The root zone is a vital part of the Earth system and a key element in hydrology, ecology, agronomy, and land surface processes. However, its definition varies across disciplines, creating barriers to interdisciplinary understanding. Moreover, characterizing the root zone is challenging due to a lack of consensus on definitions, estimation methods, and their merits and limitations. This opinion paper provides a holistic definition of the root zone from a hydrology perspective, including its moisture storage, deficit, and storage capacity. We demonstrate that the root zone plays a critical role in the biosphere, pedosphere, rhizosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and cryosphere of the Earth system. We underscore the limitations of the traditional reductionist approach in modelling this complex and dynamic zone and advocate for a shift towards a holistic, ecosystem-centred approach. We argue that a holistic approach offers a more systematic, simple, dynamic, scalable, and observable way to describe and predict the role of the root zone in Earth system science.@en

Water ice and gas hydrates can coexist in the permafrost and polar regions on Earth and in the universe. However, the role of ice in the mechanical response of ice-contained methane hydrates is still unclear. Here, we conduct direct million-atom molecular simulations of ice-contained polycrystalline methane hydrates and identify a crossover in the tensile strength and average compressive flow stress due to the presence of ice. The average mechanical shear strengths of hydrate-hydrate bicrystals are about three times as large as those of hydrate-ice bicrystals. The ice content, especially below 70%, shows a significant effect on the mechanical strengths of the polycrystals, which is mainly governed by the proportions of the hydrate-hydrate grain boundaries (HHGBs), the hydrate-ice grain boundaries (HIGBs), and the ice-ice grain boundaries (IIGBs). Quantitative analysis of the microstructure of the water cages in the polycrystals reveals the dissociation and reformation of various water cages due to mechanical deformation. These findings provide molecular insights into the mechanical behavior and microscopic deformation mechanisms of ice-contained methane hydrate systems on Earth and in the universe.

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Knowledge on the kinetics of gas hydrate dissociation in microporous sediments is very important for developing safe and efficient approaches to gas recovery from natural gas hydrate (NGH) deposits. Herein, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are used to study the dissociation kinetics in microporous sediments. The hydrate phase occupies a confined sandy nanopore formed by two hydroxylated silica surfaces with a buffering water layer between the hydrate and silica phase, meanwhile, this system is in contact with the bulk phase outside the pore. The hydrates in this sediment system dissociate layer-by-layer in a shrinking core manner. The released methane molecules aggregate and eventually evolve into nanobubbles, most of which are spherical cap-shaped on the hydroxylated silica surfaces. At high initial temperatures, a faster decomposition of the hydrate phase is observed, however, fewer methane molecules migrate to the bulk phase from the pore phase. These phenomena may occur because more methane molecules are released from the hydrate phase and facilitate the formation of nanobubbles with large heat injection; these nanobubbles can stably adsorb on the surface of silica and capture the surrounding methane molecules, thereby decreasing the number of methane molecules in the water phase. In addition, the injection speed of heat flow should be significantly increased at high dissociation temperatures when using the thermal stimulation method to extract gas from hydrates in tight sediments. This study provides molecular level insight into the kinetic mechanism of hydrate dissociation and theoretical guidance for gas production by thermal injection from sediments with low permeabilities.

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A sound knowledge of fundamental mechanical properties of water ice is of crucial importance to address a wide range of applications in earth science, engineering, as well as ice sculpture and winter sports, such as ice skating, ice fishing, ice climbing, bobsleighs, and so on. Here, we report large-scale molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of mechanical properties of bi- and poly-crystalline hexagonal ice (I_h) under mechanical loads. Results show that bicrystals, upon tension, exhibit either brittle or ductile fracture, depending on the microstructure of grain boundaries (GBs), whereas they show ductile fracture by amorphization and crystallographic slips emitted from GBs under compression. Under shearing, the strength of bicrystals exhibits a characteristic plateau or sawtooth behavior drawn out the initial elastic strains. Nanograined polycrystals are destabilized by strain-induced amorphization and collective GB sliding. Their mechanical responses depend on the grain size. Both tensile and compressive strengths decrease as grain size decreases, showing inverse Hall-Petch weakening behavior. Large fraction of amorphous water structure in polycrystals with small grain size is mainly responsible for the inverse Hall-Petch softening. Dislocation nucleation and propagation are also identified in nanograined ice, which is in good agreement with experimental measurements. Beyond the elastic strain, a combination of GB sliding, grain rotation, amorphization and recrystallization, phase transformation, and dislocation nucleation dominate the plastic deformation in both bicrystals and polycrystals.

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A sound knowledge of thermodynamic properties of sII hydrates is of great importance to understand the stability of sII gas hydrates in petroleum pipelines and in natural settings. Here, we report direct molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of the thermal expansion coefficient, the compressibility, and the specific heat capacity of C₃H₈, or tetrahydrofuran (THF), in mixtures of CH₄ or CO₂, in sII hydrates under a wide, relevant range of pressure and temperature conditions. The simulations were started with guest molecules positioned at the cage center of the hydrate. Annealing simulations were additionally performed for hydrates with THF. For the isobaric thermal expansion coefficient, an effective correction method was used to modify the lattice parameters, and the corrected lattice parameters were subsequently used to obtain thermal expansion coefficients in good agreement with experimental measurements. The simulations indicated that the isothermal expansion coefficient and the specific heat capacity of C₃H₈-pure hydrates were comparable but slightly larger than those of THF-pure hydrates, which could form Bjerrum defects. The considerable variation in the compressibility between the two appeared to be due to crystallographic defects. However, when a second guest molecule occupied the small cages of the THF hydrate, the deviation was smaller, because the subtle guest-guest interactions can offset an unfavorable configuration of unstable THF hydrates, caused by local defects in free energy. Unlike the methane molecule, the carbon dioxide molecule, when filling the small cage, can increase the expansion coefficient and compressibility as well as decrease the heat capacity of the binary hydrate, similar to the case of sI hydrates. The calculated bulk modulus for C₃H₈-pure and binary hydrates with CH₄ or CO₂ molecule varied between 8.7 and 10.6 GPa at 287.15K between 10 and 100 MPa. The results for the specific heat capacities varied from 3155 to 3750.0 J kg^-1 K^-1 for C₃H₈-pure and binary hydrates with CH₄ or CO₂ at 287.15K. These results are the first of this kind reported so far. The simulations show that the thermodynamic properties of hydrates largely depend on the enclathrated compounds. This provides a much-needed atomistic characterization of the sII hydrate properties and gives an essential input for large-scale discoveries of hydrates and processing as a potential energy source.

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