EOS

About 15% of the land area in the Northern Hemisphere is currently covered by perennially frozen soil known as permafrost. But that has not always been the case. As global temperatures fluctuated in Earth’s past, patches of that frozen soil periodically thawed and refroze.

“Permafrost is a huge reservoir of CO2, and thawing comes with repercussions because it feeds back into future warming.”

A recent study in Nature Communications shows that the Arctic was mostly free of permafrost 8.7 million years ago, when the average global temperature was 4.5°C (8.1°F) higher than it is today.

“Permafrost is a huge reservoir of CO2 [carbon dioxide], and thawing comes with huge repercussions because it feeds back into future warming,” said study coauthor Sebastian Breitenbach, a paleoclimatologist at Northumbria University. Arctic permafrost currently stores twice as much carbon as the entire atmosphere, and because the region is warming faster than the global average, those soils are susceptible to thawing.

In Search of Climate Archives

Breitenbach and his colleagues studied mineral cave deposits from northern Siberia, which is currently underlain by permafrost.

Speleothems such as stalagmites and stalactites form when mineral-rich water percolates through the ground and drips into cave openings, slowly leaving behind calcium carbonate that precipitates out of the water. They can’t grow when the ground above the cave is frozen solid because no water is able to seep through the soil. Any speleothems in the region must have formed when the ground was thawed.

The study was decades in the making. In the early 2000s, Breitenbach and his international group of colleagues were studying caves in a partially frozen region in southern Siberia. At the same time, they were looking for sites with speleothems in the heart of permafrost-covered regions farther north, turning to local communities for information about caves in remote areas. “We started asking hunters, teachers, politicians, bus drivers, anyone who would be out there in the outback,” Breitenbach said. Often, the team would visit a promising area only to find there were no caves there or, when there were caves, no useful speleothems inside them.

“Most of our information for the Miocene comes from marine sediments, so finding good terrestrial archives for this period is fantastic.”

After years of following rumors farther and farther north, they finally struck gold in 2014 at the Taba-Ba’astakh cliffs along the Lena River close to the Arctic Ocean. The team collected 14 speleothems from eroded caves high up in the cliffs and along the beach below.

Using the predictable rate of the decay of uranium into lead and the amounts of each of these isotopes in the samples, the study authors found that the cave deposits were formed 8.7 million years ago, in the late Miocene period.

“Most of our information for the Miocene comes from marine sediments, so finding good terrestrial archives for this period is fantastic,” said Dominik Fleitmann, a geologist and paleoclimatologist at Universität Basel who was not involved in the study. “There are not so many sites because erosion is our enemy. Most of the older deposits are eroded or difficult to date.”

Scientists’ ability to precisely date speleothems makes them incredibly useful as climate records, said Nikita Kaushal, a geologist at the American Museum of Natural History who was not involved with the study. “When you’re looking at past records, you want really good age control on when something happened and for how long, and information on as many climate and environmental parameters as possible.”

By studying the physical and chemical properties of speleothems, scientists can reconstruct the conditions present when the speleothems formed, such as the vegetation cover above, atmospheric circulation changes, local rainfall, droughts, and temperature.

Dima Sokol’nikov surveys a cave in the Taba-Ba’astakh cliffs. Credit: Sebastian Breitenbach

Using the proportions of bonds between certain isotopes, which are affected by the atmospheric conditions present when the mineral-rich water was flowing, the study authors established that average temperatures in the region were between 6.6°C and 11.1°C (44°F and 52°F) when the speleothems formed. That’s about 19°C–23°C (34°F–42°F) warmer than it is today.

Other studies of the same period found that global temperatures were 4.5°C higher than today at the time.

“We know from meteorological data that the Arctic is warming at about 4 times the global average,” Breitenbach said. “The underlying reasons are not entirely clear.” This phenomenon, called Arctic amplification, is likely due to a complex interplay of various factors, including loss of sea ice, air temperature inversion, and ocean heat transport.

A Vulnerable Carbon Pool

As permafrost thaws, the organic matter in the soil begins to decompose, releasing carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates 14–175 billion tons of CO2 could be released into the atmosphere by thawing permafrost for every 1°C of global warming.

It’s a process that’s already underway. According to scientists, the upper layers of permafrost were thawing in multiple areas in Svalbard, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, in February 2025 as a result of exceptionally high temperatures. The thawing of permafrost is also influenced by several factors beyond temperature, Breitenbach said. “The most important ones are vegetation, snow cover, and wildfire activity.”

Even using conservative estimates, the study authors calculated that the complete loss of permafrost in the Arctic region could release 130 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere—and that’s accounting for only short-term emissions from the top 3 meters of thawed soil. “I was quite frightened when I saw these numbers,” Breitenbach said. “4.5° warming is at the extreme end of climate models. It’s not expected to be tomorrow or in the next decades. But even half of this is still drastic.”

—Kaja Šeruga, Science Writer

Citation: Šeruga, K. (2025), Cave deposits reveal a permafrost-free Arctic, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250285. Published on 4 August 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: Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth

The Nankai subduction zone, in southern Japan, has hosted several magnitude 8+ earthquakes over the last 300 years, including the 1707 magnitude 8.7 Hōei earthquake, which, until the 11 March 2011 magnitude 9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake occurred, was the largest historical earthquake in Japan. The most recent (large) earthquakes in the region were the 1944 magnitude 8.1 Tōnankai Earthquake, followed by the 1946 M8.1 Nankaido Earthquake. Under our current knowledge, the return period of these earthquakes is thought to be approximately 100-150 years.

As a consequence, the Nankai subduction zone is arguably the best instrumented and most extensively studied subduction zone in the world. An important part of this effort has been the Nankai Trough Seismogenic Zone Experiment (NanTroSEIZE), a major project of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP). NanTroSEIZE has spent over a decade drilling, sampling, imaging, and instrumenting this margin to observe and understand the seismogenic and tsunamigenic behavior of an active subduction plate boundary system.

Stress being the driver of faulting, Schaible and Saffer [2025] use data from borehole breakouts, a technique routinely used to infer underground stresses, observed during the NanTroSEIZE experiment. Their analysis focuses on two regions that penetrate major faults along the Nankai Trough: a major out of sequence thrust fault located about 25 kilometers landward of the trench, termed the megasplay (IODP Sites C0004, C0010, and C0022), and the décollement within a few kilometers of the trench (Sites C0006 and C0024).

Their results suggest that while the toe of the prism is understressed, the megasplay fault is near failure. This single result has important consequences for possible mechanical scenarios of how a megathrust earthquake could rupture up-dip all the way to the seafloor surface and, in consequence, on the possible scenarios of earthquake related tsunami generation for southern Japan.

Citation: Schaible, K. E., & Saffer, D. M. (2025). State of stress across major faults in the Nankai subduction zone estimated from wellbore breakouts. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 130, e2024JB030242. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024JB030242

—Alexandre Schubnel, Editor-in-Chief, JGR: Solid Earth

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

Ecological forecasting is crucial for proactive environmental management and policy-making.

Ecological forecasting is crucial for proactive environmental management and policy-making. In 2001, Clark et al. identified ecological forecasting as an emerging imperative, providing a vision whereby predictions of the future with specified uncertainty enable the anticipation of changes in ecosystems. Ideally, forecasts are then integrated into natural resource decision-making to mitigate adverse effects, enhance resilience, and promote sustainability. Since 2001, the field of ecological forecasting has grown, highlighted by a rapidly increasing number of papers in the literature over time (Lewis et al., 2022).

To highlight both previously published and new research, we, with the support of the Ecological Forecasting Initiative, have launched a special collection titled, “Ecological Forecasting in the Earth System” that showcases advances in the field of ecological forecasting and provides guidance and inspiration for the broader research community.

The special collection brings together cutting-edge research that develops, tests, and applies models to forecast ecological dynamics across systems and scales or advances fundamental frameworks and methods associated with the iterative ecological forecast cycle (Dietze et al., 2018). The ecological systems and scales include marine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems, and dynamics at the population, community, ecosystem, regional, and global scales. Forecasting applications can include, but are not limited to, biogeochemistry, ecohydrology, water quality, phenology, biodiversity conservation, invasive species, vector-borne disease, land-use, and natural climate solutions. 

We are excited to present this joint special collection between the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the Ecological Society of America (ESA).

To encompass a wide range of environmental disciplines, we are excited to present this joint special collection between the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the Ecological Society of America (ESA), thereby allowing contributors to submit articles to the journal that is most appropriate for their field. Instead of siloing ecological forecasting in a single journal, we aim to promote the power of forecasting across disciplines, journals, and scientific societies. 

