Volume 18 Issue 7, July 2025

Balancing soil health and food production is a struggle for agriculture. The practice of burying crop residues in subsoil offers a dual win: richer carbon storage and higher yields.

With solar projects worldwide expected to expand rapidly, understanding the ecosystem impacts is vital. Recent work highlights that optimizing land use strategies can significantly enhance carbon sequestration in the hosting ecosystem, making them a more effective tool in combating climate change.

A new study tracks sea ice, ocean swell and ice shelf conditions over multiple years in the lead-ups to large-scale Antarctic ice shelf calving events. We quantified the strengths and durations of increased ice shelf flexure that preconditioned and subsequently triggered the calving events.

Proxy–model comparisons from the mid-Holocene and ensemble projections of future warming reveal that Northern-Hemisphere warming repeatedly forces the Pacific Decadal Oscillation into a persistent negative phase. This forced North Pacific response stifles winter storms, pointing to a persistent warming-driven drought risk in the Southwest US.

Climate model simulations suggest that both anthropogenic aerosols and tropical ocean warming have contributed to reduced precipitation over the southwestern United States in recent decades, thus making the current drought more likely than previously thought.

Post-fire dust emissions have increased by 77% globally over the past two decades, and small fires account for 95% of these emissions, according to analysis of satellite observations.

China contributed about half of the global carbon tetrachloride (CCl₄) emissions during 2011–2021, according to long-term atmospheric observations from China.

The loss of sea ice enhances swell-induced flexural stress in Antarctic ice shelves before large-scale calving events, according to satellite observations and swell-induced flexural stress modelling.

A utility-based assessment shows that the global installation of photovoltaic plants to harness solar energy between 2000 and 2018 led to an increase in terrestrial ecosystem carbon pools of 2.1 TgC.

Satellite observations suggest that prolonged hot–dry conditions induced by Rossby waves in the jet stream reduce ecosystem productivity, providing insights into the potential impacts of a future warmer and probably drier climate.

Model simulations suggest that cropland expansion since industrialization has reduced atmospheric biogenic secondary organic aerosol by 10% and its associated radiative cooling effect by 11%.

The injection of straw into subsoils can increase soil organic carbon and crop yields substantially and could therefore provide an effective approach for subsoil management in croplands, according to 15 years of field experiments on rice–wheat croplands in China.

Cropland area—and associated carbon dioxide emissions—in 110 studied countries is 6% higher than it would be without declines in agricultural productivity caused by climate change, according to a comparison of models with and without climate impacts.

Mid-Holocene and the future warming induces a North Pacific response resulting in sustained winter precipitation deficits and drought over the Southwestern United States, according to new palaeoclimate data and climate model simulations.

Metamorphic soles beneath ophiolites record rapid subduction initiation, with high-temperature metamorphism that may be driven by relative motion across the plate interface, according to diffusion speedometry of garnets combined with isotopic data.

The mantle upwelling beneath the Afar rift may be influenced by tectonic processes in the overriding lithospheric plates that shape the distribution of both the compositional heterogeneities and abundance of melt, according to a geochemical and statistical study of volcanic samples.

As bridgmanite crystallized from a reduced magma ocean, it left an oxidized lower mantle that may explain the oxidation state of the current upper mantle after mixing, according to high-pressure and high-temperature multi-anvil experiments.

Land surface modelling suggests that preserving woody debris in managed forests could remove 769–937 GtCO₂ from the atmosphere between 2025 and 2100.