EOS

Content Warning: This feature contains discussion and images of ancient human remains. The study and display of mummies are deeply entangled with the history of colonialism and the commodification of human remains. Please proceed with discretion.

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On the frozen, windswept peaks of the Andes, conditions are not great for survival—not for humans or any other living things.

Much of the mountains’ small amount of water is locked up as ice. High-speed winds present a physical pressure against easy movement. Each breath carries a fraction of the life-giving oxygen abundant at lower altitudes. The reduced volume and density of the entire atmosphere above mean the Sun’s damaging ultraviolet (UV) rays are more directly absorbed by everything they touch.

Conditions are harsh but create a geophysical space where the rapidly ticking clock of biological decomposition is slowed and the sweeping clock of geology keeps time. The phenomenon of mummification has been encountered both knowingly and unknowingly by cultures around the world. Mummification is generally defined as the process in which extreme physical conditions such as aridity, freezing temperatures, or exposure to preservative chemicals slow the process of decay for biological remains—corpses.

Like their more well-known siblings anthropogenic mummies (like those from ancient Egypt), ancestral remains preserved as natural mummies, sometimes called spontaneous mummies, preserve human stories. These unintentional mummies are part of the landscape, physically as well as culturally.

When found by later generations, natural mummies seem to have a second life. Questions are asked, observations are made. Materials are sampled and analyzed. Traditions are remembered. History is uncovered. Conversations about cultural autonomy and legacies of colonial exploitation are deepened.

Children of Llullaillaco

As the oceanic Nazca Plate is subducted beneath the South American Plate, the folding landmass, captured ocean water, and molten magma contribute to the creation of the towering mountains and volcanoes of the Andes. The lower elevations of the Andes are richly habitable zones where people have made their home for more than 10,000 years.

Near the summit of a dormant stratovolcano on the border between Argentina and Chile, some of the world’s best-preserved natural mummies have been found—the Children of Llullaillaco. Discovered and excavated from their burial site in 1999 by archaeologists Johan Reinhard and María Constanza Ceruti, the Children of Llullaillaco now rest in cryogenic preservation at Argentina’s Museo de Arqueología de Alta Montaña (MAAM).

These three Incan children (between the ages of 5 and 13) were intentionally killed as part of a ritual sacrifice in the late 1400s, but their bodies were accidentally preserved by the geophysical idiosyncrasies of their burial site. In shallow graves, the bodies froze before significant dehydration occurred—in fact, researchers reported that their hearts still contained frozen blood. Llullaillaco abuts the Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on Earth. Additionally, the bodies were surrounded entirely by volcanic ash. This combination of cold temperatures and dry conditions preserved the bodies by freezing tissues as ice, wicking away any additional moisture, and preventing the rapid growth of microbes both inside and outside the remains.

Study of the Children of Llullaillaco contributed to a better understanding of ancient but still-remembered ceremonies called capacocha. In these months-long Incan rituals, children were selected to be sacrificed for an afterlife in which they would look down from the mountains to protect and guide their community. From these summits, some of the most consequential natural phenomena arise—snows and rains, rockslides, shade and light, and habitats for plants and animals.

“It is important to note that, although the Capacocha ceremony took place during the Tawantinsuyu or Inca Empire, Andean culture transcends the Inca Empire itself and remains alive to this day,” wrote Mario Bernaski, director of MAAM, in an email to Eos.

Indigenous communities initially objected to the extraction of the Children of Llullaillaco. Local archaeologists and anthropologists were generally not involved in the expedition, and the Indigenous Colla communities were not consulted. One Colla community filed a lawsuit alleging that their rights had been violated.

Before the Children of Llullaillaco went on display at MAAM in 2005, Argentina’s Indigenous community continued to voice their opposition. “Llullaillaco continues to be sacred for us,” said Rogelio Guanuco, the late leader of the Indigenous Association of Argentina. “They should never have profaned that sanctuary, and they should not put our children on exhibition as if in a circus.”

Even Reinhard seemed to begrudgingly agree at the time, telling the Washington Post, “I’d much prefer that they not be displayed, just because of all of the headaches.”

The remains are displayed, however, and to ensure they are handled in a culturally respectful way, the museum says it has built relationships with different Indigenous communities in Argentina, particularly the Collas Unidos Community of San Antonio de los Cobres and other organizations active in the Salta–Puna region of the country.

“Today, the communities actively participate in numerous cultural initiatives at the museum,” Bernaski wrote, “contributing their music, languages, stories, ceremonies, experiences, and traditional knowledge. They also share knowledge related to weaving, pottery, singing with a caja drum, copla (traditional folk songs), and other artistic expressions that form part of the Andean cultural heritage.”

Expanded space for the Colla community at MAAM does not address the core concern for many in that community, however: The display itself is a form of desecration. Many Indigenous leaders advocate for cultural representation without the display of human remains.

The place itself is the heart of the Andean cultural experience, Bernaski wrote.

“The extreme environmental conditions that made the extraordinary preservation of the Children of Llullaillaco possible…continue to characterize the lives of many communities in the Puna region.”

“The extreme environmental conditions that made the extraordinary preservation of the Children of Llullaillaco possible—the high altitude, low temperatures, low humidity, and stable climate—continue to characterize the lives of many communities in the Puna region,” he explained. “This environment influences their production methods, ways of living, migration patterns, celebrations, beliefs, and cultural practices that persist to this day.”

“Our goal [at MAAM] has never been to speak on behalf of the communities,” he wrote, “but to create spaces where scientific knowledge respectfully engages with Andean traditions, memory, and worldview.”

European Bog Bodies

Unlike the Children of Llullaillaco, northern Europe’s so-called bog bodies were preserved not through the absence of moisture, but through its overwhelming presence. Hundreds and even thousands of these accidental mummies have been found throughout Scandinavia, as well as the British Isles, Denmark, Germany, and Poland.

“The typical sequence [of bog formation] is sort of a pond or a lake that’s filled in by wetland vegetation,” explained Merritt Turetsky, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of the new book Bogland: The Secret World That Defies Death and Protects Life. “Then come sedges, rushes, bracken grasses, shrubs, and willows, and then come the mosses, and that’s what forms these bogs.”

Peat will form, said Turetsky, as long as plant productivity is greater than microbial decomposition. Peat is “an organic soil largely consisting of dead organic matter and visible plant remains,” explained Line Rochefort, director of the Peatland Ecology Research Group at Université Laval in Canada, to the New York Times in 2022. “Peat accumulates, and is not deposited by water or ice or wind.”

Peat bogs are naturally acidic, and many are anaerobic—they lack sufficient oxygen to support a community of microbe decomposers. This makes them an excellent medium for preserving organic material. Peat, the first step in the formation of coal, is also a long-familiar source of fuel in places like County Galway, Ireland, where peat is being harvested in this bog. Credit: Peter Gorman/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

As peat itself decomposes, it releases humic acid, also known as bog acid. Humic acid inhibits the growth of bacteria, mold, and other microbes that would otherwise contribute to the process of decay. Many bog bodies were discovered in bogs dominated by sphagnum moss in particular. The thick abundance of these tiny plants prevents almost any circulation of water, contributing to the preservation of organic material. In addition to being acidic, many peat bogs are anaerobic—they lack sufficient oxygen to support a community of microbe decomposers.

The oldest bog body in Europe (Denmark’s Koelbjerg Man) is a collection of skeletal bones dating to the end of the last ice age, but most bog bodies date to the Iron Age and include startlingly well-preserved flesh and facial features, discernible quaffs of hair, animal skin and textile clothing, wood and metal jewelry, and wood, stone, bone, and iron tools.

Grauballe Man is a bog body dating to the 2nd century BCE and unearthed in a Danish peat bog in 1952. His hands were so well-preserved that scientists were successfully able to fingerprint him. Credit: Malene Thyssen/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Scientists who have carefully excavated and analyzed bog bodies have found that like the Children of Llullaillaco, bog bodies preserve the remains of men and women who often met a violent end: hanging, strangulation, blunt-force trauma, or stabbing. They may have been sacrifices, but these bog bodies were often buried with care, attention, and respect. Some were buried with grave goods, including metal jewelry and wood and metal weapons.

Though the context of their deposition is not known, their very presence attests to the importance of peat bogs from prehistoric to contemporary use.

“Peatlands have taught us perhaps more about human history than any other. They’re storytellers about Earth’s history. They’re storytellers about early human societies.”

“What I’ve learned from colleagues who call themselves bog archeologists,” said Turetsky, “is that bogs were actually working landscapes. People maybe didn’t live in the bogs, but they lived in the drier forested areas, islands interspersed with bogs. They raised their cattle and their animals by foraging in the bogs.”

Throughout the industrial era, of course, peat bogs have continued to be working landscapes: Peat—the earliest step in the formation of coal—has been consistently harvested as a source of fuel.

Today, as more nations work to reduce their carbon emissions, peatlands are still important to communities and businesses. On a global scale, they are a key site of carbon sequestration: Accounting for only 3% of the world’s landscape, they store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forest biomass combined. For industry, peat has become a lucrative soil additive that helps soils increase moisture.

“Peatlands have taught us perhaps more about human history than any other [landscape],” Turetsky said. “They’re storytellers about Earth’s history. They’re storytellers about early human societies.”

Windover Bog Bodies

Peatlands exist far beyond Europe. They can be found in tropical climates such as Southeast Asia and Africa’s Congo Basin, as well as subtropical ecosystems like the peat swamps of Florida—the site of American bog bodies.

While Europe’s peat bogs are largely dominated by sphagnum moss, Florida’s peat swamps have more varied vegetation, including cypresses (inland) and mangroves (coastal). They are usually less acidic than bogs, as they are fed by mineral-rich surface and groundwater as well as precipitation. Like bogs, however, forested wetlands are poorly drained. Organic material, such as leaves, wood, and roots, is unable to fully decompose and instead accumulates as peat at the bottom of swampy ponds.

Scientists think the more than 150 bog bodies discovered at the Windover site in eastern Florida are part of an ancient cemetery. Unlike most European bog bodies and the Children of Llullaillaco, the remains at this site are of people who seem to have died from accidents or natural causes, not intentional harm. They were carefully buried with grave goods, including bone tools and woven fabrics. The Windover remains are generally much older than other accidental mummies, dating to the North American Archaic Period, about 8,000 years ago.

“To us, this is where our ancestors were laid to rest,” said Tina Marie Osceola, the historic preservation officer of the Seminole Tribe of Florida.

“It was a pond cemetery,” said Ben Brotemarkle, executive director of the Florida Historical Society, to WFTV news earlier this year. “They cared for their loved ones and buried them with care….They were wrapped in the oldest woven cloth found in North America.”

The Windover remains were discovered in 1982. In the following years, the swamp was drained, and the bodies were extracted and examined. Although the remains are skeletal, many retain brain tissue, which underwent an early form of DNA analysis.

The scientific analysis preceded the landmark 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). NAGPRA requires that Indigenous communities be a part of any extraction or analysis of human remains or cultural items. It also requires agencies to repatriate or transfer Native American remains to the appropriate parties (to be determined by consultation with “lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations”).

NAGPRA is not an administrative requirement, nor is it a hindrance to science. It is a recognition of tribal sovereignty and stewardship.

As such, the Seminole Tribe of Florida is pursuing repatriation of the ancestral remains at Windover under the auspices laid out by NAGPRA. The tribe is working with Florida State University on a plan for preservation and research as well as, ultimately, a return of the bodies to the tribe. The cooperative effort reflects a larger movement among the Seminole community, one using the motto “no more stolen ancestors,” which seeks the repatriation of thousands of Seminole artifacts from museums such as the Smithsonian Institution.

