EOS

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.

A Colorado judge has granted a preliminary injunction to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). The move temporarily blocks the federal government from moving forward with one part of its effort to dismantle UCAR’s National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) by transferring stewardship of a state-of-the-art supercomputing facility.

Together, UCAR—a nonprofit consortium of universities and colleges—and the National Science Foundation (NSF) operate and maintain the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) in Cheyenne, Wyo. The facility provides scientists with enormous computational power necessary to run sophisticated analyses of weather, climate, and other Earth systems.

 
Related

•  UCAR Sues Federal Agencies
•  NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center
• What Americans Lose If Their National Center for Atmospheric Research Is Dismantled
•  Get Involved: AGU’s Science Policy Action Center
 

In February, as another step in a chain of actions taken to dismantle NCAR, the NSF informed UCAR and NCAR that it would transfer management and operations of NWSC to a third-party operator.

In turn, UCAR filed a lawsuit alleging that the action violated federal law under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). To halt NSF’s action under the act, the agency’s attempt to remove UCAR’s stewardship of the facility must be shown to be “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.”

Judge Richard Brooke Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado wrote in a 1 June court order that the action was both arbitrary and capricious “for at least two reasons.” First, NSF didn’t offer an explanation for its decision, and second, it didn’t follow an outlined process to consider public feedback.

The decision means that UCAR will temporarily retain its stewardship of NWSC. 

“NSF’s failure to provide any explanation for its decision—let alone a reasonable one—thwarts meaningful judicial review and renders the challenged action arbitrary and capricious,” Jackson wrote.

He went on to note that efforts to transfer stewardship of UCAR assets, including the supercomputing center, to other institutions, pose the risk of “irreparable harm” to UCAR. One of the chief harms would be brain drain, the judge noted multiple times, writing that “UCAR cannot easily replace employees with the level of education, specialized training, and institutional knowledge necessary to operate and maintain the NWSC’s ‘highly integrated, high-performance supercomputing system.'”

In addition to brain drain, Jackson cited financial injuries to UCAR that would be “difficult, if not impossible” to quantify, as well as an overall threat to the consortium’s mission.

“Any degradation in forecasting, modeling, or related scientific capabilities carries real-world consequences, including potential harm to property and human life. Given those stakes, the public interest strongly favors maintaining the status quo unless and until NSF demonstrates that its transfer decision complies with the APA,” he concluded.

In a statement posted to the UCAR website, the consortium’s interim president, Eric Barron, said UCAR was pleased that Judge Jackson recognized how harmful the proposed transfer would be for the the nation’s scientific enterprise.

“UCAR’s top priority is to advance Earth system science in service to society,” he wrote. “Today’s decision ensures that the NWSC will be able to continue its vital work on behalf of the United States and its stakeholders without interruption.”

—Grace van Deelen (@gvd.bsky.social), Staff Writer, and Emily Gardner, (@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. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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 Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposed a new rule on 28 May that, if finalized, would give political appointees approval power over scientific grants, reduce support for international collaboration, limit funding for publication fees, and make other extensive alterations to the federal government’s funding review process. 

The proposed “Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance” would require senior political appointees to conduct reviews of each grant, and would not allow those appointees to defer to peer reviewers for grantmaking decisions. Scientific peer review “remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion,” according to the proposal.

“It replaces expertise with political appointees, globally decouples the U.S. and completely guts our scientific ecosystem.”

The proposed rule would further codify an executive order from last August, titled “Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking,” in which the White House ordered federal agency heads to award grants that “advance the President’s policy priorities” and align with its criteria for “Gold Standard Science.”

The proposal states that the OMB made the suggested revisions in response to a lack of “transparency, accountability, and proper oversight” between 2021 and 2024. “Federal awards were often used during those years to promote a ‘woke’ policy agenda that did not reflect the values of the vast majority of the American public,” the proposal claims, referencing “unlawful DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] practices, various anti-American ideologies in American education,” and “non-replicable and highly misleading studies” as examples. 

“We warned of this exact form of government overreach in science a year ago,” Colette Delawalla, founder of Stand Up for Science, told Scientific American in reference to the administration’s proposed rule. “It replaces expertise with political appointees, globally decouples the U.S. and completely guts our scientific ecosystem.”

In addition to elevating government oversight of the grantmaking process, the proposed rule would, among other changes:

• Allow federal agencies to terminate active grants at any time if they are deemed “inconsistent with program goals or agency priorities.”
• Prohibit the use of federal funds for research collaborations with foreign entities affiliated with countries under sanction by the United States, unless exceptions are authorized by federal law or the head of a federal agency.
• Disallow federal grants from being used for most publication costs and open access fees. 
• Require that grant recipients obtain pre-approval from federal agencies to use their funding to attend conferences or obtain professional memberships related to the scientific work covered by their grant.
• Allow federal agencies to receive exemptions from the requirement to publicly advertise grant competitions when “publicly announcing an opportunity would pose a risk to national security or is in the national interest of the United States.”
• Ban federal funds from being used to “fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate” any activities related to DEI or “gender ideology,” defined as “theories or ideologies that deny the biological reality of sex or the sex binary in humans.”

 
Related

•  Read the Proposed Rule
•  White House Proposes New Rules Giving Political Appointees Final Approval on Research Grants
•  Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule
•  The State of the Science 1 Year On: Academia and Research
•From the Prow: A Rule That Would Rewrite the Terms of U.S. Science
•  Get Involved: AGU’s Science Policy Action Center
 

“Congress has repeatedly appropriated funds for science agencies with the expectation that those funds would be administered through merit-based, expert-driven processes insulated from political interference,” Elizabeth Ginexi, a former official at the National Institutes of Health, wrote in a blog post. “This rule attempts to override that expectation.”

Stand Up for Science will host an online meeting with scientist speakers on Tuesday, 2 June at 4 p.m. ET to review the proposed rule. The Office of Management and Budget is accepting public comments on it until 13 July. 

AGU President Brandon Jones released a statement about the rule on 3 June, urging the AGU community to submit public comment via AGU’s Action Center.

“This is not a routine regulatory update,” he wrote. “What it actually does is restructure the foundational rules of U.S. science funding—with cascading impact for global collaborators—to serve political priorities rather than the public good. We have seen executive orders, budget cuts, and terminations take aim at the scientific enterprise one by one. This proposed rule would codify that agenda into federal regulation, making it far harder to reverse.”

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

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

Recent studies have shown the climatic envelope for blanket bog peatlands to be contracting, yet questions remain about what will happen to existing peatlands as they pass outside of this shrinking bioclimatic envelope.

DigiBog, a process-based model, accurately predicts peat depth in an area of very complex topography. This presents a significant advancement in modeling peat depth in areas with complex terrain. The implications of peat expanding at a faster rate on the relatively dry and steeper slopes, compared to the wetter basins, is contrary to the current thinking.

Despite being at the edge of the future climatic envelope for blanket bog, under all climate scenarios, the site continues accumulating peat until 2100, with the greatest accumulation occurring under the moderate Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 scenario. 

While peat thickness generally depends on wetness, wetness does not fully explain accumulation patterns in blanket bogs, with some very wet areas having only shallow peat accumulation.

Tom Winter’s conceptual model proposed that wetland vulnerability to climate change depends on wetness and the position within the hydrological landscape. Baird et al. [2026] does indeed show peat depth to have moderate to strong correlations with wetness. However, greater recent peat accumulation, and predicted future accumulation, is away from basins which contradicts Winter’s “wetter is better” and may be partially explained by the ability of peatlands themselves to engineer and alter landscape wetness.

Overall, ecohydrological models that are process-based are better than simple bioclimatic models for assessing future peatland carbon, when accounting for accumulation rates and spatial patterns.

Citation: Baird, A. J., Young, D. M., Ramirez, J. A., Gill, P. J., Morris, P. J., Peleg, N., et al.(2026). Assessing the response of blanket peatlands to climate change using the DigiBog model and winter’s concept of the “hydrologic landscape”. Water Resources Research, 62, e2025WR042050. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025WR042050

 —Paul Whitfield, Associate Editor, Water Resources Research, with input from Joshua Ratcliffe

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

Off Track, On Purpose

Iceland, Chile, Kenya, Antarctica, Papua New Guinea, and the Great Salt Lake. That ambitious lineup covers (most of) the destinations where scientists featured in our annual fieldwork collection have ventured to test innovative instruments and answer pressing questions about natural processes on—and off—Earth.

Read along to learn about some fascinating field science and to hit all these hot spots and cool destinations for yourself.

In “Discovering Venus on Iceland,” scientists describe a multiweek effort traversing three rugged and rocky sites to collect samples and validate airborne radar measurements. Iceland’s basaltic lava fields are about the closest analogue to the surface of Venus that Earth has to offer, and the team’s data collection is helping to test the performance of instruments that will be a part of NASA’s VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy) mission in several years’ time.

From Iceland, travel west and south to Chile, Guatemala, and Idaho to learn how researchers have been building and using their own inexpensive, lightweight sensors to detect infrasound emanating from volcanoes, earthquakes, and wildfires in “Sensing the Sounds from Earth’s Hazardous Environments.” At Villarica volcano in the Chilean Andes, for example, they have deployed sensor clusters on, around, and even hanging from a cable above the volcano’s summit crater to better understand how infrasound may be useful for eruption monitoring.

Meanwhile, at Lake Turkana in Kenya, scientists have been partnering with local industries to map the subsurface and better understand how the continent is unzipping along the East African Rift System, as Kimberly Cartier describes in “Eastern Africa Is Splitting Apart, but Not Where We Expected.”

Stick with Cartier for another leg of our fieldwork trip as she relates how researchers have instrumented an underwater volcanic vent off Papua New Guinea to track effects of ocean acidification on corals in “Coral Diversity Drops as Ocean Acidifies.”

From there, head to the decidedly less tropical climes of the South Pole, where a team recently installed a pair of seismometers deep in the Antarctic ice, completing a challenging and years-long feat of engineering, reports Grace Van Deelen in “These South Pole Seismometers Will Detect Vibrations 1.5 Miles Under the Ice.”

