EOS

The locations of drainage divides determine how water flows across a landscape. Now, a new study has revealed how quickly these features can migrate when a region’s normally dry climate gets a little wetter.

Researchers used a combination of field observations, sediment dating, and numerical modeling to show how a river system in Israel’s Negev Desert has made sudden shifts in response to known wet periods. Drainage divides that migrated at an average rate of 1.1 kilometers (0.7 mile) per million years over the studied interval stalled and picked up speed in step with known shifts in the region’s climate.

“To my knowledge, this is the first study that directly measures rates of drainage divide migration,” said Mikaël Attal, a geomorphologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland who was not involved in the research. “This is important because drainage migration can have implications for understanding erosion across landscapes, our ability to infer tectonics from topography, and the management of water resources.”

Drainages Move Slowly, Then All at Once

Water falling on a landscape flows downhill, accumulates in rivers, and eventually drains into lakes, wetlands, or oceans. Drainage divides are topographic boundaries that control the water’s path.

“If a drop of water falls on one side or the other of a drainage divide, it will follow a different route,” Attal said. He used North America’s Great Divide as an example: “If a drop falls on the west side of the divide, it goes to the Pacific; if it falls on the other side, it goes to the Atlantic.”

A drainage divide migrates when the rivers on one side of the ridge erode more rapidly than on the other. In response, rivers may change their course or even reverse direction.

Because divide migration has a significant effect on landscapes, researchers are interested in how—and how quickly—it happens. But so far, it has been difficult to determine the rate at which drainage divides migrate on short timescales.

“Geomorphic markers capable of recording past divide locations, such as alluvial terraces, are often eroded away,” explained Elhanan Harel, a geomorphologist at the Geological Survey of Israel and a coauthor of the study, which appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Most of the movement happened in two intervals, during which the drainage divide migrated across the landscape at twice the average rate.

Previous studies have used cosmogenic nuclide dating to measure erosion on either side of drainage divides. These erosion rates, along with other variables, were fed into an equation that estimates the rate of drainage divide migration.

This approach, however, presents several drawbacks. The equation relies on a simplified geometric model of the drainage divide, which may not accurately describe a specific site. In addition, cosmogenic nuclide dating provides erosion rates that are averaged over a river basin, which may not match erosion at the drainage divide. The erosion rates inferred from cosmogenic nuclides are also time averaged, making it impossible to track short-term changes.

Harel and his coauthors overcame these difficulties by studying unusually well-preserved river terraces in Israel’s dry southern Negev Desert. River terraces, created as rivers slowly erode and leave behind steps that represent previous levels of the valley floor, are valuable markers of regional geomorphology. At the Negev Desert site, each terrace records a past location of the drainage divide, enabling Harel and others to trace the divide’s migration step by step.

The researchers used a technique called optically stimulated luminescence to date when the terraces formed. Collating dates on the sequence of terraces, they reconstructed the drainage divide’s 258-meter migration over the past 227,000 years.

Most of the movement, they found, happened during two intervals, from 245,000 to 183,000 years ago and 36,000 to 26,000 years ago, during which the divide moved across the landscape at twice the average rate.

Wet Climates May Drive Rapid Migration

Although the southern Negev Desert has been mostly dry for at least a million years, its arid state has been punctuated by occasional wet periods: One occurred around 220,000–190,000 years ago, and another took place between 35,000 and 20,000 years ago. These periods coincide with intervals of rapid drainage migration.

Increased weathering and the timing of groundwater recharge in the southern Negev indicate that extreme storms and floods occurred at those times.

The researchers simulated the physical processes of river incision to evaluate whether climate shifts could explain the observed divide migration rates. They found that a scenario assuming constant climate conditions couldn’t reproduce their observations from the Negev, but one that included intermittent climate shifts matched the results exactly.

“Our study provides the first direct evidence linking divide migration to climate fluctuations on much shorter timescales.”

The new analysis supports the idea that climate and rainfall drive landscape changes. “While previous studies have demonstrated that tectonic forces can drive divide migration over million-year timescales, our study provides the first direct evidence linking divide migration to climate fluctuations on much shorter timescales,” Harel said.

Attal agreed that the study helps researchers understand the connection between climate and drainage patterns. “It is very interesting that [the authors] found that the divide tends to migrate in bursts during wet periods,” he said.

This knowledge may be increasingly relevant as extreme weather events—such as severe rain, storms, and floods—become more common because of climate change. In flat areas with an abundance of loose sediment, severe flooding could divert rivers and shift drainage divides, causing permanent changes to the landscape.

“I think this work highlights that some landscapes may be highly sensitive to climate change,” said Attal.

—Caroline Hasler (@carbonbasedcary), Science Writer

Citation: Hasler, C. (2025), Climate shifts drive episodic drainage changes, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250139. Published on 14 April 2025. Text © 2025. 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: Geophysical Research Letters

Much of Earth’s heat uptake is passed to the ocean, making ocean heat content key for understanding long-term climate patterns. Ocean heat content is typically lower during ice ages and rises during warmer periods of glacier retreat. Over the past 1.2 million years, ice ages and interglacials have occurred in cycles lasting about 100,000 years, and we are currently in an interglacial period after the Last Glacial Maximum occurred about 20,000 years ago.

Recent climate modeling studies have suggested that ocean heat content also changes on shorter timescales of just a few thousand years as a result of intermittent changes in the strength of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)—a pattern of Atlantic Ocean currents that carries warm water north and cold water south. The models suggest that a weaker AMOC leads to increased ocean heat content. However, real-world evidence to support or refute AMOC’s potential influence on ocean heat content has been limited.

Grimmer et al. present the first record of ocean heat content during the ends of the last four ice ages and the subsequent warm periods, enabling the team to test modeling predictions against paleoclimate data.

To generate the new record, the researchers analyzed the ratios of specific noble gases trapped within 59 new samples from a 3,260-meter-long ice core drilled in East Antarctica as part of the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA). The noble gas ratios in different ice layers serve as fingerprints of ocean heat content at various times in Earth’s past.

Analysis of the new record showed that at the end of each of the last four ice ages, ocean heat content generally increased alongside a weaker AMOC, as predicted by the models. These transitions to warmer interglacial periods, known as deglaciations, last several thousand years. The record also showed evidence of millennial-scale changes in ocean heat content that occurred alongside changes in ocean circulation. When the AMOC strengthened, ocean heat content either increased at a slower pace or decreased.

These findings align with the prior modeling predictions, supporting the idea that on millennial timescales, the AMOC plays a key role in controlling heat uptake by Earth’s oceans. In turn, this interaction likely influences subsequent sea levels, climate conditions, and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. (Geophysical Research Letters, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL114415, 2025)

—Sarah Stanley, Science Writer

Citation: Stanley, S. (2025), When ice ages end, ocean circulation fine-tunes ocean heat, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250137. Published on 14 April 2025. Text © 2025. 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: Geophysical Research Letters

Ice sheets are formed by the slow transformation of snow into ice. Large masses of ice, such as the Antarctic ice sheet, deform under their own weight and transport the ice from the interior of the continent to the coast, eventually breaking off and forming icebergs. The flow of ice is non-Newtonian, which means that its viscosity decreases as it deforms more. Recent research has shown that this effect may be even stronger than what current computer models use.

Getraer and Morlighem [2025] evaluate what the consequences of ice being an even more nonlinear material may be on its stability and contribution to sea level rise. The authors find that the sector of Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica would lose 32% more ice by 2100, and 70% by 2300. Current estimates of the future contribution of the ice sheets to sea level may therefore be strongly underestimated.

Citation: Getraer, B., & Morlighem, M. (2025). Increasing the Glen–Nye power-law exponent accelerates ice-loss projections for the Amundsen Sea Embayment, West Antarctica. Geophysical Research Letters, 52, e2024GL112516. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL112516

—Minghua Zhang, Former Editor-in-Chief, Geophysical Research Letters

Text © 2024. 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 regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.

The initial draft of President Donald Trump’s budget request proposes devastating cuts to NASA’s science research, future space missions, and field centers. The draft budget request, reported by Ars Technica and The Washington Post, proposes an overall 20% cut to NASA’s budget, from about $25 billion to $20 billion.

“This is an extinction-level event for NASA science,” Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Planetary Society, told The Washington Post. “It needlessly terminates functional, productive science missions and cancels new missions currently being built, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars in the process. This is neither efficient nor smart budgeting.”

The overwhelming majority of the cuts would come from NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD), which would face a more than 50% cut from $7.5 billion to just $3.9 billion. This division includes all planetary science, Earth science, astrophysics, heliophysics, and biological and physical science research.

