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In the summer of 2020, Friends of Palm Beach, a nonprofit that cleans the shores of Palm Beach, Fla., noticed something unusual among the typical debris—many bottles and rubber bales were washing up covered in a black residue. Diane Buhler, the group’s founder, cataloged the time and location of the arrival of each piece of debris and kept an expertly photographed record.

No oil spills had been reported locally, and the high amount of residue-coated debris created a mystery: Where was all this black sludge coming from?

Christopher Reddy, a chemical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, had been working with an international team of scientists on a separate mystery: the origins of a 2019 oil spill in Brazil, the largest in the country’s history. When he saw the debris posted on the Friends of Palm Beach Instagram page, he reached out. “I was like, ‘Please, please send [the debris] to us,’” he said. The details Buhler was providing about the debris, he said, were “remarkably informative.”

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Reddy and the team had a hunch: They thought the 2020 Florida debris and the 2019 Brazil spill were linked. Because of weathering, oil residues rarely travel more than 300 kilometers (186 miles)—but perhaps they’d used plastic pollution to hitch a ride to the Sunshine State.

“This project wouldn’t have happened unless there was this knowledge of the way the currents move.”

A thorough analysis, published in Environmental Science and Technology, confirmed the residue likely originated from the Brazil spill. The findings reinforce scientists’ hypothesis that oil can travel far greater distances when attached to plastic debris in the ocean.

Matching Mysterious Oil Samples

Multiple lines of evidence informed the team’s conclusion that the Brazil spill and Palm Beach debris were related. First, previous experiments that tracked drifting bottles in the western tropical Atlantic and Caribbean Sea in the 1960s and 1970s showed it was possible for plastic debris to drift thousands of kilometers in the time that elapsed between the spill and the appearance of the debris. Second, computer simulations of the movement of oiled debris in the ocean also showed that it was possible for such debris to have reached Florida’s shores from the coast of Brazil. 

“This project wouldn’t have happened unless there was this knowledge of the way the currents move,” said Reddy, a coauthor on the new study. 

In the summer of 2020, oiled debris was found on Florida beaches. The oil likely traveled 8,500 kilometers (about 5,300 miles) from a 2019 oil spill off the coast of Brazil. Credit: James et al., 2026, https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.5c14571, CC-BY 4.0

The researchers also scraped oil residue from 10 samples of the Palm Beach debris, then performed a series of chromatography tests and molecular analyses to compare it to oil samples from the Brazilian spill. Researchers found the samples to be forensically identical to oil from the spill; compounds that the team expected to be present were, while ones that should have been lost as oil degraded were not.

“It was such crystal-clear evidence that I got nervous.”

The team was astounded at the similarities, particularly the chromatography results. “It was such crystal-clear evidence that I got nervous,” Reddy said. “Oh my gosh, this really did happen,” he remembered thinking. 

The data are “pretty striking,” agreed Bryan James, a chemical engineer at Northeastern University and coauthor on the new study. 

The research team reasoned that the oiled debris traveled about 8,500 kilometers (about 5,300 miles) from the coast of Brazil to Palm Beach over about 240 days. That much oil has never been documented traveling so far, said Michel Boufadel, an environmental engineer at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who was not involved in the study. 

Researchers think the oiled debris may also have reached Caribbean islands but wasn’t cataloged. Credit: Diane Buhler, Friends of Palm Beach

The authors think it’s likely that similar debris washed up on Caribbean shores as well as Florida’s but simply wasn’t collected or cataloged. “Southeast Florida was where there was a person thinking and looking, who had this database in her head” and reported it, too, Reddy said. 

While the “science is solid,” Boufadel said, additional evidence from elsewhere in the Caribbean would add confidence to the results. 

A Plastic Problem

Typically, oil spilled in the ocean is removed by natural processes before it reaches very far, James said. But plastic debris can travel much farther, sometimes washing ashore after traveling thousands of miles over decades.

James said this raises a colocation problem. Many sources of oil and sources of plastic overlap, creating a “greater possibility for these two to find each other…and continue to move oil farther from where it originated,” he said. 

The results are further proof of a known risk of plastic pollution: It can be a vector for other toxic substances, Boufadel said. 

The research team is investigating why plastic debris can carry oil residues so far. Boufadel said it’s likely the plastic helped to maintain the physical integrity of the oil, preventing some of the fragmentation and degradation that would otherwise have occurred.

