The Altar Stone, the 6000 kg central sandstone megalith at Stonehenge in southern England, is suggested to have originated from the Orcadian Basin in northeast Scotland, some 700 km away. However, its source location within this large basin remains unresolved and its mode of transport uncertain. Proposed mechanisms include Neolithic human transport via marine or overland routes or southward movement as a glacial erratic. Here,...

Understanding the drivers of aboveground wood productivity (AWP) in tropical forests is crucial for explaining ecosystem functioning and predicting their responses to environmental change. While climatic water availability is a well‐established driver, the role of soil nutrients and their interaction with other resources remains uncertain. We investigated how soil nutrients and light interactions shape AWP in lowland tropical...

The ongoing climate change increases vegetation flammability in the boreal forests of eastern North America, leading to more intense and severe wildfires. Using palaeoecological data—including charcoal, pollen, chironomids and testate amoebae—and climate model simulations of vapour pressure deficit (VPD) and available soil water (ASW), we analysed fire dynamics over the past 8000 years in boreal eastern North America. Over the...

“Synergistic Observing Network for Ocean Prediction (SynObs)” was launched in 2022 as a project of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development to evaluate the importance of ocean observation systems and co-design the future evolution of the ocean observing network. SynObs is currently leading the flagship OSEs/OSSEs, an internationally coordinated activity in which observing system experiments (OSEs)...

Integrating ice‐sheet models with empirical data pertaining to palaeo‐ice sheets promotes advances in the models used in sea‐level predictions and can improve our understanding of past ice‐sheet behaviour. The large number of empirical constraints on the last British–Irish Ice Sheet make it ideal for model–data comparison experiments. Here, we present an ensemble of 600 model simulations, which are compared with data on former...

Identifying locations of refugia from the thermal stresses of climate change for coral reefs and better managing them is one of the key recommendations for climate change adaptation. We review and summarize approximately 30 years of applied research focused on identifying climate refugia to prioritize the conservation actions for coral reefs under rapid climate change. We found that currently proposed climate refugia and the l...

The ocean is the main heat reservoir in Earth’s climate system, absorbing most of the top-of-the-atmosphere excess radiation. As the climate warms, anomalously warm and fresh ocean waters in the densest layers formed near Antarctica spread northward through the abyssal ocean, while successions of warming and cooling events are seen in the deep-ocean layers formed near Greenland. The abyssal warming and freshening expands the o...

The western United States is projected to experience more frequent and severe wildfires in the future due to drier and hotter climate conditions, exacerbating destructive wildfire impacts on forest ecosystems such as tree mortality and unsuccessful post‐fire regeneration. While empirical studies have revealed strong relationships between topographical information and plant regeneration, ecological processes in ecosystem models...