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Publication date: Available online 20 November 2025

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): Danyang Shi, Dengao Li, Liangquan Yan, Jumin Zhao

Publication date: Available online 20 November 2025

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): Oleg Berngardt, Ivan Lavygin

Publication date: Available online 19 November 2025

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): Chengqian Wu, Caisheng Wei, Jianhua Wang, Pengfei Guo, Chuan Ma, Xia Wu

When fire broke out at the world's largest battery energy storage facility in January 2025, its thick smoke blanketed surrounding wetlands, farms and nearby communities on the central California coast.

Around 12,000 years ago, the last Ice Age ended, global temperatures rose and the early Holocene began, during which time human societies became increasingly settled. A new study published in Nature Geoscience shows the important role played by the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica in this transition.

Slow earthquakes have been discovered to exhibit anomalously slow, long-lasting and small slips, adjacent to regular earthquakes where we sometimes feel catastrophic vibration. However, no one knows the reason why slow earthquakes show such strange characteristics. In a study published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers at The University of Osaka succeeded in experimentally reproducing the multiple features of slow earthquakes in the lab and suggested the grain-scale origin of them based on their direct observations.

The United Nations' global climate summit has finished for another year. Some progress was made in Brazil on climate finance and adaptation. But efforts to end reliance on fossil fuels were stymied by—you guessed it—fossil fuel power.

Since the first agricultural revolution, circa 10,000 BCE, humanity has adapted its farming practices to meet climatic variation. The genesis of early farming is even thought to have resulted from a shift in seasonal conditions that favored regular planting and harvesting intervals after the last ice age.

In the modern era, the necessity to adapt has led to expansive land use, fertilization, irrigation, and other agricultural routines—powered primarily by combusted carbon and freshwater extractions—to suit local environmental conditions and meet demands of growing populations. These practices have been a boon to food supplies, but they have also contributed to many of today’s climatic and environmental challenges.

Climate-smart practices have primarily been studied in small, controlled experiments, not at the extent needed to verify their effectiveness on a large scale.

Recognition of global crises with respect to climate change and biodiversity has motivated landmark international agreements such as the Paris Agreement and the Global Biodiversity Framework. The Paris Agreement legally binds participating nations to implement land use methods that mitigate emissions and actively remove carbon from the atmosphere.

One such set of modified land management practices, known collectively as climate-smart agriculture [U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2025], is lauded as a pragmatic, low-barrier pathway to manage climate change through nature-based atmospheric carbon removal and avoided emissions (related to both land use and livestock). However, these practices have primarily been studied in small, controlled experiments, not at the extent needed to verify their effectiveness—and help motivate their adoption—on a large scale.

Recently, soil carbon experts explored the utility of applying causal approaches to quantify soil carbon accrual and avoided emissions from large-scale land management interventions and to address concerns and uncertainties that are slowing their uptake [Bradford et al., 2025a]. Such approaches have long been applied in other contexts to measure and verify treatment efficacy. In particular, methods in medical science for studying vaccine efficacy broadly offer important insights for assessing climate-smart applications.

Accounting for Carbon

Climate-smart agriculture includes a variety of management practices such as cover cropping (planting noncash crops on otherwise fallow land), reducing or eliminating soil tilling, and diversifying crops. These applications can offer various cobenefits, including increased yields; greater soil water holding capacity; improved soil microbiomes; reduced erosion and runoff; enhanced control of pests, disease, and weeds; and greater soil nutrient availability that reduces the need for chemical fertilizers [U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2025].

Such benefits are linked to the idea that the applications either avoid losses or improve gains in soil organic matter. But can we measure how much they really help?

To account for carbon lost, gained, or stored in agricultural land, soil organic matter is typically measured by elemental analysis of soil samples in a laboratory. Amounts of carbon stored are determined by tracking changes in soil carbon stocks over time. Comparing results following the application of climate-smart agriculture approaches with those following business-as-usual practices provides a measure of the approaches’ effectiveness for carbon management.

