EOS

One way scientists search for Earth-like planets is the transit method, which involves observing a slight dimming in starlight when a planet passes in front of its star. Transits cause very small decreases in flux: A planet the size of Jupiter might block 1% of the light from a Sun-sized star, and an Earth-sized planet might block only 0.01%.

A study recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests that an intriguing signal from the star HD 137010 comes from the transit of a planet about the size of Earth with a similar orbit. Astronomers detected the faint signal using data from NASA’s K2 mission.

HD 137010 is dimmer than the Sun, and the new planet candidate, HD 137010 b, likely lies near the outer edge of the star’s habitable zone. As a result of these factors, HD 137010 b receives far less energy from its star than the Earth receives from the Sun.

Detecting Single-Transit Events

HD 137010 b is the smallest potential planet to be detected from a single transit around a Sun-like star.

“Detecting single transit events is computationally difficult, so it’s sometimes actually easier for a human to pick out these events from the data—as was the case here,” Alexander Venner, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and lead author of the study, wrote in an email to Eos.

Data came from the K2 mission, which itself relied on the Kepler mission, NASA’s primary mission to find Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars. After the Kepler spacecraft lost some functions, the K2 mission reused Kepler’s telescope to study brighter stars with high precision. Though each of K2’s observation campaigns lasted only about 80 days, too short to catch transiting planets with longer orbital periods, the mission still managed to discover planets from single-transit events.

“I knew there was something to it as soon as I saw it.”

The team noticed a 10-hour transit across the bright star HD 137010 in 2017. The telescope was precise enough to see the star clearly, even though its light dimmed only slightly, by 225 parts per million. Venner said some planetary scientists compare the effect to a moth passing in front of a lighthouse.

Still, Venner said the transit signal was significant enough that “I knew there was something to it as soon as I saw it.”

Even though Venner and the team were confident that the signal was significant, they still had to make sure the signal wasn’t a false alarm caused by background stars or quirks in the data.

To rule this out, the team carefully checked for any stars close to HD 137010. Radial velocity data, Hipparcos and Gaia astrometry, archival images, and high-resolution imaging showed no signs of stars falling within the K2 photometric aperture. Because only one transit was seen, astronomers can’t yet be certain it was caused by a planet, but the candidate was designated HD 137010 b.

Planetary Properties and Habitability

The new analysis suggests the radius of HD 137010 is about the same as Earth’s, and its orbital period is about 365 days. Using the planet’s orbit and the star’s brightness, the team estimated that HD 137010 b receives only about 0.3 times the amount of sunlight as Earth.

HD 137010 b is one of the coldest Earth-sized planets seen crossing a Sun-like star. Its surface may be as cold as −68°C (−90°F), even colder than Mars, which averages about −65°C (−85°F).

“Whether its surface is at all ‘Earth-like’ depends on the properties of its atmosphere, which we just can’t constrain from the current data,” Venner said. “A thick warming atmosphere might allow for a warm wet surface, but a thin atmosphere might result in a completely frozen surface colder than Mars.”

Future Prospects

This “represents a milestone in the search for worlds that might one day be considered truly Earth-like.”

“This is, indeed, an exciting result. It represents a milestone in the search for worlds that might one day be considered truly Earth-like,” Jon Jenkins, who served as the coinvestigator for data analysis on the original K2 mission but was not part of the research, wrote in an email to Eos.

“It will be extremely interesting if future observations give us information on the atmosphere or surface properties of HD 137010 b,” Venner said. “These scenarios could be distinguished if we’re able to observe the spectrum of HD 137010 b.”

—Pranjal Malewar (@PranjalMalewar), Science Writer

Citation: Malewar, P. (2026), This potential exoplanet is Earth sized but may be colder than Mars, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260062. Published on 19 February 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.

To date, 42 landslides have been identified on Mauao (Mount Manganui) in New Zealand following the 22 January 2026 rainfall event.

The extreme rainfall event that affected parts of the North Island of New Zealand triggered two fatal landslides, of which the major failure at the Mount Maunganui Beachside Holiday Park on the flanks of Mauao was the most severe. In total, six people were killed in this failure, an unusually high total for a landslide in New Zealand.

As the clear up continues, work is underway to understand the scale of the problem on Mauao (Mount Managanui), the 232 m high lava dome that sits on the edge of the Bay of Plenty. Tauranga City council has a webpage providing updates on its ongoing work at Mauao, which includes an update published today. This highlights that 42 landslides have been identified on the walking tracks of Mauao, twelve of which are considered to be “severe” for which the impacts “generally involve high complexity, higher cost, longer timeframes, and often require staged or multi-disciplinary interventions.”