Finally, journey to the North American interior to learn what scientists found when they installed electrodes on the now-desiccated surface of Utah’s Great Salt Lake in Carolyn Wilke’s—spoiler alert—“What’s Below the Great Salt Lake? More Water.”

We’ll understand if you need a break after all that globe-trotting. But you’re always welcome to join us for more adventures in the field.

—Timothy Oleson, Eos Senior Science Editor

Citation: Oleson, T. (2026), An off-road itinerary, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260181. Published on 1 June 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Source: AGU Advances

The Indian monsoon has shifted over the past quarter century. Northwest India now receives substantially more rain than it once did, while a lack of rain sends the Indo-Gangetic Plain toward drought.

More than a billion people rely on the monsoon to confer economic stability across southern Asia; further changes to this weather system could lead to widespread hardship. Scientists have struggled to predict how this weather pattern will change moving forward because commonly used climate models fail to capture changes to the monsoon that have already occurred.

Mahendra et al. suggest that models do not adequately represent either changes in the temperature of the Atlantic Ocean or how those temperature changes are linked to weather patterns around the rest of the globe. As a result, the coupled models tend to fail to predict this monsoon shift.

Specifically, current climate models lack the ability to incorporate information about the cold blob, a patch of cold water off the south of Greenland. When the researchers added the cold blob to climate model results, they found that it can alter the jet stream in a way that makes it pull moisture toward northwest India while also preventing storm systems from forming elsewhere. This is exactly the type of shift that has been observed in monsoon patterns. When a large-scale wind pattern prevents the formation of smaller-scale weather patterns in this way, it is called a barotropic governor mechanism.

This barotropic governor mechanism also explains why midlatitudes around the globe have observed more storm activity in recent years. The results highlight the importance of connecting processes from disparate parts of the globe when formulating climate models, the authors write. (AGU Advances, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV002173, 2026)

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

Citation: Sidik, S. M. (2026), The surprising link between a cold blob and the Indian monsoon, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260177. Published on 1 June 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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.

This week, a parade of scientists will spend 50 hours straight speaking about the importance of weather and climate research in the United States.

Now in its second year, the Weather & Climate Livestream will feature hundreds of scientists describing their work and why it matters. Last year’s event, which lasted 100 hours, saw more than 180,000 views and led to 30,000 phone calls to Congress to #SaveAmericasForecasts.

“The first aspect of it is just communicating science,” said Haley Crim, a climate literacy researcher at MIT and the founder of Climateliteracy.earth. “The second half of it is to inspire people to call their representatives in support of funding for climate and weather science, and science more broadly.”  

 
Related

•  The Weather & Climate Livestream
•  Get Involved: AGU’s Science Policy Action Center
 

Last year, Crim was an “avid watcher” of the livestream, so she was happy to help when a friend asked her to pitch in for the second iteration. But it’s also more personal this year, as she has since lost her position as a contractor with NOAA.

“It has a whole new meaning now, this year,” she said.

The livestream begins at 4 p.m. ET on Monday, 1 June, ending at 6 p.m. ET on Wednesday, 3 June. Speakers include meteorologist Jeff Masters and climate scientists Adam Sobel of Columbia University and Kim Cobb of Brown University. AGU President Brandon Jones and president-elect Benjamin Zaitchik will also speak from 2 p.m. to 2:40 p.m. ET on Wednesday, 3 June.

Science Under Attack

Since Donald Trump began his second presidential term in 2025, federal science funding has faced extensive cuts, with more proposed. In June 2025, for instance, a budget document proposed eliminating NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. In December 2025, the administration announced plans to break up the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

“This is really a full-frontal attack on climate science.”

“This is really a full-frontal attack on climate science,” said Andrew Williams, a climate scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography who is helping to organize the livestream and will speak during it.

He added that even though Congress pushed back against the most drastic cuts proposed last year, leaving key science program budgets mostly intact, many agencies haven’t yet seen the money they’ve been granted in the budget. For instance, according to the organization Grant Witness, 112 grants have been awarded in the NSF Directorate for Geosciences so far this year, compared with 948 in total in Fiscal Year (FY) 2025. The average total number of grants awarded between FY21 and FY24 was 1,418.

Both Crim and Williams said they hope the livestream provides the public with a better understanding of how climate and weather research affects us all, from allowing for timely evacuation warnings to affecting insurance rates. Williams offered the example of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, a federally funded NOAA research lab that would be eliminated under the president’s proposed FY2027 budget.

“It builds the engine of the U.S. weather forecasting model, which is what tells you day to day what the weather is going to be,” he said. “We’ve all been able to take for granted that these things are happening because the U.S. has for decades, for 60 or 70 years, had strong and stable federal funding for weather and climate science.”

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

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about science or scientists? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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.

The AGU Books Editorial Board comprises researchers spanning the breath of the Earth and space sciences. From diverse perspectives comes an interdisciplinary catalog of monographs and textbooks—and collaborations between scientists whose paths might not cross otherwise.

In honor of the 70th anniversary of the AGU Books Program, we interviewed three members who have served on the Books Board since its founding in 2020: Estella Atekwana is a near-surface geophysicist and serves as a dean and professor at the University of California Davis; Xianzhe Jia is a space physicist and professor at the University of Michigan; Jim O’Connor is a research geologist with the United States Geological Survey. We asked these Editorial Board members about their favorite projects and why books remain important within the scientific literature  which is dominated by journals.

What is a memory or project that stands out from your AGU Books Editorial Board experience?

Supporting Congo Basin Hydrology, Climate, and Biogeochemistry pushed Board member Jim O’Connor to engage with new topics and geographic areas of study.

JOC: Two items stand out for me. One is one of the first books that I handled, Congo Basin Hydrology, Climate, and Biogeochemistry: A Foundation for the Future. This book was so far outside my zone (topically and spatially) yet so gratifying to be a small part of. It was really a very different book, discussing much classic hydrology but also touching on resource management and politics in an area where those topics are complicated. It was so interesting. And it was published in both English and French.

The other memory sticking with me is our early discussions on what AGU books could and should be about. The discussions were so wide-ranging (including children’s books!), and they really forced me out of what was probably a pretty narrow lane. I suppose such discussions might be expected when you put together a diverse group of scientists and give them a chance to explore what AGU books could be.

Board member Estella Atekwana saw Salt in the Earth Sciences progress from a proposal through multiple iterations and finally to a published book.

EA: One project that stands out is serving as the Subject Editor for the two-volume set Salt in the Earth Sciences: Evaporite Rocks and Salt Deposition and Salt in the Earth Sciences: Basin Analysis and Salt Tectonics by Webster Mohriak. It was a pleasure to work with Dr. Mohriak, who was thoughtful, responsive, and deeply engaged with the review process. I also developed a tremendous appreciation for the reviewers, who took the time to read the full volume carefully, sometimes through multiple iterations, and provide detailed and constructive feedback. Seeing the book move from proposal to publication was deeply rewarding. It reminded me how much care, expertise, and collaboration go into producing a high-quality scholarly book.

XJ: One project that stands out for me is a book that’s still in production. It is about exoplanets, focused on how stellar-driven space environments interact with (exo)planetary magnetic fields and atmospheres and, ultimately, shape habitability. What’s made it memorable is that the book sits right at the boundary between communities that don’t always share the same language—space physics, planetary science, and exoplanets. I’m excited for it to become a resource that helps readers move back and forth between exoplanets and our solar system with a shared comparative framework.

What is your favorite thing about serving on the AGU Books Editorial Board?

EA: When I was first asked to serve as on the AGU Books Editorial Board, I approached the role with some skepticism. I wondered why early- and mid-career faculty or scientists would choose to write books when the academic reward system often emphasizes journal articles, citation counts, and publications in high-impact journals. However, serving on the Board has changed my perspective. I have enjoyed reviewing book proposals, encouraging leaders in the field to consider writing books, and working with an editorial team that provides thoughtful support every step of the way.

My favorite thing about serving on the AGU Books Editorial Board is getting to help shape syntheses—not just what’s new, but what the community collectively understands.

Xianzhe Jia

XJ: My favorite thing about serving on the AGU Books Editorial Board is getting to help shape syntheses—not just what’s new, but what the community collectively understands. This role gives me the opportunity to work with Volume Editors and authors to turn a set of strong contributions into a coherent, usable resource, and to do that in a way that brings different subfields into the same conversation.

JOC: I suppose my favorite thing has been similar to that of being a journal editor. One is forced to confront a much wider scientific arena than that framed by one’s particular scientific discipline. Every AGU book I’ve worked with has had some element of “new and cool” that came with it.

Why are books important for Earth and space science communities? 

XJ: Scientific fields advance by connecting pieces that are often studied separately—stars and their activity, planets and their atmospheres and magnetospheres—and those connections are hard to establish from individual papers alone. A good book synthesizes what we know across those interfaces, makes assumptions and terminology explicit, and highlights where knowledge gaps exist. That’s valuable both for training new scientists and for enabling collaboration; books help researchers from different disciplines meet on common ground, especially when we’re trying to interpret sparse data and compare very different environments.

JOC: I believe that in many instances books enable better stories. The length and format freedom, particularly in relation to journal articles, allows for longer and more fully developed narratives. And I believe good storytelling is essential for communicating science. My personal experience is that books I have been a part of have much wider and long-lasting reach to a wider public than most journal articles. Though this may be changing (or already changed) in the social media age.

In many fields, a well-written book becomes the go-to reference for generations of students, researchers, and practitioners.

Estella Atekwana

EA: Books are important because they provide a trusted, comprehensive place to access knowledge on a particular topic. In many fields, a well-written book becomes the go-to reference for generations of students, researchers, and practitioners. I am reminded of the book Geodynamics by Donald Turcotte and Gerald Schubert, which was foundational to my own studies as a Ph.D. student and has remained an essential text in the field through subsequent editions. It was a special delight when I came to UC Davis to meet Professor Donald Turcotte, then Professor Emeritus in Earth and Planetary Sciences, the author of a book that had been so fundamental to my intellectual development. That experience reinforced for me the lasting impact books can have. They synthesize knowledge, broaden access, and help sustain a global scientific community.