Here, we define ecological forecasts as near-term (i.e., a day to decade ahead) predictions that include estimates of uncertainty (Dietze et al., 2018). Forecasts should be evaluated using data, which can include the use of reforecast analyses (i.e., forecasts of conditions that have already passed but using only model inputs that would have been available if the forecast had been generated in real-time). Forecast uncertainty associated with predictions should be represented and communicated in submitted manuscripts, as absolute knowledge of the future does not exist. Uncertainty can arise from various sources, including the initial starting conditions of a model, model input and drivers (e.g., ensemble weather forecast inputs for an ecological model), model parameters, model structure, and model selection (e.g., multi-model ensembles). In this special collection, if model scenario uncertainty is presented, it should be provided in addition to other sources of uncertainty.

The larger ecological forecasting enterprise encompasses model development, data-model integration, computation, decision support, and education. Manuscripts that are not themselves descriptions and evaluations of ecological forecasts are welcome, provided they highlight direct connections to forecasting. These connections could highlight novel methodologies (e.g., machine learning, process-modeling, uncertainty quantification, digital twins, inverse modeling); interdisciplinary approaches (e.g., co-produced forecasts, integration with decision science, forecast dashboard design, forecast cyberinfrastructure); approaches for forecast delivery and education; and multi-forecast syntheses to enhance the accuracy, uncertainty representation, evaluation, and applicability of ecological forecasts. 

This collection aims to inspire further research and collaboration, ultimately contributing to more informed and effective environmental stewardship.

Overall, this special issue is timely as it coincides with a growing recognition of the need for predictive science in environmental decision-making. By showcasing the latest advancements and applications in ecological forecasting, this collection aims to inspire further research and collaboration, ultimately contributing to more informed and effective environmental stewardship.

The AGU journals included in the Special Collection are Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, Journal of Geophysical Research: Machine Learning and Computation, Water Resources Research, Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, and Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans. The ESA journals included are Ecology, Ecological Applications, Ecological Monographs, Ecosphere, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, and Earth Stewardship.

To submit to an AGU journal please use the standard submission portal for the appropriate journal and select the collection title from the drop-down menu in the Special Collection field of the submission form. To submit your manuscript to an ESA publication, use the standard submission portal and indicate the collection title in the cover letter. Queries to the organizers to share your topic proposal and/or abstract prior to submission are encouraged through our inquiry form.

—R. Quinn Thomas (rqthomas@vt.edu, 0000-0003-1282-7825), Virginia Tech, United States, Associate Editor of JGR: Biogeosciences and special collection organizer; Cayelan C. Carey (0000-0001-8835-4476), Virginia Tech, United States, special collection organizer; Eric R. Sokol (0000-0001-5923-0917), National Ecological Observatory Network, United States, special collection organizer; Melissa A. Kenney (0000-0002-2121-8135), University of Minnesota, United States, special collection organizer; Michael C. Dietze (0000-0002-2324-2518), Boston University, United States, special collection organizer; and Marguerite A. Xenopoulos (0000-0003-2307-948X), Trent University, Canada, Editor-in-Chief of JGR: Biogeosciences

Citation: Thomas, R. Q., C. C. Carey, E. R. Sokol, M. A. Kenney, M. C. Dietze, and M. A. Xenopoulos (2025), Advances in ecological forecasting, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO255024. Published on 4 August 2025. 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 © 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: Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets

Spectacular aurorae dance and shimmer nearly continuously at Jupiter’s poles. These grand displays are driven by energetic particles that are funneled toward the poles within Jupiter’s vast magnetosphere, or the area of space affected by the planet’s magnetic field. These particles then stream down toward the Jovian surface, setting atmospheric molecules aglow. Jupiter’s aurorae occur mainly at ultraviolet wavelengths and are hundreds of times more energetic than Earth’s.

Sometimes, Jupiter’s aurorae grow much brighter for hours or days at a time. Potential causes may involve the solar wind’s influence on the magnetosphere or the dynamics of energetic particles spewed into space by Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io. However, clarifying the solar wind’s role in any one brightening event would require taking simultaneous measurements of Jupiter’s magnetosphere and aurorae and their relationship with the solar wind—a difficult undertaking.

Recently, NASA’s Juno mission has made such simultaneous measurements possible. Giles et al. used data collected by the Jupiter-orbiting spacecraft to study how the gas giant’s ultraviolet aurorae responded when its magnetosphere was temporarily but dramatically compressed to a smaller size on 6 and 7 December 2022. Compression events happen from time to time and are normal, but this one was stronger than almost any previously observed.

Data from two of Juno’s onboard instruments—the Jovian Auroral Distributions Experiment (JADE) and Waves—suggest that as Juno neared Jupiter in its elliptical orbit on 6 December, the spacecraft was overtaken by the outer edge of the shrinking magnetosphere before later reentering it closer to Jupiter.

Additional data from modeling efforts suggest that just as sometimes seen with Earth’s magnetosphere, the extreme compression was caused by a sudden intensification of the solar wind that exerted a powerful squeeze on Jupiter’s magnetosphere.

This squeeze coincided with a major spike in ultraviolet auroral emissions. Another of Juno’s instruments, its ultraviolet spectrograph, measured the aurora’s peak power at this time to be 12 terawatts—6 times its baseline power level.

Given the coincident timing of these rare events, the researchers concluded that the powerful auroral display was likely triggered by the major solar wind shock compressing the magnetosphere. Further research could clarify the mechanisms by which compression can boost the aurora and explore additional processes that could trigger brightening events. (Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025JE009012, 2025)

—Sarah Stanley, Science Writer

Citation: Stanley, S. (2025), A solar wind squeeze may have strengthened Jovian aurorae, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250281. Published on 1 August 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.

Arctic and subarctic soils store a significant proportion of Earth’s carbon. But rising temperatures could drain these soils of nitrogen—a key nutrient. The loss could reduce plant growth, limiting the soils’ ability to store carbon and amplifying global warming, according to a new study.

High-latitude soils store vast amounts of carbon because cold temperatures slow microbial activity. Though plants produce organic matter through photosynthesis, microorganisms can’t consume it fast enough, leading to its accumulation over time. Scientists have long worried that a warmer Arctic would accelerate microbial activity, releasing stored carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO2). But they also hoped that warmer temperatures would stimulate plant growth, which would reabsorb some of the carbon and partially offset these emissions.

The new research shows that the latter scenario is very unlikely because warming causes soils to lose nitrogen, a loss that could inhibit plant growth.

“We didn’t expect to see nitrogen loss.”

The findings come from a decade-long experiment in a subarctic grassland near Hveragerði, Iceland. In 2008, a powerful earthquake altered geothermal water flows in the region, turning previously average patches of soil into naturally heated zones with temperature gradients ranging from 0.5°C to 40°C above previous levels. The event created a unique natural laboratory for observing how ecosystems respond to long-term warming.

Using stable nitrogen-15 isotopes to trace nutrient flows in the landscape, the researchers found that for every degree Celsius of warming, soils lost between 1.7% and 2.6% of their nitrogen. The greatest losses occurred during winter and early spring, when microbes remained active but plants were dormant. During this time, nitrogen-containing compounds such as ammonium and nitrate were released into the soil, but with plants unable to absorb them, they were lost by either leaching into groundwater or escaping into the atmosphere as nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than CO2.

The findings were published in a paper in Global Change Biology.

“We didn’t expect to see nitrogen loss,” said Sara Marañón, a soil scientist at the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications in Spain and the study’s first author. “The soil’s mechanisms to store nitrogen are breaking down.”

A Leaner, Faster Ecosystem

The researchers also found that warming weakened the very mechanisms that help soils retain nitrogen. In warmer plots, microbial biomass and the density of fine roots—both key to nitrogen storage—were much lower than in cooler plots. Though microbes were less abundant, their metabolism was faster, releasing more CO2 per unit of biomass. Meanwhile, plants struggled to adapt, lagging behind in both growth and nutrient uptake.

“Microbial communities are able to adapt and reach a new equilibrium with faster activity rates,” Marañón said. “But plants can’t keep up.”

“This is a not-so-optimistic message.”

Heightened microbial metabolism initially results in greater consumption of the nitrogen and carbon available in the soil. After 5 or 10 years, however, the system appears to reach a new equilibrium, with reduced levels of organic matter and lower fertility. That shift suggests that warming soils may transition to a permanently less fertile state, making it harder for vegetation to recover and leading to irreversible carbon loss.

Scientists have traditionally thought that as organic matter decays faster in a warmer climate, the nitrogen it contains will become more available, leading to increased productivity, said Erik Verbruggen, a soil ecologist at the University of Antwerp in Belgium who was not involved in the study. “This paper shows that actually, this is not happening.”

Instead, nitrogen is being leached out of the soil during the spring, making it unavailable for increased biomass production. “This is a not-so-optimistic message,” Verbruggen said.

An Underestimated Source of Greenhouse Gases

With Arctic regions warming faster than the global average, this disruption to the nutrient cycle could soon become more apparent. Nitrogen and carbon loss from cold-region soils may represent a significant and previously underestimated source of greenhouse gas emissions—one that current climate models have yet to fully incorporate.

