A new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) reveals that the aerobic nitrogen cycle in the ocean may have occurred about 100 million years before oxygen began to significantly accumulate in the atmosphere, based on nitrogen isotope analysis from ancient South African rock cores.

These findings not only refine the timeline of Earth’s oxygenation but also highlight a critical evolutionary shift, where life began adapting to oxygen-rich conditions—paving the way for the emergence of complex, multicellular organisms like humans.

SAN ANTONIO — May 28, 2025 —A series of experiments led by Southwest Research Institute’s Dr. Ujjwal Raut support spectral data recently collected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that found evidence that the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa is constantly changing. Europa’s surface ice is crystallizing at different rates in different places, which could point to a complex mix of external processes and geologic activity affecting the surface.

Water reshapes the Earth through slow, powerful erosion, carving intricate landscapes like caves and pinnacles in soluble rocks such as limestone. An international team from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, the University of Florida, and the Institute of Earth Sciences in Orléans has discovered that vertical channels, known as karstic solution pipes, preserve a record of Earth’s climatic history. Their study, published in Physical Review Letters, reveals that these pipes evolve with time into an invariant shape, a fixed, ideal form that remains unchanged as the pipes deepen, encoding ancient rainfall patterns.

Chemical grouting is an effective technique to improve soil structure when it is prone to liquefaction risks during earthquakes. Reliable and uniform grout permeation in heterogeneous soil with low-permeability zones is challenging. Researchers from Shibaura Institute of Technology, Japan, and Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand, have now developed an integrative approach of using Finite Element Method to analyze permeation behavior alongside AI-based permeation prediction, to help engineers improve grouting outcomes in complex soil types.

In a paper published in SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences, an international team of researchers present the new details about the enhancement of aragonite precipitation during photosynthesis in Skeletonema costatum in artificial and natural seawater. By directly measuring cell surfaces, it reveals the mechanism of diatom-mediated promotion of CaCO₃ precipitation. Based on this mechanism, it suggests that diatom-mediated calcification can occur in the oceans, which is supported by relevant phenomena. The newly found calcification pathway connects particulate inorganic and organic carbon flux, facilitating the reassessment of marine carbon export fluxes and CO₂ sequestration efficiency. And this discovery may have significant implications for evaluating marine carbon cycling and predicting the impacts of future ocean acidification.

In a paper published in National Science Review, an international team led by Prof. Xuanmei Fan presents a deep learning-based framework that utilizes a novel global database of nearly 400,000 earthquake-triggered landslides to predict landslide probability for any earthquake worldwide with ~82% spatial accuracy in less than one minute without requiring prior local field data.