—Dara Liling (dliling@agu.org; 0009-0005-6828-2811), American Geophysical Union, USA; Estella Atekwana (0000-0003-1424-4068), University of California Davis, USA; Xianzhe Jia (0000-0002-8685-1484), University of Michigan, USA; and Jim O’Connor (0000-0002-7928-5883), United States Geological Survey, USA

Citation: Liling, D., E. Atekwana, X. Jia, and J. O’Connor (2026), The Editorial Board marks the latest chapter in AGU Books, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO265023. Published on 1 June 2026. This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author(s). Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

The weirdest volcano in the world may be Tanzania’s towering Ol Doinyo Lengai, an active peak that squeezes out a strange, low-temperature lava called carbonatite. Carbonatites are composed of more than 50% carbonate minerals, the same substances that form the ocean’s reefs. At Ol Doinyo Lengai, they are key components of the coldest lava on the planet.

Carbonatites are found on every continent and range in age from today-ish years old (in Tanzania) to about 3 billion years old (in Greenland). What’s more, they’re a major source of critical minerals.

In a new study published in Science Advances, a team of scientists led by Carl Spandler from Adelaide University in Australia identified a compelling correlation between carbonatites and specific sections of Earth’s continents—those proximal to past subduction zones.

Carbonatites and Critical Minerals

In the United States, the federal government defines critical minerals as those essential to the nation’s economic or national security. These minerals must also have supply chains that are vulnerable to distortions such as demand surges and foreign conflict. For example, most of the world’s terbium, used for everything from naval sonar systems to indoor lighting, comes from China. The United States considers terbium a critical mineral because the possibility of political or economic conflict within China or between China and another polity could directly or indirectly threaten the world’s supply of the element.

If you wanted to identify a rock that likely hosts rare earth elements, “carbonatite would be a good place to start.”

Critical minerals are either chemical elements (like terbium) or minerals. Important elements range from the familiar, like the lithium we need for batteries, to the sesquipedalian, like praseodymium, used for high-strength magnets. (Sesquipedalian means “having to do with a very long word.”)

Praseodymium is one of the 17 rare earth elements (terbium is another), all of which are considered critical minerals. Rare earth elements are not actually rare and are often (but not always) found in carbonatites. If you wanted to identify a rock that likely hosts rare earth elements, “carbonatite would be a good place to start,” said Kathryn Goodenough of the British Geological Survey, who was not involved in this study.

Fertilizing the Mantle

Much of Earth’s mantle is rock that remains after magma has been extracted—this mantle has been depleted. But carbonatites must come from mantle that’s quite the opposite—from parts that had to have been fertilized with volatiles containing trace metals, often critical minerals of interest. The question of how the mantle source for carbonatites came to be fertilized has no definitive answer.

Just as a garden can be fertilized in many ways ranging from synthetic sprays to coplanted cover crops, Earth’s mantle can be fertilized via myriad methods. “You must have volatiles or melts rising up from deeper in the mantle that are carrying metals with them,” Goodenough said.

For example, as a slab subducts beneath another tectonic plate, a volcanic arc typically arises above the zone at which the subducting slab reaches about 100 kilometers below Earth’s surface. This is the approximate depth at which the slab releases water, triggering melting in the overlying plate.

But fluids and melts can continue to exit the subducting slab far beyond the trace of the volcanic arc. That far out, the overriding plate almost always comprises a complete section of lithosphere—crustal lithosphere on top and mantle lithosphere on the bottom. The fluids and melts from the underlying slab, rich in halogens, carbon dioxide, phosphorus, and the like, rise into the overriding plate’s mantle lithosphere, changing the rocks via a process called metasomatism, Goodenough explained.

On the other hand, mantle plumes ascending from the core-mantle boundary are thought to be fertilized from a graveyard of subducted slabs that pond in the very deepest part of the mantle.

Spandler and his colleagues focused on testing whether that first method of fertilization, subduction-driven metasomatism, spatially correlates with carbonatites and rare earth element deposits. TL;DR—it does.

Fertilized Mantle Lithosphere

GPlates is a piece of software that allows users to rewind the movements of tectonic plates, exploring how continents have shifted their locations over the past 2 billion years. Using GPlates, Spandler’s coauthors Andrew Merdith and Amber Griffin, also of Adelaide University, mapped 43 polygons that denote regions of subduction lasting 100 million years or longer. These polygons, the authors infer, mark the locations of fertilized mantle lithosphere, which they call FML. These zones are thought to contain the good stuff—the critical minerals of interest.

“If [the correlation were] 100%, I wouldn’t believe it myself.”

Spandler and his colleagues compared the locations of carbonatites and rare earth elements with the polygons. They found that 67% of carbonatites and 72% of rare earth element ore deposits lie within these polygons. This correlation, though not perfect, suggests that mantle lithosphere fertilized by subduction could provide the source for many of these curious and critical deposits.

“If [the correlation were] 100%, I wouldn’t believe it myself because geology doesn’t work that way,” Spandler said.

Two Stepping

Spandler and his colleagues argue that carbonatites form in a two-step process. He emphasized that the new paper focuses on the first step—the process that led to fertilization of the eventual sources for carbonatites and rare earth element deposits.

The second step—the trigger—generates the carbonate-rich magma itself. It’s this event that provides the heat that causes melting of the mantle, said Richard Ernst, a scientist in residence at Carleton University in Canada who was not involved in this study.

“The trigger can be almost anything,” said Spandler, because the lithosphere needs only a nudge to melt. A plume can disrupt the structure of the lithosphere, triggering carbonatite magmatism, but so can continental rifting, he said. Indeed, Ol Doinyo is one of the mountains presiding over the East African Rift (which some scientists think also sits atop a plume).

Previous work by Ernst considered whether plumes could provide at least part of the source for some carbonatites by looking at the age of the deposits and those of nearby large igneous provinces—dramatic, long-lived outpourings of hot basalt thought to result from mantle plumes. In that work, Ernst and his colleague, the late Keith Bell, found the ages of large igneous provinces correlate with the ages of nearby carbonatite deposits; in short, the examples in that paper are potentially linked in both space and time.

Where carbonatite ages match those of nearby flood basalts from large igneous provinces, Spandler said, “I suspect that may just be the trigger mechanism.”

Plume Problems

For some carbonatites, there’s a time difference between when the mantle was fertilized and when the magmas were emplaced, explained Goodenough. “We can track that in several different localities,” she said. This observation would support something like the two-step process outlined above, as opposed to plumes driving the entire sequence.

Another problem with associating carbonatite formation exclusively with plumes, Goodenough said, is that carbonatites require cool conditions that result in relatively minor mantle melting. Plumes, and the large igneous provinces they appear to produce, are hot, and a lot. Plume proponents counter this critique by arguing that carbonatites are often found near the edges of large igneous provinces, away from the hottest zones.

Ernst noted, however, that though Spandler and his colleagues have made the spatial argument for subduction, “they haven’t made the isotopic argument that requires a subduction zone mechanism [for the source].” That sets up a testable hypothesis for future studies that could make use of existing data-rich geochemical studies of deposits within FMLs.

Moreover, even newer research may link the two camps, at least in some cases, with geochemical indicators pointing to both mantle plumes and mantle lithosphere being involved in forming some carbonatites. The latter component, said Ernst, may result from subduction-based fertilization as proposed by Spandler and his colleagues.

The Future of FMLs

“This is just an example of what we could do [with GPlates],” said Spandler. “In the next decade, we’ll see these models getting much more sophisticated and applied to all sorts of things.”

Computing power has improved to allow these models to run in a reasonable time frame. Plus, there’s lots of data. “We have a much better understanding about the history of each little bit of the continental crust around the planet,” he said.

And although people rightly point out that details become fuzzy in plate models that reach into the Proterozoic and beyond, “you’ve just got to pick one model and use it,” said Goodenough. “They’ve…taken the most widely available, repeatable model out there and used that.”

And on the basis of that model, Spandler and colleagues have shown a correlation between subduction—via FMLs—and carbonatites and rare earth element deposits. If someone comes up with another explanation, Spandler said, “that’s fine as well.”

—Alka Tripathy-Lang (@dralkatrip.bsky.social ), Science Writer

Citation: Tripathy-Lang, A. (2026), Ancient subduction may have seeded today’s critical mineral deposits, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260173. Published on 29 May 2026. Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

A hole in the Montreal Protocol could delay the recovery of Earth’s ozone layer by about 7 years. New research found that the use of ozone-depleting substances used as feedstocks—chemicals used in the making of other chemicals—has not waned over time. In fact, their use has increased since the treaty’s adoption in 1987.

“The Montreal Protocol is such a success story that these ozone-harming sources are becoming relevant. A few decades ago, they were drowned out.”

“The Montreal Protocol is such a success story that these ozone-harming sources are becoming relevant. A few decades ago, they were drowned out,” said Luke Western, who researches greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting substances at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Western is a coauthor of a new study on the findings published in Nature Communications.

Almost 40 years ago, the Montreal Protocol banned the production and consumption of almost 100 long-lived gases that harm Earth’s ozone layer, such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), then largely used as coolants in refrigerators and air conditioners. These uses were the primary problem that needed to be solved and were the Montreal Protocol’s main target, Western explained.

However, ozone-depleting substances used in the production of other chemicals—including CFCs themselves—had so little impact at the time that they were not included in the ban. Only about 0.5% of feedstock chemicals, such as carbon tetrachloride (used in the making of some CFCs and a by-product of the manufacture of plastics like polyvinyl chloride, or PVC), were emitted into the atmosphere. With the production and use of the most prevalent ozone-harming gases banned, scientists thought the use of feedstocks such as carbon tetrachloride would die out over time.

However, not only did the die-out not happen, but the use of ozone-depleting substances as feedstock actually increased by 163% between 2000 and 2024. Western and his team found that associated emissions increased as well: Now, about 3.6% of these ozone-depleting feedstock chemicals are leaking into the atmosphere. The increase comes partly from their use in producing the non-ozone-depleting gases that replaced HCFCs and CFCs after the Montreal Protocol went into force.

