EOS

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

In a new study, Schnaubelt et al. [2025] examine how ‘atmospheric rivers’—bands of storms that carry large amounts of moisture through the atmosphere—impacted the Greenland Ice Sheet during a past warm period called the Last Interglacial, about 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. Using detailed computer models of Earth’s climate, the researchers find that changes in Earth’s orbit and atmospheric moisture controlled the timing and intensity of these storm systems reaching Greenland.

Early in the Last Interglacial, more atmospheric rivers occurred during summer months, causing significant melting around the ice sheet’s edges. Later in the period, atmospheric rivers became more frequent in winter, bringing increased snowfall instead.

The authors also find that conditions during that ancient warm period were similar to what scientists expect in future climate scenarios. This suggests that increased atmospheric moisture in the Arctic and more summertime atmospheric rivers will accelerate Greenland’s ice sheet melting in the coming centuries. By comparing past and future climates, this research shows how large-scale storm patterns and moisture transport influence ice sheet stability in a warming world.

Citation: Schnaubelt, J. C., Tabor, C. R., Otto-Bliesner, B. L., & Lora, J. M. (2025). Atmospheric river impacts on the Greenland ice sheet through the Last Interglacial. AGU Advances, 6, e2025AV001653. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV001653

—Francois Primeau, Editor, AGU Advances

Text © 2025. 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.

Some videos have emerged from Afghanistan this morning, reportedly showing landslides and rockfalls triggered by the M=6.3 earthquake.

At 12:59 am on 3 November 2025 (local time, which is 20:29 UT on 2 November 2025), an M=6.3 earthquake struck near to Mazar-E Sharif in Afghanistan. Initial reports suggest at least 20 fatalities have occurred, but the USGS PAGER estimate is a 40% probability of fatalities in the range of 100 – 1,000, and a 37% probability of fatalities of >1,000. That this earthquake has struck as winter approaches is likely to increase the impact over the coming months.

There are some initial reports and images of landslides. Of course, at this stage these are unconfirmed. But on social media there are two reports of particular interest. The first purportedly shows a large failure in in Marmal district of Balkh province. I have stopped using Twitter, but Jahanzeb Khan, who is an independent journalist for women and human rights violations in Afghanistan, has posted this video there:-

#URGENT: The situation in Marmal district of Balkh province after the earthquake is extremely concerning. Local residents are in difficult conditions and in urgent need of medical and humanitarian assistance.

The situation is worsening in many other districts and provinces. pic.twitter.com/Xo7o2eyKPw

— Jahanzeb Khan (@Jahanzeb_Khan20) November 3, 2025

This appears to show a large, complex landslide, possibly rotational in nature:-

A landslide reportedly triggered by the 3 November 2025 earthquake in Afghanistan. Image from a video posted to Twitter by Jahanzeb Khan.

Meanwhile, another journalist, Abdulhaq Omeri, has posted a video that appears to show a road severely damaged by rockfalls. There appears to be some injured people from these events:-

په افغانستان کې وروستۍ زلزلې زیانونه اړولي دي. #earthquake #Afghanistan pic.twitter.com/dhHhigSLQh

— Abdulhaq Omeri (@AbdulhaqOmeri) November 3, 2025

There are reports that the road between Kabul and Mazar is blocked by landslides. The USGS initial map of intensity and landslides looks like this:-

USGS MMI and landslide forecast map for the 3 November 2025 earthquake in Afghanistan. Map as of 07:20 UTC on 3 November 2025.

The east-west orientated ridge just to the north of the earthquake epicentre appears to have high landslide potential, and the Kabul-Mazar highway, which cuts through this area, is reported to be blocked. This could impede the delivery of assistance, worsening the impact of building collapses.

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

A new study by Hopkins et al. [2025], which was recently published in Community Science’s special collection on “Transdisciplinary Collaboration for Sustainable Agriculture,” looks at how small- and mid-scale farmers and ranchers see the future of agriculture. It also examines how uncertainty about that future affects their mental health, decision-making, and ability to keep their farms running.

The authors interviewed 31 farmers in Georgia, asking about the challenges they face. These included money problems, a shrinking farm workforce, more complex regulations, and difficulties in passing farms on to the next generation. Many of these personal concerns were tied to bigger worries about agriculture overall, such as the growing gap between farmers and non-farmers, the rise of corporate-owned farms, changing weather patterns, and possible risks to the country’s food supply. These challenges often left farmers feeling alone, undervalued, and discouraged.

The study gives a rare long-term view of how farming communities can remain sustainable and resilient. It calls for strategies and policies that truly reflect farmers’ experiences and concerns—both for today’s problems and for future challenges—and that address not just immediate issues but also the deeper, systemic causes of stress in agriculture.

Citation: Hopkins, N., Weatherly, C., Reece, C., & Proctor, C. (2025). “At some point, you just run out of road”: Farmers’ concerns about the future of agriculture. Community Science, 4, e2025CSJ000140. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025CSJ000140

—Claire Beveridge, Editor, Community Science

Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors. Source: AGU Advances

NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) was the first space-based sensor designed to study the Earth’s global carbon cycle and retrieves precise and accurate measurements of column CO2 from which fluxes of carbon over land and ocean may be inferred. The spectroscopic measurements, calibrated against an in-situ network, sample the atmosphere so that regional-to-continental fluxes can be quantified.

Svoboda et al. [2025] point out the enormous societal value of the OCO-2 observations from these satellites that in the normal course of events could continue providing gold-standard data for another decade.

Over its decade-plus in operation, OCO-2 has unraveled long-standing mysteries (Liu et al., 2017) and quantified massive events like the Australian fires in 2019-2020 (Byrne et al., 2021). Its most unexpected result was not from the CO2 retrieval, but rather from a serendipitous by-product! By virtue of its spectral resolution, OCO-2 ‘sees’ the faint glow, invisible to the naked eye, plants produce as chlorophyl molecules absorb photons. This glow, quantified, has turned about to be an extraordinary tool for studying plants and has proved to be amongst the most sensitive early warning signs of plant stress. It is well on its way to being a crucial way of measuring growth and anticipating stress in forest and agricultural landscapes, yet the mission is proposed for early termination.

Citation: Svoboda, M., Kira, O., Sun, Y., Smith, W. K., Magney, T., Wood, J. D., & Parazoo, N. C. (2025). Monitoring the pulse of America’s natural resources from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory missions. AGU Advances, 6, e2025AV002063. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV002063

—David Schimel, Editor, AGU Advances

Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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This is an audio story from Eos, your trusted source for Earth and space science news. Do you like this feature? Let us know in the comments or at eos@agu.org.

TRANSCRIPT

Emily Gardner: Before Chelsea Clifford was an environmental scientist, she was a college student, working at White Mountain Research Center at UCLA, studying bugs.

Chelsea Clifford: While everyone else was doing really glamorous fieldwork in Yosemite, Kings Canyon, places like that, I was borrowing my aunt’s ex-husband’s ’91 manual transmission Honda Civic. I didn’t really know how to do manual and was scared of taking it up in the mountains. And so, when I had the opportunity to do independent research, I had gotten kind of fascinated staring out the window all that summer at these weird decorative ditches they had in the desert, diverted from the irrigation ditches into people’s backyards in the fancier suburbs.

Gardner: Clifford set out to study the invertebrate communities in these ditches, to see how they compared to the communities in natural creeks. That work sent her down a rabbit hole, and she’s still going down.

(The sound of running water fades in).

If you’ve never really thought about ditches, you’re not alone. In fact, according to a new paper written by Clifford and dozens of other researchers, most scientists don’t think about them either. Here’s AJ Reisinger, a freshwater ecosystem ecologist and biogeochemist at the University of Florida, who was not an author of the paper.

Reisinger: I do think that ditches are understudied, particularly in terms of their ecological and environmental implications. I think that’s largely driven by the artificial nature of ditches and the fact that ecologists tend to gravitate towards natural settings, natural ecosystems, natural environments. That’s why we get into ecology in the first place, because we’re interested in the environment. And so the artificial nature of ditches kind of precludes a lot of people from being interested or wanting to work in those areas often, I think.

Gardner: And that’s a problem, some scientists say. Because ditches do more than just carry water: They can be sources or sinks of nutrients, transport pollutants, host distinct ecosystems, and even emit greenhouse gases. This is why Clifford and dozens of other scientists came together in 2023 for a workshop to raise the profile of ditch research. The group included biogeochemists, ecologists, biologists, and even archaeologists. They published a perspective paper on their work in Communications Earth and Environment.

Among these self-described “ditchologists” was Michael Peacock, a biogeochemist at the University of Liverpool, where the workshop was held, and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala. He and Clifford led this paper together. They started out by—after much discussion—defining a ditch.

Peacock: I think we settled on the definition of a ditch for the paper was a linear constructed waterway that is usually filled with water and is aiming to take that water somewhere else, wherever people want it to go.

