Feed aggregator

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.

For the past month, the Trump administration, via NASA’s Acting Administrator Sean Duffy, has been directing NASA employees to implement workforce adjustments and plan for the shutdown of dozens of missions and programs slated for cuts under in the President’s Budget Request to NASA. Doing so ahead of a Congressionally-approved budget for fiscal year 2026 (FY26) is tantamount to illegal impoundment of federal funds appropriated for the current fiscal year (FY25), according to an 18 July letter to Duffy signed by 64 members of Congress.

Now, despite warnings that their actions are illegal, NPR reports that Duffy and other senior NASA officials have continued to secretly direct NASA employees to draw up plans to end at least two major satellite missions specifically designed to monitor global carbon dioxide. Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO)-2, a free-orbiting satellite, and OCO-3, which is attached to the International Space Station, are slated for defunding in the 2026 President’s Budget Request (PBR).

David Crisp, a retired NASA atmospheric physicist who was the principal investigator of the original OCO mission and was OCO-2’s science team leader, told NPR that he was contacted by several NASA employees who asked him pointed questions about the satellites that added up to mission termination plans.

 
Related

•  Why a NASA satellite that scientists and farmers rely on may be destroyed on purpose
•  Implementing Trump’s proposed NASA cuts illegal before Congress passes budget, Democrats say
•  Read the letter from lawmakers to Acting Administrator Duffy
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center

“What I have heard is direct communications from people who were making those plans, who weren’t allowed to tell me that that’s what they were told to do. But they were allowed to ask me questions,” Crisp said. “They were asking me very sharp questions. The only thing that would have motivated those questions was [that] somebody told them to come up with a termination plan.” (Crisp is also a Fellow of AGU, which publishes Eos.)

Two current NASA employees confirmed to NPR that NASA leaders were told to make plans to terminate projects that would lose funding should Trump’s PBR be enacted. The employees, who requested anonymity, also told NPR that agency leadership is seeking private backers to keep the OCO satellites running should they lose federal funding.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatories were designed specifically to monitor and map the global carbon budget, and they have provided valuable data about the drivers of climate change. The satellites also exhibited a surprising ability: monitoring plant growth. The mission has provided maps of photosynthesis around the world that have proved valuable tools for farmers and the agricultural industry, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Experts warn that farmers could lose access to those tools if the satellites are privatized or decommissioned.

“Just from an economic standpoint, it makes no economic sense to terminate NASA missions that are returning incredibly valuable data,” Crisp said.

Growing plants emit a form of light detectable by OCO-2 and OCO-3. Here, red, pink, and white indicate areas of growth and gray indicates areas of little growth. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio Budgets Pending

Both the Senate and House appropriations committees recently released FY26 funding bills for NASA for consideration by Congress. The House does seek to cut NASA’s overall budget, though far less than requested by the Trump administration. The House’s draft bill does not break down appropriations by NASA’s subdivisions or programs, so there is little information about whether OCO would be defunded should the House’s budget be adopted.

The draft budget from the Senate appropriations committee, which also doesn’t mention OCO by name, nonetheless offers more details about what funding they would approve. Under that budget framework, NASA would receive $24.9 billion total (up from $24.8 billion in FY25). NASA’s Science Mission Directorate would lose a modest amount of funding ($7.3 billion, down from $7.5 billion), and the Earth Science division, which operates OCO, would also lose some funds ($2.17 billion, down from $2.2 billion).

The Senate committee’s more detailed explanation may shed light on its plans for OCO and other Earth-observing missions:

• “The Committee rejects the mission terminations proposed in the fiscal year 2026 budget request for Earth Science, Planetary Science, Astrophysics, and Heliophysics.” That’s about as explicit as they can be.
• “In advancing the U.S. national interest, NASA should seek, to the extent practicable, to retain public ownership of technologies, scientific data, and discoveries made using public funds.” This directive runs counter to NASA’s plans to privatize satellites that Trump seeks to defund.
• “Earth Science missions could help to understand the efficacy of carbon dioxide removal proposals, including to track carbon stocks and carbon cycling in aboveground biomass and coastal marine ecosystems.” The committee recognizes that Earth-observing satellites are important to the future of the planet.