“It’s almost the same as charging your electric car with fossil fuel–based energy.”

“This is quite ironic,” Western said. “It’s almost the same as charging your electric car with fossil fuel–based energy.”

If maintained at current levels, these emissions could delay full recovery of Earth’s ozone layer by anywhere from 6 to 11 years. Currently, recovery to 1980 levels is expected by 2040 for most of the world, by 2045 over the Arctic, and by 2066 over Antarctica, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

Filling a Gap

To estimate feedstock emissions, the researchers used datasets from the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE) and NOAA containing information on about 50 chemicals from 1978 to 2023. The team used these data to model feedstock production and consumption between 2025 and 2034 and then between 2035 and 2100 for business-as-usual and low-emission scenarios.

According to the World Meteorological Organization, the ozone hole over Antarctica is expected to close by 2066. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Jeff Schmaltz/MODIS Land Rapid Response Team

When measured from now until the end of this century, feedstock emissions in the models tended to stabilize, but the real problem could be in the short and medium terms, the study suggested. Under a business-as-usual scenario, the production of some chemicals, such as methyl chloroform (used in solvents and found in household cleaners), is projected to decrease by 6% per year until 2050. But others, such as halon 1301 (used in the making of insecticides and pharmaceuticals), are set to increase (in halon 1301’s case, by 4% a year until 2050). With the estimates at hand, the team modeled feedstock emissions and their potential effect on the ozone layer.

“This is a very important study because it addresses several questions that remained open not just in the Montreal Protocol, but in research on the ozone layer recovery in general,” said Marco Aurélio Franco, an atmospheric sciences researcher at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Franco, who did not take part in the study, said research like this is fundamental to improving estimates for atmospheric chemistry and physics models. After all, some feedstock chemicals, including carbon tetrachloride—whose production is set to increase by 4% a year through 2034—are also greenhouse gases.

Carbon tetrachloride, Franco pointed out, acts differently depending on where it is in the atmosphere. In the troposphere, Earth’s lowest atmospheric layer, the substance traps heat by reflecting infrared radiation back to Earth. At this level, carbon tetrachloride is still stable. But any amount of the substance that reaches the atmosphere’s next layer, the stratosphere, wreaks havoc on the ozone layer. “Ultraviolet radiation is able to break carbon tetrachloride, liberating chlorine,” Franco said. “Chlorine then breaks ozone molecules in a chain reaction. It’s the same mechanism as CFCs.”

The world, said Franco, needs to walk the last mile in refraining from producing and using ozone-depleting substances as feedstock, as we still need to understand their long-term effects. “These [feedstock emission] estimates could be appended to the Montreal Protocol, which proved to be a great success. We need to incorporate them into emission reports and atmospheric models. These emissions should not be neglected,” he said.

—Meghie Rodrigues (@meghier.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Rodrigues, M. (2026), Repairing the ozone layer may take longer than expected, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260175. Published on 29 May 2026. Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

On 19 July 2025, record-breaking rainfall triggered a landslide that destroyed 26 buildings. Plans are now being developed to permanently relocate the community.

On 19 July 2025, parts of South Korea suffered record-breaking rainfall. Flooding and landslides were the inevitable outcome. One location that was particularly severely impacted was a small rural village called Sangneung, which is located in Saengbi-riang-myeon, Sangcheong. It is incredibly difficult to track down village locations in South Korea, but after a lot of work I think it is at [35.38269, 128.05740].

This landslide has attracted considerable attemtion because of the damage it has inflicted. There is a good news report that includes a drone video of the site on Youtube:-

The drone footage starts at 00:33.

This image, released by the local government, also shows the site:-

The aftermath of the 19 July 2025 landslide at Sangneung village. Image released by Sancheong County.

There is a good reflective piece on the plight of the inhabitants of Sancheong, outlining why the village is now longer viable. A decision has now been taken to permanently relocate the village, and detailed plans are being developed.

This is an unusual intervention, but it is hard to argue that it is not the correct one.

Return to The Landslide Blog homepage Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets

Orbital imaging has hinted that Mars may have carbon-containing rocks called carbonates on its surface. Carbonates on Mars could offer new insights into how water interacted with rock on the Red Planet, helping scientists learn more about its past. In addition, because carbonates on Earth are primarily produced by living organisms, these rocks are high-value targets in the search for signatures of past life on Mars.

NASA’s Perseverance rover has been traversing Mars since 2021, covering more than 41 kilometers, much of it within Jezero Crater in the Nili Fossae region. Previous orbital data indicated the crater contains carbonates, as well as abundant olivine, which can change to carbonate in the presence of water and carbon dioxide. Now Clavé et al. have analyzed spectroscopic data from Perseverance’s SuperCam instrument suite from multiple locations within Jezero Crater, providing clear evidence of carbonates on Mars, as well as detailed information on how the mineralogy varies between locations.

The authors confirmed the presence of both carbonates and olivine-bearing rocks throughout Jezero Crater and found a generally inverse relationship between the two minerals. By contrast, carbonates were generally positively correlated with the presence of hydrated silica. The researchers hypothesize that an ancient lake in the crater, along with potential hydrothermal activity, played a role in transforming olivine to carbonate. The varying amounts of carbonate and different alteration states seen today may have been caused by changing lake levels on Mars billions of years ago, the researchers suggest.

Amounts of carbonate by weight vary between locations, from 1%–3% in the Séítah unit to 6%–16% in the Eastern Margin Unit. Extrapolating to the entire regional olivine-rich unit, the researchers calculated it could contain as much as 1.1 × 1014 kilograms of carbon, or up to 0.4% of the current total mass of the Martian atmosphere. Overall, Mars’s crust could contain significant amounts of carbon, implying that widespread carbon sequestration may have cooled the planet significantly in the past. (Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025JE009107, 2026)

—Nathaniel Scharping (@nathanielscharp), Science Writer

Citation: Scharping, N. (2026), Carbon-rich rocks may have cooled the ancient Martian atmosphere, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260170. Published on 28 May 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

On 31 March 2026, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the closure of 57 of its 77 U.S. Forest Service research facilities. The scientific community’s response was warranted: Save the science, restore the funding, protect the researchers.

All of that is correct. But it misses a structural problem inherent in agency governance, one that will recur at every reorganization until the Earth science community builds an instrument to prevent it.

In massive reorganizations like the ones federal agencies are currently experiencing, the threat to long-term research facilities is not primarily a lack of funding. The true threat is an oversight of administrative architecture. There appears to be no general federal requirement to have a successor stewardship plan in place before reducing the output or outreach of a long-term research facility—or closing it entirely.

The Physical Archive Is Not a Digital File

Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire was among the sites under review during the Forest Service restructuring but has since received a public reprieve. The future of Bartlett Experimental Forest, also in New Hampshire, remains unresolved. The governance problem, however, extends beyond either site.

Hubbard Brook’s physical archive holds more than 60,000 barcoded and cataloged samples: water, soils, plant material, and physical cores spanning 7 decades of continuous collection and stored under active environmental controls in a dedicated building on site.

These samples cannot be digitized. They cannot be migrated to a remote server, backed up to cloud storage, or emailed to a university partner. The samples require a functioning building, active temperature management, and a named human steward responsible for their integrity.

• The physical archive at Hubbard Brook holds more than 60,000 barcoded and cataloged samples stretching back to the founding of the facility in 1955. Credit: Anthony Veltri
• The archive includes core samples of trees dating to long before the experimental forest was established, and the archive maintains each as a managed scientific record with continuity of custody. Credit: Anthony Veltri
• Core samples like these document the watershed at Hubbard Brook and anchor long-term understanding of system processes. Credit: Anthony Veltri

The archive at Hubbard Brook is impressive, but a governed record is defined by continuity, provenance, and stewardship, not by the number of observations it contains: Data volume is not data value. A 70-year unbroken record of watershed chemistry, maintained by named stewards who documented what they were measuring and why, is a governed product. Without that stewardship and physical anchor, volume can become noise.

The failure to maintain archives like this is likely not malicious; it is an example of administrative indifference or perhaps a lack of awareness or understanding. Environmental controls, for example, get zeroed out of a budget line item, and nobody notices until the temperature in the facility drifts. By then, the sample record has degraded in ways that cannot be reversed.

This Is Not a Hubbard Brook Problem

Many physical archives, calibration sites, and long-duration sampling programs operate without a formal requirement for stewardship continuity.

Hubbard Brook is the most visible instance of a pattern—the lack of a successor stewardship plan—that runs across the entire 84-site federal Experimental Forests, Ranges, and Watersheds network. The March order that identified Bartlett Experimental Forest and 56 other research facilities across 31 states for closure was executed without a mandatory requirement to identify successor stewards for what gets left behind.

Nor is the pattern unique to experimental forests. The Long Term Ecological Research network spans 28 core sites. AmeriFlux includes more than 500 monitoring locations across North America.

Throughout all these systems, many physical archives, calibration sites, and long-duration sampling programs operate without a formal requirement for stewardship continuity under agency reorganization.

What We Stand to Lose

Long-term physical archives provide scientists and other stakeholders the ability to ask future questions of past reality. Nobody collecting water samples at Hubbard Brook in 1963 was thinking about PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), for instance, but the baseline its site samples provide is why we can track the chemicals today. The same continuous record was central to the regulatory science behind the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990.

Archival value compounds silently and becomes visible only when someone needs it.

Archival value compounds silently for decades and becomes visible only when someone needs it.

When these archives fail, the loss is not historical. It is operational. Regulatory agencies rely on long-baseline records to determine whether interventions are working. Without a continuous physical reference, observed changes cannot be distinguished from measurement drift, instrumentation bias, or natural variability. The results are policy decisions made without a defensible scientific baseline.

Federal investment in continuous collection at a site like Hubbard Brook runs to tens of millions of dollars over decades. That investment is not recoverable once continuity is broken.