Gardner: In addition, ditches are usually narrower than 25 meters across. “Ditch” is also sort of a catchall term. Ditches used for irrigation might be called gripes, catchwaters, or dikes, whereas ditches used for transport might be called canals or waterways, for instance. As the paper points out, people might reach for these words because the word “ditch” has something of a negative connotation. To “ditch” also means “to abandon.” There’s also “dull as ditchwater” and “last-ditch efforts.”

Then the researchers laid out several of the reasons why ditches matter. Clifford gave the example of her hometown, Gloucester, Va., a sea level rise hot spot near the Chesapeake Bay. When saltwater intrusion occurs, it tends to reach ditches first, and is then transported further inland, compromising the freshwater used for crop irrigation or even drinking. Saltwater intrusion can also cause marsh migration, in which salt-tolerant crops move farther inland, and sometimes interfere with agriculture.

Clifford: Basically, what’s happening to the landscape as a whole is often happening to ditches first. Ditches are often headwaters of larger water bodies. So water may, you know, pass through them before going further downstream. So that can be a good spot to monitor and potentially intervene before there are larger issues.

Gardner: The paper points out that ditches can transport materials including microplastics, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, trace metals, pathogens, and PFAS [per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances]. These can affect humans, of course, and also the animal and plant communities in and around ditches.

Gea van der Lee is an aquatic ecology researcher at Wageningen University [and Research] in the Netherlands—a nation home to more than 300,000 kilometers, or about 186,000 miles, of ditches, or canals. In the Netherlands, she said, ditches are seen as a way to drain the land, but their role as a space for biodiversity is overlooked: They host bugs, plants, amphibians, and other animal life. A few years ago, she led a project that found that recording the sounds made in ditches can improve understanding of metabolism in ditches, because it can capture low-frequency sounds, like these, that may correspond to photosynthesis.

(A few seconds of a low-pitched sound play.)

Here’s van der Lee.

Reading List

Lines in the Landscape
(Communications Earth and Environment paper)

Freshwater ecoacoustics: Listening to the ecological status of multi-stressed lowland waters
(Ecological Indicators paper by Gea van der Lee & colleagues)

van der Lee: I found it really nice to be together with because there’s not so many people working on ditches, and then you come together with [a] whole group of ditch nerds that are really excited about ditches.

Gardner: Of course, outside of countries like the Netherlands, ditches don’t always take up a lot of room in the landscape. But Peacock offered a biogeochemistry perspective on why ditches still shouldn’t be overlooked.

Peacock: Generally, they’re small, and we ignore them, but we know they emit a lot of greenhouse gases, particularly methane, and they can sort of exert overwhelming effects on the ecosystem-scale methane balance.

You might have a field that is drained with ditches and the field is a net sink of methane because it’s dry. But the ditches, because they’re wet, which is where the bugs that make methane like to live, the ditches emit loads of methane. And if you add up the ditches and the fields, sometimes the ditches overwhelm the fields, and the landscape can be a small net source of methane. And you would never know that if you didn’t go and look at the ditches.

Gardner: Jeremy Biggs, a freshwater biologist, CEO of the Freshwater Habitats Trust, and visiting professor at Oxford Brookes University, who was also not involved in the paper, said this effort felt timely.

Biggs: It feels quite familiar to me because it feels like the same, the same kind of approach, the same line that we’ve taken with ponds and small waters more generally, that they’ve been neglected and overlooked.

Gardner: “Small waters” include freshwaters like ponds, headwater streams, springs, seepages, and of course ditches. They’re often ignored by researchers and regulators, Biggs said, simply because they’re small.

Biggs: We just assume small things are unimportant. And everyone just assumes that a big lake is more important than a small one and a big river is more important than a small one, and that’s why they’re not in regulations, in essence. But there’s a lot of them. That’s the thing. You don’t notice them, but there’s a lot of them.

Gardner: In earlier work, Peacock came up with the rough estimate that drainage ditches alone may cover up to 10.7 million hectares, or 26 million acres, globally. All this area means there’s also a lot of life in small waters.

Biggs: Although their individual site richness, or what ecologists call alpha diversity, is less than it is for a bigger water body, just as you’d expect, when you put them together in networks, it quite often turns out that they support more species collectively than do the bigger water bodies.

Gardner: Biggs is talking about standing waters and headwater streams here, but because headwater streams are a close proxy to ditches, he said he wouldn’t be surprised if the same was true for ditches, too. Ditches are home to communities of animals like wading birds, fish, and turtles, sometimes providing the only available refuge for such animals in highly farmed or urbanized landscapes. A ditch is also home to one of the rarest plant species in the U.K., the fen ragwort.

So what’s next for ditches?

Peacock: I suppose the first step in a way is just to notice them, that to realize that they’re there and they’re everywhere and that they shouldn’t be ignored. I think in one paper I called ditches “no-man’s-land,” because all the terrestrial scientists stop at the ditch edge. “That’s a ditch. That’s nothing to do with me.” And all the limnologists, the people who study waters, see a ditch and think, “That’s not an inland water. It’s a ditch.” And they just slip through the net. And I think we need to recognize that they are there. They are important. There’s a lot of them and they’re probably doing lots of different important things, some of them positive, some of them negative.

(“Swamp Walking Blues” by Chelsea Clifford fades in.)

Gardner: I’m Emily Gardner, reporting for Eos, the science news publication of AGU. You can find a reading list and a transcript for this story at Eos.org. Thank you to Chelsea Clifford, Michael Peacock, Gea van der Lee, AJ Reisinger, and Jeremy Biggs for speaking with me for this story. And an extra big thank you to Chelsea Clifford for providing the music you’re hearing right now. Thanks for listening!

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

Sound effect by Alexander Jauk from Pixabay

Citation: Gardner, E. (2025), The role of a ditch in the matrix, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250407. Published on 31 October 2025. Text © 2025. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

In the Arctic, a major variable for future climate change lives in the ground, invisible.

Microbes in the layers of soil just above the frozen permafrost metabolize carbon, turning it into carbon dioxide and methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas. As these soils warm, more carbon is being unlocked, potentially setting in motion a warming feedback loop sometimes nicknamed the “methane bomb.” Now, new research on the microbial denizens of Arctic soils indicates that such a vicious cycle may not be inevitable.

“It could be that these systems for a variety of reasons are not actually producing the methane we believe that they’re capable of producing.”

By cataloging the kinds of microbes found in permafrost soils from around the Arctic, as well as in recently thawed permafrost itself, a group of researchers delivered a clearer picture of microbial diversity in Arctic soils, as well as how those microbial communities change as their environment warms up. One key finding in their paper, recently published in Communications Earth and Environment, is that under certain conditions there could be more methane-eating microbes than methane-making microbes in the Arctic, meaning the soil could actually end up being a carbon sink.

“It could be that these systems for a variety of reasons are not actually producing the methane we believe that they’re capable of producing,” said Jessica Buser-Young, a microbiologist at the University of Alaska Anchorage not affiliated with the research.

The Microbes and the Methane

Since 2010, a consortium of scientists from Europe has been gathering permafrost samples in the Arctic, digging through topsoil and subsoil and into the permanently frozen ground below. Gathering these samples is difficult in the vast, remote, and frozen northern reaches of the world, but the group retrieved samples from across Canada, Greenland, and Siberia.

In the new paper, the researchers conducted genomic analyses of the microbiome of eight pan-Arctic permafrost and soil samples as well as samples of both intact and degraded permafrost near Fairbanks, Alaska. They focused specifically on microbes, comprising both bacteria and archaea, that either release or consume methane, a greenhouse gas that can be 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

When the researchers looked at the data, the first surprise came from the lack of diversity among both methane-producing microbes, or methanogens, and methane-consuming microbes, or methanotrophs, said study coauthor Tim Urich, a microbiologist at the University of Greifswald in Germany.

Among methanotrophs, a single genus, Methylobacter, dominated samples at every location. These bacteria are found across the Arctic, often living in soil layers just above their methanogen counterparts, consuming the methane that bubbles up from below. Why this single genus has been so successful isn’t yet known, Urich said.

The analysis “really calls for studying representatives of this specific clade in more detail to understand the ecophysiology and their response to changing conditions in the soil,” Urich said.

Possibly Defusing the Methane Bomb

Urich and his coauthors also looked at sites where permafrost had thawed, comparing wet and dry locations. The site with sodden soils held more methanogenic microbes, which thrived in the oxygen-deprived conditions. At dry sites, by contrast, methanotrophic microbes won out, especially a variety with the unique ability to take methane from the air and turn it into less potent carbon dioxide. While these facultative methanotrophs have the ability to metabolize atmospheric methane, researchers noted, they don’t necessarily do it in practice.

“It really depends on the hydrologic fate of these soils.”

Regardless, Urich said, the upshot is that a warmer, drier Arctic may be a boon for the changing climate.

“It really depends on the hydrologic fate of these soils,” he said.

If the Arctic ends up on the dry end of the spectrum, its soils could become a net sink for methane (though not a large one) as microbes begin sucking gas from the air. The mechanism described by Urich and his colleagues is not the only potential negative methane feedback loop, either. In a recent paper in AGU Advances, Buser-Young and her coauthors found that microbes in Alaska’s Copper River Delta that use iron for their metabolism have begun outcompeting those that produce methane, potentially reducing methane emissions.

