Feed aggregator

There's been a seismic shift in science, with scientists developing new AI tools and applying AI to just about any question that can be asked. Researchers are now putting actual seismic waves to work, using data from the world's largest repository of earthquake data to develop "SeisModal," an AI foundation model designed to explore big questions about science. The effort, known as Steel Thread, involves researchers from five national laboratories operated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

For obvious reasons, it would be useful to predict when an earthquake is going to occur. It has long been suspected that large quakes in the Himalayas follow a fairly predictable cycle, but nature, as it turns out, is not so accommodating. A new study published in the journal Science Advances shows that massive earthquakes are just as random as small ones. A team of researchers led by Zakaria Ghazoui-Schaus at the British Antarctic Survey reached this conclusion after analyzing sediments from Lake Rara in Western Nepal.

Bright streaks of material trickle down the slopes of many of Mercury’s craters, but scientists have struggled to understand how these geologically young features, called slope lineae, appeared on a seemingly dead world. Now, researchers have used machine learning to analyze more than 400 slope lineae in the hope of understanding the streaks’ origin.

The analysis of images from NASA’s decade-gone MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging) mission showed that lineae seem to stream from bright hollows on the sunward side of crater slopes and mainly appear on craters that punched through a thin volcanic crust to a volatile-rich layer beneath. The lineae, the team theorized, could have formed when that exposed layer heated up and released volatiles like sulfur to drip downslope.

“We have these modern data science approaches now—machine learning, deep learning—that help us look into all those old data sets and find completely new science discoveries in them,” said Valentin Bickel, a planetary geomorphologist at Universität Bern in Switzerland and lead researcher on the study.

Streaks and Stripes

MESSENGER orbited Mercury from 2011 to 2015, and observations from those 4 years remain some of the best data we have on our solar system’s smallest planet.

The images revealed that although there is not a lot of geologic activity happening today, the planet remains chock-full of oddities.

One of those strange phenomena is the existence of slope lineae streaking down from the rims of many of Mercury’s craters. The higher-resolution MESSENGER images show that Mercury’s lineae are made of bright material and are geologically young, with crisply defined edges and no small craters superimposed on top. But planetary scientists had not conducted any systematic analysis of lineae before now, focusing instead on understanding the planet’s similarly bright, but more numerous, hollows.

“The first things we as geologists like to do is put things on a map.”

Bickel and his team sought to fill that knowledge gap. Their machine learning tool looked at more than 112,000 MESSENGER images with spatial resolutions finer than 150 meters (492 feet), identified 402 individual lineae, and cataloged their properties in a uniform way.

“The first things we as geologists like to do is put things on a map,” Bickel said.

Most of MESSENGER’s high-resolution images cover the northern hemisphere, Bickel explained, so most (93%) of the lineae the team cataloged were in the north. Ninety percent of lineae are located within craters. They are hundreds or thousands of meters long, are less than 20 meters (65 feet) tall, and are located on steeper-than-average crater slopes. Most lineae extend from young, bright hollows or hollow-like features.

But the most telling commonality among lineae is that they prefer the side of craters facing the equator, which is the side that receives the most sunlight.

The MESSENGER mission imaged slope lineae in Mercury’s craters on 1 August 2012 (left) and 19 October 2013 (right). Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/Carnegie Institution of Washington

That trend led the researchers to their theory of how lineae form. An impact exposes Mercury’s shallow but volatile-rich bedrock layer. Insolation, or heat from the Sun, draws out volatile gases in those rocks, and those volatiles then slowly drip down the crater wall, leaving bright deposits behind.

“The fact that lineae are on slopes that are facing the Sun implies that insolation might play a role in activating the process,” Bickel said. “And whenever insolation is so prominent, that implies that volatile material is involved. And in Mercury’s case has to come from the subsurface.”

The team published these results in Communications Earth and Environment.

Making a More Complete Map

Susan Conway, a planetary geomorphologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Nantes, France, said planetary scientists have long accepted that Mercury’s hollows are produced by the loss of subsurface volatiles.

“Given that the slope lineae often originate at what appear to be hollows on the crater wall and have the same colour as them, the inference that slope lineae are also linked to volatile loss makes sense,” Conway wrote in an email.