The Iceman

The peaks of the southern European Alps rise kilometers and ecosystems away from bogs and swamps. The mountains’ temperature, elevation, rockiness, and impassibility occasionally allow for an icy state of preservation, however.

In fact, the Alps are home to one of the best-known natural mummies in the world: Ötzi, the Iceman. Although he was initially thought to be the victim of either an accident or an extreme winter storm, later analysis revealed he was, in fact, the victim of severe violence: shot in the back by a flint arrow. His body had endured other injuries (a blow to the head, a cut to the hand), but ultimately, he likely bled to death within a matter of minutes and came to rest in a rocky gully in the Ötzal Alps.

Ötzi, who died at around 45 years old around 3250 BCE, was famously discovered by tourists hiking in the Alps in 1991. This life-size reconstruction of the Iceman shows some of the associated material that was unearthed with his body: leather clothing; leather shoes insulated with grasses; a belt with a pouch (visible on his behind) that contained a scraper, drill, flint flake, bone awl, and dried fungus; and a flint dagger. The weapon in his right hand is an unfinished longbow. Credit: © South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology

The unusual site of Ötzi’s discovery allowed for preservation. The location of the site was vigorously debated between Austria and Italy, and the conditions of his preservation remain a subject of debate.

One theory is that Ötzi died in early autumn where he was found—a rocky, nearly snow free gully. Freezing temperatures and dry winds quickly dehydrated his corpse. A relatively short time later, a glacier blanketed the mountain, but the protective walls of the gully prevented Ötzi’s body from being crushed or transported. His positioning allowed his body to remain intact and his goods close by.

“The preservation of the body is based on the fact that he was found at 3,200 meters altitude, in a cold and also dry climate—because the Schnalstal Valley is one of the driest valleys in the Eastern Alps,” explained Andreas Putzer, curator at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, where Ötzi’s body and gear are preserved and displayed.

Another theory holds that Ötzi died much earlier in the year, when the gully would almost certainly have been filled by snow. This theory posits that Ötzi died in a nearby valley and his body and goods were transported by a thin ice field (not a basally sliding glacier) in a centuries-long series of freeze-and-thaw processes.

“What we discovered is that the body was first dried out, and then he lay in water. [And] he has melted up completely a few times in the last 5,000 years,” Putzer explained. “That’s what we know from the analysis on the tissue of the Iceman, but how this happened and why it happened, it’s difficult to glean.”

“If you have an emotional connection to what happened a few thousand years ago, you are able to connect these people that lived thousands of years ago in the area.”

Alpine hikers famously stumbled upon Ötzi’s remains peeking out of the ice in 1991. Weather prevented the body’s extraction for nearly a week, but his gear (leather clothing, iron and wooden weapons, containers, and a copper ax) hinted that the remains may not be that of a modern mountaineer.

Scientists were quickly able to deduce that the remains dated to Europe’s Copper Age, and later genetic analysis revealed that a handful of living Austrians are related to the Iceman.

Moreover, the traditions preserved in Ötzi’s 5,000-year-old remains are startlingly recognizable to contemporary Alpine communities. “The geomorphology of the valley is very particular,” Putzer explained. “It’s a very steep terrain, and it’s still today worked by farmers under these hard conditions. So the connection to this Alpine area of the local people is alive still today as it was in the past.”

Although genetic analysis revealed that he himself was lactose intolerant, it is likely that Ötzi was part of a goat-herding community. His well-preserved cloak and leggings are made of goat leather, and analysis of his stomach contents revealed that his last meal likely contained goat jerky.

The dairy industry remains a vital part of Alpine communities today. Putzer initially excavated close to an Alpine farm, “and the farmer was interested,” he said. “When we discovered that the find site was connected to Alpine dairy and to Alpine farming, he was very proud of that—that we were excavating on his ground the first settlers of the valley. So, if you have an emotional connection to what happened a few thousand years ago, you are able to connect these people that lived thousands of years ago in the area.”

Putzer believes Ötzi holds relevance beyond the Alps. Much like modern cultures, Copper Age peoples were forced to respond to a changing climate. “In the past, it was other factors that changed the climate,” Putzer noted. “But that’s why we are still on Earth, we are able to adapt very fast to changes in a global view, but also in a small territory.”

The Saltmen of Iran

Thousands of kilometers from Ötzi’s icy mountaintop, Iran’s Chehrabad salt mines have created a different sort of natural mausoleum.

For millennia, miners excavated the crystal rock salt of the Douzlākh salt deposit near Chehrabad. What had once been an exposed outcropping of salt became a recess of salt, then a cave of salt, and, ultimately, a network of deep salt tunnels and centuries of debris.

Chehrabad is in a tectonically active region of Iran, and these salt tunnels are especially unstable. Intermittent tunnel collapses killed workers trapped there, and the hygroscopic nature of salt whisked moisture from their bodies, killing internal bacteria that would otherwise have broken them down.

The mummies are not as intact as other examples; some are skeletal, some were damaged in the initial mining accidents, and all were continually crushed over centuries. Still, from the hair of their beards to the leather of their shoes, the “Saltmen” (which include at least one woman and one teenager) are nearly as recognizable as when they set out to work thousands of years ago.

Saltman 1, whose desiccated head still has flowing hair and a beard, was presumably killed in an accident at the Chehrabad salt mine in what is now Iran in the 8th century BCE. Credit: Haleh Brooks, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The Saltmen represent the continuity of Persian salt mining traditions, not a single community. The oldest body dates from the Achaemenid Empire, and the youngest dates to the Sasanian Empire nearly a thousand years later. The mummies were discovered during the first mechanized excavation processes at Chehrabad in 1994. Prior to that, excavation at the site was largely carried out using handheld tools similar to those found with the Saltmen: woolen ropes, iron picks, adzes, chisels, and knives. The Saltmen’s clothing was also familiar, most notably durable leather trousers and boots. One of the Saltmen still wore a gold earring. Another carried a leather bag of salt.

Salt, originally used as table salt but primarily used for deicing roads in the last century, continued to be mined at Chehrabad until the mid-1990s, when the site became protected under Iranian cultural heritage laws.

Serendipitous Preservation

Natural mummies, whether discovered on mountaintops or in murky depths, are a testament to the fundamental relationship between the human experience and the conditions of our planet.

The question of stewardship of ancestral remains continues to evolve. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) considers remains to be part of a region’s “moveable cultural property” and includes some naturally preserved remains as part of its World Heritage List. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples maintains that Indigenous communities have the full “right to the repatriation of their [ancestors’] remains” and that countries “shall seek to enable the access and/or repatriation of ceremonial objects and human remains in their possession through fair, transparent and effective mechanisms developed in conjunction with Indigenous peoples concerned.”

Communities are informed by their geography—“geography is destiny,” according to one aphorism. Natural mummies make this adage practical if not pretty.

The International Council of Museums’ Code of Ethics for Museums outlines several ways museums and other cultural institutions should engage with ancestral remains, always considering the “interests and beliefs of the community, ethnic or religious groups from whom the objects originated.”

The Vermillion Accord on Human Remains, adopted by the World Archaeological Congress in 1989, forced archaeologists to reconsider the Western tradition of so-called mummy studies and influenced the passage of NAGPRA. The accord calls for “respect for the wishes of the local community and of relatives or guardians of the dead,” as well as respect for scientific study.

Unlike NAGPRA, these accords and codes are largely unenforceable guidelines, not rules. The UNESCO document is a recommendation, for instance, while the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People is, like all UN declarations, not a legally binding treaty.

Communities are informed by their geography—“geography is destiny,” according to one aphorism. Natural mummies make this adage practical if not pretty. Hundreds if not thousands of Incan traditions were defined by the Andean landscape and survive in the Children of Llullaillaco. The Seminole believe that “if the land dies, so will the Tribe,” making conservation and repatriation of the Windover skeletons a vital concern. Mines that yielded salt for Cyrus the Great continue to provide for the people of Iran. European bogs are reservoirs of an agrarian past as well as an ongoing legacy of fossil fuel. And occasionally icy Alpine hillsides have provided agricultural sustenance for centuries.

Earth’s dynamic nature creates countless worlds in which life can thrive and occasional ones in which life can’t. Natural mummies reveal how humans have adapted to a remarkable range of natural environments, creating cultures as distinctive as the landscapes they inhabit.

—Andrew Howley, Science Writer; and Eos

Citation: Howley, A., and Eos (2026), Natural mummies hold memories of life and land, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260309. Published on 1 October 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.

Secrets in the Peat

Written into an approximately 30-meter-long (100-foot-long) core sample drilled from the seafloor near West Antarctica is a history that might seem impossible if it weren’t so clearly documented. From fossilized pollen grains and preserved plant roots in the core sample, scientists found that during the Cretaceous period around 90 million years ago, Antarctica was a humid, swampy rainforest. When scientists published the results in 2020, it became the southernmost forest ever recorded.

Now, in a new study published in Communications Earth and Environment, the same scientists report that the original core sample, drilled roughly 900 kilometers (560 miles) from the South Pole, also holds evidence of the southernmost wildfires ever recorded. Those wildfires likely facilitated the transition of the landscape from rainforest into a sphagnum moss–dominated peat bog that experienced low-level fires. According to the scientists, the discovery reveals a fire regime that is remarkably similar to that of modern-day peat bogs.

A Changing Landscape

When the scientists were studying the core sediment for traces of ancient forests, they used strong acids that dissolve away everything except organic material. At first, they were interested in the pollen and spores that remained, aiming to get an idea of the flora that grew on the landscape, but they also noticed another interesting organic material in the mix.

“We spotted these tiny pieces of charcoal,” evidence of burnt material, said Johann Klages, a sedimentologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute.

“It’s the southernmost evidence for wildfires on the planet so far.”

For the new study, the scientists took a variety of approaches to confirm they were looking at remnants of ancient blazes. First, they examined the charcoal fragments using high-powered microscopes and saw plant cell walls, indicating the fragments were burnt plant material. Partially burnt plants also leave behind specific chemical residues, which the scientists identified in the core sediment using spectrometry. The presence of amber, which is fossilized tree resin, was another clue.

“We saw, in some instances, that the amber was covering the bark of a former tree,” Klages said. “That usually happens when the tree gets injured by some kind of external force,” such as a fire. On the basis of the way that light reflected off the burnt particles in the sediment core, the scientists were even able to determine that the fires were lower-temperature surface fires, as opposed to underground fires that can occur in peatlands or crown fires that burn the tree canopy.

Taken together, “it’s the southernmost evidence for wildfires on the planet so far,” Klages said.

Scientists examined a sediment core under a microscope to learn more about Antarctica’s past. Top, left to right: a moss spore, charcoal, and amber. Bottom, left to right: a scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of cell walls that appear to be homogenized, indicating that charcoal burned at high temperatures; an SEM of radial wood, with arrows pointing to gaps that indicate coniferous wood; and a similar image highlighting similarities between a modern-day conifer and the fossil image. Credit: Salzmann et al., 2026, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03959-1

The story broadened when the scientists tracked changes to the fire history and ecosystem over time. By investigating the chemical signatures further and assessing the different types of fossilized pollen and spores, the researchers recorded a landscape full of conifers representative of a temperate rainforest in the lower, earlier sections of the Cretaceous. Higher up in the sample, later in the Cretaceous, they saw a sharp increase in ferns and sphagnum moss, commonly found in peat bogs. Peat bogs are also acidic environments, and the scientists saw in tests that the pH in the core dropped during the transition.

“It was just spectacular to have slightly different ways of looking at the geologic record and looking at fire histories. And by putting them all together, you understand more than you would with just one proxy.”