“We believe that this could be happening potentially everywhere there’s glaciers in the world,” Buser-Young said.

What studies like Urich’s are making clear is that while thawing Arctic permafrost is an obvious sign of climate change, its contribution to warming is less apparent, said Christian Knoblauch, a biogeochemist at the University of Hamburg who was not involved with the research.

“We had so many papers about this methane bomb,” he said. “I think this was an oversimplification or an overestimation of methane release.”

Future of Methane Still Uncertain

Researchers are still hampered by a paucity of data about the changing Arctic.

High on Urich’s list of potentially valuable datasets are studies on the ecophysiology of the methane-associated microbes he and his colleagues found in Arctic soils. Such studies would provide more data on how microbe metabolism changes in response to warming temperatures and varying levels of oxygen, among other things.

Urich also cautioned that his research did not measure levels of methane release or uptake from Arctic soils, leaving unanswered the question of the microbes’ actual impact on the environment.

Knoblauch reiterated the need for more data, noting that we still cannot say with certainty whether the future Arctic will be more wet or more dry and therefore what methane release will look like.

“We have a lot of models, and there are a lot of simulations, but we do not have so much data on the ground,” he said. “I think the big questions are really how fast is the material decomposed, how much will thaw and in [what] time it is decomposed and then released, and how the system will be affected by changing vegetation.”

—Nathaniel Scharping (@nathanielscharp), Science Writer

Citation: Scharping, N. (2025), In Arctic soils, methane-eating microbes just might win out over methane makers, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250400. Published on 31 October 2025. Text © 2025. 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.

Tropical forests are biodiversity hot spots; preserving them is a crucial part of global efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change. When these verdant ecosystems are destroyed, they release millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, emissions numbers second only to those driven by fossil fuel consumption.

A host of international efforts have emerged to help curb tropical forest loss. The Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD+) program, established in 2005, is a United Nations–supported initiative for countries to sustainably manage and conserve forested land to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Countries receive financial incentives to preserve and maintain their forests—compensation intended to make forests more valuable intact than cut down.

There are more than 350 REDD+ projects worldwide, and in many project locations, habitats have been protected, and deforestation has slowed.

Many other projects, however, may not be delivering results as hoped, and their climate benefits may be overstated. A new study from an international team of researchers quantifies these concerns, suggesting that only 19% of REDD+ projects met their emissions targets and even fewer met their deforestation goals. But, the authors suggest, REDD+ shouldn’t be abandoned. Instead, it needs to be fixed.

REDD+ in Review

Most REDD+ projects are funded through the program’s sale of carbon credits, which are permits that represent 1 metric ton of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere. The companies, communities, or individuals that voluntarily buy carbon credits are doing so to offset their own emissions. By 2021, REDD+ projects accounted for two thirds of the 227.7 million land use carbon offsets traded (excluding agriculture) and represented $1.3 billion in market value. (Land use carbon credits include forest, wetland, and grassland conservation. Other carbon offsets include renewable energy projects and technology-based solutions such as carbon capture.)

In recent years, scientists and stakeholders have started to question the efficacy of REDD+ programs. Critics say some projects either fail to reduce deforestation or the results are smaller than claimed.

Many REDD+ projects lack additionality, explained Thales A. P. West, an environmental scientist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Additionality describes the concept of determining whether a project’s emissions reductions would happen without carbon credit revenue.

“Reductions are estimated based on a baseline scenario: What would have happened in the absence of the project. The more ‘catastrophic’ the baseline deforestation is, the more credits projects can claim. Thus, there is an incentive for project developers to exaggerate project baselines,” said West, who was not an author of the recent study.

Real REDD+ Results

To assess REDD+ efforts, researchers examined 66 REDD+ project units across tropical regions in 12 countries, focusing on avoiding unplanned deforestation (AUD) projects. AUD projects are a major component of REDD+ efforts to protect forests from small-scale farming, logging, and fuelwood use.

Researchers used a synthetic control method, a type of statistical analysis in which they compared areas with REDD+ projects in place with nearby locations that shared the REDD+ area’s environment and socioeconomic conditions. By comparing forest loss in the REDD+ area with its counterpart where no REDD+ interventions had occurred, the scientists could estimate the true impact of the REDD+ project. Finally, they compared these findings with the data reported as part of the REDD+ projects themselves to evaluate whether the carbon credits issued were backed by a real reduction in deforestation.

“We followed up on previous work that said, ‘Hey, you know, when you get the math right, this mechanism doesn’t seem very effective.’”

Twenty-one out of the 66 REDD+ sites studied (32%) showed significantly lowered deforestation—meaning successful climate mitigation. At one site in the Brazilian Amazon, deforestation rates were cut by up to 99%.

But other project sites painted a less positive picture. Seventeen percent of the REDD+ project areas showed increased deforestation compared with their controls. Thirty-five percent of the projects reported deforestation baselines that were 10 times higher than the researchers’ estimates, especially at sites in Colombia. When the researchers compared forest loss with reported carbon credits, only 13.2% could be verified by actual forest preservation, throwing the validity of the carbon credit system into question.

“We followed up on previous work that said, ‘Hey, you know, when you get the math right, this mechanism doesn’t seem very effective,’” said Jonathan Chase, an ecologist from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research and one of the study’s authors. “We show that these credits are not at the level that one would hope they could be.”

The Future of REDD+

This new study is important, West explained, because “it corroborates previous findings and contributes to the growing scientific evidence that many REDD projects do not deliver what they claim, consequently compromising the environmental integrity of their carbon offsets.”

“I think we can certainly do a better job with the statistics, but ultimately, it comes down to doing a better job with protecting these habitats.”

Despite the variable results from the REDD+ project areas covered in the new study, many sites still showed improvements, leading researchers to suggest that this program doesn’t need to be abandoned entirely, just reorganized or reformed. More attention could be paid to shifting political and economic trends, as those social factors can shape patterns of deforestation occurring in a particular country or region. Stricter baselines, increased transparency, and stronger oversight might also help build a more robust REDD+ program.

“I think we can certainly do a better job with the statistics, but ultimately, it comes down to doing a better job with protecting these habitats,” said Chase.

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

Citation: Owen, R. (2025), REDD+ results and realities, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250408. Published on 31 October 2025. Text © 2025. 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.

An early morning landslide, triggered by heavy rainfall, killed at least 22 people in rural PNG.

At about 2 am on 31 October 2025, a landslide struck a rural community at Kukas in Enga Province, Papua New Guinea. News reports suggest that it was triggered by heavy rainfall and that 22 bodies have been recovered to date, but that the final toll may be as high as 30 people.

Loyal readers will know that tracking down landslides in rural PNG is a major challenge – the quality of baseline mapping of villages is quite poor. However, an ABC News report indicates that the landslide occurred in the vicinity of Pausa, so I think the most likely location is in the region of [-5.67878, 143.91848]:-

The likely location of the 25 October 2025 landslide at Kukas in PNG. Image from Google Maps.

We will need to wait for Planet imagery to confirm, noting of course that PNG is notoriously cloudy.

There is a post on Facebook by a local from Kukas, Ben Mcpitu, that contains a short video of the site. Please be cautious, the post includes an picture of some of the victims. The post is here. It also includes a video of the aftermath of the landslide, from which this is a still:-

The aftermath of the 25 October 2025 landslide at Kukas in PNG. Still from a video posted to Facebook by Ben Mcpitu.

Assuming that this is indeed the site, this appears to have been a failure high on the slope in a natural gully. Note that the regolith has been stripped backin the mid-slope area, possibly to bedrock. The news reports indicate that at least one house, and possibly as many as three houses, were directly in the path of the landslide. Given the timing in the early hours of the morning, there would have been little chance to escape. However, the ABC report also describes the capricious nature of risk:

Mr Tumu [the deputy principal at a nearby school] said the dead were mostly visitors from a neighbouring village about 5 kilometres away that was undergoing local government elections.

“It came in force, and then it just covered the old house that they stayed [in] last night,” he said.

Return to The Landslide Blog homepage Text © 2023. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors. Source: AGU Advances

Global warming is expected to affect freezing and thawing (FT) water in the ground, thus changing the dynamics of rock and soil breakdown and weathering. To investigate trends in FT induced erosion, and the conditions leading to relevant impact, researchers employ numerical models calibrated to match field observations.

Kido et al. [2025] investigate FT processes in the Pekerebetsu River basin, Hokkaido, Japan, and show the key role played by snow, which insulates the ground thus decreasing the impact of warming. The results show that changes in FT under increasing temperature and snow cover are regulated by the interaction of insulation, warming and current state of FT processes. Some areas experience little change in FT because effects from increasing temperatures are offset by decreasing insulation. Other areas where such offsetting is weak may display increases in FT and, therefore, increased weathering.

