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This position paper elaborates on the significance and implications of the world's soil systems as climate regulators in their still unexploited potential to fight climate change and in the aspiration of modern society aiming at sustainable use of resources and safeguarding of life on the planet.The paper stresses the importance of Soil Management and Land Conservation as essential tools for the longevity of civilizations.Under the current climate change, there is a close relationship between climate factors and soil performance, but soil influences climate parameters, making it an important climate regulator.The text calls for a vision that recognizes soil as a natural system with socio-economic benefits and ecological functions and mentions the European Green Deal and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as initiatives addressing soil and land issues.The text emphasizes the need for a profound and intelligent radical change in environmental, social, and economic approaches to address climate change. It highlights the responsibility of the current generation to make the right choices for the planet and future generations.

Reply to the discussion and comments of Azerêdo et al. (2023) and Schneider et al. (2023).

Natural Hydrogen is a new, clean and low-carbon source of hydrogen that is produced by the Earth, and can migrate and accumulate in geological reservoirs. Its exploration has begun in many countries and its price could be significantly lower than other H2 sources. In this position paper, the earth2 initiative summarizes (i) what natural hydrogen is, (ii) how we explore and produce it, (iii) the benefits of this new resource, (iv) the maturity of the technology, (v) the presence of a very active community (vi) the potential growth for this business, (vii) the need for regulatory evolution and appropriate taxonomy at European level and (viii) the next steps in natural H2 development, considering the needs for investments in demonstration systems and pilots.

There has been controversy regarding the air pollutants emitted from sources closely related to the activities of daily life in China, such as cooking, setting off fireworks, sacrificial incense and joss paper burning, and barbecue (which have been named the five missing sources – FMSs), and the extent to which they impact the outdoor air quality. To date, due to the lack of both an activity dataset and emission factors, there have been no estimations of the emission of air pollutants from FMSs. In this work, we have attempted to combine questionnaire data, various statistical data, and data on points of interest to obtain a relatively complete set of activity data. The emission factors (EFs) of carbonaceous aerosols were tested in our lab. Emission inventories of carbonaceous aerosols with a high spatial–temporal resolution for FMSs were then established, and the spatial variation trend and driving forces were discussed. From 2000 to 2018, organic carbon (OC) emissions were in the range of 4268–4919 t. OC emissions from FMSs were between 1.5 ‰ and 2.2 ‰ of the total emissions in China. Black carbon (BC), elemental carbon (EC), and brown carbon (BrC) absorption cross-section (ACSBrC) emissions from FMSs were in the ranges of 22.6–43.9 t, 213–324 t, and 14.7–35.6 Gm2, respectively. Their emissions tended to be concentrated in certain periods and areas. The OC emission intensities in central urban areas were 3.85–50.5 times those in rural areas (due to the high density of human activity), while the ACSBrC emissions in rural regions accounted for 63.0–79.5 % of the total emissions (resulting from uncontrolled fireworks). A mass of fireworks led to much higher ACSBrC and EC emissions on Chinese New Year's Eve, with respective values that were 1444 and 262 times their corresponding yearly averages. Significant (p<0.01) correlations between the population's income and pollutant emissions were also found: these correlations were positive (r=0.94) and negative (r=-0.94) for urban and rural regions, respectively, indicating the necessity to regulate residents' lifestyles and increase residents' income in respective urban and rural regions. This study provides firsthand data to identify emissions, variation trends, and impacting factors from the FMSs. This is helpful for modeling works on air quality, the climate effect, and human health risks during specific periods or in specific regions as well as for modifying emission control policies. The data compiled in this work can found at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.19999991.v2 (Cheng et al., 2022).

To mark the 20th anniversary of Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences (NHESS), an interdisciplinary and international journal dedicated to the public discussion and open-access publication of high-quality studies and original research on natural hazards and their consequences, we highlight 11 key publications covering major subject areas of NHESS that stood out within the past 20 years. The papers cover all the topics contemplated in the European Geosciences Union (EGU) Division on Natural Hazards including dissemination, education, outreach and teaching. The selected articles thus represent excellent scientific contributions in the major areas of natural hazards and risks and helped NHESS to become an exceptionally strong journal representing interdisciplinary areas of natural hazards and risks. At its 20th anniversary, we are proud that NHESS is not only used by scientists to disseminate research results and novel ideas but also by practitioners and decision-makers to present effective solutions and strategies for sustainable disaster risk reduction.