Colleagues in Brazil, Reddy added, are continuing to investigate the origin of the still-mysterious 2019 spill there, as well. It may be oil that leaked from the SS Rio Grande, a German supply boat sunk by the U.S. Navy in 1944, but more research is needed to confirm that hypothesis, Reddy said.

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

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

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2026), Plastic debris helps oil residues reach farther across the ocean, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260033. Published on 20 January 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: AGU Advances

Technologies for Earth observation by satellites have been used to give advance warning of potentially imminent crop failure due to drought conditions. These risks are increasing with climate change and are especially concerning for middle- and low-income countries that are vulnerable to food insecurity.

Nakalembe [2026] reports on the effectiveness of Uganda’s Disaster Risk Financing Program, which pioneered satellite-triggered financing for drought disaster relief operating at scale. The $14 million program yielded $40.7 million in total benefits, including $11.1 million in immediate emergency aid cost savings. In addition to offering lessons learned, this commentary concludes that institutional and financial barriers, rather than technical limitations, now constrain the scaling of this satellite-driven climate resilience mechanism. Similar programs may reduce vulnerabilities worldwide, as climate disasters become increasingly frequent and severe.

Anomalies in the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (ANDVI) from satellites and the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI-3) during the peak growing season (June – September) of each year from 2000 to 2015 across the Karamoja Region of Uganda. The solid-colored lines show ANDVI (left axis) for six Ugandan districts, with negative values indicating reduced crop health. A horizontal dashed line at -0.02 ANDVI represents the trigger threshold for activating financial assistance by Ugandan government agencies. The dashed black line illustrates precipitation anomalies from SPI-3 (right axis), with classification of drought severity indicated by horizontal lines D1-D4 at negative SPI-3 values. Note that the in years when the SPI-3 index dropped below the drought severity lines (D1-D4), many of the ANDVI values for the six districts (colored lines) also become negative, often below the threshold of -0.02, indicating a crop response to drought that warns of potential crop failure and proactively triggers governmental disaster relief. Credit: Nakalembe [2026], Figure 1

Citation: Nakalembe, C. (2026). Lessons From Uganda’s Earth Observation-Based Disaster Risk Financing Program. AGU Advances, 7, e2025AV002224. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV002224

—Eric Davidson, 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.

The remnants of ice attached to the coast offer astounding insights into the climate history of past millennia. An international research team led by the CNR Institute of Polar Sciences (Italy) and involving the University of Bonn has applied a new method of analyzing sediment drill cores to show the climate history of the past 3,700 years in Antarctica. Surprisingly, it is connected to the natural fluctuations in solar activity. The study has now been published in the journal Nature Communications.

A new study (Akhila et al. 2025) in the the journal Development in Practice examines the mental health impacts of the 30 July 2024 Wayanad landslides in India.

In this blog, I generally provide a commentary on recent landslide events and a review of subsequent studies of landslides. I regularly discuss the impacts on the local population at the time of the disaster, but in 18 years I have almost never written about the long term effects on those people. This is primarily because of a lack of literature that covers this issue for landslides. This is particularly true of mental health impacts.

However, it is logical to assume that the mental health impacts must be profound. Landslides are deeply traumatic events even setting aside the loss of friends and family. They are violent and unpredictable in their behaviour, and people are often buried alive, which is a fundamental human fear.

In that context, a faascinating study (Akhila et al. 2025) has been published in the journal Development in Practice that examines the mental health impacts of the 30 July 2024 Wayanad landslides in India, which are believed to have killed 454 people and injured 397 more. Back at the time, I posted this image of the aftermath of these channelised debris flows:-

Planet Labs image of the 30 July 2024 landslide at Wayanad in Kerala, India. Image copyright Planet Labs, used with permission, captured on 12 August 2024.

The first author was present in some of the 53 camps established in the immediate aftermath of the landslides to house and care for the 6,759 people displaced by the landslides. The paper provides a reflection on their experiences.

The short term impacts of the landslide on survivors decumented by Akhila et al. (2025) are perhaps unsurprising but valuable. They describe emotional breakdown:-

“The very grounds they once called home had turned into graveyards of their people. Many survivors now carry the weight of survivor’s guilt, asking why they survived when others didn’t. This leads to feelings of self-blame, helplessness, and in some cases, post-traumatic stress symptoms.”

Survivors lost cherished places and livelihoods, and their “sense of security, identity, and hope was disrupted”. This triggered “heightened anxiety, sleep disturbances, a lingering sense of fear and uncertainty about the future.” The picture that emerges is one of profound collective trauma.

