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Category: climatology

The real reason states first emerged thousands of years ago: New research

Globalization, migration, climate change and war—nation states are currently under huge pressure on many fronts. Understanding the forces that initially drove the emergence of states across the world may help explain why.

For a long time after humans evolved, we lived in oral-based, mostly small-scale and egalitarian societies. Things began to change with the dawn of the Holocene, when a suite of climatic, social and technological shifts led to the emergence of the first states about 5,000 years ago.

The earliest known state was in Mesopotamia (now southern Iraq), followed by Egypt, the Indus Valley, China and Meso-America. The long-standing view was that the invention of agriculture was the spur for these large-scale human societies to emerge. But there was a 4,000-year gap between the expansion of agriculture (circa 9,000 years ago) and the founding of the earliest states, which throws this link into question.

Using peat as sustainable precursor for fuel cell catalyst materials

Iron-nitrogen-carbon catalysts have the potential to replace the more expensive platinum catalysts currently used in fuel cells. This is shown by a study conducted by researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB), Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) and universities in Tartu and Tallinn, Estonia. The research is published in the journal ACS Nano.

At BESSY II, the team observed the formation of complex microstructures within various samples. They then analyzed which structural parameters were particularly important for fostering the preferred electrochemical reactions. The raw material for such catalysts is well decomposed peat.

Fuel cells convert the chemical energy of hydrogen directly into electrical energy, producing only water. Fuel cells could be an important component in a climate-neutral energy system. The greatest potential for improvement lies in the reduction of costs via the replacement of the electrocatalysts, which are currently based on the precious metal platinum.

NASA, SpaceX launch US–European satellite to monitor Earth’s oceans

About the size of a full-size pickup truck, a newly launched satellite by NASA and its partners will provide ocean and atmospheric information to improve hurricane forecasts, help protect infrastructure, and benefit commercial activities, such as shipping.

The Sentinel-6B satellite lifted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in central California at 9:21 p.m. PST on Nov. 16. Contact between the satellite and a ground station in northern Canada occurred about 1 hour and 30 minutes later at 10:54 p.m. All systems are functioning normally.

“Understanding tidal patterns down to the inch is critical in protecting how we use our oceans every day on Earth,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Sentinal-6B will build upon the legacy of Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich by making sea level measurements that improve forecasts used by communities, businesses, and operations across the country. It also will support a safer reentry for our astronauts returning home, including crew from Artemis Moon missions.”

Scientists detect new climate pattern in the tropics

Tropical cyclones can unleash extensive devastation, as recent storms that swept over Jamaica and the Philippines made unmistakably clear. Accurate weather forecasts that buy more time to prepare are crucial for saving lives and are rooted in a deeper understanding of climate systems.

Driving this forward, researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) and others have successfully identified a previously unknown cyclic climate pattern by historical reanalysis of datasets and satellite observations. The findings are published in PNAS.

Jiawei Bao still remembers coming home from middle school to catch the weather forecast on TV. It spanned from China’s northernmost province, Heilongjiang, to the southernmost province and tropical island, Hainan. In winter, the temperature between these regions can range from cold to balmy, varying by a staggering 50 degrees Celsius.

Higher resolution climate models show 41% increase in daily extreme land precipitation by 2100

Despite continuous efforts to evaluate and predict changes in Earth’s climate, most models still struggle to accurately simulate extreme precipitation events. Models like the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phases 5 and 6 (CMIP5 and CMIP6) use fairly coarse resolution due to computing constraints, making it a little easier, faster and less expensive to run simulations, while still providing some degree of accuracy.

However, a new study, published in Nature Geoscience, is shedding light on some of the features missed by these coarser resolution models.

The team involved in the study developed a higher resolution model that breaks up the atmosphere into 10–25 km (6–15.5 mile) squares for analysis, instead of 100 km (62 mile) squares. Their high-resolution model is based on the Community Earth System Model v.1.3 (CESM-HR), which looks at the time period between 1920–2100. These results are then compared with the low-resolution version’s (CESM-LR) results.

Ancient bog growth reveals shifting Southern Hemisphere winds 15,000 years ago

Scientists have revealed that ancient bogs in the Southern Hemisphere hold clues to a major shift in Earth’s climate thousands of years ago.

Researchers looking at peatlands have discovered that sudden shifts in the Southern Westerly Winds 15,000 years ago triggered a massive growth of the swamps.

Geo-experts have never fully understood what caused the bogs to form across the Southern Hemisphere after the last Ice Age.

Scientist captures tiny particles for clues on what sparks lightning

Using lasers as tweezers to understand cloud electrification might sound like science fiction, but at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) it is a reality. By trapping and charging micron-sized particles with lasers, researchers can now observe their charging and discharging dynamics over time.

This method, published in Physical Review Letters, could provide key insights into what sparks lightning.

Aerosols are liquid or that float in the air. They are all around us. Some are large and visible, such as pollen in spring, while others, such as viruses that spread during flu season, cannot be detected by the naked eye. Some we can even taste, like the airborne salt crystals we breathe in at the seaside.

Key driver of extreme winds on Venus identified

Imagine the catastrophic winds of a category 5 hurricane. Now, imagine even faster winds of more than 100 meters per second, encircling the planet and whipping clouds across the sky, with no end in sight. This scenario would be astonishing on Earth, but it’s business as usual on Venus, where the atmosphere at cloud level rotates about 60 times faster than the planet itself—a phenomenon known as superrotation. In contrast, Earth’s cloud-level atmosphere rotates at about the same speed as the planet’s surface.

Prior research has explored the mechanisms driving atmospheric superrotation on Venus, but the details remain murky. New evidence from Lai and team suggests that a once-daily atmospheric tidal cycle, fueled by heat from the sun, contributes much more to the planet’s extreme winds than previously thought. The study is published in the journal AGU Advances.

Rapid atmospheric rotation often occurs on rocky planets that, like Venus, are located relatively close to their stars and rotate very slowly. On Venus, one full rotation takes 243 Earth days. Meanwhile, the races around the planet in a mere 4 Earth days.

Antarctic ice loss linked to ‘storms’ at ocean’s subsurface

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have identified stormlike circulation patterns beneath the Antarctic ice shelves that are causing aggressive melting, with major implications for global sea level rise projections.

In a paper published recently in Nature Geoscience, the scientists say their study is the first to examine ocean-induced ice shelf melting events from a weather timescale of just days versus seasonal or annual timeframes. This enabled them to match “ocean storm” activity with intense ice melt at Thwaites Glacier and Pine Island Glacier in the climate change-threatened Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica.

The research team relied on climate simulation modeling and moored observation tools to gain 200-meter-resolution pictures of submesoscale ocean features between 1 and 10 kilometers across, tiny in the context of the vast ocean and huge slabs of floating ice in Antarctica.

The simulated Milky Way: 100 billion stars using 7 million CPU cores

Researchers have successfully performed the world’s first Milky Way simulation that accurately represents more than 100 billion individual stars over the course of 10 thousand years. This feat was accomplished by combining artificial intelligence (AI) with numerical simulations. Not only does the simulation represent 100 times more individual stars than previous state-of-the-art models, but it was produced more than 100 times faster.

Published in Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, the study represents a breakthrough at the intersection of astrophysics, high-performance computing, and AI. Beyond astrophysics, this new methodology can be used to model other phenomena such as and .

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