EOS

Climate & Personal Health

The health effects of our warming climate go far beyond heat illnesses and direct fallouts from more frequent natural disasters. This issue of Eos explores some of the more nuanced ways that climate change is influencing personal health outcomes.

As deputy editor Emily Gardner bluntly states in the headline of this month’s new feature, “Antimicrobial Resistance Is Killing Millions. Climate Change Is Making It Worse.” Although climate change is far from the only (or even the leading) cause of antimicrobial resistance, it is a factor: “Climate change can modify the environmental, ecological, and social conditions that allow resistant microorganisms and resistance genes to emerge, persist, move, and reach humans, animals, and ecosystems,” environmental health scientist Ronan Adler Tavella explains.

There are many other correlations between specific effects of climate change and personal health. Some scientists have linked an increase in particulate air pollution driven by more intense, more frequent wildfires to greater instances of stroke. Others have found that sea surface temperatures may help predict seasonal risks of malaria thousands of kilometers away.

Researchers have long tracked the mental toll of climate change but are now drawing specific lessons from specific instances. Scientist-authors Maheshwari Neelam and Kamaldeep Bhui, for example, explain how lake bed dust from the drying Great Salt Lake is associated with mental health outcomes across Utah in “Lessons from Linking Great Salt Lake Desiccation and Depression.” Scientists are only beginning to learn the lessons of extreme temperatures and fatal overdoses, explains science reporter Grace van Deelen in “Extreme Heat and Extreme Cold Drive an Increase in Fatal Overdoses.”

Finally, effectively communicating the relationships between climate change and personal health is a science unto itself. That’s one message from research in GeoHealth that Rebecca Owen covers in “Many Americans Underestimate Health Risks of Extreme Weather, New Study Finds.” Poor risk communication can leave affected populations underprepared to face health dangers that can accompany climate-driven ecological changes, extreme heat and cold, and more intense instances of natural hazards.

We hope this issue of Eos helps improve risk communication by allowing you to better appreciate the scope and influence of climate change.

—Caryl-Sue Micalizio, Editor in Chief

Citation: Micalizio, C.-S. (2026), Individual consequences of a global crisis, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260279. Published on 1 September 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Climate & Personal Health

Born with cystic fibrosis, Ella Balasa is used to doing several breathing treatments a day and taking antibiotics to fight the infections in her lungs. By her mid-twenties, the antibiotic courses were taking longer and longer to work. In 2019, she got severely sick. Despite a combination of oral and intravenous antibiotics, her lungs would fill up with mucus every few hours. Her lung function dipped down to the teens. (Normal function is 80% or higher.)

“I’m not going to live to be able to fight off these infections,” she remembers thinking. “Antibiotics aren’t working, and that’s all we have, so I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

In her mid-twenties, Ella Balasa faced a serious lung infection caused by Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium that left her struggling to breathe. Credit: Laventie Benoit-Joseph/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

“Antimicrobial use remains one of the central drivers of AMR, but climate change can modify the environmental, ecological, and social conditions that allow resistant microorganisms and resistance genes to emerge, persist, move, and reach humans, animals, and ecosystems.”

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one in six infections is drug resistant. In some areas, it’s one in three. In 2021, WHO estimated that bacterial antimicrobial resistance (AMR) was associated with more than 4.7 million deaths around the world.

There are many factors driving the rise of AMR, including the misuse and overprescription of antibiotics not just for humans, but for controlling disease among livestock and agricultural crops. But a growing body of research suggests there’s another piece of the puzzle: a changing climate.

“Antimicrobial use remains one of the central drivers of AMR, but climate change can modify the environmental, ecological, and social conditions that allow resistant microorganisms and resistance genes to emerge, persist, move, and reach humans, animals, and ecosystems,” Ronan Adler Tavella, an environmental health scientist at the Antimicrobial Resistance Institute at the Federal University of São Paulo, told Eos in an email.

How Do Antimicrobial-Resistant Genes Spread?

Antimicrobial-resistant genes (ARGs) are found in nature because different microbial groups are often locked in ecological competition. In the soil, water, and even air, microbes produce antimicrobial compounds and resistance mechanisms designed to take out or communicate with competitor microbes. Bacteria are also capable of a unique phenomenon called horizontal gene transfer, meaning that bacteria can transfer genes between each other outside of a parent-offspring relationship, even across species.

Soil microbes, seen here under a microscope, naturally produce antibiotic genes as a form of offense against other microbes—and antibiotic-resistant genes as a form of defense. Credit: Courtesy of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The field of medicine was transformed when physicians and researchers began taking advantage of ARGs to treat disease in the early 20th century. The broad class of antimicrobial drugs is designed to kill, inactivate, or slow the growth of microbes, which can include bacteria as well as viruses, parasites, and fungi.

“Antibiotics themselves are the pillar of basic and modern medicine.”

Antimicrobials are used to treat animal bites, pneumonia, strep throat, urinary tract infections, Lyme disease, cardiac infections, diarrhea, sexually transmitted diseases, ringworm, malaria, yeast infections, valley fever, eye and ear infections, parasitic infections, and many, many other ailments. In fact, experts say there’s not much we can do without them.

“Antibiotics themselves are the pillar of basic and modern medicine,” said Sarah Paulin-Deschenaux, a microbiologist and technical officer on antimicrobial resistance in WHO’s AMR department. “We need to have effective antibiotics to enable the treatment of simple cuts, the allowance of surgical procedures, [and] safe delivery for cancer chemotherapy.”

But there’s a catch.

An antimicrobial designed to kill a specific microbe—say, E. coli—doesn’t kill every single microbe. It kills many of them, but the most resistant ones survive. These microbes with ARGs can reproduce, creating a whole new community of microbes that don’t respond to the antimicrobial, creating the need for another.

However, overuse of antibiotics isn’t the only thing that can lead harmful microbes to grow stronger and spread. Everything from heavy metals to fertilizers to pharmaceutical waste in soil can cause stress to soil microbes.

“Anything that stresses them—heat, chemicals—all this is going to increase their mutation rates,” said Jason Burnham, an infectious disease and medicine professor at Washington University and VA St. Louis.

Fighting Infection in a Climate Hot Spot

Because Balasa, the cystic fibrosis patient, had to take antibiotics so often, the microbes in her body, which tend to proliferate in the scar tissue of her lungs, grew resistant over time.

But some antibiotic-resistant infections come seemingly without warning. Shortly after finishing her master’s degree in Mumbai, India, Bhakti Chavan was diagnosed with drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB), though she had no previous history of the disease.

For 8 months, Chavan received antibiotic injections six times a week. Her course of oral antibiotics, a combination of four to five drugs taken daily, went on for another 16 months. Her side effects included depression, a darkened skin tone, and heavy nausea. She was unable to work for about 2 years. She stopped seeing friends and even stopped looking in the mirror.

“Without having any previous history of TB, I got directly diagnosed with drug-resistant tuberculosis,” she said. “That means the strains are already circulating in the environment.”

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. Shortly after college graduation, Bhakti Chavan was diagnosed with a drug-resistant form of tuberculosis, despite having no history of the disease. Credit: Ajay Kumar Chaurasiya/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

India is a hot spot for both high heat and AMR, which can be a deadly combination. As of 2021, an estimated 31% of India’s population over the age of 15 had a tuberculosis infection. It’s a situation Chavan is all too aware of.

When Bhakti Chavan was diagnosed with an antibiotic-resistant strain of tuberculosis, she had to take specialized antibiotics for two years. Her symptoms included depression, nausea, weight loss, and a darkened skin tone. Credit: Bhakti Chavan

Humans are struggling in the face of climate change, but microbes “are growing faster, they are becoming stronger, and they are becoming resistant,” Chavan said. “We need to seriously look into climate change right now. Because we need to be one step ahead of them.”

Strength in Adaptability

The climate has changed rapidly in the decades since the Industrial Revolution, leaving many individuals, communities, and nations struggling to adapt. In contrast, adaptability may just be bacteria’s greatest strength, Burnham explained.

For “some bacteria, their doubling time, or their ability to make a copy of themselves, is like 20 minutes. So, they can change really quickly to anything in their environment, whether that’s heat or pollutants or antibiotics,” Burnham said. “Obviously, we humans can’t do that as fast.”

Higher temperatures are making it easier for mosquitoes carrying diseases like malaria, seen here under a microscope, to thrive. Credit: Hanna Sörensson/Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

Burnham used the example of the sickle cell anemia gene. Over time, the gene variant developed in people who live in tropical, mosquito-friendly areas where malaria is endemic because having a copy of the gene provides a strong resistance to malaria.

There were “similar conditions for so long that humans actually were able to adapt,” Burnham said. “Now things are changing so fast that they can’t” evolve quickly enough.

Higher temperatures are linked to increased risk of tuberculosis, COVID-19, and a wide array of other infectious diseases.

“Almost every type of bacterial infection categorization that we have, those are increased in warmer, more humid times of the year,” Burnham said. “So, surgical site infections, urinary tract infections, skin infections, pneumonias, bloodstream infections. All of these things are more common when it’s warm.”

All of this represents an indirect, but real, link between climate change and AMR: When it’s hotter, more people are sick. And when more people are sick, more people are taking antibiotics.

Paulin-Deschenaux of WHO was careful to state that climate change is not the cause of AMR but noted that evidence linking the two is growing.

There is some evidence indicating that climate change may “accelerate the development and spread of drug-resistant infections,” she said.

As a cystic fibrosis patient, Ella Balasa has battled forms of antimicrobial resistance throughout her life. Credit: Ella Balasa

Balasa, the cystic fibrosis patient, now works as a patient advocate and consultant, a role in which she speaks about the importance of examining alternatives to antibiotics. She herself has found success with an experimental bacteriophage treatment. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect and destroy bacteria.

“Even if we develop new antibiotics in the future, bacteria are going to become resistant no matter what,” Balasa said. “And so, I really urge researchers and drug developers to think outside the box of the development of more traditional antibiotics. I just don’t think traditional antibiotics are a viable long-term solution.”

Another important piece of the puzzle, Paulin-Deschenaux emphasized, is prevention of infections in the first place, particularly in areas without strong health care systems and infrastructure.

“One of the best lines, really, for mitigating AMR is strengthening prevention: investing in clean water, sanitation, hygiene, and infection prevention practices, as well as immunization.”

The Air We Breathe

There’s more to the story than adaptability. A changing climate can also enhance bacteria’s ability to travel from one area of the globe to another.

AMR can spread through wastewater, such as when patients taking antibiotics pass remnants of the drugs as waste. When a natural disaster, such as a hurricane or flood, affects wastewater treatment plants, the spread can be dramatically sped up. Some research has even indicated that as glaciers melt, ARGs stored in the ice for thousands of years can be released into the environment.

AMR’s pathways through the soil can be affected by climate too. For instance, drought conditions can lead to desiccated soils that in turn lead to an escalation in the production of both antibiotics and ARGs.

But perhaps the most understudied transmission pathway is the air itself.

Airborne bacteria are shown here, magnified 3,000 times by optical microscopy. Credit: Josef Reischig/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY SA 3.0

Drug-resistant pathogens can travel vast distances when they are aerosolized, or made small and light enough to be carried through the air: A 2024 study showed that aerosolized bacteria and fungi (including resistant species) can travel thousands of kilometers through the air.

But it’s “very, very hard to analyze the air microbiome,” in part because of the potential for contamination, said Fumito Maruyama, an environmental microbiologist at Hiroshima University who focuses on antibiotic resistance and pathogens in the natural environment. “That’s one reason why we still don’t know much about the air resistome.”