The longer term mental health impacts are also deeply troubling. Akhila et al. (2025) describe how the communities were left in a constant state of fear of a repeat of the event. This was heightened by anxiety about rehabilitation, livelihoods and relocation. The population lost their homes and the fabric of their communities; some inevitably turned to alcohol or substance abuse, leading to high risk behaviours. Financial crises further exacerbated the challenges for many.

Akhila et al. (2025) also highlight the particular mental health impacts for children, older people, those with disabilities and those who were from outside of the area. The ways that landslide disasters have particular impacts on different groups is a really interesting topic.

But the authors also look at the impact on first responders, noting that many of these individuals were themselves survivors, and some lost loved ones. They note that the responders were “forced to work under extreme stress during the disaster relief efforts. Many were deployed without prior debriefing and continue to carry the emotional distress from that period into their daily lives.”

Finally, Akhila et al. (2025) briefly consider the provision of long term mental health support for survivors. They note that there were many gaps in provision of such services, leading to many people failing to receive the support that they needed, but also to some duplication of effort due to poor coordination. Providing such services affectively would stretch any community, but the authors recommend better planning and integration of services.

This is an incredibly valuable piece of work that explores an issue so rarely considered for landslides. The picture described in the paper must be replicated again and again around the world. It would be great to see both more studies of this type and, of course, better provision of mental health support in the aftermath of landslide disasters.

Reference and acknowledgement

Akhlia, V et al. 2025. Mental health aftershocks following the high-intensity landslide in Southern India. Development in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1080/09614524.2025.2551850.

Thanks as ever to the kind people at Planet Labs for providing access to their amazing 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.

SummaryElectrical resistivity tomography (ERT) is used to infer the subsurface resistivity structure. ERT requires solving a nonlinear inverse problem that is often approximated as linear to reduce computational time. However, the approximation requires assumptions that cause limitations for the data analysis. Most of the computational time is due to the forward problem that requires solving the Poisson equation. Recently, similar forward problems have been shown to be replaceable with a surrogate model of lower computational cost. We present a geoelectric surrogate based on Fourier Neural Operators (FNO) and demonstrate a successful application in nonlinear inversion. The standard deviation of the surrogate prediction error for unseen samples is <5%. Furthermore, the surrogate reduces computational time by over three orders of magnitude per realization, enabling ERT for previously intractable settings. We apply the surrogate in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) inversion of simulated data. The results resolve sharp resistivity changes with plausible uncertainties.

Soils store more carbon than the atmosphere and vegetation combined, with soil microorganisms playing the main role. As a result, the global soil carbon cycle—by which carbon enters, moves through, and leaves soils worldwide—exerts a significant impact on climate change feedback.

The climate warmed up almost as quickly 56 million years ago as it is doing now. When a huge amount of CO2 entered the atmosphere in a short period of time, it led to large-scale forest fires and erosion. Mei Nelissen, Ph.D. candidate at NIOZ and UU, and her colleagues were able to see this very clearly in the layers of sediment drilled off the Norwegian coast. The research was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on January 19.

Marine turbidites are layers of mud and sand deposited on the deep ocean floor by massive underwater landslides and are often used as a historical record for reconstructing earthquake histories.

Researchers at the University of Tsukuba conducted a three-year observational study (January 2019–December 2021) using a network of live cameras to monitor characteristic clouds around Mount Fuji.

According to researchers from Science Tokyo, a new three-dimensional model of the fault beneath the Marmara Sea in Turkey reveals where a future major earthquake could take place. Using electromagnetic measurements, the team mapped hidden structures that help explain how earthquakes initiate and where ruptures could occur in this region.

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have studied how polymer-coated fertilizer (PCF) applied to fields ends up on beaches and in the sea. They studied PCF deposits on beaches around Japan, finding that only 0.2% of used PCFs are washed into rivers and returned to the coastline. When there are canals connecting fields to the sea, this rises to 28%.

New research by Monash University and the ARC Center of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century analyzed close to three decades of weather data during the coral bleaching season and identified the prevalence of "doldrum days," and the absence of the trade winds, as a key factor in the mass bleaching events threatening the Great Barrier Reef.

Geologists from Heriot-Watt are part of an international research team that has confirmed why the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake off northeast Japan behaved in such an extreme and destructive way.