Unlike a paused research grant, a degraded physical archive cannot be restarted. You can photograph a sample, but you cannot rerun its chemistry 40 years from now if the physical sample has degraded.

In 2017, a double mechanical failure at the University of Alberta destroyed 12.8% of the Canadian Ice Core Archive over a single weekend, permanently erasing records dating back 12,000 years. That incident was accidental. A mechanical malfunction is a failure of equipment. Administrative disposal without a named successor steward is a failure of governance. One arrives without warning. The other can be prevented.

The Community Already Knows How to Do This

The Earth observation community has already built the governance model we need. We are not yet applying it to long-term ecological research infrastructure.

GRUAN, the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) Reference Upper-Air Network, operates under the World Meteorological Organization and GCOS, with explicit named stewardship obligations. Upper-air observations—measurements of temperature, humidity, and wind through the atmosphere—are foundational inputs to weather forecasting and climate monitoring. Each GRUAN station has a designated principal investigator with a documented succession obligation.

ICOS, the Integrated Carbon Observation System operating across Europe, applies the same logic to terrestrial ecosystem observations through formal site-level stewardship agreements and named succession requirements.

In the United States, the National Ecological Observatory Network is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by Battelle, a science and technology nonprofit, under a contract that includes explicit data continuity obligations.

These systems did not emerge by accident. They were explicitly designed to solve a known failure mode: Distributed observational networks cannot maintain their own calibration integrity without a separately governed reference layer. That design decision is documented, enforced, and funded. The absence of an equivalent requirement in long-term ecological research infrastructure is not a technical limitation. It is a governance omission.

The pattern is consistent across every network that has solved this problem: Named continuity obligations must be written into the governance structure before the need becomes acute.

The Governance Instrument

The best outcome is the continued, uninterrupted operation of facilities like Hubbard Brook.

Any federal agency action that would reduce operational support for a long-term research facility should require a formal continuity plan before the action takes effect.

If reductions move forward, however, the proposed fix is specific and not novel: Any federal agency action that would reduce or eliminate operational support for a long-term research facility should require a formal continuity plan before the action takes effect. That plan must name a successor steward for each active long-term dataset and for each physical archive under active environmental control.

In practice this means specificity: the name and institutional affiliation of the successor, a funded maintenance budget sufficient to sustain environmental controls and sample integrity, documented protocols for custody transfer, and a timeline for uninterrupted handoff. The plan must demonstrate that the successor steward has the operational capacity and funded mandate to preserve the archive’s physical integrity and continuity.

This instrument prepares plant samples collected at Hubbard Brook using standardized methods. Consistent preparation is what makes results comparable across time and labs and why continued stewardship is so important. Credit: Anthony Veltri

The default should be continued stewardship by the responsible federal entity. If a change in custody is legally permitted and genuinely unavoidable, any successor steward, whether another federal unit, a university partner, a consortium, or another entity, must have a funded mandate, demonstrated technical capacity, enforceable continuity obligations, and the ability to maintain the archive without interruption.

Protocol demands that if the agency cannot name a viable successor steward, the agency cannot execute the closure. This requirement does not prohibit closure; it prohibits closure without continuity of custody.

The instrument requiring a research facility to have a formal continuity plan should be applied not on a site-by-site basis, but uniformly across networks. A limitation narrowly written to protect a named facility invites the agency to execute the same administrative disposal at adjacent sites while technically complying with the specific requirement. The governance is structurally sound only if it applies across the network.

How This Actually Happens

The pathways that would make such an instrument possible already exist.

Agencies can impose continuity requirements through policy directives, appropriations language, or funding conditions. The federal Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of Management and Budget have coordinated interagency data management guidance before, and a directive requiring named successor stewardship before any facility reduction does not require legislation. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) has already secured fiscal year 2026 language directing the Forest Service to prioritize staffing at long-standing experimental forests; attaching successor stewardship language is the logical next step. NSF, the Department of Energy, and NOAA could require stewardship continuity guarantees from partner agencies as a condition of incorporating facility data into federally funded continental-scale products.

Scientists recognize that agencies reorganize and funding for facilities can be downgraded. That is why preserving a continued record of any long-term research facility must be part of the facility’s governance structure from the outset. Credit: Anthony Veltri

What is missing is the requirement itself—and the strategic initiative to establish it. The Earth science community has the standing, the documented models, and the mechanisms to close those gaps.

This is not an argument against reorganization. Agencies reorganize. Budgets shift. Research priorities evolve.

The argument is that reorganization cannot be permitted to destroy multigenerational scientific infrastructure through administrative indifference when a specific, enforceable governance requirement can prevent it. The Earth observation community built GRUAN because it recognized that no federation of climate datasets can be a substitute for a governed anchor point. Long-term ecological research infrastructure needs the same recognition applied to the administrative layer that governs its continuity.

The scientific enterprise already knows how to do this. The governance has not caught up yet.

Author Information

Anthony Veltri (anthony@anthonyveltri.com) is an independent practitioner and former physical scientist and senior policy analyst with the USDA Forest Service Washington Office, where he worked on enterprise architecture and governance in federal programs, including those supporting scientific research.

Citation: Veltri, A. (2026), The governance gap threatening long-term ecological archives, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260172. Published on 27 May 2026. This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author(s). Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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

Explosive volcanic eruptions inject gases and ash into the atmosphere, posing major hazards for human health, infrastructure, and aviation. A new article in Reviews of Geophysics examines recent advances in estimating Eruption Source Parameters (ESPs), the key conditions at the volcanic vent that are a necessity for modeling the behavior of volcanic plumes. Here, we asked the authors to explain what ESPs are, what technologies are used to observe eruptions, and which scientific challenges and future research directions remain for improving volcanic plume monitoring and modeling.

In simple terms, what are Eruption Source Parameters?

Eruption Source Parameters (ESPs) describe the key conditions at the volcanic vent during an eruption.

Eruption Source Parameters (ESPs) describe the key conditions at the volcanic vent during an eruption, such as the mass eruption rate, exit velocity, temperature, and particle size distribution. These parameters define how material is injected into the atmosphere and are essential inputs for models that simulate plume rise and subsequent dispersal of volcanic gases and ash in the atmosphere. In simple terms, ESPs represent the boundary conditions that control the behavior of volcanic plumes. Because they cannot usually be measured during an eruption, they must be estimated from indirect observations and models, which introduces significant uncertainty.

Why is it important to understand how volcanic ash and gases disperse after an eruption?

Volcanic ash and gases can travel long distances and affect aviation safety, human health, infrastructure, and even climate. Fine ash particles are particularly hazardous for aircrafts, while ash fallout can disrupt communities and critical services on the ground. Gas emissions may also impact air quality and alter the atmospheric radiative budget. Understanding volcanic dispersion is therefore essential for forecasting the movement of volcanic clouds and issuing timely warnings. Reliable forecasts support risk mitigation strategies and enable more effective responses by civil protection agencies and aviation authorities.

What technologies are used to observe volcanic plumes?

Volcanic plumes are observed using a combination of satellite, ground-based, and, more rarely, airborne measurements. Satellite observations are crucial for tracking ash and gas clouds over large spatial scales and in near real time. Ground-based instruments, such as radar, cameras, and infrasound sensors, provide detailed information on plume dynamics close to the source. Increasingly, these observations are integrated with numerical models to infer eruption conditions. The combination of multiple data streams is essential for constraining ESPs and improving the reliability of plume simulations.

What are some of the recent advances in estimating Eruption Source Parameters?

Recent advances have focused on combining observations with numerical models to better constrain ESPs. Multi-sensor approaches, data inversion techniques, and improved plume models have significantly enhanced our ability to estimate eruption rates and plume dynamics. At the same time, high-resolution computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations provide deeper insights into the complex fluid dynamic processes governing plume behavior. However, these models are computationally expensive and unsuitable for real-time applications, highlighting the need for approaches that bridge the gap between physical realism and operational efficiency.

What strategies do you propose in your review to improve Eruption Source Parameters estimation?

A central contribution of this review is the proposal of a new class of operational models for volcanic plumes.

A central contribution of this review is the proposal of a new class of operational models for volcanic plumes. These models integrate the physical realism of high-fidelity CFD simulations with the efficiency of simplified models used in forecasting. In particular, the review highlights the potential of artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to “learn” from CFD results and optimally calibrate the key variables controlling plume dynamics. This hybrid approach allows complex physical processes to be represented in a computationally efficient framework, making it suitable for real-time applications while retaining improved accuracy.

How does improved volcanic plume monitoring lead to more effective volcanic hazard assessment?

Improved monitoring leads to more accurate estimates of ESPs, which directly translate into better forecasts of plume rise and ash dispersion. This reduces uncertainty in hazard assessments and supports more reliable decision-making. For example, more accurate forecasts can help aviation authorities minimize disruptions while maintaining safety and enable civil protection agencies to issue targeted warnings. Ultimately, better integration of observations and models enhances the capacity to respond effectively during eruptions and to mitigate their societal and economic impacts.

What are the remaining questions or knowledge gaps where additional research is needed?

Further research is needed to improve the coupling between observations, physics-based models, and data-driven approaches.

Despite progress, significant challenges remain. ESPs are still difficult to constrain in real time, and uncertainties in both observations and models propagate into forecasts. The integration of diverse data sources is not yet fully optimized, and different estimation methods can yield inconsistent results. Further research is needed to improve the coupling between observations, physics-based models, and data-driven approaches. In particular, developing robust hybrid frameworks that combine CFD, simplified models, and machine learning represents a key direction for advancing both scientific understanding and operational forecasting.

—Antonio Costa (antonio.costa@ingv.it, 0000-0002-4987-6471), Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Italy

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

Citation: Costa, A. (2026), From volcanic vents to safer skies, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO265022. Published on 27 May 2026. This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author(s). Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

A new study (Sun et al. 2026) shows that in six earthquakes in China between 2010 and 2022, landslides and rockfalls were responsible for at least half of the total fatalities.