Across the solar system, “slope lineae are pretty common,” added Conway, who was not involved with this research. “Several different kinds have been documented on Mars—slope streaks believed to be dust avalanches, recurring slope lineae whose formation is still debated and could be related to volatiles.” Granular flows on the Moon as well as lineae on Ceres and some icy moons in the outer solar system also resemble those on Mercury.

But a good 10% of Mercury’s known lineae don’t appear within craters, and conversely, there are plenty of craters with hollows that don’t have lineae. Other mechanisms are likely at work there, Bickel said.

“BepiColombo will image the whole surface at a resolution that would enable us to see most slope lineae.”

Thankfully, planetary scientists won’t have to wait long to test this theory. The BepiColombo spacecraft will arrive at Mercury in November and will begin science operations in early 2027. The joint mission from the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will image more of the planet’s surface than MESSENGER did and at a consistently higher spatial resolution.

Bickel and other Mercury scientists expect that BepiColombo will image more slope lineae across the planet, including smaller lineae, dimmer lineae, and lineae at southern latitudes. It will likely reimage some lineae-dense locations and reveal whether the streaks have changed in the 16 years since MESSENGER’s last images. And it may even capture repeat snapshots of a few locations, allowing scientists to see whether lineae change on short timescales.

“BepiColombo will image the whole surface at a resolution that would enable us to see most slope lineae,” Conway said. “We’ll get a complete picture of their spatial distribution, which will enable us to better test the volatile-driven hypothesis.”

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

Citation: Cartier, K. M. S. (2026), Oozing gas could be making stripes in Mercury’s craters, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260052. Published on 12 February 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Fast ice, also called landfast sea ice, is a relatively short-lived ice that forms from frozen seawater and attaches like a “seatbelt” to larger ice sheets. It can create 50- to 200-kilometer-wide bands that last anywhere from a few weeks to a few decades and act as a site for valuable geochemical processes, breeding grounds for emperor penguins, and a protective buffer between caustic Antarctic winds and waters and inland bodies of ice.

In new research published in Nature Communications, scientists found that buried sediments can track the long-term growth of Antarctic fast ice—and that the ice’s freezing and thawing may be linked to cycles of solar activity. Given that this ice plays a significant role in protecting Antarctica’s larger ice sheets, the research could have major implications for understanding the ongoing impacts of climate change in Antarctica.

“Fast ice, especially in the summertime, is suffering the same fate as overall pack ice,” said Alex Fraser, a glaciologist at the University of Tasmania, who was not involved in the study. We’ve seen a “dramatic decrease” over the past decade, he said. “We’re down to around half of the ‘normal’ [amount].”

“To understand how humans are changing the planet, we first need to know how the planet changes on its own.”

Over the past several decades, the only way for scientists to track fast ice has been through satellite data, which can reveal the ice’s history over only the past 40 or so years. This narrow range has prohibited researchers from understanding the ice’s behavior prior to human-induced climate change.

“To understand how humans are changing the planet, we first need to know how the planet changes on its own,” said Mike Weber, a geoscientist at Universität Bonn in Germany and a coauthor of the study. The new work aimed to establish a “blueprint” for how fast ice behaves in the long term, allowing researchers to better understand how the ice contracts or expands when exposed to greenhouse gas emissions.

Sediment Secrets

To better understand fast ice history, the team turned to sediment cores from Victoria Land in eastern Antarctica. By scrutinizing laminated layers within the cores, the researchers were able to pinpoint key markers that correspond to ebbs and flows in fast ice going back 3,700 years.

The team found that lighter sediment layers formed during summer months marked by prolonged ice loss, whereas darker layers formed during regular seasonal thawing. They also found evidence that different species of small organisms called diatoms grew during summer months versus thawing periods, further enabling the science team to distinguish the cycles. By combining these and other data unearthed from the sediments, the researchers identified recurring periods of open-water and low-ice conditions pinned to solar cycles—called the Gleissberg and Suess-de Vries solar cycles—that occur approximately every 90 and 240 years, respectively.

