Carbon

Plant compounds promoted as a way to cut nitrous oxide emissions from farmland also suppressed the soil bacteria that consume methane, researchers at Kansas State University report in a study…

The physics of climate change runs on decades and centuries. Politics runs on the last hot summer. A new modeling study asks what happens when you wire the two together and let the short clock start…

At the bottom of the world, on the islands of the Fuegian Archipelago, a rodent from another hemisphere has been reshaping the forest for the better part of a century. The North American beaver was…

The carbon that Amazon forests take in and the water they give off have been moving further out of step for four decades, an analysis of 40 years of satellite data published Aug. 22 in Nature…

A team led by Ohio State University's Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center has published a 2,000-year record of atmospheric methane extracted from ice drilled on a tropical mountain in Peru.…

Charred carbon washed into fresh water after a wildfire drives sulfur chemistry in sunlight, according to laboratory experiments published Aug. 19 in Communications Earth & Environment by researchers…

Salt marsh area along China's coast has grown on net in recent decades, and the organic carbon held in the topsoil under those marshes rose overall with it, according to a national mapping study…

For most of the year the far North does its climate work in the dark. Long after the growing season ends and the last flux of summer photosynthesis fades, the soil beneath the snow keeps breathing:…

For decades the Aral Sea has stood as a monument to what human engineering can undo. Once the fourth-largest lake on Earth, it began shrinking in the 1960s when Soviet planners diverted the rivers…

Qikiqtaruk is a small, treeless island off the Yukon coast, and every summer it gets smaller. Waves undercut its ice-rich bluffs, thawed ground slumps, and slabs of Pleistocene permafrost drop into…

"Cities cause most of the world's carbon emissions" is one of those facts that sounds precise until you try to pin it down. Most? Two-thirds? Three-quarters? The honest answer is that it depends on a…