The transition from rainforest to peat bog paralleled an increase in fire occurrence. “We see an evolution of fire going on,” said Ulrich Salzmann, a paleoecologist at Northumbria University. The scientists speculate that more frequent fires helped sustain the shift to peat bogs by keeping the landscape more open. “You basically see the peat spores increasing at the same time that fire goes up,” Salzmann said. He noted that similar links between fire and peat bogs are seen in the high Arctic today.

“It was just spectacular to have slightly different ways of looking at the geologic record and looking at fire histories. And by putting them all together, you understand more than you would with just one proxy,” said Ellen Currano, a paleoecologist at the University of Wyoming who wasn’t involved in the study.

Peat Bogs, Then and Now

Antarctica’s peat bogs show similarities to peat bogs throughout history all the way up to present day. Salzmann said that when he looks at the 90-million-year-old sphagnum spores from the study and compares them to ones from the past 10,000 years in Scotland, they look remarkably similar. “I find it so amazing,” he said. Peat bogs today also experience low-intensity, surface fires like those they documented in ancient Antarctica. Though the Cretaceous had a climate dramatically different from today’s, with warmer temperatures and higher carbon dioxide and oxygen levels, the findings reflect that fire can be a part of healthy peatlands as long as they aren’t drained or dried.

“One of the greatest powers of the fossil record is it teaches us that the present is just one data point for how Earth works,” Currano said. “By looking at the Late Cretaceous and seeing a time period when you have much warmer temperatures, we can see other ways that Earth works, and maybe even a little bit about where we might be heading in the future.”

—Andrew Chapman (@andrewgchapman.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Chapman, A. (2026), Wildfires burned in Antarctica 90 million years ago, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260312. Published on 1 October 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.

Secrets in the Peat

Peat bogs are weird repositories of Earth science, history, and ecology.

“Peatlands have taught us perhaps more about human history than any other” ecosystem, says ecologist Merritt Turetsky, author of Bogland: The Secret World That Defies Death and Protects Life. “They’re storytellers about Earth’s history. They’re storytellers about early human societies.”

“Bog bodies,” unearthed hundreds and even thousands of years after their burial, are one example of the preservative power of peatlands. “Natural Mummies Hold Memories of Life and Land” is a fascinating introduction to bog bodies, icemen, and other human remains that are naturally, if unintentionally, preserved by the intersecting idiosyncrasies of temperature, moisture, aridity, pressure, and microbiomes. This feature also reminds us that these mummies are not only scientific specimens—they are the remains of human beings and touchpoints for the rights of Indigenous peoples long overlooked in Western-dominated research.

Peatlands record stories far older than humanity, of course. “Wildfires Burned in Antarctica 90 Million Years Ago” explores how Antarctic sediment cores are revealing the White Continent’s evolution from a temperate rainforest to a peatland during the Cretaceous.

History is still being written in peat, and it might even help predict the future. Recent research revealed that bird biodiversity is soaring in a solar park built on degraded peatland. (That story is one of many Eos articles available in audio.) Rewetted bogs offer an additional reason for cautious optimism, as detailed in “Restored Peatlands Could Become Carbon Sinks Within Decades.”

In addition to being Turetsky’s storytellers, peat bogs and other wetlands “are actually unsung heroes,” says Annie Proulx in Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis.

We hope this issue of Eos reacquaints you with wetlands and ushers in a hopeful approach to October.

—Caryl-Sue Micalizio, Editor in Chief

Citation: Micalizio, C.-S. (2026), Science on repeat, peat, peat, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260311. Published on 1 October 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.

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.

Last week, FEMA administrator Cameron Hamilton issued a memorandum outlining the agency’s scope and essentially redefining “emergency management.”

 
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“Effective immediately, FEMA defines emergency management as the strategic coordination of emergency services to protect life, property, and continuity of operations,” Hamilton said in a video announcement.

A previous definition on the FEMA website defined the phrase as “the managerial function charged with creating the framework within which communities reduce vulnerability to hazards and cope with hazards.” Samantha Montano, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy who researches emergency management, explained that this previous definition was developed by a focus group of emergency management researchers and practitioners.

It’s unclear whether any experts were involved in developing the new definition.

Montano said she was disturbed by the new definition’s emphasis on “emergency services.”

“I know it looks like a really small change, but that term ‘emergency services’ is a total, total recalibration of what emergency management is, does, and who we work with, in a way that is deeply concerning,” she told Eos.

In the field of emergency management, “emergency services” refers to fire, police, and emergency medical services—what people typically mean when they refer to first responders, she explained. This means the new definition does not involve emergency managers coordinating with other government agencies, nonprofits such as the Red Cross, or private entities—including utility companies. The new definition also seems to preclude providing funding for disaster mitigation or recovery.

By this definition emergency management has no role in mitigation and recovery and also excludes from response groups like the Red Cross, utility companies, public health, hospital/ university emergency management, etc.

— Dr. Samantha Montano (@samlmontano.bsky.social) 2026-09-30T16:14:52.032Z

Montano also noted that the new definition seemed to be in line with suggestions made in the right-wing policy initiative Project 2025 as well as the FEMA Review Council report released in May. Those documents proposed a shift of many current FEMA responsibilities to states and localities.

What’s In a Name?

Hamilton was ousted as acting head of FEMA in May 2025 after suggesting that the agency should continue to exist, but was confirmed as the agency’s new leader in August 2026.

His new memo, titled in part “We Must Return to Basics,” frames the redefinition as an effort to clarify FEMA’s mission. It argues that the field of emergency management has expanded beyond its original scope, “which has diluted our credibility, capability, and professional development.”

Montano agreed that there is value in clarifying the definition of some terms within the field of emergency management, and that she has been involved with such efforts herself. However, this redefinition struck her as “bizarre.” Hamilton himself doesn’t have a background in emergency management, and the new definition doesn’t engage with the decades of work experts have put into developing a definition of the field, she said.

It’s unclear exactly what implications the new definition carries, but the memo seems to imply changes could be sweeping, noting that all “doctrine, policies, guidance, training, websites, workforce materials, planning and exercise products, publications, presentations, and other internal and public-facing materials” will be updated to align with the new definition.

The memo also identifies 12 core areas for the agency to focus on, some of which seem to contradict the new definition of emergency management—including risk analysis and hazard vulnerability assessments, planning and plan development, and cross-functional coordination.

“If, as the memo implies, [Hamilton] is expecting FEMA to start operating under this definition, then everything at FEMA would change,” Montano said. “There’s a real potential here for a complete overturning of what we think of as being emergency management.”

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

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
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Examination of Planet Labs satellite imagery before the collapse of the slope suggests that there were surprisingly few signs of incipient failure.

The catastrophic landslide – debris flow – flood that swept through Tibet and Nepal on 26 August originated with very large rock slope failure on the flanks of Langtang Lirung, a massif located within Langtang National Park in Nepal. Good satellite imagery is available via Planet Labs from two days (12 and 25 August 2026) leading up to the failure.

Given the discussion about the potential for protecting the population through early warning systems (loyal readers will know that I have my doubts about this), thought it would be interesting to see what changed in the days leading up to the failure.

A caveat is of course that the Planet Labs imagery is of moderate spatial resolution – but that is likely to be imagery upon which this sort of system is based if an optical approach is used.

So this is the Planet Labs image from 12 August 2026 for the site of the landslide, draped onto the Google Earth DEM:-

Satellite image draped onto the Google Earth DEM for the Langtung Lirung landslide. Image copyright Planet Labs, used with permission, collected on 12 August 2026.

Here is the same location with an image from 25 August 2026:-

Satellite image draped onto the Google Earth DEM for the Langtung Lirung landslide. Image copyright Planet Labs, used with permission, collected on 25 August 2026.

And here is a slider to allow comparison:-

Images copyright Planet Labs, used with permission.

Two things jump out – first, there is comparatively little change on first inspection between the two images bar the obvious (and irrelevant) shadows, clouds and suchlike. And second, the 25 August 2026 image – collected the day before the massive landslide – shows no real signs of instability. There is no obvious dust being generated for example, and there are no obvious dust deposits around the landslide.

In more detail, there are a couple of things that have changed. First, it does appear that the ice near the crown of the landslide has moved – this is the change that was picked up in the pixel tracking research that I highlighted previously. Care is needed here because of the shadows, but there is probably change in this area.

Second, there are signs of increased rockfall activity in the midslope area – this can be seen in the image below:-

Satellite image draped onto the Google Earth DEM for the middle section of the Langtung Lirung landslide. Image copyright Planet Labs, used with permission, collected on 25 August 2026.

The area in the centre of the image has seen substantial change. It appears that several areas parts of the rock slope have detached, with large boulders collecting immediately below (still in the midslope area).

This indicates debuttressing of the upper part of the slope, and this was probably part of the failure process. But these are really minor changes that are probably very difficult to differentiate from the background level of activity.

It is quite interesting that this slope generated so little obvious precursory signs of failure. Other large landslides behave very differently. This needs more detailed investigation, but the signs are not good in terms of being able to use these sorts of precursory signals as a reliable indicator of incipient failure.

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to the wonderful people at Planet Labs for allowing me to use their imagery.

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Editors’ Vox is a blog from AGU’s Publications Department.

As wildfire activity and severity continue to amplify across the globe, it is increasingly important to understand and have the ability to forecast wildfire emissions, which can affect air quality, climate, and public health.

A new article in Reviews of Geophysics explores our current understanding of the chemical reactions within wildfire smoke plumes. Here, we asked the lead author to give an overview of fire plumes, how scientists study them, and future directions for research.

In simple terms, what are fire plumes?

Fire plumes are rising masses of hot air, gaseous chemical species and particles produced as vegetation and other material burn. We commonly see them as smoke columns above the fire source, but their chemical constituents are not visible. Depending on the fire intensity and meteorological conditions, a plume may disperse near the source or rise high into the atmosphere and travel further away from the source. Its composition also depends on the fuel type. For example, a forest, a grassland, and a building can release different pollutants and chemicals. A plume is not chemically uniform or static. Close to the flames, newly emitted compounds can react rapidly, while downwind in-plume species mix with surrounding gases and form new secondary species. This is commonly called plume aging, meaning that smoke can alter significantly between the fire source and the areas it reaches.

Why is it important to understand the chemistry inside fire plumes?

Understanding the chemistry inside fire plumes helps us answer the question that smoke concentration alone cannot: “What are people and ecosystems actually exposed to as smoke travels?”

Fires release pollutants directly, but reactions inside the plume can result in the formation of new pollutants.

Fires release pollutants directly, but reactions inside the plume can result in the formation of new pollutants. Specific compounds get consumed, while others become more abundant or change their properties as the plume moves downwind. Our review brings together these chemical pathways to explain why smoke from different fuels, locations, and meteorological conditions present different behaviors. Combining this knowledge, in-plume chemistry helps improve air-quality forecast and estimates of downwind exposure. In addition, it provides necessary evidence and information to investigate health and climate impacts, inform health guidelines, and fire management decisions. It is important to understand that smoke that reaches a community may be chemically different from the smoke emitted near the fire source.

How do scientists observe and measure chemical reactions in fire plumes?

Scientists usually investigate plume chemistry by utilizing a combination of complementary approaches. Ground stations continuously measure gases and particles as smoke passes, while research aircrafts can collect samples within and around a plume at different distances from the fire source. These approaches are characterized as online methods. Comparing these measurements helps see which compounds are emitted, reduced, and formed as the smoke ages.

Air filters collected during fire events can later be analyzed to identify additional particle components and constitute an offline method. Additionally, controlled in-lab combustion experiments allow scientists to burn selected fuels and examine reactions under known conditions. Moreover, satellites provide a wider view of plume dispersion and select, typically long-lived, species. However, they cannot detect reactions. Finally, atmospheric models combine these observations to test possible chemical pathways and investigate changes that cannot be measured directly. Each method reveals different pieces of the same evolving chemical system.