The draft budget request proposes a 68% cut to astrophysics (from $1.5 billion to $487 million), a more than 43% cut to heliophysics (from $805 million to $455 million), a 30% cut to planetary science (from $2.7 billion to $1.9 billion), and a 53% cut to Earth science (from $2.2 billion to $1.033 billion).

The proposal retains funding for the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, but kills funding for the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is fully assembled, on budget, and on schedule to launch in 2 years.

Also on the chopping block are the funding for the DAVINCI+ mission to Venus and the Mars Sample Return joint mission with the European Space Agency, which has been a budgetary flashpoint for years.

— Casey Dreier (@caseydreier.bsky.social) 2025-04-11T17:45:09.472Z

NASA’s Earth science division within SMD is home to NASA’s Earth observing satellite programs and climate research. Combined with continued attacks on NOAA and the National Weather Service, such steep budget cuts to NASA Earth science would nearly eliminate the United States’s capacity to study climate change and protect people from increasingly severe climate impacts.

The draft budget also appears to seek to force the closure of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., which employs more than 10,000 civil servants and contractors.

 
Resources

•  Trump White House budget proposal eviscerates science funding at NASA (Ars Technica)
•  Massive cuts to NASA science proposed in early White House budget plan (Washington Post)
•  Historical NASA Budget Data (Casey Dreier, The Planetary Society)
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
 

“NASA Goddard and the NASA science missions are critical to discovering the secrets of the universe and the planet we live on and have a direct bearing on our leadership in technological innovation and our national security,” wrote U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) in a statement. Van Hollen is the Ranking Member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies.

“This is a wholly unserious budget proposal,” Van Hollen noted. “I will fight tooth and nail against these cuts and to protect the critical work being done at NASA Goddard.”

On 9 April, Jared Isaacman, Trump’s nominee for NASA administrator, said in his Senate hearing that he had no knowledge of any planned budget cuts to NASA and had no present intentions of cancelling existing programs. Notably, he did not commit to keeping all NASA field centers open given multiple chances to do so. Isaacman repeatedly emphasized that he was committed to ensuring U.S. dominance in the space race against China, which also seeks to put humans on the Moon and Mars, as well as expand its exploration science program throughout the solar system. These budget cuts would make that goal much harder to achieve.

With Trump’s proposed NASA budget…1st samples from Mars:

Source: Geophysical Research Letters

In magnetic reconnection, adjacent magnetic field lines break and snap together to form new lines. This process converts magnetic energy to both thermal energy, or heat, and kinetic energy, or the acceleration of particles, creating jets of electrons and ions. Magnetic reconnection plays a key role in many outer space events such as solar flares and aurorae, as well as in laboratory methods related to nuclear fusion.

Several years ago, observations of Earth’s magnetic field by NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale mission led to the discovery that magnetic reconnection can occur with only electron jets, without also involving the acceleration of ions. These events also have a relatively high reconnection rate, meaning the involved magnetic field lines snap together quickly. Now Fan et al. report the results of new simulations that deepen the understanding of these electron-only events.

The researchers applied a computational method known as particle-in-cell simulation to model the behavior of ions and electrons during magnetic reconnection. They ran 12 simulations to explore what factors might underlie electron-only reconnection.

The simulations revealed that the electron-only status of reconnection occurs when field lines outside of the electron diffusion region do not bend enough, leading to an underdeveloped ion diffusion region. This atypical bending happens in the early stage and may continue throughout the process if the entire system size (the size of the area in which reconnection occurs) is smaller than the radius of the path along which the ions travel.

The team also realized that magnetic reconnection and field line bending may not develop at the same pace. A relatively thin initial current sheet allows the reconnection rate to peak before field lines are fully bent, leading to calculations of high reconnection rates if they are normalized by ion parameters. However, the calculations of the reconnection rate are more typical when they are normalized by electron parameters.

These findings could help clarify the fundamental physics of magnetic reconnection, the authors suggest. (Geophysical Research Letters, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL113889, 2025)

—Sarah Stanley, Science Writer

Citation: Stanley, S. (2025), New insights into an enigmatic form of magnetic reconnection, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250138. Published on 11 April 2025. Text © 2025. 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.

Cycles of ice sheet growth (glacials) and intervening warmth (interglacials) in Earth’s past—largely triggered by shifts in the amount of solar radiation (insolation) reaching the planet—have been characterized by major changes in global atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, sea levels, and temperatures. Around the time of the Last Glacial Maximum 20,000 years ago, for example, average global temperatures were roughly 6°C (11°F) colder, and sea levels were more than 120 meters (400 feet) lower than today, whereas ice covered about a quarter of Earth’s land surface.

Such changes have had profound effects on ecosystems, particularly coastal ecosystems, including coral reefs. And as CO2 levels, temperatures, and sea levels rise rapidly around the world today, modern ecosystems—humans included—will likely continue to experience major impacts as well.

Coral reef systems are highly sensitive to sea level and climate, and fossil reefs preserve reliable records of past variations.

Yet many unknowns remain about the mechanisms that control climate transitions, particularly during past episodes of rapid warming. These unknowns raise critical questions about present and future warming as well: Are predictions of catastrophic sea level rise—up to several meters—resulting from ice sheet collapse valid? Will the behavior and effects of annual to interannual climate phenomena, such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and seasonal rainfall, change as the average global climate changes?

Also uncertain is how coral reefs and coasts will respond to associated environmental stresses. Coral reef systems are highly sensitive to sea level and climate, and fossil reefs preserve reliable records of past variations. Yet our understanding of these variations is severely limited because we lack continuous fossil coral records, particularly from periods of abrupt climate instability. Such records are exceptionally rare given the specific conditions required to build and preserve fossil reef sequences over extended periods and the difficulty of sampling them where they do occur.

In fall 2023, scientists and crew on the International Ocean Discovery Program’s (IODP) Expedition 389 (X389) employed an advanced, remotely operated seabed drilling system to access the interiors of submerged, or “drowned,” fossil reefs off the island of Hawai‘i for the first time (Figure 1). The reef sequences there contain globally unique records of sea level and climate change—and their impacts on reef ecosystems—over the past 500,000 years [Webster et al., 2025].

Fig. 1. A unique sequence of drowned fossil coral reefs was sampled off Hawai‘i during X389. (a) Sampling sites (red markers) are indicated along with their depths below sea level and name (H1, H2, etc.). (b) Sea level changes (blue curve) are shown through the cold glacials (blue shading) and warm interglacials (orange shading) over the past 600,000 years [Rohling et al., 2009; Elderfield et al., 2012; Lambeck et al., 2014]. New preliminary age data (red bars) confirm that reefs H1–H8 (gray bars) span 13 glacial-interglacial intervals (termed marine isotope stages (MIS), numbered boxes), including rapid climate transitions. ka = thousand years ago. Credit: Adapted from Webster et al. [2025], CC BY 4.0 Hawai‘i’s Unique Reef Records

Hawai‘i is geologically special. Located over an active volcanic hot spot, it has been—and continues to be—built up by successive eruptions. As the underlying mantle compensates for the increasing weight of the island, the ocean crust has experienced nearly constant subsidence over the past 500,000 years. This subsidence creates space that accommodates growth and vertical expansions of reefs, which, as they accumulate and fossilize, capture conditions through glacial-interglacial intervals in great detail (Figures 1b and 2). These reefs ring the island, forming a spectacular sequence of increasingly older terraces between 100 and 1,500 meters below present sea level (Figure 1a).

Rapid sea level rises linked to catastrophic ice sheet collapse and abrupt meltwater pulse events during deglaciations cause reef drowning.

The reefs have been the subject of 4 decades of data collection and study involving multiple methods of seafloor imaging (bathymetric, backscatter, and seismic) and sampling (with dredges, submersibles, and remotely operated vehicles), as well as geochronologic methods and numerical modeling [Webster et al., 2009]. These prior data underpin our knowledge of fossil reef development and motivated the scientific rationale and drilling strategy of X389.

As Hawai‘i subsides at a rate of 2.5 millimeters per year, space below the ocean surface is created for reef growth in the near term (Figure 2). But how do large and longer-term sea level changes occurring through glacial-interglacial intervals affect reefs?

Reef growth initiates during sea level highstands and continues during glaciation as sea levels slowly drop. If sea level falls quickly, outpacing the island’s subsidence rate, the living part of the reef dies as it is exposed above the waves. If, on the other hand, sea level rises too quickly and new reef growth—which requires the sunlight available near the ocean surface—fails to keep up, the reef will deepen and ultimately drown.