Citation: Kido, R., Inoue, T., & Johnson, J. P. L. (2025). Predicting changes in hillslope freeze–thaw potential due to climate change. AGU Advances, 6, e2025AV001810. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV001810

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

Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors. Source: Water Resources Research

There is a consensus that beaver dams with associated ponding and floodplain inundation have a strong influence on ambient hydrologic and hydrogeologic conditions in mountainous alluvial valleys. However, very little quantitative information is available that sheds light on the impact on groundwater recharge and flow patterns.

In their comprehensive field and modeling study, Wang et al. [2025] show how vertical infiltration from flooded areas interacts with underflow in permeable gravel layers. Utilizing observations, sophisticated modeling, and efficient machine learning technologies, they are able identify flow patterns and rates. They also address uncertainty in groundwater storage changes and sensitivity to e.g. floodplain geometry, subsurface layering and heterogeneity in hydraulic subsurface properties. The ratio between the vertical flux and the underflow rules the flow patterns and is also key in solute transport, which has major implication for renaturation projects and water quality. A straightforward analytical solution is proposed that is transferable and can be used with remote sensing data for water balance estimations.

MODFLOW model discretization: A) Cross-section of the MODFLOW model discretization, including the soil layer, gravel bed, beaver dam, and pond level. B) Map view of the river extent colored by the constant head boundary condition for the baseflow steady state simulation. The labeled cross-section indicates the location for the cross section in A. Credit: Wang et al. [2025], Figure 4

Citation: Wang, L., Babey, T., Perzan, Z., Pierce, S., Briggs, M., Boye, K., & Maher, K. (2025). Quantifying groundwater response and uncertainty in beaver-influenced mountainous floodplains using machine learning-based model calibration. Water Resources Research, 61, e2024WR039192. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024WR039192

—Stefan Kollet, Editor, Water Resources Research

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Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences

Nitrogen is an important component of the global environment, affecting agriculture, climate, human health, and ecosystems. The role of the nitrogen cycle has become more widely appreciated, yet the Earth system models (ESMs) used to predict global environmental change still do not fully incorporate it.

Kou-Giesbrecht argues for the inclusion of a fully interactive nitrogen cycle in ESMs, which would account for the complex and interconnected ways nitrogen moves between the land, oceans, and atmosphere. Nitrogen has only recently been incorporated into the land components of some ESMs and only as a limiting factor of primary productivity.

Nitrogen has roles far beyond plant growth, including as a potent greenhouse gas and a driver of ozone formation and aerosol components. Wildfires release nitrogen oxides and ammonia that contribute to particulate matter concentrations, while marine microorganisms both take up and release nitrogen. Nitrogen export to the oceans influences both ocean primary productivity and ocean nitrogen emissions, and excess nitrogen in marine waters leads to eutrophication, or excessive nutrient levels that can cause harmful algal blooms.

Though globally important, many components of the nitrogen cycle in ESMs are not fully interactive, if they are included at all; rather, they are static inputs to the models. Adding dynamic representations of nitrogen cycling between the land, oceans, and atmosphere would close a significant gap in our understanding of how Earth’s climate and environment will evolve in the near future, the author argues.

To achieve this goal, more observations to better benchmark models of terrestrial nitrogen cycling are needed, as well as experimental manipulations to provide empirical constraints on nitrogen-related processes. These advances could help us understand and meet the goals of the Colombo Declaration on Sustainable Nitrogen Management to halve nitrogen waste by 2030, which could save $100 billion per year and help mitigate climate change and improve biodiversity, food security, and public health, the author says. (Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025JG009209, 2025)

—Nathaniel Scharping (@nathanielscharp), Science Writer

Citation: Scharping, N. (2025), Global climate models need the nitrogen cycle—all of it, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250401. Published on 30 October 2025. Text © 2025. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Managing fires in tropical forests can be a daunting task: Loggers and arsonists often move faster than first responders, resources are scarce, and the territory is immense. In the Brazilian Amazon, these obstacles strain a chronically underfunded environmental sector whose field agents face threats from farmers and, increasingly, organized crime.

In 2024, fires consumed 30.8 million hectares across Brazil—79% more than in 2023. More than 80% of the total burned area was inside the Legal Amazon, according to the environmental data platform MapBiomas. (The Legal Amazon is a government-designated region consisting of all nine of Brazil’s states in the Amazon basin.) Because of the scale of the fires, in August 2024, the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) increased its fire patrols to 2,227 brigadiers (firefighters), with 1,239 of them—more than half—stationed in the Legal Amazon.

Millions of Hectares in Acre

Acre is Brazil’s westernmost state, borders Peru and Bolivia, and is part of the Legal Amazon. In Acre, four professional fire brigades with 68 full-time firefighters operate in three municipalities and one protected area. A volunteer brigade also works near the state’s capital and largest city, Rio Branco.

With about 14 million hectares of forest to patrol, these forces can cover only a fraction of Acre’s territory.

Science, it turns out, has been an important tool to close that gap, because the challenge of firefighting in Acre is not just a shortage of squads on the ground; it’s also related to data access. Brazil’s environmental information is scattered across myriad agencies: the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), federal environmental agencies like IBAMA and the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, the National Water Agency (ANA), and Brazil’s National Center for Monitoring and Alerts for Natural Disasters, as well as individual state secretariats, each working with its own priorities and cadences.

Without data in compatible formats, crucial information can overlap or contradict. “To know where to act, we need qualified information—land tenure, zoning, fire hot spots. Without that, any public policy for fires or deforestation will be ineffective in the Amazon,” said Claudio Cavalcante, chief at the Center for Environmental Geoprocessing (CIGMA), the geospatial hub Acre created within its Environmental Secretariat in 2020 to connect deforestation and fire monitoring with policy response.

CIGMA has made efforts to integrate data from across Brazil’s federal and state agencies to inform agents on the ground. “We have worked with data stratification: deforestation [in areas] from 1 to 5 hectares, then areas from 5 to 10 hectares, and then from 10 to 50. Automating some data fluxes has been a really complex and labor-intensive process,” added Cavalcante, who took part in a meeting with researchers, communicators, and policy experts at CIGMA’s headquarters in July.

Eyes on the Data

All that integration takes place in CIGMA’s Situation Room, where scientists and analysts assess live feeds of fire alerts, air quality, river levels, rainfall, drought indices, and a host of other data.

“All the maps for action on the ground are developed here. We also prepare the monthly deforestation reports and technical notes,” said Quelyson Souza, who coordinates Acre’s Environmental Secretariat’s Environmental Command and Control Group.

Quelyson Souza, who coordinates the Environmental Command and Control Group in Acre, explains how logging alerts work and how those data might be integrated into regional firefighting responses. Credit: Bibiana Garrido/IPAM Amazonia

CIGMA’s system merges INPE fire alerts with land tenure and zoning data to identify potential violators. Hydrological data from ANA, the water agency, updates every 15 minutes and feeds data to the state’s Civil Defense and Fire Department. Air quality sensors detect smoke coming from forests within or beyond Brazil’s borders.

To the coordinator of Environmental Protection Operations of Acre’s Firefighting Corps, Major Freitas Filho, the scientific data his corps has access to on the ground “is essential to optimize and refine the use of operational resources.” Acre’s fire department leads the Controlled Fire Operation, which focuses on integrating teams of military and environmental agents to fight fires during the dry season, which spans the second half of the year.

According to a report on fire management in the Amazon forest released earlier this month by the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM Amazônia), Acre has a very effective model of linking data and governance that recommends early-warning systems and open data sharing so municipalities and communities can act quickly.

Lessons from Acre

Despite the challenges, Acre stands out as one of the few Amazonian states where scientists, firefighters, and policymakers share the same room.

“It’s inspiring to see the evolution of Acre’s Situation Room. I’ve used it as a national example because action happens on the ground, even across borders,” said Liana Anderson, a remote sensing researcher at INPE.

“It’s much harder to be fooled by offenders who try to get away with their environmental wrongdoing. It’s like lifting the blindfold over one eye when you’re playing blindman’s buff.”

As Brazil prepares to host COP30 (the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference) in Belém, scientists and policymakers hope Acre’s experience can be an example of science-focused environmental management: Unified datasets, shared dashboards, and collaboration can turn information into planning and action.

“When we get to a cleared area with the information we now have access to, it’s much harder to be fooled by offenders who try to get away with their environmental wrongdoing,” Souza said. “It’s like lifting the blindfold over one eye when you’re playing blindman’s buff.”

—Meghie Rodrigues (@meghier.bsky.social), Science Writer

Meghie Rodrigues visited CIGMA’s headquarters in Acre as part of a press trip organized by IPAM Amazônia.

Citation: Rodrigues, M. (2025), In parts of the Brazilian Amazon, science leads the fight against forest fire, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250406. Published on 30 October 2025. Text © 2025. 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.

A c1.4 million cubic metre landslide, triggered by intense rainfall, killed 19 people.

On 22 May 2025, the large Qingyang landslide occurred in Dafang County, Guizhou Province, China. This landslide was widely reported to have “trapped” 19 people.

