Feature Article

Antartica is a “natural reserve, devoted to peace and science”, according to the Antarctic Treaty System. This complex set of agreements collectively takes a firm stance on conservation, exemplified by the Convention on the Conservation of Marine Living Resources. Adopted in 1980, this convention was negotiated rapidly in response to expanding trawling of Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba). Krill are at the base of the region’s marine food web, so there were worries that a dearth of the small crustaceans would threaten the whole ecosystem, especially whales.

Of the common adjectives used to describe Earth’s southern polar region, ‘pristine’ is among the most inappropriate. The ocean around Antarctica bobs with pieces of microplastic pollution, and for decades, whales and other marine life have been stripped from the sea. The ozone hole gapes above. To find any of the advertised unspoiled wilderness, a visitor has to trek inshore and away from the direct influence of the rest of the world. Because there is another misapplied label: remote.

A growing network of ice cores reveals the past 800,000 years of Antarctic climate and atmospheric composition. The data show tight links among greenhouse gases, aerosols and global climate on many timescales, demonstrate connections between Antarctica and distant locations, and reveal the extraordinary differences between the composition of our present atmosphere and its natural range of variability as revealed in the ice core record.

Human activities have been implicated in the observed increase in Global Mean Surface Temperature. Over regional scales where climatic changes determine societal impacts and drive adaptation related decisions, detection and attribution (D&A) of climate change can be challenging due to the greater contribution of internal variability, greater uncertainty in regionally important forcings, greater errors in climate models, and larger observational uncertainty in many regions of the world.

The aim of this study is to investigate the differences in the mappable characteristics of earthquake-triggered and rainfall triggered landslides in terms of their frequency-area relationships, spatial distributions and relation with causal factors, and to evaluate whether separate susceptibility maps generated for specific landslide size and triggering mechanism are better than a generic landslide susceptibility assessment including all landslide sizes and triggers.

The existence of a chemosynthetic subseafloor biosphere was immediately recognized when deep-sea hot springs were discovered in 1977. However, quantifying how much new carbon is fixed in this environment has remained elusive. In this study, we incubated natural subseafloor communities under in situ pressure/temperature and measured their chemosynthetic growth efficiency and metabolic rates. Combining these data with fluid flux and in situ chemical measurements, we derived empirical constraints on chemosynthetic activity in the natural environment.

Despite the well-documented clinical efficacy of artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) against malaria, the population-level effects of ACT have not been studied thoroughly until recently. An ideal case study for these population-level effects can be found in Vietnam’s gradual adoption of artemisinin in the 1990s.

Original Source

Western disturbances (WDs) are upper-level synoptic-scale systems embedded in the subtropical westerly jet stream (STWJ), often associated with extreme rainfall events in north India and Pakistan during boreal winter. Here, a tracking algorithm is applied to the upper-tropospheric vorticity field for 37 years of ERA-Interim reanalysis data, giving a catalogue of over 3000 events.

As the Earth’s atmosphere warms, the atmospheric circulation changes. These changes vary by region and time of year, but there is evidence that anthropogenic warming causes a general weakening of summertime tropical circulation. Because tropical cyclones are carried along within their ambient environmental wind, there is a plausible a priori expectation that the translation speed of tropical cyclones has slowed with warming.

This paper presents an example of usage of Ensemble Weather Forecast for the control of Satellite-based Communication Systems. Satellite communication systems become increasingly sensitive to weather conditions as their operating frequency is increasing to avoid electromagnetic spectrum congestion and enhance their capacity. In the microwave domain, electromagnetic waves that are conveying information are attenuated between the satellite and Earth terminals in presence of hydrometeors (mostly rain drops and more marginally cloud droplets).