The Council has released this image showing some of the impacts:-

Landslides on Mauao following the 22 January 2026 rainfall event. Image from Tauranga City council.

This Planet Labs image, captured with their standard PlanetScope instrument on 15 January 2026, shows Mauao before the landslides:-

Satellite image of Mauao before the 22 January 2026 rainfall event. Image copyright Planet Labs, used with permission, captured on 15 January 2026.

And here is an image from five days after the 22 January 2026 event:-

Satellite image of Mauao after the 22 January 2026 rainfall event. Image copyright Planet Labs, used with permission, captured on 27 January 2026.

And here is a slider to allow the two images to be compared:-

Images by Planet Labs:- https://www.planet.com/

The fatal landslide occurred on the eastern side of Mauao just below the 3 o’clock position – this is clearly visible. But other landslides can be seen on the eastern side at the end of the beach and further to the north, and on the southwestern side too. In some cases, the impact of the landslides on the walking tracks is clear.

Resolving these landslides will be time consuming and expensive, yet another burden on a large country with a comparatively small population. Tom Robinson of the University of Canterbury has a very nice article about the impact of landslides on New Zealand, noting that they have claimed 1,800 lives over the last two centuries, twice the number killed by volcanoes and earthquakes combined. As extreme rainfall events increase in frequency and severity, the challenges for New Zealands are intensifying.

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to the wonderful people at Planet Labs for providing access to the satellite imagery.

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

Inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility (IDEA) are recognized as central ethical commitments that strengthen science and expand its impact. However, their contribution to support continued innovation and the factual barriers and enablers are under-documented.

A new study from Naji and Reyes et al. [2026] addresses this gap. The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with underrepresented and underserved Earth observation professionals and identified challenges and support they received during their career. Through these conversations, they identify barriers and enablers and discuss solutions. The authors present interesting quotes from the interviews that excellently convey the feelings and discouragement caused by the barriers and the enthusiasm and scientific benefit stimulated by successful enablers. The article provides an illuminating perspective on the real value of IDEA for the benefit of science and humanity.

Citation: Naji, N., Reyes, S. R., Crowley, M. A., Schenkein, S. F., González, M., Siwe, R., et al. (2026). Global perspectives on barriers and enablers to inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility (IDEA) in the field of Earth observation. AGU Advances, 7, e2025AV001858. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV001858

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

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.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

Heading into the Milan-Cortina 2026 Olympics, skiers and snowboarders were already adjusting to a ban on fluorinated waxes long prized for making their equipment faster. Last week, the Winter Games saw their first enforcement of that rule, which is aimed at protecting public health and the environment.

South Korean cross-country skiers Han Dasom and Lee Eui-jin were disqualified from the women’s sprint event on 10 February. That came one day after Japanese snowboarder Shiba Masaki was disqualified from the men’s parallel giant slalom. In all three cases, routine testing found banned compounds on their equipment.

The so-called “fluoro” waxes provide a “really ridiculous speed advantage.”

For decades, elite snow sports athletes have relied on waxes with fluorocarbons that are exceptional at repelling water and dirt. Former U.S. cross-country racer Nathan Schultz told Grist the so-called “fluoro” waxes provide a “really ridiculous speed advantage,” especially in warmer conditions like those experienced at these Games.

But these waxes also contained PFAS, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. This class of 15,000 so-called “forever chemicals” are notorious for never breaking down. Studies have linked exposure to PFAS to thyroid disease, developmental problems, and cancer, and research has found elevated levels in ski technicians who regularly handled the waxes. PFAS have also been detected in soil and water near ski venues, including wells drawing from aquifers in Park City, Utah, suggesting broader environmental contamination.

Amid growing concern over the environmental impacts and the risks to skiers, their technicians, and others, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, or FIS, called for a ban in 2019. The prohibition took effect in 2023, and applies to all events governed by the federation, including nordic, alpine and freestyle skiing, ski jumping, and snowboarding.

Officials test multiple points on each competitor’s equipment, using a technique known as Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy to detect fluoros. If a given spot on a ski or snowboard turns green, it passes. A red result indicates the presence of the banned substance. Three or more red spots leads to disqualification.

Representatives for the Japan team did respond to comment. A spokesperson for the Korea Ski Association initially told the South Korean news agency Newsis that the organization was “perplexed” by the results. “They tested negative in all previous international competitions with no prior issues,” they said. “We will consult experts from wax and ski manufacturers to investigate whether the issue lies with the wax or skis.”