Neither the House nor Senate appropriations bills have been taken up by either chamber of Congress. The bills still need to be passed by their respective chambers, reconciled into a single budget bill that passes both chambers of Congress, and signed into law by the president before FY25 ends on 30 September.

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

Correction 5 August 2025: David Crisp’s position with NASA and his association with AGU have been corrected.

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org. Text © 2025. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

A previously unexploited source of information is now throwing new light on Earth's climate during the age of dinosaurs. Fossilized dinosaur teeth show that concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during the Mesozoic Era, i.e., 252 to 66 million years ago, were far higher than they are today. This has been determined by researchers at the universities in Göttingen, Mainz, and Bochum following the analysis of oxygen isotopes in the dental enamel of dinosaur teeth.

A massive landslide has destroyed a remote Himalayan village. Fifty or more people may have died.

Astonishing and terrifying footage has appeared today of a dreadful debris flow that struck the village of Tharali (also called Dharali in some places) in Uttarakhand today. The video has been widely shared on social media. This is a version on Youtube (the footage starts at about 6 seconds):-

There is confusion about the location of this event, but i believe it is at: [31.0406, 78.7811]. This is a Google Earth view of the village in question:-

Google Earth view of the site of the 5 August 2025 debris flow at Tharali in northern India.

News reports indicate that four people are known to have died and that about 50 people are missing, although there will be huge uncertainty in those numbers.

Whilst this event has been variously described as a flood or a flash flood, it is without doubt a debris flow (i.e. a landslide). The trigger appears to have been a cloudburst event. The exact mechanism to generate the debris flow is unclear at present, but the valley above Tharali is steep and rugged:-

Google Earth view of the valley that generated the 5 August 2025 debris flow at Tharali in northern India.

Note the marker that delineates Tharali – it is the valley above the village that has generated the flow. Possible causes could be multiple landslides that have combined to create a channelised debris flow, a single large landslide that transitioned into the flow, or a valley blocking landslide that collapsed. We won’t know until satellite or aerial imagery is available.

Rescue operations are going to be hampered by the blockage of other roads by the same rainfall event, the remote location and the low survivability of such debris flows.

Return to The Landslide Blog homepage Text © 2023. 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.

Discover a vast, previously unknown world of microbial life that survives—and even thrives—for hundreds of millions of years in some of the planet's harshest environments.

A study published in the journal Tectonics has provided new insights into the forces that cause tectonic movements in Europe's most seismically active regions. Researchers used advanced satellite data to track land movements in Greece, western Turkey and the southern Balkan countries.

Periods of extreme heat often lead to increased exposure to ground-level ozone, in addition to other negative effects. This is dangerous for humans, the environment and agriculture. A study led by Forschungszentrum Jülich now provides surprising findings: With strong global warming, ozone pollution could decrease in some regions of the world.

A research team led by Dr. Shi Hailiang at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a novel infrared imaging payload and AI-based retrieval framework capable of detecting carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄) emissions from space at a spatial resolution of approximately 100 meters.

As giant planet HIP 67522 b orbits its host star, it triggers its own doom. The planet orbits HIP 67522, a young star slightly larger than the Sun, in just 7 Earth days. At just 17 million years old, the star is far more active than our Sun, regularly flaring and releasing massive amounts of energy and stellar material.

By using observations from three exoplanet telescopes, scientists have found that these flares don’t occur at random times and locations like on our Sun. Instead, they are concentrated at a particular time in the planet’s orbit, which suggests that the planet itself could be triggering the flares. What’s more, the flares are also pointed at the planet, bombarding it with nearly 6 times more radiation than it would experience if the flares occurred at random.

“We want to understand the space weather of these systems in order to understand how planets evolve over time, how much high-energy radiation they get, how much wind they’re exposed to, what consequences that has on the evolution of their atmospheres, and, down the line, habitability,” said Ekaterina Ilin, lead researcher on the discovery and an astronomer at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) in Dwingeloo.