What are the main chemical components of fire plumes explored in your review?

Fire plumes contain a complex mixture of gases and particles, rather than a single compound we simply call smoke. Major gases emitted during a fire include carbon dioxide and monoxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, usually referenced as VOCs. Depending on the fuel, plumes can also contain ammonia and sulfur species. The particle fraction includes soot, organic material, ash, and trace metals.

In our review, we pay particular attention to black and brown carbon, which are light-absorbing species, and organic particles that can change as the smoke ages. It is important to note that not all the species existing inside a plume were emitted directly by the fire. Chemical reactions can generate ozone and secondary organic aerosols, resulting in the formation of new pollutants in the original mixture. Understanding both the initial emissions and the secondary formed products is essential for assessing air quality, climate effects, and potential exposure.

Simple schematic representation of selected in-plume chemical species and processes. Credit: Dovrou et al. [2026], Figure 1

What factors influence the chemistry inside fire plumes?

The chemistry of a fire plume begins with what is burning and how it burns. Different vegetation types and anthropogenic materials release different compounds, while intense flaming and slower, smoldering combustion produce release emissions. Temperature and oxygen availability also affect the in-plume chemistry. In addition, plume size and injection height play a key role. Specifically, a dense plume rising high above the surface encounters different conditions from a smoke remaining close to the ground. As the plume dilutes and ages, gases can react or dilute into particles, altering both pollutant concentrations and particulate properties. All these factors interact; thus, two fires of similar size will produce chemically different smoke plumes.

How do fire plumes impact cloud formation?

Fire smoke can influence clouds, as small smoke particles can act as cloud condensation nuclei, meaning surfaces on which water vapor condenses to from droplets. When smoke adds large numbers of these particles, a cloud may contain more droplets that are individually smaller, potentially changing its lifetime and precipitation. Some fire-related mineral particles can also assist ice crystals to form colder clouds. In-plume chemistry is important because the particles continue to change as plume ages, altering their size, composition, and ability to take up water. There is also a competing effect. Black and brown carbon absorb sunlight and warm the surrounding air, occasionally reducing humidity and making cloud formation less favorable. The overall outcome depends on the plume and cloud types as well as the atmospheric conditions.

What are some of the remaining knowledge gaps where additional research efforts are needed?

Ultimately, the goal is to predict not only where the plume travels, but how its composition and impacts evolve along the way.

One major challenge is capturing the fastest reactions in fresh smoke and following the same plume as it ages, especially under dark conditions or after it passes through clouds. We also need to understand why models sometimes struggle to reproduce ozone, and the formation or loss of organic particles when simulating fire events. Other uncertainties include the mechanism of smoke rise, its mixture with surrounding air, and the way that biological particles change during plume transport. Our review highlights the value of combining controlled laboratory experiments with aircraft, ground-based and satellite observations, supported by higher-detailed chemical models. Improved sensors and drones could also help fill important gaps. Ultimately, the goal is to predict not only where the plume travels, but how its composition and impacts evolve along the way.

—Eleni Dovrou (edovrou@uoc.gr; 0000-0003-0564-9573), Assistant Professor at the University of Crete, Department of Chemistry, Greece, Visiting Fellow Honorary Appointment at the HEAL Research Institute, University of Canberra, Australia, Alumni Affiliate at the Leverhulme Research Center, Imperial College, UK, Alumni Affiliate at the Technical University of Crete, School of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Greece

Citation: Dovrou, E. (2026), Where fire ends, chemistry begins, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO265038. Published on 30 September 2026. This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author(s). Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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On 6 August 2025, the Dayuan landslide in Guangzhou, China killed 7 people. It was triggered by rainfall onto an area affected by a wildfire.

In recent decades, China has built substantial capacity for investigating landslides. One result of this is that most significant landslides there are now analysed with the results published. This is a welcome development.

One example is the 6 August 2025 Dayuan landslide in Guangzhou, China, which killed seven people. An analysis of this event (Che et al. 2026) has been published in the journal Landslides – it is a very interesting story.

The location of this landslide is [23.24560, 113.33723] (Che et al. (2026) provide a location that appears slightly incorrect, but mapping in China is an issue in its own right). This is a Google Earth image of the site:-

Google Earth image of the location of the 6 August 2025 Dayuan landslide.

The Dayuan landslide had a volume of about 15,000 m3, travelling about 80 metres to impact eleven houses at the toe of the slope. The event, which was triggered by an intense burst of rainfall (peak intensity = 32.8 mm/h) that followed a prolonged period of rainfall. The landslide had unusually high mobility, which was a major factor in its lethality.

The really interesting aspect of this event is that the slope had suffered a substantial wildfire in January 2025, a few months before the landslide. Che et al. (2026) conclude that this wildfire created an ash layer that initially impeded infiltration until it was eroded away, which then exposed a layer of highly permeable soil. When the rains arrived, the topography channelled water into this part of the slope, generating high pore water pressures that triggered the failure.

It is not clear as to why the landslide had unusually high mobility – perhaps static liquefaction was a factor?

Wildfire occurrence is rising, and the link to landslides in places such as California is well established. That even small wildfires are promoting fatal landslides in Asia is very interesting, especially ahead of the unpredictable global weather that will accompany the peak of the 2026-27 El Nino event.

Reference

Che, F., Zou, J., Qiu, Y. et al. 2026. Coupled effects of wildfire, rainfall, terrain, and lithology on the failure of the Dayuan landslide. Landslides. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-026-02854-2

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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.

A recent investigative report found that spending for NASA’s research and analysis programs has remained relatively flat for 15 years, ignoring recommendations from community-led decadal surveys and directives by Congress. Given inflation, spending for these programs has actually decreased 30% in value from Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 to FY2025.

“The consequences are devastating,” wrote Mark Sykes in the blog that accompanied his investigation. “NASA is losing the intellectual content needed to identify and answer the breadth of significant scientific questions it is faced with today and it is losing the community of scientists (young and old) our nation needs to pursue these questions and maintain leadership in the world.”

Following the Money

Research and analysis (R&A) programs fund openly competed proposals that generate basic research and data analysis. This basic science underpins most of the agency’s mission and research portfolios, from high-profile, high-budget space telescopes to interplanetary spacecraft to lunar science.

In the two most recent decadal surveys for planetary science, published in 2011 and 2022, the scientific community recommended that NASA increase its budget for planetary science R&A to better support its expanded research portfolio, and that those increases should slightly outpace inflation.

What’s more, Congress also directed that NASA grow its R&A grant programs. As recently as the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, it set a goal that R&A “reaches a level of not less than 10 percent of the total annual funding of relevant divisions of [NASA’s] Science Mission Directorate by fiscal year 2025.” That is, planetary R&A should strive to reach 10% of the Planetary Science Division (PSD) budget.

While neither decadal surveys nor goals set by Congress are legally binding, ignoring both is decidedly against the norm.

Sykes, a planetary scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., obtained data on NASA’s R&A funding through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and publicly available documents. R&A is not listed as a single line item in NASA’s budget or the President’s Budget Request to Congress, but rather spread throughout individual programs and missions. Sykes’s investigation tallied separate R&A contributions across PSD programs for 15 years to reveal the total level of funding.

NASA systemically underspent on its planetary research and analysis for 15 years (blue) when compared with funding levels recommended by the 2011 Planetary Science Decadal Survey (green), the 2022 Planetary Science Decadal Survey (yellow), and the level recommended by Congress in the 2022 CHIPs and Science Act (arrow). Credit: Mark Sykes, CC BY 4.0

The data show that in the first year covered by the 2011 planetary science decadal survey recommendations (which was 2013), planetary R&A spending ($119 million) was already lower than the recommended funding level ($140 million). The discrepancy between recommended and actual spending only grew over the years covered by the 2011 survey.

The 2022 planetary science decadal survey, as well as Congress, then recommended that planetary R&A spending reach 10% of the total PSD budget. In 2023, planetary R&A spent only 2.5% the PSD budget, a discrepancy of about $185 million.

Shortchanging Basic Science

The only significant change in planetary R&A spending since 2011 was in 2025. NASA budgeted $144 million for planetary R&A in FY2025, still a relatively flat amount. But halfway through that fiscal year, it had spent just 47% of that ($68 million).

“For years, money budgeted has been very close to money expensed,” Sykes told Eos via email. “I noticed that FY2025 budget numbers did not appear to [be] in the President’s Budget Requests for FY2026 and FY2027, which made me wonder what might be going on.”

NASA has 2 years to spend appropriated funds, but historically has spent those funds by the end of the fiscal year.

 
Related

•  An Investigative Report on the Funding of NASA Planetary Research and Analysis Programs, FY2011-FY2025
•  An Update for FY2025
•  Trump’s Attacks on Science: The State of the Science 1 Year On
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
 

“It would be pretty notable for NASA to incur costs amounting to 50% of its R&A budgets in the last three months!” Sykes said. “I would say that the accrued costs for FY2025 reflects a de facto change in the budget by the Administration.”

He added that this may be one of the many examples of the second Trump administration choosing not to spend Congressionally allocated funds for programs that don’t align with their politics.

Despite anticipating the shortfall, Sykes said, “it was still a shock to actually see it.”

This investigation spans 15 years, 8 NASA administrators, and four presidential administrations with varying levels of support for NASA and for science. FY2025 spending aside, the systemic underfunding of research and analysis cannot be laid at the feet of any individual or group of appropriators.

However, “When coupled with huge cuts to science proposed by the Administration, the discouragement of foreign students from all nations and international collaborations, and the deep reductions in experienced NASA personnel that has already occurred over the past year and a half, the U.S. may not recover,” Sykes wrote.

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

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More than 80% of plants on Earth partner with mycorrhizal fungi to extract nutrients from soil.

Underground, in a zone of soil known as the rhizosphere, these fungi grow into vast networks of tubular cells called mycelium (individual cells are called hyphae). These tiny hyphae—about one tenth to one hundredth the width of a human hair—can gather nutrients in the soil and send them into plants.

A network of hyphae is seen under a microscope, magnified 630 times.

Some researchers estimate that the amount of mycelium, such as the specimen seen here, in the top 10 centimeters of soil on Earth adds up to about 450 quadrillion kilometers of length—or about half the width of our galaxy. Credit: Christian Scheckhuber/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

If plants don’t get enough nutrients, neither do the animals that depend on them or the animals that depend on those animals. Furthermore, some research has suggested that mycorrhizal fungi absorb the equivalent of 13 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually.

All of this makes the rhizosphere essential to the health of our planet and its inhabitants.

“Basically everyone on Earth is dependent on this really, really tiny zone around roots, in a way.”

“Basically everyone on Earth is dependent on this really, really tiny zone around roots, in a way,” said Henri Braunmiller, a soil ecologist and graduate student at the Technical University of Munich.

Again, hyphae are tiny: One gram of soil can contain up to 90 meters of mycelium. Most of the time, imaging them requires removing them from soil, which means scientists don’t have a 3D view of what the interconnected networks of roots, hyphae, and fungal spores look like.

But in new research published in New Phytologist, Braunmiller and his colleagues report a way to study this network in its natural environment for the first time using a technique called synchrotron computed tomography (CT).

Justin Stewart, an ecologist with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, told Eos in an email that the capacity to study fungal hyphae within intact soils at higher resolution represents a “major advance.”

“This makes it possible to examine the interface between living fungal networks and the mineral soil matrix, and opens new avenues for studying how fungal-derived carbon is transferred to soil minerals,” he said.

Shedding Some Light

Hyphae are seen stretching between soil particles in a petri dish. This light microscopy image, taken by paper coauthor Jan Jansa, measures less than 1 millimeter across.