In a paper in the journal Landslides, Wen et al. (2025) provide an initial but very helpful description of this failure. It confirms that 19 people were indeed killed in the event.

In the aftermath of the landslide, Xinhua published this image of the failure:-

A drone photo taken on May 22, 2025 shows the site where the Qingyang landslide occured in Dafang County, southwest China’s Guizhou Province. Image by Xinhua.

The crown of the landslide is at [27.52004, 105.83551]. There is some drone footage of the landslide on Youtube:-

Wen et al. (2025) have calculated that the landslide had a total volume (including material entrained from the lower part of the slope) of 1.388 million m3. Based upon imagery on Planet, it had a total runout distance from rear scarp to toe of 1.35 km.

The authors note two key causal factors for this landslide. First, the Qingyang landslide is a bedding-plane failure, occurring on the interface between a sandstone layer that overlaid a limestone layer (this is visible in the upper part of the images above). The geological units were orientated parallel to the slope, a condition that frequently promotes instability. Second, the toe of the slope had been eroded by the river, undermining the stability of the mass.

The final failure was triggered by heavy rainfall. Wen et al. (2025) report that nearby rain gauges recorded over 200 mm of rainfall between 19:00 on 21 May and 06:00 on 22 May. A rain gauge located 1.4 km from the Qingyang landslide recorded 98.9 mm of rainfall in a three hour period.

Warnings were in place for this rainfall, but of course a slope failure of this type had not been anticipated. Other, smaller, failures also occurred in the local area.

China is able to respond rapidly to these types of events – probably more so than in most other places – but of course the likelihood of survival for those caught in such a landslide is low.

The challenge remains as to how such failures can be anticipated given the complexity of the topography and the geological conditions. The combination of an adverse geological structure and toe erosion is probably replicated widely across this area, but the vast majority of such slopes did not fail in this rainfall event.

Reference

Wen, H., Zhou, X., Xia, Z. et al. 2025. Preliminary reports of a catastrophic bedding-plane landslide in Qingyang Village, Dafang County, Guizhou Province, China, on May 22, 2025. Landslides https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-025-02641-5

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A yearly analysis of climate change’s progress and effects shows a “planet on the brink” of ecological breakdown and widespread crisis and suggests that only rapid climate mitigation can avoid the worst consequences.

“We felt an ethical responsibility to document this turning point clearly.”

“We felt an ethical responsibility to document this turning point clearly and to speak directly to humanity about where we stand,” wrote William Ripple, an ecologist at Oregon State University and coauthor of the new report, in an email. “What we’re seeing now are signs of systemic distress.”

The sixth annual report, published in BioScience, analyzes global data on Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, energy, ecosystems, food systems, and more. Researchers identified our planet’s so-called vital signs, including ocean temperature, surface temperature, sea ice extent, and carbon pollution. Of the 34 vital signs, 22 were at record levels, indicating a highly stressed Earth system. 

For example, 2024 surpassed 2023 as the hottest year on record. Ocean heat and wildfire-related tree cover loss are both at all-time highs. Deadly weather disasters surged in 2024 and 2025, with floods, wildfires, and typhoons killing hundreds in the U.S. alone. Atmospheric warming is showing signs of accelerating. Ice at the poles continues to melt, contributing to sea level rise. And the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a global network of currents critical for circulating heat on Earth, is showing signs of weakening, which could trigger further climate disruptions.

Sixteen of the 34 vital signs that researchers tracked as part of their 2025 State of the Climate report. Credit: Ripple et al. 2025, doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaf149

“Without effective strategies, we will rapidly encounter escalating risks that threaten to overwhelm systems of peace, governance, and public and ecosystem health,” said Ripple in a press release. “In short, we’ll be on the fast track to climate-driven chaos, a dangerous trajectory for humanity.”

Another “State of the Climate” report was published in August. The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society report, authored by more than 500 scientists, presented similar indicators of a stressed Earth system, including record-setting ice loss at the poles, unusually high global temperatures, and an increase in the frequency and severity of weather disasters and wildfires. 

Notable climate anomalies and events in 2024, based on information from NOAA’s State of the Climate reports. Credit: Blunden et al. 2025, doi.org/10.1175/2025BAMSStateoftheClimate.1 Climate & Consumption

The new report identifies resource consumption, especially meat and energy consumption, as a major driver of climate change and ecological harm. 

“We can’t fix the climate by technology alone; we have to rethink the way we live.”

Global gross domestic product, or GDP, a measure of the goods and services produced in a given year, reached an all-time high in 2025 according to preliminary data. While such economic growth is often celebrated, it is also typically coupled with ecological degradation and increased emissions, the authors point out. Reducing consumption, especially among the world’s wealthiest individuals (who tend to consume more resources), is essential to managing the effects of climate change, they write. 

“We need systemic change: rethinking what we value, shifting toward circular economies, and promoting well-being over endless growth,” Ripple wrote in an email. “We can’t fix the climate by technology alone; we have to rethink the way we live.”

 
Related

•  Read the BioScience report: “The 2025 State of the Climate Report: A Planet on the Brink”
•  Read the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society report: “State of the Climate in 2024”
•  New “State of the Climate Report” Delivers Sobering and Stunning Data
 

Though the use of solar- and wind-powered electricity is soaring, so is fossil fuel consumption. The State of the Climate authors emphasize that a rapid reduction of fossil fuel use is both necessary and possible, and that renewable energy sources have the potential to supply most global energy needs by 2050.

“We are in a planetary emergency, but we are not powerless,” Ripple wrote. “The science is clear, the mitigation strategies are known, and every fraction of a degree matters.”

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

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about science or scientists? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org. Text © 2025. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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As global plastic production has ballooned, small fragments of plastic have infiltrated rivers, sea ice, and even our brains. When the minuscule fibers and shards seep into soils, they change how the soil interacts with water, according to a new study.

The study, published in Vadose Zone Journal, measured water retention and conductivity in soils from three regions of Germany with and without four different microplastics. The researchers found that a plastic concentration of just 0.4% by mass can change how quickly water flows through soil, depending on both the type of plastic and the type of soil. The altered hydraulic properties likely result from the hydrophobic nature of plastic and the microplastic particles changing the arrangement of individual soil granules, the authors said.

Tiny soil particles stick together to form clumps. The spaces between these clumps form conduits for water, nutrients, and plant roots to move through. The size and distribution of these spaces affect soil drainage and water-holding capacity, which have implications for plant growth.

“The water characteristics of a soil tell you how quickly water drains through the soil, which impacts crops and aquifers.”

“The water characteristics of a soil tell you how quickly water drains through the soil, which impacts crops and aquifers,” said the study’s first author, Katharina Neubert, a soil scientist at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany.

Earlier research has shown that microplastics can alter soil structure and its hydraulic properties, but those studies each examined only one soil type or one plastic type. The new study is the first to evaluate how multiple types of microplastics affect multiple soil types.

The researchers collected soil from three distinct agricultural regions in Germany, which had varying textures, carbon levels, and pH levels. They then obtained four widely used microplastics ranging in size from 300 micrometers to 5 millimeters—polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, and polyester. They broke down the larger particles in a blender, then mixed each plastic with each soil type at a concentration of 0.4% by weight. Combined with a plastic-free control for each soil type, this yielded 15 unique soil‑microplastic combinations.

The authors poured each mixture into a metal cylinder connected to a suction device to see how quickly the suction would pull water through the soil. They performed the test on wet soil and dry soil, as moisture level also influences how quickly water drains through soil.

Unearthing a Nuanced Relationship

All four microplastics altered water flow rates in at least one of the soils, but the magnitude and direction of the effect varied widely. For example, polyester fibers, commonly shed from some types of clothing, boosted the speed at which water flowed through one soil by more than 50% when the soil was wet, yet reduced the flow rate by more than 50% under dry conditions.

“It’s very difficult to make a general statement about how soil changes with microplastics.”

“All of the results are context dependent,” said Rosolino Ingraffia, a soil scientist at Università degli Studi di Palermo in Italy, who was not involved in the research. “It’s very difficult to make a general statement about how soil changes with microplastics.”

Another recent study coauthored by Neubert showed how differences in flow rates could translate to agriculture. She grew wheat plants in the same three soil types with and without two microplastics: polyethylene and polyester. The results were similarly complicated, with the added plastic increasing, decreasing, or not affecting root growth, depending on the combination.

The plastic concentration of 0.4% used in both studies is much higher than that which most agricultural fields harbor today, said both Neubert and Ingraffia. For example, arable lands that have been treated with biosolids for a decade see concentrations closer to about 0.002%. But calculations based on the current rate of microplastic accumulation suggest that many areas could reach this 0.4% concentration in 50 or 60 years, Ingraffia added.

Neubert hopes her research leads to regulations that keep microplastics from ever reaching those levels. Germany plans to phase out the use of nutrient-rich sewage sludge as fertilizer in most agricultural fields, in part because of concerns about plastic pollution, she said. One study identified the practice as a major source of soil microplastics in Germany.