Cover crop grows amid rows of corn stubble in a farm field in Deerfield, Mass. Credit: Lance Cheung, U.S. Department of Agriculture/Flickr, PDM 1.0

Assuming this carbon accounting reveals increased soil carbon stocks, agricultural projects implementing these approaches can be considered natural climate solutions, which are valued in the voluntary carbon market for their carbon offset and removal power. For example, one project developer selling carbon credits since 2022 recently reported that their efforts have so far stored nearly 1 million tons of soil carbon in U.S. farmlands. Further, across farms in four U.S. states, the combined use of three climate-smart agriculture techniques—no tillage, cover cropping, and crop rotation of corn and soybeans—is claimed to have resulted in a shift to carbon gains from soil carbon loss using conventional practices [U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2025].

Limited Evidence, Low Adoption

Despite claims about the successes of climate-smart agricultural practices, adoption remains low. Although no-till and reduced-till methods have been implemented on more than half of all U.S. soybean, corn, and sorghum fields, cover cropping is used across less than 5% of the country’s agricultural lands.

If robust data showing that climate-smart practices lead to widespread yield increases, cost reductions, and climate benefits were available, they might be more widely adopted by growers.

A multitude of social, cultural, and economic factors—along with questions about the viability for meaningful climate change mitigation—contribute to the limited adoption of some climate-smart practices [Prokopy et al., 2019; Eagle et al., 2022]. However, if robust data showing that they lead to widespread yield increases, cost reductions, and climate benefits were available, they might be more widely adopted by growers.

Presently, most evidence supporting the benefits of climate-smart agriculture for carbon management relies on a limited set of small-plot experimental trials and projected outcomes derived from applying process-based biogeochemical models. Public and private investment in studies aimed at quantifying the practices’ efficacy through measurement, monitoring, reporting, and verification (MMRV) at scales of real-world commercial agriculture has been inhibited by the assumption that soils vary too much to measure treatment effects feasibly [Poeplau et al., 2022].

This assumption is driven by the fact that regional and national soil carbon inventories reveal substantial variation in soil carbon contents at scales within individual fields (meters to tens of meters) and between fields (kilometers to tens of kilometers)—variation that is thought to preclude detections of how agricultural practices affect carbon stocks [Bradford et al., 2023]. Yet this variability can be overcome by scaling up field-level data to multifield scales focused on understanding the average effect of interventions.

What could this scaling look like, and what cues from other fields can we use to make progress?

Adapting Methods from Medical Research

Causal approaches are used regularly in health sciences, including in vaccine trials. In later-stage trials, vaccine efficacy is quantified under conditions approximating real-world delivery by measuring the differences in the health responses of people who receive the vaccine and those who do not.

Public health scientists use large-scale clinical intervention-style experiments to account for factors that can modify real-world vaccine efficacy. Earth scientists can take direction from such trials.

Importantly, such real-world trials occur only after there is enough experimental evidence—typically from controlled laboratory experiments and small-scale clinical trials—of underlying mechanisms indicating the likelihood of broad, meaningful positive effects and minimal negative effects of the vaccine. Public health scientists use these large-scale clinical intervention-style experiments (or observational studies) to account for factors such as varied exposure risks and preexisting conditions that can modify real-world vaccine efficacy compared with efficacy under controlled conditions.

Earth scientists can take direction from such trials. Adapting this experiment structure for soil science research would allow project developers, scientists, land managers, and policymakers to assess the ability of climate-smart agricultural practices to store carbon and reduce emissions across real fields and farms. It would also better inform meaningful climate action policy initiatives.

A base of highly controlled small-scale experiments—typically conducted in plots operated by researchers—already exists that suggests the carbon benefits of improved agricultural practices under highly controlled conditions. What is missing are the large-scale intervention studies sampling soil carbon in fields that receive a climate-smart treatment (e.g., no till or reduced till, crop rotation, cover cropping) versus those that are conventionally managed [Bradford et al., 2025b].

Such studies must be undertaken with appropriate design principles to confirm whether treatment interventions cause measured carbon gains and to focus on the external validity of the experiments. In the case of climate-smart agriculture, “external validity” refers to the extent to which a study’s results are applicable to other fields receiving similar management interventions. Achieving external validity necessitates sustained observation of realistic intervention behaviors on working commercial farms and on well-defined and preserved control fields, repetition of experiments at a variety of sites, and quantification of average outcomes from interventions across fields rather than for individual fields.

