Research reveals that unvegetated meandering rivers can geologically masquerade as braided rivers, suggesting they were much more common in the first 90 percent of Earth’s history than previously thought.

A research team led by a Ph.D. student at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science has developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can automatically identify and track tropical easterly waves (TEWs)—clusters of clouds and wind that often develop into hurricanes—and separate them from two major tropical wind patterns: the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and the monsoon trough (MT).

Forests across the globe are experiencing significant changes in their age structure. Many tropical regions, including the Amazon, the Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia, are seeing widespread shifts towards younger forests, driven by disturbances such as fire and logging. This is the result of a study from an international team of scientists led by Simon Besnard from GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences. The study is published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

JapanFlux2024 is Asia’s first large-scale open dataset of eddy covariance observations, compiled by Japanese researchers. Covering 83 sites across East and Southeast Asia, it tracks carbon, water and energy exchange in terrestrial ecosystems. The dataset fills a regional information gap and supports climate, land-use and carbon cycle research.

Weak discontinuities in limestone rock samples introduce noise into acoustic imaging with implications for monitoring lab-scale hydraulic fracturing.

Identifying a mineral might sound straightforward: analyze its chemistry, compare it to known minerals and voilà. But for geologists, this process can be a time-consuming puzzle requiring specialized expertise and a lot of manual calculation. Now, a team of researchers at Rice University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences has developed MIST — Mineral Identification by Stoichiometry — the first online tool capable of automatically identifying hundreds of different mineral species from their chemical composition using a carefully designed rules-based algorithm.