Credit: Jan Jansa

Researchers can learn about mycorrhizal networks when they form in a petri dish like in the above photo or in soil chips, which are silicon wafers designed to mimic the structure of soil. But the information scientists gain from these methods is limited because the rhizosphere’s many facets are not replicated in these environments.

That’s where CT, the same technology used in medical scans, comes in. A typical laboratory CT, especially a high-resolution model, can take hours to image a sample, however. In those hours, fungi move and grow, blurring the image.

“A synchrotron produces a million times the energy that your lab CT produces.”

So the team turned to a synchrotron, a specialized particle accelerator that can create highly intense beams of light.

“A synchrotron produces a million times the energy that your lab CT produces,” Braunmiller said. “So you don’t want to stand in the way of the beam. But then you can do the same images in a couple of minutes.”

Braunmiller and his team set out to grow tomato plants in both loam and sandy soils containing fungi spores, hyphae, and colonized root fragments.

Then, they added small cylinders of soil, about 12 millimeters across and 60 millimeters tall, to the pots. The cylinders acted as baskets, covered in holes big enough—2 by 4 millimeters—for both the hyphae and plant roots to grow into. When removed after about 8 weeks of tomato growth, the cylinders contained a cross section of the rhizosphere’s various elements.

In this microscopy image, fungal structures, stained blue, are growing inside the root of a tomato plant.

Credit: Henri Braunmiller

The team drove the samples 9 hours from Munich to SOLEIL just outside of Paris, one of France’s very large scale research infrastructures and home to one of only a few dozen existing synchrotrons.

It was after midnight by the time researchers began to scan the samples. When the team looked through the images in succession, they saw tiny white points moving across the image.

This stack of images, shown one by one, shows how hyphae (the small white dots) move through soil in and around a root (the gray circle). The larger white blobs are grains of soil. Credit: Henri Braunmiller

They were hyphae.

“It was so exciting, because nobody was expecting that we could see them, because they’re so tiny,” Braunmiller said. “They’re right at resolution edge.”

Understanding a Tool

By stacking the images they’d gathered using CT, Braunmiller and his team could reconstruct 3D images of the full rhizosphere in its natural environment for the first time.

A 2D image (right) can be seen as the cross section of a 3D depiction (left).

In the left image, the large cylinder is a root, the thin filaments are hyphae, and the surrounding blobs are soil aggregates.

Credit: Henri Braunmiller

The researchers expanded their visualizations from there.

For instance, adding colors allowed them to conduct image analysis on the volume and surface area of the hyphal network.

Here a 3D reconstruction shows hyphae (pink) and fungal spores (red) growing in sandy soil.

This CT image shows hyphae (pink threads) connecting fungi spores (red spheres) in soil. On the left, grains of sand cover parts of the image. On the right, the sand grains have been removed from the image, and color has been added to represent different structures. Credit: Henri Braunmiller

Visualizing these networks is important because of the crucial role the rhizosphere plays in plant health, food systems, and the carbon cycle.

The team hopes their findings could be particularly useful for helping plants get enough water during drought, especially as drought increases in the face of climate change. Mycorrhizal fungi can help plants with nutrient uptake and pathogen resistance, so using these networks strategically could help improve crop yield stability and reduce dependence on herbicides and fungicides.

These networks “are a tool, but you also have to understand the tool,” Braunmiller said, explaining that these networks are more helpful in some settings than others, and researchers don’t fully understand why. “We’ll look also at how these networks work in different kinds of soils, so we can give recommendations on when to use them and when to maybe not.”

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

Correction: This article was updated on 1 October to correctly describe soil aggregates in a photograph.

Citation: Gardner, E. (2026), Fungi are holding the food web together. New research images this underground network., Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260307. Published on 29 September 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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Videos show a large landslide on the Kaligandaki River at Lete in Mustang.

On 27 September 2026, a large landslide occurred on the Kaligandaki River in Nepal. The landslide, which was triggered by heavy rainfall over the last few days, has been widely shared on social media. The Straits Times has posted a version to Youtube, although there are many more versions on social media platforms. I note also that all of these reports are somewhat vague:-

The location is reported to be Lete, although this is difficult to pin down. It appears to be in the area of [28.63113, 83.61219], although this is peculation. The image below is the Google Earth representation of the terrain in the area of Lete:-

Google Earth image of the site of the 27 September 2026 landslide on the Kaligandaki River in Nepal.

The landslide appears to have been valley-blocking, but news reports suggest that the breach event occurred within a short period, minimising the hazard.

There is some uncertainty as to whether this landslide caused loss of life. At present, it does not appear on the Bipad portal as a mass fatality event.

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Tiny asteroid Chariklo, floating through the void between Saturn and Uranus, boasts two rings. It’s the first asteroid found to have them, and their existence took astronomers by surprise when they were spotted in 2013. Now, Chariklo’s rings are showing some unexpected and unexplained behavior.

“The opacity of the outer ring is now lower than in the previous observations, but also the opacity of the inner ring was stronger,” said Pablo Santos-Sanz, an astrophysicist at Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Granada, Spain, and lead researcher on the discovery.

When Santos-Sanz saw the results, he asked himself, “Oh, what has happened here?”

Dynamic Rings

Chariklo is a Centaur asteroid, meaning it orbits the Sun in the space between the giant planets. It’s 302 kilometers (108 miles) across, is not very spherical, and orbits about 2.3 billion kilometers (1.5 billion miles) from the Sun.

In 2013, Chariklo passed between earthbound observers and a distant star, an alignment called stellar occultation. Astronomers saw that the star’s light dimmed twice before Chariklo obscured the star and twice again after Chariklo passed by, revealing the presence of two thin rings orbiting the asteroid. That made Chariklo only the fifth solar system object, the first besides the four giant planets, discovered to have rings.

Later observations revealed that the rings are thin, sharply defined, and separated by a mere 14 kilometers (8.7 miles). Other measurements suggest they may contain water ice.

The James Webb Space Telescope observed Chariklo (moving dot) crossing in front of a background star (stationary dot). This occultation revealed that Chariklo’s rings (too faint to see) have changed since they were last observed. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Nicolás Morales (IAA/CSIC)

But occultations are rare, and the rings themselves are too faint to observe directly. Santos-Sanz and his colleagues decided to see whether a space-based occultation might be possible. They turned to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is orbiting Earth’s L2 Lagrange point 1.5 million kilometers (nearly a million miles) away. With meticulous precision, the researchers calculated the future positions of JWST and Chariklo and searched the Gaia mission’s database to find stars along the lines connecting them.

But the positions and trajectories of JWST, Chariklo, and every background star each have some degree of uncertainty. JWST’s orbit is the trickiest aspect, as it is nearly impossible to predict the telescope’s position more than a few months ahead of time.

“At the beginning I felt like a crazy guy proposing this.”

“If you put these three things together, it’s really very challenging to predict an occultation from James Webb…At the beginning I felt like a crazy guy proposing this,” Santos-Sanz said.

Nevertheless, after several months of searching, the researchers found one potential alignment in October 2022 in which JWST would likely pass through Chariklo’s tiny occultation “shadow.” They predicted it just a month ahead of time, secured time on the telescope, and kept refining their calculations. When the time came, the team triggered the telescope, and JWST successfully observed its first stellar occultation.

The telescope clearly detected both of Chariklo’s rings but revealed that the inner ring’s opacity increased 42% from previous observations. In contrast, the outer ring was so translucent it was barely visible.

The team published these results in Science Advances on 9 September.

Rings Might Not Be Forever

Right now, the team has no definitive answer to explain the rings’ opposing evolutions. It’s possible the inner ring particles are colliding and changing how much light they reflect while the outer ring particles are drifting away. Or Chariklo might have an unseen satellite driving the rings’ evolution, both keeping the rings in their orbits and providing extra material to the inner ring. Future stellar occultations, observed either from the ground or space, will be needed to reveal whether and why the rings are still changing.

“The existing observations of such miniature ring systems are still very sparse, compared to the vast amount of data collected of their giant-planet analogues,” said Heikki Salo, an astronomer at the University of Oulu in Finland. “Nevertheless, the dynamical processes in such ring systems around irregular small bodies are at least as challenging to understand as those governing the rings of the giant planets!”

Salo, however, thinks the evolution of Chariklo’s rings might not be so inexplicable after all.

“It’s a piece in the big puzzle that is solar system science.”

“The perturbations induced by the highly nonspherical shape of Chariklo make most orbits in its vicinity highly unstable,” said Salo, who was not involved with the new research. Chariklo’s rings orbit in a particular gravitational resonance—the ring particles orbit three times for every one rotation of Chariklo—that is known to make rings evolve. “In this sense, the Chariklo rings can be expected to resemble Saturn’s F ring, with highly time-variable structure.”

Salo added that an unseen moon around Chariklo might yet play some role, perhaps in replenishing material in the inner ring and keeping it stable over longer periods.

But for now, with the next occultation maybe 5 years away, Chariklo and the mystery of its changing rings will remain unsolved.

“It’s a piece in the big puzzle that is solar system science,” Santos-Sanz said. “In a few years we will have more pieces, and we will understand more what is really happening in Chariklo and probably in other ringed objects like Haumea, Chiron, and Quaoar.”

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

Citation: Cartier, K. M. S. (2026), Chariklo’s rings are evolving, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260308. Published on 28 September 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: Water Resources Research

Groundwater models are fundamental for tackling a wide range of water resources problems but are inherently challenging to parameterize due to the sparsity of subsurface data. Geophysical data can help address this by providing proxy measures of hydraulic properties, potentially offering a spatially rich dataset. There is growing interest in using airborne geophysical surveys for this purpose as they can provide insight into the spatial heterogeneity of an entire aquifer system.

Scantlebury and Harter [2026] offer a novel approach for deriving hydraulic structure models over large spatial scales from the integration of airborne geophysics models of subsurface electrical resistivity and borehole data, recognizing the uncertainty in resistivity-lithology relationships. The derived structures can then be incorporated into a groundwater model, as demonstrated by the authors in an application to the Scott Valley aquifer system. Such a workflow could improve significantly the utilization of large-scale geophysical data for reducing groundwater model predictive uncertainty.

Citation: Scantlebury, L., & Harter, T. (2026). From resistivity to hydraulic properties: Calibrating a groundwater flow model by integrating airborne electromagnetic and borehole data into a probabilistic multi-texture framework. Water Resources Research, 62, e2025WR042695. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025WR042695

—Andrew Binley, Associate Editor, Water Resources Research 

Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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Source: AGU Advances

The origins of the earliest life on Earth, prior to the rise of oxygen and photosynthesis, remain a mystery. Graveyards in brine pools at the bottom of the Red Sea may hold some answers.

Brine pools are underwater ponds or lakes that sit at the bottom of the sea. They’re dark, full of salt, and devoid of oxygen. For years, they were presumed to be lifeless. But research revealed that for certain extremophiles, these brine pools aren’t inhospitable: They’re oases. And the bacteria and archaea that thrive there leave geochemical signatures long after they’re gone, Chakraborty et al. show in a new study.

The researchers analyzed the geochemical composition of sediments and organic matter in an active brine pool, three nonbrine seafloor spots, and a spot they suspected was an “extinct” brine pool based on mineral rings around a depression filled with dead marine organisms. They used metagenomics and metatranscriptomics to characterize the microbial communities at the sites.

The active pool, 1,770 meters below the surface of the Red Sea, was teeming with bacteria and archaea. And the sediments under the microbial mat were extremely enriched in metals like manganese, iron, molybdenum, and copper, with some areas hosting concentrations upward of 100 times higher than their non–brine pool counterparts. The extinct pool, nearly 1,400 meters below the sea surface, had similar enrichment patterns.

