The Amazon rainforest responded to the most severe drought ever recorded in the basin with an unexpected defense mechanism. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, found that during and after the intense 2023–2024 El Niño cycle, the most intense drought ever recorded in the region, vegetation significantly changed its chemical emissions to cope with environmental stress. The study was published in Communications Earth & Environment.

When you think of Antarctica, you might imagine a stark, otherworldly continent of endless, white ice, with the only sound being the wind punctuated by the crack of a glacier calving in the distance.

The Euphrates River is the longest river in Western Asia and runs through the eastern side of the Fertile Crescent. Flowing over 1,700 miles from Turkey through Syria and Iraq, the river played a crucial role in sustaining the region known as the "Cradle of Civilization." Yet, researchers aren't sure about the river's origins or how tectonic activity might have shaped its evolution. A new study, published in Nature Geoscience, suggests that two ancient rivers, diverted by shifting plate tectonics, merged to form this vital river.

Scientists have identified the two biggest reasons that once-pristine rivers across the Arctic are growing cloudy with toxic orange iron particles that smother insects and suffocate fish.

Researchers have uncovered a key mechanism behind Japan's extreme winter weather, revealing how distant climate patterns interact to intensify cold waves and heavy snowfall.

A collaborative study with the University of Cologne, recently published in Nature Communications, provides compelling evidence that the extreme aridity in the hyperarid core of the Atacama Desert began over 40 million years ago—significantly earlier than previously assumed. The findings require a reconsideration of how deserts form and offer a new perspective on the long-term evolution of Earth's most extreme environments. Researchers from SUERC Centre for the Isotope Sciences are co-authors of a study which casts new light on the history of Earth's driest region, the Atacama Desert in Chile.

A fault line running alongside the Hunua Ranges in South Auckland is now identified as active and has the potential to cause a major earthquake with serious consequences, University of Auckland researchers say.

Mid-latitude Asian drylands, stretching from Central Asia to northern China, are among the largest dryland systems in the world. Home to extensive agricultural activities and fragile ecosystems, the region is highly vulnerable to climate change and water scarcity.

Researchers at iC3 have found a way to improve records of past high latitude ocean change using tiny plankton shells called foraminifera. By growing these foraminifera under controlled cold-water conditions, the team has extended a key temperature tool into the range most relevant for subpolar and polar oceans.

The Indian monsoon has shifted over the past quarter century. Northwest India now receives substantially more rain than it once did, while a lack of rain sends the Indo-Gangetic Plain toward drought.

New research from a team of scientists led by Cornell is transforming how researchers understand one of the atmosphere's most abundant and least understood constituents: mineral dust.