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For decades, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has offered a snapshot of the planet's changing climate—but University of Toronto researchers have found that some of the underlying data underrepresents a key driver of Arctic warming.

McGill engineering researchers have introduced an open-source model that makes it easier for experts and non-experts alike to evaluate greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. natural gas supply chains and yields more accurate results.

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.

More than 200 scientists have signed a letter condemning U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to acquire Greenland.

“Greenland’s scientists and citizens have made enormous contributions to the world’s understanding of the Arctic and how rapid Arctic changes are affecting people around the world,” the letter reads. “To Greenlanders: Qujanaq, and we stand with you.”

It follows another letter issued in February 2025, which called the effort “a dangerous distraction from the urgent work of addressing environmental change impacts to U.S. citizens.”

The president first expressed interest in buying Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, in 2019, during his first term in office, and has mentioned it throughout his second term. The campaign for the acquisition has intensified in the wake of the United States’ seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

 
Related

•  Letter from US Researchers in Support of Greenland’s Self-Governance and Autonomy
•  Statement From U.S. Scientists in Solidarity With Greenland
• Why Greenland Is Indispensable to Global Climate Science
 

Greenland is rich in oil and in minerals such as lithium, copper, and rare earths. However, Malte Humpert, founder and senior fellow at The Arctic Institute, told CNN that the idea of extensive rare earth mining on the island is “completely bonkers.”

“You might as well mine on the Moon,” he said. “In some respects, it’s worse than the Moon.”

Greenland is also strategically located between the North American and Eurasian Arctic. Its northwest coast is also home to the U.S. Pituffik Space Base.

“If we don’t take Greenland, Russia or China will take Greenland, and I am not going to let that happen,” Trump told reporters on 11 January from Air Force One. “One way or the other, we’re going to have Greenland … They need us much more than we need them.”

“Times have changed since Inuit lands were mere commodities that could be bought and sold,” wrote Sara Olsvig, Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar in a January 2025 statement. “In today’s world, we are active participants in decision-making about our lands and resources. We are beyond the times of typical colonial attitudes of superiority.”

In a LinkedIn post last week, Greenland’s prime minster, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, called the rhetoric “totally unacceptable” and “disrespectful.” A statement issued by the leaders of several European countries affirmed that “Greenland belongs to its people.”

Greenland is a critical location for climate science research, and many researchers have expressed concerns about how a U.S. takeover could affect this international scientific enterprise.

“Anything that injures our long-standing friendly relationship with Greenland is also an injury to science,” Yarrow Axford, a paleoclimatologist and one of the creators of the letter, wrote in an email to Eos. “There’s so much climate science and other important work that can only be done in Greenland, and only in partnership with Greenland’s people. I hope we can all weather this latest storm together.”

Mia Tuccillo, a paleolimnologist and Arctic scientist who is advised by Yarrow and also helped author the letter, wrote in an email to Eos that the research collaborations between the two nations are relatively new, and are delicate because of the history of U.S. intervention in Greenland.

“The statements by our government and by Trump that challenge Greenland’s sovereignty directly threaten these new priorities and collaborations—things that have greatly revolutionized and improved the ethos of geosciences—and things that are still very new and very, very valuable,” Tuccillo wrote.

“A unilateral US takeover threatens to disrupt the open scientific collaboration that is helping us understand the threat of global sea-level rise,” wrote glaciologist Martin Siegert in The Conversation.

The U.S. scientists behind the letter also issued a statement expressing solidarity with Greenland. Many shared (unattributed) personal messages at the end of the letter.

“Greenland is a unique culture and a critical part of the earth’s climate system, not a pawn in a real estate deal,” wrote one scientist.

“Without the help, knowledge, and skills of people in Greenland, we would have never been able to even reach our field site let alone conduct our research. When Greenlanders lead the way, our science improves and becomes more useful and relevant to both local and the international communities,” wrote another.

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

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correctly differentiate between the letters issued in February 2025 and January 2026.

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

The fault beneath Istanbul doesn't behave the way scientists once thought.

Publication date: Available online 6 January 2026

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): Jiaxin Liu, Feng Yu, Yunxiao Yang, Yinghao Wu

Publication date: Available online 6 January 2026

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): Peerawat Artitthang, Chuang Yao, Mingpei Lin

The US is saber-rattling over Greenland once again. The vast island's natural resources are back on the agenda, a year after then-US national security advisor Michael Waltz announced: "This is about critical minerals. This is about natural resources."

Connecticut gets snow in the winter, but that's about it for bad weather.

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the planet's greatest driver of year-to-year climate swings, shapes temperature, rainfall, and extreme weather around the world. Its impact ranges from heat waves and floods to air pollution and disruptions to food security, with growing evidence that these climate fluctuations influence human health and economic growth.