The presence of oxidized manganese and molybdenum-enriched organic matter in the sediments of both the active and extinct brine pools will improve interpretations of similar patterns in the rock record. Metagenomic analyses of the active pool revealed manganese oxidizers such as Nitrospira.

That finding, together with oxidized iron-manganese phases in the sediment, offers some evidence that microbial oxidation of Mn(II) to manganese oxides could have served as a mechanism for energy production prior to the rise of atmospheric oxygen during the Great Oxidation Event around 2.4–2.2 billion years ago.

Overall, though the authors note that more research is needed, the findings support hypotheses that metal enrichment in the early oceans could have occurred independently of oxygenic photosynthesis or photoautotrophy. Chemotrophic oxidation of manganese and iron could well have been the engine of the earliest life in the oceans. (AGU Advances, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026AV002570, 2026)

—Rebecca Dzombak, Science Writer

Citation: Dzombak, R. (2026), Briny “death pools” hold clues to early life, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260301. Published on 22 September 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.

Source: Geophysical Research Letters

The Van Allen radiation belts are huge, doughnut-shaped regions of highly energetic charged particles trapped by Earth’s magnetosphere. These charged particles play a major role in space weather, so studying them is important for predicting and managing risks to satellites, astronauts, power grids, and other infrastructure.

Geomagnetic storms and other events can rapidly and dramatically increase or reduce the number of highly energetic electrons trapped in the radiation belts. During a key type of event known as a relativistic microburst, trapped electrons escape from the outer belt into Earth’s atmosphere in an intense surge lasting less than 1 second. Microbursts could influence radiation belt hazards and may even alter atmospheric chemical composition.

However, new research by Romero-Minaya et al. challenges the prevailing understanding of what triggers highly energetic electron microbursts.

The study focuses on chorus waves—naturally occurring electromagnetic waves that ripple through the vast mass of charged particles, or plasma, surrounding Earth. Chorus waves are named for the sounds made by a radio receiver when it detects them. They are known to be able to accelerate trapped electrons to high speeds, and they are thought to be the primary drivers of microbursts.

The researchers analyzed statistical associations between chorus waves and relativistic microbursts using data from NASA’s Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions During Substorms (THEMIS) and Solar Anomalous and Magnetospheric Particle Explorer (SAMPEX) missions. The dataset included chorus waves and microbursts detected by the satellites between June 2010 and November 2012.

They discovered that only a very small percentage of the chorus waves happened in conjunction with relativistic microbursts—far fewer than expected, given the strong links seen in prior studies.

The small number of chorus waves that were associated with relativistic microbursts tended to have larger amplitudes and other distinctive characteristics, suggesting that only a small subset of chorus waves drive microbursts at these high energies. Future research could explore this possibility and further clarify these surprising results, the researchers say. (Geophysical Research Letters, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026GL124627, 2026)

—Sarah Stanley, Science Writer

Citation: Stanley, S. (2026), Presumed role of chorus waves out of tune with new data, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260302. Published on 22 September 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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In Japan, record breaking rainfall associated with Typhoon Dujuan has triggered at least six fatal landslides in the Kanto region.

Over the last 24 hours or so, rainfall associated Typhoon Dujuan has swept across the Kanto Region in Japan, bringing exceptional (and in some cases record breaking) rainfall. There are multiple reports of landslides, some of which have been fatal.

The rainfall associated with typhoons can be hard to visualise. In Oshima, on the Izu islands, 832 mm were recorded in 48 hours – that is more than the entire annual rainfall of the city (Nottingham) in which I work. Totals exceeding 400 mm in 48 hours have been recorded widely across parts of Kanto.

The Japan Times has a report that describes a series of fatal landslide events. These include:

• Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture: one fatality
• Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture: two people missing
• Miura, Kanagawa Prefecture: one person missing
• Miura, Kanagawa Prefecture: one person missing
• Sodegaura, Chiba Prefecture: “a 51-year-old worker died after he and the heavy machinery he was operating fell into a bamboo grove while he was removing mud and debris from a road…A landslide had occurred around the site.”
• Kamogawa, Chiba Prefecture: one fatality
• Sanmu, Chiba Prefecture: one fatality

A cluster of six or more fatal landslides is quite unusual for Japan, which works extremely hard to manage landslide risk.

James Reynolds has been recording Typhoon Dujuan – he has tweeted this image of a landslide on Highway 34 near Kyonan Hota IC:-

A debris flow on Highway 34 near Kyonan Hota IC in Chiba triggered by Typhoon Dujuan. Image tweeted by James Reynolds.

Typhoon Dujuan is now moving away from Japan, so more information will emerge over the next 24 hours about the impact of the storm. I expect that we will see a large number of landslides in those upland areas most affected by the intense rainfall.

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On Wednesday 7 October 2026 at 6 pm I will deliver my NTU inaugural lecture entitled “Landslides in a changing climate”. This is a public lecture, so all are welcome.

In UK universities, there is a long tradition of inaugural lectures for newly appointed professors. Wikipedia describes an inaugural lecture as follows:-

“An inaugural lecture is a formal public lecture given at a university by a newly appointed full professor, the holder of a chair. It marks the professor’s official introduction to the academic community. These lectures are often attended by colleagues, students, and sometimes the general public. They are a way to showcase the professor’s expertise and to contribute to the intellectual life of the institution.“

Whilst I have been a professor in a variety of institutions since some time in the early Cretaceous, I am of course a newly appointed professor at NTU. As such I get the privilege of an inaugural lecture.

This is scheduled for Wednesday 7 October 2026, 6 pm (UK time) at the City Campus of NTU. It is a public event, so anyone can attend. I have chosen to title this: “Landslides in a changing climate”. This is the synopsis:-

Landslides are one of the most deadly but poorly appreciated natural hazards. Occurring on every continent on the planet, and indeed on other planets as well, they are responsible for thousands of deaths and billions of pounds worth of losses annually.

Over the 40 year career of Professor Petley, there has been growing evidence that the pattern of landslides is being heavily modified by the effects of human-induced climate change, which is altering both large-scale weather systems, such as the Asian monsoon, and localised rainfall events, such as cloudbursts.

This lecture will draw upon examples from New Zealand, the Himalayas and the UK to examine how both our understanding of the impacts of climate change on landslides, and the patterns of loss from landslides have changed. Reviewing initially the devastating August 2026 landslide and debris flow in Nepal and Tibet, in which over 5,000 people were killed, it will explore the ways in which new technologies have allowed huge improvements in our understanding of landslides. It will review global patterns of landslide losses, and investigate the ways in which these have are being changed by the rapid shifts occurring in our climate. Finally, it will review future prospects for landslide triggered losses, emphasising that both climate driven changes in the hazard and human driven changes in vulnerability mean that losses are likely to accelerate in the coming years.

You are welcome to attend – the event details are here:-

https://www.ntu.ac.uk/about-us/events/events/2026/10/professor-dave-petleys-inaugural-lecture

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On board the EPA research vessel Lake Guardian, every scientist works a 12-hour shift. From 4:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. or vice versa, researchers survey and sample the Great Lakes to better assess water quality and food web conditions.

This grab sampler takes sediment samples from the bottom of Lake Michigan—sometimes with views of the Chicago skyline. Credit: EPA

“We sample day or night, 24/7,” said Anne Scofield, a physical scientist at the EPA’s Great Lakes National Program Office, technical lead for the office’s Biology Monitoring Program, and one of the researchers on board the Lake Guardian during the office’s 43rd annual summer survey, conducted this August.

The annual summer surveys take about a month to traverse all five Great Lakes. Another annual survey in the springtime monitors lakes when their water temperatures are at their coldest. Since April, the Lake Guardian has traveled more than 12,500 nautical miles (23,150 kilometers) and sampled 282 locations. The vessel will travel for one more survey in Lake Superior and one more survey in Lake Erie before the end of the year.

“It really does remind me of being in the ocean, because the lakes are just so huge,” Scofield said.

Data from Lake Guardian surveys help scientists and natural resource managers track how stressors like nutrient pollution, chemical contaminants, and invasive species affect the ecology of the Great Lakes over time.

“It’s one of the foundational datasets that all the scientists in the region use.”

The Lake Guardian also offers non-EPA scientists a chance to join the survey, collect data, and use those data in their own research. Each annual survey is funded by the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, a multiagency fund meant to understand and mitigate the largest threats to Great Lakes ecosystems.

“We’re the only group out there that is measuring the same things in the same places in the same way year after year after year for all five of the Great Lakes,” Scofield said. “It’s one of the foundational datasets that all the scientists in the region use.”

Freshwater Finds At night, tiny crustaceans called mysids migrate upward in the water column, giving scientists on board the chance to sample them. Credit: EPA

During their shifts on the Lake Guardian, scientists and crewmembers deploy sampling equipment and prepare samples for storage or analysis. At night, they deploy nets to collect mysids, the Great Lakes’ largest zooplankton and an important food source for fish.

The team uses water samples to monitor nutrient concentrations, algae, phytoplankton, zooplankton, and invertebrates living on the lake bed. They measure a suite of physical characteristics, too, such as turbidity, pH, and water clarity. And they drill sediment cores, which provide insight into how the chemistry and contaminants in the lakes have changed over time.

Every year, the Lake Guardian’s overall monitoring is supplemented by an in-depth study of one of the Great Lakes’ lake bed invertebrate communities. During those studies, an underwater video camera helps the team map the spatial distribution of invertebrates on the lake bed, and a giant claw collects chunks of sediment from the bottom of the lake for analysis.

This in-depth approach allows the agency to track changes in lake bed ecology, particularly changes to populations of invasive mussels. “We’re trying to understand their trajectories and what that might mean for the lakes going forward,” Scofield said.

Invasive quagga mussels threaten fisheries across the Great Lakes. Credit: EPA

The in-depth survey for 2026 is ongoing in Lake Superior. Scientists on board are monitoring and mapping the distribution of lake bed organisms such as Diporeia, a tiny freshwater crustacean that serves as an important food source for fish.

Though scientists have not yet analyzed data from the 2026 summer survey, Scofield said she has already noticed interesting features of lake health. In Lake Michigan, for example, the team noticed few mysids, especially in the southern basin of the lake. This observation contributes to a consistent trend documenting decreasing populations of mysids since the early 2000s, she said, possibly because of a reduction in phytoplankton in the lake as well as increasing water clarity over time, which limits habitat for these light-sensitive organisms.

Managing the Great Lakes

Many of the data collected by the Lake Guardian team are used to update the EPA’s State of the Great Lakes reports, which are published every 3 years and provide a summary of the health of the Great Lakes, from water quality to fish population metrics. These reports are part of a collaboration between the EPA and the Canada Water Agency to support the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, a binational commitment signed in 1972 to protect the waters of the Great Lakes.

Water sampling equipment deploys in Lake Superior. Credit: EPA

Scientists reference these reports in their research, and resource managers use the data to help make decisions. “Fishery managers, especially, are always wanting to connect with us to understand what’s going on with the lower food web,” Scofield said.

Vic Santucci, the Lake Michigan program manager in the Division of Fisheries at the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, is not involved in the Lake Guardian’s annual surveys but uses the data collected by the Lake Guardian team to make decisions about where, when, and how to manage Lake Michigan’s fisheries.

This video of Lake Michigan’s lake bed, taken in August 2025, shows the extent of invasive mussels. Credit: EPA

For example, in 2013 and 2016, Santucci used State of the Great Lakes report data on declines in lake productivity and the spread of invasive mussels to inform decisions to stock the lake with fewer salmon and trout.

“Long-term datasets are crucial for managing lakes the size of the Great Lakes,” Santucci wrote in an email.

