Soil carbon cycling is closely linked with landscape complexities in soil properties, climate and land use. This Perspective outlines how soil formation theory could provide insight on landscape-scale soil–carbon interactions as well as carbon sequestration and improve predictions of future soil organic matter dynamics.

The Zanclean megaflood poured water from the western to the eastern Mediterranean basin through a shallow marine corridor in south-eastern Sicily, ending the isolation of the Mediterranean Sea from the global oceans about 5.3 million years ago, according to onshore-offshore geological data from southern Sicily and numerical modelling.

Alissa Flatley explains how detailed assessments of morphological dune changes are conducted with handheld terrestrial laser scanning.

Austin Routt explains how capacitively coupled resistivity can probe near-surface structures in highly resistive frozen ground.

Modelling of the evolution of the Kosi drainage basin near Chomolungma suggests that a river capture event occurred approximately 89 ka ago. Isostatic rebound due to this capture event could contribute 10–50% of the total rock uplift rate in the Chomolungma region and might partly explain Chomolungma’s renewed uplift rate and anomalous elevation.

Ceres’s surface is ice-rich and warm, so we expect craters to viscously flow. Yet most of Ceres’s craters are not shallow. A new model that includes a stronger, progressively dirtier icy crust, frozen from an ancient ocean, may reconcile this discrepancy.

The Holocene flooding and sedimentation history of the Nile illustrates how fluvial geomorphology has long influenced human society.

Although ongoing volcanic activity on Venus has been hypothesized, directly detecting active lava flows is challenging. Now, an analysis of Magellan radar images of Venus acquired at different times provides indications of ongoing volcanic activity in two distinct areas. This evidence also suggests a planet more volcanically active than previously thought.