In an emailed statement, the Korean Olympic Committee told Grist that fluorine was detected in what it believed to be fluorine-free waxes. “The Ski Association has purchased [fluorine]-free wax products, so it will protest,” wrote the spokesperson. The team will also replace the wax and check the skis again after cleaning to “prevent recurrence.”

It is unclear if a protest was ever officially filed or what the outcome was. The Korean team declined to elaborate and FIS did not immediately respond to Grist’s questions. But unlike some infractions, like those related to doping, discipline for unintentional fluoro use generally applies only to the event in question. The Korean athletes competed again Thursday in the 10-km freestyle event, finishing 73rd and 80th.

This time the results stood.

Correction 24 February 2026: An earlier version of this story accidentally referred to fluoride instead of fluorine in one paragraph.

—Tik Root, Grist

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/accountability/the-olympics-just-saw-its-first-forever-chemical-disqualifications/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

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

Of all the ground impacts induced by large earthquakes, liquefaction often feels to be the most neglected. The costs can be savage, and the long term implications wide ranging.

In this context, a very interesting paper (Valkaniotis et al. 2026) has been published in the journal Engineering Geology, which documents the liquefaction induced by the 29 March 2025 Mw=7.7 Mandalay earthquake in Myanmar. Given the challenges of fieldwork in this highly contested area, the work has been conducted medium resolution remote sensing.

It is an excellent study that demonstrates that liquefaction was extremely wide-ranging. The authors have documented 18,000 locations in which liquefaction has occurred, with the distribution being controlled by both proximity to the rupture (and not to the epicentre) and by the geology. The presence of thick deposits of Holocene fluvial materials, which occur widely in this area, allowed extensive liquefaction to occur.

One aspect that I found particularly interesting, and highly informative, is the comparison of the utility of satellite images with different resolutions for mapping liquefaction features. In particular, they show that 10 metre resolution Sentinel 2 images are useful for mapping liquefaction. So, I thought I’d take a look at the utility of Planet Labs imagery in this context.

One example that Valkaniotis et al. (2026) provide lies at [22.311, 96.012]. The Planet Labs image below shows this area as of 16 March 2025, a few days before the Mandalay earthquake:-

Satellite image of an area of Myanmar prior to the 2025 Mandalay earthquake. Image copyright Planet Labs, used with permission, collected on 16 March 2025.

And this is the same area on 31 March 2025, three days after the eartuqkae:-

Satellite image of an area of Myanmar after the 2025 Mandalay earthquake. Image copyright Planet Labs, used with permission, collected on 31 March 2025.

And here is a slider to compare the two images:-

Images by Planet Labs.

In the second image, there are hundreds of areas of exposed fluvial deposits (the light coloured patches) that are not present in the first image. These are the areas of liquefaction mapped by Valkaniotis et al. (2026). I think there may also be some locations in which lateral spreads are visible too, but this is less clear.

This is a fascinating finding, which will be very helpful in assessing post-seismic impacts in the future.

The extant of the liquefaction after the 2025 Mandalay earthquake is very interesting. At the end of the day, studies like this provide insight into the response of the ground to large earthquakes, and in turn this is intended to allow us to build resilience to these events. Valkaniotis et al. (2026) conclude their article as follows:-

“The 2025 Mandalay event serves as a reminder that liquefaction remains one of the most devastating secondary hazards associated with strong earthquakes, especially in densely populated floodplains with complex dynamic fluvial histories. The insights gained from this inventory can not only enhance national seismic resilience efforts in Myanmar but also contribute to the better understanding of liquefaction behavior in large strike-slip earthquakes worldwide.”

Quite.

Reference and acknowledgement

Valkaniotis, S. et al. 2026. Regional-scale inventory and initial analysis of liquefaction triggered by the 2025 Mw 7.7 Mandalay earthquake, Myanmar. Engineering Geology,
363. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enggeo.2026.108543.

Many thanks to the wonderful people at Planet Labs for providing access to the satellite imagery.

Return to The Landslide Blog homepage 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’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors. Source: AGU Advances

River terraces are archives of past environmental and climate change as they form when rivers erode into alluvial plains, leaving behind an elevated flat surface. A sequence of terraces can take tens to hundreds of thousands of years to develop, thus they potentially hold important information over the period of formation. This is the case for the extensive terraces in southern Patagonia.

Through mechanistic models of terrace formation, Ruby et al. [2026] both isolate and combine the key drivers of terrace formation and connect them with the observed terrace shapes. Some terrace shapes were shown to form only under a specific combination of model parameters. This opens a new quantitative way to reveal past tectonic, climatic, and environmental conditions and how these have changed using terraces.  