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

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2026), Aboard the Lake Guardian, scientists search for clues about the Great Lakes’ health, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260299. Published on 21 September 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.

Source: Space Weather

Solar storms can have major effects on terrestrial technology, dating back to the earliest days of railroads and telegraph communications—most infamously the Carrington Event of September 1859. For that reason, space weather researchers use recorded disturbances from the past to characterize the strength of these storms and fill in the history of the solar cycle.

Determining the dates of the first disruptive solar storm turned out to be complicated by an error in a 19th century article, Wild et al. explain. An 1871 Nature article claimed the first communications disruption from a solar storm occurred on 18 October 1841, when magnetic interference in railway signaling telegraph lines led to a delay in the 10:05 p.m. passenger train departure out of Exeter, England.

The problem, as these scientific detectives discovered? That railway line wasn’t yet running in 1841.

The 1871 Nature article indicated that the train was delayed by a few minutes on the evening of 18 October 1841 because the telegraph lines that allowed operators to check whether the tracks were clear had been disrupted by the solar storm. However, England’s South Devon Railway Company began operating passenger trains between Exeter and Newton Abbot only in 1846. The researchers dug into records of aurorae and railway timetables, cross-referencing these events to pin down what actually happened.

Railway schedules reveal the 10:05 p.m. train out of Exeter was only time-tabled for a period of just over a year, starting in 1848. Contemporary observers recorded strong sunspot and aurora activity around 18 October 1848, precisely 7 years after the date mentioned in the Nature article.

In other words, the 1871 Nature story got the date right but the year wrong. This mistake means the Exeter delay was not the first known solar storm to affect human technology. Instead, accounts of geomagnetic disturbances affecting the telegraph system of the Midland Railway near Derby, England, on 19 March 1847 stand as the earliest credible report on record.

Knowing the correct date fills in an important detail of the recorded history of geomagnetic weather and helps researchers understand the links between solar cycles and communications disruptions. (Space Weather, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026SW005239, 2026)

—Matthew R. Francis (@BowlerHatScience.org), Science Writer

Citation: Francis, M. R. (2026), Of cosmic rains and delayed trains, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260287. Published on 21 September 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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Do forests cool the planet or warm it? It’s a deceptively simple question with no clear answer. The catch is that the same forest can push climate in opposite directions at once.

Forests are widely viewed as climate change mitigators—and planting trees as a partial climate solution—because they absorb carbon dioxide. Yet that framing is incomplete. Trees also release reactive gases called biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) that can influence cloud formation, contribute to air pollution, and extend the atmospheric lifetime of methane, a greenhouse gas that can trap about 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide.

Although largely invisible to the public, BVOC emissions are significant. They account for roughly 90% of the global mass of nonmethane volatile organic compounds entering the atmosphere [Khan et al., 2025]. In natural habitats, forest trees are the dominant sources of BVOCs. They’re responsible for the familiar scent of pine stands and the bluish haze often seen above dense tropical canopies. Agricultural crops and wetlands are major sources in rural regions. In cities, BVOC emissions come primarily from parks, street trees, and remnant woodlands.

Accounting for the competing effects of BVOCs has become increasingly important for climate scientists, especially as forest habitats and footprints shift and land use patterns continue to change worldwide [Wang et al., 2024]. Better understanding whether, where, and to what extent these plant emissions affect the atmosphere will allow researchers to improve forecasts of air quality, cloud formation, and future warming.

From Leaves to Clouds

Whether forests cool or warm the planet depends on how BVOCs behave once they leave the foliage.

Cloud-shaping plant chemistry begins with photosynthesis in sunlit leaves.

Cloud-shaping plant chemistry begins with photosynthesis in sunlit leaves. From there, the normal steps of plant metabolism synthesize and release BVOCs. Globally, isoprene makes up the largest share of BVOC emissions and is especially emitted from many broad-leaved trees. Additional volatiles, such as monoterpenes and sesquiterpenes, are released in smaller amounts, often by conifers and stressed vegetation.

Once airborne, these invisible vapors oxidize rapidly and condense into microscopic specks known as secondary organic aerosols (SOAs). As SOAs drift and collide, they can grow into cloud condensation nuclei, the tiny seeds around which water droplets form. Particles larger than about 1 micrometer, about 1/100 the diameter of human hair, can influence cloud brightness and longevity, as well as Earth’s energy balance. The result is a chain of interactions that begins at the level of individual leaves and extends to regional and global climate systems.

These interactions are dynamic, not fixed. Rising temperatures generally amplify BVOC emissions. A 2°C–3°C rise in mean global temperature is expected to increase total BVOC emissions by 30%–45% worldwide. High-latitude, nutrient-limited ecosystems are especially sensitive. Researchers have found, for example, that isoprene emissions from Arctic sedges are exceptionally temperature sensitive, suggesting that warming could produce disproportionately large increases in emissions from these ecosystems.

But if temperatures rise beyond the range that plants can tolerate or warming is paired with prolonged drought, then photosynthesis can falter, and BVOC emissions can be suppressed. The system thus comprises a powerful and delicate feedback, in which plants respond to climate while simultaneously helping to regulate it through their effects on the clouds above.

A Climate Paradox

The paradox is that identical molecules released by living plants can either cool or warm Earth, depending entirely on the conditions in the atmosphere when and where they enter it (Figure 1).

Fig. 1. The same compounds emitted by forests can either cool or warm the atmosphere depending on background pollution levels and atmospheric chemistry. BVOCs, biogenic volatile organic compounds; NOx, nitrogen oxides. Credit: Mary Heinrichs/AGU

In cleaner air, the balance tilts toward a cooling effect of BVOCs. As SOAs seed clouds, droplet numbers increase, and clouds grow brighter. They reflect more of the Sun’s energy back into space. The longer those droplets persist, the more they extend a thin planetary shade over the landscape below.

Recent model estimates suggest that BVOC-driven aerosol effects may have a radiative cooling effect between −2.0 and −0.4 watts per square meter [Bellouin et al., 2020]. This value is smaller than the roughly 2–3 watts per square meter of warming from carbon dioxide currently. Nevertheless, the effect is large enough to shape regional weather and cloud feedbacks.

Under polluted skies, however, the same emissions can have the opposite effect. In the presence of nitrogen oxides from tailpipe exhaust, power plant emissions, and other combustion sources, for example, BVOCs help generate ozone, a greenhouse gas found in urban smog. They can also disrupt the chemistry that normally removes methane from the atmosphere, allowing it to remain aloft longer and trap more heat.

These warming pathways partially offset the cooling produced by biogenic aerosols, although current evidence indicates that the global cooling effect remains larger overall, with substantial regional variation and uncertainty among warming effects.

Temperature, sunlight, drought, and pollution thus determine whether forests act as air conditioners or furnaces with respect to warming.

The Air People Breathe

The consequences of plant vapors are not confined to clouds and climate. Biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) can also contribute to pollution.

The consequences of plant vapors are not confined to clouds and climate. BVOCs themselves can also contribute to pollution that exacerbates respiratory health conditions and leads to increased hospital emergency room visits and premature deaths.

Photochemical reactions in the air can intensify quickly above traffic corridors and rooftops, especially under summer sunlight. The ground-level ozone and SOAs (an important component of fine particulate matter) formed through reactions of BVOCs with nitrogen oxides are both harmful forms of air pollution. Ozone inflames airways in our lungs, worsens asthma, and is linked to higher mortality. Fine particles small enough to penetrate deep into the lungs are associated with heart disease, stroke, and premature death.

Haze hangs over Los Angeles, as seen from the Hollywood Hills. Credit: David Iliff/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

The risk is greatest where dense populations and human-caused emissions overlap with strong biogenic emissions, a scenario that characterizes places like Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Beijing. Even with stricter vehicle tailpipe standards and other emissions controls, ozone pollution persists in many cities around the world as heat, sunlight, and mixed emissions from anthropogenic and natural sources continue to interact.

A Gray Area of Greening Cities

Urban vegetation is one of the most visible tools that cities have for confronting another public health threat: extreme heat. Trees reduce heat exposure by shade- and evapotranspiration-driven cooling. They can also help filter pollutants from the air and are associated with benefits for mental health and well-being.

But not all trees are chemically equivalent. A recent meta-analysis covering 357 plant species found that broad-leaved trees such as oaks produce markedly different blends of BVOCs than pines and other conifers [Bao et al., 2023]. For example, 78% of broad-leaved trees emit isoprene, compared with only 48% of conifers, whereas 93% of conifers emit monoterpenes.

These emissions are also highly sensitive to climate. Another meta-analysis found that warming increased isoprene emissions globally by an average of 107% and monoterpene emissions by 60%, whereas drought reduced them by 27% and 33%, respectively [Chen et al., 2026]. Thus, the trees planted to cool tomorrow’s cities may behave differently under tomorrow’s climate conditions than they do today.

Reducing nitrogen oxide pollution decreases ground-level ozone formation, yet expanding urban tree cover may increase emissions of reactive BVOCs that offset these decreases.

This uncertainty creates a challenge for policymakers. Reducing nitrogen oxide pollution decreases ground-level ozone formation, yet expanding urban tree cover may increase emissions of reactive BVOCs that offset these decreases depending on species choice and local conditions.

A pioneering 2024 survey by the California Department of Transportation evaluated more than 260 commonly used roadside plants for their potential to contribute to ozone and fine particulate formation. The report identified willows (Salix spp.), American sweet gum (Liquidambar styraciflua), sycamores (Platanus spp.), gum trees (Eucalyptus spp.), and several oak species (Quercus spp.) among the highest BVOC emitters. In contrast, all pines (Pinus spp.) and other conifers were categorized as comparatively low emitters.

The survey’s findings underscore that urban greening strategies are not chemically neutral. Species selection can shape local atmospheric composition and influence whether vegetation improves or inadvertently worsens air quality. Questions of urban forestry, once framed mainly around shade and aesthetics, are increasingly considering how trees affect atmospheric chemistry.

Challenges for Atmospheric Modeling

Climate modelers must address three main challenges to translate the chemistry and behavior of BVOCs into realistic simulations of the atmosphere.

The first is accurately estimating the magnitudes of BVOC emissions themselves. Some analyses report uncertainties in modeled emissions estimates approaching or exceeding 100% [Wang et al., 2021]. Even for a single compound, such as isoprene, emissions can vary substantially depending on ecosystem composition. In some regions, updated land cover data reduced estimated emissions modestly, whereas in others they more than doubled them relative to estimates based on conventional land cover maps [Opacka et al., 2021].

BVOCs and their oxidation products can travel far beyond forested regions, influencing atmospheric processes well downwind of their sources.

The second challenge is that BVOC oxidation in the atmosphere remains incompletely understood. A major limitation for models has been the difficulty of representing the thousands of intermediate reactions involved in this chemistry. Recent work shows that incorporating more detailed oxidation mechanisms into current models can significantly alter predictions of SOA formation and its climatic effects, narrowing some of the models’ largest uncertainties [Zha et al., 2023].

The third challenge is one of scaling. Observations from high-altitude monitoring stations have shown that air masses containing BVOCs and their oxidation products can travel far beyond forested regions, influencing atmospheric processes well downwind of their sources [Okamoto and Tanimoto, 2016]. To capture these effects, models must account for processes occurring in individual leaves and then accurately simulate the transport and chemical evolution of BVOCs throughout the atmosphere [Guenther et al., 2012].

Although these difficulties limit our ability to resolve BVOC-driven climate feedbacks, available models have clearly revised the standard view of forests as passive carbon sinks.