The link to solar cycling was surprising at first, but the researchers suggested the explanation is straightforward: Solar activity can influence winds over the Southern Ocean, transporting warm air over the Victoria Land coast and leading to ice melt.

“Laminated sediments are always intriguing because you know they’re hiding a message.”

“Laminated sediments are always intriguing because you know they’re hiding a message,” said Tesi Tommaso, a biogeochemist at the National Research Council of Italy’s Institute of Polar Sciences and lead author of the study. “When we realized that over long timescales, this laminated pattern was linked to solar activity, it actually made perfect sense—it was super exciting.”

In future work, the team plans to dig up deeper sediment cores to push fast ice records back even further. The data would be “incredibly informative,” said Tommaso.

“We have finally developed a high-resolution ‘time machine’ for a critical but poorly understood part of Antarctica,” Weber said. “It’s a testament to how interconnected our atmosphere, ocean, and ice really are.”

—Taylor Mitchell Brown (@tmitchellbrown.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Brown, T. M. (2026), Sediments offer an extended history of fast ice, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260054. Published on 12 February 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: Earth and Space Science

Atmospheric conditions over Antarctica affect global climate cycles, and are thus critical for climate assessment. However, studying atmospheric changes in Antarctica is quite challenging as they are driven by a variety of processes at local scale not easily captured by global models. Monitoring seasonal atmospheric pressure changes is one way to keep track of the evolving Antarctic atmosphere.

Because changes in stratospheric conditions influence the flux of cosmic rays reaching Earth’s surface, Santos et al. [2025] use measurements from a water-Cherenkov cosmic-ray detector, to monitor variations in the 100-hPa geopotential height (about 15 kilometers) over the Antarctic Peninsula. After conducting a thorough statistical analysis of the data, the authors develop a simple model linking surface pressure and cosmic ray count data, validating it against observed ERA5 100-hPa geopotential height reanalysis data. The model is especially accurate in (southern hemisphere) spring, but it performs well also at other times of the year.

With their model, the authors demonstrate that water-Cherenkov cosmic-ray detectors can be reliably used as proxies for atmospheric pressure changes, thus adding a new, simple, and effective tool to monitor and study lower stratospheric dynamics over Antarctica.

Citation: Santos, N. A., Gómez, N., Dasso, S., Gulisano, A. M., Rubinstein, L., Pereira, M., et al. (2025). Cosmic ray counting variability from water-Cherenkov detectors as a proxy of stratospheric conditions in Antarctica. Earth and Space Science, 12, e2025EA004298. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EA004298

  —Graziella Caprarelli, Editor-in-Chief, Earth and Space Science

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.

Geologists from St. Petersburg State University, as part of an international scientific team, have analyzed rock data from East Antarctica and determined that the magnetic anomaly in this region resulted from the convergence of continents and the birth of the supercontinent Rodinia approximately 1 billion years ago. The research is published in the journal Polar Science.

AbstractHigh-frequency induced polarisation (HFIP) measurements enable quantification of ground ice content in frozen media by capturing ice relaxation within the frequency range of 1 to 100 kHz. Existing parameterised inversion approaches may bias results by imposing an ice relaxation signature where none exists, assuming a Cole-Cole-type response that may not reflect the true dielectric behaviour of ice, and neglecting low-frequency polarisation. These limitations can lead to high data misfits and ambiguities in interpretation. This study presents an alternative approach that applies independent frequency inversion to directly derive complex resistivity spectra from field measurements, avoiding reliance on predefined models. The resulting inverted spectra provide a representation that more closely captures the true subsurface response. A second, petrophysical, inversion is then performed by fitting a two-component mixture model to the inverted spectra, weighted by the volumetric fractions of its components. One of these components is ice, allowing for the estimation of the volumetric ice content. The approach was applied at Heliport Mire (Abisko, Sweden), a permafrost peatland site, using two complementary profiles: a 50-m 2D profile that captured broad lateral variations of frozen to unfrozen conditions, and an 8-m high-resolution 2D profile that resolved the vertical transition between the upper unfrozen and underlying frozen layers. Independent frequency inversion, across 1 Hz to 57 kHz, successfully produced smooth, coherent spectral responses of true resistivity and phase shift across both profiles. Petrophysical inversion results show diverse conditions along the profile, identifying three distinct zones: ice-rich frozen peat (40-77% ice content), a thawed or degraded peat region (<10% ice content), and unfrozen forest (<5% ice content, effectively representing ice-free conditions). HFIP-derived ice content values were consistent with those derived from laboratory measurements on a permafrost core extracted along the profile. The high-resolution profile distinctly identified the boundary between unfrozen and frozen ground, as confirmed by direct probing measurements. Additionally, the petrophysical model resolves parameters such as shape factor and matrix permittivity, offering further insight into subsurface properties. This methodology advances ground ice characterisation by providing robust quantitative estimates of ice content while retaining spectral information with broader interpretative potential.