The researchers periodically returned to the warm grassland near Hveragerði, Iceland, to measure nitrogen. Credit: Sara Marañón

The researchers plan to explore the early phases of soil warming by transplanting bits of normal soils into heated areas and also to investigate how different soil types respond to heat. Marañón noted that the Icelandic soils in the study are volcanic in origin and very rich in minerals, unlike organic peat soils common in other Artic regions.

“Arctic soils also include permafrost in places like northern Russia and parts of Scandinavia, and they are the largest carbon reservoirs in the world’s soil,” Verbruggen said. The soils analyzed in this research, on the other hand, were shallow grassland soils. “They are not necessarily representative of all Arctic soils.”

Still, Verbruggen added, the study’s findings highlight the delicate balance between productivity and nutrient loss in these systems.

Soil’s abundant carbon reserves make it a major risk if mismanaged, Marañón said. “But it can also become a potential ally and compensate for CO2 emissions.”

—Javier Barbuzano (@javibar.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Barbuzano, J. (2025), As the Arctic warms, soils lose key nutrients, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250282. Published on 1 August 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: Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets

Lakes that form on top of glaciers on Earth (called supraglacial lakes) have been observed to drain downwards when a fracture forms.  The fracture may further propagate through a process called hydrofracturing, where additional pressure is caused by the weight of the overlying water. 

Europa is a moon of Jupiter with a subsurface ocean under an outer icy lithosphere that is likely tens of kilometers thick. Taking this glacial lake analogy to Europa, Law [2025] investigates whether this process was likely to play a role in perched water bodies in Europa’s icy shell. The perched water bodies, those formed inside of the ice shell, could be created through either convective upwellings in Europa’s icy shell or through an impact to the surface. 

Illustration of scenarios discussed for perched water bodies and how they may evolve over time. Upper row: possible evolution of a perched water body that formed through convection or other in-shell processes. The collapse of the shell above the water may enable downward hydrofacturing by weakening the shell above. Lower panel: possible evolution of a perched water body that formed as a result of an impact, as an alternative way to weaken the upper shell. Credit: Law [2025], Figure 1

The author concludes that downward hydrofracture and drainage of liquid water from perched water bodies on Europa are possible if the overlying ice lithosphere is thin or mechanically weak. Such a condition might occur if there is a perched water body below a broken-up region of crust (called chaos regions on Europa) or shortly after an impact crater forms. 

If hydrofracturing is possible, this may provide a means to transport melt from near the surface of Europa to deeper parts of the icy crust, or potentially all the way to the subsurface ocean.  The movement of melt and other elements or minerals carried with it may affect the habitability of Europa by bringing nutrients and chemical disequilibria to the subsurface ocean.

Citation: Law, R. (2025). Rapid hydrofracture of icy moon shells: Insights from glaciology. Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, 130, e2024JE008403. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024JE008403

—Kelsi Singer, Associate Editor, JGR: Planets

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.

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.

515 miles—roughly the distance from Washington, D.C. to Detroit, one-third the length of the Colorado River, and now, the longest lightning bolt ever recorded.

That’s right: A new analysis of satellite data has revealed that a 22 October 2017 storm over the U.S. Midwest created a lightning bolt that reached 829 kilometers (515 miles), from eastern Texas to nearly Kansas City. The record-setting bolt lasted about 7 seconds. 

The record was certified by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the weather agency of the United Nations, and entered into their World Weather and Climate Extremes Archive.

Researchers discovered the lightning bolt while analyzing lightning detection data from NOAA’s GOES-16 satellite. They published their findings in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society today. 

Imagery from the GOES-16 satellite shows the record-breaking lightning bolt. Red circles mark positively charged subsidiary branches of lightning, and blue circles mark negatively charged subsidiary branches. Credit: World Meteorological Organization, American Meteorological Society, Peterson et al. 2025, https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-25-0037.1

The 515-mile-long bolt is considered a megaflash, which refers to lightning that reaches at least 100 kilometers (62 miles). Megaflashes extend through the clouds, initiating hundreds of cloud-to-ground bolts along the way. The flash from the 2017 storm created more than 116 cloud-to-ground offshoots seen in the above map as blue and red dots.

 
Related

•  Read the report in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
•  WMO Certifies Megaflash Lightning Record in U.S.A.
•  Longest Lightning “Mega-Flash” Sets a Shocking New Record
 

Less than 1% of storms create megaflash lightning; most flashes reach less than 16 kilometers (10 miles). 

Still, most people don’t realize how far from a storm lightning can strike. “The storm that produces a lightning strike doesn’t have to be over top of you,” Randy Cerveny, a geographer at Arizona State University and coauthor of the new report, said in a press release. 

Historically, scientists have detected lightning using ground-based networks that estimate location and speed based on the time it takes radio signals emitted by lightning to reach antennas. Satellite-based lightning detectors are a relatively recent addition to atmospheric scientists’ toolkit, and allow researchers to detect lightning continuously on continent-scale distances.

The previous record certified by the WMO was a flash over the southern United States and the Gulf of Mexico measured by satellite sensors to be 768 kilometers (477 miles) long. 

“It is likely that even greater extremes still exist, and that we will be able to observe them as additional high-quality lightning measurements accumulate over time,” Cerveny said.

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

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story idea about science or scientists? We’re listening! Send us a tip at eos@agu.org. 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.

Since 2013, a small plot of forest in northern New Hampshire has been heated with buried cables, an experiment meant to simulate the effects of climate change on soil temperatures. Now, after a decade of artificial warming, scientists are getting a glimpse into how temperate forests may change in the future.

Previous studies of temperate forests indicated that climate change might accelerate tree growth during spring and summer growing seasons, increasing the volume of carbon that the world’s trees store and making them a critical player in fighting climate change. But a warmer world will also have warmer winters and less snow, which damage those same trees.

A new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, indicates that changing winters could damage trees enough to offset the growth benefits of warmer temperatures. Climate models don’t take this offset into account and may be overestimating the ability of forests in the northeastern United States to fight climate change.

“Winter climate change in systems that are adapted to snow and its insulation is going to cause a reduced ability to sequester carbon,” said Pamela Templer, a forest ecologist at Boston University and a coauthor of the new study. 

Hot and Cold

To test how changing snow behavior in a warming temperate forest might affect carbon sequestration, the research team measured biomass changes in red maple trees in three types of plots: one plot treated with warming cables during the growing season, one treated with both warming and recurring freeze-thaw cycles in the winter, and reference plots with no treatments.

Each time it snowed from 2013 to 2022, researchers shoveled the insulating snow off the second plot, exposing soil to the freezing air for 72 hours. Then, they thawed the soil for 72 hours with warming cables. 

Researchers measured changes in biomass, a proxy for carbon storage, with metal bands that record the diameter of trunks.

The freezing and thawing cycles simulated in the study will likely become more common with climate change, said Kyle Arndt, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center who was not involved in the new study. “In these kinds of northern forests, this is expected to happen more often.”

“What’s striking here is that when you add the effect of winter climate change, the difference [between warmed and unwarmed plots] disappears.”

Those cycles of freezing and thawing damage tree roots, limiting their ability to take up nutrients, including nitrogen, meaning the trees can’t grow as much as they would following a more stable winter.

The plot of trees that was warmed in the growing season sequestered 63% more carbon than the reference plots. But the plot with both warmer growing seasons and additional freeze-thaw cycles sequestered just 31% more. Analysis of the growth data showed that the difference between this plot and the reference plot (with no warming or freeze-thaw cycles) was not statistically significant.

“What’s striking here,” Templer said, “is that when you add the effect of winter climate change, the difference [between warmed and unwarmed plots] disappears.”

The results align with a previous study from the same research group showing a 40% reduction in aboveground tree growth for sugar maple trees when insulating snow was removed.

Arndt said the results made sense and that the particularly long dataset added credence to the findings. 

The results may also have implications for nutrient cycling on the ecosystem scale, said Carol Adair, a forest ecologist at the University of Vermont who was not involved in the new study. When roots are damaged by freeze-thaw cycles, all the nitrogen they can’t absorb is left in the soil and flushed into watersheds during the spring melt. 

“We see a lot of nutrient loss happening [in the winter],” Adair said. Nutrients lost to surface waters could spur harmful algal blooms and even create a feedback loop that further decreases forest growth. Climate change–driven rain, rain-on-snow, and snowmelt events during warmer winters exacerbate the issue.

Forests’ Role in Carbon Storage

The results suggest that current models of the climate system may be overestimating how much carbon mid- to high-latitude forests will be able to sequester over the next couple of centuries, according to the authors.

“Without including these freeze-thaw cycles, they’re going to be overestimating [carbon storage] over time.”

The researchers searched existing model projections and could not find any that included the complex freeze-thaw dynamics identified in the plots, said Emerson Conrad-Rooney, a doctoral student and ecologist at Boston University and lead author of the new study. “How winter climate change can impact forest processes is not typically incorporated.”

“The models are really only including some of these net positive impacts” of climate change on northern forest biomass, Arndt said. “Without including these freeze-thaw cycles, they’re going to be overestimating [carbon storage] over time.”

