Calcareous termite mounds in South Africa are ancient carbon reservoirs.

Ecosystems that offer carbon sequestration by leaching bicarbonate to groundwater are valuable natural capital. One region that may offer this service is the west coast of South Africa. Over 20 % is covered by soil mounds ("heuweltjies") up to 40 m diameter, 2 m high, inhabited by the southern harvester termite Microhodotermes viator and enriched in soil organic and inorganic carbon and soluble minerals.

Record of H and Cl from the Fukushima nuclear accident recovered from soil water in the unsaturated zone at Koriyama.

The opportunity to measure the concentrations of H and Cl released by the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 directly in rain was lost in the early stage of the accident. We have, however, been able to reconstruct the deposition record of atmospheric H and Cl following the accident using a bore hole that was drilled in 2014 at Koriyama at a distance of 60 km from the accident. The contributions of H and Cl from the accident are 1.

Interdisciplinary Analyses of Bronze Age Communities from Western Hungary Reveal Complex Population Histories.

In this study, we report 21 ancient shotgun genomes from present-day Western Hungary, from previously understudied Late Copper Age Baden, and Bronze Age Somogyvár-Vinkovci, Kisapostag, and Encrusted Pottery archeological cultures (3,530-1,620 cal Bce). Our results indicate the presence of high steppe ancestry in the Somogyvár-Vinkovci culture. They were then replaced by the Kisapostag group, who exhibit an outstandingly high (up to ∼47%) Mesolithic hunter-gatherer ancestry, despite this component being thought to be highly diluted by the time of the Early Bronze Age.

Tritium and radiocarbon in the water column of the Red Sea.

Despite being the busiest transient sea in the world due to the Suez Canal, radionuclide distribution studies in seawater and sediment of the Red Sea remain rare. A sampling expedition in the Red Sea was conducted from June 9 to July 6, 2021, visiting a transect of several deep sampling stations located along the central axis of the basin from the Gulf of Aqaba to the southern Red Sea (near Farasan Island, Saudi Arabia). The collected seawater profile samples were analyzed for tritium, radiocarbon and oxygen-18.