EOS

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

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

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

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

—Susan Trumbore, Editor, AGU Advances

Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Return to The Landslide Blog homepage Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.