EurekAlert! News by Subject: Earth Science - News by Subject: Earth Science

Earth Science

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 13-May-2025 10:09 ET (13-May-2025 14:09 GMT/UTC)

Earth saw record-high greening in 2020. What’s at the root?

Duke University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Satellite records show spectacular vegetation growth coinciding with the first year of the pandemic. Researchers investigated whether lockdowns played a role.

Journal: Remote Sensing of Environment

Roving the red planet: New paper documents first Mars mission soil samples

University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNLV-led research details early insights from NASA’s Perseverance rover; Specimens due back on Earth in the 2030s.

Journal: Journal of Geophysical Research Planets

Global “sisterhood” seeks to understand what makes a healthy vaginal microbiome

Cell Press
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Vaginas host a complex microcosm of bacteria and yeasts that can fluctuate over time. However, little is known about these microbial communities and their roles in a person’s health, and 9 out of 10 studies only include participants from one continent, resulting in major geographical gaps in data. In a paper publishing February 6 in the Cell Press journal Trends in Microbiology, scientists share insights gleaned from a “sisterhood” of thousands of citizen scientists and demonstrate how international collaboration can help illuminate the gaps in our knowledge about the vaginal microbiome, including which bacteria are helpful or harmful and whether microbiomes look different for people across the globe.

Journal: Trends in Microbiology

Whale poop contains iron that may have helped fertilize past oceans

University of Washington
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A recent theory proposes that whales weren’t just predators in the ocean environment: Nutrients that whales excreted may have provided a key fertilizer to these marine ecosystems. Research led by University of Washington oceanographers finds that whale excrement contains significant amounts of iron, a vital element that is often scarce in ocean ecosystems, and nontoxic forms of copper, another essential nutrient that in some forms can harm life.

Journal: Communications Earth & Environment
Funder: MAC3 Impact Philanthropies, MUIR Program at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, University of Washington Program on Climate Change, Ford Foundation

Timing is everything

MARUM - Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, University of Bremen
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Being in the right place at the right time is crucial. Clocks help us to coordinate dates and appointments. This is also important for research of the geological past, as it is the only way to reliably reconstruct cause and effect in the climate system. Geological climate archives must therefore be dated as precisely as possible in order to draw reliable conclusions. An international initiative of researchers, to which Dr. Thomas Westerhold from MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen, among others, has made a significant contribution, is now calling for the most important marine climate archives to be dated more precisely than ever before across all regions.

Journal: Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology

How life's building blocks took shape on early Earth: the limits of membraneless polyester protocell formation

Institute of Science Tokyo
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A recent study from the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) investigates how polyester microdroplets, potential precursors to modern cells, could form under realistic early Earth conditions. Researchers pushed these conditions to the limits, demonstrating that these protocells can emerge from the polymerisation of alpha-hydroxy acids (αHAs) even at low concentrations/volumes and in salty environments. The findings indicate that polyester protocells were more prevalent than previously thought, potentially forming in environments on early Earth from rock pores to briny pools.

Journal: ACS Bio & Med Chem Au
Funder: American Friends of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia, Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia, RIKEN, Institute of Science Tokyo, Earth-Life Science Insitute, Mizuho Foundation for the Promotion of Science, National Science and Technology Council of Taiwan

Drying and rewetting cycles substantially increased soil CO2 release

Niigata University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Soil incubation experiments revealed a comprehensive increase in CO₂ release by drying–rewetting cycles (DWCs) among Japanese forests and pastureland soils, suggesting a significant contribution of the DWCs-induced destruction of microbial cells and reactive metal-organic matter complex to the CO₂ release increase.

Journal: SOIL
Funder: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

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