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The Independent Review Board has released its report into a 6 million cubic metre landslide in Canada. It indicates that an initial rotational failure triggered a flow slide that travelled 1,400 metres.

On 24 June 2024, a very large landslide affected a heap leach facility (HLF) at the Eagle Gold Mine in Yukon, Canada. I wrote about this event at the time. The failure was of sufficient scale to force the mine into administration – creating a very big pile of problems (if you’ll excuse the pun) for the government. The administrator is PWC, which has now released a report by the Independent Review Board established to understand what happened. The report can be downloaded as a PDF and makes interesting reading. As expected, it is a comprehensive piece of work.

This was a large landslide – the IRB report indicates a volume of 5,946,000 m3 (about 12.3 million tonnes) with a runout distance of 1,400 m. The report includes some nice imagery of the failure, including this picture of the main body of the landslide:-

Figure 1: The main flow slide at the Eagle Gold Mine. Image from the IRB report.

Also included is this image of the upper portions of the landslide:-

Figure 2: The upper portions of the landslide at the Eagle Gold Mine. Image from the IRB report.

The IRB report provides a detailed understanding of the sequence of events that led to the failure. In creating the HLF, the operators created an oversteepened section of ore (locally the slope angle as 36.5o), which was vulnerable to failure. The system for collecting the fluids that were being circulated through the HLF was deficient, allowing the water table to rise within the ore body, and this section of the HLF had low permeability, impeding drainage. Starting in mid-April, the operator increased the level of irrigation within the HLF, allowing the water table to rise until the factor of safety reduced to one.

On 24 June 2024, a rotational failure occurred in the oversteepened section of the HLF at the Eagle Gold Mine. This can be clearly seen in Figure 1. This was a rotational failure which remained within the HLF – see the intact benches in Figure 2.

Within 10 seconds, this triggered a flow slide through static liquefaction, which rapidly moved down the slope (as shown in Figure 2). In Appendix A2, it is estimated that the landslide moved at 9 to 18 metres per second, suggesting that the total time duration of the failure was 1.5 to 2.5 minutes.

I speculated at the time that this was a rotational failure that transitioned into a flowslide.

The IRB report into the Eagle Gold Mine landslide makes a series of recommendations (see page 123 and the following pages). These seem sensible – I can only hope that they are adopted. There has been a long succession of investigations into mining landslides that have also made very sensible recommendations, but failures continue to occur.

But, I would also highlight from an external perspective that some of these recommendations seem surprising. Thus, for example, the IRB recommends that the such facilities should have independent review boards; that a single individual (a “Responsible Person”) should be in place to monitor on-site activities; that there should be a detailed monitoring and surveillance system in in place to ensure that design assumptions are correctly satisfied; and that there should be active monitoring of the performance of the HLF.

All very sensible indeed, and it is impossible to disagree, but it is deeply shocking that such recommendations are needed for a large-scale mining facility in a properly regulated country with very extensive experience of mining.

Return to The Landslide Blog homepage Text © 2023. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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SummaryThe mantle transition zone (MTZ) plays an important role in the global material circulation, slab dynamics, and seismogenesis of deep earthquakes in subduction zones. Here we construct fine MTZ structures of both P and SH waves beneath the northeast Asia continental margin using improved grid-search waveform modelings, based on high-quality triplicated waveforms of three deep Kuril earthquakes recorded by the China Digital Seismograph Network (CDSN). We find a high-velocity anomaly (HVA, average 3.3 per cent δVp and 2.3 per cent δVs) with a thickness of 130-138 km in the lower MTZ. The HVA hosts a top interface with positive velocity contrasts (δVp: 4.3 per cent, δVs:3.2 per cent), while the 660-km discontinuity (660) shows reduced velocity contrasts (δVp: 3.6 per cent, δVs: 5.1 per cent) and negligible depressions of less than 10 km. The HVA we detected likely implies the thickened stagnant Pacific slab that may alter localized heat exchanges between the MTZ and lower mantle. The increased Vp/Vs ratio (∼1.85) indicates a water-rich state (∼0.42 wt per cent) inside the stagnant slab, evidencing the deep water transportation by the slab subduction. We infer that the interior localized dehydration of hydrous minerals within the stagnant slab may trigger the large outboard 1990 Mw 7.2 Sakhalin (Kuye) earthquake. Our results can provide more insight into slab dynamics and seismogenesis of deep earthquakes in northeast Asia.

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At least 2,145 high-level NASA employees are set to leave as the agency faces pressure from the Trump administration to reduce its staff, Politico reported on 9 July. More than half of these employees, all of whom hold GS-13 to GS-15 positions, work within core NASA mission sets including science and human spaceflight. Staff were offered early retirement, buyouts, and deferred resignations.