Magnetic Interactions

Space weather is common in our solar system. At Earth’s relatively safe distance from the Sun, space weather manifests as aurorae and enhanced solar wind that, nonetheless, can wreak havoc on navigation and communication systems.

But in exoplanet systems, space weather can be far more deadly. Stars have strong magnetic fields, which are even stronger and more turbulent when stars are young. A star’s magnetic field lines stretch out from its surface, carrying superheated plasma along with them. Field lines regularly twist and tangle and coil until they eventually snap back into place, releasing stored energy and stellar material in a flare or coronal mass ejection (CME).

Astronomers have observed exoplanets orbiting so close to their stars that their atmospheres or even rocky surfaces are being blasted away by intense stellar radiation, winds, and flares. But for decades, astronomers have theorized that the connection between stars and close-in planets can go both ways.

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory detected this X1-class solar flare from the Sun on 22 March 2024. This video was taken in extreme-ultraviolet light that highlights hot material in the flare. Credit: NASA/SDO

According to the theory, some planets orbit so close to their star that they are inside the star’s magnetic boundary, the so-called sub-Alfvénic zone. Such a so-called short-period planet could gather up magnetic energy like a windup toy as it orbits and release it in waves along the star’s magnetic field lines. When the energetic waves reach the star’s surface, they could trigger a flare back toward the planet.

The idea was born after the discovery of the first exoplanet—51 Pegasi b—in 1995 showed astronomers that planets could orbit extremely close to their host stars (51 Pegasi b has a 4.23-day orbit). Ilin said that although the theory has existed since the early 2000s, it has taken a while to find even one exoplanet that might fit the bill because most planets discovered thus far orbit much older stars with few flares and weak magnetic fields.

Too Close for Comfort

Ilin and her colleagues combed through thousands of confirmed and candidate exoplanets detected by the now-retired Kepler Space Telescope and the extant Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). They looked for young, flaring stars with close-in giant planets—a very broad search with hundreds of results—and narrowed their search down by looking for planets that might orbit within the sub-Alfvénic zone and for stars with strange flare timings.

“It was really a shot in the dark,” Ilin said.

After a long, tedious search, the team homed in on HIP 67522 and its two planets: planet HIP 67522 b, with its 7-day orbit, and a second giant planet with a 14-day orbit. The star’s flares were clustered together, but only barely within the margin of significance.

“The expectation was that it would have one of the strongest magnetic interactions based on how close the star is to the [inner] planet, how big the star is, how big the planet is, how young it is, [and] how strong a magnetic field we expect,” Ilin said. Despite the marginal significance, she thought, “Oh, actually, it might be worth a second look.”

“Statistically, almost impossible.”

The researchers observed the star with the European Space Agency’s Characterising Exoplanets Satellite (CHEOPS) for 5 years. They characterized 15 stellar flares during that period, a typical number for this size and age of star, but found that the flares clustered together when the innermost planet passed between the star and the telescope’s vantage point at Earth.

“When the planet is close to transit, the flaring goes up by a factor of 5 or 6, and that should not happen,” Ilin explained. “Statistically, almost impossible.”

“It is fascinating to see clustered flaring following the planet as it orbits its star,” said Evgenya Shkolnik, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University in Tempe who was not involved with this research. Some of Shkolnik’s past work investigated enhanced stellar activity in Sun-like stars with hot Jupiters, but those stars were much older and did not flare as much as HIP 67522. “It makes sense that more flares could be triggered through the same type of magnetic star-planet interactions we observed,” she said.

“It makes its life even worse by whipping up this interaction…and firing all these CMEs directly into the planet’s face.”

Like other short-period giant planets, HIP 67522 b likely would have been losing its atmosphere to stellar radiation no matter what because of how closely its orbits—indeed, the planet is about the size of Jupiter but just 5% its mass. But because the flares are synced with HIP 67522 b’s orbital period, Ilin’s team calculated that HIP 67522 b is experiencing roughly 6 times the stellar radiation that it would if the flares were randomly distributed, and the corresponding CMEs are pointed directly at it.

The team’s simple estimates show that because of this increased radiation, the planet is losing its atmosphere about twice as fast as it would otherwise.