Fig. 2. This conceptual model illustrates the development and accumulation of drowned fossil coral reefs and other rock facies (e.g., microbialites, volcanic deposits) in different paleoenvironments around Hawai‘i over the past 100,000 years in response to rapid island subsidence, which creates accommodation space (double-headed arrow), and changing sea levels (dark blue curve). ka = thousand years ago; mbsl = meters below sea level. Credit: Adapted from Webster et al. [2025], CC BY 4.0

Rapid sea level rises linked to catastrophic ice sheet collapse and abrupt meltwater pulse events during deglaciations thus cause reef drowning [Sanborn et al., 2017]. Then, during the subsequent warm high sea level stand, a new reef is initiated upslope, and the cycle starts again.

Numerical models of reef growth and demise, forced by changes in sea level, predict that the Hawaiian terraces comprise thicker sequences of fossilized reef—100–150 meters per glacial cycle—compared with those built on stable margins such as the Great Barrier Reef. As such, the Hawaiian expanded sequences hold great promise for providing sea level and climate records of unprecedented resolution and detail.

To sample these Hawaiian reefs across a range of water depths and challenging lithologies (they commonly fragment and break), researchers required a novel drilling system—unavailable to the scientific community until recently—that could penetrate the reef interior rather than just scratch its surface.

The Core of the Matter

The X389 team found the needed technology in Benthic’s fifth-generation portable remotely operated drill (PROD5). This commercial, tethered device can be guided to and secured at seafloor targets as deep as several kilometers, where its automated capabilities allow it to collect long sample cores (up to 73 meters below the seafloor in the case of X389). A major advantage of seafloor drills over ship-based systems is that they’re stationary, which makes it easier to keep constant weight on the drill bit and improves recovery of continuous core segments.

Scenes from X389’s drilling operations show the PROD5 drill (a) being deployed over the side of the MMA Valour and (b) landing on the seafloor, as well as (c) team members processing and archiving a core collected from a well-preserved fossilized massive Porites coral. Credit: Jody Webster

Sailing aboard the MMA Valour, the expedition used PROD5 to obtain reef material from roughly the past 500,000 years to address four major objectives: (1) measuring the extents of past sea level variations, (2) investigating seasonal to millennial climate and oceanic change, (3) assessing coral reef ecosystem responses to abrupt sea level and climate changes, and (4) improving knowledge of the growth and subsidence of Hawai‘i over time.

Over the course of 2 months in fall 2023, we deployed the drill at 16 drowned reef sites offshore Hawai‘i, coring 35 holes at water depths ranging from 132 to 1,242 meters (Figure 1a). A total of 425 meters of core were recovered, comprising both reef (83%) and volcanic (17%) materials. Core recoveries averaged 66%, and numerous intervals of well-preserved reef samples exhibited recoveries greater than 90%, significant achievements compared with recoveries from prior expeditions. For example, core recoveries averaged 27% using a ship-based drilling system during Expedition 325 to the Great Barrier Reef in 2010 [Webster et al., 2011].

The deployments were largely successful, but the expedition was not all smooth sailing.

The deployments were largely successful, but the expedition was not all smooth sailing. Technical issues with the drill, including mechanical breakdowns and difficulties penetrating heterogeneous coral reef material, limited our ability to reach all target depths.

Moreover, the expedition did not adequately engage with community members about the plans and purpose of its research or about concerns it may have posed. This regrettable oversight alienated members of the local and Native Hawaiian communities, some of whom expressed frustration at not being informed or consulted prior to the Valour’s arrival offshore and voiced uncertainties over possible environmental harms.

In addition to damaging the expedition’s relationship with local communities, the lack of timely and vital engagement directly affected the science we could pursue. The concerns raised by community members contributed to the denial of a permit to drill in state waters—a decision received after X389 was already at sea—meaning that we could not sample at some young, science-critical reef sites as originally planned.

Consequently, we pivoted our approach to add more sites in federal waters where we could sample other young reef sequences and to drill transects of shorter, but high-quality, cores to capture small sea level oscillations. Since the research cruise, expedition members have sought to redouble community engagement efforts to redress the offenses and concerns caused by the expedition.

Ancient Anatomy Lessons Fig. 3. Line scan images of two core sections show shallow, in situ reef frameworks characterized by branching Porites coral with well-developed encrusting coralline algae, vermetid gastropods, and microbialite deposits. These cores were collected from the same H2 reef terrace but on opposite sides of Hawai‘i, (a) one near Kawaihae on the leeward, dry side and (b) one near Hilo on the windward, wet side; they are indicative of rapid reef accretion in response to sea level rise and differing riverine inputs. Credit: Adapted from Webster et al. [2025], CC BY 4.0

Analysis of the hundreds of meters of core collected during X389 will reveal, for the first time, the complex internal anatomy and composition of Hawai‘i’s extensive reef packages through the past half million years. Preliminary visual observations have already offered glimpses of exquisite new details, including drowning reef sequences formed during the terminations of glacial periods [Webster et al., 2025]. The building blocks of these drowning reefs include branching, columnar, and massive shallow corals; several types of microbialite; thick crustose coralline algae (Figure 3); lithified and unlithified sediments; and a diversity of volcanic flows and associated sediments.

Observations so far also suggest that our sampling captured distinct shallow, intermediate, and deep reef communities and depositional settings, as well as the first evidence of major lithologic boundaries indicating repeated reef initiation and demise, as predicted by models and previous seafloor observations [Webster et al., 2009] (Figure 2). Furthermore, substantial differences in sedimentary contributions to the reefs between the dry and wet sides of Hawai‘i highlight that variations in precipitation, sediments, and nutrient input might influence reef evolution (Figure 3).

Fig. 4. A suite of nondestructive analytical techniques from across the electromagnetic spectrum was used to investigate fossil coral reef cores collected during X389. Shown here are representative high-resolution images of a robust branching Porites coral and other components from the same core from the H2 reef terrace (dated to between MIS7 and MIS6). The images include (a) a line scan image, (b) an X-ray computed tomography image showing 3D density changes, and hyperspectral images providing mineralogic information such as the (c) aragonite index, (d) calcite index, and (e) minimum wavelength mapping. Credit: Adapted from Webster et al. [2025], CC BY 4.0

Early analyses of the cores have been done using a suite of nondestructive imaging techniques (Figure 4). X-ray computed tomography is providing 3D reconstructions of massive Porites coral specimens, which often provide accurate records of past ocean conditions. In addition, traditional high-resolution line scans integrated with high-resolution hyperspectral scanning of the cores are revealing carbonate and other minerals (e.g., aragonite, calcite, clay, and iron), helping to guide sampling and more detailed analyses of the cores.

Windows into the Past and Future

The material recovered during X389 is between 10,000 and 500,000 years old and includes hundreds of well-preserved samples. These samples will be used to reconstruct the first absolute dating of sea level changes during portions of this time window. Putting absolute dates to these changes will have profound implications for testing theories about the drivers and triggers of past glacial-interglacial cycles and for validating climate and ice sheet models that are critically important for predicting sea level changes resulting from current and future global warming.

Further, the X389 cores include more than 300 Porites coral specimens with annual banding that will provide the first estimates of seasonal to millennial paleoclimate variability in the region. Geochemical analyses can be used to estimate monthly oceanographic variability with respect to temperature, precipitation, nutrient dynamics, carbon chemistry, and pH.

Assessing the nature of variability at different temporal scales will help answer critical questions. For example, were the occurrence and seasonality of extreme climate events in the past dependent on the background average climate state at times when global temperature, Pacific storm tracks positions, solar insolation, and atmospheric CO2 levels were different? The state dependency of high-frequency temperature and hydroclimate variability is a key question today as Earth warms.

The sequences of reef lithologies recovered during X389, including volcanic flows and the diverse variety and shapes of reef-building organisms, will be interpreted to reveal a story of ecosystem response to geological processes and paleoclimatic variations in sea level and oceanographic conditions. This interpretation will inform broader understanding of the factors that control reef growth, reef health, and coastal resilience in subsiding island settings in the face of future changes in hydroclimate, ocean temperature, nutrient availability, sediment supply, and ocean pH.

The X389 science party is working together to continue studying the collected cores in greater detail to address the project’s scientific goals. And we welcome contributions from external scientists as well: Careful sampling of the cores has left much of the material intact, and as of late February 2025, anyone can request X389 samples from the IODP core repository at Texas A&M University. With concerted and collaborative efforts, we can continue the flexible and inclusive approach of IODP—even as the Sun sets over its current phase—to advance knowledge of the paleoclimate over the past 500,000 years and understanding of what conditions Earth may experience in the future.

Acknowledgments

We thank the entire IODP 389 Expedition Science Party, ECORD Science Operator (ESO) support staff, Benthic drilling team, MMA surveyors, and the captain and crew of the MMA Valour for their outstanding work on the offshore and onshore phases of the expedition. IODP Expedition 389 was supported by funding from the various national funding agencies of the participating IODP countries.

