EOS

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At least 2,145 high-level NASA employees are set to leave as the agency faces pressure from the Trump administration to reduce its staff, Politico reported on 9 July. More than half of these employees, all of whom hold GS-13 to GS-15 positions, work within core NASA mission sets including science and human spaceflight. Staff were offered early retirement, buyouts, and deferred resignations.

The departures are spread across NASA’s 10 regional centers, with the largest loss of staff (607) concentrated at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The president’s budget request for NASA calls for an overall staff reduction of more than 5,000. One departing staffer told Politico that their decision to leave was out of fear for NASA’s uncertain future.

“Things just sound like it’s going to get worse,” they said.

 
Related

•  Over 2,000 senior staff set to leave NASA under agency push
•  NASA FY 2026 Budget Technical Supplement
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
 

The Trump administration has made loud noises about sending humans back to the Moon and then to Mars. These priorities were made clear in its budget request to NASA, which cut nearly 50% of the budget for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate while boosting funding for its human spaceflight program (this is within a 25% reduction in NASA’s overall budget). The proposed budget would shut down 41 space missions. The budget reconciliation bill that was signed on 4 July also included about $10 billion for NASA’s human spaceflight efforts.

Despite the boost in funding, it’s hard to see how the Moon-to-Mars goals are achievable in a reasonable timeframe with the massive drain of experience these departures represent.

“You’re losing the managerial and core technical expertise of the agency,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at The Planetary Society. “What’s the strategy and what do we hope to achieve here?”

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

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org. Text © 2025. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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body {background-color: #D2D1D5;} Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.

The Trump administration can act on its planned restructuring of the federal government, the United States Supreme Court announced in an 8 July decision.

In the decision, the court stayed an order prohibiting the Trump administration from proceeding with mass layoffs of federal workers including scientists at agencies like NOAA and the EPA. The decision, while temporary, means the administration is free to continue with reductions in force (RIFs) and restructuring efforts at federal agencies.

The decision is the latest action in the case of Trump v. American Federation of Government Employees. In the case, a coalition of plaintiffs including labor unions, municipal and regional governments, nonprofits and other organizations assert that President Trump’s February executive order directing federal agencies to carry out large-scale reductions in force is illegal in that it “goes far beyond the authority of the President to direct, and that such a massive reorganization of federal agencies must be planned in accordance with law and approved by Congress.” AGU is a co-plaintiff in the case.

“That temporary, practical, harm-reducing preservation of the status quo was no match for this Court’s demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this President’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture.”

In a ruling in May, a federal judge in California extended a two-week pause on federal layoffs by granting a preliminary injunction, which would continue that pause through the conclusion of the case.  The Trump administration appealed the decision, but it was upheld on 30 May by the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. The Trump administration then filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court.

With the 8 July ruling, the Court is allowing the administration to move forward with its restructuring plans outlined in the February executive order. In the unsigned decision, the Court did not express an opinion on the legality of the RIFs, but reasoned that the Trump administration “is likely to succeed” in its argument that the executive order is lawful.

In a lone dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson argued that any attempt by a president to reorganize the federal government requires authorization from Congress, which President Trump did not obtain.

Referring to the pause established in May, Jackson wrote: “That temporary, practical, harm-reducing preservation of the status quo was no match for this Court’s demonstrated enthusiasm for greenlighting this President’s legally dubious actions in an emergency posture.”

“This ruling will give Trump’s wrecking crew more awful ideas about sacking critical federal workers, like regional meteorologists with the National Weather Service and climate scientists at NOAA,” wrote Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., on Bluesky.

 
Related

•  8 July Opinion
•  Statement from Coalition of Plaintiffs
•  AGU Files New Lawsuit to Protect Hundreds of Thousands of Federal Workers
• Supreme Court Allows Trump to Resume Mass Federal Layoffs For Now
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
 

The plaintiffs expressed disappointment. “This decision does not change the simple and clear fact that reorganizing government functions and laying off federal workers en masse haphazardly without any congressional approval is not allowed by our Constitution.”

Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, the other two members of the court’s liberal wing, sided with the conservative majority in this case. Sotomayor wrote a concurrence in which she agreed with Jackson that President Trump could not restructure federal agencies “in a manner inconsistent with congressional mandates,” but found the executive order in question does not direct federal agencies to defy the law when carrying out reorganization plans and that the case did not require the Court to consider the legality of the plans themselves. 