The departures are spread across NASA’s 10 regional centers, with the largest loss of staff (607) concentrated at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The president’s budget request for NASA calls for an overall staff reduction of more than 5,000. One departing staffer told Politico that their decision to leave was out of fear for NASA’s uncertain future.

“Things just sound like it’s going to get worse,” they said.

 
Related

•  Over 2,000 senior staff set to leave NASA under agency push
•  NASA FY 2026 Budget Technical Supplement
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
 

The Trump administration has made loud noises about sending humans back to the Moon and then to Mars. These priorities were made clear in its budget request to NASA, which cut nearly 50% of the budget for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate while boosting funding for its human spaceflight program (this is within a 25% reduction in NASA’s overall budget). The proposed budget would shut down 41 space missions. The budget reconciliation bill that was signed on 4 July also included about $10 billion for NASA’s human spaceflight efforts.

Despite the boost in funding, it’s hard to see how the Moon-to-Mars goals are achievable in a reasonable timeframe with the massive drain of experience these departures represent.

“You’re losing the managerial and core technical expertise of the agency,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society. “What’s the strategy and what do we hope to achieve here?”

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

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
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An international research team led by Aalto University has just published the first large-scale analysis based on long-term satellite data on the effects of peatland restoration. The paper is published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

New international research led by Professors Willy Baeyens and Yue Gao of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), published in One Earth, demonstrates that plankton is not only the basis of the marine food chain but also a crucial natural ally in combating global warming.

The climate we live in affects our lives in profound ways: hot summers, cold winters, dry spells and wet weather all leave their mark.

In the late 2010s, when Assistant Professor Flavio Lehner worked for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, water managers often asked him about the drought in the Southwest. Was the low precipitation simply an unlucky draw in the cycle of long-term weather variations? What role did climate change play? Most importantly, was the drought there to stay?

At the year's halfway point, the National Interagency Fire Center reported active fires in 10 states, marking the highest number of individual fires in a decade. Some of the more vulnerable homes lie at the intersection of forest and town—the wildland-urban interface.

Plastic waste pollutes oceans across all regions of the world. Marine animals may become entangled in larger plastic debris such as nets and bags or mistake smaller pieces for food. Ingested plastic can block or injure the gastrointestinal tract. The smallest plastic particles in the micro and nano range are mostly excreted, but a small proportion can pass through the intestinal wall and enter the bloodstream.

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.

The Trump administration can act on its planned restructuring of the federal government, the United States Supreme Court announced in an 8 July decision.

In the decision, the court stayed an order prohibiting the Trump administration from proceeding with mass layoffs of federal workers including scientists at agencies like NOAA and the EPA. The decision, while temporary, means the administration is free to continue with reductions in force (RIFs) and restructuring efforts at federal agencies.

The decision is the latest action in the case of Trump v. American Federation of Government Employees. In the case, a coalition of plaintiffs including labor unions, municipal and regional governments, nonprofits and other organizations assert that President Trump’s February executive order directing federal agencies to carry out large-scale reductions in force is illegal in that it “goes far beyond the authority of the President to direct, and that such a massive reorganization of federal agencies must be planned in accordance with law and approved by Congress.” AGU is a co-plaintiff in the case.

“That temporary, practical, harm-reducing preservation of the status quo was no match for this Court’s demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this President’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture.”

In a ruling in May, a federal judge in California extended a two-week pause on federal layoffs by granting a preliminary injunction, which would continue that pause through the conclusion of the case.  The Trump administration appealed the decision, but it was upheld on 30 May by the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. The Trump administration then filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court.

With the 8 July ruling, the Court is allowing the administration to move forward with its restructuring plans outlined in the February executive order. In the unsigned decision, the Court did not express an opinion on the legality of the RIFs, but reasoned that the Trump administration “is likely to succeed” in its argument that the executive order is lawful.

In a lone dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson argued that any attempt by a president to reorganize the federal government requires authorization from Congress, which President Trump did not obtain.

Referring to the pause established in May, Jackson wrote: “That temporary, practical, harm-reducing preservation of the status quo was no match for this Court’s demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this President’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture.”

“This ruling will give Trump’s wrecking crew more awful ideas about sacking critical federal workers, like regional meteorologists with the National Weather Service and climate scientists at NOAA,” wrote Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., on Bluesky.

 
Related

•  8 July Opinion
•  Statement from Coalition of Plaintiffs
•  AGU Files New Lawsuit to Protect Hundreds of Thousands of Federal Workers
• Supreme Court Allows Trump to Resume Mass Federal Layoffs For Now
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
 

The plaintiffs expressed disappointment. “This decision does not change the simple and clear fact that reorganizing government functions and laying off federal workers en masse haphazardly without any congressional approval is not allowed by our Constitution.”

Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, the other two members of the court’s liberal wing, sided with the conservative majority in this case. Sotomayor wrote a concurrence in which she agreed with Jackson that President Trump could not restructure federal agencies “in a manner inconsistent with congressional mandates,” but found the executive order in question does not direct federal agencies to defy the law when carrying out reorganization plans and that the case did not require the Court to consider the legality of the plans themselves. 

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

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.

Groundwater is declining across Eastern Washington's complex, interconnected aquifer system, as people draw on it for irrigation, drinking and other uses at a pace that threatens its sustainability, according to a new study by a Washington State University researcher.

Tropical cyclones (TCs) rank among the most destructive weather phenomena, often bringing intense winds, heavy rainfall, and massive storm surges.

Scientists have traditionally described long-term changes to Earth’s marine ecosystems by measuring biodiversity—the number of different species that show up in ancient rock samples.

Until now, no one had measured how marine biomass—the sheer amount of organic material—fluctuated over hundreds of millions of years. A new study published in Current Biology does just that, using limestone samples to show for the first time that marine biomass and biodiversity trends aligned over the past 541 million years. The results may help answer questions about how ecosystems evolve over geologic time and how humans are driving a mass extinction in the modern world.

“[Biomass] patterns really followed the biodiversity curve, at least on macroevolutionary timescales.”

“[Biomass] patterns really followed the biodiversity curve, at least on macroevolutionary timescales,” said Pulkit Singh, a paleobiologist at Stanford University and coauthor of the new study. Singh’s graduate research forms the basis of the new study. 

“This provides a new type of data that allows us for the first time to test some very influential ideas about the causality of long-term biodiversity changes,” said Seth Finnegan, a paleobiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new study. 

Counting Skeletons and Shells

As organisms living in shallow marine environments die and settle to the seafloor, their calcium carbonate shells and skeletons are preserved as fossil-filled limestone. The successive layers of this limestone serve as an inventory of the diversity and abundance of life in the oceans over millions of years and are especially valuable to paleontologists because of their high shell content as well as the fact that limestone deposition rates likely stay stable over time, even in the absence of shells and skeletons.

To get a comprehensive picture of biomass over the Phanerozoic eon, Singh and the research team collected troves of data from previous studies that included counts of skeleton and shell fragments in marine limestone samples. In all, the team found data for more than 7,000 samples from 111 studies and conducted point counts for 73 new samples, too. 

The data collection required a lot of “intellectual courage” from Singh, said Jonathan Payne, a paleobiologist at Stanford University and coauthor of the new study. “It took a lot of hard work with no guarantee that we’d get anything informative in the end.”

The gamble paid off: Results showed that “shelliness,” as Payne calls it—a proxy for biomass—generally increased over the past 541 million years alongside recorded trends in marine biodiversity, with dips in biomass aligning with known major extinction events. 

The study “provides a link that has been missing until now” that connects long-term biodiversity processes to biomass trends, Finnegan said. The data appear to confirm an idea many paleobiologists expected but had not had the data to demonstrate—that marine animal biomass and biodiversity aligned over Earth’s history, he said.

Singh and the team performed a series of analyses to ensure the trends they were seeing weren’t due to other factors such as depositional environment, latitude, ocean depth, and ecosystem type. No matter how they sliced up the data, the results showed the same trends.

“It’s really rare to get the first chance to document a pattern about life across long histories of time,” Payne said. “There’s theory, but in the end, theory is meaningful when you can compare it to real data.”

The patterns the team uncovered in the limestone were reflected, too, in language past researchers used to describe their samples: An analysis of nearly 16,000 abstracts including descriptions of sedimentary carbonate rock over geologic time showed that the “shelliness” of words used to describe limestone samples increased alongside biomass trends. Words like “skeletal” and “fossiliferous” showed up at higher ratios compared to nonskeletal words in descriptions of samples from times in Earth’s history when biomass was higher.

“It was an interesting, independent confirmation of the rest of the study,” Payne said.

What Biomass Tells Us

Biomass indicates how much energy is available in an ecosystem. For animals, the ultimate source of that energy is created via the primary productivity of photosynthetic organisms such as plants and algae. Understanding the relationship between biomass and biodiversity can provide insight into how ecosystems evolve, how diversity arises and collapses, and what the ultimate factor that limits biodiversity in an ecosystem is.

“When there is more stuff to eat at the base of the food chain, ecosystems can support more and larger individuals, and maybe they can also support more different kinds of organisms.”

“It has been suggested for a long time that the long-term increase in biodiversity is a response to higher primary productivity,” Finnegan said. “When there is more stuff to eat at the base of the food chain, ecosystems can support more and larger individuals, and maybe they can also support more different kinds of organisms.”

In the ecology of the modern world, scientists have evidence that this is true. But modern scientists live in a “thin little time slice” in which any observations of ecosystems occur on very short timescales relative to Earth’s history, Finnegan said. 