References

Elderfield, H., et al. (2012), Evolution of ocean temperature and ice volume through the mid-Pleistocene climate transition, Science, 337(6095), 704–709, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1221294.

Lambeck, K., et al. (2014), Sea level and global ice volumes from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Holocene, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci U. S. A., 111(43) 15,296–15,303, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1411762111.

Rohling, E. J., et al. (2009), Antarctic temperature and global sea level closely coupled over the past five glacial cycles, Nat. Geosci., 2(7), 500–504, https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo557.

Sanborn, K. L., et al. (2017), New evidence of Hawaiian coral reef drowning in response to meltwater pulse-1A, Quat. Sci. Rev., 175, 60–72, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2017.08.022.

Webster, J. M., et al. (2009), Coral reef evolution on rapidly subsiding margins, Global Planet. Change, 66(1–2), 129–148, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2008.07.010.

Webster, J. M., et al. (2011), Great Barrier Reef environmental changes, Proc. Integrated Ocean Drill. Program, 325, https://doi.org/10.2204/iodp.proc.325.2011.

Webster, J. M., et al. (2025), Hawaiian drowned reefs, Proc. Int. Ocean Discovery Program, 389, https://doi.org/10.14379/iodp.proc.389.2025.

Author Information

Jody M. Webster (jody.webster@sydney.edu.au), School of Geosciences, Geocoastal Research Group, University of Sydney, Australia; and Christina Ravelo (acr@ucsc.edu), Ocean Sciences Department, Institute of Marine Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz

Citation: Webster, J. M., and C. Ravelo (2025), Unlocking climate secrets of Hawai‘i’s drowned reefs, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250135. Published on 11 April 2025. Text © 2025. 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.

Past lunar missions have detected evidence of large ice deposits in permanently shadowed regions near the Moon’s south pole. Such ice could provide astronauts with drinking water, oxygen, and rocket propellants, reducing the cost of lunar operations.

But new research has found that astronauts might not have to dig very deep or journey especially close to the Moon’s poles to find water ice. A recent study published in Communications Earth and Environment says the critical resource for future lunar explorers might lurk tantalizingly close to the surface on pole-facing slopes at lower latitudes. The Sun shines at a low angle on such regions, which may allow ice to accumulate just centimeters below the surface, where it would be insulated by lunar regolith.

The Moon’s low axial tilt means that craters and low-lying areas near the south pole never see direct sunlight. This lack of sunlight would allow even surface ice deposits to remain frozen for a long time—perhaps billions of years. Because of the likely presence of ice, both NASA and China’s space agency have announced plans to land astronauts near the south pole and eventually establish permanent outposts there.

The Chandrayaan-2 orbiter photographed the Vikram lander from orbit. Credit: Indian Space Research Organisation

Locations farther from the poles “can also become potential locations for future human habitats, with better illumination and smoother topography than the poles. These regions pose less technical challenges for landing and operations.”

“Our study reveals that the poles are not the only options for future exploration,” said K. Durga Prasad, lead author of the report and a planetary scientist at the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, India. Locations farther from the poles “can also become potential locations for future human habitats, with better illumination and smoother topography than the poles. These regions pose less technical challenges for landing and operations.”

“This result is very much consistent with both theoretical modeling studies and observations made by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter,” said Timothy McClanahan, an emeritus planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who was not involved with the study.

First Measurements Since Apollo

The new lunar temperature data come from Chandra’s Surface Thermophysical Experiment (ChaSTE), an instrument aboard the Vikram lander, which itself was part of India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission. Vikram touched down on 23 August 2023 at 69° south latitude, the most southerly landing site at that time. (Two subsequent landers, both built by the American company Intuitive Machines, landed farther south, but both tipped over on landing and were unable to achieve all of their science goals.)

ChaSTE collected data continuously from 24 August to 2 September, shortly before the Sun set on the solar-powered lander (a lunar day lasts about 29.5 Earth days). The probe penetrated 10 centimeters into the regolith, with temperature sensors spaced at 1-centimeter intervals. The instrument also heated the regolith to measure its thermal conductivity.

ChaSTE provided the first direct subsurface lunar temperature measurements since the Apollo 15 and 17 missions of the early 1970s. The Apollo heat probes drilled deeper than ChaSTE did but provided fewer measurements of the top 10 centimeters. The Apollo sites also were close to the equator, where temperatures are likely to remain too warm for water ice even well below the surface, Prasad said.

An enlarged version of the Pragyan image of Vikram indicates the location of the ChaSTE instrument, which measured thermal conductivity and temperatures, and the Instrument for Lunar Seismic Activity (ILSA). Credit: Indian Space Research Organisation

Vikram landed on the rim of a shallow crater in a Sun-facing area with a 6° slope. ChaSTE and other instruments aboard the lander recorded a peak daytime surface temperature of 355 K (81.85°C). That was higher than expected on the basis of both models and observations by Diviner, an infrared instrument aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that has compiled temperature maps of much of the lunar surface. (Temperatures at the probe’s maximum depth ranged from 55 K to 85 K colder than surface temperatures, depending on the time of day.)

However, the temperature on a flat area just 1 meter from the ChaSTE site peaked at only 332 K (58.85°C), suggesting that a location’s slope could play a significant role in its subsurface temperatures.

The findings “validated the idea that topographic variation, even toward meter scales, has an important impact on locations where we might expect water ice to occur,” McClanahan said.

Taking the Right Angle

Modeling showed that at high latitudes, poleward-angled slopes of 14° or greater could remain cold enough to preserve ice at depths of just a few centimeters. The Sun would hit such tilted regions at a low angle, minimizing heating, and the fine-grained top layer of the regolith would be an efficient thermal blanket, effectively insulating the shallow subsurface.

“Depending on the slope, you can have a lot of temperature variation even in craters as small as a meter. One side might be quite warm, but…you could have conditions that are suitable for water ice on the poleward-facing slope.”

“Depending on the slope, you can have a lot of temperature variation even in craters as small as a meter,” McClanahan said. “One side might be quite warm, but given the low thermal conductivity of the regolith, you could have conditions that are suitable for water ice on the poleward-facing slope.” The slope angle suitable for hosting ice increases as you move farther from the pole, he added.

The Vikram team is continuing to analyze the ChaSTE observations to learn more about the thermal characteristics of the landing site and of high lunar latitudes in general, Prasad said. In addition, because temperatures are important for any lunar lander, “future missions will definitely carry similar instruments that will also help substantiate our results,” he said.

—Damond Benningfield, Science Writer

Citation: Benningfield, D. (2025), Lunar ice might be easier to reach than we thought, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250136. Published on 11 April 2025. Text © 2025. 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.

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

Magma transport involves interactions of rocks and volatiles in their solid, fluid, and gas phases that must be captured by physical models across a vast range of scales. What complicates matters further is that eruptions respond to heterogeneous and time-variable source conditions modulated by a crust that experiences hysteresis due to its volcano-tectonic history. Any efforts of interpreting signals such as the multi-decadal unrest at the Campi Flegrei, Italy volcanic fields thus must find the balance between honoring the regional specifics and fundamental volcano dynamics.

Numerical scenario computation illustrating how dike populations may respond to the large-scale caldera stress field. Credit: Buono et al. [2025], Figure 7l

Buono et al. [2025] present a sweeping review that seeks to integrate rock physics, seismic tomography, and mechanical modeling into a systems-level understanding of the Campi Flegrei setting. It appears that the combination of caldera geometry and lithology leads to a crustal stress state that affects volcanic dike ascent which in turn may feed back into crustal deformation behavior. This suggests the importance of a resulting weak crustal layer for subsequent magma and gas pathways and perhaps an evolutionary scenario for similar volcanic centers. While the modeling is suggestive, there are a range of interactions and features left to be explored. However, the range of geophysical and geological constraints that are accessible in well instrumented volcanic systems points toward the potential of future, fully integrated models that might be capable of assimilating time dependent observations for improved, physics-based forecasting of volcanic hazards.

Citation: Buono, G., Maccaferri, F., Pappalardo, L., Tramelli, A., Caliro, S., Chiodini, G., et al. (2025). Weak crust owing past magmatic intrusions beneath Campi Flegrei identified: The engine for bradyseismic movements? AGU Advances, 6, e2024AV001611. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024AV001611

—Thorsten Becker, Editor, AGU Advances

Text © 2024. 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.

The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.

Rail Advent has a very nice article that describes the now completed repair of the Browney Curve landslide on the East Coast Mainline railway line in England. This is a site that is dear to my heart as, for 14 years, I drove across the landslide on my way to work.