It is well-established that landslides are a major cause of loss of life in earthquakes in mountainous areas. The seismology maxim that “it is not earthquakes that kill people, it’s collapsing buildings” does not apply in its pure form in mountains – landslides also kill large numbers of people.

An earthquake triggered landslide from the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake.

However, the actual number of people killed by landslides in earthquakes is poorly understood. This is largely due to the challenges of collecting reliable information in the aftermath of a major earthquake, when the focus is on rescue and recovery rather than data collection. For this reason, many studies of landslide fatalities do not include seismically-triggered events. This is true of my own work.

However, a study has just been published (Sun et al. 2026) in the journal Natural Hazards Review that starts to address this issue. The paper nominally examines fatalities from all causes from earthquakes in China from 2001 to 2022. However, the authors note that the data has low reliability until 2010, so I’ll focus on the period from 2010 to 2022. I also note that the authors use the term “geological hazards“, which is a little broader than landslides. I should note that the paper isa broad look at fatalities from earthquakes – there is a much richer range of analyses than I will cover here.

In the period from 2010 to 2022, Sun et al. (2026) identified 14 earthquakes in which geological hazards caused loss of life. In some cases, the impacts were substantial. Thus, the M=6.5 3 August 2014 earthquake at Ludian in Yunnan led to 134 fatalities and 40 people missing from geological hazards from a total of 728 fatalities (c.24 % of the total), whilst the 5 September 2022 M=6.8 earthquake at Luding in Sichuan led to 76 geological hazard fatalities and 25 missing from a total of 118 fatalities (c.86% of the total). In six of the 14 examples, geological hazards caused at least 50% of the fatalities.

Sun et al. (2026) highlight that “fatalities from geological hazards concentrate in geologically complex, mountainous provinces, i.e., Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu, Guangxi, and Guizhou”. They note that even small events can trigger fatal landslides – for example, six people were killed in a rockfall triggered by a M=4.3 earthquake in Guizhou in 2010, whilst a M=2.8 aftershock from the Yanjin earthquake in 2006 triggered a rockfall that killed a person.

This is an incredibly useful study. It starts to shed light on the impact of landslides in large earthquakes. It is not the definitive study, and questions remain – not least, the pattern of landslide losses in very large earthquakes, like the 2010 Wenchuan event, in which landslides were ferocious. But it forms the basis for such investigations, starting to fill a major gaps in our understanding.

Reference

Sun, B. et al. 2026. Causes Analysis of Earthquake-Related Deaths in Mainland China 2001–2022. Natural Hazards Review, 27 [2]. https://doi-org.ntu.idm.oclc.org/10.1061/NHREFO.NHENG-2458

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Magma on the move can cause the ground around a volcano to heave in measurable ways. But surface deformation doesn’t always point to an impending eruption—new results show that the terrain around a volcano can also shift during episodes of heavy rainfall. Researchers studying Japan’s Mount Fuji spotted instances of centimeter-level ground deformation tied to intense precipitation. Fortunately, such events can be readily differentiated from deformation caused by magmatic activity, the team reported in Geology.

Keeping an Eye on Volcanoes

Volcanoes around the world, from Kīlauea in the United States to Calbuco in Chile, are outfitted with arrays of sensors. Mount Fuji is no exception—the region around the edifice is equipped with dozens of instruments to detect ground movement, infrasound, and other signs of potential volcanic unrest. All that monitoring is warranted: Shin-Fuji (“Younger Fuji”)—the youngest of Mount Fuji’s three overlapping volcanoes—is currently active.

Shuo Zheng, a hydrological geodesist at Hong Kong Polytechnic University in China, and his colleagues recently mined some of those Mount Fuji data. The team focused on Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) observations—otherwise known as GPS data—collected daily from 2017 to 2023.

Rain and Rise

Zheng and his collaborators found several instances in which the two GNSS stations located within 10 kilometers of the summit of Mount Fuji recorded clear signs of uplift. Those signals, reflecting changes of roughly 1–2 centimeters, far exceeded the sensors’ millimeter-level precision. And when the team correlated the timing of that uplift with rain gauge records, they found that the ground often tended to rise almost immediately during periods of heavy precipitation (defined as several tens of millimeters of rain falling per day).

“They can store and transmit groundwater, acting like aquifers.”

There’s likely a physical link behind that correlation, the researchers surmised. The explanation involves the so-called clinkers that cap each of Mount Fuji’s subterranean layers of lava. Clinkers are layers of small rocks that form when the surface of a lava flow rapidly cools, and these structures persist in the shallow subsurface of Mount Fuji. “They can store and transmit groundwater, acting like aquifers,” Zheng said.

Clinkers, or layers of small rocks that form from cooling lava, can store and transmit water. They may be responsible for the way Mount Fuji’s surface uplifts in response to heavy rainfall. Credit: U.S. Geological Survey

When water fills up the pore space within a clinker, there’s no place for the overlying ground to go but up. It therefore makes sense that GNSS stations located atop old lava layers would exhibit uplift in response to intense rainfall, the team concluded.

When Zheng and his collaborators analyzed data from the nine GNSS stations located between 25 and 40 kilometers from the summit, however, they found that the ground actually tended to subside during periods of heavy precipitation. “There are two different responses,” said Kosuke Heki, a geophysicist and geodesist at Hokkaido University in Japan and a member of the research team. That subsidence is a known effect, and it’s been observed in a variety of locales. The subsidence doesn’t dominate closer to the summit of Mount Fuji because of the presence of the clinker layers there, the team reasoned.

Long-Lasting Magma

“Uplift by rain easily terminates when it stops raining.”

The uplift that the team recorded close to the summit of Mount Fuji tended to last just a day or two; it disappeared when the rainfall ceased. That timing is key for differentiating precipitation-induced uplift from magma-induced uplift. “Uplift by rain easily terminates when it stops raining,” said Heki. “But magma has a much longer timescale. It continues for weeks or months.”

That difference is critical, said Luca Caricchi, a volcanologist at the Université de Genève who was not involved in the research. There’s long been the mindset that ground deformation means that an eruption is imminent, but these new findings show that a heaving volcano doesn’t always mean that magma is on the move, said Caricchi. If the deformation is short-lived, the explanation might just be precipitation, he said. “You don’t need to worry.”

Zheng and his colleagues have looked for a similar effect for other volcanoes in Japan. They didn’t find any conclusive trends when they analyzed a chain of island volcanoes south of Tokyo, however. Perhaps that’s because the clinker layers beneath those edifices are so close to the sea that water efficiently drains out of them, the team hypothesized.

—Katherine Kornei (@KatherineKornei), Science Writer

Citation: Kornei, K. (2026), Heavy rainfall inflates Mount Fuji, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260169. Published on 26 May 2026. Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Source: AGU Advances

As meltwater drains through and beneath a glacier, it can alter how the ice flows and whether it breaks apart. Meltwater can also cause feedbacks that lead to more ice loss. Understanding when and how glacial meltwater drains is therefore critical to predicting how fast glaciers will lose ice and how that loss will affect sea level.

Chudley et al. modeled how the rate of water flowing into a glacier relates to seasonal changes in the forces that squeeze and stretch ice—forces caused by gravity pulling the glacier downhill, by the ice sliding over subglacial water, and by how portions of the ice interact with the ocean.

The researchers focused on the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier (also known as Store Gletsjer or Store Glacier) in Greenland. In spring, meltwater can fill cracks, or crevasses, that run through the surface of this glacier. These crevasses sometimes go on to drain as the year progresses.

The researchers used satellite imagery from the Sentinel-2 mission to see how much water was present in crevasses between 2016 and 2022, focusing especially on 2019, when the Sentinel-2 satellites provided the best coverage of the glacier. They fed those data into a convolutional neural network to map water cover through the season and looked for a relationship between the mechanical forces acting on the ice and the formation and drainage of crevasse ponds.

The researchers found that the mechanical forces acting on ice are the dominant factor in determining when crevasse meltwater drains into a glacier. When seasonal changes cause ice to stretch, crevasses can drain suddenly, releasing the water they held.

The Greenland Ice Sheet sheds trillions of gallons of water each year, and knowing when to expect that water to drain through the ice sheet is key to understanding processes such as how the glacier slides across the bed and when meltwater emerges in the ocean. The study’s results likely also shed light on dynamic processes in other glaciers and ice sheets, the authors say, and should help inform representations of ice behavior in numerical models. (AGU Advances, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV002150, 2026)

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

Citation: Sidik, S. M. (2026), Stretching and squeezing release glacial meltwater, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260152. Published on 26 May 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors. Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth

Highly porous rocks, such as sandstones, often deform in a surprising way: instead of breaking apart or sliding, they develop thin zones called deformation bands. In these bands, the grains are squeezed closer together, making the rock denser, and reducing how easily fluids such as water or oil can move through it. This behavior is important because it affects both the strength of rocks and their ability to store and transport fluids underground. However, these bands are difficult to model because they form suddenly from an initially uniform material and concentrate deformation into very narrow zones.

Wang et al. [2026] developed a computer modeling approach called a “phase‑field model” to study this process. Instead of drawing the bands in the initially homogeneous rock, the model allows them to appear naturally as the system evolves and minimizes its energy. The study shows how grain crushing and rearrangement allows the formation of localized deformation zones. The results also demonstrate that natural spatial variations in the rock, such as differences in grain size or porosity, strongly influence where bands initiate and how they grow. Additionally, the model captures how deformation changes from sliding (shear bands) to pure compaction as pressure increases. Overall, this work provides a realistic way to understand how localized deformation develops in rocks, with important implications for geology, engineering, and energy applications.

Citation: Wang, Y., Zhang, C., Braun, P., Kang, X., & Wu, W. (2026). How does heterogeneity control strain localization patterns in high-porosity rocks? Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 131, e2025JB032494. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025JB032494

—François Renard, Associate Editor, JGR: Solid Earth

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

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

After 18 years of data collection, quality control, processing, and archiving, the United States Magnetotelluric Array (USMTArray) data set was completed in 2024. A new article in Reviews of Geophysics introduces this unprecedented data set and a new high-resolution model of the Earth’s crust and upper mantle that was made possible because of it. Here, we asked the authors to give an overview of magnetotellurics, how the USMTArray was developed, and future directions for research.