“If we want to understand how future forests are going to sequester carbon, we need to know mechanistically how they’re going to behave [under a changing climate],” Templer said.

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

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2025), Warming winters sabotage trees’ carbon uptake, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250278. Published on [DAY MONTH] 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: Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems

More than a century ago, Alfred Wegener proposed that the Atlantic Ocean formed after North America drifted away from Africa and Eurasia. Much later, the theory of plate tectonics explained this movement as resulting from the formation of new oceanic crust in the space between the continents. But how did the the initial rift between the landmasses form, and how did it transition into a mid-ocean spreading ridge? Answers to these questions have remained elusive, partly because the time history of the rifting process has been difficult to decipher.

Foster-Baril et al. [2025] shed new light on the “rift to drift” transition by dating igneous rocks across a broad swath of the North American margin. They find that continental breakup and the subsequent transition to seafloor spreading was accomplished by three major pulses of magmatism. The first pulse was the largest, and involved extensive melting of mantle from below as the rift opened across a wide area. The second and third pulses, which were smaller, helped to localize the extensional deformation into a confined region. This localization facilitated the transition to symmetric seafloor spreading.

This sequence suggests that continental breakup happens across a much broader area, and over a longer time period, than was previously thought. It is still unclear if other continental breakup events also featured a series of magmatic pulses, or if the North American margin was unique in this way. Can this sequence also help us to understand “failed rifts” that never transition into seafloor spreading events? More studies that examine magmatism across broad regions of a rifting zone can help to answer such questions.

Citation: Foster-Baril, Z. S., Hinshaw, E. R., Stockli, D. F., Bailey, C. M., & Setera, J. (2025). Duration and geochemical evolution of Triassic and Jurassic magmatism along the Eastern North American Margin. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, 26, e2024GC011900.  https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GC011900

—Clinton P. Conrad, Associate Editor, G-Cubed

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: Global Biogeochemical Cycles

Africa is a source of uncertainty in carbon cycle calculations. By some estimates, the continent’s landscapes emit 2.1 billion tons more carbon dioxide than they take up each year—about equal to 1.5 times the annual emissions from coal-fired power plants. But other estimates are almost the complete opposite, suggesting that the continent’s copious plant matter takes up 2.0 billion more tons of carbon dioxide per year than it releases.

This uncertainty exists in part because the amount of carbon Africa takes up and emits varies greatly from year to year and partly because there is a dearth of available surface observations across the continent. Yun et al. investigated the reason for these fluctuations by applying a suite of atmospheric transport models to data from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2), a satellite-borne instrument that tracks carbon dioxide emissions across Earth’s surface. By filling a critical observational gap over Africa, the OCO-2 satellite has allowed researchers to examine the continent’s carbon cycle in unprecedented detail.

Scientists previously suspected that temperature was the prime factor influencing plant growth and therefore carbon dioxide emissions. Instead, these researchers found that in Africa, moisture levels have a much bigger impact.

Different types of landscapes react to moisture quite differently, however. In shrublands and grasslands, plants take full advantage of water when it becomes available by increasing their mass with little energy expenditure. That reaction means that in wet years, shrublands and grasslands take up a lot of carbon and expel very little, substantially shifting the continent’s carbon flux. In contrast, forests and savannas emit and take up about the same amount of carbon in wet conditions; their overall impact on the continent’s carbon flux is therefore smaller.

These findings suggest an explanation for the long-standing question of why Africa was such a weak carbon sink during the El Niño event of 2015–2016. The continent was unusually dry during that time, leading to stalled plant growth and carbon uptake.

Rainfall is expected to change in Africa in the coming decades. Overall, moisture availability is expected to increase in the north and decrease in the south, but precipitation will likely be patchy, leading to discrete bursts of plant growth. The researchers emphasize that the long-term operation of OCO-2 is essential for monitoring how African ecosystems respond to these shifting rainfall patterns. Taking moisture fluctuations into account could enable more accurate predictions of how the carbon cycle will respond to climate change. (Global Biogeochemical Cycles, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025GB008597, 2025)

—Saima May Sidik (@saimamay.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Sidik, S. M. (2025), When rain falls in Africa, grassland carbon uptake rises, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250277. Published on 30 July 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.

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.

One of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded struck off the eastern coast of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula Wednesday morning local time. Initially pegged at a magnitude-8.0, the quake was eventually upgraded to a magnitude-8.8. Adjusted magnitude estimates are not unusual for large earthquakes as more data become available.

If the estimate is not adjusted farther, the quake will be tied as the sixth largest earthquake ever recorded by modern instrumentation. The next largest instrumented event, a magnitude-9.0 quake, struck in 1952 roughly 45 kilometers to the northeast of the latest epicenter. 

U.S. Geological Survey “Did You Feel It?” reports captured the shaking that people on the Kamchatka Peninsula felt during the magnitude-8.8 earthquake. Credit: USGS, public domain

According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the recent earthquake likely struck along the Kuril-Kamchatka arc, which separates the Pacific tectonic plate and the Okhotsk microplate. Along the boundary, the Pacific plate is being subducted roughly to the west beneath the microplate. A preliminary USGS analysis of seismic data suggests the recent earthquake accommodated thrust motion, which is expected during slip along a subduction boundary.

On 20 July 2025, a magnitude-7.4 earthquake struck roughly 60 kilometers to the northeast of the recent epicenter. That quake occurred as a result of slip along a thrust fault of similar orientation. It’s proximity in location and time to the recent earthquake suggests the magnitude-7.4 quake was a foreshock to the magnitude-8.8 quake.  

Aftershocks are ongoing and will likely continue for weeks. More than 90 earthquakes of at least magnitude-4.4 have struck as of 1:00 p.m. UTC Wednesday, including a magnitude-6.9 shock followed a few minutes later by a magnitude-6.3 shock.

The magnitude-8.8 earthquake caused strong to extreme shaking in southern Kamchatka, according to USGS “Did You Feel It?” reports from the region.

 
Related

•  USGS Event Page: 2025 Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia Earthquake
•  U.S. Tsunami Warning Center
•  Japan Meteorological Agency Tsunami Warnings
 

The earthquake generated tsunami waves that spread across the Pacific. Wave heights of more than 3 meters inundated Severo-Kurilsk in the Kuril Islands south of Kamchatka, according to a Russian news agency.

The Japan Meteorological Agency issued tsunami warnings for much of the country’s Pacific coast. Waves up to 1.3 meters struck Kuji Port in northern Honshu. The U.S Tsunami Warning Center issued warnings for coastal Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, and Northern California. Waves reached as high as 1.2 meters in Northern California. In Hawaii, waves reached 1.74 meters in Kahului on Maui and 1.5 meters in Hilo on the Big Island. 

Some injuries and no deaths have been reported.

—Jennifer Schmidt, Managing 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. 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.

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.

On 28 July, more than 170 researchers sent a letter to National Science Foundation leaders and Congress, urging them to reconsider the decision to terminate the lease of the Nathaniel B. Palmer, the United States’ only Antarctic research vessel-icebreaker (RVIB) and a key part of science operations around the White Continent.

NSF revealed plans to end its lease with Offshore Service Vessels, the icebreaker’s owner, in its May budget request for 2026. An NSF spokesperson confirmed the plan to Science on 28 July, saying the lease would be terminated in October.

“This decision forecasts the decline of an exceptional history of U.S. scientific contributions,” the letter’s authors wrote.  

 
Related

•  Read the Letter to NSF
•  NSF Plans Abrupt End to Lone U.S. Antarctic Research Icebreaker
•  Confined at Sea at the End of the World
• Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
 

The Palmer has operated since 1992, spending much of its time in the Southern Ocean. There, scientists have collected data to gain understanding of Earth’s past, ocean processes, and the changing sea ice in Antarctica, including Thwaites Glacier—the so-called “doomsday glacier.” 

At a planning meeting earlier this summer, NSF officials said the R/V Sikuliaq would take over some of the work planned for the Palmer. But the Sikuliaq may not be up for the task: The ship is “wholly unsuited to most of what we do in Antarctica,” Julia Wellner, a marine geologist at the University of Houston, told Science. 

The research community has long been sounding the alarm about the dwindling U.S. Academic Research Fleet. Many vessels in the fleet have passed or are nearing the end of their original design lives, and although mid-life refits can extend their use, the yearslong process of designing, building, and outfitting a new vessel means the time to invest in replacements is now, according to ocean scientists.

“If federal budgets don’t keep pace to enable science, U.S. expertise in ocean science is largely going to continue to dwindle,” Paula Bontempi, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island, told Eos in January. “An investment in our ocean enterprise as a country is an investment in our shared future.”

Last year, NSF retired the JOIDES Resolution, a beloved ocean drilling vessel that had been conducting research for 4 decades, without plans to build or acquire a replacement. It also ended support for its other Antarctic research and supply vessel, the R/V Laurence M. Gould. In addition to ending operations of the Palmer, this year’s budget request also proposed to cut funding for a potential replacement vehicle for the ship.

