The 23rd World Congress of Soil Science, often regarded as the “Olympics” of the soil science community, opened in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province. Held from June 8 to 12 under the theme “Soil and the Shared Future of Humankind,” the congress marks the first time in its nearly 100-year history that this premier global academic event in soil science has been hosted in China.

Storm surges and extreme water levels along coastlines occur significantly more frequently today than at the beginning of the 20th century. A new study in the journal Nature Climate Change shows that what was statistically expected to occur only once every 100 years around 1900 now occurs, in global average, about every eight years. This corresponds to an increase by a factor of about twelve. The team of authors includes Prof. Ben Marzeion from the Institute of Geography and MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen.

 

Climate change could make historically rare tropical cyclones more common in Southern California, significantly expanding landslide risk across the region by 2050.

For almost a century, researchers have known that vertical land motion — the lifting and sinking of the ground — affects sea level locally. As the ground sinks, the sea level rises relative to the land. Scientists also assumed this process generally occurred at a steady rate over time. But a research team that includes Thomas Wahl, a UCF researcher and associate professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering, has found that ground subsidence has undergone phases of variable change, creating significant implications for coastal communities.

The number of icebergs in the Arctic has increased sharply since the 2000s. This is due to the destabilisation of large glaciers in north-east Greenland and parts of the Russian Arctic as well as the increasing mobility of sea ice. The result: Stones rain down from the melting icebergs, forming new hard-substrate habitats for marine life on the soft seafloor. This gradually alters the existing communities in the deep sea. At the same time, the increasing presence of icebergs also poses greater risks to shipping and fisheries. These findings were reported by a research team led by the Alfred Wegener Institute and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the journal Nature.

The deep sea is a unique ‘evolutionary engine’ with one of the richest and most unexplored sources of genetic diversity on Earth, according to a major new study that has assessed its potential to transform biotechnology and DNA sequencing technologies.