There is a Google Earth image from 2020, taken from a low sun angle, that beautifully illustrates the issues at this site:-

Google Earth image from 2020 showing the Browney Curve landslide site. Note the East Coast mainline railway running across the landslide.

The East Coast Mainline is one the most important long distance line the country. Built two centuries ago, the line links London and Edinburgh, via York and Newcastle. The Browney Curve landslide has caused issues for many years. The image below, from Network Rail, shows the scale of the problems:-

The Browney Curve landslide site. Image from Network Rail.

The hummocky terrain seen in the image is characteristic of land that is undergoing movement. The underlying surface geology consists primarily of glacial till, which causes stability issues in many locations in the UK. The embankment supporting the railway line runs below the very clear back scarp of a natural landslide, and there are clear signs of ground deformation on the slopes above and below the track.

The landslide has regularly caused damage to the track and the road, and there were concerns that a major movement could close the line for a protracted period. Prior to the works, the line was being intensely monitored at this location to ensure that the alignment was safe.

Network Rail has a good page detailing the remediation works, which primarily consist of the installation of 529 piles extending up to 25 metres into the ground to anchor the slope, plus extensive drainage works to lower pore water pressures. The gradient of the embankment has also been reduced, and there will be a tree planting programme as well.

Pell Frischmann has a good web page detailing the ground investigation and design works at the site. There is also a very good, very detailed review of the problems and the repairs on Youtube, presented by Pell Frischmann and Network Rail. This is a fantastic resource:-

The works have cost £33 million (US$43 million), representing a significant investment in the safety and resilience of the East Coast Mainline.

Return to The Landslide Blog homepage Text © 2023. 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.

A warm cup of tea could offer some unexpected health benefits.

While steeping, tea leaves soak up lead ions from water, researchers reported in ACS Food Science and Technology. Though the process doesn’t completely purify the water and is not intended for large-scale water remediation, the passive benefit could help explain the correlation between regular tea consumption and lower incidences of heart disease and stroke.

“This idea that the tea bag, or tea within the bag, would absorb something was something nobody thought about.”

Tea is known to release various compounds such as tannins and caffeine into water. But “this idea that the tea bag, or tea within the bag, would absorb something was something nobody thought about,” said Vinayak Dravid, a coauthor of the study and a materials scientist at Northwestern University.

In the lab, Dravid and his research group regularly develop spongelike materials that absorb pollutants. The composition of one of these sponges reminded study coauthor Benjamin Shindel of tea bags, Dravid said. Shindel, at the time a Ph.D. candidate and now a materials scientist contracting with the U.S. Department of Energy, suspected that conditions inside a cup of tea would encourage metals to stick to the tea leaves.

To test the hypothesis, Shindel and his colleagues prepared solutions made of water with different concentrations of lead, ranging from 10 parts per billion—EPA’s trigger level for lead—to highly toxic levels of 10 parts per million. Then they heated the solutions to 85°C (185°F, just below the boiling point of water) and prepared different kinds of teas, including traditional black, green, oolong, and white teas brewed from the Camellia sinensis plant as well as the herbal teas rooibos and chamomile. After steeping the tea leaves for a range of times—anywhere from a few seconds to 4 hours—the researchers measured how much lead was left in each cup.

Spilling the Tea

Black and green teas were the most effective at removing lead, the team found, although the type of tea had less efficacy than the time it steeped. Finely grinding the leaves before steeping slightly improved their performance, likely because the increased surface area left more space for lead atoms to attach to the leaves. Steeping leaves in a cup of black tea for 5 minutes removed about 15% of the lead from the laboratory solutions. White and herbal teas, whose leaves remain smooth as they steep, were less effective.

The wrinkled surface of black tea leaves, seen here under a scanning electron microscope, may contribute to an increased surface area onto which lead and other metal ions adsorb. Credit: Vinayak P. Dravid Group/Northwestern University

The longer the leaves steeped, researchers found, the more lead adsorbed onto them. The longer leaves steep, however, the more bitter the tea becomes.

Tea’s metal-remediating benefits weren’t limited to lead. The team also prepared separate solutions of cadmium, chromium, copper, and zinc. Ions of each adsorbed onto the leaves.

In addition to the leaves themselves, the team also experimented with whether the type of tea bag influenced the amount of metal removed. Though nylon and cotton tea bags didn’t remove any lead, the metal did bind to cellulose (or “wood pulp”) tea bags.

Previous research has shown that C. sinensis can absorb metals from soil and store them in its leaves, so “there is always a risk, and obviously a concern, that you are actually then contributing those heavy elements and heavy toxins into water again when you make tea,” Dravid said.

But the new study suggests that metals will stick with the plant and not be released into the surrounding environment. “What our work showed,” Dravid explained, is that C. sinensis “has an affinity for heavy metals—that even if they exist in the leaf, they actually will remain. And that’s so reassuring.”

Brewing with Perspective

Tea leaves are not a substitute for existing methods of water purification, the authors emphasized. Most of the lead that enters drinking water does so through lead pipes connecting water mains and homes, and many domestic faucets or under-sink filters can remove more than 90% of lead ions.

Instead, tea leaves are “a way of reducing the lead exposure that occurs naturally,” explained Marc Edwards, an environmental engineer at Virginia Tech who was not involved in the study. Tea leaves could help mitigate—though not completely remove—the presence of other metals that enter drinking water either through corrosion (e.g., of copper or zinc pipes) or through erosion of mineral deposits like chromium.

“It’s not going to remove all the metal in the water.…But it is removing a fraction that may be meaningful from a public health perspective.”

“It’s not going to remove all the metal in the water, 99.9% or something like this,” Shindel agreed. “But it is removing a fraction that may be meaningful from a public health perspective.” If brewing tea removes 15% of lead and a person drinks enough tea to account for one fifth of their daily liquid consumption, that consumption could lower their lead intake by 3% compared with someone who drinks no tea.

This passive removal may help explain the observed relationship between tea consumption and a lower incidence of certain health issues such as heart disease, high blood pressure, and stroke, the researchers suggest. All three conditions have been associated with lead intake. But more research is needed to determine whether a direct link exists between tea consumption and metal intake, they said.

Though tea leaves can’t eliminate lead in water completely, their widespread use may help reduce an individual’s lead exposure over time.

Still, there’s no need to oversteep your morning cup, Shindel said. “I don’t think people should be changing their tea consumption patterns, or brewing really bitter tea…so they can get more metals out.”

—Skyler Ware (@skylerdware), Science Writer

Citation: Ware, S. (2025), Tea leaves remove lead from water, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250134. Published on 10 April 2025. Text © 2025. 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.

After decades of nondetections and tantalizing maybes, astronomers have definitively detected an aurora on Neptune. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers detected an infrared auroral glow and the spectral signature of a key tracer of aurorae in Neptune’s upper atmosphere for the first time. The spectrum of this ionized molecule also suggests that Neptune’s upper atmosphere has cooled significantly since Voyager 2’s flyby 34 years ago.

Aurorae have been seen on planets and moons throughout the solar system. Theories predicted that Neptune should have aurorae, too, but previous attempts to detect them failed, said Henrik Melin, a planetary aurora researcher at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom (U.K.).

“I’ve spent many, many nights up a mountain trying to detect this stuff using ground-based telescopes. You spend four nights staring at Neptune, and you see nothing,” Melin said.

This auroral detection is “completing the set” of giant planet aurorae, he added. “We have Jupiter, we have Saturn, we have Uranus. We now have Neptune.”

Chilly Aurora

Aurorae occur when charged particles from the solar wind or a nearby volcanic moon, for example, interact with a body’s magnetosphere and upper atmosphere. Some aurorae glow in visible light, like on Earth and some of Jupiter’s moons. Mercury’s aurorae shine in X-ray light.

On planets with hydrogen-dominated atmospheres like Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, aurorae typically glow in the infrared or ultraviolet and are traced by the presence of the trihydrogen cation (H3+). Anywhere they occur, aurorae can help scientists understand the inner workings of a planet’s magnetosphere.

“Auroral emissions provide important insight into the space environment of a planet.”

“Auroral emissions provide important insight into the space environment of a planet, and this is particularly important for Neptune, which has a very bizarre magnetic field,” said Jonathan Nichols, a planetary aurora researcher at the University of Leicester in the U.K. who was not involved with the new discovery.

Voyager 2’s brief 1989 flyby suggested that Neptune’s magnetic field is both tilted from its axis of rotation and offset from the center of the planet. The flyby also detected some hints of a possible aurora that astronomers have been hoping to confirm ever since. Models of Neptune’s atmosphere and magnetic field have suggested that Neptune’s aurorae should also be traceable by H3+ and have even predicted the longitudes at which they should appear. But detecting the aurorae proved elusive.