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

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org. Text © 2025. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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Scientists have traditionally described long-term changes to Earth’s marine ecosystems by measuring biodiversity—the number of different species that show up in ancient rock samples.

Until now, no one had measured how marine biomass—the sheer amount of organic material—fluctuated over hundreds of millions of years. A new study published in Current Biology does just that, using limestone samples to show for the first time that marine biomass and biodiversity trends aligned over the past 541 million years. The results may help answer questions about how ecosystems evolve over geologic time and how humans are driving a mass extinction in the modern world.

“[Biomass] patterns really followed the biodiversity curve, at least on macroevolutionary timescales.”

“[Biomass] patterns really followed the biodiversity curve, at least on macroevolutionary timescales,” said Pulkit Singh, a paleobiologist at Stanford University and coauthor of the new study. Singh’s graduate research forms the basis of the new study. 

“This provides a new type of data that allows us for the first time to test some very influential ideas about the causality of long-term biodiversity changes,” said Seth Finnegan, a paleobiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new study. 

Counting Skeletons and Shells

As organisms living in shallow marine environments die and settle to the seafloor, their calcium carbonate shells and skeletons are preserved as fossil-filled limestone. The successive layers of this limestone serve as an inventory of the diversity and abundance of life in the oceans over millions of years and are especially valuable to paleontologists because of their high shell content as well as the fact that limestone deposition rates likely stay stable over time, even in the absence of shells and skeletons.

To get a comprehensive picture of biomass over the Phanerozoic eon, Singh and the research team collected troves of data from previous studies that included counts of skeleton and shell fragments in marine limestone samples. In all, the team found data for more than 7,000 samples from 111 studies and conducted point counts for 73 new samples, too. 

The data collection required a lot of “intellectual courage” from Singh, said Jonathan Payne, a paleobiologist at Stanford University and coauthor of the new study. “It took a lot of hard work with no guarantee that we’d get anything informative in the end.”

The gamble paid off: Results showed that “shelliness,” as Payne calls it—a proxy for biomass—generally increased over the past 541 million years alongside recorded trends in marine biodiversity, with dips in biomass aligning with known major extinction events. 

The study “provides a link that has been missing until now” that connects long-term biodiversity processes to biomass trends, Finnegan said. The data appear to confirm an idea many paleobiologists expected but had not had the data to demonstrate—that marine animal biomass and biodiversity aligned over Earth’s history, he said.

Singh and the team performed a series of analyses to ensure the trends they were seeing weren’t due to other factors such as depositional environment, latitude, ocean depth, and ecosystem type. No matter how they sliced up the data, the results showed the same trends.

“It’s really rare to get the first chance to document a pattern about life across long histories of time,” Payne said. “There’s theory, but in the end, theory is meaningful when you can compare it to real data.”

The patterns the team uncovered in the limestone were reflected, too, in language past researchers used to describe their samples: An analysis of nearly 16,000 abstracts including descriptions of sedimentary carbonate rock over geologic time showed that the “shelliness” of words used to describe limestone samples increased alongside biomass trends. Words like “skeletal” and “fossiliferous” showed up at higher ratios compared to nonskeletal words in descriptions of samples from times in Earth’s history when biomass was higher.

“It was an interesting, independent confirmation of the rest of the study,” Payne said.

What Biomass Tells Us

Biomass indicates how much energy is available in an ecosystem. For animals, the ultimate source of that energy is created via the primary productivity of photosynthetic organisms such as plants and algae. Understanding the relationship between biomass and biodiversity can provide insight into how ecosystems evolve, how diversity arises and collapses, and what the ultimate factor that limits biodiversity in an ecosystem is.

“When there is more stuff to eat at the base of the food chain, ecosystems can support more and larger individuals, and maybe they can also support more different kinds of organisms.”

“It has been suggested for a long time that the long-term increase in biodiversity is a response to higher primary productivity,” Finnegan said. “When there is more stuff to eat at the base of the food chain, ecosystems can support more and larger individuals, and maybe they can also support more different kinds of organisms.”