Citation: Ruby, A., McNab, F., Schildgen, T. F., Wickert, A. D., & Fernandes, V. M. (2026). How sediment supply, sea-level, and glacial isostatic oscillations drive alluvial river long-profile evolution and terrace formation. AGU Advances, 7, e2025AV002035. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV002035

—M. Bayani Cardenas, Editor, AGU Advances

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.

Drained peatlands in Finland can become carbon sinks within just 15 years of restoration, suggests a study published in Restoration Ecology. The findings are a stark contrast to another recent publication that suggests the switch from source to sink can take hundreds of years.

Finland will submit a biodiversity restoration plan to the European Commission this September, and what to do about the country’s 5 million hectares of drained peatland will likely be a hot topic. Teemu Tahvanainen, the author of the new study and a plant ecologist at the University of Eastern Finland (Itä-Suomen Yliopisto), said the upcoming deadline motivated him to add to the conversation.

Moreover, if the country is to one day achieve carbon neutrality, it “cannot neglect those areas,” said peatland ecologist Anke Günther from Universität Rostock, in Germany, who was not involved in the new paper.

Like a Forest with No Air

To understand why pristine peatlands are powerful carbon sinks, imagine a forest without any air between the trees, said Günther. That’s how densely the mosses that make up peat are packed together.

To understand why pristine peatlands are powerful carbon sinks, imagine a forest without any air between the trees, said Günther. That’s how densely the mosses that make up peat are packed together. In some places, peatlands can cover millions of hectares and be meters deep. All told, they contain massive amounts of plant matter and therefore massive amounts of carbon—about a third of the total carbon found on Earth.

Peatlands are waterlogged, which largely prevents the peat from decomposing, but also limits how well trees and other plants can grow. Forestry and agricultural companies, governments, and private landowners often dig trenches to drain off some of the water, making the land available for other uses. But draining peat exposes it to oxygen, which then allows microbes to break it down, releasing carbon dioxide.

Rewetting stops these carbon emissions, but it can also cause others, explained soil scientist Jens Leifeld from the Swiss federal research institute Agroscope, who was not involved in the new study. For example, any trees growing in a drained peatland will die upon rewetting, and their deaths will release carbon dioxide if the trees aren’t harvested. Moreover, rewetting shifts the peatland’s microbial population from aerobic microbes to anaerobic, increasing methane emissions. Studies have produced conflicting answers when asking how restoring peatlands affects carbon emissions. “There was no agreed opinion,” Leifeld said.

Increasing the Resolution

Tahvanainen modeled peatland restoration with greater temporal resolution than in previous studies. Rather than assume that parameters such as methane emissions and decomposition of forest litter will remain the same after rewetting, he predicted how these parameters will vary in the years and decades following.

His take-home message: Restoration can cool the climate in as little as a couple of decades. “I’m saying that it can, which sounds a little bit ambiguous on purpose,” he added. There are many variables his approach can’t account for, he said, such as how climate change will progress and the state of a peatland prior to restoration.

“The results make sense to me in a way that other studies didn’t always.”

“The results make sense to me in a way that other studies didn’t always,” said Günther. It seemed implausible to her that the carbon sequestered through a bit of tree growth would compensate for the vast amount of carbon released from draining a peatland.

But rewetting also has consequences the model doesn’t consider, Leifeld pointed out. For example, rewetting changes the color of the landscape in the winter, taking it from the dark color of a forest to the white color of open snow. Snow reflects more sunlight than trees, which cools Earth.

Only field studies can truly answer the question of how rewetting peatlands will affect their greenhouse gas emissions, said forest ecologist Paavo Ojanen from Natural Resources Institute Finland. These studies are ongoing, but they require following peatlands for years. Until they’re complete, “we don’t have the real measurements,” he said.

For now, Tahvanainen said his work adds nuance to studies reporting that peatland restoration won’t bring climate mitigation in the next hundred years. That’s “just way too strongly put,” he said.

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

Citation: Sidik, S. M. (2026), Restored peatlands could become carbon sinks within decades, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260060. Published on 17 February 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 massive gully has been developing over the last two decades at Pondok Balik. It now covers an area of over 3 hectares.

In Indonesia, a massive and rapidly developing gully is causing considerable concern. Located at Pondok Balik in Central Aceh Regency, Aceh province, this feature has been developing since 2004. Reuters has an excellent gallery of images that is worth a view. There is a really good summary of the history of this gully on The Watchers website too.