Maruyama and Salametu Saibu, an environmental microbiologist and postdoctoral researcher in his lab, introduced the concept of the “air resistome,” or the community of ARGs held in and traveling through the atmosphere, in a 2026 review paper.

Organisms carrying ARGs can enter the air via soil or water, then be redeposited in soil or water in a new location, Saibu explained. These particles can be inhaled by humans, potentially exposing them to antibiotic-resistant microorganisms or ARGs.

Increased air temperatures also make it easier for bacteria to horizontally transfer genes, she added.

Here, E. coli is seen during the process of bacterial conjugation, a form of horizontal gene transfer. The thin appendages labeled “F-pilus” are conduits the microbes use to share DNA. Credit: Jonasz Patkowski/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

“When the temperature is warm, it enables transmission of antibiotic-resistant genes from one community to another community, from one bacterial population to another bacterial population,” Saibu said. “There’s no barrier, no barrier at all.”

But climate change is more than just higher temperatures. Cascading effects can lead to increased risk of disasters such as flooding, drought, and wildfires. Wildfires can worsen respiratory conditions, leading to increased hospital visits and antibiotic use.

A less studied link between wildfire smoke and AMR, Adler Tavella explained, is smoke’s potential ability to aerosolize resistant microbes and genes.

“Wildfire smoke should not be viewed only as chemical air pollution,” he said. “Fires can aerosolize microorganisms from soils, vegetation, and burned biomass, and smoke plumes can transport bacteria, fungi, spores, and other biological particles.”

Breathing is, of course, unavoidable, and taking stronger antibiotics to combat increasingly resistant bacteria contributes to a vicious cycle. Though antibiotics can pay off for shorter-term illnesses like Chavan’s bout of drug-resistant tuberculosis, AMR can leave patients with chronic illnesses, like Balasa, with few options. Though the bacteriophage treatment she began in 2020 has been beneficial, in the past few years, she’s been getting sick more frequently again.

“You can’t fully get rid of resistant pathogenic bacteria, at least not in the cystic fibrosis lung microbiome. They can’t be eradicated, and they are incessant and very resilient,” she said.

Drug-resistant pathogens can travel vast distances when aerosolized. This satellite video shows aerosols visible from NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System model. Blue represents sea salt aerosols, pink is dust aerosols, orange/red is smoke from fires, and green is sulfates from pollution and volcanoes. Credit: NASA’s Global Modeling Assimilation Office (GMAO) and NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) The One Health Approach

With a wealth of studies documenting the inequitable effects of climate change, it may come as no surprise that the highest number of drug-resistant infections occur in low- and middle-income countries, where health systems are the weakest. It’s another example of a dangerous feedback loop: With infections more common and high-quality diagnostics less common, people in these countries are more likely to get sick and less likely to receive the appropriate treatment.

“It’s a global issue, and we need to fight it together.”

A lack of treatment access, inappropriate or unregulated use of antimicrobials, and a dearth of resources that could prevent infection, such as clean water and immunization programs, make for a dangerous combination, said Paulin-Deschenaux. “That coming all together really is a melting pot for antimicrobial resistance.”

Researchers are largely united in viewing AMR as a problem requiring a multidisciplinary, global effort, or what WHO often calls a “One Health” approach. The approach recognizes that the health of humans, animals, plants, and the wider environment are linked. Therefore, the prevention, detection, and treatment of disease require collaboration between scientists, physicians, public health specialists, governments, industry, and even patients.

“Everybody must be informed about antibiotic resistance and about the environment, how we should take care of the environment for the next generation to come,” Saibu said. “It’s a global issue, and we need to fight it together.”‘

Across the globe, geoscientists are stepping up to the challenge.

• In China, soil scientists are comparing soil resistomes across the country to learn more about how agricultural practices are contributing to AMR’s spread, while environmental engineers are developing methods to degrade antibiotic contaminants in water and slow their transport through soil.
• In the United States, environmental scientists are studying the presence of ARGs in urban karst aquifer systems and how different soil management strategies affect the resistome.
• In Brazil, environmental scientists like Adler Tavella are investigating the links between catastrophic floods and AMR, while others are researching the use of bacteriophages as antibiotic alternatives.
• In South Africa, researchers are studying the role of extracellular DNA in transporting ARGs from wastewater treatment plants to rivers.

In May 2026, WHO adopted an updated global action plan on antimicrobial resistance that outlined priorities, including raising awareness, enhancing surveillance systems and laboratory networks, improving infection prevention to reduce the need for antimicrobials, ensuring equitable access to and appropriate use of the drugs, and accelerating research into AMR. The report notes the growing importance of tackling the problem, suggesting that AMR could reduce global life expectancy by 1.8 years within a decade and cause up to 39 million deaths by 2050.

“Solving AMR will require much broader collaboration than we traditionally imagine,” said Lianping Yang, a public health scientist at Sun Yat-sen University who researches AMR and climate change. “If we want to protect antibiotics for future generations, we need to think beyond prescribing practices. We need a healthy environment, a healthy planet, a stronger health system, and better preparation for a changing climate.”

Moreover, Yang said, “sustainable development strategies are important for helping the global, especially the low- and middle-income countries to address the dual threats of climate change and AMR.”

—Emily Gardner (@emfurd.bsky.social), Deputy Editor

Citation: Gardner, E. (2026), Antimicrobial resistance is killing millions. Climate change is making it worse., Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260274. Published on 1 September 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Editors’ Vox is a blog from AGU’s Publications Department.

“Mysterious”, “a black box”, “I’m really not sure…”—these are phrases many early career researchers might use when discussing the editorial process of peer-reviewed scientific journals. Peer-review is esoteric as it is, and while most scientists become familiar with peer review as authors and, eventually, reviewers, very few receive formal training in how editorial decisions are made or how to evaluate manuscripts from the broader perspective of an editor (Gradoville and Deemer, 2022). The Early Career Editorial Fellows (ECEF) program, launched in 2024 in Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences (JGR: Biogeosciences) and GeoHealth, offers an opportunity to glimpse behind the veil of journal editing and gain that perspective. The program aims to cultivate the next generation of scientific editors by providing early-career researchers with hands-on editorial experience, mentorship, and exposure to the decision-making process (Xenopoulos and Nguyen, 2024). Through mentorship from experienced editors, fellows learn to evaluate research beyond their own areas of expertise, contribute to the broader scientific community, and develop the skills needed to become both capable reviewers and future editors. As the first cohort to complete the program in JGR: Biogeosciences, we wanted to share our experiences in the hope that more AGU journal editorial boards will  consider offering this opportunity.

We’ve learned the ropes of scientific publishing and journal editing from reviewer recruitment through synthesizing feedback and issuing editorial recommendations.

Over the past two years, we’ve learned the ropes of scientific publishing and journal editing from reviewer recruitment through synthesizing feedback and issuing editorial recommendations. Upon joining the editorial team, our role was primarily that of a reviewer as we familiarized ourselves with the editorial process under the guidance of mentors and demonstrated our ability to provide and recognize a useful peer review. Following this onboarding period, we transitioned into an associate editor (AE) role, actively handling manuscripts from start to finish. The workload was typically sporadic, with concentrated time spent reading incoming manuscripts, searching for and contacting reviewers, synthesizing feedback, and drafting recommendations for the handling editor. When revisions were recommended, we were typically looped back in upon resubmission to assess whether concerns were sufficiently addressed and if an additional review cycle was warranted.

Recruiting reviewers frequently emerged as the most time-consuming component of the overall process, consistent with recent trends in scientific publishing (Gradoville and Deemer, 2022). Compiling a qualified list required balancing topical expertise, career stage, geographic and gender diversity, and avoiding conflicts of interest,  then cycling through and appending the list as invitees declined, went silent, or failed to deliver promised reviews could stretch across several weeks. Once reviews were in, reconciling conflicting assessments was often the most mentally demanding task, requiring us to conduct an independent read of the manuscript to make a fair recommendation, particularly when the topic touched on areas outside our own expertise. Beyond handling manuscripts, we attended quarterly editorial board meetings and had opportunities to write ‘Editor’s Highlights’ for Eos, which challenged us to distill a paper’s core message and engage the broader scientific community to promote noteworthy new publications.

Within JGR: Biogeosciences, we worked one-on-one with mentors who were in the same or similar scientific fields, some of whom we may not have necessarily connected with otherwise. This mentorship was focused on expanding skills related to reviewing, evaluating reviews, and making editorial recommendations, which are skills that early career scientists do not often have dedicated time or mentorship to practice and learn, especially from mentors with differing perspectives on the editorial process.

In addition to hands-on editorial experience, the ECEF program also provided opportunities to network with scientists from a variety of fields, as well as with the broader AGU journals community. As ECEFs, we were invited to attend official and unofficial events at the AGU Annual Meeting. The Editors’ Dinner was an opportunity to reunite with editors we had worked with previously or seen at quarterly board meetings, as well as connect with editors from other AGU journals that we had never met. Being invited to be a part of the broader AGU journals community was an impactful experience, which highlighted the importance of having a community of scientists and journal staff that make our science visible. We were also invited to meetups with the other JGR: Biogeosciences editors to discuss matters relating to the journal and network in a more casual setting. These events allowed for more in-depth, personal conservations that seemed more productive than typical passing interactions at conferences.

Participating in the ECEF program fundamentally changed how we review manuscripts, write papers, and interact with journals.

Participating in the ECEF program fundamentally changed how we review manuscripts, write papers, and interact with journals. Viewing peer review from an editor’s perspective emphasized that the most valuable reviews are not those that identify the greatest number of minor issues, but those that assess a manuscript’s overall scientific contribution, clearly identify its key strengths and weaknesses, and provide constructive suggestions for improvement. It also helped us recognize that reviewers do not need to evaluate every aspect of a multidisciplinary study; instead, they can focus on making meaningful contributions within their own areas of expertise. Furthermore, the program changed how we view editorial decisions. Previously, we often regarded an editor’s decision as the final word. As one ECEF participant reflected, “Now, if I were in this situation again [of having a paper rejected despite positive reviews], I would email the AE and ask for additional clarification on their decision/make the case for why their decision should be revisited.”

As the inaugural fellowship concludes, one question naturally follows: Should other journals adopt similar programs? Our answer is simple: yes. High-quality scientific publishing depends on knowledgeable editors who can manage peer review fairly, efficiently, and transparently. Yet many editorial boards are under increasing pressure from rising submission rates, reviewer fatigue, and the growing complexity of modern publishing (AGU Editorial Network, 2024; Gradoville and Deemer, 2022). Editorial fellowships provide a structured pathway to develop future editors while strengthening journals today.

The benefits extend far beyond the fellows themselves. First, fellowships create a sustainable pipeline of well-trained editors, reducing reliance on a small pool of overburdened senior researchers. Second, they improve the quality of peer review by giving fellows a deeper understanding of editorial decision-making, publication ethics, and constructive reviewing. These skills extend into their own research, improving the manuscripts they write, the reviews they provide, and the guidance they offer colleagues and students. Third, fellowships diversify editorial leadership by bringing early-career researchers—and often individuals from underrepresented groups—into editorial decision-making, broadening perspectives, and strengthening the scientific community.