Empirical causal studies at the regional scales of commercial agricultural practices should be the gold standard of evidence for evaluating the effectiveness of climate-smart approaches.

New research suggests that empirical measure-and-remeasure projects are scientifically feasible at regional agricultural scales using current best practices for soil sampling and carbon analysis [Potash et al., 2025; Bradford et al., 2023]. Potash et al. [2025], for example, simulated a randomized-controlled trial for intervention projects across hundreds to thousands of fields, incorporating known variations in soil carbon stocks and measurement errors. The results showed that such projects can reliably estimate the effects of the treatments applied.

Using causal empirical approaches can complement, rather than compete with, the development of other approaches for MMRV of carbon storage and emissions. Approaches using satellite and airborne remote sensing may, for example, enable more efficient scaling of climate mitigation projects, albeit only if they are first validated against causal empirical data.

Empirical causal studies at the regional scales of commercial agricultural practices should thus be the gold standard of evidence for evaluating the effectiveness of climate-smart approaches. Data from these experiments will provide a rigorous basis for independent validation of established and emerging digital- and model-based approaches for soil carbon MMRV. They will also build confidence that adopting climate-smart practices really does result in mitigation of carbon emissions and climate change under real-world conditions.

Acknowledgments

The perspectives presented here were informed by discussions at and outcomes from a workshop convened in October 2024 by researchers at Yale University and the Environmental Defense Fund. Funding support was provided by the Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture and gifts to the Environmental Defense Fund from King Philanthropies and Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

References

Bradford, M. A., et al. (2023), Testing the feasibility of quantifying change in agricultural soil carbon stocks through empirical sampling, Geoderma, 440, 116719, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoderma.2023.116719.

Bradford, M. A., et al. (2025a), Agricultural soil carbon: A call for improved evidence of climate mitigation, Yale Applied Science Synthesis Program and Environmental Defense Fund white paper, Yale Appl. Sci. Synth. Program, New Haven, Conn., https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/uk3n2_v1.

Bradford, M. A., et al. (2025b), Upstream data need to prove soil carbon as a climate solution, Nat. Clim. Change, 15, 1,013–1,016, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02429-4.

Eagle, A. J., N. Z. Uludere Aragon, and D. R. Gordon (2022), The realizable magnitude of carbon sequestration in global cropland soils: Socioeconomic factors, Environ. Defense Fund, New York, www.edf.org/sites/default/files/2022-12/realizable-magnitude-carbon-sequestration-cropland-soils-socioeconomic-factors.pdf.

Poeplau, C., R. Prietz, and A. Don (2022), Plot-scale variability of organic carbon in temperate agricultural soils—Implications for soil monitoring, J. Plant Nutr. Soil Sci., 185, 403–416, https://doi.org/10.1002/jpln.202100393.

Potash, E., et al. (2025), Measure-and-remeasure as an economically feasible approach to crediting soil organic carbon at scale, Environ. Res. Lett., 20(2), 024025, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ada16c.

Prokopy, L. S., et al. (2019), Adoption of agricultural conservation practices in the United States: Evidence from 35 years of quantitative literature, J. Soil Water Conserv., 74(5), 520–534, https://doi.org/10.2489/jswc.74.5.520.

U.S. Department of Agriculture (2025), Documentation of literature, data, and modeling analysis to support the treatment of CSA practices that reduce agricultural soil carbon dioxide emissions and increase carbon storage, Off. of the Chief Econ., Off. of Energy and Environ. Policy, Washington, D.C., www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/USDA_Durability_WhitePaper_01_14.pdf.

Author Information

Savannah Gupton (savannah.gupton@yale.edu), Applied Science Synthesis Program, The Forest School at the Yale School of the Environment, Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.; Mark Bradford, Alex Polussa, and Sara E. Kuebbing, The Forest School at the Yale School of the Environment, Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.; and Emily E. Oldfield, Environmental Defense Fund, New Haven, Conn.; also at Yale School of the Environment, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

Citation: Gupton, S., M. Bradford, A. Polussa, S. E. Kuebbing, and E. E. Oldfield (2025), How can we tell if climate-smart agriculture stores carbon?, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250446. Published on 1 December 2025. This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author(s). Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Early in the time-twisting, exoplanet-exploring film Interstellar, a scientist on a blight-plagued Earth stares at corn in a greenhouse, watching the crop die. That scene, said Northern Arizona University doctoral candidate Laura Lee, got her thinking about growing food in difficult soils.

