Rock weathering, the breakdown and dissolving of rocks and minerals caused by their exposure to water, air, and biological life, is a major regulator of Earth’s atmospheric CO₂ levels and climate. Scientists have asked if rock weathering could be accelerated to pull excess CO₂ out of the atmosphere. However, current efforts to achieve this are still too slow to affect the global carbon balance or to be economically viable at industrial scale.

Now, researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School (HMS)’s Department of Systems Biology, and the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, engineered a solution to this problem. They showed in customized bioreactors with a continuous flow of seawater that an engineered marine bacterium sped up the weathering of a silicate mineral, boosting the amount of CO₂that was removed from air. Their findings are published in Nature Biotechnology.

 Scientists at the University of Plymouth and the British Antarctic Survey investigated how shifts in ocean salinity could affect marine species in the Antarctic

A study led by University of Michigan finds that El Niño events have become 37% stronger in the last 40 years compared to any in the 1,000 years before the industrial revolution.

A research team led by Professor Kaicun Wang at Peking University has released a homogenized gridded climate dataset for China (HCD01), providing daily, 0.1-degree climate data for 1961-2022. The dataset corrects non-climatic signals in long-term observations and merges homogenized station records with ERA5-Land reanalysis, offering a high-quality data basis for studying climate change and its impacts across China.

A team of northern New England universities and institutions has been awarded $5.9 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to advance snow research and explore connections between winter weather and the outdoor recreation economy in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. The University of Vermont (UVM), which will lead the effort, is the recipient of $3.3 million and the University of New Hampshire (UNH) is the recipient of an additional $2.6 million as a collaborator. The project will include the University of Maine and eight other regional institutions.

New research by Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) shows that globally up to 560 million children aged 0 to 9 years old (43% of all children in this age group) are living through at least one additional month (30 or more days) of heat stress per year due to human-induced climate change. This exposure outpaces any other age group and is nearly triple the 190 million people (30%) aged 60-69 experiencing this additional health threat. Children are therefore already facing disproportionately high levels of dangerous humid heat caused by human-induced climate change, with exposure expected to grow under further warming.