The journals themselves also benefit directly. Fellows contribute fresh perspectives on submission systems, reviewer guidance, and editorial workflows while expanding subject expertise and editorial capacity. Although mentoring fellows requires an initial investment from senior editors, our experience suggests that this is quickly offset as fellows become independent and begin sharing editorial responsibilities. Careful selection of participants, structured mentoring, and regular interaction among fellows can further maximize the effectiveness of these programs. The need for such initiatives has never been greater. Scientific publishing is adapting to the rapid rise of AI and large language models (LLMs), increasing concerns over publication ethics, reviewer fatigue, paper mills, and the continued growth of predatory publishing (AGU Editorial Network, 2024; Van Noorden, 2023). These challenges place increasing demands on editors to safeguard the integrity and credibility of the scientific peer review process.

Investing in the next generation of editors is ultimately an investment in the quality, credibility, and resilience of science itself.

Programs like the Early Career Editorial Fellowship offer a practical and much needed forward-looking solution. By training future editors through structured mentoring and real editorial experience, they strengthen peer review, build editorial capacity, and foster a culture of scientific integrity. Investing in the next generation of editors is ultimately an investment in the quality, credibility, and resilience of science itself. If journals are serious about protecting research integrity and strengthening peer review (Bohrer et al., 2026), they must invest not only in today’s editors, but also in training tomorrows.

—Bailey A. Murphy (murphyba@ornl.gov, 0000-0002-0399-5221), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, United States; Ceara J. Talbot (ctalbot@ucdavis.edu, 0000-0002-6227-6868), University of California, Davis, United States; Hongyan Bao (baohy@xmu.edu.cn, 0000-0002-9632-1487), Xiamen University, Xiamen, China; Kyle S. Boodoo (kyle.boodoo@univie.ac.at, 0000-0001-7063-5042), Department of Geography and Regional Research, University of Vienna, Austria; and Kendalynn A. Morris (kendalynn.morris@pnnl.gov, 0000-0002-0388-6965), Pacific Northwest National Lab, United States

Citation: Murphy, B. A., C. J. Talbot, H. Bao, K. S. Boodoo, and K. A. Morris (2026), Behind the veil of journal editing, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO265034. Published on 1 September 2026. This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author(s). Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Source: Community Science

Resources such as sea level rise viewers, heat maps, and flood prediction services are crucial tools in a changing climate. NASA Earth Observations (NASA EO) datasets provide important information on these and other natural hazards, but many communities who may benefit from these tools face barriers to accessing them.

La Margarita, a community along Puerto Rico’s southern coast, faces hazards including flooding, storm exposure, crumbling infrastructure, and inadequate government investment. Residents of this historically underserved community contend with pollution from nearby power plants and an industrial sterilization facility. Hurricane Fiona exposed many of the region’s vulnerabilities in 2022, after 30 inches of rain destroyed homes in low-lying areas and left residents without basic services.

Raub et al. worked with La Margarita residents to learn about their environmental concerns and preferred solutions and to assess ways NASA EO datasets might be able to address those concerns in a three-phase project over 9 months.

In phase 1, one-on-one bilingual interviews with 16 local leaders and residents helped researchers determine participants’ environmental justice concerns as well as familiarity with EO tools and the possible barriers to using them. In phase 2, a NASA representative showed community members how EO tools could be used, such as to show patterns of power outages and to project rates of sea level rise. For phase 3, researchers created a bilingual English-Spanish report to summarize the study participants’ concerns and the available NASA EO resources. La Margarita community members were invited to provide feedback to ensure that the report accurately reflected their needs and concerns.

Key concerns that study participants identified were flooding (56%), land misuse from illegal development (63%), and air quality and accompanying health conditions (50%). Government inaction was participants’ biggest concern (69%). Participants initially had little awareness of the EO tools but felt that flood mapping and air quality monitoring systems would be useful, especially if they were paired with support for how to use the tools. Barriers to EO tools included spotty internet access, unfamiliarity with the technology, previous experiences with unhelpful authorities, and the language barrier.

Study participants did not want solutions imposed on them by outside experts—they wanted collaboration with researchers and agencies who would listen to their concerns and work toward community-led decisionmaking. The study authors suggest that environmental justice means more than providing data: Building trusting relationships between scientists, communities, and agencies like NASA can ensure that important tools reach and are used by the people who need them most, the authors say. (Community Science, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025CSJ000157, 2026)

—Rebecca Owen (@beccapox.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Owen, R. (2026), Communities affected by climate change need more than data, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260277. Published on 31 August 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Editors’ Vox is a blog from AGU’s Publications Department.

As environmental conditions change, it is increasingly important to understand the structure and properties of the Earth’s critical zone, the layer where rock, soil, water, air, and living organisms meet and interact. While several geophysical methods provide images of the subsurface, they do not directly measure rock properties, such as porosity and water saturation.

A new article in Reviews of Geophysics explores rock physics models, which help bridge the gap between these geophysical methods and rock properties. Here, we asked the lead author to give an overview of the critical zone, the different types of rock physics models, and some of the remaining challenges for researchers.

In simple terms, what is the critical zone?

The critical zone is Earth’s thin outer layer that stretches from the tops of the trees down to the base of weathered bedrock.

The critical zone is Earth’s thin outer layer that stretches from the tops of the trees down to the base of weathered bedrock. Within it, physical, chemical, and biological weathering slowly transforms intact rock into a porous material that stores and transmits the water and nutrients ecosystems depend on. It is called “critical” because these near-surface processes sustain life, regulate water supplies, and shape landscapes over long timescales. Indeed, the critical zone controls how much water is available to plants, how groundwater is recharged, and how landscapes evolve over time.

What is the subsurface critical zone comprised of, and why is it important to study?

Below the soil, the subsurface critical zone grades downward from chemically altered and physically weakened rock (called “saprolite”), to fractured and partially weathered bedrock, and finally to fresh bedrock at the base. These layers are not sharply separated; they blend gradually, and their thicknesses vary with rock type, climate, topography, and tectonic history. This complex architecture governs how water infiltrates, how much is stored, and how it moves toward streams and plant roots. It matters because it controls water availability, groundwater recharge, nutrient cycling, and landscape evolution. Since it is hidden from direct view beneath our feet, we rely on indirect methods to map it across entire hillslopes.

Why is rock physics important for understanding the critical zone?

Rock physics supplies the missing bridge: it is the set of quantitative relationships that translate these geophysical signals into meaningful properties.

Geophysical surveys can image the subsurface over large areas, but they can’t measure the properties that critical zone scientists care about, such as porosity or water content. Instead, they record how signals (e.g., seismic waves, electrical currents, radar, or magnetic responses) move through the ground. Rock physics supplies the missing bridge: it is the set of quantitative relationships that translate these geophysical signals into meaningful properties such as porosity, water saturation, and permeability.

Without rock physics, a seismic velocity map is just a picture of how fast waves travel; however, that same picture becomes an estimate of how much water the subsurface can hold when rock physics is applied. This transforms qualitative images into quantitative characterization, letting us test ideas about weathering, water storage, and how the critical zone responds to climate and environmental change.

What are the most common geophysical methods that scientists use to study the critical zone?

Several complementary methods are used in critical zone studies. Seismic refraction and surface-wave techniques measure how fast elastic waves travel, revealing subsurface layering, weathering profiles, and depth to bedrock. Electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) injects current into the ground to map resistivity, which is sensitive to porosity, water content, and the presence of clay. Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) uses radio-frequency waves to produce detailed images of subsurface contrasts in dielectric permittivity due to boundaries in porosity, composition, and water content. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) directly detects hydrogen in water, providing quantitative water content and pore-size information. Because each method senses a different physical property, combining them yields a fuller and less ambiguous picture of water and structure in the critical zone.

An example modeling workflow for characterizing the critical zone using rock physics. Geophysical measurements are first converted through geophysical inversion into maps of seismic velocity, resistivity, and other geophysical properties. Rock physics models then translate those into estimates of porosity and water saturation. Credit: Grana et al. [2026], Figure 1

Why do scientists use rock physics models?

Geophysical images are inherently non-unique: different combinations of porosity, water, mineralogy, and structure can produce the same measured response. Rock physics models resolve this ambiguity by encoding the physical relationships between what we measure and the underlying rock and fluid properties. Some are empirical, derived from laboratory and field observations, while others are physics-based, built from first principles describing how grains, pores, and fluids behave. Combined with mathematical inversion, these models convert geophysical property fields into quantitative estimates of porosity, saturation, and permeability, as well as into estimates of the uncertainty in those values. This is what allows geophysical data to be integrated into hydrological and geochemical models of the critical zone.

What types of rock physics models are explored in your review article?

We review models grouped by the geophysical property they address. Elastic models link seismic velocities to porosity and saturation, using granular-media theories for loose, weathered material, inclusion models for fractured bedrock, and Gassmann’s equations to account for pore fluids. Electrical and electromagnetic models relate resistivity to porosity and water content. Dielectric mixing models connect GPR measurements to water content. NMR models tie relaxation signals to pore size, water content, and permeability. We also discuss soil physics effects, like matric suction, that become important in the shallow, unsaturated near surface where standard rock physics assumptions begin to break down.

Examples of rock physics models: an elastic model estimates P-wave velocity from porosity and water saturation, while an electrical model estimates resistivity from the same properties using Archie’s equation. Credit: Grana et al. [2026], Figure 2 (left panel) and 3

What are some of the remaining challenges where additional research efforts are needed?

Several challenges remain. Weathered materials are far more heterogeneous than the sedimentary rocks most rock physics models were originally built for, so relationships are often site-specific and don’t transfer easily between locations. Calibrating and validating models requires direct measurements from cores or boreholes but this is expensive, coverage is sparse, and the process can alter the properties of the very material being sampled. Additionally, some properties are difficult to constrain from surface data alone. For example, permeability and fracture connectivity are critical for predicting water flow but are notoriously difficult to measure in the field. Relying instead on data from the lab has its own problems: laboratory samples are centimeters wide, while geophysical surveys average over meters. Promising directions include systematic laboratory measurements of critical zone materials, inversion methods that explicitly quantify uncertainty, physics-guided machine learning, and emerging monitoring technologies such as distributed acoustic sensing that can track subsurface changes continuously over time.

—Dario Grana (dgrana@uwyo.edu; 0000-0003-4220-053X), University of Wyoming, United States; Brady A. Flinchum (brady.flinchum@newcastle.edu.au; 0000-0003-0395-0450), University of Newcastle, Australia; Denys Grombacher (denys.grombacher@geo.au.dk; 0000-0003-2447-0085), University of Aarhus, Denmark; Andrew D. Parsekian (aparseki@uwyo.edu; 0000-0001-5072-9818), University of Wyoming, United States; Clifford S. Riebe (criebe@uwyo.edu; 0000-0002-8744-8208), University of Wyoming, United States; and W. Steven Holbrook (wstevenh@vt.edu, 0000-0003-0065-8841), Virginia Tech, United States

Editor’s Note: It is the policy of AGU Publications to invite the authors of articles published in Reviews of Geophysics to write a summary for Eos Editors’ Vox.

Citation: Grana, D., B. A. Flinchum, D. Grombacher, A. D. Parsekian, C. S. Riebe, and W. S. Holbrook (2026), Decoding rocks to reveal what the critical zone hides, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO265033. Published on 31 August 2026. This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author(s). Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

body {background-color: #D2D1D5;} Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news that impacts science and scientists today.

A new era of space exploration began today with the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Roman is poised to solve one of the fundamental mysteries of the universe: what it’s made of.

“There’s something really fundamental that we don’t understand about the nature of our universe itself, and Roman is purpose-built to address and provide the data that we need to address these questions,” Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist and an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a 27 August interview on NASA’s Curious Universe podcast.