Wildfires are devastating events that destroy forests, burn homes and force people to leave their communities. They also have a profound impact on local ecosystems. But there is another problem that has been largely overlooked until now. When rain falls on the charred landscapes, it increases surface runoff and soil erosion that can last for decades, according to a new study published in Nature Geoscience.

What's the shape of water? In 2022, NASA launched the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite to answer this question by precisely measuring the height and extent of bodies of water. Virginia Tech geoscientists are using the same satellite to ask a related question: How is water shaping the land?

It is well known that discarded cigarette butts release nicotine, heavy metals and other toxins into the environment, including natural water systems. Less understood, however, is what happens to the plastic-based filters that shed these chemicals.

The long-term health of the ocean off the coast of Southern California, and the health of the region's freshwater streams and rivers and lakes, soon could hinge on the Trump administration's definition of a single word: ditch.

New research indicates that over 100,000 landslides were triggered by a single rainstorm.

Back in July 2023, the remnants of Typhoon Doksuri swept across northern China, bringing exceptional rainfall. I briefly covered this at the time, but there was a lack of clear information about the impacts.

A technical note has been published in the journal Landslides in the last few days (Xie et al. 2026) [this link should allow you to access the paper behind the paywall), which provides greater clarity on what occurred. And the picture is remarkable.

The authors have undertaken detailed mapping of the landslides triggered by Typhoon Doksuri, identifying 104,555 landslides. The authors describe this as “the largest rainfall-induced landslide event in North China to date”.

To give an idea if the scale of this event, the image below shows just a small part of the affected area, centred on [39.9530, 116.04518]. This is a Planet Labs image captured on 25 July 2023, just before the rainfall:-

Satellite image of a part of northern China before Typhoon Doksuri. Image copyright Planet Labs, captured on 25 July 2023, used with permission.

And here is the same area after Typhoon Doksuri:-

Satellite image of a part of northern China after Typhoon Doksuri. Image copyright Planet Labs, captured on 16 August 2023, used with permission.

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

Images copyright Planet Labs, used with permission.

The situation will be familiar to regular readers of this blog – intense rainfall has triggered multiple shallow landslides in steep terrain, which have then coalesced to form channelised debris flows with high mobility and a long runout. Note the way that these debris flows have entered the populated area – in some cases the damage looks very serious:-

Satellite image of a part of northern China after Typhoon Doksuri showing debris flows in populated areas. Image copyright Planet Labs, captured on 16 August 2023, used with permission.

These landslides were triggered by extreme rainfall – Xie et al. (2026) suggest that some areas received over 400 mm in a seven day period, and over 200 mm in 24 hours.

It was not the aim of this paper to consider the cost of these landslides, but this must have been substantial. A paper in Mandarin (Yang et al. 2023) on the meteorology of this event notes that:

“According to incomplete statistics (as of August 10, 2023), the continuous heavy rainfall affected 3.8886 million people in 110 counties (cities, districts) of Hebei Province, causing direct economic losses of 95.811 billion yuan, 29 deaths, and 16 missing persons. It is necessary to review and summarize the precipitation characteristics and weather causes of this event to provide a reference for forecasting extreme torrential rainstorms in North China.”

This translates to US$13.7 billion.

References
Xie, C., Huang, Y., Xu, C. et al. 2026. Over 100,000 landslides triggered by typhoon-induced rainfall in North China in July 2023. Landslides. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-026-02698-w

Yang, X. et al. 2023. Evolution characteristics and formation of the July 2023 severe torrential rain on the eastern foothills of Taihang mountains in Hebei Province.
Meteorological Monthly, 49, 1451-1467. (in Chinese). https://doi.org/10.7519/j.issn.1000-0526.2023.102301

Thanks as ever to the kind people at Planet Labs for providing access to their amazing 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.

On Wednesday, January 14, 2026, the coolest library on Earth was inaugurated at the Concordia station, Antarctica. Samples from glaciers rescued worldwide are now beginning to be stored there for safekeeping. This will allow, among other things, future generations to continue studying traces of past climates trapped under ice, as glaciers on every continent continue to thaw out at a fast pace.

As Earth warms due to climate change, oceans are heating up, becoming more acidic, and losing oxygen. These changes threaten marine life, food webs, and global fisheries. Scientists agree that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is essential, but current efforts are not enough to keep global warming below the 1.5–2 degrees Celsius targets set by the Paris Agreement. Because of this, researchers are exploring climate intervention strategies as possible additions to emissions cuts.