“We urge reconsideration of the decision to terminate the lease of the RVIB Nathaniel B. Palmer, and the continued forward-looking development of the next generation of Antarctic research vessels that will continue US leadership, scientifically and geopolitically, in the high southern latitudes,” the letter’s authors wrote.

—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 © 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.

The Southern Ocean exists in a state of precarious balance. The sea is layered, with cold surface water sitting atop relatively warm water. It’s an inherently unstable situation—all else being equal, the warm water should rise to the top. But it’s saltier and therefore denser, so it lurks below. The cold upper layer, meanwhile, is freshened by snowfall and sea ice, which forms near the coast, then drifts northward into the open ocean before melting.

For the past 10 years, sea ice cover has been in decline as ocean temperatures have warmed. The rapid melting has delivered even more freshwater to the surface, which should strengthen the cold-water-layer’s insulative ability, allowing the sea ice to eventually expand again.

But that feedback loop appears to have been disrupted. New satellite data have revealed that the ocean around Antarctica, against all expectations, is getting saltier.

The study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Measuring Where It’s Hard to Measure

Sea ice, rough seas, and 24-hour darkness make it nearly impossible to monitor Southern Ocean salinity from a ship in the winter. Only in recent years has it been possible to measure salinity in the Southern Ocean from space. Satellites can observe the ocean surface’s brightness temperature—a measure of radiation given off at the sea surface. The fresher the water, the higher the brightness temperature.

The technique works well in warmer waters, but in cold waters, brightness temperature doesn’t shift as much as salinity changes. Because these changes are generally quite subtle to begin with, satellites haven’t been able to accurately detect them in polar regions. In these areas, sea ice has also clouded the signal.

Recent advances in satellite technology, however, have greatly improved the sensitivity of brightness readings, and new algorithms allow researchers to clean up noise from sea ice.

Oceanographer Alessandro Silvano of the University of Southampton and his colleagues analyzed the past 12 years of salinity records from the European Space Agency’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite. Team member Alex Haumann, a climate scientist with Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, in Germany, said having these broad data, which cover the entire Southern Ocean at 25-square-kilometer resolution, is a game changer. “Due to the big coverage and the time series you can get, it’s super valuable. It’s really a new tool to monitor this system.”

“With warming, we expect more freshwater to be flowing into the ocean. So having this saltier water appearing at the surface is quite shocking.”

When the team saw that salinity had increased over that period, however, they couldn’t help but question the technology. To ground truth what they were seeing, they turned to Argo floats—automated buoys that sample water up to 2,000 meters deep. A network of the floats dots the world’s seas, including the Southern Ocean.

To Silvano’s surprise and shock, the floats corroborated the satellite data. “They show the same signal,” he said. “We thought, okay, this is a real thing. It’s not an error.”

Matching the salinity data to trends in sea ice, the team noticed a disturbing pattern. “There is a very high correlation between the surface salinity and the sea ice cover,” Haumann said. “Whenever there’s high salinity, you have low sea ice. Whenever it is low salinity, there is more sea ice.”

“With warming, we expect more freshwater to be flowing into the ocean. So having this saltier water appearing at the surface is quite shocking,” said Inga Smith, a sea ice physicist at the University of Otago in New Zealand who was not involved in the research.

A Shifting Regime

The most plausible explanation for the boost in salinity, Silvano said, is that the delicate layers of Antarctic water have been upset, and the warmer, saltier water below is now bursting through to the surface, making the surface too warm for sea ice to form.

Though he stressed it’s too early to pinpoint a cause for the upwelling, Silvano postulated that it may be driven by stronger westerly winds around Antarctica—a result of the warming climate. He said he fears that Antarctica’s natural damage control mechanism, in which ice melt releases freshwater, which in turn traps the warm deep water and eventually allows more sea ice to form, is now irreversibly broken.

The weakening of the ocean’s stratification instead threatens to set up a dangerous new feedback, whereby powerful convection currents bring up even more warm, salty water from depth, leading to runaway ice loss.

“We have to find ways to monitor the system, because it’s changing very rapidly.”

“We think this could be a regime shift—a shift in the ocean and ice system, where you have permanently less ice,” Silvano said.

Wolfgang Rack, a glaciologist with the University of Canterbury in New Zealand who was not involved in the research, said the satellite record is not long enough to show whether the rise in salinity is an anomaly, or a new state of normal, but “it is quite unlikely that it is a simple anomaly, because the signal is so significant.”

Zhaomin Wang, an oceanographer with Hohai University in Nanjing, China, who was not involved in the research, said the study was a “very firm result,” but cautioned that it’s still too early to conclusively pin the sea ice retreat on upwelling. “It’s quite difficult to disentangle the cause and effect between Antarctic sea ice change and the surface salinity change,” he said, “because it’s a coupled system, making it difficult to determine which process initiates the changes.”

For Haumann, the findings show how crucial new technology is for tracking changes in the Southern Ocean. “We have to find ways to monitor the system, because it’s changing very rapidly,” he said. “This is one of the most distant regions on Earth, but one of the most critical for society. Most of the excess heat we have in the climate system goes into this region, and this has helped us keep the planet at a relatively moderate warming rate.”

“Now we don’t really know what will happen to that,” he said.

—Bill Morris, Science Writer

Citation: Morris, B. (2025), Southern Ocean salinity may be triggering sea ice loss, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250276. Published on 29 July 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.

This is an authorized translation of an Eos article. Esta es una traducción al español autorizada de un artículo de Eos.

A medida que el mundo supera los 1.5 °C de calentamiento antropogénico y parece cada vez más probable que alcance los 2.6 °C y 3.1 °C hacia finales de siglo, sigue existiendo una gran controversia, incluso entre geocientíficos, sobre cómo frenar, detener o revertir el acelerado cambio climático que estamos provocando. Como han documentado numerosos estudios, ese calentamiento provocará la inundación de muchas ciudades costeras, daños con valor de billones de dólares derivados de fenómenos meteorológicos extremos, las extinciones generalizadas de especies y olas de calor cada vez más intensas. También representará una amenaza profunda para los sectores financieros y las economías a todas las escalas.

“La escala de mitigación necesaria para mantener el calentamiento por debajo de los 2 °C–3 °C va más allá de la reducción de las emisiones anuales”.

Una cosa es clara: para mitigar estas consecuencias, la primera prioridad de la humanidad debe ser reducir drásticamente sus emisiones anuales de alrededor de 40 gigatoneladas (mil millones de toneladas métricas) de dióxido de carbono (CO₂), el gas de efecto invernadero que más contribuye al calentamiento global. Sin esta reducción, cualquier otra medida en el mejor de los casos tendrá una eficacia limitada.

Desgraciadamente, a estas alturas, la escala de mitigación necesaria para mantener el calentamiento por debajo de los 2 °C–3 °C va más allá de la reducción de las emisiones anuales. También debemos eliminar y almacenar el carbono acumulado en la atmósfera.

Reducir las emisiones anuales no es suficiente

La necesidad de reducir las emisiones ha sido expresada con precisión, pasión y contundencia durante décadas. Sin embargo, las emisiones globales continúan batiendo nuevos récords, aumentando en un 1% en cada uno de los últimos tres años. Mientras tanto, aunque el crecimiento de las energías limpias y renovables (CRE, por sus siglas en inglés) ha batido recientemente sus propios récords, el consumo global de combustibles fósiles continúa en ascenso, y el petróleo, el gas y el carbón siguen representando más del 81% del consumo total de energía (solo 4% menos que hace 20 años).

Incluso bajo condiciones políticas favorables, el consumo de CRE, que como porcentaje del consumo mundial de energía primaria crece a un ritmo de aproximadamente 1% anual, está lejos de alcanzar el crecimiento del consumo energético global, que ronda el 2% por año. Incluso si el crecimiento de las CRE lograra igualar ese ritmo, podrían pasar décadas hasta alcanzar algo parecido a una descarbonización energética global, durante las cuales emitiríamos varias veces más CO₂ del que ya hemos liberado.

En las últimas décadas, centrarse en las emisiones anuales no sólo no ha servido para reducirlas, sino que tampoco son nuestras emisiones actuales (y las futuras) las que están causando el calentamiento de 1.55 °C que estamos presenciando. Es la cantidad de CO₂ que ya hemos emitido. Nuestras emisiones acumuladas de 1.8 billones de toneladas (1,800 gigatoneladas) de CO₂ procedentes de la energía y la industria — pesan más que toda la biomasa viva del planeta — extraídas de reservorios geológicos y vertidas a la atmósfera, permanecerá allí (y en el océano) durante miles de años. Incluso en ese feliz día en que finalmente empecemos a reducir nuestras emisiones, estaremos más lejos que nunca de resolver el problema. De hecho, aún seguiremos agravándolo.