Keeping plastic out of the ground is important because “we don’t yet know what consequences it has for our soils,” Neubert said.

—Mark DeGraff (@markr4nger.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: DeGraff, M. (2025), Microplastics have widely varying effects on soil, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250396. Published on 29 October 2025. Text © 2025. 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.

The term “ecosystem engineering” has been used for decades as a way to describe organisms that drastically alter their environment, changing the abiotic factors in their habitat as well as the lives of other organisms in their orbit. Beavers, bison, and possibly dinosaurs fall into this category.  

The idea has, over decades, helped ecologists move past the idea that animals are simply passive players in the environment toward an understanding that life itself affects its surroundings.

“Are we just a new version in a long line of the evolution of new processes that have fundamentally altered the planet? Or are we truly something new?”

A more expansive view of ecosystem engineering—one that identifies effects over geologic timescales—could be useful for Earth scientists as well as ecologists, according to a new framework recently published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. The authors argue the framework could be useful for answering fundamental questions about humans’ role in Earth’s history.

“Are we just a new version in a long line of the evolution of new processes that have fundamentally altered the planet? Or are we truly something new?” said Kate Lyons, a paleoecologist at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and coauthor of the new framework.

Engineering Earth

Lyons and the research team were inspired to create the new framework when they realized that many large-scale planetary changes caused by living beings didn’t fall strictly into the original definition of ecosystem engineering. “We felt we really needed a different term,” she said.

The framework distinguishes Earth system engineers from ecosystem engineers by the scale of their effects. Earth system engineers may be processes as well as organisms, and they affect their surroundings over longer periods of time and across larger, sometimes global, spatial scales. In many cases, Earth system engineers affect species they “don’t even coexist with,” Lyons said.

In fact, the fossil record shows that many biological and ecological processes both had a global impact and introduced changes in Earth systems that have lasted for millions and even billions of years. For example, the Great Oxidation Event, a period roughly 2.4 billion years ago during which single-celled organisms began to metabolize carbon dioxide and water, drastically increased the concentration of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere. We’re still experiencing the aftermath of the Great Oxidation Event—it’s why all animals on Earth today are alive. 

Calcium carbonate biomineralization—the process by which marine life takes up calcium and carbon from seawater and produces mineral skeletons or other hard structures—is another Earth system engineering process, the authors write. This process has been a major contributor to the sequestration of carbon in the ocean, which helps to control the global climate.

Planetary History, Here and Beyond

The new paper’s authors suggest their framework could be useful for answering questions about whether the scale of humanity’s changes to Earth systems is unique in Earth’s history.

Similarly, the authors expect the framework to help in investigations of how often such planetary-scale changes happen and how they usually play out: “[Are they] typically followed by mass extinctions? [Do they] typically spur speciation?” Lyons said. 

These questions also have applications for astrobiology because knowledge of how organisms affect their environments on planetary scales—creating oxygen via photosynthesis, for example—could give insight into how and why some planets become habitable, said Peter Wagner, a paleobiologist at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and coauthor on the new study. 

There is “growing interest” in the question “When does life leave a mark on the planet?” said Clive Jones, one of the scientists who originally developed the concept of ecosystem engineering in 1994. “It’s very worthwhile thinking about,” he said.  

What’s in a Name?

Scientists have been grappling with these questions for years, however, and the idea that ecosystem engineering could be a planetary process has been implicit in previous published work, said Erle Ellis, an ecologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who was not involved in the new paper. In fact, in 2012, Jones published a paper presenting a theory of when and why certain species create geomorphological signatures in the landscape, responding to a 2006 paper that raised the question of when life leaves a mark.

“There are some really cool interfaces between…ecosystem science and Earth system science.”

Ellis also cautioned that the line between “ecosystem engineer” and “Earth system engineer” may be arbitrary. Though it is helpful to recognize that ecosystem engineering can scale up, “there’s not really a clean break” between which processes are planetary and which aren’t, he said.

Creating a binary like the one presented in the paper “tends to divide up the community of scientists…when they’re actually working on the same thing,” Ellis said. “That’s not necessarily an advance in the sciences.”

Jones still thinks the new Earth system engineering framework could be useful. Just as the idea of ecosystem engineering helped ecologists conceptualize organisms as active agents in the abiotic environment, the idea of Earth system engineering could help scientists better understand the spatial and temporal scales of interactions between animals and Earth systems, he said.

Jones also hopes the new framework spurs additional collaboration. “There are some really cool interfaces between…ecosystem science and Earth system science,” he said. “That’s where the productive territory will be.”

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

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Citation: van Deelen, G. (2025), Earth system engineers take planetary alterations to extreme scales, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250402. Published on 29 October 2025. Text © 2025. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

body {background-color: #D2D1D5;} Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news that impacts science and scientists today.

An annual United Nations report, published 29 October, reveals a “yawning gap” between existing and necessary climate adaptation finance that is “putting lives, livelihoods, and entire economies at risk.”

Adaptation needs in developing countries—estimated to be at least $310 billion per year by 2035—are 12 times higher than current public international finance flows, which currently sit at about $26 billion per year. 

This so-called adaptation gap limits poor countries’ ability to withstand the changing climate, the report states.

Poorer countries are often the hardest hit by the effects of climate change, despite emitting just a fraction of the world’s greenhouse gases. These countries rely on funding from other countries, from both public and private sources, to finance climate adaptation efforts.

A comparison of adaptation financing needs from nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and national adaptation plans (NAPs) and international public adaptation finance flows in developing countries. Achieving the Glasgow Pact and delivering the multilateral development banks’ (MDB) target would help narrow the gap slightly, but would not be enough to close the gap. Credit: UNEP

“We need a global push to increase adaptation finance—from both public and private sources—without adding to the debt burdens of vulnerable nations,” said Inger Andersen, the executive director of the UN Environment Programme, in a press release.  “Even amid tight budgets and competing priorities, the reality is simple: If we do not invest in adaptation now, we will face escalating costs every year.”

“New finance providers and instruments must come on board.”

The report credits the difficulty of mobilizing necessary financial resources to “current geopolitical tensions and cuts to overseas development assistance, among other factors.” 

The Glasgow Climate Pact, an international agreement adopted in 2021, set a goal to double international public adaptation finance by 2025. The goal will not be met under current trajectories, according to the report. The most recent climate finance target of $300 billion per year by 2035, agreed upon at the UN climate change conference last year, COP 29, is also insufficient to meet the adaptation needs of developing countries.

A failure to meet international finance goals means “many more people will suffer needlessly,” Andersen wrote in the report. “New finance providers and instruments must come on board.”

“The smart choice is to invest in adaptation now,” she wrote.

The report did include some silver linings: The adaptation finance gap is slightly smaller for Least Developed Countries, the UN’s classification for low-income countries facing severe obstacles to sustainable development, and Small Island Developing States. Additionally, in-country progress to plan for climate change is improving: 172 countries have at least one national adaptation strategy in place, while 21 others have started developing one.

However, the world is failing to reach other climate goals: Another UN report, published 22 October, found that oil and gas companies are still vastly underreporting their methane emissions. And ahead of COP30, scheduled to be held next month in Belém, Brazil, only 64 of the 195 nations party to the Paris Agreement have submitted their required updates to their emissions plans.

 
Related

• Adaptation Gap Report 2025
•  Carbon Brief: Five charts which explain the ‘gap’ in finance for climate adaptation 

The new report is expected to inform discussions at COP30. The Brazilian presidency of COP30 has called for the conference to be a “mutirão global,” a global collective effort, to achieve ambitious climate action. In the report, authors advise nations attending the conference in Belém to transition away from fossil fuels, engage additional financial system stakeholders, and avoid expensive but mostly ineffective maladaptations such as seawalls or wildfire suppression. 

In a recent interview with The Guardian about COP30 priorities, Secretary-General of the UN António Guterres said the world has “failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5°C [2.7°F] in the next few years” and urged swift action.

“It is absolutely indispensable to change course,” he said.

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

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about science or scientists? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org.

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A judge has announced that the government cannot issue further reduction-in-force (RIF) notices to federal employees because of the government shutdown, nor implement RIFs that had already been issued during the shutdown.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Susan Illston will mark the latest in a months-long court battle over RIFs at federal agencies.

“I think it’s important that we remember that, although we are here talking about statutes and administrative procedure and the like, we are also talking about human lives, and these human lives are being dramatically affected by the activities that we’re discussing this morning,” Judge Illston said at the top of the hearing, which was held at the headquarters of the Northern District of California in San Francisco.

 
Related

• Judge pauses shutdown layoffs at more than 30 federal agencies
•White House threatens layoffs — not furloughs — if the government shuts down
• Mass Firing of Probationary Federal Employees Was Illegal, Judge Rules
• Judge rules that probationary federal workers were fired illegally — AGU’s plaintiff coalition prevails
 

The case, American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO v. United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) (3:25-cv-01780), was first filed in February. AGU joined as a plaintiff in the case in March. Other plaintiffs include Climate Resilient Communities, the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, and the American Public Health Association.

