Although volcanic eruptions are spectacular natural events that occur around the world every day, most volcanoes spend the majority of their time not erupting. To accurately forecast volcanic activity, it's important to characterize the magma before an eruption is imminent.
The magma reservoir of the largest volcanic eruption of the Holocene is refilling. This Kobe University insight on the Kikai caldera in Japan allows us to understand giant caldera volcanoes like Yellowstone or Toba more generally and gets us closer to predicting their behavior, too.
New research from a team at Trinity College Dublin has unearthed a cheap and environmentally friendly new option for removing pollutants from our water. The key? Oyster shells that would ordinarily end up in landfill sites after consumption. The research, just published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, shows that waste seashells—especially those from oysters—can capture and remove rare earth elements from polluted water. And what's more, they do it entirely naturally, turning them into stable mineral crystals.
SummaryBroadband seismic stations are primarily designed to record ground displacement from earthquakes, but they are sensitive to a wide range of processes, including human activity, oceanic waves, and atmospheric pressure variations. These signals are often considered noise, yet their study at frequencies from a few millihertz to one hertz has been fundamental for understanding geosphere coupling, developing methods to image Earth’s interior, and monitoring climate. At lower frequencies, below 10 cycles per day, the origin of continuous seismic noise remains poorly understood and may result from multiple coexisting mechanisms. To illuminate this part of the spectrum and its governing physics, we apply a dedicated processing method to 20 years of global seismic data. Our approach enables precise quantification of frequencies, angular degrees, and velocities of low-frequency modes, which we unambiguously identify as Lamb waves in the atmosphere.
SummaryThe February 6, 2023, Mw 7.8 Kahramanmaraş earthquake reactivated the East Anatolian Fault Zone (EAFZ) and involved surface rupture from the Amik Basin in south to the northeast of Çelikhan in north. Although the EAFZ continues southwest towards the Gulf of İskenderun across the Amanos Mountain Range (AMR) via the Türkoğlu–Osmaniye segment, the 2023 rupture instead followed the western margin of the Karasu Valley. Our analysis suggests that this deviation was governed by structural architecture of these two routes. While both routes involve similar rock units, the AMR is characterized by a massive, intact, and thicker crust that allowed the velocity-strengthening frictional properties of the basement to act as an effective barrier, arresting the rupture east of Türkoğlu. In contrast, the transtensional architecture of the Karasu Valley—evidenced by deep-seated extensional fissures and basaltic volcanism—represents a structurally dilated and thinner crust. This extensional setting neutralized the potential frictional resistance of the basement, providing a rheologically compliant path of least resistance for the 2023 rupture. The Türkoğlu–Osmaniye segment has not experienced a major event for about last 1 500 years and considering a slip rate of ~4.8 mm/yr, about 7 meters of slip deficit has accumulated. Furthermore, the 2023 earthquake loaded stress on the Türkoğlu-Osmaniye Fault. For these reasons, the potential for an M > 7 earthquake on this part of the EAFZ is high, necessitating urgent preparedness for a large earthquake in the region.
The Phlegraean Fields volcanic complex, located beneath the metropolitan area of Naples—a city of 900,000 inhabitants in Italy—has been rising increasingly since 2005, accompanied by a growing number of small earthquakes. This development has been attracting increasing attention in the densely populated region for years. Although such phases of uplift and subsidence have occurred there for over a thousand years, the relationship between ground uplift and seismic activity is complex and not yet fully understood.
The structure of the plant communities that grow on the thawing permafrost in the Arctic is changing, with grasses displacing slower-growing shrubs. Although these grasses bind more carbon dioxide than previous plant communities, they lead to far more methane emissions over the course of the year. Methane is a greenhouse gas that accelerates the global temperature rise much faster than carbon dioxide.
For the second consecutive year, winter sea ice in the Arctic reached a level that matches the lowest peak observed since satellite monitoring began in 1979. On March 15, Arctic sea ice extent reached 5.52 million square miles (14.29 million square kilometers), very close to the 2025 peak of 5.53 million square miles (14.31 million square kilometers). Scientists with NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado, Boulder, note that the two years are statistically tied.