The idea propelled Lee, a planetary scientist and astronomer, into a new project, studying how the outer veneer of planetary bodies might be enriched to sustain crops needed for future human settlements. At AGU’s Annual Meeting 2025 on 16 December, Lee will present findings about how various amendments, such as fungi, urea-based fertilizer, and even poop, could help plants like corn grow on the Moon and Mars.

Necessary Ingredients

Plants need 17 specific elements to survive. Carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen combine to form cellulose—the building blocks of cell walls. Nitrogen helps lush green leaves flourish. Phosphorous stimulates stability-providing roots. Iron, potassium, and other nutrients are also critical for plants to function.

“If you can avoid bringing all that up, it’s super advantageous. Mass is really expensive.”

But on the Moon and Mars, the regolith—the loose outer layer of any planetary body—lacks some of these plant essentials. For instance, lunar regolith contains almost no carbon or nitrogen, said Steve Elardo, a planetary geochemist at the University of Florida who was not involved in Lee’s study.

Plus, the phosphorus that is present, at least on the Moon, isn’t in a useful form for plants, said Jess Atkin, a doctoral candidate and space biologist at Texas A&M who studies how microbes can remediate regolith to grow plants on the Moon.

Taking terrestrial soil to space is not ideal because of cost. “If you can avoid bringing all that up, it’s super advantageous,” Elardo said. “Mass is really expensive.” Taking microbes to the Moon, on the other hand, is a much lighter option.

What’s in a Regolith?

Scientists rely on data from rovers, landers, and satellite remote sensing to understand the chemistry of Martian regolith. The Apollo missions brought back 382 precious kilograms (842 pounds) of the Moon. The Chang’e and Luna missions combined brought back another ~4 kilograms of lunar samples. Because of the limited supply of real lunar regolith, most planetary crop studies, including Lee’s, rely on something called simulant, a synthetic imitation of extraterrestrial regolith.

For her experiments, Lee selected two simulants from Space Resource Technologies: one of the lunar highlands and one that approximates Martian regolith on the basis of data from both remote sensing and the Curiosity rover. But because of the lack of necessary nitrogen in both simulants, Lee tested two nitrogen-bearing media to introduce this key ingredient.

For the first, she used a synthetic urea-based fertilizer used by many home gardeners. For the second, Lee used Milorganite—a nitrogen-rich biosolid made from processing human waste produced by the population of Milwaukee, Wis. For Lee, the Milorganite imitates a nutrient-rich resource that future astronauts heading to planetary bodies will certainly have and that shouldn’t add weight to the mission payload: their own waste.

The hardened final remains from a sewage plant are called sludge or biosolids. The semisolid leftovers form desiccation cracks as they dry. This image is from a sewage plant in Kos, Greece. Credit: Hannes Globe/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5

“When they’re adding human waste, the best thing they’re doing is adding organic matter” that can also help bind regolith particles together, said Atkin, who was not involved with Lee’s study.

“You can go full Mark Watney on this,” said Elardo, referencing the 2015 film The Martian, in which a botanist astronaut amends Martian regolith with the crew’s biosolids to grow potatoes. “If you compost [astronaut waste] and make it safe…it should provide a pretty good fertilizer.”

Fabulous Fungi

Lee also tested how crops grew with and without arbuscular mycorrhizae, a microscopic, symbiotic interconnection between certain fungi and the plant roots in which they reside.

“It extends that root zone, giving stability,” Atkin said, “like a glue in our soil.” The plant provides carbon to the fungi, and the fungi transfer water and nutrients, particularly phosphorus, to the plant, she explained.

In the fertilizer-only experiments, Lee found that plants grown in lunar simulant with Milorganite tended to grow larger, but in comparison, plants grown in lunar simulant with urea-based fertilizer were more likely to survive the 15-week growing period. For the Martian simulant, no plants survived in Milorganite.