“It makes its life even worse by whipping up this interaction…and firing all these CMEs directly into the planet’s face,” Ilin said. These results were published in Nature.

“This discovery is extremely exciting,” said Antoine Strugarek, an astrophysicist at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission in Paris who was not involved with the research. “Such magnetic interactions are clearly the prime candidate to explain the observed phenomenon, and no other theories are really convincing to explain these observations, to the best of my knowledge.”

Expanding the Search

Strugarek explained that the magnetic interaction observed in the HIP 76522 system has a few analogs in our own solar system. The Sun experiences “sympathetic flares,” he said, in which a solar flare in one spot can trigger another one nearby—they account for about 5% of solar flares. And in the Jupiter system, the Galilean moons Io, Ganymede, and Europa propagate waves along their orbits that trigger polar aurorae on Jupiter.

For HIP 76522, “the theory is that the perturbation originates from the exoplanet. This is definitively a possibility, and extremely exciting for future research,” Strugarek said. He added that he would like to see future work constrain the geometry of HIP 76522’s magnetic field to better understand the star-planet connection.

“We need to scrutinize all the compact star-planet systems with large flares for such occurrences. This should be ubiquitous for very compact systems.”

He also wants to go back into the archives to look for more exoplanets like this. “Now that we have one tentative system, we need to scrutinize all the compact star-planet systems with large flares for such occurrences,” Strugarek said. “This should be ubiquitous for very compact systems.

Shkolnik added, “I would love to see dedicated observing programs at both higher- and lower-energy wavelengths, namely, in the far-ultraviolet, submillimeter, and radio wavelengths.” The far ultraviolet is more sensitive to flares, and finding more flares might confirm the theory that the planet is triggering them.

Thus far, HIP 76522 b is the only planet discovered to be magnetically influencing its star. Ilin said that when her team started looking into HIP 76522 b, it was the youngest short-period planet in their catalogs. TESS has since observed several more, and Ilin’s team is ready to investigate them.

The researchers also hope to flip the script on star-planet interactions. Instead of starting with an exoplanet and looking for clustered stellar flares, they want to first look for flare patterns and then find the planet causing them. The untested technique could detect exoplanets around stars that other detection methods struggle with: young, active stars.

“It is a bit of a statistically tough cookie,” she said, “but it will be quite exciting if we can make that happen.”

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

Citation: Cartier, K. M. S. (2025), Exoplanet triggers stellar flares and hastens its demise, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250284. Published on 5 August 2025. Text © 2025. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Conferences are key enablers of community building within and outside academic ecosystems, bringing together broad groups of individuals with different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. They can also provide safe and constructive environments for open discussions of cultural issues important to scientific communities, including those related to equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI, also known as DEI) [Hauss, 2021; Zierath, 2016].

These discussions, which likely would not otherwise occur on a broad scale outside of meetings [Oester et al., 2017; Barrows et al., 2021], are particularly valuable in geoscience and climate research. Those fields are notably lacking in diversity, and within them, hearing the voices of marginalized groups is crucial for guiding effective evidence-informed public policy [Standring and Lidskog, 2021; Bernard and Cooperdock, 2018; Colquhoun and Fernando, 2020; Dowey et al., 2021]. Involvement in conference EDI programming by a wide swath of the scientific community can also help to ameliorate the academic “minority tax” that often disproportionately burdens scientists from underrepresented groups with the responsibility for driving change.

Many conferences now include EDI-related sessions [e.g., Fiedler and Brittani, 2021]. However, encouraging broad engagement with EDI- and community culture–focused sessions—both those looking inward within academia and those looking outward at how science affects society—at conferences remains a challenge. On the basis of our experiences organizing these types of sessions and the current literature on best practices, we propose eight changes that organizers and convenors can implement to boost attendance in, engagement with, and useful outputs from such discussions. These approaches group into three themes: focusing attention on EDI programming, facilitating open and productive discussion, and emphasizing evidence and solutions.

Focusing Attention on EDI Programming

A key part of generating wider engagement with equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) sessions at conferences is indicating that they are priorities for organizers and all attendees.