In June 2023, Melin and his colleagues obtained near-infrared JWST spectra of Neptune, originally intending to explore the circulation of Neptune’s middle atmosphere. The observations unexpectedly revealed an infrared auroral glow as well as a shockingly clear infrared spectrum of H3+ emitted by the planet’s upper atmosphere.

The intensity of the H3+ spectrum suggests that the upper atmosphere generating the aurora is 85°C (358 K), a significant cooldown from the 477°C (750 K) temperature measured by Voyager 2.

“It’s great to see this addition to the family portrait of solar system auroras.”

“That was quite a surprise,” Melin said.

Neptune’s seasons are roughly 41 Earth years long, so this dramatic cooling took place faster than the seasonal timescale. The researchers don’t yet understand what might be driving the cooldown, Melin said, though it is likely unrelated to the unseasonably cool summer observed elsewhere in Neptune’s atmosphere.

“The consequence of these really cold temperatures means that the auroral emissions are extremely faint,” Melin said. That explains why Neptune’s aurorae eluded the gazes of ground- and space-based telescopes before. “It was just really, really cold.”

“It’s great to see this addition to the family portrait of solar system auroras,” Nichols said. “Now we know how bright the infrared emission is, we can work out the intensity in other wavelengths such as ultraviolet, and we can run models to see what the upper atmosphere is like.”

The researchers published this discovery in Nature Astronomy.

A Neptunian Day

These JWST data were clear enough to trace aurorae to specific latitudes and longitudes, “producing the first map of the aurora at Neptune,” Melin said.

What’s more, the aurorae appeared at the exact longitudes in the southern hemisphere predicted by long-standing theories.

“This is the tantalizing starting point of really getting to understand Neptune.”

“This was not a given,” Nichols explained, “since the length of the planet’s day was determined more than 3 decades ago, and the uncertainty was such that we were supposed to have lost track of what the time is at any point on Neptune.” (Uncertainty in planetary day lengths is pretty common.)

“But it appears as if it is more accurate than we thought!” Nichols added.

Later this year, the team will point JWST at Neptune several times over the course of a month to learn more about what drives its aurorae and how the planet’s magnetosphere responds to different levels of solar activity.

“By studying the morphology of the aurorae and its changes over time, we can figure out what drives it,” Melin said. The team needs more data to do that, “but this is the tantalizing starting point of really getting to understand Neptune.”

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

This news article is included in our ENGAGE resource for educators seeking science news for their classroom lessons. Browse all ENGAGE articles, and share with your fellow educators how you integrated the article into an activity in the comments section below.

Citation: Cartier, K. M. S. (2025), After 30-year search, scientists finally find an aurora on Neptune, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250130. Published on 10 April 2025. Text © 2025. 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: Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets

The longer a magma chamber resides in the upper crust, the more likely it will evolve to silica-rich compositions. Volcanism has been active on Mars throughout its history, but there is an apparent lack of widespread evolved magmatism, and the development of magma storage systems has been poorly constrained.

To better understand how crustal depth and temperature profile affect the evolution and growth of magma chambers on Mars, Chatterjee et al. [2025] utilize numerical modeling and compare with recent results from the InSight lander mission. Their models suggest that Mars’ crust is divided into three zones that are consistent with InSight seismic data: (1) the upper crust where small intrusions, such as dikes, dominate the upper crust; (2) the lower crust where larger magma chambers can develop and grow; and (3) a middle zone where magma chambers can occasionally grow and produce dikes that erupt at the surface.

The depths where the three magma storage zones are located depend on the crust’s temperature gradient and this study is the first to model the longevity of magma chambers on Mars as it has gradually cooled over geological time. A higher temperature gradient during Mars’ early history (the Noachian and Hesperian time periods) would have allowed larger, more long-lived upper crustal chambers to develop with the potential to feed eruptions at the surface. Seismic activity in Cerberus Fossae detected by InSight is consistent with magmatism and suggests its continued influence on the structure and make-up of the crust of Mars.

Citation: Chatterjee, A. P., Huber, C., Head, J. W., III, & Bachmann, O. (2025). Magma chamber longevity on Mars and its controls on crustal structure and composition. Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, 130, e2024JE008798. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024JE008798

—Mariek E. Schmidt, Associate Editor, JGR: Planets

Text © 2024. 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.

The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.

On 8 May 2022, the catastrophic Baiyan rock avalanche occurred in Zhijin County, which is located in Guizhou Province, China. The digital lat/long is [26.63771, 105.69200]. I described this event at the time (on the old AGU blogsite). It destroyed 53 houses, killing three people.

Intriguingly, many of the reports of this event seem to have been removed, such as the 163.com news item and the Youtube video. This is the image of the failure that I posted at the time:-

The 8 May 2022 Baiyan rock avalanche in Bijie, Guizhou. Image from 163.com.

There is a very interesting new paper (He et al. 2025) about this event in the journal Landslides. The aim of the paper is to examine the behaviour of the particles that formed the rock avalanche using a very impressive combination of a drone survey and articial intelligence driven analysis of individual particles. This is fascinating work, which demonstrates that underlying topography plays a large role in determining the runout characteristics of individual blocks.

But along the way, the paper also provides some very interesting information about the Baiyan rock avalanche itself. First, the slope from which this failure occurred had suffered an astonishing total of seven other rock avalanches in the period between 2019 and 2022. The Google Earth image below, from March 2022 (i.e. before the Baiyan rock avalanche) shows the problems that were occurring on the slope:-

Google Earth image of the site of the 8 May 2022 Baiyan rock avalanche in China.

According to He et al. (2025), the Baiyan rock avalanche itself had a volume of 36,000 cubic metres. It had a runout distance of about 560 metres and a vertical height difference of about 455 m. Significant, but not exceptional, rainfall occurred in the days leading up to the collapse.

Tucked away towards the end of the article is a fascinating consideration of the causes of this event, and of the extraordinary cluster of failures that occurred in this area at the time. Underground coal mining was being undertaken directly below this slope – He et al. (2025) show that a panel advanced from the SW to the NE directly below the ridgeline, starting in the southwest in October 2021. In May 2022, the mining activities were occurring directly below the source area of the Baiyan rock avalanche. The implication is clearly that disturbance / subsidence caused fracturing of the rock mass, triggering the failure.

That comparatively shallow coal mining was occurring directly below such a sensitive location is perhaps surprising. This should be a classic case study of the impacts of poorly controlled mining on slope stability. I also wonder why the village was not evacuated before the landslide given the multiple failures that were occurring on the slope directly behind. It would be interesting to know more about the analyses and discussions that were occurring at this location in the early months of 2022.

Reference

He, J., Zhang, Y., Sun, P. et al. 2025. Investigation of deposition characteristics using a novel super-resolution method: a case study of Baiyan rock avalanche in Guizhou, China. Landslides. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-025-02512-z

Return to The Landslide Blog homepage Text © 2023. 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 regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.

The Trump administration has canceled funding used to coordinate the National Climate Assessment, a major, congressionally mandated U.S. climate change report produced through the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP).

The National Climate Assessment is published approximately every four years and is the United States’ broadest assessment of current climate change impacts and climate science. 

NASA canceled a contract with ICF International, a consulting firm. ICF International was hired by the agency to support USGRCP’s logistical work and help coordinate the expansive assessment, which involves input from 15 federal agencies and hundreds of authors and contributors.

ICF previously supported the development and release of the Fifth National Climate Assessment and the Fourth National Climate Assessment. 

The change likely means the Sixth National Climate Assessment, planned for publication by early 2028, won’t be completed.

I can't say this was unexpected, but it is deeply, deeply disappointing nonetheless. The #NCA6 is now up in the air – at best.Some problems go away on their own. This is not one of them.It is coming. It's already here. You can either be prepared or unprepared.

— Cullen Hendrix (@cullenhendrix.bsky.social) 2025-04-09T16:15:43.477Z

Congress requires the Sixth National Climate Assessment to move forward, but federal officials involved in USGCRP work told Politico that the assessment is likely dead without the support of ICF International staff. Two dozen staff at the USGCRP will lose the funding to support their roles, Science reported.

 
Related

•  Trump Moves to Hobble Major U.S. Climate Change Study
•  Trump Team Takes Aim at Crown Jewel of U.S. Climate Research
•  Trump Administration Fires Staff for Flagship U.S. Climate Assessment
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
 

The move is not a surprise to those who have been following Trump’s actions on climate change. Russell Vought, the current director of the Office of Management and Budget for the Trump administration, has previously recommended ditching the National Climate Assessment and firing scientists who worked on previous editions of the report.