Improving tsunami hazard assessments depends on understanding what happens at the moment an earthquake ruptures beneath the seafloor, especially near deep-ocean trenches where measurements are often scarce. When a powerful magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula on July 29, 2025, it generated a tsunami that traveled across the Pacific.
The analysis of a sediment core from an oasis lake in Chad provides new insights into the history of precipitation in the Sahara. The study, led by the University of Cologne, shows that a prolonged wet phase, which lasted from 14,800 to 5,500 years ago, was interrupted by short-term droughts. Such drought events could also occur in a similar manner in the future.
The tropical Pacific Ocean and the frozen expanse of Antarctica sit more than 10,000 kilometers apart. Yet new research shows that when surface waters warm near the equator in northern winter, the Antarctic stratosphere responds months later—a delayed reaction that could improve predictions of Southern Hemisphere climate patterns.
SummaryThe Born approximation offers a computationally efficient alternative to full electromagnetic (EM) forward modeling, but suffers from limited accuracy due to its reliance on a fixed background conductivity. In this work, we develop an adaptive Born approximation that treats the background medium as a tunable parameter to enhance accuracy in a goal-oriented manner. The background conductivity is selected locally for each measurement configuration using spatial sensitivity functions, enabling accurate modeling in both isotropic and anisotropic media. In this study, we primarily focus on horizontally layered earth models penetrated by a vertical well to investigate the fundamental behavior of the approximation in a simplified setting. We formulate our approach to be applicable to general anisotropic media by using the Green’s function defined for a homogeneous medium. Furthermore, the approach extends to cases where the background conductivity is isotropic while the actual medium is anisotropic. For a layered medium, the orientation of induced current densities relative to the layering provides physical intuition for background selection, drawing analogies to Voigt- and Reuss-type bounds. While these analogies offer useful guidance, our numerical results do not always conform to the expectations derived from them. Among the averaging schemes evaluated, arithmetic averaging generally yields the most accurate results. Numerical experiments indicate that the adaptive approach significantly outperforms fixed-background models across a range of frequencies, spacings, and conductivity contrasts. Furthermore, an example with a 3D structure illustrates the method’s broader applicability beyond the horizontally-layered earth setting. This framework provides a principled and efficient path toward fast, accurate EM borehole modeling for real-time well geosteering and subsurface electrical imaging.
Earthquakes occur when the tectonic plates of the Earth's crust shift, jolting past each other in a release of built-up tension. However, other natural forces can also influence seismic activity: Hydrological dynamics, like changes in groundwater and snowpacks, in particular, put pressure on faults. A new study from Caltech finds that a higher rate of change in groundwater levels leads to a noticeable increase in seismic activity. The work is published in the journal Science Advances.
A wildfire forecasting system powered by artificial intelligence (AI) could help detect dangerous fire conditions earlier and reduce the cost of wildfire response, according to new research from Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha, University of Canterbury (UC). The work is published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire.
This past winter, the Rocky Mountains experienced an historic snow drought, a worrying development for the tens of millions of people in the arid American West who depend on snowmelt for water. Now, a new study in the journal Geology investigates the geologic history of a surprising process that might be making the problem even worse: sublimation, the process by which frozen water transforms directly into water vapor, skipping the liquid phase altogether.
Across much of the Western United States, winter 2026 was the year the snow never came. Many ski resorts got by with snowmaking but shut down their winter operations early. Fire officials and water supply managers are worried about summer.
Publication date: Available online 18 March 2026
Source: Advances in Space Research
Author(s): Ramin Saadi Esfangareh, Fatemeh Imanpour, Mahdi Hasanlou
Publication date: Available online 17 March 2026
Source: Advances in Space Research
Author(s): Yifan Shen, Guangjian Xu, Liang Chen, Qiang Wang, Huizhong Zhu, Wei Zheng, Peifeng Kang, Shijie Zhao
Publication date: Available online 17 March 2026
Source: Advances in Space Research
Author(s): Wen Yu, Xiaojia Zeng, Xiongyao Li
Publication date: Available online 17 March 2026
Source: Advances in Space Research
Author(s): Yuqing Wang, Huijun Le, Libo Liu, Yiding Chen, Bo Xiong, Ruilong Zhang, Rongjin Du
