Climate shifts over this century are widely expected to alter the structure and functioning of temperate plant communities. However, long-term climate experiments in natural vegetation are rare and largely confined to systems with the capacity for rapid compositional change. In unproductive, grazed grassland at Buxton in

Oceanic anoxic events (OAEs) were episodes of widespread marine anoxia during which large amounts of organic carbon were buried on the ocean floor under oxygen-deficient bottom waters. OAE2, occurring at the Cenomanian/Turonian boundary (about 93.5 Myr ago), is the most widespread and best defined OAE of the mid-Cretaceous.

From the timing, it looks as if an episode of marked oceanic oxygen deficiency during the Cretaceous was the result of undersea volcanism. Studies of such events are relevant to the warming world of today.

A research vessel embedded in the thinning Arctic sea ice has a front-row seat for the cryospheric show of the century. Quirin Schiermeier reports from Darnley Bay, Canada.

A year after sending its first fully fledged expedition to the Arctic, India has established a research station in Svalbard, about 1,200 kilometres from the North Pole.

Here the authors show the effects of acidification on benthic ecosystems at shallow coastal sites where volcanic CO2 vents lower the pH of the water column. Along gradients of normal pH (8.1