Una gran oportunidad

Científicos y profesionales de múltiples disciplinas y sectores pueden desempeñar un papel clave en la mitigación del cambio climático. La investigación en geociencias es fundamental para comprender los reservorios de carbono y los flujos entre ellos, así como los efectos pasados, presentes y posibles en el futuro sobre el clima. Sin embargo, a estas alturas, parece evidente que es poco probable que más ciencia climática, e incluso mejor comunicación de la misma, inspiren la acción colectiva o política necesaria para activar una mitigación significativa. Entonces, ¿qué más pueden aportar los geocientíficos?

“La remoción de dióxido de carbono (CDR, por sus siglas en inglés) implica riesgos mucho menores que el multi-centenario experimento de geoingeniería de utilizar la atmósfera como desagüeo desagüe”.

Algunos ven un papel en apoyar la extracción de recursos naturales para satisfacer la asombrosa demanda proyectada de metales como el cobre y las tierras raras, y en promover el tipo sostenibilidad impulsada por la tecnología que promueve la industria minera. Los geocientíficos también contribuyen a informar sobre los enfoques de adaptación y resiliencia, aunque ninguna de estas constituye una forma de mitigación y, a largo plazo, resultan mucho más costosas. Se calcula que el impacto económico del calentamiento es de alrededor 12% del PIB (producto interno bruto) mundial por cada 1 °C de aumento de temperatura, y se prevé que nuestra trayectoria actual reduzca el PIB mundial hasta un 40% para el año 2100, con pérdidas aún mayores en ciertas regiones.

La mayor oportunidad — y quizá la mayor responsabilidad — para que los geocientíficos contribuyan a la mitigación está en facilitar la eliminación duradera de dióxido de carbono (CDR, por sus siglas en inglés). A veces surgen preocupaciones sobre la CDR como una forma de intervención climática o geoingeniería; pero es mucho menos arriesgada que el multi-centenario experimento de geoingeniería de utilizar la atmósfera como desagüe. De hecho, eliminar gigatoneladas de CO₂ cada año es esencial para alcanzar las estrategias de emisiones netas cero y evitar cantidades desastrosas de calentamiento, tal como lo han señalado de forma inequívoca el Panel Intergubernamental sobre Cambio Climático (IPCC), la Comisión de Transiciones Energéticas y la Sociedad Americana de Física.

Claves para el retiro de carbono

Generalmente se consideran tres principios fundamentales para la CDR. En primer lugar, se debe extraer el CO₂ que ya está presente en la atmósfera. Este principio se distingue de la captura y almacenamiento de carbono en fuentes puntuales (CCS, por sus siglas en inglés), el cual solo reduce las nuevas emisiones de CO₂ provenientes de fuentes fósiles industriales y energéticas a medida que compite con la energías limpias.

La instalación de captura directa de aire de Mammoth, en Islandia, operada por Climeworks, empezó a extraer dióxido de carbono del aire en 2024. Crédito: ©Climeworks

Existen múltiples enfoques para la eliminación duradera de dióxido de carbono. La captura directa del aire (DAC, por sus siglas en inglés), por ejemplo, es un método que está creciendo rápidamente el cual extrae CO₂ directamente de la atmósfera. Los métodos de eliminación y almacenamiento de carbono a partir de biomasa (BiCRS, por sus siglas en inglés) capturan una fracción de las 480 gigatoneladas de CO₂ que las plantas absorben naturalmente cada año, impidiendo que ese carbono regrese a la atmósfera al convertir la biomasa en formas que pueden aislarse y almacenarse.

Otros enfoques de CDR se centran en la gestión de ecosistemas para estimular una mayor eliminación de CO₂ de la que ocurriría de forma natural, el segundo de los tres principios de la CDR. Algunos ejemplos son las diversas estrategias para mejorar la meteorización de rocas en tierras agrícolas o bosques, y para métodos marinos, como el uso de nutrientes para fomentar el crecimiento de biomasa o el aumento de la alcalinidad del agua de mar para que extraiga más CO₂ del aire.

“Independientemente del método utilizado para eliminar CO₂, este debe almacenarse de forma duradera, con una probabilidad mínima de regresar a la atmósfera durante un largo periodo”.

El tercer principio, y el más importante, es el hecho de que, independientemente del método utilizado para eliminar CO₂, este debe almacenarse de forma duradera, con una probabilidad mínima de regresar a la atmósfera durante un largo periodo de tiempo. Usar el carbono capturado para crear productos comercializables como fertilizantes o compuestos químicos puede parecer económicamente inteligente, pero no es un enfoque duradero. Toda la demanda industrial global de CO₂ representa menos del 1% de nuestras emisiones anuales, y gran parte de ese carbono vuelve a la atmósfera o se utiliza en la recuperación mejorada de petróleo (EOR, por sus siglas en inglés) para extraer más petróleo.

Los llamados enfoques de CDR basados en la naturaleza o uso del suelo, como la reforestación, las prácticas agrícolas y la gestión de suelos, son alternativas intuitivamente atractivas que pueden eliminar y almacenar CO₂ y, si se hacen bien, mejorar la salud de los ecosistemas. Pero estos métodos tampoco son muy duraderos. Las plantas terrestres almacenan una masa de carbono (~1,650 gigatoneladas en toda la vegetación terrestre) casi equivalente a nuestras emisiones acumuladas, y los suelos contienen cuatro veces más. Sin embargo, la mayor parte del carbono de las plantas y el suelo regresa a la atmósfera a través de la descomposición natural o de perturbaciones en escalas de tiempo de años a décadas.

Además, las alteraciones antropogénicas de los bosques y los suelos provocadas por el calentamiento, que son cada vez más intensas y frecuentes, podrían debilitar aún más la durabilidad de la CDR basada en la naturaleza y la tierra. Solo los incendios forestales de Canadá en 2023 liberaron casi 3 gigatoneladas de CO₂, casi cuatro veces más que las emisiones anuales de toda la aviación global. (Estas perturbaciones también amenazan con desestabilizar los antiguos reservorios de carbono en turberas y permafrost, que almacenan en conjunto un stock de carbono equivalente a cinco veces nuestras emisiones acumuladas, otra razón más para acelerar el desarrollo de CDR.) Por lo tanto, aunque la CDR basada en la naturaleza y la tierra aporta beneficios colaterales y es barata y fácil de desplegar, en el contexto de contabilizar emisiones netas cero, solo tiene sentido como compensación de emisiones biogénicas análogas (por ejemplo, uso del suelo o la silvicultura), no para el 82% procedente en su mayor parte de la quema de combustibles fósiles.

Aparte de los tres principios fundamentales de la CDR, el potencial de aplicar enfoques a una escala lo suficientemente grande como para marcar una diferencia significativa es una consideración clave. La escalabilidad de la DAC a gran escala, por ejemplo, se enfrenta a problemas de consumo energético y costos. Asimismo, para reducir la carga acumulada de emisiones con métodos basados en la naturaleza y en la tierra, como la reforestación, requeriría extensiones de tierra descomunales que ya tienen otros muchos usos. Mientras tanto, el océano, que ya contiene cerca de 140,000 gigatoneladas de CO₂, ofrece un enorme potencial debido a su enorme tamaño y a su mayor tiempo de residencia en comparación con otros reservorios cercanos a la superficie, a pesar de las interrogantes sobre cómo el calentamiento futuro afectará esa durabilidad.

El sustancial subsuelo

“Cada vez está más claro que, tanto por su capacidad como por su durabilidad, es difícil superar a los yacimientos geológicos subterráneos”.

Los enfoques de eliminación duradera de dióxido de carbono son diversos y están evolucionando, pero cada vez está más claro que, tanto por su capacidad como por su durabilidad, es difícil superar a los yacimientos geológicos subterráneos. La cantidad de carbono presente en la corteza terrestre es millones de veces mayor que la contenida en todos los reservorios cercanos a la superficie combinados, y permanece allí abajo por varios órdenes de magnitud más tiempo. Las estimaciones sugieren que existe suficiente capacidad de almacenamiento subterráneo para al menos decenas de miles de gigatoneladas de CO₂ recapturado, y análisis recientes de factibilidad han demostrado que alcanzar tasas de almacenamiento de al menos 5 a 6 gigatoneladas de CO₂ por año para 2050 es realista y consistente con las trayectorias tecnológicas actuales.

Lograr una CDR a escala de gigatoneladas será un gran desafío — que requeriría construir apoyo y un mayor desarrollo de los métodos necesarios. Algunos enfoques muestran el mayor potencial.

El CO₂ capturado puede comprimirse e inyectarse como fluido supercrítico (sCO₂) en acuíferos salinos o en yacimientos de petróleo y gas agotados situados a gran profundidad bajo aguas subterráneas dulces y recubiertos por rocas impermeables. Este enfoque es probablemente la principal vía de almacenamiento para el CO₂ capturado mediante tecnologías de captura directa del aire (DAC), así como por la captura y almacenamiento de carbono (CCS) proveniente de las emisiones, y es algo que ya sabemos hacer gracias a décadas de práctica (aunque principalmente para la recuperación mejorada de petróleo). Bajo las condiciones adecuadas, diversos mecanismos de captura minimizan las probabilidades de que escape el CO₂ almacenado de esta manera.