Tracking the Chemical Pulse of Forests

New tools are narrowing gaps between living ecosystems and the climate models built to represent them. For decades, scientists estimated BVOC emissions by combining vegetation maps with average emission rates for different plant types and equations describing how emissions change with temperature and sunlight. In these models, forests were represented largely as static patches on a grid, with broad vegetation categories standing in for the diversity and responsiveness of real ecosystems. That simplified picture is now giving way to a far more observational, data-rich view of Earth’s vegetation.

The Model of Emissions of Gases and Aerosols from Nature (MEGAN) is one example of how that transition is occurring. MEGAN estimates BVOC emissions by combining information about terrestrial vegetation with data on environmental conditions that influence emissions. Its latest generation, MEGANv3.2, improves upon earlier versions by estimating emission factors from measurements of individual plant species rather than relying on fixed categories of plant functional types.

Using MEGANv3.2 together with time-varying satellite observations of vegetation and meteorological reanalysis data, Wang et al. [2024] estimated that average annual global BVOC emissions from 2001 through 2020 amounted to about 835 million metric tons, including 348 million tons of isoprene and 185 million tons of monoterpenes.

The atmosphere responds not simply to how much vegetation is present but to what grows where and how vegetation is influenced by its changing environment.

The new model also illustrates why representing vegetation accurately matters. Although global isoprene emissions declined slightly during the study period, regional patterns differed sharply under varying influences from changes in vegetation, temperature, soil moisture, and atmospheric carbon dioxide [Wang et al., 2024]. In Europe, for example, higher temperatures helped increase emissions, whereas higher soil moisture was more important for increasing emissions in East and South Asia.

Earlier generations of MEGAN had shown the importance of vegetation type on BVOC emissions. Guenther et al. [2012] found that tropical forests, which cover less than a fifth of Earth’s land surface, account for roughly 80% of the isoprene and terpenes emitted by vegetation and about half of other plant-emitted volatiles, whereas other forested ecosystems covering a similar area contribute only about 10% of total emissions.

Such early estimates helped establish a fundamental principle that newer models are now able to examine in greater detail: The atmosphere responds not simply to how much vegetation is present but to what grows where and how vegetation is influenced by its changing environment.

Sensing Biogenic Volatiles from Orbit

Satellites are also driving much of the shift toward better data and improved understanding. Instruments such as the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) aboard the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-5P satellite can detect atmospheric formaldehyde, a compound formed when isoprene oxidizes in air. Because isoprene is the dominant BVOC emitted by many forests, formaldehyde serves as a large-scale chemical fingerprint of plant emissions.

From hundreds of kilometers overhead, satellite instruments like TROPOMI and the Cross-track Infrared Sounder now allow a comparison of modeled emissions with real atmospheric chemistry across continents rather than at only a scattering of field sites.

Measurements of atmospheric formaldehyde reveal regions where vegetation releases large quantities of reactive gases. Because formaldehyde forms during the oxidation of plant-emitted compounds such as isoprene, these observations provide a global view of the chemical exchanges linking forests, clouds, air quality, and climate. These data, collected by the Sentinel-5P satellite, reflect averaged formaldehyde concentrations across the globe from 1 March to 31 May 2026. Credit: Sentinel-5P Product Algorithm Laboratory; contains modified Copernicus Sentinel-5P/TROPOMI data

Satellite observations have already revealed that even widely used emission inventories can contain substantial regional biases. For example, a prior version of MEGAN was found to overestimate total African isoprene emissions by 22%—and emissions in the central African rainforest by 43%—while underestimating emissions from southern deciduous forests by 21% [Marais et al., 2012]. Satellite observations have also shown that some mismatches between observations and models arise not from incorrect emissions estimates, but from incomplete understanding of atmospheric oxidation chemistry, particularly that of isoprene [Wells et al., 2020].

Other satellites observe plants more directly. Missions such as NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatories (OCO-2 and OCO-3) measure solar-induced fluorescence emitted by chlorophyll during photosynthesis. Because the amount and composition of BVOC emissions can change with plant productivity and metabolic activity, these data help to determine when ecosystems are active and how emissions respond to drought, heat waves, and seasonal change.

Continuing to Reveal Ecosystem Influences

The behaviors of clouds, aerosols, and tropical ecosystems still pose major challenges for atmospheric modeling, as does resolving the detailed chemistry of BVOCs. Thousands of reactions happen in air and aerosol droplets, and no satellite or global model can track them all in full.

Yet the atmosphere above forests is no longer being inferred and approximated from temperature curves or simplified assumptions. Innovative models and observing technologies are linking forest emissions to the beat of photosynthesis itself and revealing how ecosystems continuously influence climate, clouds, and air quality through dynamic chemical exchanges once treated as background noise.

References

Bao, X., et al. (2023), A meta-analysis on plant volatile organic compound emissions of different plant species and responses to environmental stress, Environ. Pollut., 318, 120886, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2022.120886.

Bellouin, N., et al. (2020), Bounding global aerosol radiative forcing of climate change, Rev. Geophys., 58(1), e2019RG000660, https://doi.org/10.1029/2019RG000660.

Chen, J., et al. (2026), Global variability in isoprenoid emissions: Divergent responses to warming and drought driven by physiochemical controls, Plant Cell Environ., 49(8), 5,294–5,312, https://doi.org/10.1111/pce.70536.

Guenther, A. B., et al. (2012), The Model of Emissions of Gases and Aerosols from Nature version 2.1 (MEGAN2.1): An extended and updated framework for modeling biogenic emissions, Geosci. Model Dev., 5(6), 1,471–1,492, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-5-1471-2012.

Khan, M. A. H., et al. (2025), Isoprene emissions, oxidation chemistry and environmental impacts, Atmosphere, 16(3), 259, https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos16030259.

Marais, E. A., et al. (2012), Isoprene emissions in Africa inferred from OMI observations of formaldehyde columns, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 12(14), 6,219–6,235, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-12-6219-2012.

Okamoto, S., and H. Tanimoto (2016), A review of atmospheric chemistry observations at mountain sites, Prog. Earth Planet. Sci., 3, 34, https://doi.org/10.1186/s40645-016-0109-2.

Opacka, B., et al. (2021), Global and regional impacts of land cover changes on isoprene emissions derived from spaceborne data and the MEGAN model, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 21(11), 8,413–8,436, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-8413-2021.

Wang, H., et al. (2021), A long-term estimation of biogenic volatile organic compound (BVOC) emission in China from 2001–2016: The roles of land cover change and climate variability, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 21, 4,825–4,848, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-4825-2021.

Wang, H., et al. (2024), Regional to global distributions, trends, and drivers of biogenic volatile organic compound emission from 2001 to 2020, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 24(5), 3,309–3,328, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-3309-2024.

Wells, K. C., et al. (2020), Satellite isoprene retrievals constrain emissions and atmospheric oxidation, Nature, 585(7824), 225–233, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2664-3.

Zha, Q., et al. (2023), Oxidized organic molecules in the tropical free troposphere over Amazonia, Natl. Sci. Rev., 11(1), nwad138, https://doi.org/10.1093/nsr/nwad138.

Author Information

Dennis Clark (drdennisclark@gmail.com), Arizona State University (retired), Tempe

Citation: Clark, D. (2026), Chemical conversations between forests and the sky affect air quality, clouds, and more, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260295. Published on 18 September 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.

Venus’s pale face enshrouds a hostile reality unfolding beneath its clouds, one that’s inhospitable for life-forms as we know them. Acidic downpours and a crushing carbon dioxide–rich atmosphere lead to blistering surface temperatures of about 467°C (872°F) and atmospheric pressure about 93 times that of sea level on Earth.

Yet the clouds themselves, made almost entirely of sulfuric acid, have held astrobiologists’ curiosity for decades, especially in the upper reaches where the ambient conditions can host liquids and organic molecules brought by meteorite showers. Some see the clouds as an opportunity to test whether life-forms not only can survive concentrated sulfuric acid but also rely on it instead of on water.

In recent years, Massachusetts Institute of Technology planetary scientist Sara Seager and her team have demonstrated how the chemical bonds in amino acids and nucleic acid bases—the building blocks of proteins and DNA and RNA, respectively—can survive in concentrated sulfuric acid. The more concentrated sulfuric acid gets, the fewer water molecules are present to trigger the hydrolysis that breaks the molecule’s chemical bonds.

“This shouldn’t even be happening, and yet it does.”

In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, the team shows that some peptides—or chains of amino acids—can also remain intact in concentrated sulfuric acid. And they can go a step further, folding into a distinctive knot shape called an omega loop that could give these chains biological functions.

“This shouldn’t even be happening, and yet it does,” said coauthor Janusz Petkowski, an astrobiologist at Wrocław University of Science and Technology in Poland. He’s a longtime collaborator of Seager’s, who will assume an appointment at the University of Toronto in October.

In finding these shapes, the team has done away with the assumption that concentrated sulfuric acid destroys every peptide it comes in contact with. The finding could mean expanding the search for signs of life beyond Earth to new environments previously considered too hostile to support biological functions.

On Omega Loops

Omega loops are one of many shapes peptides can fold into in nature and are typically known to occur in water-based chemistry. Scientists didn’t think such bonds could exist in concentrated sulfuric acid; it was thought that the presence of excess protons and hydrogen bonds would inhibit folding or unfurl any 3D structure.

In the new work, researchers tested three synthesized peptides. While in water, the peptides arranged themselves as flat sheets without folding. In concentrated sulfuric acid, they folded into omega loops.

Not every peptide can remain stable in the acid, let alone fold. A few years ago, Seager’s team reported dipeptides degrading in the acid. But the latest study has astrobiologists reconsidering commonly held assumptions about organic compounds’ behavior in the medium.

“The cool part is they find some peptides are stable, some are not,” said Martin Rahm, a quantum chemist and astrobiologist at Chalmers University of Technology who was not involved in the study. Commenting on the omega loop, he said, “Seemingly, this is not like a random coil.”

However, Rahm was “less sure” about interpreting these peptides as bearing omega loops. Researchers used a spectroscopic technique called nuclear magnetic resonance to identify the structures, applying a magnetic field to the peptides and observing their atoms realign. But the researchers’ modeling software wasn’t designed to interpret structures in sulfuric acid–based media.

Though concentrated sulfuric acid is a “severely understudied” solvent, according to Petkowski, he said the team took care to adopt controls to avoid bias in their structural models, finding the three peptides tested bore omega loops of “slightly” different curvatures. The loops reemerged under every assumption they varied and tested for.

Life in an Acid Environment

It may be too early to speculate whether these omega loops have biochemical functions, in part because the study itself doesn’t necessarily point to this. “If they all fold into the same thing (omega loops), that might actually be bad for life,” Rahm said. The reason is that none of the peptides would fold into the other structures necessary for life as we know it, such as sheets and helices.

“From an astrobiological point of view, there could be sulfuric acid in many places and likely on Venus. So then, understanding what could survive in it, what kind of chemistry that can happen, would be important regardless [of] if it’s related to life or not.”

“There is a lot of work ahead of us,” Petkowski said. While he agreed with Rahm about the ubiquity of omega loops not necessarily pointing to life, he noted the team has only just begun experimenting with various peptides, exploring the many possible shapes peptides can fold into and amino acid sequences beyond the ones found in life on Earth. “One of the avenues of research is essentially looking at sulfuric acid as a solvent for life.”

“From an astrobiological point of view, there could be sulfuric acid in many places and likely on Venus,” Rahm said. “So then, understanding what could survive in it, what kind of chemistry that can happen, would be important regardless [of] if it’s related to life or not.”

That way, he added, “we can understand what we find when we go there.”

—Karthik Vinod (@karthikvin2000), Science Writer

Citation: Vinod, K. (2026), Venusian sulfur clouds might not be so inhospitable after all, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260298. Published on 18 September 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.