Thomas Gernon's team used computer models to propose that a cliff up to 2 km high, formed as Rodinia split, wore away a billion years of Grand Canyon rock. Snowball Earth glaciers are cast as the accomplice, and testing the idea now depends on dating whether the rock was stripped before, during or after the ice.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+10
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence50
MARUM-led researchers used niobium in a Greenland fjord core to tie local precipitation to the North Atlantic Oscillation over thousands of years. The paper's title limits that persistent link to the Late Holocene, and its glacier forecast assumes the relationship survives warming.
Reality
- Evidence50
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+15
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence55
Researchers found a 9-million-year-old molar from a water-dependent capybara relative in Chile's Atacama Desert. It adds to evidence that the desert had wet intervals long after its hyperarid core began forming in the Eocene.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+10
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence50
Scientists report charcoal from 90-million-year-old fires in a seafloor core drilled about 900 km from the South Pole, the southernmost wildfires on record. Fire grew more common as rainforest gave way to moss bog, but the case that fire drove the change rests on timing in one core.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+8
- Incentives
- Insufficient
- Confidence55
Researchers reviewing East Antarctica's Wilkes Subglacial Basin say its ice would raise seas 3 to 4 metres if it all melted. The basin shrank sharply in past climates 2 to 3 degrees warmer, yet too little ocean data exists to project how fast it could retreat now.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+10
- Incentives55
- Confidence50
Simulations strand Earth outside the heliosphere three times in 14 million years, and dust in sediment cores agrees. The cadence, roughly one encounter every 4.5 million years, limits what it explains.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+35
- Incentives55
- Confidence45
An international team sorted 539 million years of CO2 and temperature proxies into five recurring regimes and found elevated extinction near the transitions between them. What makes those transitions harmful is still open.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+12
- Incentives45
- Confidence55
Priscilla Martinez's team pulled the tooth from a marine deposit at El Morro in northern Chile. Freshwater fish, gavials and palm phytoliths from the same beds carry more of the argument than the tooth does.
Reality
- Evidence72
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives30
- Confidence65
Aksel Samuelsberg's group at Tromso put precipitating sea salt into a simple climate model and watched the freeze settle into the colder of two Snowball states, on the strength of a reflectance value measured in a lab.
Reality
- Evidence48
- Adoption
- Insufficient
- Hype gap+8
- Incentives24
- Confidence45