ScienceDaily: Earth & Climate News

Southern Ontario wetlands provide $4.2 billion worth of sediment filtration and phosphorus removal services each year, keeping our drinking water sources clean and helping to mitigate harmful and nuisance algal blooms in our lakes and rivers.

Lead haunts old homes in chipping paint and pipes, but it also lurks outside, in soil. It's the stuff of mud pies and garden plots, crumbling from boot treads to join household dust in forgotten corners. It's easily overlooked, but soil can be an important source of lead where children live and play.

A new study found that seafloor sediments have the potential to transmit a deadly pathogen to local corals and hypothesizes that sediments have played a role in the persistence of a devastating coral disease outbreak throughout Florida and the Caribbean.

Storms over the waters around Antarctica drive an outgassing of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to a new international study. The research group used advanced ocean robots for the study, which provides a better understanding of climate change and can lead to better global climate models.

Decommissioning and clean-up are ongoing at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP); however, many difficult problems remain unaddressed. Chief amongst these problems is the retrieval and management of fuel debris.

The great diversity of scientific techniques and methods used in the study of marine microplastics pollution limits the current knowledge of this serious environmental problem threatening our ecosystems.

An international team of researchers has demonstrated a technique for producing perovskite photovoltaic materials on an industrial scale, which will reduce the cost and improve the performance of mass-produced perovskite solar cells.

Water quality in rivers is affected by underpinning 'natural' hydrogeological and biogeochemical processes, as well as interactions between people and their environment that are accelerating stress on water resources at unprecedented rates. Pollutants can move at different speeds and accumulate in varying quantities along rivers where the mix of the complex 'cocktail' of chemicals that is making its way towards the ocean is constantly changing, a new study reveals.

More than 70 million tons of carbon were prevented from being released into the atmosphere under a deforestation emissions reduction scheme in Indonesia -- but researchers point out this is only 3 per cent of the total required by Indonesia's Nationally Defined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreement.

Taking into account a variety of trees and green structures in four otherwise similar residential courtyards, a new study evaluates their effects on thermal comfort, biodiversity, carbon storage and social interaction. The authors show that those courtyards with more green structures yield considerably better results than those with fewer, and in their cooling capacity have a significant impact on people's thermal comfort.