There is a huge ethical question about bringing microorganisms to extraterrestrial places.

The fertilizer-only experiments provided a control to help Lee assess what happens with the addition of fungi. In the lunar experiments with fungi, no matter which nitrogen fertilizer source was used, plants grew larger than in the fertilizer-only trials. Lee also found higher chlorophyll levels in the leaves of plants grown with fungi and Milorganite. These results are signs that fungi facilitate healthier plants. Plants grown in Martian simulant amended with either fertilizer option also fared better with the addition of fungi. Although only a single plant out of six survived in Martian simulant amended with Milorganite and arbuscular mycorrhizae, this plant “produced the highest chlorophyll levels across all lunar and Martian corn, and produced the most biomass out of all plants grown in Martian regolith,” Lee wrote in an email.

“There is a huge ethical question about bringing microorganisms” to extraterrestrial places, said Lee, whether in the form of fertilizer or fungi. But any future astronauts will introduce microorganisms to the Moon and Mars via their own microbiomes, she said. Plus, 96 bags of human waste already languish on the lunar surface, divvied up between the six Apollo landing sites.

Simulant Versus Regolith

In an experiment published in 2022, a team of scientists including Elardo demonstrated that lunar regolith collected during Apollo 11, 12, and 17 could grow a plant called Arabidopsis thaliana, or thale cress. But the plants were stressed. “They grew, but they were not particularly happy,” Elardo said. The same plants produced healthy roots and shoots when grown in lunar simulants.

These findings demonstrated that for biology purposes, “[simulants] don’t capture the chemistry of extraterrestrial regoliths,” Elardo said, in part because that’s not always what simulants are designed to do. Several are made by the truckload for large-scale engineering projects, like testing the wheels of a rover destined for Mars, he explained. Moreover, the Moon’s iron isn’t in the same state as Earth’s, and it’s a version plants don’t want. Plus, real lunar regolith grains are extremely sharp and shard-like, impeding the progress of delicate roots.

Nevertheless, comparative studies such as Lee’s might be useful, Elardo said. “Can you add a fungus…that increases nutrient uptake?” he pondered. “That’s an awesome idea.”

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

Citation: Tripathy-Lang, A. (2025), Fungi, fertilizer, and feces could help astronauts grow plants on the Moon, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250445. Published on 1 December 2025. Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

SummaryDistributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), a photonic technology that converts a fibre-optic cable into a long (tens of kilometres) high-linear-density (every few metres) array of seismo-acoustic sensors, can provide high-density, high-resolution strain measurements along the entire cable. The potential of such a distributed measurement has gained increasing attention in the seismology community for a wide range of applications. It has been shown that DAS has a sub-wavelength sensitivity to heterogeneities near the fibre-optic cable. This sensitivity is linked to the fact that the DAS measures deformation, as opposed to the displacements that seismometers measure. However, this sensitivity can create difficulties for many DAS applications, such as source location or distant imaging. Regardless, it can be advantageous in obtaining information about the subsurface near the cable. Here we present a method to locate small heterogeneities near the fibre-optic cable by inverting an indicator of the small-scale heterogeneities: the homogenised first-order corrector. We show that this first-order corrector can be used to locate heterogeneities near the fibre-optic cable at the gauge length precision, independent of the wavelength.

Publication date: Available online 19 November 2025

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): Achraf Djerida

Publication date: Available online 19 November 2025

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): Zixuan Ge, Yongkai Wang, Wenhao Wu, Jie Liu, Weijie Ran, Peixian Yuan, Yanan Su, Jiangtao Xu, Jiyuan Hu, Peijie Zhu, Yu Zhang

Publication date: Available online 19 November 2025

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): A.M. Mateos, V.M.S. Carrasco, P.G. Rodríguez, J.M. Vaquero

Publication date: Available online 19 November 2025

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): P.R. Zapevalin, V.E. Zharov

Publication date: Available online 19 November 2025

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): Yu Wang, Kang Liu, Yuquan Chen