Current global climate models (GCMs) support with high confidence the view that rising greenhouse gases and other anthropogenic forcings account for nearly all observed global surface warming—slightly above 1 °C—since the pre-industrial period (1850–1900). This is the conclusion presented in the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) published in 2021.

Geographic information system (GIS) maps help researchers, policymakers, and community members see how environmental risks are spread throughout a given region. These types of interactive, layered maps can be used for storytelling, education, and environmental activism. When community members are involved in their use and creation, GIS maps can also be a tool for equity.

A new study reports that climate warming can increase soil carbon accumulation in boreal Sphagnum peatlands by boosting plant productivity, protecting iron, and inhibiting microbial decomposition. These responses contrast sharply with warming-enhanced soil carbon mineralization—the process by which carbon is released as CO2—in boreal forests and tundra. Together, these contrasting processes highlight the vital yet often overlooked role of Sphagnum peatlands in counteracting boreal carbon loss under future warming.

UK winters are becoming significantly wetter mainly due to warming driven by human burning of fossil fuels releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, a Newcastle University study reveals. The research shows that for every degree of global or regional warming, winter rainfall increases by a compounding 7%, increasing the risk of flooding. And the scientists warn it is happening much faster than most global climate models predict.

Geologic reservoirs that trapped petroleum for millions of years are now being repurposed to store the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. New research is improving how we monitor this storage and verify how much CO2 these reservoirs have stored.

Scientists have long known that Earth's core is mostly made of iron, but the density is not high enough for it to be pure iron, meaning lighter elements exist in the core, as well. In particular, it's suspected to be a major reservoir of hydrogen. A new study, published in Nature Communications, supports this idea with results suggesting the core contains up to 45 oceans' worth of hydrogen. These results also challenge the idea that most of Earth's water was delivered by comets early on.

Earth systems may be on the brink of long-term, irreversible destabilization, sending our planet on a “hothouse Earth” trajectory, a scenario in which long-term temperatures remain about 5°C (9°F) higher than preindustrial temperatures, according to a new paper.

In the paper, published in One Earth, scientists argue that uncertainties in climate projections mean Earth system components could be at a higher risk than we think of reaching crucial tipping points such as the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and the thawing of the world’s permafrost—points of destabilization that, once breached, are irreversible.

“As we move to higher temperatures, we go into higher risk zones,” said Nico Wunderling, a coauthor of the new paper and a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Goethe University Frankfurt, both in Germany. Scientists know higher temperatures will activate interactions between tipping elements, he said.

The new paper “strongly builds” on a 2018 perspective paper linking the possibility of hothouse Earth to tipping points, said Swinda Falkena, a climate scientist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands who was not involved in either publication.

Uncertain Earth Systems

Scientists use climate models—simulations of Earth systems—to project how rising emissions may impact global temperatures, weather patterns, ice sheets, ocean circulation, and more.

But those models are never perfect representations of our planet. Climate models contain uncertainties regarding the sensitivity of Earth systems to increased levels of carbon dioxide and the role of climate feedbacks, including land and ocean carbon sinks. Simulations have particular trouble modeling potential tipping points, such as weakening ocean circulation and the dieback of the Amazon rainforest, and the interactions between them, Wunderling said.

These uncertainties mean it’s virtually impossible to reliably estimate the timing of some tipping points and that some Earth system components could be closer to tipping points than scientists thought.

