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The Last Glacial Maximum hydroclimate over western North America differed from the modern climate. A proxy-model comparison suggests that the glacial storm track was squeezed and steered by atmospheric high-pressure systems.

The cryosphere remains one of the least-understood microbial ecosystems on Earth, but as climate change accelerates, cryosphere microbial communities will have an increasingly prominent role in Earth’s biogeochemical cycles. In this Review, Whyte and co-workers discuss the effects of climate change on cryosphere microbial ecosystems.

Global patterns in animal size and shape have been long observed, but their underlying drivers are not well understood. Here the authors suggest latitudinal patterns in shorebird size and shape are best explained by thermal adaptation to warm climates.

A transition from carbon sink to source for the aboveground woody biomass of moist tropical Australian forests has occurred, driven by increasingly extreme climate anomalies.

A new multi-speleothem record from Guatemala demonstrates that Atlantic Ocean circulation and sea surface temperature controlled Central American monsoon convection during the last glacial cycle, with a limited role for orbital summer insolation.

Whole-genome sequencing, transcriptome-wide association and fine-mapping analyses in over 7,000 individuals with critical COVID-19 are used to identify 16 independent variants that are associated with severe illness in COVID-19.

The authors report Acheulean hominin occupation of eastern Britain during glacial marine isotope stages 17–16 and again in glacial marine isotope stage 12 via stone tools in sediments dated to 712,000 to 424,000 years ago.

Warm and moist air-mass intrusions into the Arctic are more frequent than the past decades. Here, the authors show that warm air mass intrusions from northern Eurasia inject record amounts of aerosols into the central Arctic Ocean strongly impacting atmospheric chemistry and cloud properties.

Fine sea salt aerosols produced by blowing snow in the Arctic impact cloud properties and warm the surface, according to observations from the MOSAiC expedition.

Available wheat genomes are annotated by projecting Chinese Spring gene models across the new assemblies. Here, the authors generate de novo gene annotations for the 9 wheat genomes, identify core and dispensable transcriptome, and reveal conservation and divergence of gene expression balance across homoeologous subgenomes.

Marine darkwaves can be used to compare patterns and ecological consequences of episodic light reduction in marine ecosystems, according to application of the framework to both in situ and satellite based light irradiance data from California and New Zealand.

Brain-wide recordings in mice reveal that prior expectations are distributed through recurrent loops across all levels of cortical and subcortical processing.

It is found that carbon export fluxes to the deep ocean from a highly productive, naturally iron-fertilized region of the sub-Antarctic Southern Ocean are two to three times larger than the carbon export fluxes from an adjacent high-nutrient low-chlorophyll area not fertilized by iron. These findings support the hypothesis that increased iron supply to the glacial sub-Antarctic may have directly enhanced carbon export to the deep ocean.

Thlaspi arvense (pennycress) has the potential to provide new sources of food and bioproducts when grown as a winter cover crop. Here, Chopra et al. demonstrate that multiple desirable traits can be stacked to rapidly domesticate pennycress. The resulting crop integrates into current crop rotations and produces seeds with improved nutritional qualities, easier harvesting and suitability for human consumption.

Measurements collected during recent polynya events in the Southern Ocean reveal that these sea ice openings formed as a result of weakened stratification and severe storms and were sustained by deep overturning.

A combination of proteomics, metagenome-assembled genomes and heterologous gene expression experiments reveals a trophic system for carbon utilization in the moose rumen microbiome and provides insights into phage dynamics in this ecosystem.

Safely opening university campuses has been a major challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, the authors describe a program of public health measures employed at a university in the United States which, combined with other non-pharmaceutical interventions, allowed the university to stay open in fall 2020 with limited evidence of transmission.

Exceptionally warm years in 2017–2019 have caused changes in the physical and biological characteristics of the Pacific Arctic Ocean. What these changes mean for the ecosystem and societal consequences will depend on if they are evidence of a transformation or anomalies in the system.

Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) sinks near Antarctica and fills the deep ocean. This Review discusses how AABW is formed, past changes to its properties and transport, and projects future changes in AABW and the deep overturning circulation.

Meltwater ponding reduces Greenland Ice Sheet albedo, but this process is not included in models. This study uses drone imagery to show that small streams and ponds, often missed by satellites, considerably increase the energy available for melt.

Synoptic-scale atmospheric pressure patterns control moisture delivery and thus drought occurrence across western North America, yet long-term records are lacking. Here, the authors use a novel combination of tree-ring data and self-organizing maps to reconstruct and analyse pressure patterns since AD 1500.