In simple terms for a non-specialist, what is the science of magnetotellurics?

Magnetotellurics (MT) is a passive geophysical technique capable of imaging the subsurface from hundreds of meters to hundreds of kilometers depth using the Sun and global lightning as sources. The science behind MT is largely based on Faraday’s law of induction, where external magnetic field variations induce telluric (from the Latin word ‘tellus’ meaning Earth) currents in the conducting Earth. These magnetic field variations are constantly occurring and happen over a wide range of time scales ranging from milliseconds to hours. And they are tiny – typically on the order of 0.1% of Earth’s magnetic field amplitude and even during intense magnetic storms rarely exceed 1%. 

By measuring these magnetic variations, and the induced electric field variations at Earth’s surface, we can constrain the 3D distribution of conductivity in the Earth. MT is an elegant method – we exploit powerful and distant energy sources which we have no control over and can mathematically remove the stochastic source spectrum to recover reliable estimates of Earth impedance. Impedance can be thought of as the Earth filter – a complex, frequency dependent set of functions that encapsulates all the information about the 3D conductivity structure beneath our feet. Through numerical inversion of impedance data at an array of sites, we build up 3D models of electrical conductivity.

What are some of the applications of the magnetotelluric method?

MT is applied across a broad spectrum of the Earth and space sciences ranging from mineral and geothermal resource investigations, to fundamental geologic and tectonic studies, to imaging the magmatic plumbing systems of active volcanoes, and to hazard mapping centered upon geomagnetically induced currents and the risk they pose to power grids.

Studies using MT are performed on every continent and in all tectonic settings, on land and on the ocean floor, on the Antarctic ice sheet, and even on the Moon. Because of its ability to image the entire lithospheric column, MT studies have made important contributions to our understanding of continental assembly by revealing ancient orogens and rifts. Moreover, MT is uniquely able to constrain the stability of cratonic roots by mapping hydration of the mantle lithosphere. MT studies are key to understanding active tectonic processes, including constraining the water budget in subduction zones, imaging melt zones beneath orogenic plateaus, and mapping the extent of crustal extension – for example beneath the western U.S.

Installation of a USMTArray site in the arid southwestern United States. Sites are installed in remote areas far from infrastructure (powerlines and pipelines) which can interfere with magnetotelluric measurements. Credit: Lena Tokmakoff

With the rise of computational power and 3D modeling and inversion codes, MT is now routinely used to study complex 3D systems, such as active volcanoes, geothermal systems, and mineral deposits. The sensitivity of MT to minor conductive phases – be it partial melt, clay, or conductive minerals such as graphite and metallic sulfides – make it ideal for studying these types of systems. As a result, MT is commonly employed within the resource sector at both the district and deposit scale. Many of the world’s iconic volcanoes have also been imaged with MT, where they constrain the geometry of crustal melt reservoirs – especially their volume and melt fraction which is in turn linked to the eruptibility of a subsurface magma. These analyses are especially powerful because they are sensitive to a distinct physical parameter – resistivity – of Earth materials. MT therefore provides unique and complementary information about the subsurface across a wide range of scales and is a particularly invaluable tool when other methods yield non-unique interpretations. 

One somewhat unexpected application of MT has been to space weather hazards. It was recognized a little over a decade ago that MT impedances are key to estimating surface electric fields generated during intense geomagnetic storms that can impact electric power grids. Past storms have knocked out power to vast areas and damaged critical infrastructure such as transformers. The importance of MT data to scenario analysis, in which power grid components are ‘stress tested’ against past geomagnetic storms, cannot be overstated. Regional to national-scale geoelectric hazard maps, both in the U.S. and internationally, are also informed by MT data, as are real-time geoelectric hazard estimates.

What is the United States Magnetotelluric Array (USMTArray)?

The USMTArray was an ambitious program begun in 2006 under the NSF-funded EarthScope program and completed in June of 2024 under USGS funding. The USMTArray collected long-period MT soundings on a 70-km grid across the contiguous U.S. – totaling more than 1,800 stations – each collected with uniform instrumentation, acquisition parameters, data processing, archiving, and metadata. Funded throughout its 18-year lifetime by three different federal agencies (the NSF, NASA, and USGS working closely with the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology and Oregon State University), the data – time series, response functions and metadata – were released incrementally to the public without data embargo or usage restriction.

Map of USMTArray site locations illustrating how the survey rolled across the country over its nearly two-decade lifetime. Credit: Kelbert et al. [2026], Figure 1

In broad terms, how was the USMTArray developed?

The USMTArray had humble beginnings – being mentioned in early planning documents as having value in understanding subduction zones and characterizing volcanic systems. Funded by NSF in 2003, the MT component of EarthScope was modeled after the much larger seismic component, with a transportable array of instruments to march across the U.S. on a 70-km spaced grid and a backbone array of seven instruments to study deep mantle structure. The USMTArray started off small and before dedicated instruments were even available. In 2006, a pilot study collected the first 30 stations in eastern Oregon using borrowed instruments, while subsequent years expanded what became known as the ‘northwest’ footprint, a 331-sites array completed in 2011 encompassing the Yellowstone-Snake River Plain, the Northern Rocky Mountains, the Cascades magmatic arc, and the northern Basin and Range province. Subsequent footprints in the midcontinent and the eastern U.S. continued to expand coverage.

What were some of the challenges in developing the USMTArray?

The biggest challenge by far was money. Within the EarthScope program, the USMTArray was never funded at the level needed to cover the contiguous U.S. The MT component was instead carried out as a series of footprints in areas deemed most scientifically advantageous. This limitation, however, led to one of the big successes of the USMTArray – active community engagement. Siting workshops held in 2008 and 2013 brought together participants from academia, government, and industry to discuss and prioritize where the array would go next, while a community working group provided scientific and operational guidance throughout the life of the array. The success of the USMTArray was recognized early on by the community governance of the EarthScope facility activities, with the ‘full-48’ concept endorsed in 2009, leading to modest increases in funding and an acceleration of station completions. In 2018, by the end of NSF-sponsored activities, roughly 2/3 of the contiguous U.S. had been covered. Seeing the array to completion, however, required additional funding, a challenge met by NASA (2019-2020) and the USGS (2020-2024), in large part due to recognition of the importance of USMTArray data to space-weather hazards and supported through executive orders in 2016 and 2019.

Another notable challenge that we faced while developing the USMTArray operations was the absence of established data sharing practices within the magnetotelluric community. Indeed, the concept of FAIR data was only introduced in 2016. Back in 2006 when this program commenced, the concepts of open data and systematic data sharing were largely unfamiliar, and no widely adopted, sustainable data formats existed. Available data formats were lacking in flexibility, consistency, and self-descriptive metadata. As the project progressed, our team developed such formats and accompanying databases, which have now reached maturity and are helping to drive more sustainable MT data‑sharing practices internationally.

How has the development of the USMTArray advanced the scientific field?

The USMTArray, along with parallel advances in modeling capabilities and increased computational power, ushered in a jump to 3D MT and to interrogating the Earth at regional to national scales. National-scale conductivity models, such as those developed from the USMTArray, now join the ranks of other data sets like magnetic, gravity, and seismic, and are a new lens with which to view the architecture of the North American continent. Numerous contributions to continental architecture and assembly and to understanding active tectonic processes have come from the USMTArray.

Map of the United States underground electrical structure integrated over mid- to lower crustal depths, illustrating the resistive (dark) and conductive (hot) regions. The latter reflects ancient tectonic scars within the crust. Credit: Kelbert et al. [2026], Figure 17

The USMTArray also serves as a framework for more detailed studies, allowing Principal Investigators (PIs) to derisk future surveys and industry to investigate anomalous or unexpected structure. Studies of the Cascadia subduction zone and the adjacent magmatic arc and geothermal energy prospectivity studies in the Oregon Cascades and Great Basin have been built upon the USMTArray while new MT surveys along the eastern seaboard are collecting high-resolution MT data to improve space-weather hazard maps over areas identified as particularly at risk from the analysis of USMTArray data.

Beyond the data and models derived from them, the USMTArray has motivated methodological advances, led to an investment in MT instrumentation and open-source software for researchers within the NSF-supported National Geophysical Facility, and served as a model for other regional and continental scale MT experiments.

What are some of the future directions for research in continental scale magnetotellurics?

With completion of the USMTArray, and the 3D conductivity models derived from it, there are numerous avenues for future research. Most models of continental evolution, for example, were developed prior to the advent of this rich data set. Critically evaluating such models in light of this new data set is paramount, and initial studies are already forcing a reexamination of certain paradigms.  

Multi-disciplinary studies incorporating geochronology, geochemistry, and rapidly evolving seismic models is another promising area as is the coupling of geophysical models to geodynamic models to examine the evolution of newly imaged model structure. Similarly, advancements in integrated and joint inversion are promising directions to leverage the wealth of public data sets available at regional to continental scales.  

Geology doesn’t stop at national borders or the land-sea interface – additional opportunities exist for cross-border arrays and onshore/offshore MT studies. Investigation of subduction zone processes and rifted continental margins by their very nature demand an amphibious approach.

On the applied front, resource assessments increasingly are applied at national and even global scales and demand data support at these same scales. Mineral resource assessments, for example, in the U.S., Canada, and Australia are exploring machine learning approaches to map prospectivity for various deposit types and incorporate a range of geophysical data layers to do so. Similarly, geothermal assessments can benefit from the consistent and synoptic data coverage offered by USMTArray data and models.

Finally, on the space-weather hazards front, partnering with power-system engineers to investigate data scale and uncertainty shows promise in generating accurate hazard maps and in improving upon operational, near real-time geoelectric field models. For all these future research directions the USMTArray remains both a framework and a benchmark upon which to build.