Roman launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:26 a.m. local time on 30 August. The telescope is named after NASA’s first chief of astronomy, Dr. Nancy Grace Roman (1925–2018). Roman was also the first woman to be a NASA executive and is widely considered to be the “Mother of the Hubble Space Telescope” for her work to make that pioneering telescope a reality.

A Universe to Discover

Roman is a NASA mission and received instrumentation and science support from the Centre national d’études spatiales in France, the European Space Agency, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany. The telescope has a field of view 100 times that of the Hubble Space Telescope and is capable of capturing much more detail in a single glimpse.

Roman is expected to probe deep into the early universe and study more than a billion galaxies. In doing so, scientists hope to create 3D maps of the evolving universe.

Nancy Grace Roman stands next to a scale model of the Hubble Space Telescope outside the Hubble control center. Credit: NASA

“One of the motivations for Roman was the discovery that our universe is not just expanding, but that expansion is accelerating,” McEnery said. “That was crazy. It’s like if you were to throw a ball in the air, and instead of the ball coming back down, it just keeps shooting away.”

Cosmologists theorize that around 75% of the universe is composed of a mysterious substance called dark energy that is pushing space-time itself apart. One way of measuring the impact of dark energy, and thereby narrowing down just what dark energy might be, is to track the expansion history of the universe. This can be done by mapping the locations and distances of supernovae across the universe and measuring how quickly they are receding from us.

“We can best do that with something that has a huge view because when you’re measuring the property of a large chunk of the sky, you can be reasonably confident you’re understanding how the universe itself is behaving, rather than the vagaries of a particular small group of galaxies in one particular spot,” McEnery said.

Roman will also add to our knowledge of dark matter, which makes up about 20% of the universe and is mostly understood through its invisible gravitational effects on light as it passes near galaxies.

Scientists expect Roman to discover as many as 200,000 exoplanets in the Milky Way.

On the opposite end of the astrophysical paradigm are exoplanets. Roman is designed to find “an awful lot of them,” McEnery said.

The telescope is equipped with three ways to detect exoplanets: by monitoring starlight for dips as an orbiting planet passes in front (transit method), by watching for spikes in starlight as a foreground planet wanders past (microlensing), and by blocking a star’s light to see the glow from the planet itself (direct imaging).

Astronomers currently know of more than 14,000 confirmed and candidate exoplanets. Through these three methods, scientists expect Roman to discover as many as 200,000 exoplanets in the Milky Way.

What’s more, each detection method is best at detecting different subsets of exoplanets, so Roman can help provide a more complete picture of exoplanet populations, which can help astronomers understand how exoplanets form.

After Launch

The telescope’s primary mission is 5 years, with an expected lifetime of 10 years.

Roman scientists will spend the next three months ensuring Roman reaches its distant orbit and testing the telescope’s systems. The team expects the first science images to be released in early 2027. Those images will likely offer stunning views of familiar places of the sky to demonstrate Roman’s capabilities.

 
Related

•  All About the Roman Space Telescope
•  Who was Nancy Grace Roman?
•  More from Roman’s Senior Project Scientist
 

But one of the most anticipated early looks will be Roman’s first deep field survey. Like its predecessors from Hubble, Roman’s deep field will reveal millions of distant galaxies hidden within a seemingly blank patch of the sky. Those surveys will look as far back into the early universe as Hubble’s do, but they will be more than 1,500 times larger. McEnery said it would take more than half a million 4K TVs to fully display Roman’s largest survey.

“It’s the equivalent of covering 45 city blocks,” she said. “You can think about Mount Rushmore, but Mount Rushmore is too small. You would need to fully cover El Capitán with 4K TVs to fully display Roman’s largest survey. I don’t think we should do that, but it gives you a sense of how amazing this survey is going to be.”

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about science or scientists? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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In May 1992, a group of scientists gathered at the edge of Marble Canyon in northern Arizona, where the Colorado River has cut into Permian sandstone to form cliffs that rise hundreds of feet above the water. The occasion was the First International Workshop on Paleoflood Hydrology, organized by Vic Baker of the University of Arizona. For Baker and his colleagues, the canyon walls were not just scenery. They were a kind of archive.

Here, sediment deposits mark the high-water lines of floods that surged through the canyon centuries before any stream gauges were there to measure them. In particular, Baker and his colleagues studied slackwater deposits, fine-grained sediments emplaced by floodwaters in sheltered alcoves and tributary mouths.

Over the course of decades, Baker, together with collaborators and students, developed methods to read the Marble Canyon deposits. Researchers used hydraulic models to back-calculate past flood discharge and used radiocarbon dates to pinpoint when floods occurred. Their analyses revealed floods that were nearly twice the size of those captured by the instrumental record and that recurred far more frequently than engineers had assumed [Greenbaum et al., 2014].

Baker and his collaborators also mapped out statistical frameworks to translate their data into flood frequency estimates that present-day engineers and water managers could use.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation put those data to use, incorporating the long flood history written on the canyon walls into formal hazard assessments for dam safety and infrastructure design on the Colorado River. The logic was straightforward: The biggest, most destructive floods are also the rarest, which means they are routinely missing from the short instrumental records engineers rely on, leading to dangerous underestimates of risk.

Expanding the Field in Breadth and Depth

In the decades since Baker helped establish paleoflood hydrology as a discipline, the field has expanded to encompass a much wider range of settings and methods, including boulder berms in mountain rivers, alluvial fills in lowland valleys, tree ring “flood rings” in riparian (riverbank) forests, detrital layers on stalagmites in caves, and historical archives stretching back centuries in regions with long written records, to name just a few.

The study of riverine flooding represents just one of several fields that use geological records to improve hazard assessments.

A landmark synthesis by Wilhelm et al. [2019] documented this methodological diversity across flood settings worldwide. Each approach requires its own deep disciplinary expertise and preserves different aspects of flood history. The approaches vary considerably in the precision and accuracy of the estimates they produce, and not all have matured to the point where their outputs can be directly incorporated into formal hazard assessments in the way Baker’s analyses of slackwater deposits were.

Moreover, the study of riverine flooding represents just one of several fields that use geological records to improve hazard assessments. Want to reconstruct the history of tropical cyclones and coastal storms? Paleotempestology uses sediment cores from coastal ponds and sinkholes, and isotopic signatures preserved in tree rings, to do just that. Need to understand how often a fault experiences a major earthquake? Paleoseismology reads fault scarps, liquefaction features, disturbed stratigraphy, and tsunami deposits to find out.

Each of these fields has its own methods, its own archives, its own hard-won expertise—its own Vic Bakers. And each faces the same fundamental challenge: translating qualitative or semiquantitative evidence of past events into the precise, uncertainty-bounded estimates that planners, engineers, and risk managers can use.

A Proposed Center for Paleoenvironmental Records of Extreme Events

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) [2026] (“A Synthesis Center for Paleoenvironmental Records of Extreme Events”) represents a welcome and timely recognition that these fields have something important to offer. Despite decades of progress, the report finds, these long-term records of extreme events remain underused by the agencies, industries, and communities that manage risk.

The report proposes a new center with a mandate to “focus on the integration, synthesis, and translation of paleoenvironmental data.” The report envisions this work carried out through mission-oriented working groups spanning academia, government, and industry. This is a laudable structure, given how disconnected these communities’ incentives and timelines often are.

But this framing raises a fundamental question: Is the primary barrier to translation really a lack of synthesis? Or is it that most of these records have not yet reached the standard that made Baker’s analysis of slackwater deposits useful to the Bureau of Reclamation?

The answer, I would argue, is that the quality of the records themselves represents a fundamental barrier to bridging the translational gap. The report recognizes this, at least implicitly, by distinguishing “Tier 1” records (those that provide quantitative, precise estimates of past hazard magnitudes directly comparable to instrumental data) from lower-quality records. It also acknowledges that such records are rare.

Across most settings and hazard types, the majority of existing records of paleoenvironmental hazards fall short of the Tier 1 standard.

Across most settings and hazard types, the majority of existing records of paleoenvironmental hazards fall short of the Tier 1 standard. This matters enormously, as incorporating paleoflood estimates with large errors into flood frequency analysis increases uncertainties rather than reducing them [Reinders and Muñoz, 2021].

Records need to meet a quality threshold—roughly 20% error or less—to help rather than hurt. Synthesizing records that fall below that threshold widens the translational gap instead of closing it.

In addition to quality, these records face a second challenge that resists synthesis: They are, by their very nature, site-specific. What gets recorded at a given site depends on factors that can vary enormously over short distances—the geometry of a canyon, the height and orientation of a beach barrier, the elevation of a tree in a floodplain.

Two nearby sites on the same river can preserve fundamentally different flood histories, not because the floods were different, but because local geomorphic conditions controlled what was recorded and preserved. This site specificity is simply how these archives work.

Site specificity means that such records resist the kind of broad synthesis that works well for more standardized data types. Aggregating them in a database does not produce a clean regional picture of hazard frequency and magnitude. Rather, it produces a collection of site-specific stories that require deep disciplinary expertise to interpret, compare, and contextualize.

A Path Forward: Investing in Methods and People

There are promising methodological pathways to elevate records toward a quality that practitioners can use. My lab, which focuses on hydrologic extremes across a range of settings and timescales, has worked on integrating paleoenvironmental records with physical model simulations. Such simulations enable researchers to move beyond qualitative or semiquantitative evidence and toward precise, uncertainty-bounded estimates of hazard magnitude. Other frontiers exist across geochronology, proxy development, and statistical frameworks.

In paleoflood hydrology, hydraulic models can simulate the water levels, velocities, and depositional conditions associated with floods. This ability links sediment properties directly to flood magnitude and reduces uncertainties in paleoflood estimates [Reinders et al., 2023].

The number of labs actively producing high-quality paleoenvironmental records of extreme events, and advancing the methodologies to improve them, remains small.

In paleotempestology, overwash deposits in coastal ponds record when hurricanes occurred, but not their tracks or magnitudes. Coastal hydrodynamic and morphodynamic models offer a promising path to fill that gap, back-calculating storm surge magnitudes from the sedimentary deposits that storms leave behind. Site-specific factors such as sea level change and barrier morphology present real challenges, but the approach shows promise and warrants sustained investment.

Developing these methods requires a strong professional cohort. Here, the field faces a compounding challenge. The number of labs actively producing high-quality paleoenvironmental records of extreme events, and advancing the methodologies to improve them, remains small. This means there are few graduate students and postdoctoral researchers trained in these approaches, few experienced reviewers for papers and proposals, and a limited capacity to evaluate whether new work is actually meeting the quality threshold that translation of paleoenvironmental data requires.

The NASEM report itself names education and training as a core function of the proposed center, envisioning opportunities for postdoctoral researchers, students, and visiting scholars. Training researchers who understand both the science and the needs of practitioners—those who speak the languages of both sedimentology and flood frequency analysis, for example, or stratigraphy and storm surge modeling—is exactly what government agencies and industry partners need, and exactly what would make a center so valuable.

A Center Worth Building

A center dedicated to paleoenvironmental records of extreme events is an idea worth pursuing. Its design, however, will determine whether it actually closes the translational gap it aims to address.

What such a center could accomplish would differ fundamentally from what any single lab can. One group can advance one method for one hazard type, but a center could convene parallel working groups across hazard types, drawing together expertise currently dispersed across a small number of labs and sustaining training pipelines beyond the durations of individual grants. The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center are both National Science Foundation–funded synthesis centers built on a convening structure. They offer templates for how such a center might be organized and hosted.

I recommend that such a center explicitly prioritize methods development and workforce training alongside synthesis and translation.

