News & Views in 2018

The annual quantity of metal being used by humans has been on the rise. A new analysis of 43 major economies reveals the extent to which year-to-year fluctuations in metal footprints have been in lockstep with countries’ economic growth and changes in investment spending.

A comprehensive assessment of grounding-line migration rates around Antarctica, covering a third of the coast, suggests retreat in considerable portions of the continent, beyond the rates expected from adjustment following the Last Glacial Maximum.

Multi-disciplinary analyses of Earth’s most destructive volcanic systems show that continuous monitoring and an understanding of each volcano’s quirks, rather than a single unified model, are key to generating accurate hazard assessments.

Substantial amounts of denitrification and other anaerobic metabolisms can occur in anoxic microenvironments within marine snow particles, according to model simulations. This microbial activity may have a global impact on nitrogen cycling.

Continental stability may be linked to a shallow, buoyant mantle layer, and the deepest craton roots can be destabilized and removed by mantle plumes.

Experimental data reveal that Earth’s mantle melts more readily than previously thought, and may have remained mushy until two to three billion years ago.

The first of two stepwise increases in atmospheric oxygen occurred at the end of the Archaean eon. Analyses of sulfur and iron isotopes in pyrite reveal a near-shore environment that hosted locally oxygenated conditions in the Mesoarchaean era.

Advances in high-precision isotopic analysis have provided key constraints on the origin and early evolution of the Earth and Moon. Measurements of the isotopes of tungsten provide the most stringent constraints on this history.

The slowdown in surface warming in the early twenty-first century has been traced to strengthening of the Pacific trade winds. The search for the causes identifies a planetary-scale see-saw of atmosphere and ocean between the Atlantic and Pacific basins.

The composition of the oceans is altered by hydrothermal circulation. These chemical factories sustain microbial life, which in turn alters the chemistry of the fluids that enter the ocean. A decade of research details this complex interchange.

The elemental ratios of marine phytoplankton and organic matter vary widely across ocean biomes, according to a catalogue of biogeochemical data, suggesting that climate change may have complex effects on the ocean’s elemental cycles.

Tectonic controls on atmospheric oxygenation are frequently invoked — but whether geochemical records support these ties is an unsettled question.

A compilation of hundreds of palaeoclimate records highlighted the extent of regional variability during the past 2,000 years, and therein the uniqueness of recent warming.