Floods kill numerous people every year in both developed and developing countries. The transfer of research findings from the academic community to practitioners, policy-makers and citizens may reduce the impact of floods on mortality. This systematic review analyzes 44 scientific articles extracted from WOS and SCOPUS databases written in English, published between 2010 and 2020, and focuses on flood fatalities. The first main finding of this review is the classification of drivers of flood mortality into two groups: the first group relates to the environment, and the second group relates to the fatalities. The second main finding is the identification of strategies to practically cope with the identified drivers of flood fatalities. The main shortcomings of the review concern (a) the unavailability of papers based on flood fatality occurrence in developing countries and (b) the absence of data focusing on people who have survived floods. This review amplifies useful findings, best practices and lessons learned that can be useful for administrators, risk managers, and teachers of primary and secondary schools to mitigate the impact of future floods on human life.

After receiving a mini-grant for developing integrated information literacy programs, a Geography/Geology Department faculty member worked with the Science Librarian to embed information literacy in a cross-listed geology and geography course, Geog/Geol 455, Introduction to Remote Sensing. Planning for the revisions to the class started with identification of five key literacy standards for the discipline of remote sensing. Each standard was addressed through a combination of teaching, assignments and measurements. From this planning exercise, two lectures and two laboratory exercises on information literacy were developed. Student response to the information literacy material, as measured through pre- and post-course surveys, was overwhelmingly positive. The project also provided an important opportunity for collaboration between the scientist and librarian. (Contains 2 tables and 4 figures.)

Mineral materials, such as corundum, quartz and periclase are very often used in technological processes. Due to its characteristics, and chemical reaction in solid state, these minerals form very interesting and useful material, cordierite. The mineral ratio in this compound (MgO : Al2O3 : SiO2) is 2:2:5. They form cordierite, electronic ceramic, which can be sintered in a narrow temperature range, at about 1375 °C. Composition of this electronic ceramics material is is 2MgO-2Al2O3-5SiO2 (MAS) and in this research 20% mass Bi2O3 was added in the aim of decrease the sintering temperature. The effects of sintering, the composition and morphology were followed by x-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy and EDS analysis, as a function of sintering temperature. MAS ceramics were sintered at 1000ºC, 1100ºC and 1200ºC.

Students in Honors Physical Geology at Louisiana State University (LSU) participated in instruction in eighth- to ninth-grade geology and geography classes in East Baton Rouge Parish Schools (EBRPS) to help meet community needs. LSU students created instructional materials and reflected on the service activity to gain a deeper understanding of course objectives, an appreciation of Earth science as it relates to the global community, and an enhanced sense of civic responsibility. The service-learning project focused on an historical volcanic eruption and consisted of four parts distributed throughout the semester: K-12 teacher interview, research paper, poster and presentation to peers, and classroom teaching. Reflection, peer review, teamwork, and revision were emphasized. Presentations focused on Earth Science Literacy Initiative (ESLI)'s "Big Ideas" (e.g., humans can mitigate but not control natural hazards). LSU students' perception of their learning from reflections/class evaluations indicated that they moved from "remembering-understanding" to "analyzing-evaluating-creating" within Bloom's Taxonomy hierarchy. LSU students also gained valuable experience in creating, reviewing, and revising written and oral communication. Based on K-12 teacher responses, EBRPS students learned about volcanoes, deepened their understanding of plate tectonics, and learned about college. Service learning requires a strong desire for collaboration among all participants. Communication and coordination are vital to success so that everyone has the same expectations, knows his/her role, and problems are identified and resolved.

Abstract We thank the authors (hereafter referred to as CCC) for providing us an opportunity to clarify some points of our original paper. CCC list in their abstract three “key points”that we respond to in this Reply. The first comment is the central one and the most developed. It deals mainly with discussion of features of methods of spectral analysis, mainly SSA. We have quoted the sub‐parts of that comment as items 1a to 1k. The replies to comments/key points 2 and 3 are shorter. We disagree with most of the comments by CCC and explain why. We conclude that we have successfully countered CCC's criticism and shown many of their points to be unsubstantiated. The main problem seems to reside in differences concerning the literature on Singular Spectral Analysis and our use of it. Much of our response to the comments can be found in textbooks and review papers on SSA and time series analysis; we quote extensively, both in our original paper and in this response to CCC, Golyandina and Zhigljavsky (2013).