I recommend that such a center explicitly prioritize methods development and workforce training alongside synthesis and translation.

This means funding graduate and postdoctoral fellowships and sabbatical residencies that convene early-career scientists, established researchers, and practitioners. Working together, these groups can develop approaches to elevate records toward more effective translation across disciplines and professions.

It means establishing working groups organized around specific hazard types and methodological approaches, each charged with developing and disseminating best practices and evaluating what it takes to produce records that practitioners can use.

And it means recognizing that these same sectors have a direct stake in this investment. Such partners include the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the insurance and catastrophe risk industries. These sectors need researchers trained to speak the languages of both science and industry, and cofunding a center that produces them would serve the interests of both communities.

The scientists who gathered at Marble Canyon in 1992 had spent decades building the foundation that made their work useful. The proposed center offers an opportunity to accelerate that process across a much wider set of hazards and settings, but only if it invests in the foundation first.

References

Greenbaum, N., et al. (2014), A 2000 year natural record of magnitudes and frequencies for the largest Upper Colorado River floods near Moab, Utah, Water Resour. Res., 50(6), 5,249–5,269, https://doi.org/10.1002/2013WR014835.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) (2026), A Synthesis Center for Paleoenvironmental Records of Extreme Events, 132 pp., Natl. Acad. Press, Washington, D.C., https://doi.org/10.17226/29290.

Reinders, J. B., and S. E. Muñoz (2021), Improvements to flood frequency analysis on alluvial rivers using paleoflood data, Water Resour. Res., 57(4), e2020WR028631, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020WR028631.

Reinders, J. B., et al. (2023), A hydraulic modelling approach to study flood sediment deposition in floodplain lakes, Earth Surf. Processes Landforms, 48(4), 756–769, https://doi.org/10.1002/esp.5515.

Wilhelm, B., et al. (2019), Interpreting historical, botanical, and geological evidence to aid preparations for future floods, WIREs Water, 6(1), e1318, https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1318.

Author Information

Samuel E. Muñoz (s.munoz@northeastern.edu), Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences, Northeastern University, Nahant, Mass.; and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston

Citation: Muñoz, S. E. (2026), Prioritizing quality before synthesis in paleoenvironmental hazard science, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260275. Published on [DAY MONTH] 2026. This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author(s). Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Want updates from a trusted source about how climate change is shaping public health? Preference Eos in your searches! Go to Google Climate & Personal Health

The transmission of malaria—a parasitic disease transmitted by mosquitoes that affects about 250 million people globally each year—occurs between approximately 16°C (60.8°F) and 34°C (93.2°F) because of the life cycle of mosquitoes and the temperature sensitivity of the parasite they transmit.

That means a warming climate will affect where and how malaria spreads. However, scientists have been split on the question of how climate change has reshaped malaria prevalence in Africa: Some studies have suggested climate change is a substantial driver of shifting malaria prevalence, while others indicate climate change plays little or no role.

A new study published in Nature offers some clarity in that debate. After analyzing more than 50,000 malaria surveys spanning over a century and decades of climate data, researchers found that warming temperatures in sub-Saharan Africa have already made some places too hot for transmission, lowering malaria prevalence. Other regions have become better habitat for mosquitoes and their parasites over time. Researchers expect the trend to continue, amplifying changes in malaria prevalence across the continent as climate change persists.

“The story is really not [about] net aggregate effects across the large and diverse continent of Africa,” said Tamma Carleton, an environmental economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a coauthor of the new study. “This is a story about a shifting burden across space.”

The Role of Climate Change

To study how climate change has affected malaria prevalence, researchers borrowed methods from climate attribution research, which uses climate modeling and comparisons to a hypothetical world without human-caused climate change to determine the extent to which climate change played a role in a specific weather event. The confidence of such studies is improving for weather events, but the methods aren’t typically used to attribute public health phenomena such as malaria prevalence.

“We build on top of well-developed climate attribution science methods but face additional complexities because we’re trying to trace impacts on human outcomes,” Carleton said. In health fields, in particular, there are very few examples of studies that causally link historical anthropogenic emissions to observed health outcomes, she said. She hopes the methods presented in the new study can help other researchers further investigate the link between climate change and human health outcomes.

In their analysis, the researchers focused on childhood malaria prevalence because about 95% of global malaria cases are experienced by children between 2 and 10 years of age throughout parts of central, eastern, southern, and western Africa. Results showed that climate change has already reshaped malaria prevalence in the region since 1901.

The prevalence of childhood malaria attributable to human-caused climate change has increased in parts of Central, southern, and East Africa but decreased in West Africa from 1901 to 2014. Click image for larger version. Credit: Carlson et al., 2026, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10840-w

In particular, human-caused climate change has slightly increased malaria prevalence across Africa, adding about 1 excess case per 1,000 children since 1901. Rising temperatures have created better conditions for malaria transmission in East and southern Africa. But hotter weather in West and central Africa has made the region too hot for transmission to occur, lowering malaria prevalence.

The changes are “modest” compared to observed reductions in malaria prevalence that have occurred as a result of eradication campaigns alongside economic development, Carleton said. Erin Mordecai, an infectious disease ecologist at Stanford University who was not involved in the new research, wrote in an email that the claims in the paper about climate change driving increased malaria burden are nuanced.

“This may be subtly true, to a small extent, in some regions like southern and highland east Africa, where temperatures were previously sub-optimal. At the same time, even in these places the effects of climate change are small” compared to other drivers such as malaria control programs, she wrote.

Researchers compared real-world data on childhood malaria prevalence (blue lines) with predicted childhood malaria prevalence in a hypothetical world without climate change (gray lines). Their analysis showed climate change has played a role in increasing the disease’s prevalence in central, East, and southern Africa and has played a role in decreasing prevalence in West Africa. Click image for larger version. Credit: Carlson et al., 2026, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10840-w

To Mordecai, the most exciting aspect of the study was its confirmation of the “thermal biology of malaria transmission”—the study’s results show clear changes in transmission when temperatures go up or down. “The fact that this was predicted…and [is] now validated at such a large scale is very compelling,” she wrote.

Amplified Patterns

As the climate continues to change, the trends the researchers noticed “amplify in ways that really do start to shape the policy conversation,” Carleton said.

“It’s important to show that the burden of malaria is shifting away from those very hot places, but that also means many other threats to public health are unfolding as the temperatures get extremely, extremely hot.”

Carleton and the team projected changes in childhood malaria prevalence up to 2100 using data on past climate and disease prevalence for multiple future climate change scenarios. They found that rising temperatures will continue to reduce disease prevalence in West Africa, particularly under the highest-emissions scenario.

For the rest of Africa, rising temperatures could cause a slight increase in malaria prevalence. Still, temperatures will likely become so hot by the end of the century that the majority of the continent could see more than a 2% decrease in malaria prevalence, a projected reduction that “begins to approach the magnitude of some historical eradication programmes,” according to the authors.

By 2100, childhood malaria prevalence will further shift, as shown by this map of the projected future changes in prevalence driven by human-caused climate change. Click image for larger version. Credit: Carlson et al., 2026, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10840-w

Carleton emphasized that decreases in malaria presence in warming regions are not exactly cause for celebration—if temperatures are hot enough to halt malaria transmission, they’re hot enough to cause a lot of human suffering, too. “It’s important to show that the burden of malaria is shifting away from those very hot places, but that also means many other threats to public health are unfolding as the temperatures get extremely, extremely hot,” she said.

“Just because malaria risk is going down doesn’t mean aggregate human health and well-being is improving under a future with aggressive emissions.”

Messages for Malaria Eradication

Noticing a shifting disease burden means that policymakers and nongovernmental organizations can begin to “prepare places that have not put this disease at the top of the health priority list,” such as places where, historically, the climate has suppressed transmission, Carleton said. That’s especially important as funding for global health has been dramatically cut in recent years, she added.

“We have to spend each dollar of funding in the way that can alleviate human suffering the most effectively.”

“We have really limited resources going towards prevention of this disease, and we have climate change hitting like a train…This means we have to spend each dollar of funding in the way that can alleviate human suffering the most effectively,” she said.

The projected changes in malaria prevalence could also work in tandem with malaria eradication efforts in some countries, the authors write: “The combined benefits of disease surveillance, healthcare, vector control and economic development can easily counter-balance climate change impacts in most places.”

To Mordecai, the results “highlight the critical importance of control programs for malaria, and these should be sustained even in areas where climate suitability isn’t necessarily increasing,” she wrote. Despite a warming climate, with malaria eradication methods, malaria could still be gone from most of Africa by 2050, according to the study’s authors.

—Grace van Deelen (@gvd.bsky.social), Staff Writer

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2026), Climate change will reshape malaria prevalence across Africa, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260273. Published on 27 August 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Source: Geophysical Research Letters

As climate change has led to more frequent high-heat events around the world, moist heat metrics such as wet-bulb temperature, which combines temperature and humidity, have become increasingly relevant. Days with both high heat and high humidity are dangerous for human health; understanding how these extreme events will change in the future is important.

Jha and Byrne examined moist heat extremes over extratropical continents using ERA5 reanalysis data (the fifth generation of reanalysis from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) and the Community Earth System Model Version 2 (CESM2) global climate model. They paid special attention to the ways dry air mixes into plumes of warm, moist air traveling upward in convective environments.

The authors simulated varying rates at which dry air mixes into these plumes rising from near Earth’s surface to the upper troposphere and found that this process, known as entrainment, exerts a significant influence on moist heat extremes outside of the tropics. The authors say this process alters the relationship between the amounts of stored energy in the air near the ground and higher up in the troposphere. This mixing of dry air into rising plumes enables the near-surface air to become more energetic through higher humidity and temperature, leading to more severe moist heat events.

Using simulations, the authors found that as climate warms and the lower troposphere becomes drier, the entrainment mechanism will continue to drive up wet-bulb temperatures at the surface, potentially leading to moist heat extremes that are even more severe.

Future work examining in more detail how global warming is changing rates of dry-air entrainment into rising plumes will be useful to better understand how wet-bulb temperatures will increase in the future, the authors say. (Geophysical Research Letters, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026GL122678, 2026)

—Nathaniel Scharping (@nathanielscharp), Science Writer

Citation: Scharping, N. (2026), How rising air plumes help spike moist heat, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260271. Published on 27 August 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

The Colorado River and its reservoirs, which supply water for about 40 million people and 30 tribes across seven states and two countries, is drying up.

Lake Mead on the Arizona-Nevada border, which has the largest storage capacity of any reservoir in the United States, hit its lowest recorded levels on 7 August. Water levels in Lake Powell, located on the Utah-Arizona border, reached their own record low about a week later.

The maximum capacity of Lake Mead is 28.5 million acre-feet. Right now, it is holding about 6.95 million acre-feet—about 27% of its capacity. Its level has dropped by more than 20 feet since the start of 2026. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Though overallocation is one reason the river is shrinking, reduced snowpack and increased evaporation caused by climate change are also contributing factors.

“The Colorado River crisis is one of the clearest examples of climate change in the U.S.”

“The Colorado River crisis is one of the clearest examples of climate change in the U.S.,” Douglas Kenney, the director of the Western Water Policy Program and a hydroscientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in an email to Eos. “The basin has warmed dramatically, especially over the last 30 years, changing virtually every aspect of the water cycle in ways that result in lower streamflows. Flows so far in the 21st century are 20 percent lower than the 20th century. In an already arid region with very few water sources, that is a huge issue.”