The cuts come alongside other efforts from the Trump Administration to undermine climate change research including cutting funding to cooperative agreements between U.S. universities and federal agencies to study Earth systems and climate change. 

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

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org. Text © 2024. 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 regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.

President Trump signed an executive order on 8 April to drastically reduce restrictions on domestic coal production . It lays out plans to enable coal mining on federal lands, identify and revise existing regulations and policies that seek to transition the country away from coal production, and identify regions where “coal-powered infrastructure” can be used to support artificial intelligence data centers.

In a separate order, Trump said he would instruct the Justice Department to identify and fight any state and local laws “purporting to address ‘climate change’ or involving ‘environmental, social, and governance’ initiatives, ‘environmental justice,’ carbon or ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions, and funds to collect carbon penalties or carbon taxes.” Such climate policies, he said, were “putting our coal miners out of business.”

In March, the president signed a different executive order demanding immediate action to increase production of minerals in the United States. The order defined “mineral” as critical minerals, uranium, copper, potash, gold “and any other element, compound, or material as determined by the Chair of the National Energy Dominance Council (NEDC).”

The new executive order designates coal as a mineral as well. Several days before Trump signed the order, the U.S. Department of Agriculture removed regulations that protected 264,000 acres of land in Nevada from oil, gas, and geothermal energy development and 165,000 acres of land in New Mexico from mining and geothermal leasing.

 
Related

• Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry
•  Protecting American Energy from State Overreach
•  Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production
•  Layoffs threaten US firefighter cancer registry, mine research and mask lab (AP)
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
 

According to the 2024 global carbon budget, coal is responsible for 41% of global fossil carbon dioxide emissions. Burning coal also emits sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulates, mercury, and other heavy metals, all of which can contribute to health problems such as respiratory illness and some of which contribute to smog and acid rain.

In the United States, reliance on coal has been falling for decades as it has been replaced with other sources of electricity, primarily natural gas. Though natural gas is not a clean energy source, it produces fewer emissions than coal does, and natural gas plants are cheaper than coal plants to build and operate. Solar and wind power have also risen in popularity. In 2001, about 51% of the country’s net electricity generation came from coal. By 2023, the figure had dropped to just 16.2%.

Trump signed the executive orders while standing in front of a group of coal miners wearing hard hats, and spoke about “bringing back an industry that was abandoned, despite the fact that it was just about the best, certainly the best, in terms of power, real power.”

“I told my people ‘Never use the word “coal” unless you put “beautiful, clean” before it,’” he said. “Today, we’re taking historic action to help American workers, miners, families and consumers.”

The executive order comes in the wake of the General Services Administration closing dozens of Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) offices across the country, laying off an estimated 85% of employees at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and imposing tariffs on Chinese-made ships entering U.S. ports to pick up materials, including coal.

In a 9 April statement, Cecil E. Roberts, international president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), said the union appreciated the new executive order. In an earlier statement, he had called the downsizing of MSHA offices “devastating to the coal industry” and said the Trump administration owes American miners an explanation for the slew of new policies that put “a target on their back.”

The White House posted a video on X of several of the people who stood behind Trump while he signed the executive order. None were identified by name, but one was Jeff Crowe, a miner from West Virginia who also spoke briefly at the podium during the announcement of the executive order. All praised the president’s decision, as well as his new tariff policies.

President Trump signed major energy executive orders today—surrounded by REAL AMERICANS.

The fake news media's latest orchestrated attack—this time over tariffs—falls flat with coal miners, who told us: "it's actually gonna help our industry out [&] bring jobs back to America." pic.twitter.com/yQsxAJxIxm

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 9, 2025 These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org. Text © 2024. 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.

Valentina Rossi first saw the 30,000-year-old griffon vulture as a master’s student in Rome in 2014. The fossil, which had been found by a local landowner near Rome in 1889, was remarkably well-preserved. She couldn’t look away as her future collaborator, Dawid Iurino, presented about the fossilized imprint of the bird’s head.

“I was mind-blown,” Rossi said. 

The presentation by Iurino, now an associate professor at Universita degli Studi di Milano Statale, ended with a discussion of the bird’s feathers. Rossi remembers him saying that determining what exactly the feather fossils were made of was a topic for future research because analyzing such well-preserved structures was outside of the expertise of the team of paleontologists at the time. 

Now, a new study by Rossi, Iurino, and others, published in Geology, has finally revealed the answer: The feather fossils are made of zeolites—minerals made of aluminum and silicon compounds. This study is the first time scientists have reported soft-tissue mineralization by zeolites.

“We finally did it.”

“We finally did it,” said Rossi, lead author of the paper and a paleontologist at University College Cork in Ireland.

It’s extremely rare to find feathers preserved in three dimensions and even rarer to find mineralized feathers, Rossi said. The knowledge that the feathers were fossilized by zeolites, minerals that form naturally by reactions between volcanic rock and water, could guide paleontologists to target volcanic settings when searching for fossils.

“The more people look, the more people are going to find the preservation of materials that we previously thought was impossible,” said Mary Schweitzer, a paleontologist and emeritus professor at North Carolina State University who was not involved in the new study. 

Matching Minerals

Rossi and the team of scientists used a powerful electron microscope to study the shape and texture of the preserved structures, confirming that the tissue was mineralized. Then, they analyzed the chemical structure of the fossil using multiple spectroscopy methods. “We recognized certain chemical bonds that are similar to those found in zeolites,” Rossi said. 

Valentina Rossi and the research team used a variety of methods, including electron microscopy and multiple forms of spectroscopy, to determine the feather fossils were made of zeolites. Credit: Dirleane Ottonelli

Certain soft tissues lend themselves to fossilization. Muscle tissues, for example, are commonly mineralized by the calcium phosphate mineral apatite. That’s because muscle tissue already contains calcium and phosphorus, which jump-start the mineralization process. 

Laboratory studies have shown that zeolites will form on biological materials in solutions of silicon and aluminum. But feathers do not contain these elements, making the zeolite fossil puzzling, Rossi said.

Schweitzer said that parts of certain molecules that make up decaying feather tissue may have an affinity for aluminum or silica but that more research would be needed to determine the exact chemistry behind the mineralization. Another explanation for the mineralization, Rossi suggested, may involve the pH of the soft tissue, especially as the tissue decays.

A Vulture’s Final Moments

The findings helped Rossi and her colleagues create a taphonomic model—a likely story line of how the bird went from a living animal to a hunk of rock. Previous studies of the whole fossil had not indicated that the bird was injured; Rossi suspects toxic gases from a nearby volcanic eruption may have killed it. 

Dead but intact, the bird lay in the path of a lava flow. Rossi thinks the vulture was probably quite far from the actual eruption and may have been covered by a cooler, slow-moving volcanic flow, as its tissues weren’t destroyed by heat or turbulence. 

The findings “open up another window for fossilization.”

The volcanic flow hardened and cooled with the griffon vulture beneath it. Eventually, rains soaked the rock, creating a fluid rich in minerals. The chemical composition of the bird’s feathers spurred a reaction with the silicon- and aluminum-rich fluids, and zeolites began to form and replace the tissue. The feathers turned to stone faster than they decayed.

Something similar may have happened to many more specimens over Earth’s history, which could mean that paleontologists are overlooking entire categories of rock in which highly preserved soft-tissue fossils may be found, the authors write. Volcanic settings are typically disregarded as likely spots to find fossils because volcanic flows are turbulent and hot and usually destroy soft biological material that might otherwise be fossilized. But the new paper’s results mean there are likely some exceptions.

The findings “open up another window for fossilization,” Schweitzer said.

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

This news article is included in our ENGAGE resource for educators seeking science news for their classroom lessons. Browse all ENGAGE articles, and share with your fellow educators how you integrated the article into an activity in the comments section below.

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2025), A 30,000-year-old feather is a first-of-its-kind fossil, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250131. Published on 9 April 2024. Text © 2025. 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.

On Earth, mud flows because water, a major ingredient, often exists in its liquid state.

On Mars, however, the thin atmosphere causes liquid water to sublimate or freeze. This general lack of liquid makes it difficult to explain mounds that dot parts of the Red Planet—mounds that some scientists think are mud volcanoes.

A study published in Communications Earth and Environment suggests that a key to understanding how these features form is simple: add salt. By lowering the freezing point of water, salt allows mud to flow for longer periods of time and form structures that more closely resemble flows on Earth.

On Earth, mud volcanoes form when pressurized mud and gases bubble to the surface, often forming a cone with a crater. Here, one of the smaller cones of the Dashgil mud volcano in Azerbaijan erupts. Credit: Petr Brož/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Because salt has been detected on Mars, it is likely that Martian mudflows are also salty, much like Earth’s mud volcanoes, which form when pressurized mud and gases are pushed to the surface, often forming a cone with a crater.

