Global water sustainability flows through natural and human challenges

Results from an expedition to far eastern Russia that set out to find the origin of naturally occurring quasicrystals have provided convincing evidence that they arrived on Earth from outer space. Scientists reveal that new, naturally occurring quasicrystal samples have been found in an environment that does not have the extreme terrestrial conditions needed to produce them, therefore strengthening the case that they were brought to Earth by a meteorite. 

For years, many scientists had thought that plate tectonics existed nowhere in our solar system but on Earth. Now, a researcher has discovered that the geological phenomenon, which involves the movement of huge crustal plates beneath a planet’s surface, also exists on Mars.

NASA researchers are helping to fill a big gap in scientists’ understanding of how much urban pollution — and more precisely formaldehyde — ultimately winds up in Earth’s upper atmosphere where it can wreak havoc on Earth’s protective ozone layer.

Shifting sands and tides make it difficult to measure accurately the amount of beach that’s available for recreation, development and conservation, but researchers have now combined several remote sensing technologies with historical data to create coastal maps with an unsurpassed level of accuracy.

Scientists have announced a major breakthrough in understanding the Earth’s climate machine by reconstructing highly accurate records of changes in ice volume and deep-ocean temperatures over the last 1.5 million years.

Water’s fate in China mirrors problems across the world: fouled, pushed far from its natural origins, squandered and exploited. Scientists look back at lessons learned in China and management strategies that hold solutions for China — and across the world.