Last week, the Department of the Interior (DOI) issued a final decision for what to do about all of this, at least for the next 2 years. Among the primary takeaways are 1.25 million acre-feet of water cuts across what are known as the Lower Basin states: 760,000 acre-feet for Arizona, 440,000 acre-feet for California, and 50,000 acre-feet for Nevada. (One acre-foot is equivalent to 325,851 gallons (1,233 cubic meters), or enough water for a year for two to four single-family homes.) This number represents a cut of about 21% across the Lower Basin states, but the cuts could increase in coming years.

The Upper Basin states—Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—are not facing cuts. The “record of decision,” as it is called, also established criteria for how to maintain enough water in Lake Powell to continue operating Glen Canyon Dam.

By the Numbers

20%:  amount by which the Colorado River’s flow has reduced since 2000

40 million:  number of people who rely on the river’s water

30:  Native American tribes in the Colorado River Basin

27%:  Lake Mead’s current level, relative to full capacity

21%:  Lake Powell’s current level, relative to full capacity

John Berggren, a regional policy manager with Western Resource Advocates, said the record of decision puts the future of the Colorado River Basin “on the right path” but that the new guidelines don’t make management of the river sustainable or resilient in the long term.

“In the short term, we got a little bit of certainty in how they’re going to operate, but fingers crossed for a big snowpack. Otherwise, we’re not going to be in a good spot come next year,” he said. “Best case is in 2 years, we’re kind of where we are now, which is just barely hanging on by a thread, and very vulnerable to one more bad year that could completely tank the system.”

The DOI announcement followed the release of a final environmental impact statement (FEIS) in late July 2026 and a draft EIS in January 2026. The draft itself followed about 2.5 years of negotiations between the Bureau of Reclamation and the seven basin states.

The public had 45 days to comment on the proposal before the FEIS was released. The Bureau of Reclamation received more than 18,000 submissions, most of which were form letters, and responded to the comments in a 54-page document. Read some of the public comments from different parts of the Colorado River Basin in the map below.

“We are grateful for the Seven Basin States, the thirty Basin Tribes, Mexico, and many other basin stakeholders who have provided the feedback and voluntary arrangements necessary for the development of the 2027–2028 Operating Guidelines,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in a statement accompanying the release of the record of decision.

The Haves and Have-Nots

The FEIS released in August included the idea that the Lower Basin states be asked to cut their water by as much as 3 million acre-feet—more than twice the amount decided for 2027 and 2028. And greater cuts are still on the table for future years.

Arizona, which faced the most severe cuts, was particularly unhappy with the FEIS. The Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR) called parts of the proposal “unacceptable” and said that “such reductions would devastate Arizona’s water users and its economy.” In a letter to DOI’s Assistant Secretary for Water and Science Andrea Travnicek, ADWR director Thomas Buschatzke effectively threatened to sue, noting that “Arizona reserves the right to seek the resolution of its Compact rights in an appropriate judicial forum.”

In response to the record of decision, Buschatzke struck a more positive note, thanking the Department of the Interior “for clarifying the decision-making process” and stating that the “actions in the Lower Basin in recent decades to protect the system have demonstrated how much we can accomplish when we all join together as part of the solution.”

On X, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs said, “We’ve protected Arizona from disastrous and unacceptable forced federal water cuts…But the work is not over.”

Arizona’s Gila River Indian Community released a statement saying that the document “fails to adequately address the federal government’s trust responsibility to tribes in the Basin who are seriously affected by cuts to critical water supplies.”

Lake Powell’s water level hit a record low of 3,520 feet this month. The minimum level for the lake to generate power at Glen Canyon Dam is 3,490 feet. The minimum level for water to be able to flow past the dam is 3,370 feet. Credit: Jiří David, World Meteorological Organization/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

JB Hamby, Colorado River commissioner for California, called the record of decision “a bridge, not a permanent solution,” and added that “three states cannot carry the responsibility of all seven.”

Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo released a statement the day the record of decision came out, saying that “the federal government is positioning to short Nevada—the state with the smallest river allocation at only 1.8%—sacrificing the health and safety of Nevadans before requiring equal water responsibility for our shared water resources from the Upper Basin.”

On Monday, 24 August, the state of Nevada, the Colorado River Commission of Nevada, and the Southern Nevada Water Authority filed a lawsuit against the DOI and Bureau of Reclamation. The lawsuit claims the record of decision gives the federal government the authority to impose an annual reduction of 213,556 acre-feet on the state—about 71% of Nevada’s allocation.

“The magnitude of such shortages will cause acute environmental, socioeconomic, and health and human safety impacts to southern Nevada,” the lawsuit reads.

Upper Basin states are happier: The governors of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico released a joint statement following the release of the FEIS, noting that they were “encouraged” by the suggested new operating guidelines. (They did not release a new statement in response to the record of decision, but neither document proposed water cuts to the Upper Basin states.)

What About the Science?

In 2023, Shemin Ge, a hydrogeologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, was lead author of an article for Eos about how it was important that, unlike the drafting of the original 1922 agreement for managing the river, all involved parties use the best available science to inform their decisions.

Nearly 200 people from the Bureau of Reclamation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, and other agencies helped prepare the FEIS. The report summarizes how the proposed plans could affect everything from river flow to groundwater levels to sand transport to harmful algal blooms. It also analyzes the impact on vegetation, terrestrial and riverine wildlife, paleontological resource preservation, socioeconomics, agriculture, Native American tribes, and recreation.

But is this plan any better than the 1922 compact? Ge said she’s not sure.

“My impression about these government documents, whether it’s a decision, a record, or guideline, [is that] it’s more a short-term operational document.”

“My impression about these government documents, whether it’s a decision, a record, or guideline, [is that] it’s more a short-term operational document,” she said. “Many experts have called for more holistic, science-based, long-term strategies to manage the river, and I don’t feel that it’s heard at the upper level.” By long-term future, Ge added, she’s “talking about maybe 20 years, not 2 years.”

Kenney said that the FEIS raised the questions of whether the cuts are equitably distributed (the Lower Basin states certainly don’t think so), whether the cuts will be enough to solve the problem (“The best we can probably hope for is to avoid further reservoir declines,” he said), and whether the Bureau of Reclamation will actually be able to enforce the suggested framework.

“Given all that, I’m not sure the framework will be effective in practice, but it is well reasoned,” he said. “It’s likely the best they can do with the tools they have. A true solution likely requires permanently removing a lot of agriculture in the basin, and that’s not really a job for a water agency.”

—Emily Gardner (@emfurd.bsky.social), Deputy Editor

Citation: Gardner, E. (2026), The Colorado River Basin is running out of water. Not everyone is happy with the government’s suggested solution., Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260276. Published on 26 August 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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body {background-color: #D2D1D5;} Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news that impacts science and scientists today.

Scientists come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes, that shape is a blubbery 1,000-kilogram whale with a 2-meter tusk.

In research published today in Science Advances, a team of (human) scientists describe their collaboration with six narwhals to track warming water sea temperatures off the coast of East Greenland.

The warming of these waters is part of a process called atlantification, or the influx of warm, salty water from lower latitudes into the Arctic. This research focused on Scorseby Sound, an area that spans about 10,000 square kilometers, where waters can reach depths exceeding 1,000 meters.

“Narwhals visit areas that are logistically difficult and expensive to reach with traditional methods, and they sample localities in winter that are usually only sampled in the ice-free summer months.”

“There are very few oceanographic measurements from Scoresby Sound despite the fact that it is the world’s largest fjord system,” Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen, a biologist at Pinngortitaleriffik/Greenland Institute of Natural Resources and lead author of the paper, told Eos via email. “Narwhals visit areas that are logistically difficult and expensive to reach with traditional methods, and they sample localities in winter that are usually only sampled in the ice-free summer months.”

 Related

•  Read the Paper: “Narwhals document atlantification of East Greenland”
• Narwhal Facts
•  Atlantification of the Arctic
 

The researchers outfitted the animals with satellite transmitters, which tracked temperature, salinity, and the depth of the whales’ dives. Data collection occurred each time a whale dove at least 50 meters below the water, with at least 15 minutes between dives. From August 2017 to July 2020, the six narwhals recorded data from a total of 2,060 dives.

“Narwhals have been used as ocean sampling platforms several times in the past because they are excellent samplers of remote ice-covered areas and deep depths. They make repeated dives in one area, sometimes to a mile below the surface, often over many months,” Kristin Laidre, a polar scientist at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center, who was not involved in the study, explained in an email to Eos.

Though this isn’t the first time narwhals have participated in data collection, this experiment marks the first time that devices attached to narwhals were used to measure salinity.

Scoresby Sound is the world’s largest fjord system, but understanding of its oceanography has been limited. Credit: Delphinidaesy, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0

The researchers also used ships to gather data about the area. Using data from both sources, they found that, compared to glaciers terminating in shallow basins, glaciers terminating in deep basins tended to be surrounded by warmer waters, especially at depths of 200 to 500 meters. Most of the influx of Atlantic waters occurred at depths exceeding 150 meters.

The warm water is likely contributing to the melting of glaciers in the Nordvestfjord in Scoresby Sound, as well as those in the Nansen Fjord and the Kangerlussuaq Fjord farther south, the researchers report. Glaciers in shallow coastal areas are less affected by atlantification.

Heide-Jørgensen said that, though scientists were already aware from other studies that atlantification is occurring in East Greenland, it was surprising to see how much Atlantic water is influxing to areas that are 300 kilometers or farther from Greenland’s outer coast (ice-free headlands that face the open ocean as opposed to inner fjords).

Researchers attached the satellite devices to six narwhals, which, over the course of about three years, recorded data from a total of 2,060 dives. Credit: Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen

In the paper, the researchers describe how the work demonstrated not just new findings, but a methodological breakthrough, saying it illustrated how work with “unconventional collaborators can revolutionize oceanographic research.” The project was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of the University of Copenhagen.

“Narwhals and other marine mammals routinely navigate the most remote corners of the polar seas, reaching sites like glacial fjords where human researchers struggle to collect data due to the presence of sea-ice and icebergs,” Ian Fenty, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who was not involved in the work, wrote in an email to Eos. “Provided these animals are treated ethically, the information gathered from the instruments they carry will continue to be invaluable for improving our understanding of climate change.”

—Emily Gardner (@emfurd.bsky.social), Deputy Editor

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about science or scientists? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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The catastrophic debris flow that struck Nepal and Tibet today was triggered by the collapse of a glacier high in the mountains.

Loyal readers will have seen the footage of the catastrophic debris flow that struck parts of Tibet and Nepal today, 26 August 2026. There is a variety of sources, of which the CCTV footage from Gyirong on the border is probably the most dramatic and horrifying – indeed at this scale the event is close to be apocalyptic:-

Current reports indicate around 400 fatalities, but I think it is reasonable to assume that the cost is going to be higher.

The root cause of this disaster is already known, although there is a lot of misinformation and some uncertainty. On Bluesky, Dan Shugar has posted a video compiled from Planet imagery that shows the initiating event:-

A Bluesky post by Dan Shugar showing the origin of the 26 August 2026 debris flow in Tibet and Nepal.

The image above was from 25 August 2926, whist the one below is from 26 August 2026:-

A Bluesky post by Dan Shugar showing the origin of the 26 August 2026 debris flow in Tibet and Nepal.

The location is is in the area of [28.2765, 85.5194]. The exact sequence is not clear as yet, but the imagery definitely pins down the location.

There has been some speculation, and indeed official comments, that the trigger was an earthquake. This is likely to be a misinterpretation of the data – the seismic signal is almost certainly the rock ice avalanche and debris flow, not a tectonic event.