1. Be thoughtful about time-tabling. A key part of generating wider engagement with EDI sessions is indicating that they are priorities for organizers and all attendees (especially those in leadership roles), rather than ancillary topics of interest only to marginalized groups. Meeting convenors can signal this importance through effective time-tabling of EDI sessions, which can enhance attendance and engagement [Burnett et al., 2020].

Specifically, we advise against holding these sessions at the start or end of the day, when attendance tends to be lowest, especially for those with caregiving responsibilities. Likewise, organizers should be cognizant of how placing these sessions at the very end of conference programs may result in sparse attendance, unintentionally portray the session topics as less valuable to the community, and reduce their effectiveness in influencing change. Instead, we suggest that convenors schedule EDI-related sessions during the main program alongside prominent scientific programming and use plenary and keynote talks to highlight and support discussions of EDI.

2. Optimize physical placements. In addition to careful time-tabling of EDI sessions, organizers should consider how to maximize attendees’ opportunities to engage with related posters and talks by designating optimal locations for content sharing. EDI-related issues have an advantage over many scientific topics in that they are relevant to all attendees; hence, placing them in central, easily accessible locations where they are more visible can spur additional attention and discussion. Additional suggestions for placing EDI posters include displaying them outside main poster halls (e.g., in reception areas), allowing them to be presented multiple times (e.g., once in an “EDI” session and once in a “science” session), and fully integrating them into scientific poster sessions to help normalize conversations around culture in science.

Facilitating Open and Productive Discussion

3. Create welcoming and respectful spaces. Considering how personal issues related to EDI can be, it is crucial that conferences establish robust and agreed-upon codes of conduct and norms for related discussions, as well as mechanisms to enforce them if needed [e.g., Favaro et al., 2016]. Such frameworks help to ensure that conferences are spaces where attendees can present their ideas freely while being accountable for their contributions. The code of conduct and norms should also make clear that reasonable and respectful challenges of ideas (and recognition of how the conduct of these discussions affects others) are encouraged when discussing issues of community culture, in the same way they are in discussions of scientific ideas. Common terminologies for use within EDI discussions can also help to overcome differences in the meanings of words or concepts among countries and languages [Fernando et al., 2024], which can be especially important at climate and geoscience research conferences, given their international attendance.

Many conferences group all EDI-related contributions into large catchall sessions, which can make it challenging for attendees to identify best practices relating to specific aspects of EDI.

4. Avoid additional costs for attendees. Many conferences limit attendees to giving a single oral presentation, which can force them to choose between presenting their science (which often is more highly rewarded in academic systems) or their EDI-related work or experiences. Best practice has been showcased by some organizations, such as AGU, which now allows presenters to contribute two abstracts to its Annual Meeting. Nonetheless, the costs of submitting an additional abstract to a conference can impose a significant financial constraint on a researcher, especially if they must pay for poster printing in cases where only one oral contribution is permitted. When reviewing EDI- and community-focused abstracts, organizers should consider dispensing with single oral abstract submission rules, issuing fee waivers for these abstracts, or issuing small rebates in registration fees (e.g., $50) to partially cover poster printing costs.

5. Group EDI contributions by topic. EDI encompasses a wide range of specific subtopics, from school education to inclusion in graduate programs and beyond. However, many conferences group all EDI-related contributions into large catchall sessions, which can make it challenging for attendees to identify best practices relating to specific aspects of EDI. Organizers should solicit enough EDI contributions that they can group them by theme. Especially at larger conferences, having themes will help organizers reach the critical mass of posters and talks needed to hold parallel sessions focusing on different issues (e.g., one about geoscience education in schools and another about accessible fieldwork), hence maximizing the potential for useful discussions. The United Kingdom’s Royal Astronomical Society, for example, has demonstrated best practice in its larger meetings by soliciting contributions to specifically organized EDI sessions that are integrated into the main conference program but have different focuses (e.g., outreach, supporting students and postdocs).

