News by Subject Atmospheric Science

Researchers from Graz University of Technology and the Universities of Cambridge and Surrey succeeded to track down the first step in ice formation at a surface, revealing that additional energy is needed for water before ice can start to form.

Urgent investment in new tools is needed to address major global losses of wheat crops which cost £22 billion per year.

Researchers at Aalto University in Finland have found strong evidence that warm ice - that is, ice very close in temperature to zero degrees Celsius - may fracture differently than the kinds of ice typically studied in laboratories or nature. A new study published in The Cryosphere takes a closer look at the phenomenon, studied at the world's largest indoor ice tank on Aalto's campus.

Our results suggest that olivine and wadsleyite show dry transformation kinetics even in wet slabs. It is therefore possible that olivine transformation as a cause of deep-focus earthquakes and large slab deformation creating stagnant slabs could occur in the water-undersaturated wet slabs. These processes could be caused jointly by dehydration of hydrous minerals and the subsequent rapid phase transformation when the dehydration starts at lower temperatures than the phase transformation.

After a wildfire, soils in burned areas often become water repellent, leading to increased erosion and flooding after rainfall events - a phenomenon that many scientists have attributed to smoke and heat-induced changes in soil chemistry. But this post-fire water repellency may also be caused by wildfire smoke in the absence of heat, according to a new paper from the Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Nevada.

Researchers report the climate clues that can be found by analyzing the magnetic fossil particles, or magnetofossils.

The study shows that the 2019-20 drought resulted from a natural meteorological phenomenon similar to the one that caused the 2014-16 critical water shortage in São Paulo state, Southeast Brazil.