An international team of scientists, including a senior researcher at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, has uncovered new evidence of ancient wildfires that reshapes our understanding of Earth’s turbulent Early Triassic epoch, about 250 million years ago.

In the summer of 2022, 20 islands in the Maldives were flooded when a distant swell event in the Indian Ocean coincided with an extremely high tide level. Now researchers from the University of Plymouth (UK) and Deltares, a not-for-profit applied research institute in the Netherlands, have warned that future predicted rises in sea levels - coupled with an increase in extreme weather events and wave conditions - could result in such flooding becoming far more common, perhaps happening every two to three years by around 2050.

Emissions of the greenhouse gas methane from lakes and reservoirs risk doubling by the end of the century due to climate change according to a new study from Linköping University, Sweden, and NASA Ames Research Center in the US. This in turn could raise Earth’s temperature more than suggested by the UN climate panel IPCC’s current worst-case scenario.

Researchers from the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences, analyzed hourly dust emissions during 136 large dust events across Central East Asia from 2000 to 2023 using a state-of-the-art wind erosion model calculation. The results show that Mongolia has become the dominant source of dust emissions in the region, with its contribution increasing from 43% in the early 2000s to 53% in recent years. After two decades of decline, regional dust storm activity has rebounded sharply after 2021 due to stronger winds, vegetation degradation, and soil drying. The study provides new insights into the changes of Central East Asia dust activity and underscores the urgent need for cross-border dust monitoring and early warning systems. The findings were published in Science China Earth Sciences.

A recent study published in National Science Review has estimated the global biological nitrogen fixation from natural terrestrial ecosystems as 78.2–89.8 Tg N yr^-1, revealing an underestimation of this flux up to ~18% in existing Earth System Models (ESMs). The findings suggest many ESMs may overstate the nitrogen limitation or vegetation internal nitrogen recycling efficiency.