Emphasizing Evidence and Solutions

6. Encourage sharing of data and applicable lessons. A major benefit of conferences is the opportunities they offer to develop new ideas in groups and to identify and optimize existing solutions that can be applied in new settings. Science departments and institutions often run dedicated programs to widen participation, increase diversity, and improve inclusivity, many of which include elements for monitoring and evaluating their success. However, these programs—and the qualitative and quantitative data they produce—are rarely discussed or presented in conference settings, limiting chances for shared identification of lessons learned and where else such lessons can be applied.

To call attention to the scientific basis behind effective EDI interventions, organizers should explicitly encourage contributions that showcase institutional programs and their evaluations. This encouragement might include asking presenters to share data reflecting how their intervention had positive outcomes or, conversely, why it was ineffective (and what lessons can be learned as a result). Organizers could also provide guidelines for how to present EDI work and outreach programs such that intervention successes and best practices can be shared clearly and potentially scaled for use in other institutions (e.g., by explicitly addressing issues of funding, time and added labor costs, and other logistical requirements). Furthermore, organizers should consider optimal formats for engagement around this information. Standard lecture-style talks, for example, may be less effective than town halls, open discussions, or breakout working groups.

Making an effective case for the need for broad interventions often requires providing quantitative evidence linking individual experiences to systemic and problematic issues.

7. Encourage presenters to link experience and evidence. Issues relating to EDI, scientific culture, and the academic community are naturally rooted in individuals’ lived experiences, and hence, presentations on these experiences often form a substantial portion of EDI sessions. As powerful as these presentations typically are, making an effective case for the need for broad interventions to scientists and decisionmakers (e.g., funding bodies) often requires providing quantitative evidence linking individual experiences to systemic and problematic issues.

Encouraging presenters in EDI sessions to frame their discussions in a scientific light when possible—for example, by presenting a clear synthesis of background literature and an evidence base for the work—can help foster positive reactions and productive decisionmaking for implementing change. Professional associations and conference hosts could, again, provide presenters with best-practice guidelines for discussing EDI topics (for example, encouraging the use of quantitative evaluation and significance testing), given that many EDI presenters are not social scientists by training.

8. Provide space and funding for additional community events. Society and conference leadership should also support their community members and attendees in organizing affiliated EDI-related events that do not fall within traditional conference programs of talks and posters. This support could include providing space or other accommodations (e.g., free refreshments) for groups to arrange meetups or social events that encourage community building and a sense of belonging. Or it could entail offering groups the opportunity to add their events to the main conference program, rather than organizing them on the periphery. When possible, support should also be offered for these groups to write and publish summaries of observations and outcomes from their EDI-related sessions—for example, through small grants funding the publication of white papers—to extend the reach and impact of their discussions.

Progressing Toward Greater Engagement

Enacting many of the above suggestions will come with financial, logistical, or workload costs for conference organizers. Waiving or reducing abstract fees for EDI-related abstracts, for example, would reduce revenue and must be balanced against other financial constraints and commitments, such as providing financial support to people who would otherwise be unable to attend.

These suggestions for change need not all be acted upon simultaneously. Gradual change, such as tackling the simplest improvements first, still represents progress.

Nonetheless, some suggestions (e.g., optimizing scheduling and physical placement of sessions and soliciting more EDI-related abstracts) should incur little to no additional financial cost and could be acted upon immediately. Others, such as developing guidelines for effective presentation of EDI talks and posters, will likely require more sustained effort over multiple conference cycles. Outside experts in EDI, for example, from the diversity committees of professional societies, may be able to help here.

Ideally, conference organizers would adopt all the outlined approaches—and perhaps find additional ways to spotlight and support EDI research and discussions at their events. Considering the many challenges and constraints of conference planning, though, it is important to note that these suggestions for change need not all be acted upon simultaneously. Gradual change, such as tackling the simplest improvements first, still represents progress and should encourage broader engagement in EDI sessions and conversations at scientific conferences. This engagement is especially vital in geoscience and climate science, where research often has inherent and significant implications for communities and, hence, where the presence of diverse voices is key to producing effective change.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Emily Ward and Becca Edwards for their helpful suggestions in compiling this article.

References

Barrows, A. S., M. A. Sukhai, and I. R. Coe (2021), So, you want to host an inclusive and accessible conference?, FACETS, 6(1), 131–138, https://doi.org/10.1139/facets-2020-0017.