There is some nice drone footage of this feature in this SindoNews report on Youtube:-

The location of this very large gully is [4.72374, 96.73117]. This is a Google Earth image of it, captured in June 2025:-

Google Earth image from June 2025 of the massive gully at Pondok Balik in Indonesia.

By comparison, here is an image from February 2015:-

Google Earth image from February 2015 2018 of the massive gully at Pondok Balik in Indonesia.

And here is a slider to compare the two, showing the raid development of the gully:-

Google Earth images

The gully is reportedly developing in loose volcanic materials, which are prone to rapid erosion when disturbed and saturated. In Indonesia, rainfall totals are high.

There are concerns about potential damage to the road seen in the image and to high voltage electricity pylons running through the area. It is proposed to seek to manage the hazard by reinforcing the soil and managing surface and subsurface water. This will not be straightforward or cheap.

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

Coastal landscapes evolve under the combined influence of wave action, climatic variations, sea‑level change, and tectonic processes. Shoreline evolution is especially important along rocky coasts such as those of the western United States, where it shapes hazards to people and infrastructure and affects exposure to events like tsunamis. In this context, tectonically driven uplift plays a key role over both individual earthquake cycles and longer timescales associated with fault-system and topographic development.

Using a compilation of coastal change metrics and statistical analyses, Lopez and Masteller [2026] identify a tentative link between tectonics and shoreline change. On decadal timescales, uplift can slow coastline retreat, as might be expected. Over many earthquake cycles, however, higher long-term uplift associated with cumulative subduction-zone deformation appears to enhance shoreline retreat. These findings highlight some of the interactions between coastal and solid earth hazards. They also point toward future models that integrate similar constraints to improve our understanding of how earthquakes build topography and how sea level, coastal processes, and tectonics together modulate short‑ and long‑term coastal risk.

Citation: Lopez, C. G., & Masteller, C. C. (2026). Tectonics as a regulator of shoreline retreat and rocky coast evolution across timescales. AGU Advances, 7, e2025AV002065. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV002065

—Thorsten Becker, Editor, AGU Advances

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Six people were killed when intense rainfall triggered over 6,500 landslides

On 16 June 2024, an extreme rainfall event triggered a dense cluster of landslides and channelised debris flows in Wuping County, Fujian Province, China. This is one of many such events in recent years – anecdotally at least, these events are becoming more common and more severe.

Thus, I very much welcome a paper in the journal Landslides (Liao et al. 2026) that describes this event. The paper is not open access, but this link should allow you to read the full manuscript. The authors highlight the impact of the event – six people were killed (two of whom were never recovered) and hundreds of houses were damaged.

The cluster of landslides centres on the area around [24.94745, 116.29172]. This Planet Labs image, captured on 27 November 2024 after the event, shows some of the landslides triggered:-

Landslides triggered by the 16 June 2024 rainfall event in Wuping County, Fujian Province. Image copyright Planet Labs, used with permission, collected on 27 November 2024.

Note the presence of multiple shallow landslides that have combined to form channelised debris flows. In the centre of the image, by the marker, there is a small reservoir that has been almost entirely infilled by debris from the landslides.

In total, Liao et al. (2026) have mapped 6,526 landslide triggered by the rainfall event. The main initiating rainfall appears to have been a period between 14:00 and 18:00 on 16 June 2024, during which 161 mm was recorded, with a peak intensity of 55 mm per hour. Interestingly, though, the landslide density correlates with rainfall total prior to the main initiating event, rather than to the total rainfall. I wonder whether this indicates that the key parameter (the distribution of peak rainfall intensity, for example) is not being captured in the data?

Very helpfully, Liao et al. (2026) have investigated the mechanism of the landslides in some detail. They find that behaviour differed according to the bedrock lithology. In areas underlain by granite, failure occurred on the interface between the weathered and the unweathered materials, a common situation. In most cases, granitic landslides did not generate channelised debris flows.

On the other hand, in areas underlain by greywacke, failures also occurred in these interface areas, but channelised debris flows were more common. This may be related to the steeper local topography in the greywacke areas.

The paper by Liao et al. (2026) further helps us to understand these clusters of landslides and channelised debris flows, which are proving to be so very destructive. Expect more of these events in the coming months and beyond.

Reference and acknowledgement

Liao, Z., Wu, J., Ma, J. et al. 2026. Characteristics and initiation mechanism of clustered landslides triggered by an extreme rainfall in Wuping County, Fujian Province, China. Landslides. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-026-02712-1.

Many thanks to the wonderful people at Planet Labs for providing access to the satellite imagery.

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