En yacimientos como éste, la empresa islandesa Carbfix inyecta dióxido de carbono disuelto en agua en depósitos geológicos subterráneos, donde reacciona con la roca para formar minerales carbonatados. Crédito: Siljaye/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Otro enfoque prometedor es la mineralización directa, que consiste en inyectar CO₂, ya sea como fluido supercrítico o disuelto en agua, en rocas máficas y ultramáficas reactivas para formar minerales carbonatados. El uso de este método está aumentando a escalas de millones de toneladas por año en algunos lugares.

Otros métodos de eliminación y almacenamiento de carbono a partir de biomasa, BiCRS, relativamente nuevos pero prometedores que aprovechan la capacidad de captura de carbono de las plantas son la inyección subterránea (a menudo en yacimientos agotados de petróleo y gas) de carbono derivado de biomasa en forma de bioaceite, residuos agrícolas o forestales pirolizados, u otros desechos orgánicos (por ejemplo, municipales o de origen ganadero).

Desafíos para los geocientíficos

Dada la trayectoria aún ascendente de nuestras emisiones y la necesidad de soluciones escalables de almacenamiento de carbono, es difícil imaginar que la remoción de CO₂ mediante almacenamiento subterráneo duradero, CDR, no crecerá en las próximas décadas, especialmente si las políticas e incentivos relacionados con el carbono pasan de favorecer la reducción y la evitación de emisiones a la eliminación. Con el interés de la industria de los combustibles fósiles en apuntalar sus activos de producción energética, es posible que también prolifere el uso del almacenamiento de carbono asociado a emisiones (CCS), una tecnología afín a la CDR. En cualquier caso, es probable que el subsuelo sea cada vez más objeto de atención y acción.

A medida que crece este interés, debemos reconocer que el subsuelo es un lugar cada vez más concurrido, donde interactúan recursos hídricos, energéticos y minerales, sin mencionar que alberga hasta el 90 % de toda la vida microbiana y entre el 10 % y el 20 % de toda la biomasa del planeta. Aquí es donde entran en juego las geociencias.

“Ha llegado el momento de que los geocientíficos asuman un papel central en el desarrollo de soluciones de mitigación”.

Tras un siglo en el que la industria de los combustibles fósiles ha definido directa e indirectamente gran parte de la investigación y la formación de la disciplina, ha llegado el momento de que los geocientíficos asuman un papel central en el desarrollo de soluciones de mitigación, específicamente en el almacenamiento duradero de carbono y la gestión responsable del subsuelo. No faltarán desafíos.

Las actividades de minería, geotermia, y producción y disposición de petróleo y gas ya han incrementado los flujos de fluidos subterráneos muy por encima de los niveles previos al Antropoceno, y las proyecciones de estos flujos para 2050 son muchas veces superiores. Tan solo en Estados Unidos, además de más de 4 millones de pozos de producción de petróleo y gas, casi un millón de pozos de inyección subterránea eliminan una enorme variedad de materiales y residuos peligrosos y no peligrosos.

Escalar el almacenamiento subterráneo de carbono a niveles de gigatoneladas por año significaría inyectar grandes cantidades de CO₂, así como de diversas soluciones de carbono, en una amplia gama de reservorios geológicos y aguas asociadas. Esto generará no solo desafíos de ingeniería, sino también retos de esclarecimiento de la eficacia y los peligros de las inyecciones en condiciones muy diversas. Aunque sabemos relativamente bien cómo se comportan el CO₂ supercrítico (sCO₂) y del CO₂ disuelto en ciertos tipos de entornos subterráneos, no sabemos casi nada sobre el comportamiento de los nuevos fluidos de almacenamiento de carbono, como el bioaceite y los residuos biológicos en suspensión o torrefactos.

Los hidrogeoquímicos Ji-Hyun Kim y Rebecca Tyne toman muestras de aguas subterráneas en la cuenca de Paradox, Utah, para comprender las conexiones entre las rocas del subsuelo, los fluidos y las comunidades microbianas y cómo pueden verse afectadas por las actividades antropogénicas, incluido el almacenamiento de carbono. Fotografía: Jennifer McIntosh

El papel de las geociencias en la gestión responsable del subsuelo también implicará aportar nuevas perspectivas sobre cuencas sedimentarias y provincias ígneas, para abordar cuestiones como la permeabilidad y la composición de las rocas que son importantes para el almacenamiento duradero, así como para evaluar los factores de riesgo críticos. Entre los factores de riesgo incluyen la migración de fluidos y su interacción con fallas geológicas y otras barreras de permeabilidad, el potencial de disolución mineral para movilizar metales y modificar los flujos de fluidos, la contaminación de aguas subterráneas dulces y la sismicidad inducida.

Gran parte de este trabajo será necesariamente transdisciplinario, lo que supondrá un reto para los científicos acostumbrados a los énfasis tradicionales y disciplinarios a la hora de desarrollar un lenguaje y unos enfoques compartidos. Por ejemplo, para entender cómo afecta el almacenamiento de carbono a las comunidades microbianas (por ejemplo, a través de la diversidad de especies y metanogénesis) y a las comunidades humanas, y traducir ese conocimiento en acciones de política pública e involucramiento social, requerirá que los geocientíficos colaboren y se comuniquen con biólogos, ingenieros, planificadores, la industria, gobiernos, comunidades indígenas y otros.

A la altura de las circunstancias

El almacenamiento duradero de carbono para la remoción de dióxido de carbono puede literalmente estar debajo de nosotros, pero no podemos permitir que lo esté en sentido figurado.

La percepción pública hacia la CDR está mejorando, aunque muchos geocientíficos siguen considerándola una distracción de la reducción de emisiones o, peor aún, un obstáculo que desincentivará la reducción de emisiones. Sin embargo, este riesgo — en gran medida teórico, que, vale la pena señalar, también se plantea al perseguir la adaptación y la resiliencia — puede abordarse mediante la creación de objetivos separados para la CDR y la reducción de emisiones y por otros medios de implementación estratégica. Otros ven la CDR duradera como una forma de complicidad con la industria de los combustibles fósiles y sus tácticas de retraso y distracción, o que es una alternativa opuesta a enfoques intuitivamente atractivos basados en la naturaleza.

“Debemos tener claro que las emisiones acumuladas de la humanidad, tanto hasta la fecha como en el futuro (incluso con proyecciones optimistas), nos sitúan en una senda que requiere gigatoneladas al año de CDR duradera para tener alguna esperanza de evitar un calentamiento de entre 2 °C y 3 °C”.

Pero debemos tener claro que las emisiones acumuladas de la humanidad, tanto hasta la fecha como en el futuro (incluso con proyecciones optimistas), nos sitúan en una senda que requiere gigatoneladas al año de CDR duradera para tener alguna esperanza de evitar un calentamiento de entre 2 °C y 3 °C. Y, sea cual sea el método, la mayor parte de ese carbono capturado tendrá que almacenarse en reservorios geológicos.

Desarrollar y gestionar de manera responsable el almacenamiento subterráneo de carbono representa un desafío histórico para las geociencias. Estar a la altura de estos retos servirá a la sociedad y al planeta al ayudar a mitigar las desastrosas consecuencias del cambio climático. También puede cambiar la percepción pública de este campo como anticuada o desconectada y ofrecer una misión inspiradora para las nuevas generaciones de geocientíficos.

Datos del autor

Peter Reiners (reiners@arizona.edu), Universidad de Arizona, Tucson

This translation by Saúl A. Villafañe-Barajas (@villafanne) was made possible by a partnership with Planeteando and Geolatinas. Esta traducción fue posible gracias a una asociación con Planeteando y Geolatinas.

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 © 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

Observational analyses consistently find that yields of major rainfed crops increase with temperature up to a threshold of approximately 32°C, above which they reduce sharply. However, we still have a limited understanding of the explanation for such outcomes and, therefore, future yield projections are uncertain.

Agricultural productivity as a function of cumulative growing-season evapotranspiration. The connection between agricultural productivity and the cumulative water flux out of the ecosystem suggests that a land surface model that explicitly represents transpiration can be useful for exploring yield variations. Credit: Vargas Zeppetello et al. [2025], Figure 2

Vargas Zeppetello et al. [2025] explore an innovative hypothesis, which is both intuitive and revolutionary: that soil water stress limits both agricultural productivity and evaporative cooling, giving rise to increase in near surface temperature and finally decrease of yield at extremely high temperatures. In other words, they assume that water stress, and its influence on evaporative cooling, temperature, and agricultural productivity, drives the yield-temperature relationship.