In recent years, scientists have noticed that the rate of climate change has outpaced some projections. In 2024, for instance, global temperatures briefly reached 1.5°C (2.7°F) above preindustrial levels, surpassing the Paris Agreement target and indicating that Earth is virtually certain to consistently break this limit in the long term. In another example of real climate change outpacing models, exceptionally high temperatures in 2023, 2024, and 2025 led experts at Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit climate research organization, to suggest scientists may need to rethink their analyses of Earth’s warming rate.

“Warming now seems to have accelerated, which is not something we expected,” Falkena said. “That gets us to think, ‘Okay, is there something we’re missing?’”

The paper identifies 16 Earth system components (such as ice sheets, permafrost, and rainforests) that could reach tipping points, 10 of which could accelerate global heating if triggered. These 10 tipping points include the collapse of major ice sheets, the collapse of Arctic sea ice, the loss of mountain glaciers, the abrupt thaw of boreal permafrost, and the dieback of the Amazon rainforest.

The authors point out that these tipping elements are linked and even interact with each other to create feedback loops. For example, melting ice sheets would reduce Earth’s ability to reflect sunlight, amplifying warming. Melting ice sheets could also weaken the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC (an ocean current key to regulating Earth’s temperature), which could cause the conversion of Amazon rainforest (a critical carbon sink) into dry savanna.

A Hothouse Trajectory

The higher Earth’s temperature rises, “the more likely it is to trigger self-amplifying feedbacks.”

If enough of these tipping points are reached, Earth’s climate could be steered toward a hothouse Earth scenario, the authors write. And although there is “no precise answer” to the question of whether humanity is at risk of triggering hothouse Earth, Wunderling said the 1.5°C (2.7°F) limit set by the Paris Agreement was made with tipping point thresholds in mind.

If Earth’s temperature exceeds preindustrial levels by 2°C (3.6°F), then “we certainly run into a high-risk zone for tipping elements,” Wunderling said. The higher Earth’s temperature rises, “the more likely it is to trigger self-amplifying feedbacks.”

One 2024 modeling study showed that Earth had a high risk of breaching at least one of four climate tipping elements—the Greenland Ice Sheet collapse, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse, the AMOC collapse, and a dieback of the Amazon rainforest—if temperatures do not return to below the 1.5°C (2.7°F) mark. (Scientists say the prospect of lowering Earth’s temperatures with new policies or technology after exceeding this mark is slim.)

Falkena said the likelihood of a hothouse Earth trajectory is low, but the fact that such a severe scenario is plausible at all means it’s something worth the world’s concern. As models improve, scientists will be able to better quantify the risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory.

“While averting the hothouse trajectory won’t be easy, it’s much more achievable than trying to backtrack once we’re on it.”

“While averting the hothouse trajectory won’t be easy, it’s much more achievable than trying to backtrack once we’re on it,” said Christopher Wolf, a research scientist at Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates, a former postdoctoral scholar at Oregon State University, and a coauthor of the new study, in a press release.

The world hasn’t sufficiently cut down on emissions, though: Earth is on track to warm by about 2.8°C (5.04°F) by 2100. In 2025, global carbon emissions rose by 1.1% compared to 2024 levels, and in the United States, total emissions rose by 2.4%. The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is likely higher than it has been in at least 2 million years, and average global temperatures are likely warmer than at any point in the past 125,000 years, according to the authors.

The uncertainty about when tipping points may be breached, combined with ever-higher global temperatures, should be taken as a reason for urgent action to combat or mitigate climate change, the authors write.

“In order to avoid high-end climate risks, it is necessary to go down to net zero, to mitigate as quickly as we can,” Wunderling said.

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

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2026), Earth’s climate may go from greenhouse to hothouse, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260057. Published on 11 February 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Scientists say that multiple Earth system components appear closer to destabilization than previously believed, putting the planet in increased danger of following a "hothouse" path driven by feedback loops that can amplify the consequences of global warming.

The Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA)—the statutory agency responsible for planning the Basin's water resources—has just shared the starkest news yet about the Basin's future: the Basin is almost certainly going to get hotter, drier, and more volatile in the future, with reduced river flows.