Bernard, R. E., and E. H. Cooperdock (2018), No progress on diversity in 40 years, Nat. Geosci., 11(5), 292–295, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-018-0116-6.

Burnett, N. P., et al. (2020), Conference scheduling undermines diversity efforts, Nat. Ecol. Evol., 4, 1,283–1,284, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-020-1276-5.

Colquhoun, R., and B. Fernando (2020), An audit for action, Astron. Geophys., 61(5), 5.40–5.42, https://doi.org/10.1093/astrogeo/ataa075.

Dowey, N., et al. (2021), A UK perspective on tackling the geoscience racial diversity crisis in the Global North, Nat. Geosci., 14(5), 256–259, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00737-w.

Favaro, B., et al. (2016), Your science conference should have a code of conduct, Front. Mar. Sci., 3, 103, https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2016.00103.

Fernando, B., et al. (2024), Evaluation of the InSightSeers and DART Boarders mission observer programmes, Nat. Astron., 8, 1,521–1,528, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02434-1.

Fiedler, B. P., and S. Brittani (2021), Conference critique: An analysis of equity, diversity, and inclusion programming, paper presented at 2021 ALA Virtual Annual Conference, Assoc. of Coll. and Res. Libr.

Hauss, K. (2021), What are the social and scientific benefits of participating at academic conferences? Insights from a survey among doctoral students and postdocs in Germany, Res. Eval., 30(1), 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1093/reseval/rvaa018.

Oester, S., et al. (2017), Why conferences matter—An illustration from the International Marine Conservation Congress, Front. Mar. Sci., 4, 257, https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2017.00257.

Standring, A., and R. Lidskog (2021), (How) does diversity still matter for the IPCC? Instrumental, substantive and co-productive logics of diversity in global environmental assessments, Climate, 9(6), 99, https://doi.org/10.3390/cli9060099.

Zierath, J. R. (2016), Building bridges through scientific conferences, Cell, 167(5), 1,155–1,158, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2016.11.006.

Author Information

Benjamin Fernando (bfernan9@jh.edu), Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.; and Mariama Dryák-Vallies, Center for Education, Engagement and Evaluation, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder

Citation: Fernando, B., and M. Dryák-Vallies (2025), Eight ways to encourage equality, diversity, and inclusion discussions at conferences, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250291. Published on 5 August 2025. This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author(s). Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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

Evaluating progress toward sustainable agriculture is essential for assessing a country’s commitment to sustainability but remains highly complex, particularly given the varying socioeconomic conditions and natural endowments of countries worldwide.

Rich picture created by one of the breakout groups during the stakeholder workshop in Austria. Participants were asked to draw relevant elements of a sustainable agricultural system from the perspective of Austria and then add notes to the existing Sustainable Agriculture Matrix (SAM) indicator wheel with suggestions for relevant sustainability indicators. Credit: Folberth et al. [2025], Figure S15

A recent study by Folberth et al. [2025] represents one of the first attempts to address the critical challenge of balancing global comparability and national specificity in agricultural sustainability indicators. Leveraging the Sustainable Agriculture Matrix (SAM), an indicator system that provides consistent evaluations across countries, the authors co-evaluate the framework with Austrian stakeholders. This process reveals the limitations of current global indicator systems in capturing context-specific social, economic, and environmental nuances.

The study highlights the value of engaging diverse national stakeholders to identify gaps and proposes strategies to regionalize indicators without compromising global coherence. By advancing methods for co-creating regionally tailored frameworks, this research provides a roadmap for enhancing the relevance and applicability of sustainability assessments worldwide.

Citation: Folberth, C., Sinabell, F., Schinko, T., Hanger-Kopp, S., Lappöhn, S., Mitter, H., et al. (2025). Integrating global comparability and national specificity in agricultural sustainability indicators through stakeholder-science co-evaluation in Austria. Community Science, 4, e2024CSJ000092.  https://doi.org/10.1029/2024CSJ000092

—Xin Zhang, Guest Associate Editor, Community Science

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.