A fascinating element of this is the source of the huge volume of water. This may be a combination of ice that converted to water as a result of the release of energy from the initial collapse, water embedded in the sediments that were entrained en route and river water. But I am speculating. There is no evidence that this was a GLOF.

Understanding this event is going to need an international team, as has been the case for similar events in recent years. That team has now got together and has started work.

Finally, this event is going to have profound implications on Nepal. The loss of many people, including a large number of tourists as well as local people, will be extremely painful. The Gyirong border crossing has clearly been destroyed, along with its infrastructure. Houses have been lost and at least two hydroelectric schemes destroyed along the Bhote Khosi river. The true scale of the loss is not yet clear.

I have made the point many times before, but we systematically under-estimate the risk associated with these events in the Himalaya mountains. Investments in large-scale hydropower projects are repeatedly being destroyed by these catastrophic debris flows. Unfortunately, under the conditions that result from climate change, many more of these events will occur in the future.

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Source: AGU Advances

Saturn’s moon Enceladus sports a thick shell of ice surrounding a liquid water ocean. As though scraped by an enormous claw, four parallel cracks slash across its south pole. Each about 500 meters deep, 2 kilometers across, and 130 kilometers long, the fissures spew water vapor and other materials from the subsurface ocean directly into space. But the origin of these “tiger stripes” is mysterious.

Most prior research has explored the possibility that Enceladus’s tiger stripes were created by processes primarily involving the ice shell itself, such as tectonic fracturing and cooling. Now, Abdulah et al. show that waves in the ocean beneath the ice could play a deciding role in their formation.

The researchers took inspiration from ocean waves on Earth, which can propagate from the seafloor to the surface, focus to a point, break, and dissipate. Using mathematical analysis and computational simulations, the research team investigated how waves in Enceladus’s subsurface ocean might interact with the inner surface of the ice shell. They incorporated a key feature of the moon: Because of its irregular orbit around Saturn, the moon’s entire ice shell wobbles relative to its ocean.

In the new picture of tiger stripe formation, one initial fissure already existed in the ice shell. As the shell wobbled, the motion of the fissure’s uneven underside topography against the liquid ocean below excited waves, which traveled tens of kilometers through the ocean down to the seafloor. The waves then ricocheted back up and broke against an adjacent part of the ice shell, imparting energy as heat that began to melt the ice from beneath.

The analysis suggests that this melting could kick-start a process that would eventually carve out additional parallel fissures about 35 kilometers apart from each other—matching the observed spacing of Enceladus’s existing tiger stripes.

If this proposed mechanism is correct, it would set constraints that reveal additional characteristics of the subsurface ocean, including how its density changes with depth. Additional modeling and a possible future mission to Enceladus could help refine and test the mechanism and its implications. (AGU Advances, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026AV002539, 2026)

—Sarah Stanley, Science Writer

Citation: Stanley, S. (2026), Did ocean motion carve Enceladus’s tiger stripes?, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260272. Published on 26 August 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors. Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface

Coastal dunes provide a vital natural buffer against flooding for low-lying infrastructure, yet their capacity to do so varies alongshore due to differences in dune and beach morphology. Heminway et al. [2026] quantify the drivers of alongshore variability across spatial (~40 kilometers) and temporal (multidecadal) scales using data from long-term beach and dune monitoring surveys on the Long Beach Peninsula, Washington, USA. The authors then present sensitivity tests using a reduced-complexity model to isolate the controls on dune change.

Their results identify shoreline change rate as the dominant variable governing alongshore variability in foredune evolution. In addition, beach slope and sediment grain size emerge as important secondary controls. Together, these findings provide a quantitative framework linking shoreline behavior to dune development over decadal timescales.

This study combines a rare multi-decadal field dataset with a reduced-complexity modeling approach to robustly quantify the dominant controls on alongshore variability in dune evolution. By demonstrating the primary role of shoreline change rate in shaping foredune volume over decadal timescales, it provides valuable insight into large-scale sediment-dune coupling in progradational coastal systems.

Beyond its scientific contributions, this work has clear applied implications. Improved understanding of the controls on dune variability can inform coastal hazard assessments, guide dune management strategies, and help constrain risks to coastal communities. In particular, identifying shoreline change rate as a leading indicator provides a practical metric for anticipating future dune behavior.

The study underscores the critical value of long-term monitoring. Multi-decadal datasets of this kind remain rare globally, yet they are essential for detecting trends, validating models, and advancing process understanding. Continued investment in sustained coastal observations, including topography, hydrodynamics, and sediment characteristics, is essential to support both fundamental science and its translation into effective coastal management.

Citation: Heminway, S. S., Cohn, N., van IJzendoorn, C., Ruggiero, P., Wengrove, M., Weiner, H., & Kaminsky, G. M. (2026). Assessing drivers of alongshore variation in historical coastal dune evolution: A field and model-based approach. Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, 131, e2025JF008717. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025JF008717

—Ana Vila-Concejo, Associate Editor, JGR: Earth Surface

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Source: Geophysical Research Letters

This is an authorized translation of an Eos article. 本文是Eos文章的授权翻译。

研究人员早已知道,厄尔尼诺-南方涛动（ENSO）存在不对称性，即风与洋流相互作用所引发的厄尔尼诺事件和拉尼娜事件的温差现象。然而，大规模气候模型往往未能充分反映这种不对称性，其原因尚不完全清楚。更准确地模拟导致厄尔尼诺事件变暖的机制，不仅有助于理解地球气候系统，还能提升未来ENSO事件的预测能力。

以往对厄尔尼诺-南方涛动（ENSO）不对称性的研究主要关注风应力响应和热力平流等大尺度过程，但并未完全解答这一问题。杨等人采用了一种新的方法，从更小的尺度入手，研究了昼夜海表温度变化如何影响ENSO不对称性。

研究人员比较了35个耦合模式比较计划第六阶段（CMIP6）模式，发现温度日变化幅度（DA）较大的模式能更好地捕捉ENSO不对称性。通过针对性的模式实验，他们进一步发现，这一机制的主要驱动因素是太平洋中部和东部地区日均海表温度异常响应的反向差异。这种东西向的温度差异导致海洋在数月甚至更长时间内出现不均匀升温。因此，厄尔尼诺现象对海洋的升温作用大于拉尼娜现象的降温作用。

作者指出，对于气候模型而言，采用更大的温度日变化幅度日温差幅度可将ENSO模拟中的不对称性改善高达38.5%，这凸显了海表温度日变化对厄尔尼诺等大尺度气候事件的重要性。此外，他们还强调，引入较大的DA可能从多个方面影响ENSO模拟，包括相位锁定、不对称性和振幅变化，这为其他气候模型的开发提供了有价值的指导。(Geophysical Research Letters, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026GL122494, 2026)

—科学撰稿人Nathaniel Scharping (@nathanielscharp)

This translation was made by Wiley. 本文翻译由Wiley提供。

Read this article on WeChat. 在微信上分享本文。

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Anomalously high and low temperatures affect human habits in myriad ways—forcing us inside, disrupting our sleep, and even exacerbating mental health conditions.

Temperature extremes seem to affect drug use and overdose deaths, too. A new study published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence shows that both extreme heat and extreme cold may cause an uptick in fatal overdoses. The study adds to a limited but growing field of research on temperature and drug use and could help communities better prevent overdoses, especially as climate change makes our weather more volatile.

Fatal overdoses are “something we need to pay attention to in the future” as extreme temperature events affect more people.

Fatal overdoses are “something we need to pay attention to in the future” as extreme temperature events affect more people, said Thanh Lu, a research economist at RTI International, a science and policy research institute, and lead author of the new study. (Although there is significant debate about the role of climate change in the occurrence of extreme cold events, there is scientific consensus that climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme heat waves.)

Though there is little research in the space, the study confirms previous findings indicating a link between heat and overdoses, said Raminta Daniulaityte, a population health researcher at Arizona State University who was not involved in the new study.

Hot and Cold

To further study the link between extreme temperatures and fatal overdoses, Lu and the research team compared cause-of-death data from 1999 to 2021 from the National Center for Health Statistics to county-level weather data from NOAA’s Global Historical Climatology Network. They analyzed how many fatal overdoses occurred when a person would have been experiencing extreme temperatures relative to a typical day in that county in each month.

They found that annual fatal overdoses increased with temperature extremes. For example, one day above 90°F (32°C) relative to days in the 70°F (21°C) to 80°F (27°C) range led to a 0.2% increase in overdoses. Similarly anomalous extreme low temperatures led to a similar increase in overdoses. According to the analysis, in 2021, temperatures likely drove 1,431 of the year’s 107,000 fatal overdoses.

Despite the link, the overall impact of extreme temperatures on total overdoses was still small, with temperature driving about 1% of the total annual fatal overdoses that the team studied.

Researchers also found that the types, not just the number, of overdoses varied with temperature; opioid-related overdoses occurred more at extreme low temperatures, while stimulant-related overdoses were more correlated with extreme high temperatures. The results align with what Daniulaityte sees in her research in the Phoenix area, where afternoon temperatures in the summer frequently exceed 110°F (43°C). In particular, her research shows a significant relationship between the impacts of heat and overdoses from stimulants, she said.

Extreme temperatures likely drive overdoses in two main ways, Lu said: First, substance use can decrease the body’s ability to cope with extreme heat and extreme cold, making some of the effects of substances, like altered heart rate and weakened breathing, more likely to lead to a fatality. Second, extreme temperatures can affect economic or employment opportunities, decreases in which are known to increase overdoses.

“We were not able to examine or tease out what mechanism, specifically, is a key driver,” Lu said. However, moderately high and low temperatures had a small effect on fatal overdoses, too, indicating that heat and cold can drive overdoses even when it’s not too hot or too cold to go outside or go to work. This means the physiological effects of extreme temperatures likely play an important role, she said.

Daniulaityte said scientists see more consistent links between heat and stimulant-related overdoses than opioid-related overdoses. “We need more data” on how heat affects opioid-related overdoses, she said.

Prevention in a Warming World

The overall impact of extreme temperatures on total overdoses was small in the study, and the researchers did not explicitly link the increase in fatal overdoses to climate change. Still, extreme temperature may become more of a factor in overdose deaths as the climate continues to warm, Lu said.

“People who will be impacted first will be people who experience multiple vulnerabilities.”

Mitigating the effects of extreme temperatures on overdose deaths could look like providing more cooling and warming centers for unhoused people who use drugs or increasing communities’ supplies of naloxone (a medication that reverses an opioid overdose) when extreme temperatures are expected, Lu said. Policymakers should pay equal attention to the effects of both extreme cold and extreme hot weather on overdoses, she said.

Daniulaityte emphasized that increased risk for overdoses is just another way that climate change harms the most vulnerable members of society. “We see the risks [of overdoses] significantly higher for people who are experiencing housing instability and poor access to health services,” she said.

“People who will be impacted first will be people who experience multiple vulnerabilities.”

—Grace van Deelen (@gvd.bsky.social), Staff Writer

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2026), Extreme heat and extreme cold drive an increase in fatal overdoses, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260270. Published on 25 August 2026. Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors. Source: AGU Advances

Plasma density irregularities are small-scale ripples in the ionized gas surrounding the Earth and other planets – some no larger than a hundred-meter city block in length. They can affect the propagation of radio waves by steering, trapping, or scattering specific portions of a radio signal, and thereby impact satellite communications and navigation in a complex manner – GPS navigation being a good example on Earth.

NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) satellite recently revealed that the plasma density irregularities in the Mars ionosphere are electromagnetic in nature, in contrast to the electrostatic nature in the terrestrial ionosphere: the variations in density are accompanied by changes in the magnetic field.

Using numerical simulations to investigate how these irregularities form and evolve, Jiang et al. [2026] find that electromagnetic Rayleigh-Taylor instability (RTI) – a special kind of plasma instability caused by gravity – can induce their formation in the nighttime Mars ionosphere. The magnetic field variations would reach the level of 1 nano-Tesla for plasma density variations up to 70% of the background density.

In addition to improving our understanding of the physical processes shaping the Mars ionosphere, these findings suggest that electromagnetic Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities may also be applicable on other weakly magnetized planets or satellites in the solar system.

Citation: Jiang, K., Lei, J., & Yan, M. (2026). Beyond the electrostatic approach: Numerical simulations of Martian ionospheric irregularities. AGU Advances, 7, e2026AV002327. https://doi.org/10.1029/2026AV002327

—Andrew Yau, Editor, AGU Advances

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Editors’ Vox is a blog from AGU’s Publications Department.

As climate models become more advanced and complex, it is increasingly important to evaluate model performance with respect to observations. A new article in Reviews of Geophysics explores climate model evaluation and benchmarking efforts in the scientific community. Here, we asked the authors to give an overview of climate modeling, how scientists evaluate models, and what challenges remain.

When did scientists first start developing climate models?

While today’s climate models are comprised of millions of lines of code and need to be run on large supercomputers, climate modeling started over a century ago. Lewis Fry Richardson published his 1922 book ‘Weather Predication by Numerical Process’, outlining his idea to forecast the weather using differential equations. It took him six weeks to derive an eight-hour forecast by hand. It wasn’t until 1950 when the first computerized weather forecast was run at Princeton University, led by Jule G. Charney. Six years later, Norman Phillips published a paper titled ‘The general circulation of the atmosphere: a numerical experiment’, in which he details the first General Circulation Model (GCM) of the atmosphere.

Climate modeling, as a distinct field of study from weather forecasting, developed significantly throughout the 1960s, with several seminal studies being published which still underpin climate research today, culminating in the first results from a coupled atmosphere-ocean GCM, in which the atmosphere, ice, and ocean interact with each other for the first time (Manabe et al., 1975 Part 1 and Part 2).

What’s the difference between physical climate models and Earth System Models (ESMs)?

GCMs are predecessors of ESMs, which have been expanded to include more processes describing the climate system.

The difference between physical (“physics-based”) climate models (GCMs) and Earth System Models (ESMs) can be very clearly determined: GCMs are predecessors of ESMs, which have been expanded to include more processes describing the climate system. GCMs focus strictly on the physical processes and exchanges of energy and matter between the atmosphere, oceans, land surface, and sea ice. They therefore provide the means to understand the physics of the system.

ESMs are based on more comprehensive model configurations. In addition to the physical representation of the climate system, they also include processes such as interactive atmospheric chemistry, biogeochemical cycles, and marine/terrestrial ecosystems, and carbon exchange between Earth system components. These additional processes help with the realistic representation of the climate system and increase the confidence in future climate projections, but they come with increased costs in resources and time. Which configuration of climate models are used to prepare a simulation is therefore still very much dependent on the planned use of the simulation.

Why is it important to evaluate and benchmark climate models?

A diverse set of tests and diagnostics can help understand differences between models, differences caused by changes over model generations, and identify priorities for future scientific development.

Climate models are among the most important and useful scientific mechanisms to study the Earth system, and the past and future climate. Every generation of climate models brings new advances in representing processes in different components of the Earth system such as the atmosphere, oceans and land and their interactions. State-of-the-art models also include the representation of the carbon cycle across these different domains, allowing us to understand the role of carbon cycling in determining the Earth’s climate. Climate model evaluation with a wide variety of diagnostics is how we develop confidence in the fidelity with which models represent processes that affect future climate projections (IPCC AR 4). A diverse set of tests and diagnostics can help understand differences between models, differences caused by changes over model generations, and identify priorities for future scientific development.

What are some of the different ways that scientists evaluate climate model simulations?

Climate model evaluation is described as the process of comparing model simulations against observational or reanalyzes datasets. Benchmarking is the process where model simulations are evaluated with observations, reanalysis data, or with other models often resulting in a statement made about the “goodness” of the simulation or model based on a predetermined set of standards or criteria. One or more models can be compared against the same set of observations in evaluation. Some of the more basic diagnostics used in model evaluation are the comparison of climatological (average over a period of 30 years or so) means, inter-annual variability and biases often expressed as time series. Maps or spatial patterns comparing models and observations, statistical analyses such as distributions of a specific variable and portrait plots for multi-model evaluation are other approaches commonly used to evaluate models. More complex diagnostics such as water, energy or carbon budgets and cross-domain interactions (e.g. how does temperature vary with precipitation) are also used for better process-based evaluation.

The evaluation of climate model simulations can be grouped in six general approaches. Most approaches require observations and can be applied on a global or regional scale. Credit: Hassler et al. [2026], Figure 2

What are some specific model biases that have been improved due to routine assessments?

Systematic model evaluation assures scientists are frequently reminded of biases that have not been eliminated or that often recur, and it helps modeling centers identify process representations to prioritize in future model development. Biases in cloud and water vapor process representations have been reduced over the past 20 years due to the growth of detailed observations and improvements in cloud vertical distribution and parameter tuning.

The East Asian summer monsoon (EASM), which carries moisture from the Indian and Pacific Oceans to East Asia, exhibits intense interannual variability that results in severe droughts and floods. Several multi-model benchmarking studies have focused on model reproductions of the EASM, and they identified a weakened western North Pacific anticyclone as a primary cause of biases in the western Pacific subtropical high and the Meiyu-Baiu-Changma rainband.

Early efforts in evaluating land carbon cycle models identified persistent biases in the timing of the seasonal variation of vegetation growth, especially with respect to satellite-derived leaf area index (LAI), which were tied to an underestimate of carbohydrate pools carried from one growing season to the next. Land models substantially overestimated aboveground live biomass in the Amazon Basin compared to estimates from satellite observations, which researchers attributed primarily to low autotrophic respiration and excessive allocation of net primary production to wood. Improvements in model representation of vegetation processes significantly reduced these long-standing biases that have been routinely assessed through comparison with observational data for at least three decades.

What are some of the remaining biases in climate models where additional research and development efforts are needed?

Identifying persistent biases and tracking their reductions are crucial to strengthening the utility of projections from climate and Earth system models.

A variety of biases exhibited by many climate models have been difficult to reduce or completely eliminate despite frequent model evaluation and bias characterization. Many of these have led scientists to perform extensive model tuning exercises or apply bias removal techniques to reduce the impacts of such biases. Examples include both positive and negative regional biases in precipitation, the double ITCZ (intertropical convergence zone), warming biases in the tropical troposphere, and low Arctic Sea ice sensitivity to global warming compared to observations. Identifying such persistent biases and tracking their reductions are crucial to strengthening the utility of projections from climate and Earth system models. Creating a wealth of additional model performance metrics and enhancing collections of observational data sets are required to understand the sources of these long-standing model biases.

—Birgit Hassler (birgit.hassler@dlr.de, 0000-0003-2724-709X), Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), Germany; Forrest Hoffman (0000-0001-5802-4134), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, United States; Ranjini Swaminathan (0000-0001-5853-2673), University of Reading, United Kingdom; and Beth Dingley (0000-0002-9831-9671), European Space Agency, United Kingdom

Editor’s Note: It is the policy of AGU Publications to invite the authors of articles published in Reviews of Geophysics to write a summary for Eos Editors’ Vox.

Citation: Hassler, B., F. Hoffman, R. Swaminathan, and B. Dingley (2026), Climate model benchmarking: building trust and advancing science, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO265032. Published on 24 August 2026. This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author(s). Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Source: AGU Advances

Marine heat waves and extreme ocean acidification events are each damaging on their own. But when both stressors hit simultaneously, their individual effects can be exacerbated.

That threat may be best exemplified by “the Blob” of 2013–2015, during which both a marine heat wave and an ocean acidification extreme event hit the northeastern Pacific. Fisheries were closed, marine mammals were stranded, seabirds died, and sea creatures either changed their distribution or perished.

But our understanding of these compound heat-acidity ocean extreme events is limited, with more research focused on the marine heat wave component than on the acidification aspect.

Gregor and Gruber used 43 years of monthly data (1982–2024) on surface ocean temperatures and acidity to determine when, where, and why compound heat-acidity extreme events have occurred. They defined extreme events as those situations when detrended acidity and temperature exceed their 95th percentiles.

Compound ocean heat-acidity events happen more often than would be expected by chance, the authors found. In the low to midlatitudes, they occur roughly 4 times more often than compared to chance, mostly in places with permanent stratification. In these places, heat waves drive waters to be more acidic. The compound events were least common in the eastern equatorial Pacific and around the poles, where deep waters upwell to the surface. When marine heat waves strike in these upwelling regions, a warm lens (top layer of water) prevents the surfacing of the deep acidic waters, leading to unusually low acidity for the region.

A majority (73%) of compound heat-acidity extreme events in the study period were smaller than 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles, roughly the size of Spain) and lasted for about a month. But a few events, like the Blob in 2015, lasted for more than a year, sometimes with long-lasting consequences.

El Niño and La Niña events are important drivers of these compound events, but the events seldom happen at the weather events’ epicenter in the equatorial Pacific. During El Niño, warmer waters create a lens that prevents upwelling, thus reducing the typical acidity of the region. And during La Niña, cold, deep waters with higher acidity upwell, resulting in only an acidification extreme. However, it is in the neighboring regions where the knock-on effect of this warming or acidity causes compound extremes to occur.

The new findings are in line with several key facets of earlier work and offer more insights into temporal patterns and drivers. (AGU Advances, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV002112, 2026)

—Rebecca Dzombak, Science Writer

Citation: Dzombak, R. (2026), Why marine heat waves and acidification strike together, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260269. Published on 24 August 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors. Source: Community Science

What are the benefits of sustainable agriculture practice, who reaps those benefits, and how do we measure them? Komarek et al. [2026] tackle those questions by integrating national-scale frameworks for assessing sustainable practices in agriculture with on-the-ground knowledge of farmers in the midwestern United States.

Through a combination of surveys and workshops, farmers and scientists worked together to a develop of usable and localized set of indicators for assessing the use of cover crops. “Indicators” are things you can measure to see how something is working; you can measure carbon in the soil to see if cover crops are making soil healthier. The paper describes the resulting indicators, but more importantly it shows that iterative engagement with farmers produces indicators that are easier to measure, give a more complete picture, and are more useful in decision-making that the indicators that come from national-level frameworks alone. It also reveals things that might have been missed otherwise: in this case, farmers recognized that some of the long-term benefits of cover crops accrued to landowners, while much of the short-term cost of cover cropping was born by the farmers who rented that land, illuminating a key challenge for increasing sustainable practices.

In the workshop, farmers used colored dots to qualitatively show whether each indicator revealed an increase (green) or decrease (red) in sustainability. Yellow indicates uncertainty or both positive and negative impacts on sustainability. Credit: Komarek et al. [2026], Figure 4

Citation: Komarek, A. M., Castellano, M. J., Jackson, K., Lee, A., Zhang, W., & Zhang, X. (2026). A participatory framework to assess agricultural sustainability: Cover cropping as an illustrative example. Community Science, 5, e2025CSJ000138. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025CSJ000138

—Rajul Pandya, Editor, Community Science Exchange

Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.