To test their assumption, the authors use growing-season transpiration from an idealized land surface model as a proxy for yield. This approach reproduces the observed yield-temperature relationship, even though the model includes no mechanisms that limit productivity at high temperatures. In experiments where the influence of temperature on soil moisture is suppressed, yields still decline during hot, dry periods in a manner consistent with the observations. The authors conclude that future yield outcomes depend more critically on changes in rainfall, or irrigation, than suggested by estimates that attribute yield losses primarily to temperature variations.

Citation: Vargas Zeppetello, L. R., Proctor, J., & Huybers, P. (2025). Is water stress the root cause of the observed nonlinear relationship between yield losses and temperature? AGU Advances, 6, e2025AV001704. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV001704

—Alberto Montanari, Editor-in-Chief, AGU Advances

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.

Though winds may shift, science perseveres. And so do scientists. Whether change pushes them in new directions or strengthens their resolve, scientists find ways to keep doing important work.

The stories that follow highlight the journeys of scientists who have been blown off course, let the winds carry them, and stood tall in the breeze.

When, from the age of 11, one scientist knew she wanted to drive rovers on Mars, she made it happen.

When a young man saw his Narragansett community’s concerns about the degradation of local landscapes and waters, that—along with his family’s Traditional Knowledges—set him on the path to becoming a soil conservationist.

Cassius Spears Jr.: Conserving the Living Soil Jeff Massey: Atmospheric Science Meets the Private Sector Kate Mulvaney: Bringing Human Dimensions to Water Resources Lucia Perez Diaz: Expressing Earth with Art Phoebe Lam: Embracing the Ocean’s Complexities Stacey Hitchcock: From Fearing Storms to Seeking Them Susanne Maciel: Marrying Mathematics and Geology Wendy Bohon: Quelling Fears and Sparking Geoscience Joy Jess Phoenix: Curiosity Unfettered Tanya Harrison: Roving on Mars Alex Teachey: Elevating Astronomy with the Arts

When an earthquake shook an aspiring actress’s world (and her apartment), she enthusiastically asked how he could help.

When an atmospheric scientist pushed through her childhood fear of storms, she found a career studying extreme weather.

Along the way, all of the scientists profiled here connected communities, made discoveries, and had some wild adventures. May their inspiring stories help you weather whatever comes your way.

—The Editors

Citation: Editors (2025), Winds of change, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250267. Published on 28 July 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.

The Career Issue

Each year, we take a moment to appreciate the varied careers Earth and space scientists have forged. Their stories of determination, taking chances, and finding success are always inspiring.

This year’s cohort doesn’t disappoint.

In this issue we learn about 12 scientists who navigated their fields and found rewarding careers. Sometimes their plans went awry, or opportunities arose, or they found renewed purpose after taking a hard look at their priorities and interests. For Jess Phoenix, that meant running for Congress. For Lucia Perez Dias, it was illustrating a book. Alex Teachey left the theater to study physics.

Some of the scientists profiled here knew where they wanted to go, and they worked hard to get there. After hearing tribe members’ concerns about their land, a teenage Cassius Spears decided to study conservation. As a child, Tanya Harrison wanted to work with Mars rovers; as an adult, she did it.

Navigating a career has been even more challenging for some scientists this year amid drastic funding cuts, mass layoffs, and uncertainty due to shifting political priorities in the United States. These uncertainties put early-career researchers especially at risk, but senior scientists are positioned to influence institutional actions and mobilize in support of their more vulnerable colleagues, says Mark Moldwin in an opinion.

We hope you find these stories as uplifting as we do.

—Jennifer Schmidt, Managing Editor

Citation: Schmidt, J. (2025), Where the wind blows, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250268. Published on 28 July 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.

Lucia Perez Diaz always needed a creative outlet. She studied music from an early age and played the piano through her teens. She was always the one to be scolded for doodling in class.

Wary that the hustle required by a professional career in music might be challenging and inspired by an influential Earth systems teacher, Perez Diaz chose a geology degree over a music degree when attending the Universidad de Oviedo in Spain. She then completed a master’s degree and Ph.D. in geodynamics at Royal Holloway, University of London, investigating the geologic formation and evolution of the South Atlantic Ocean.

But Perez Diaz never let go of her creative side. After years of producing intricate illustrations for her own presentations, a pandemic-era refocusing spurred her to grow her illustration business. Now she’s a published children’s book author: Her first book, How the Earth Works, hit the shelves earlier this year.

Perez Diaz’s artwork includes a geosciences poster series. Credit: Lucia Perez Diaz

“Science is full of inspiring stories,” she said. “Art is a really great vehicle to tell them.”

Perez Diaz also works as a computational geodynamicist at Halliburton. Learning to program didn’t feel natural to Perez Diaz initially, and she required a lot of support from her peers. But the fact that she eventually succeeded and built a career using those skills motivated her to take on new, unfamiliar projects—like book publishing—with zeal.

“It’s rarely about having all the skills—it’s more about giving ourselves space to learn and time to get there.”

“People often ask me, ‘How did you manage to make a book?’” she said. “I’m like, ‘Honestly, because I thought, What’s the worst that could happen?’”

She hopes to use what she’s learned to help others explore their own creativity. She hosts workshops to show aspiring illustrators that creating art isn’t as daunting as it may seem. “Often we look at others’ achievements and they make us feel like we don’t have their talent or their skills,” she said. “It’s rarely about having all the skills—it’s more about giving ourselves space to learn and time to get there.”

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

This profile is part of a special series in our August 2025 issue on science careers.

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2025), Lucia Perez Diaz: Expressing Earth with art, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250261. Published on 28 July 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.

Phoebe Lam’s science career started when she looked up at the stars. Her father, a theoretical physicist, explained the movements of Earth, the Moon, and planets, and Lam developed an appreciation for the natural world.

Today Lam works below the stars as a marine geochemist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, studying the role particles play in the cycling of carbon, iron, and other elements in the ocean.

Early on, it was hard for Lam to fit her love for nature into the confines of a scientific discipline. As an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), she enjoyed all her classes—calculus, physics, chemistry, biology—almost equally.

“I realized I like the messiness of the real world.”

Lam saw her peers joining research labs and did the same. She dove into oceanographic work with scientists at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. An adviser predicted that Lam would be a “great generalist someday,” Lam said. “I wasn’t super focused—I was trying little things there, little things here. I think that still characterizes my brain.”

Drawn to work that integrated different disciplines, she joined an oceanography lab at Princeton University to study the trace metal requirements of phytoplankton.But dealing only with tightly controlled variables felt limiting. “I realized I like the messiness of the real world,” she said.

Frustrated, Lam joined the world of environmental policy—a “rebound relationship,” she said. While enrolled in a policy-focused master’s program, she took a class on carbon cycles, and found her way back to oceanography, eventually earning a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

The twists and turns of Lam’s academic journey “made me understand…that there are a lot of ways to do science,” she said. She counsels prospective undergraduate and graduate students to think about how they might feel satisfied by their research.

For Lam, that satisfaction comes from putting together the complex puzzle of the ocean’s chemistry—from knowing there are so many different questions she can ask of the ocean.

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

This profile is part of a special series in our August 2025 issue on science careers.

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2025), Phoebe Lam: Embracing the ocean’s complexities, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250262. Published on 28 July 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.

Stacey Hitchcock remembers being terrified of storms as a child. (It didn’t help that her neighbor’s house was struck by lightning three times.) But today she is an atmospheric scientist studying extreme weather at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.

Hitchcock’s younger self conquered her fears of the weather by asking lots of questions. “I remember at some point asking my dad to explain radar to me,” she said.

Hitchcock first learned that studying the weather could be a profession when she took a tour of a university in Indiana while visiting to play in a tennis tournament. “I didn’t know it was a career,” she said.

As an undergraduate, Hitchcock helped with research on climate and snow. But extreme weather was always her passion. “I kept coming back to storms,” she said. And she pushed on when she encountered adversity. Some of her classmates said she wouldn’t make it professionally as an atmospheric scientist, but Hitchcock knew she was doing good work.

“If you feel like you’re succeeding, don’t let naysayers tell you that you’re not.”

“If you feel like you’re succeeding, don’t let naysayers tell you that you’re not,” she said. “That’s advice that I try to give to students.”

Hitchcock uses both observations and simulations in her research. She is working to better understand the structure of storms that produce intense rainfall and the challenges of forecasting multiple storms that occur in close succession. She credits her wide-ranging research interests to her willingness to try out projects and develop new collaborations.

“A lot of the best things that have happened to me in my career happened because I had an interesting opportunity and I said yes,” she said.

For instance, Hitchcock spent 4.5 years in Australia as a postdoctoral researcher.

The professional connections she made abroad led to investigations of how turbulence in the atmosphere caused by storms translates into bumpy flights. Hitchcock is still involved in that field.

It’s a somewhat fitting line of work, Hitchcock admits, because she used to be a queasy flyer.

—Katherine Kornei (@KatherineKornei), Science Writer

This profile is part of a special series in our August 2025 issue on science careers.

Citation: Kornei, K. (2025), Stacey Hitchcock: From fearing storms to seeking them, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250263. Published on 28 July 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.