AbstractWe present an earthquake catalog in northeastern Tibetan plateau between September 2013 to April 2016 during the ChinArray-II deployment. Using continuous records from 676 transportable ChinArray-II stations and 172 permanent stations, the P/S phases are obtained using one deep learning phase picker. After associating these phases, the events are identified and located to establish the ChinArray-II Regional Earthquake Database (CARED-II). Benefiting from both improved station coverage and sensitive phase picker, CARED-II catalog has 156 057 events (around 3 million picks), about tenfold more than the manual routine catalog (15 967 events) using the permanent stations. The improved event catalog delineates the fault structures clearly. The deep structure of south-dipping north Qilian thrust faults is revealed, consisting with previous geology studies. The hidden faults and fault connectivity are revealed by improved seismicity, especially in the Alxa Block with sparse permanent stations and severe environments restricting geological field work. Moreover, small anthropogenic events are identified and related to highway tunnel construction across Qinling Mountain, forming a straight event cluster. The results demonstrate the high event detection ability of our procedure and reliability of the automatic catalog. Our array-based CARED-II catalog provides improved seismicity images in northeastern Tibet and could be used for further seismology and geotectonic studies.

SummaryThe global prevalence of organic pollutants presents a significant environmental challenge, necessitating sustainable remediation strategies. In situ biodegradation emerges as a cost-effective and eco-friendly solution. However, the real-time monitoring of in situ bacterial activities, particularly biodegradation processes, remains a challenge due to the limitations of traditional intrusive methods, including issues of representativeness, reproducibility, and high associated costs. Spectral induced polarization (SIP) has shown sensitivity to surface changes in subsurface environments, especially for biogeochemical reactivity monitoring including those associated with biodegradation. Despite this potential, advances have to be made to quantitatively link SIP parameters to in situ biodegradation processes. This study addresses this gap by conducting controlled biogeophysical experiments on a sand-packed column undergoing biodegradation facilitated by Rhodococcus wratislaviensis IFP 2006. SIP measurements were paired with bacterial growth kinetics to develop a quantitative model estimating bacterial growth. The results demonstrate that SIP, coupled with routine laboratory measurements, can effectively and quantitatively assess bacterial growth and the biodegradation of organic pollutants. These findings highlight the potential of SIP as a non-intrusive and reliable method for monitoring biodegradation in contaminated subsurface environments.

AbstractThe Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission (SWOT), equipped with the Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn), provides groundbreaking two-dimensional sea surface heights (SSHs), bringing new potential for optimizing the deflection of the vertical (DOVs). However, conventional DOV modeling—combining along- and cross-track geoid gradients with equal weights—fail to fully exploit the potential of SWOT/KaRIn observations and overlook the spatial variability in precision. We present a tailored method for optimizing DOVs estimation. The method combines geoid gradients in the along-track, cross-track, diagonal (forward and backward) directions with adaptive weighting. The refined weights are employed to exploit the potential of each geoid gradient based on the relationship between the standard deviation of SSHs and the significant wave height. To mitigate data gaps, prior and locally averaged geoid gradients are incorporated in the gaps and overlapping regions. SWOT/KaRIn-derived DOVs and gravity anomalies from the science-phase observations are validated against shipborne gravity in the Philippine Sea. Results indicate that the DOV model derived by the tailored method—particularly by combining triple-directional (along, cross, and diagonally forward) geoid gradients with refined weights—achieves a 7.3% improvement in accuracy over the conventional method. The supplement of additional geoid gradients is critical for mitigating leakage errors caused by missing or reduced observations in the gap regions. Furthermore, the gravity anomaly model recovered from DOVs by stacking 17-cycle observations achieved an accuracy of 2.97 mGal, representing a 7.2% improvement over single-cycle observations. The clear advantages of SWOT/KaRIn observations are gradually emerging in marine gravity recovery.

A new study published in Science Advances overturns a long-standing paradigm in climate science that stronger Northern Hemisphere summer insolation produces stronger tropical rainfall. Instead, a precisely dated 129,000-year rainfall reconstruction from a Cuban cave shows that the Caribbean often did the opposite, drying during intervals of intensified summer insolation.

Researchers from the Institute of Applied Ecology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Riverside, have investigated how the loss of forest soil gaseous nitrogen (NO, N2O, and N2) is affected by climate warming, highlighting the critical role of these gases in regulating forest nutrient cycling and ecosystem functioning.