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.

Update, 12 February: At a press conference today, President Donald Trump announced that the EPA has revoked the 2009 Endangerment Finding.

Trump said regulations related to the finding were “crippling,” and designed to “facilitate the green new Scam.”

“Effective immediately, we are repealing the ridiculous Endangerment Finding,” he said.

AGU immediately denounced the repeal.

Revoking the finding repeals the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and removes all greenhouse gas emissions regulations for vehicles, according to the EPA.

11 February: The Endangerment Finding is a scientific determination made by the EPA that greenhouse gases threaten public health. It is the legal underpinning for major U.S. climate rules under the Clean Air Act. Revoking the finding repeals the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and removes all greenhouse gas emissions regulations for vehicles, according to the EPA. 

“I think it’s a historic low, frankly, for EPA to be taking this stance now,” Benjamin DeAngelo, a former EPA official involved in writing the 2009 finding, told POLITICO. 

Leavitt called the planned finalization the “largest deregulatory action in American history.” She said the repeal of the finding would increase energy affordability and, especially, lower vehicle costs, allegedly saving Americans “$1.3 trillion in crushing regulations.” Businesses and groups prioritizing free markets support the administration’s claim, with the editorial board of the Washington Post writing that rescinding the Endangerment Finding will “end the federal government’s power over cars.”

President Donald Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin will make the announcement to finalize the repeal on 12 February.

The EPA based its July proposal to revoke the finding on an Energy Department report written by five climate contrarians that downplayed accepted climate science. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, an independent organization meant to advise the federal government on scientific matters, conducted their own review of the report and found that the 2009 Endangerment Finding was “beyond scientific dispute.”

The science supporting the Endangerment Finding “has only gotten stronger” since 2009, DeAngelo told POLITICO. 

 
Related

•  Trump EPA to Take Its Biggest Swing Yet Against Climate Change Rules
•  EPA ‘Endangerment Finding’ Explained: 5 Facts About the Science and Health Risks
•  Public Speaks Out Against EPA Plan to Rescind Endangerment Finding
•  The EPA is Barreling Toward a Supreme Court Climate Showdown
•  AGU Denounces Trump Administration’s Repeal of the EPA Endangerment Finding
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
 

In public hearings in August, hundreds of people, including children, scientists, doctors, parents, advocates, and members of Congress, spoke out against the proposal to revoke the Endangerment Finding. Many cited immediate health concerns, worry about the health and safety of future generations, and a fear that the proposal would accelerate environmental degradation.

The move by the EPA will likely be challenged in the courts—which may be one reason the Trump administration has pushed its finalization through so rapidly, according to The New York Times. Legal scholars say the current, conservative-majority Supreme Court is more likely to uphold decisions supporting deregulation while Trump is still in office. 

The administration wants “to not just do what other Republican administrations have done, which is weaken regulations. They want to take the federal government out of the business of regulation, period,” Jody Freedman, director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program, told The New York Times.

—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 © 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.

Source: Community Science

Geographic information system (GIS) maps help researchers, policymakers, and community members see how environmental risks are spread throughout a given region. These types of interactive, layered maps can be used for storytelling, education, and environmental activism. When community members are involved in their use and creation, GIS maps can also be a tool for equity.

Lively et al. outlined a project focusing on mapping the features and flooding risks at and around the Tar Creek Superfund site in Ottawa County, Okla. Ottawa County is home to 10 federally recognized Tribal Nations. Residents have experienced decades of health and environmental harm from the region’s legacy of zinc and lead mining, most of which occurred within the Quapaw Reservation. Although mining ceased in 1970, giant piles of mining waste, mine water discharges, and unstable ground have poisoned residents and made entire towns unlivable. For almost a century, floods have spread these contaminants across downstream communities.

Technical experts and community members with local knowledge worked together to build a GIS map that can be used by community members and leaders. It depicts how floodwaters run through former mining sites, which then ferry toxic waste throughout the region’s creeks and soils.

The map is viewable in various layers that show the locations of different kinds of mining waste, tribal land boundaries, and flood zones designated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Users can also view layers showing soil types and the locations of aquifers, fault lines, and wells.

