The problem with this is that historically frozen carbon-rich soils are expected to thaw as the planet warms, making them even more vulnerable to wildfires and more likely to release large amounts of ...carbon. The Russian Wildfires Remote Monitoring System catalogued 18,591 separate fires in Russia's two easternmost districts, with a total of nearly 14 million hectares burnt, says Evgeny Shvetsov, a fire specialist at the Sukachev Institute of Forest, which is part of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Krasnoyarsk. To estimate the record carbon dioxide emissions, scientists with the European Commission's Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service used satellites to study the wildfires' locations and intensity, and then calculated how much fuel each had probably burnt (see go.nature.com/2zk8wcn).
A 28July analysis by the international World Weather Attribution research group found that human-induced climate change made this year's UK heatwave at least ten times more likely5. Like the Pacific ...Northwest heatwave of2021, the UK heatwave of2022 might become a catalyst for understanding what causes heatwaves to become even more extreme than expected, says Erich Fischer, a climate scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. ...the continent has seen record heat several times over the past five years, says Kai Kornhuber, a climate scientist at Columbia University in New York City. After decades working on climate projections for the future, what startled him most was to see wildfires raging in London's urban area, fuelled by the extreme heat.
The edge of the Pacific plate heats up as it sinks into the planet's depths, and molten rock rises to feed the volcanoes of the Tonga-Kermadec arc. Geochemical analysis of that material, described in ...a paper in Lithos3, found that the 2009 and 2014-15 eruptions involved molten rock that had not risen recently from the great depths of Earth's mantle. The water factor Volcanoes in deep water rarely erupt through the ocean surface in big blasts, because the pressure of the overlying water prevents gas bubbles from forming and growing with explosive force. High-resolution satellite imagery is allowing them to track how ash, gas and tain species are drifting through the atmosphere - in much more detail than they could in 1991, when Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted even more powerfully than Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai.
Another asset is image sharpness, thanks to the LBT's adaptive optics system, which uses deformable secondary mirrors to correct for distortions in Earths atmosphere. NASA is also planning to use the ...LBT's binocular mode to conduct a sim- ilar survey that would detect places where plan- ets may be born and would help astronomers to subtract the signal from the exozodiacal dust that may obscure any planetary signatures.
Among the embedded contaminants are specks of fly ash - remnants from the burning of fossil fuels - and traces of radioactive plutonium from atmospheric nuclear bomb testing. Because of its depth, ...the bottom layer of water does not mix with the upper ones. ...the Anthropocene should become a geological epoch ending the Holocene; the name of its first age could be the Crawfordian age.
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