026 12:00:01 EDT news710416741 A region of Antarctica with some of the greatest potential to reshape the natural world and human society is also the least scientifically understood and explored. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-climate-threat-lurk-beneath-antarctica.html Earth Sciences Sun, 04 Oct 2026 19:00:01 EDT news709985866 As Ted Schuur stepped along the edges of Smith Lake, a bubble surfaced from the muck underfoot. And then another. They're bubbles of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas made from decomposing plants and animals that had once been stuck in Alaska's frigid permafrost. But that frozen ground is thawing because the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the globe. For thousands of years that frozen ground stored dead plants and animals, but the accelerating thaw is allowing them to decay into methane and carbon dioxide. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-gas-frozen-arctic-ground-slowly.html Environment Sun, 04 Oct 2026 12:20:01 EDT news710069106 Cutting greenhouse gas emissions now may limit how much ice Antarctica loses this century and reduce the sea-level rise facing coastal communities, according to findings from a new study. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-today-emissions-choices-limit-antarctic.html Earth Sciences Sat, 03 Oct 2026 16:00:01 EDT news710166079 Atmospheric circulation governs weather and climate, but it also carries angular momentum. When winds shift or mass redistributes, the atmosphere can exchange momentum with the solid Earth, slightly altering the planet's rotation rate. This is not a new concept, but what happens under long-term global warming? https://phys.org/news/2026-10-atmosphere-earth-uncovering-subtle-climate.html Earth Sciences Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:20:01 EDT news710068763 Aerosols are small particles suspended in our atmosphere. They come in many flavors: Wildfire smoke, pollen, desert dust, sea salt lofted by powerful storms, volcanic sulfates and emissions from engines and industrial processes are all examples. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-scientists-tiny-particles-weather-air.html Earth Sciences Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:00:11 EDT news710158021 Earth's poles do not always stay in the same place. For example, a region once near the North Pole can end up near the equator, and an area near the equator can shift up toward the pole. This is known as true polar wander (TPW), and it's when Earth's crust and mantle shift together relative to its spin axis. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-ancient-sea-reveal-earth-poles.html Earth Sciences Fri, 02 Oct 2026 13:20:03 EDT news710153946 The world's oceans behave like a thermometer: As the water warms, it expands and sea levels rise. Geodesy researchers at the University of Bonn are able to measure this and determine how much the oceans are warming. For individual ocean basins, their method has revealed significant deviations from model calculations—in some cases in the double-digit percentage range. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-world-oceans-method-reveals-digit.html Earth Sciences Fri, 02 Oct 2026 11:20:12 EDT news710152981 Anak Krakatau, which means Child of Krakatoa, has been active sporadically since it emerged from the sea at the beginning of the last century in the caldera formed after the 1883 eruption of Mount Krakatoa. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-earthcare-view-volcanic-plume-boosts.html Earth Sciences Thu, 01 Oct 2026 16:20:20 EDT news710075761 New research brings together recent advances in urban hydrology, boundary-layer meteorology, extreme precipitation and flood-risk research and proposes a new framework for understanding how cities and extreme rainfall interact and co-evolve. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-cities-extreme-rainfall.html Environment Thu, 01 Oct 2026 16:00:42 EDT news710075644 Researchers from the University of Sheffield and University of Cambridge have conducted the most comprehensive study to date on how habitat restoration in sub-Saharan Africa impacts tree loss beyond project boundaries. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-african-landscapes.html Environment Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:50:01 EDT news710087461 Soils are warming quickly and at considerable depth across Alaska, with temperatures rising fastest in the state's permafrost region, a trend that could accelerate climate change and undermine the stability of roads, buildings and other infrastructure built on the continuously frozen ground. https://phys.org/news/2026-10-alaska-soil-permafrost-regions-fastest.html Earth Sciences Thu, 01 Oct 2026 13:00:09 EDT news710070961 Ice cores recovered from an ice cap in northwestern Tibet appear to preserve fragments of ancient ice from the last ice age, extending Earth's glacial record by more than 100,000 years and making them the oldest ice cores ever recovered from the region, according to a new study. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-deep-high-altitude-glacier-ice.html Earth Sciences Wed, 30 Sep 2026 17:50:02 EDT news710005741 Irrigation canals form a sort of circulatory system for global agriculture. Across the world, millions of kilometers of human-made canals carry water from lakes, rivers and reservoirs downhill to farmland. Canals are vitally important to human food production, yet many agricultural areas lack the means to monitor the ebb and flow of water through these waterways. This forces farmers and water managers to rely on scattered gauges, inspections and local reports to make decisions about water use. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-nasa-satellite-world-irrigation-canals.html Earth Sciences Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:50:01 EDT news709998482 Urban heat is more than a matter of temperature. It can affect how people sleep, work, travel through the city and dress, and even how safe or comfortable they feel in public spaces. Yet these everyday consequences often remain invisible in conventional assessments of urban heat. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-temperature-people-urban.html Environment Tue, 29 Sep 2026 19:20:04 EDT news709916462 Plastic pollution is a growing threat to marine environments, with discarded waste reaching from coastlines to the deepest parts of the ocean. Now, a six-year study has revealed how quickly debris can accumulate on a beach in Ecuador, with one monitoring site collecting about 570 grams (1.25 pounds) of debris every week. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-survey-reveals-plastic-feet-deep.html Environment Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:50:02 EDT news709899131 Three much-loved glaciers in British Columbia are set to disappear completely within a few decades, according to a Simon Fraser University study. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-history-identity-bc-glaciers-brink.html Earth Sciences Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:40:01 EDT news709902383 Climate patterns in the tropics help determine how much snow falls from year to year in Antarctica, one of the coldest, windiest and driest places on Earth. New research from the University of Utah shows that tropical conditions and the oceans also influence the continent's massive ice sheets. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-tropical-weather-patterns-west-antarctic.html Earth Sciences Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:00:12 EDT news709897321 The South Asian summer monsoon has long been known to shape the Mediterranean climate thousands of kilometers away as part of a phenomenon known as the "monsoon–desert" mechanism. Through this mechanism, intense monsoon convection during the summer releases large amounts of heat into the atmosphere, triggering large-scale circulation changes that promote sinking air over the Mediterranean. This process suppresses clouds and rainfall and contributes to the Mediterranean region's hot, dry climate. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-weakens-asian-monsoon-mediterranean.html Earth Sciences Tue, 29 Sep 2026 10:00:02 EDT news709891191