Between 2021 and 2023, members of the Local Environmental Action Demanded Agency (LEAD), a community-led organization, connected with GIS professionals through AGU’s Thriving Earth Exchange. This program partners local organizations with volunteer scientists and experts to address environmental or geoscience-related issues in their communities. Many members of the project team contributing to the Tar Creek project were local to the Miami, Okla., region.

Though much of the actual map building was completed by the GIS expert team member, decisions on what to include in each layer of the map were made by LEAD representatives and nonscientist community members. This coproduction defined equity not only by who built or contributed to the map but also by how it is used by the community as a key storytelling tool—helping to educate officials and residents about the ongoing environmental and health risks when flooding occurs in the region. For the team, it was important not to just make the map but also to use it: Production without activism, the researchers said, would make for an unfinished project. (Community Science, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024CSJ000077, 2026)

—Rebecca Owen (@beccapox.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Owen, R. (2026), Making a map to make a difference, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260035. Published on 11 February 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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

The color of the oceans is an important diagnostic parameter as it reflects the health of oceans, monitors CO2 variability, and tracks ecosystem changes due to environmental stressors. Remote observations of the ocean color (OC) are routinely performed, but rapid changes in this parameter are difficult to capture. Geostationary platforms are uniquely suited for this purpose, because they monitor the same area and can therefore detect changes in real time. However, measurements of OC from geostationary satellites are not routinely performed.

The Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) geostationary instrument monitors air quality and pollution over North America. Using a new approach, Fasnacht et al. [2025] apply a combination of statistical and machine learning techniques to TEMPO hyperspectral hourly measurements, and obtain OC values across the USA coastal regions and the Great Lakes.

Thus, the authors demonstrate the feasibility of capturing hourly variability of environmental parameters from deep space. This reinforces the scientific value of future dedicated geostationary ocean color missions, such as the Geosynchronous Littoral Imaging and Monitoring Radiometer (GLIMR), and the Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) Ocean Color Instrument (OCX).  

Citation: Fasnacht, Z., Joiner, J., Bandel, M., Ibrahim, A., Heidinger, A., Himes, M. D., et al. (2025). Exploiting machine learning to develop ocean color retrievals from the tropospheric emissions: Monitoring of pollution instrument. Earth and Space Science, 12, e2025EA004341. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EA004341

—Graziella Caprarelli, Editor-in-Chief, Earth and Space Science

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.

SummaryIn the last two decades, the improvement of both instruments and theory, as well as the broadened scope of applications, led to a spectacular development of the use of induced polarization. In particular, the richness of complex conductivity spectra is driving the scientific community towards vast deployment of this measurement method often referred to as Spectral Induced Polarization (SIP). In this contribution, we describe an innovative multichannel instrument that we develop for fast monitoring of critical zone processes. The spectral content of a signal with line spectrum resulting from square-wave current is exploited by injecting successively three square-wave currents with periods of 1, 10 and 100 s, covering the frequency range of 10−2 to 102 Hz in less than four minutes. One dataset consists of eight successive current injections at different depths. For each current injection, the electrical potential is simultaneously measured at seven dipoles. The time-series are recorded with a 2 kHz sampling rate, allowing to calculate by Fourier transform the amplitude and phase spectra up to 1 kHz for each quadrupole. The complex conductivity data was validated by a comparison with the commercial SIP-Fuchs instrument, despite a significant discrepancy below 0.1 Hz which may be due to a worse signal-to-noise ratio at low frequencies. The prototype version of the instrument has been installed in 2018 at a wetland at Ploemeur-Guidel hydrogeological observatory to monitor reactive processes with high spatial resolution across the top meter of soil. The instrumental device, controlled by a Gantner data acquisition system connected to a solar panel, is fully autonomous and consumes little energy. Acquisitions are made several times a day and recorded on a SD card. Seven-year continuous monitoring highlights significant temporal variations of both subsurface resistivity and phase angle. The absence of correlation between resistivity and phase variations in the continuously saturated soil thickness highlights the potential of the system to monitor and separate different types of dynamics processes, such as groundwater/surface water mixing and mineral precipitation/dissolution.