Global efforts to reduce pollution will not be enough to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, scientists say. We will also need to extract over 10 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year for the next century. However, currently only two gigatons are being removed annually, so we have to rapidly scale up existing methods or come up with new ideas.

Climate change is no longer just about melting ice or hotter summers. It is also a financial problem. Droughts, floods, storms and heat waves damage crops, factories and infrastructure. At the same time, the global push to cut greenhouse gas emissions creates risks for countries that depend on oil, gas or coal.

Weeks after Cyclone Senyar made landfall in northern Sumatra, Indonesia, the province of Aceh continues to struggle. The cyclone passed through the Strait of Malacca in late November, bringing heavy rains and causing widespread flooding in parts of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. More than 500 people were killed and 250,000 people displaced in Aceh alone.

After a weekend of extreme heat and windy conditions, more than 30 blazes were still burning in Victoria and New South Wales as of Sunday evening, including major fires in the Otways, near the town of Alexandra in central Victoria, and on the NSW-Victoria border near Corryong.

Rivers deliver freshwater, nutrients, and carbon to Earth's oceans, influencing the chemistry of coastal seawater worldwide. Notably, a river's alkalinity and the levels of dissolved inorganic carbon it brings to the sea help to shape regional conditions for marine life, including shellfish and corals. These factors also affect the ability of coastal seawater to absorb carbon dioxide from Earth's atmosphere—which can have major implications for climate change.

When airplanes create trails of soot and moisture, water in the atmosphere condenses on the particles and freezes, leaving behind the familiar streaks known as condensation trails—or contrails. Contrails are so frequently the target of conspiracy theories that it might seem as though the word is a portmanteau of “conspiracy trails.” And although contrails do not contain harmful chemicals, these bands of condensation can, in fact, affect the atmosphere, with some reports suggesting that they account for more than half of aircrafts’ warming effect on the climate.

Most of these traces of air travel vanish within minutes of a plane’s passage. To have any effect on even local climate conditions, the air must be cold and humid enough for the contrails to last on the order of hours so that they can spread into a thin blanket of high-altitude ice crystals that captures some of Earth’s outgoing heat.

Though contrails are most recognizable when they pull a fresh veil across a clear sky, it’s within preexisting cirrus clouds that relevant climate conditions are most common. Exactly what percentage of condensation deposits form within clouds and what that means for their effects on the climate, though, have long been uncertain.

“We didn’t expect that.”

Now, new research in Nature Communications aims to elucidate scientists’ understanding of how contrails embedded within high-altitude cirrus clouds affect the climate.

Along with his team, Andreas Petzold, an atmospheric scientist at the research institution Forschungszentrum Jülich, examined 7 years of temperature and humidity data collected by sensors aboard passenger aircraft that together covered a combined 17 million kilometers (10.6 million miles) of flights. They combined these data with satellite-based weather observations to determine how often the conditions for long-lived contrails are met both inside and outside of extant clouds.

Though Petzold expected that the majority of contrails would form in regions preseeded with clouds, he didn’t anticipate the scale. “The fraction was so huge,” he said. “We didn’t expect that.”

In the flight corridors of the Northern Hemisphere over eastern North America, the North Atlantic, and western Europe, where the bulk of data were collected, roughly 90% of long-lived contrails formed within preexisting clouds. Many climate models, however, assume that the atmospheric imprints of aircraft are stamped on clear skies.

The net climate effect of a contrail changes depending on the thickness of the cloud in which it forms. Thicker cirrus clouds can buffer the warming that contrails might contribute and can even lead to local cooling. But when contrails appear in thin clouds (many so thin that the eye can’t see them), the force of their warming can become even more significant than if they had formed in clear skies.

The new findings mean that the relationships between contrails and the climate is more complex than previously realized. “We need to get a quantification of the effects from model studies,” Petzold said, “because we’ve shown that this is such a big fraction, but we do not know how they impact the whole picture.”

Cirrus Streaks

During the day, the Sun’s heat can make a cirrus cloud thickened by a contrail more reflective, creating a local cooling effect. But at night, this contrail thickening traps heat and increases local warming.

In another study published just a few weeks after Petzold’s, a Leipzig University research group studied contrails’ climate effects by examining more than 40,000 contrails that planes streaked through cirrus clouds over a 6-year span.

They found that on average, embedded contrails contributed just 5 milliwatts per square meter of warming across the planet—a measurement of the amount of change in radiative force occurring at any given moment in time. That’s a paltry sum compared to the 3,320 milliwatts per square meter of warming caused by greenhouse gases emitted over the industrial era, as estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“Cirrus are quite important for climate in general.”