Author(s): M. J. MacDonald, H. A. Scott, K. H. Ma, S. R. Klein, T. F. Baumann, R. W. Falcone, K. B. Fournier, C. M. Huntington, E. Johnsen, C. C. Kuranz, E. V. Marley, A. M. Saunders, M. P. Springstead, P. A. Sterne, M. R. Trantham, and T. Döppner

We present the use of x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XFS) to a sensitive temperature diagnostic in shocked foams at temperatures of 30–75 eV. Cobalt-doped foams were shock compressed using a planar drive at the OMEGA laser facility and photo-pumped with a Zn Heα x-ray source. Analysis of the resul…

[Phys. Rev. E 112, 025203] Published Tue Aug 05, 2025

A quick clay landslide in the Quebec region has destroyed most of a farm and a local road.

Over the next few days I will try to bring the blog up to date with some of the major landslides that have occurred whilst I have been on leave.

To start, on 15 July 2025 an interesting quick clay landslide occurred at the Rivière-Blanche Est range, in Saint-Thuribe, in Portneuf, Canada. Radio Canada has an excellent piece on this event (in French) that includes images and videos. They have also posted this video (again, in French) that includes some very good aerial imagery of the site:-

This includes the still below:-

The 15 July 2025 quick clay landslide at Portneuf in Canada. Still from a video posted to Youtube by Radio Canada.

The location of this landslide is, I think, [46.69818, -72.15138]. This is a Google Earth image of the site collected in July 2024:-

Google Earth image of the site of the 15 July 2025 quick clay landslide at Portneuf in Canada.

The news reports that I have read do not highlight an obvious trigger for this landslide, but it is interesting to note that the toe is located on the outside of the river bend, where erosion is high. There had been a period of rainfall prior to the landslide, but this does not seem to have been exceptional.

No-one was killed or injured in the landslide, but there is substantial loss of farmland and, in all probability, the farm buildings. The road has also been destroyed. Quick clay landslides are a known hazard in this part of Quebec, but interestingly this site was not classified as being potentially exposed to landslides.

Acknowledgement

Thanks to loyal reader Maurice, and others, for highlighting this event.

Return to The Landslide Blog homepage Text © 2023. 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.

Storm Floris made landfall in northern parts of the UK on the morning of Monday August 4, 2025, bringing intense rainfall followed by severe winds throughout the afternoon. The Met Office issued an amber weather warning for much of Scotland and yellow alerts for parts of Northern Ireland and northern England.

Climate change is starving the Arctic Ocean of essential nutrients, with the region's six largest rivers now delivering far less of the type of nitrogen that marine ecosystems need to survive, according to new research in one of Earth's most vulnerable regions.

As the climate warms and regional drying becomes more frequent, peatlands—some of the planet's most important carbon sinks—are increasingly under threat. But a study led by an international team including scientists from the University of Bristol has shown peatland ecosystems may have a natural defense through the combined forces of plant changes and microbes.

A UNSW-led global collaborative study has found most shoreline prediction models are effective at forecasting changes to natural, sandy beaches with an accuracy of approximately 10 meters.

Almost a quarter of the glaciers in one of the world's last pristine ecosystems have melted from climate change, according to new research from Monash University.

If your home was destroyed by a sudden disaster that you couldn't control, you would hope that at the very least, your insurance would cover your losses. However, disaster risk financing systems are struggling to keep pace with growing economic losses. Natural catastrophic (NatCat) events are becoming increasingly costly, and recent global warming could potentially worsen the situation.

NASA has a long record of monitoring Earth's sea surface height, information critical not only for tracking how the ocean changes over time but also for hurricane forecasting. These extreme storms can cost the United States billions of dollars each year, wreaking havoc on lives and property. Meteorologists have worked to improve forecasts for a hurricane's path, or track, as well as its intensity, measured as surface wind speed. Sentinel-6B, the U.S.-European satellite launching later this year, will help in that effort.

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

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

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

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

In Search of Climate Archives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Vulnerable Carbon Pool

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

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

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

—Kaja Šeruga, Science Writer

Citation: Šeruga, K. (2025), Cave deposits reveal a permafrost-free Arctic, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250285. Published on 4 August 2025. Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.