Recent discoveries about the role of microorganisms in the establishment of the geological conditions in the planet have lead to the development of courses in Geomicrobiology. Unfortunately, most courses are designed for students with a strong Geology background, which is a limitation for universities that lack such courses. To overcome this limitation at our university, we have designed a special topics course entitled Introductory Geomicrobiology that was offered for the first time to undergraduate students from the Biology, Marine Biology and Microbiology Programs. To attract non-geology majors the course included topics such as description of Early Earth ecosystems, search for geo-biological signatures and current approaches in the search for extra-terrestrial life forms. An active learning environment was fostered throughout the course through different activities including oral reports of research papers in the subject, followed by Gallery Runs and class discussions. Our assessment strategies, both formative and summative, revealed that such presentations were an effective way to introduce students to eight main concepts of Geomicrobiology. Student performance was stronger in group discussions than individually, with Gallery Runs as the preferred class discussion technique. Overall, our assessment system proved that the design of the course was effective in teaching Geomicrobiology to nongeology majors.

Abstract The objective of this short paper was to provide some advice on how to write a geoscience paper of international standard and to warn against some common pitfalls. It is focused on how to structure a paper and stresses the importance of building its contents around a well-defined problem. Furthermore, the importance of moving away from outdated and counterproductive ways of describing and interpreting deformation is emphasized. In particular, describing structures and tectonic evolution in a poorly founded scheme of multiple deformation phases and making stress interpretations from structurally complex and heterogeneous rocks where rotations and stress perturbations are difficult or impossible to account for are strongly discouraged. Instead, I encourage the use of modern structural geology and tectonics ideas that, among other things, allow for composite and overprinting structures to form progressively and diachronously with a wide variation in style and orientation during a single deformation history. Also, more emphasis should be put on strain and kinematics, toning down the use of stress. After all, stress is only observed through strain and kinematics; going from one to the other is not straightforward in general, and particularly difficult in ductilely deformed rocks.

Image classification becomes a very challenging task when it involves classes that have shared characteristics and few data are available for training the classifier. Considering this problem, in this work we adopt a case study based on images from geoscience papers and investigate how different features can be combined in order to improve image classification results. In our investigation, we present a tool for evaluating class separability based on the position of the samples in a two-dimensional map according to different features. Moreover, we investigate the usefulness of classifiers’ membership probabilities for our scenario, validating if they can be used as reliable measures of the confidence in the predicted labels. Our experimental results show that it is possible to take advantage of deep learning models’ ability to learn discriminating features from data and combine them with hand-crafted features to improve classification. With this feature combination, we trained a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier whose results are better than the ones achieved using only deep learning.

Characterization of porewater chemistry in low-permeability, clay-rich rocks provides insights into solute transport mechanisms and the origin and residence time of porewater. Extraction of porewater for chemical quantification is challenging, and several methods have been applied including squeezing, advective displacement, crush and leach, and a relatively new technique that extracts porewater by absorption into a cellulosic paper by capillary action. Here we compare porewater Cl− and Br− mass ratios from samples using the paper-absorption and crush-and-leach techniques. Samples were obtained from Upper Ordovician shales in the Michigan Basin in Ontario, the Opalinus Clay at the Mont Terri Rock Laboratory in Switzerland, and the Upper Ordovician Lorraine Group shale in southern Quebec. The data display consistent and reproducible differences among methods for Cl− and Br− mass ratios, with the paper-absorption method producing systematically lower Cl− : Br− ratios. The observed differences in Cl− : Br− ratios are attributed primarily to anion exclusion effects which are stronger for Br− than for Cl−, resulting in higher Br− concentrations in the largest pores that are preferentially sampled by the paper-absorption technique. In addition, calculations suggest that Cl− is more effective than Br− in forming ion pairs and clusters with neutral or positive charge which can enter the diffuse double layer. This causes a further decrease in the Cl− : Br− ratios for the mobile water. One important message from this work is that different extraction methods should not be expected to converge on a unique porewater Cl− : Br− ratio because each method reflects different proportions of the interlayer, diffuse double layer, and mobile fractions of porewater.