Carbon

Microbes consume more than 70% of the methane dissolved in the surface water of African lakes, according to measurements across 79 of them published Sept. 29 in Nature Communications. Lakes are large…

The sticky substances soil microbes release while they are alive are a major route into the soil's longest-lasting carbon store, researchers at Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan report. Their…

Carbon dioxide sticks to desert soil minerals as they cool at night and comes back off as they warm through the day, an exchange that involves no living thing at all, according to a study published…

A global analysis by researchers at Columbia University and the University of Notre Dame reports that rain makes the ocean absorb 13.6% more carbon dioxide than wind alone would drive into it,…

Antarctic penguin colonies give off methane, and Spanish researchers have now put a number on how much. Chinstrap penguin colonies across the continent emit an estimated 0.49 ± 0.16 teragrams of the…

Building the power plants and grids that China would need to meet stricter climate targets releases more carbon dioxide during construction than a business-as-usual expansion would, according to a…

Soil carbon and the mass of microbes living in soil generally rise together where forests are planted, but how long the gains keep building depends on what the land was before, Zexin Meng of Xi'an…

A study published Sept. 17, 2026 in Environmental Research Letters found no net gain in aboveground carbon in selectively logged tropical forests in central Vietnam, contradicting widely used…

Set fire to a peatland and the flames are the least of it. Below the surface, in ground built from plant matter that never fully rotted, the burning keeps going slowly and without flame. It works…

China's national clean-air program is linked to better weight outcomes in young children, according to a study published Sept. 15, 2026 in Communications Earth & Environment. Counties covered by the…

Irrigation on US farmland keeps far more greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere than it puts in, a study published Sept. 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimates, because the…

Most of the natural gas New York City loses to the atmosphere was burned incompletely, not leaked from pipes, according to a study published Sept. 14 in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.…