Judge Illston granted a temporary restraining order earlier this month, which prevented the government from executing RIFs during the shutdown until further notice.

However, the Trump administration only paused some RIFs, arguing that most of the thousands of layoffs announced since the shutdown are not covered by the court order.

As part of the temporary restraining order, the court ordered the government to provide an accounting of “all RIFs, actual or imminent,” that it planned to execute during the shutdown. The list included 143 Fish and Wildlife Service employees, 355 USGS employees, 272 National Park Service employees, and 474 Bureau of Land Management employees.

On 22 October, Judge Illston broadened the reach of who was protected by the temporary restraining order by adding several unions representing federal employees as plaintiffs.

In today’s hearing, the plaintiffs argued for a preliminary injunction, a move that essentially preserves the status quo before the final judgement of a trial. Danielle Leonard, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, argued that, in this case, the state of affairs prior to the government shutdown should be considered the “status quo.” In essence, this meant seeking for a halt to RIFs that have occurred since the shutdown, not just future RIFs.

The plaintiffs sought prove that the RIFs were “arbitrary or capricious,” a legal standard that is part of the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies operate.

Michael Velchick, an attorney representing the U.S. government, argued that the government’s actions were not only not arbitrary or capricious, but good policy, and “the right thing to do.”

“Morally it’s the right thing to do, and it’s the democratic thing to do,” he said. “The American people selected someone known above all else for his eloquence in communicating to employees that, ‘You’re fired.’”

This was seemingly a reference to the president’s former reality TV show, The Apprentice.

Leonard argued that Velchick’s statement was offensive to the 1.5 million federal employees represented by her clients. She summed up the defendant’s argument like this:

“There is some general authority, and therefore that blesses the specific actions that are happening here for the reasons that the government has given, regardless of how poor those reasons are. And that’s just not the way the law works.”

Judge Illston seemed to agree, stating that the Office of Personnel Management and Office of Management and Budget were prohibited from issuing more RIF notices or implementing those already issued.

The judge noted that she will likely hold an evidentiary hearing to settle a potential dispute over whether specific RIF notices were issued because of the shutdown, or were “already in the works” and unrelated to the shutdown.

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

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org. Text © 2025. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.

When the biggest earthquake in more than a decade rattled Russia’s remote Kamchatka Peninsula in July, seismologists around the world knew within moments. For earthquakes big or small, sensors around the globe detect the tremors and relay that information to researchers, who quickly analyze the observations and issue alerts.

Now artificial intelligence is poised to make almost everything about earthquake research much faster—and to rewrite researchers’ very understanding of how earthquakes happen.

“Machine learning opened a whole new window.”

By using a subfield of AI called machine learning, some scientists are identifying up to millions of tiny, previously unseen earthquakes in data gathered from seismically active places. These new and improved databases are helping researchers to better understand the geological faults along which quakes happen, and can help to illuminate the risks of future quakes. Some scientists are even using machine learning to improve their forecasts of how many aftershocks may rattle a location that has just experienced a large and damaging earthquake.

More broadly, researchers hope that machine learning, with its ability to crunch through huge amounts of information and learn from the patterns within, will reveal fresh insights into some of the biggest mysteries about earthquakes, including how a quake unfolds in its first devastating seconds.

“Machine learning opened a whole new window,” says Mostafa Mousavi, a seismologist at Harvard University.

Shaking Earth, Exploding Data

Earthquakes happen when geological stress builds up in the ground, such as when two plates of Earth’s crust grind alongside one another, as they do at California’s San Andreas Fault. At some point, the stress reaches a critical threshold and the fault ruptures, breaking the rock and causing seismic energy to ripple outward and shake the ground.

The San Andreas fault, seen here as a dramatic slash across the Carrizo Plain in Southern California, is an example of a geologically active area where seismologists are using AI to better understand earthquake patterns. Credit: John Wiley, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0

That energy is recorded by seismometers and other instruments around the world, which are positioned in great numbers in geologically active areas like California and Japan. The data feed into national and international systems for tracking earthquakes and alerting the world. The amount of data has exploded in recent years as seismologists find new ways to gather information on ground movements—like detecting seismic signals over fiber optic networks, or using the accelerometers built into smartphones to create a phone-based earthquake warning network.

Just a decade or two ago, much of the analysis of seismic signals was done by hand, with scientists working as quickly as possible to assess recordings coming in from their observing networks. But today, there are just too many data points. “Now the only—almost—way that you can deal with the seismic data is to go to automatic processing,” says Mousavi, who coauthored a 2023 article in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences on machine learning in earthquake seismology.

One of the most common uses of machine learning in seismology is measuring the arrival time of seismic waves at a particular location, a process known as phase picking. Earthquakes generate two kinds of seismic waves, known as P and S waves, that affect the ground in different ways and show up as different types of squiggles on a seismogram. In the past, a seismologist would analyze data arriving from seismic sensors and hand-select what they gauged to be the start of P waves or S waves on those seismogram plots. Picking the starts of those waves accurately and precisely is important for understanding factors such as where exactly the earthquake hit. But phase picking is very time consuming.

An earthquake’s energy appears as a squiggly waveform on measurements made by seismometers. The first type of signal to arrive is a ground movement known as a P wave, followed by a type known as an S wave. Picking where the waves first arrive on a seismometer reading is an important part of understanding an earthquake’s impact—this has typically been done by human seismologists but in recent years the process has been made much quicker by incorporating machine-learning algorithms. Credit: Knowable Magazine, adapted from USGS.gov

In the past few years, seismologists have been using machine learning algorithms to pick seismic phases much faster than a human can. There are a number of automated methods that can do phase picking, but machine learning algorithms, which have been trained on huge volumes of data on past quakes, can identify a wide variety of signals from different types of tremors in a way that was not possible before. The practice is now so standard that the term “machine learning” is no longer stated in the titles of research papers, says Mousavi. “By default, everybody knows.”

AI-based phase picking is faster than phase picking by humans and at least as accurate, Mousavi says. Seismologists are now working to expand these tools to other types of seismic analysis.

Expanding Quake Catalogs

One area that has already seen big discoveries is the use of machine learning to expand earthquake catalogs—basically, lists of what earthquakes happened where in a particular region. Earthquake catalogs include all the quakes that seismologists can identify from recorded signals—but AI can find exponentially more tremors than human scientists can.

Essentially, machine learning can trawl through the data to identify small earthquakes that people don’t have the ability or time to flag. “Either you don’t see them by eye, or there’s no time to go and look at all those tiny events,” says Leila Mizrahi, a seismologist with the Swiss Seismological Service at ETH Zürich. Often, these tremors are obscured by background noise in the data.

Tiny earthquakes are important as a window into how larger earthquakes begin.

In a pioneering 2019 study in Science, researchers used an AI algorithm that matched patterns of seismic waves to identify more than 1.5 million tiny earthquakes that happened in Southern California between 2008 and 2017 but had not been spotted before. These are itty-bitty quakes that most people wouldn’t feel even if they were standing on top of them. But knowing they exist is important in helping seismologists understand patterns of behavior along a geological fault.

In particular, Mousavi says, tiny earthquakes are important as a window into how larger earthquakes begin. Large earthquakes may happen along a particular fault once every century or more—far too long a time period for scientists to observe in order to understand the rupture process. Tiny quakes behave much the same as big ones, but they happen much more frequently. So studying the pattern of tiny quakes in the newly expanded earthquake catalogs could help scientists better understand what gets everything going. In this way, the richer catalogs “have potential to help us to understand and to model better the seismic hazard,” Mousavi says.

Expanded earthquake catalogs can also illuminate the structure of geological faults below a region much better than before. It’s like going from a simplistic sketch of how the faults are arranged to a painting with more photorealistic details. In 2022, a team led by seismologist Yongsoo Park, then at Stanford University, used machine learning to build an expanded catalog of quakes in Oklahoma and Kansas between 2010 and 2019, many of them induced by oil and gas companies injecting wastewater into the ground. The work illuminated fault structures that weren’t visible before, allowing the scientists to map the faults more precisely and to better understand seismic risk.

This dramatic example shows the power of machine learning to enhance scientists’ knowledge of earthquakes. Top is a depiction of an earthquake swarm that occurred near Pawnee, Oklahoma, in September 2016. Each dot represents an earthquake measured by seismometers (with yellow representing quakes that occurred early in the swarm, and red representing quakes that occurred later). Bottom is the same earthquake swarm, but in this case when scientists used machine learning to pinpoint additional, smaller quakes in the observations. The enhanced earthquake catalog shows far more detail of where the quakes occurred, including illuminating the underlying geological faults. Credit: Courtesy of Yongsoo Park

Park and his colleagues showed that 80 percent of the larger earthquakes that happened could have been anticipated based on the smaller earthquakes that occurred before the big ones. “There is always a possibility that the next major earthquake can occur on a fault that is still not mapped,” says Park, who is now at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. “Routinely capturing smaller earthquakes might be able to reveal such hidden faults before a major earthquake happens.”