—Paul A. Bedrosian (pbedrosian@usgs.gov; 0000-0002-6786-1038), U.S. Geological Survey, United States; Anna Kelbert (anna.kelbert@cfa.harvard.edu; 0000-0003-4395-398X), Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, United States; Adam Schultz (adam.schultz@oregonstate.edu; 0000-0003-1663-1547), Oregon State University, United States; and Gary D. Egbert (gary.egbert@oregonstate.edu; 0000-0003-1276-8538), Oregon State University, United States

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

Citation: Bedrosian, P. A., A. Kelbert, A. Schultz, and G. D. Egbert (2026), Mapping the hidden electrical anatomy of a continent, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO265021. Published on 26 May 2026. This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author(s). Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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

Today, NASA announced an agencywide realignment that includes combining related mission directorates to sharpen the agency’s focus on human spaceflight.

“This initiative reflects NASA’s extreme focus on executing the mission in direct support of the National Space Policy,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a press release about the realignment.

The National Space Policy refers to Executive Order 14369: Ensuring American Space Superiority, which was released by the Trump administration in December 2025. The order sets national priorities of returning Americans to the Moon, establishing a lunar base, developing a nuclear reactor in space, developing the commercial space economy, and enhancing the United States’ national security space architecture.

NASA’s Artemis II crew captured this image of the Moon eclipsing the Sun during their flyby of the Moon on 6 April 2026. Credit: NASA

NASA’s six existing mission directorates will be slimmed down to four. Exploration Systems Development and Space Operations will be combined into a new Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate and will facilitate human spaceflight in low-Earth and lunar space environments. Aeronautics Research and Space Technology will be folded into a new Research and Technology Mission Directorate, tasked with researching and developing nuclear power and propulsion. The structure of the Science Mission Directorate (SMD) and Mission Support Directorate remain unchanged at the time of publication. All directorate leaders will now report directly to the NASA Administrator (Isaacman) to ensure that each remains focused on their directorate’s new mission.

“There will be no reduction in force, no program cancellations, no closures, but we will achieve cost savings through more efficient execution and taking an active role in delivering the outcomes the world has been waiting for from NASA,” Isaacman said.

More Efficient?

At first glance, it is hard to see how combining four mission directorates into two, refocusing the missions of each, and pushing for increased efficiency and cost reduction will not result in some loss of talent either through positions being eliminated or individuals finding themselves in jobs they do not want to hold.

In a letter to NASA employees, Isaacman went into more detail about the specifics of this realignment and described how it will shift the agency’s internal bureaucratic authority away from directorates and toward NASA’s field centers. Prior to this, centers like Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and Johnson Space Center in Houston would need to compete for funding that had been appropriated to directorates based on the programs or missions they were tasked with.

A NASA source based in Houston told Ars Technica that the competition for funding “has been an absolute disaster.”

 
Related

•  NASA Announces Realignment to Accelerate Mission Delivery
•  Isaacman’s Letter to NASA Employees
•  ENSURING AMERICAN SPACE SUPERIORITY
•  AGU Action Center: Tell the Senate to reject House cuts to science funding 

This new realignment “will adjust the funding distribution, so Centers have the financial support needed to sustain the baseline critical capabilities independent of near-term mission assignment,” Isaacman stated. “This shift will allow Center Directors to focus on maintaining the infrastructure, workforce, and capabilities required for current and future missions.”

Isaacman was unclear about when these changes will take effect, and policy analysts are unsure whether the realignment will be recognized by Congress through its appropriations process. The most recent Fiscal Year 2027 appropriations bill for NASA, which advanced out of the House Committee on Commerce, Justice, and Science on 13 May, allocates funding for six mission directorates, not four. The Senate appropriations committee is expected to release its proposed budget for NASA in the coming weeks, and the two bills must still undergo a lengthy reconciliation process.

In fiscal year 2026, Congress broke with the president’s budgetary priorities for NASA and passed a budget that ignored several of the administration’s proposed financial and mission cuts. Whether Congress will do the same this year and maintain the prior breakdown of directorates will become clear in the coming months.

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

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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For many years a source of irritation, a fossil of the Brazilian spinosaurid Irritator challengeri is now bringing some joy to paleontologists in its homeland.

Following a successful public campaign for restitution, the piece is returning to Brazil from the collection of Germany’s State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart (SMNS), where it has been kept for the past 30 years—a situation that Brazilian paleontologists and lawmakers deemed illegal.

Representatives of both countries made the announcement last month during Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s visit to Germany. In a joint statement, they announced the German museum’s “willingness” to “hand over” the fossil to Brazil and start a new, more transparent era of international collaboration.

“It is a very expected and cherished move because it represents a huge scientific and social victory for the Global South and for Brazil.”

“Finally, the Irritator will be back to its original place,” said paleontologist Allysson Pontes Pinheiro, director of the Plácido Cidade Nuvens Paleontology Museum.

The museum, located in northeastern Brazil where the fossil was discovered in the 1990s, will host the Irritator when it returns to Brazil. “It is a very expected and cherished move because it represents a huge scientific and social victory for the Global South and for Brazil,” Pinheiro said, highlighting that the return will allow local scientists and the population to have access to a heritage that would be difficult and expensive to access abroad.

The Irritator challengeri fossil is one of many that have been illegally obtained from South America by researchers from the Global North. Considered the most complete spinosaurid skull ever described, the 110-million-year-old specimen was taken from the Araripe Basin in northeastern Brazil and described in 1995 by British paleontologist David Martill and his German colleague Eberhard “Dino” Frey. Martill and Frey worked on at least one other fossil smuggled from Brazil to Germany, an Ubirajara jubatus specimen, which was repatriated in 2023 and is currently housed at Plácido Cidade Nuvens.

Martill and Frey named the newly discovered species in reference to their irritation upon learning that the skull had been manipulated by fossil dealers to get a better price. Little did the researchers know that the fossil would irritate many other scientists, especially those from the animal’s homeland.

Revisiting a Fossil with “Problematic Status”

In 2023, triggered by the publication of a paper that acknowledged the fossil’s “problematic status,” paleontologists in South America published an open letter to the Ministry of Science, Research and Arts of Baden-Württemberg State demanding its return. The document received about 300 signatures from scientists and lawyers and was followed by a viral social media campaign involving influencers and a more recent public petition on Change.org that gathered more than 34,000 signatures.

“This campaign showed us that it is worth continuing to fight for our fossils.”

The restitution request is based on Brazilian legislation passed in 1942 that determined that fossils found in the country are the state’s property and cannot be traded or exported without explicit authorization. In addition, a more recent Brazilian ordinance (dating to 1990) mandates that any holotype (a fossil used to describe a new species, such as the contested Irritator specimen) must remain in the country. Regardless, SMNS maintained the fossil had been legally purchased from a private dealer in Germany in 1991.

“We are very happy the Brazilian law is now being respected,” said Aline Ghilardi, a paleontologist at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte who was at the forefront of the repatriation campaign. “This campaign showed us that it is worth continuing to fight for our fossils.”

At the time of publication, SMNS had not responded to requests for comment.

A Long Process of Decolonization

But Ghilardi is not entirely satisfied. She didn’t like the wording of the announcement, which used the expression “hand over” rather than return, repatriate, or restitute.

“The statement was a missed opportunity to demonstrate the German government’s willingness to decide in favor of a restitution process,” she explained. “It seems there is resistance to making these restitutions as actual restitutions. It appears as if it is theirs by right and that they will hand over the fossil to Brazil as part of scientific cooperation.”

Ghilardi expressed that she will believe the repatriation will actually happen only when a specific return date is announced. (As of publication, it has not.) She also hopes that the Irritator case is not an isolated incident, but part of an ongoing trend of restitutions intended to break the pattern of neocolonialism in science.

A 2025 study published by Ghilardi and colleagues in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica showed that of nearly 500 invertebrate species described from fossils found in the Araripe Basin—one of Brazil’s richest and most threatened regions of geodiversity—about half have holotypes stored in institutions across Europe, Asia, and North America, violating Brazilian law.

Most of these smuggled fossils are hosted in Germany. “Some foreign colleagues complained about our campaign, saying that it looked like we were persecuting Germany,” Ghilardi said. “But that is not the case. It is just the numbers.”

It is possible, she noted, that other countries hold even more specimens that were not described in the scientific literature and therefore could not be counted.

The same study also found that more than 200 species were described in publications that did not include any Brazilian scientists as coauthors, despite Brazilian legislation requiring foreign research on Brazilian fossil material to be conducted in partnership with local institutions.

Wave of Repatriation

Paleontologist Serjoscha Evers at the Universität Freiburg, who authored the 2023 study on the Irritator fossil, wrote in an email to Eos that he welcomed the news of the dinosaur’s return.

However, he also wondered whether the decision is just “a diplomatic favor that resulted from the public pressure, or foreshadowing a broader wave of repatriations based on a legal conclusion that the fossils are unlawfully in German custody.”

Paleontologists involved in the Irritator restitution efforts said that since the campaign began, they have been receiving emails from museums and institutions worldwide seeking information on the procedures for returning fossils to Brazil.

Germany recently said it would “hand over” the Irritator challengeri fossil to Brazil. This illustration suggests what the dinosaur would have looked like before it was a fossil, about 110 million years ago. Credit: PaleoGeekSquared/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

The Plácido Cidade Nuvens Paleontology Museum, the final destination of the Irritator, has received several restitutions itself, including 45 fossils originally collected from the Araripe Basin and previously held by the University of Zurich in Switzerland, the fossil of a crustacean that was in the possession of the Universidad Nacional del Nordeste in Argentina, and a fish fossil seized in Italy.

According to Pinheiro, the museum’s director, paleontologists and the Brazilian government have listed at least 90 Brazilian holotypes still held in Germany. And the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed to Eos that it is currently negotiating the return of nine fossils held in undisclosed countries.

“We have been talking with colleagues from the museums where these materials are hosted, and they seem very favorable to returning them,” Pinheiro observed. “It is a huge advancement and a great change of behavior from important museums that have been holding heritage from the Global South.”

—Sofia Moutinho (@sofiamoutinho.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Moutinho, S. (2026), Germany to return contested dinosaur fossil to Brazil, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260167. Published on 22 May 2026. Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.