New field measurements and modeling show meltwater refreezing in Greenland’s bare ice may reduce runoff to surrounding oceans, highlighting a process climate models can incorporate for improved predictions of future sea-level rise.

Genomic and phenomic screens of 827 wheat landraces from the A. E. Watkins collection provide insight into the wheat population genetic background, unlocking many agronomic traits and revealing haplotypes that could potentially be used to improve modern wheat cultivars.

Many lakes in arid, organic-poor permafrost landscapes have a negligible role in mineralizing terrestrial carbon, according to metabolic analyses of lakes in the arid Yukon Flats Basin.

Springtails are omnipresent soil arthropods, vital for ecosystems. In the first global assessment of springtails, this study shows a 20-fold biomass difference between the tundra and the tropics, with distinct temperature-related patterns for diversity and metabolism that suggest climate change may restructure the functioning of soil biodiversity.

Surface meltwater draining to the bed of the Greenland Ice Sheet each summer causes ice flow changes inconsistent with the prevailing theory of channelizing subglacial drainage. Here, the authors show this is caused by limited, gradual leakage of water from previously ignored weakly connected regions of the bed.

Increasing the accuracy of crop productivity estimates is key to ensuring global food security. This Article develops temperature response functions that reduce error in grain yield by 19% to 50%.

Six surveys show substantial public agreement with misinformation about wind farms. Agreement with diverse contrarian claims is best predicted by participants’ worldviews, most notably the tendency to believe conspiracy theories.

Resequencing and genome-wide association analysis of 683 common bean accessions across different latitudes identifies 505 loci associated with yield components, of which seed size, flowering and harvest maturity traits are stable across environments.

The regulatory landscape controlling Hoxd gene expression in tetrapod digit development was probably co-opted from a pre-existing cloacal regulatory mechanism, as evidenced by the effects of genetic deletion experiments in zebrafish fin, cloaca and mouse urogenital development.

Liu et al. used the NASA GRACE/FO missions to show that since 2019, groundwater depletion in California’s Central Valley has accelerated by 31% compared to recent droughts, and has increased by a nearly a factor of 5 compared to the 60-year average.

Nitrite tends to peak at the base of the sunlit zone in the ocean, but the ecological drivers of the local and global distributions of nitrite are not known. Here, Zakem et al. use a marine ecosystem model to show how the interactions of nitrifying microbes mediate nitrite accumulation.

Continued sea-level rise is driving the intrusion of saltwater into coastal wetlands and shallow groundwater reservoirs. High-resolution aerial images reveal that saltwater intrusion in the US Mid-Atlantic may be worse than previously thought, with costly impacts on regional agriculture.

The cloud radiative effect (CRE) in the Arctic plays an important role in the amount of infrared radiation that reaches the surface. Here, the authors show that interplay between temperature and humidity controls CRE through competing influences in two semi-transparent wavelength ranges.

The InSight lander has expanded our knowledge of the atmosphere of Mars by observing various phenomena, including airglow, bores, infrasound and Earth-like turbulence.

Analysing a long-term tracking dataset of migrating mule deer, the authors show that the expansion of natural gas energy infrastructure over 14 years along a migratory corridor changes deer behaviour and reduces by more than 38% their ability to keep pace with spring vegetation green-up.

Warming ocean water plays a significant role in accelerating Arctic sea ice melt. Here the authors present detailed observations of warm water of Pacific origin entering and diving beneath the Arctic ocean surface, and explore the dynamical processes governing its evolution.

An assessment of variations in phytoplankton nutrient limitation in the tropical Pacific over the past two decades finds that phytoplankton iron limitation is more stable in response to ENSO dynamics than models predict.

About 33.5 million years ago, at the Eocene–Oligocene transition, the Earth's climate switched from greenhouse to icehouse conditions. The analysis of terrestrial spore and pollen evidence deposited in ocean sediments in the Norwegian–Greenland Sea now reveals that cold-month mean temperatures declined by about 5 °C prior to the Eocene–Oligocene transition and that seasonality increased.

Abrupt changes are developing across Antarctica’s ice, ocean and biological systems; some of these changes are intensifying faster than equivalent Arctic changes, potentially irreversibly, and their interactions are expected to worsen other impacts across the Antarctic environment and global climate system.

Global energy budgets of planets are important to understand their climate system. Here, the authors show long-term multi-instrument observations from Cassini spacecraft, which reveals dynamical imbalances of Saturn’s global energy budget.