Scientists don’t know whether ecosystems work the same now as they did for all of Earth’s history. Long ago, biodiversity may have dictated biomass instead, or the relationship may have been a feedback loop. “Really understanding biodiversity processes means understanding them on the million-year timescale,” he said.

Since humans started to dominate ecosystems, biodiversity has plummeted. Biomass, however, has increased significantly, mostly as a result of animal husbandry and pet ownership. “We have a lot of humans, and a lot of cats and dogs, but not a lot of diversity,” Singh said. The world’s oceans are also “very likely in the early stages of a significant extinction event,” Finnegan said.

Deeper knowledge of how biomass and biodiversity relate over geologic time could help scientists better understand the effects of human-caused ecosystem changes and the drivers of this sixth mass extinction. Humans are altering the planet in a “massive experiment,” Payne said. And the only way to understand planetary-scale experiments is to use the geologic record, he said. “It is the only source of information at the same temporal and spatial scales.”

At least during the Phanerozoic, biomass and biodiversity seem to have been coupled, according to the new study. The results provide a coarse, but robust, picture, Payne said, though “there’s a lot more to learn.”

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

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2025), Biomass and biodiversity were coupled in Earth’s past, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250243. Published on 9 July 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.

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

Over two-thirds of Earth’s surface lies underwater, and the boundary of the hydrosphere and the lithosphere at the seafloor represents an important area of study of both materials–rock, sediment, fluid, and gas– and ecosystems for scientists studying Earth and ocean processes.

In a new commentary, FUTURE 2024 PI-team et al. [2025] report on the U.S. Seafloor Sampling Capabilities 2024 Workshop, which assessed the current state and future needs for U.S. oceanographic assets, including the evolution and design of multiscale science infrastructure. A key finding of the workshop is that future study of science at the seafloor interface will be severely limited by recent reductions in the oceanographic infrastructure available in the U.S. 

Such infrastructure includes, among others, scientific deep drilling platforms, which enable human access to ice-covered seas in the polar regions; an expansion of ships in the U.S.-Academic Research Fleet that can handle heavy over-the-side shipboard coring and deeper rock dredging; and sample repository infrastructure that maximizes the value of returned samples by better supporting discoverability and accessibility of archived materials. The authors also emphasize the importance of workforce training and knowledge transfer through inclusive educational and professional development opportunities, particularly for early-career researchers.

Citation: FUTURE 2024 PI-team, Appelgate, B., Dugan, B., Eguchi, N., Fornari, D., Freudenthal, T., et al. (2025). The FUTURE of the US marine seafloor and subseafloor sampling capabilities. AGU Advances, 6, e2024AV001560. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024AV001560

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

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Analysis of ancient core samples from the bottom of a lagoon in the Northern Territory suggests future monsoons across northern Australia will be more intense as the global climate warms further.

An international research team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon has, for the first time, succeeded in visualizing and quantifying the complex airflow dynamics directly above the ocean surface in high resolution. Using an innovative laser measurement system, previously unknown and highly complex mechanisms of energy exchange between wind and waves have been deciphered—a significant step forward for climate research, weather models, and ocean dynamics. The research findings have been published in Nature Communications.

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

Baroclinic instability, which converts vertical wind shear into energy in storms, is the main driver of the growth of midlatitude storms. However, previous investigations of the relationship between baroclinicity and storm growth have been limited to case studies, idealized simulations, or region-specific analyses.

Hadas and Kaspi [2025] use 83 years of ERA-5 data to analyze the growth and tracks of midlatitude storms. The ERA-5 dataset provides a much wider dataset for analysis, including an estimated 100,000 cyclones and 50,000 anticyclones. The authors find that while storm intensity increases linearly with baroclinicity under mild conditions, under more extreme conditions the traditional linear relationship between baroclinicity and storm activity becomes nonlinear. They attribute this shift to a decrease in the storm growth time with baroclinicity. Based on a Lagrangian analysis, the authors then propose a nonlinear correction better accounting for the relationship of baroclinicity and storm activity under extreme conditions. Such a correction is found to be crucial for advancing our understanding of midlatitude climate.

Citation: Hadas, O., & Kaspi, Y. (2025). A lagrangian perspective on the growth of midlatitude storms. AGU Advances, 6, e2024AV001555. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024AV001555

—Alberto Montanari, Editor, AGU Advances

Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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Described as "Earth's kryptonite twin," jadarite is a rare and fascinating mineral that quickly caught the attention of scientists and Superman fans alike.

A combination of sewage overflows and coastal winds could be sending billions of airborne microplastic particles into the world's coastal towns and cities, a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports suggests.

Northern Australia's annual monsoon season brings relief to drought-stricken lands and revitalizes crops and livestock for farmers. But a study of 150,000 years of climate records shows that the monsoon is likely to intensify—triggering a higher risk of flooding while worsening the impact of droughts in East Asia.