Though neither study overturns scientists’ understanding of the way contrails form, said Michael Diamond, a cloud physicist at Florida State University, “one of the really big advances here is just how much high-quality data they’re bringing to bear.”

The data collected by Petzold’s team could help inform future studies of the internal microphysics of cirrus clouds, which is important not only for a better understanding of the climate consequences of aviation but also because “cirrus are quite important for climate in general,” Diamond said. Cirrus is the only cloud type that traps more heat than it reflects, so understanding whether cirrus clouds will become more or less frequent as climate change progresses is a key question to answer.

Results like Petzold’s can also help inform the work that many in and around the aviation industry are doing to improve forecasting so that aviators can follow flight paths that limit the potential for long-lived contrails to form. And though finding ways to eliminate aviation emissions entirely through sustainable fuel sources or battery-powered planes is essential, decreasing the formation of the most impactful forms of long-lived contrails would make a meaningful difference in reducing the near-term warming caused by air travel.

—Syris Valentine (@shapersyris.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Valentine, S. (2026), New insights into the foggy role of contrails within clouds, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260024. Published on 12 January 2026. Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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

Roots are essential plant organs responsible for the uptake of water and nutrients from soil.  However, they are largely hidden from view and notoriously hard to quantify. Roots are often quantified by their mass distribution with depth, which involves separating and weighing roots having a variety of diameters below a cutoff (often 2 millimeters). However, this approach emphasizes the largest roots that contain most of the mass, while the very fine roots with little mass are responsible for most of the biogeochemical functioning.

Billings et al. [2025] have developed a relatively simple method for estimating the volume of soil interacting with fine and coarser roots, by quantifying root abundance instead of mass. They show that the abundance of fine roots does not decline as fast as overall root mass with increasing soil depth. Their results upend the standard paradigm of exponential decline in root functions set by root mass measurements and indicate a new paradigm is needed that links fine-root depth distributions with their hydrological, geochemical and ecological functions.

Citation: Billings, S. A., Sullivan, P. L., Li, L., Hirmas, D. R., Nippert, J. B., Ajami, H., et al. (2025). Contrasting depth dependencies of plant root presence and mass across biomes underscore prolific root-regolith interactions. AGU Advances, 6, e2025AV002072.  https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV002072

—Susan Trumbore, 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.

Recovery operations continue for the 36 victims of the 8 January 2026 garbage landslide in the Philippines.

Recovery operations are continuing at the site of the 8 January 2026 landslide at Binaliw in Cebu, the Philippines. At the time of writing, it is reported that the bodies of eight victims have been recovered, whilst 28 more remain missing. Whilst there were some reports yesterday of signs of life in the debris, the reality is that this is unlikely to be a rescue operation. A further 18 people were injured in the failure.

The location of the landslide is [10.41609, 123.92159].

Recovery operations have been hindered by heavy rainfall and the potential for a further failure at the site. Garbage also generates methane, which represents an additional risk.

There is some footage of the landslide as it occurred posted to Youtube:-

There is also a really good set of drone footage of the aftermath:-

This image, from the drone footage, captures the situation well:-

The aftermath of the 8 January 2026 garbage landslide at Banaliw in the Philippines. Image from a drone video posted to Youtube by The Daily Guardian, courtesy of Reuters.

The victims are believed to be located in the destroyed building at the foot of the Binaliw landslide.

Note the very steep rear scarp of the landslide. It appears that the failure mechanism at the crown was rotational – the remains of a rotated block can be seen forming a bench across the site – with the lower portion transitioning into a flow.

Rotational landslides typically occur in relatively homogenous materials (which at the scale of the landslide, will often be the case for garbage). At the most simple level, it is likely that the garbage pile was over-steepened, perhaps compounded by poor management of water. Work will be needed to understand how that can have occurred, but the processes through which tipping of wate at the top of the pile will be a focus. I would also consider carefully the road that appears to have crossed the waste upslope of the building (now buried). Did that cause local oversteepening?

I have written about garbage landslides repeatedly over the years. In 2011, I highlighted an event at Baguio in the Philippines. In every case, the losses were preventable.

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.

The Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers, located in the Amundsen Sea sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), are among the fastest-melting glaciers on Earth. Together, they are losing ice more rapidly than any other part of Antarctica, raising serious concerns about the long-term stability of the ice sheet and its contribution to future sea-level rise.

In order to understand currents, tides and other ocean dynamics, scientists need to accurately capture sea surface height, or a snapshot of the ocean's surface, including peaks and valleys due to changes in wind, currents and temperature, at any given moment. In order to more accurately forecast ocean circulation and other processes, climate variability, air-sea interactions and extreme weather events, researchers need to be able to accurately predict sea surface height into the future.