Terrestrial “mudflows are similar to lava flows, but they’re made of water, clay, and other materials,” explained geophysicist Ondřej Krýza of the Institute of Geophysics of the Czech Academy of Sciences and first author of the study.

In the laboratory, Krýza and his colleagues tested how different salts affect mud behavior under Mars-like conditions. They prepared separate mud samples containing magnesium sulfate, sodium chloride, sodium sulfate, or calcium sulfate. Inside the Large Mars Chamber, a mechanism poured 500 milliliters of mud onto an aluminum tray cooled to around −25°C (−5.8°F), mimicking temperatures that might be found on the Martian surface. The chamber itself simulated the planet’s low atmospheric pressure.

The experiments showed that a solution of 10% magnesium sulfate or 2.5% sodium chloride maximized mud propagation. Both salts have been identified on the Red Planet.

Exploration of Microbial Life

“The study presents a unique and fascinating approach that I have not encountered before,”  Ryodo Hemmi, a planetary geologist at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency who was not involved in the research, said in an email.

Hemmi pointed out that though some Martian mounds resemble mud volcanoes on Earth, how they formed remains unclear. He emphasized that the new study is valuable for examining mound shapes but that more research is needed before drawing definitive conclusions. Current models, he said, don’t explain how material composition affects the size and form of Martian mounds, especially given their large scale compared to mud volcanoes on Earth.

“These salts are important because they can…affect the flow of water and other fluids, which is crucial for understanding the potential for microbial life.”

“I believe their study provides a valuable new perspective on the morphological analysis of both terrestrial and Martian mud volcanoes,” Hemmi said.

“Mud volcanoes on Earth act like natural exploration wells because they bring up sediments from many different layers beneath the surface,” explained Adriano Mazzini, a geologist at the University of Oslo in Norway and a coauthor of the study.

If the volcano-like structures on Mars are, indeed, made of salty mud, studying them could provide insights into Mars’s subsurface geology and could potentially reveal areas where liquid water once existed or may still be hidden.

“These salts are important because they can…affect the flow of water and other fluids, which is crucial for understanding the potential for microbial life,” Krýza said.

—Larissa G. Capella (@CapellaLarissa), Science Writer

Citation: Capella, L. G. (2025), Salt may be key to Martian mudflows, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250133. Published on 9 April 2025. Text © 2025. 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.

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

Magnetotail high-speed electron flows are found to be associated with magnetic field line reconnection in Earth’s magnetotail. They are found to be widely distributed using high-resolution data from NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission.

As described in Liu et al. [2025], our knowledge of the electron physics of magnetic field line reconnection has been greatly enhanced by the in-situ 4-spacecraft NASA MMS measurements in a way that cannot be achieved directly in solar eruptions. A better understanding of these eruptions, both solar flares and coronal mass ejections, when and under what circumstances they occur, has important societal implications for technological systems subject to space weather.

Citation: Liu, H., Li, W., Tang, B., Norgren, C., Liu, K., Khotyaintsev, Y. V., et al. (2025). High-speed electron flows in the Earth magnetotail. AGU Advances, 6, e2024AV001549. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024AV001549

—Mary Hudson, Editor, AGU Advances

Text © 2024. 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.

Guest post by Giuseppe Esposito and Stefano Gariano

The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.

In a recent article published in the journal Landslides, Esposito and Gariano (2025) describe the first post-fire debris flow event with fatal consequences recorded in Italy.

On 27 August 2024, a large part of the Campania region in southern Italy was affected by intense rainfall associated with local storm cells forced by orography. Three watersheds affected by wildfires some weeks before responded to the rainfall with intense runoff and erosion processes supplying extremely rapid debris and hyperconcentrated flows downstream. These hit the urban settlements, causing extensive damage to the main and secondary road network, the ground and basement floors of many buildings.

Post-fire debris flow deposits in the urban centre of San Felice a Cancello. Image from the Italian Fire Brigade: www.vigilfuoco.tv

In the town of San Felice a Cancello, two people lost their lives while they were coming back home with their vehicle. The latter was dragged by the flows within the main drainage channel of the watershed for about 800 m. The two lifeless bodies were found only after long searches 2 km away from the impact point, on 2 and 12 of September 2024, respectively.

The vehicle on which the two people were travelling, found 800 m away from the impact point near San Felice a Cancello. Image from the Italian Fire Brigade: www.vigilfuoco.tv.

This event highlights an emerging cascading hazard in the whole Mediterranean area, where both burned areas and intense rain bursts are expected to increase in the future. The very short timing of hydro-geomorphic responses (e.g., 15-20 min) represents the main challenge in the implemention of an effective early warning system for small-scale, urbanised watersheds.

Incision of a channel bed created by turbulent flows at San Felice a Cancello. Image from the Italian Fire Brigade: www.vigilfuoco.tv

Esposito and Gariano (2025) found many similarities between this and previous post-fire debris flows occurred in the region (Esposito et al., 2023), even if none of them was characterized by a so severe impact on people and properties. According to their analysis, this unprecedented impact may have been due to both natural and human factors, among which the role played by the rainfall inputs is predominant (peak intensity in 30 minutes of 83.6 mm/h; peak intensity in 10 minutes of 106.8 mm/h; both highly ranked among historical events of the same duration in the area, and located well above the triggering threshold for such events previously defined in the area).

The quarry located 2 km away from the impact point where the two lifeless bodies were found near San Felice a Cancello. Image from the Italian Fire Brigade: www.vigilfuoco.tv

The current local warning system for geo-hydrological risk mitigation is based on rainfall thresholds coupled with different risk scenarios. Both this and previous events demonstrated that such system is not suitable to face this type of process, providing insufficient lead time to fully develop an effective emergency response. Therefore, they conclude that focusing on innovative monitoring and predicting tools based on meteorological, geomorphological and hydrological factors may represents a key strategy to face future challenges posed by post-fire debris flows in Italy and similar settings worldwide.

References

Esposito, G., Gariano, S. 2025. Overview of the first fatal post-fire debris flow event recorded in Italy. Landslides. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-025-02516-9

Esposito, G., Gariano, S., Masi, R. et al. 2023. Rainfall conditions leading to runoff-initiated post-fire debris flows in Campania Southern Italy. Geomorphology, 423, 108557. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geomorph.2022.108557

Image credits: www.vigilfuoco.tv (Italian Fire Brigade).

Return to The Landslide Blog homepage Text © 2023. 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 regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.

This month, the National Weather Service (NWS) announced that, until further notice, it will no longer be offering automated translation services for its severe weather alerts. These alerts warn U.S. residents about imminent dangers including thunderstorms, tropical cyclones, flooding, and extreme heat. The news was reported by Earth.org, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, and other outlets.

The agency attributed the change to a contract lapse with Lilt, an artificial intelligence company that worked with NWS forecasters to develop software that could accurately translate weather terminology into Spanish, simplified Chinese, Vietnamese, French, and Samoan.

The agency’s short announcement came on 1 April. Credit: NCEP/NWS

The agency’s product translation page states that the NWS “is committed to enhancing the accessibility of vital, life-saving information by making urgent weather updates available in multiple language.” However, it also notes that “changes or discontinuations may occur without advance notice.” A banner atop the page now reads, “The translated text production functionality on this site may be interrupted after 3/31/2025. Further details will be provided when available.”

 
Related

•  US Weather Service Set to Halt Foreign-Language Forecasts As Contract With AI Translation Firm Expires (Earth.org)
•  National Weather Service pauses severe weather alerts in Spanish and other languages (PBS)
•  National Weather Service halts automated translation for alerts (The Washington Post)
• Language Use in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau)
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
 

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 67.8 million people in the United States speak a language other than English at home, including nearly 42 million Spanish speakers and more than 2 million French (including Patois, Cajun, Creole, and Haitian) speakers. The Census Bureau lists communication barriers, such as those that exist in households with limited English, as a measure of social vulnerability. Previous research has documented that a lack of translated emergency alerts, or poorly translated alerts, can leave communities uninformed, confused, and ultimately more vulnerable to danger.

The NWS is part of NOAA, which has faced drastic cuts under the Trump administration. More than 1,000 employees have been laid off from the agency, though a handful have been rehired. More mass layoffs are expected as the Department of Government Efficiency eliminates thousands of federal positions.

A NOAA employee told PBS that if the contract with Lilt is not reinstated within 30 days of its 1 April expiration, restarting it will be a complex and lengthy process that involves seeking bids from several companies.

—Emily Dieckman (@emfurd.bsky.social), Associate Editor

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org.