Scientists are applying this approach around the globe. Researchers in Taiwan, for instance, recently used machine learning to produce a more detailed catalog of a magnitude 7.3 tremor in April 2024 that killed at least 18 people on the island and damaged hundreds of buildings. The study, reported at a seismology meeting in April 2025, found the AI-based catalog to be about five times more complete than the one produced by human analysts, and it was made within a day rather than taking months. It revealed new details on the location and orientation of geological faults—information that can help officials better prepare for how the ground might move in future quakes. Such catalogs “will become the standard in every earthquake-prone region in the future,” says team leader and seismologist Hsin-Hua Huang of Academia Sinica in Taiwan.

Forecasting is Still a Problem

So far, AI hasn’t been as successful in tackling another of seismology’s biggest challenges—forecasting the probability of future quakes.

The field of earthquake forecasting deals with general probabilities—such as the chances of a quake of magnitude X happening in region Y over time period Z. Currently, seismologists create quake forecasts using mathematical analyses of past earthquakes, such as a statistical method that relies on observations of how past earthquakes triggered subsequent quakes. This approach works well enough for specific tasks, like understanding how many aftershocks may rattle a region after a Big One. That sort of information can help people in a disaster zone know whether it’s safe to return to their houses or whether more aftershocks might be on the way, threatening to collapse more buildings.

But this kind of analysis can’t always accurately capture the real seismic risk, especially along faults that only rarely yield big quakes and thus aren’t well represented in the seismic record. Seismologists are testing AI-based algorithms for earthquake forecasting to see if they might do better, but so far, the news is tepid. In their best performances, the machine learning analyses are about as good as the standard methods of quake forecasting. “They are not outperforming the traditional ones yet,” says Mousavi, who summarized the state of the field in an August 2025 article in Physics Today.

Overall, though, seismologists see a bright future in using AI to understand earthquakes better.

In one of the more promising experiments, Mizrahi has been trying to use AI to speed up producing aftershock forecasts in the crucial minutes and hours after a large earthquake hits. She and a colleague trained a machine-learning algorithm on the older statistical method of quake forecasting, then unleashed it on its own to see how the AI would do. It did perform much faster than the older, non-AI approach, but there’s still more work to do. “We’re in the process of evaluating how happy we are with it,” says Mizrahi, who published the findings last year in Seismological Research Letters.

In the future, researchers hope to speed up these types of forecasting analyses. Other areas of seismology could eventually benefit, too. Some early research hints that machine learning could be used in earthquake early warning, for instance estimating exactly how much the ground will move in the seconds after an earthquake has started nearby. But the usefulness of this is limited to the few parts of the world that have early warning systems in place, like California and Japan.

Park also cautions about relying too much on machine learning tools. Scientists need to be careful about maintaining quality control so they can be sure they are interpreting the results of any AI analysis correctly, he says.

Overall, though, seismologists see a bright future in using AI to understand earthquakes better. “We’re on the way,” Mizrahi says.

—Alexandra Witze, Knowable Magazine

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter. Read the original article here.

In 2020, the scientists and engineers behind NASA’s InSight lander were optimistic. The mission was performing spectacularly, and it had no end in sight. Then, its power began to fade. Fine Martian dust was relentlessly piling on top of its solar panels, blocking sunlight. Mission operators had anticipated this but hoped that occasional wind gusts or passing dust devils would sweep the panels clean. Such fortuitous cleaning had prolonged the lives of earlier robotic explorers, such as the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. But for InSight, no such wind ever came, and its batteries slowly ran out of juice. InSight fell silent in December 2022.

InSight’s demise illustrates a long-standing gap in Martian science: Researchers still know little about how winds move across the planet’s surface and interact with dust. To help fill this gap, a group of researchers has now reviewed decades of orbital imagery from two European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft—Mars Express and the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, operational since 2004 and 2016, respectively—looking for dust devils and using them as a proxy for surface winds.

Over the years, these orbiters have captured thousands of high-resolution images of Mars’s surface. Hidden within this vast dataset are countless sightings of dust devils, which drift with the prevailing winds. Because surface winds are otherwise impossible to measure directly from Martian orbit with the available instruments, tracking the motion of these vortices provides a rare window into their direction and velocity.

To measure these parameters, the researchers exploited a technical quirk of the spacecraft cameras, namely, the slight temporal delay between capturing different color layers of an image or between the right and left images in stereoscopic views. By tracking the dust devils’ movement between exposures, the team could track the velocity and directions of the winds carrying them. Their observations revealed some of the fastest surface wind speeds ever detected on Mars, challenging existing atmospheric models.

The Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS) on board the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter captured this dust devil tracking across the Martian surface on 28 February 2019. Credit: ESA/TGO/CaSSIS, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

“With dust devils, we now have a tool to measure wind velocities across the planet, across space and time,” said Valentin Bickel, a planetary scientist at the University of Bern and lead author of the study. “We get a measurement of wind speeds in a distributed way around the planet, not just in specific lander locations.”

AI-Assisted Research

Detecting dust devils in orbital images, however, is not easy. For instance, the Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS) camera on board the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter resolves the surface at about 4 meters per pixel, meaning that dust devils dozens of meters wide appear as tiny smudges. Finding all these dust devils in the images is something that “an army of people could do in a few months or years, but nobody can pay for that,” Bickel said.

To automate the search, Bickel and colleagues trained a convolutional neural network—a type of artificial intelligence (AI) commonly used in image recognition—to identify the dust devils. After training the algorithm with about 50 examples labeled by experts, they let it loose on their full dataset of 50,000 orbital images. “Its only function is to identify dust levels in images; it can’t do anything else. It’s very stupid,” Bickel said. However, it needed only a few hours to scan the entire collection.

“The velocities we measured are totally surprising; I didn’t think we would see so many fast dust devils on Mars.”

The neural network detected more than a thousand dust devils across nearly all Martian latitudes. Each detection offered a new data point on local surface winds. The analysis revealed that Martian surface winds are generally faster than current atmospheric models suggest—and occasionally stronger than any speeds directly recorded by landers or rovers equipped with weather instruments. For instance, the researchers detected wind speeds of up to 44 meters per second, which is substantially faster than the previous 32 meters per second mark recorded by the Perseverance rover. Scientists previously assumed that dust devils might not even have been able to form at such wind speeds, as they could be destroyed by currents, Bickel said.

“The velocities we measured are totally surprising; I didn’t think we would see so many fast dust devils on Mars,” Bickel said. “You always picture them as these slowly moving clouds of dust, but it turns out they’re like superfast, highway speed level objects. I think it’s just crazy.”

The second key finding is that fast winds are more widespread across the planet than previously thought. To showcase this, the researchers produced a map with the locations of all 1,039 dust devils detected, including the direction of motion for 373 of them, confirming that dust devils are found all over Mars, even atop the tallest volcanoes. However, dust devils tend to cluster in specific regions, for instance, in Amazonis Planitia (visible at upper left in the map), a vast area known to be covered by an extensive, fine layer of dust and sand.

Researchers created a map showing 1,039 dust devils that occurred on the Martian surface, as seen in 20 years’ worth of images from European Mars orbiters. Credit: ExoMars TGO data: ESA/TGO/CaSSIS; Mars Express data: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin; Background: NASA Viking color mosaic, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

“Of course,” Bickel noted, “we have a bias because we need dust devils to see [the winds], so if there’s no dust at ground level, we don’t see the wind.”

The team also observed a clear seasonal pattern: Dust devils and strong winds appear more frequently during each hemisphere’s spring and summer, typically happening around midday, when surface heating is more intense. The researchers published their findings in Science Advances.

Blowing in the Dusty Wind

Deciphering how Martian winds work is key to understanding how dust shapes the planet’s weather and climate. Wind is the main force that lifts and transports the Red Planet’s abundant dust, which in turn regulates how the Martian atmosphere absorbs and radiates heat.

Understanding dust transport is thus critical for future exploration, both robotic and human. A global map of wind patterns might have helped InSight’s engineers choose a landing site less prone to rapid dust accumulation. On a larger scale, planet-encircling dust storms that erupt every decade or so—sometimes blocking sunlight for months—remain a serious hazard for exploration.

“Wind is one of the holy grails for human exploration and to understand the Martian climate.”

“Wind is one of the holy grails for human exploration and to understand the Martian climate,” said Germán Martínez, a researcher at the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid, Spain, who wasn’t involved with the new study. “Surface winds are very important, for Martian climatology, but especially at this time for human exploration safety, and we know very little.” In that sense, Martínez said, this research is important because it provides a map of surface wind speeds and directions that we didn’t have before, even if it’s a bit coarse.

Bickel agreed that more data, and more tools in orbit, will improve understanding of the Martian wind system. In the meantime, he hopes the new map will be used to validate and improve climate and wind models of Mars.

—Javier Barbuzano (@javibar.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Barbuzano, J. (2025), Martian dust devils reveal dynamic surface winds, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250404. Published on 28 October 2025. Text © 2025. 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.