In the ecology of the modern world, scientists have evidence that this is true. But modern scientists live in a “thin little time slice” in which any observations of ecosystems occur on very short timescales relative to Earth’s history, Finnegan said. 

Scientists don’t know whether ecosystems work the same now as they did for all of Earth’s history. Long ago, biodiversity may have dictated biomass instead, or the relationship may have been a feedback loop. “Really understanding biodiversity processes means understanding them on the million-year timescale,” he said.

Since humans started to dominate ecosystems, biodiversity has plummeted. Biomass, however, has increased significantly, mostly as a result of animal husbandry and pet ownership. “We have a lot of humans, and a lot of cats and dogs, but not a lot of diversity,” Singh said. The world’s oceans are also “very likely in the early stages of a significant extinction event,” Finnegan said.

Deeper knowledge of how biomass and biodiversity relate over geologic time could help scientists better understand the effects of human-caused ecosystem changes and the drivers of this sixth mass extinction. Humans are altering the planet in a “massive experiment,” Payne said. And the only way to understand planetary-scale experiments is to use the geologic record, he said. “It is the only source of information at the same temporal and spatial scales.”

At least during the Phanerozoic, biomass and biodiversity seem to have been coupled, according to the new study. The results provide a coarse, but robust, picture, Payne said, though “there’s a lot more to learn.”

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

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2025), Biomass and biodiversity were coupled in Earth’s past, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250243. Published on 9 July 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.

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

Over two-thirds of Earth’s surface lies underwater, and the boundary of the hydrosphere and the lithosphere at the seafloor represents an important area of study of both materials–rock, sediment, fluid, and gas– and ecosystems for scientists studying Earth and ocean processes.

In a new commentary, FUTURE 2024 PI-team et al. [2025] report on the U.S. Seafloor Sampling Capabilities 2024 Workshop, which assessed the current state and future needs for U.S. oceanographic assets, including the evolution and design of multiscale science infrastructure. A key finding of the workshop is that future study of science at the seafloor interface will be severely limited by recent reductions in the oceanographic infrastructure available in the U.S. 

Such infrastructure includes, among others, scientific deep drilling platforms, which enable human access to ice-covered seas in the polar regions; an expansion of ships in the U.S.-Academic Research Fleet that can handle heavy over-the-side shipboard coring and deeper rock dredging; and sample repository infrastructure that maximizes the value of returned samples by better supporting discoverability and accessibility of archived materials. The authors also emphasize the importance of workforce training and knowledge transfer through inclusive educational and professional development opportunities, particularly for early-career researchers.

Citation: FUTURE 2024 PI-team, Appelgate, B., Dugan, B., Eguchi, N., Fornari, D., Freudenthal, T., et al. (2025). The FUTURE of the US marine seafloor and subseafloor sampling capabilities. AGU Advances, 6, e2024AV001560. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024AV001560

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

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

Baroclinic instability, which converts vertical wind shear into energy in storms, is the main driver of the growth of midlatitude storms. However, previous investigations of the relationship between baroclinicity and storm growth have been limited to case studies, idealized simulations, or region-specific analyses.

Hadas and Kaspi [2025] use 83 years of ERA-5 data to analyze the growth and tracks of midlatitude storms. The ERA-5 dataset provides a much wider dataset for analysis, including an estimated 100,000 cyclones and 50,000 anticyclones. The authors find that while storm intensity increases linearly with baroclinicity under mild conditions, under more extreme conditions the traditional linear relationship between baroclinicity and storm activity becomes nonlinear. They attribute this shift to a decrease in the storm growth time with baroclinicity. Based on a Lagrangian analysis, the authors then propose a nonlinear correction better accounting for the relationship of baroclinicity and storm activity under extreme conditions. Such a correction is found to be crucial for advancing our understanding of midlatitude climate.

Citation: Hadas, O., & Kaspi, Y. (2025). A lagrangian perspective on the growth of midlatitude storms. AGU Advances, 6, e2024AV001555. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024AV001555

—Alberto Montanari, Editor, AGU Advances

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Yesterday, catastrophic flood swept down the Bhote Kosi river through Tibet and Nepal. At least 28 people have been killed. There is speculation that this might have been a GLOF.

On 8 July 2025, a catastrophic mudslide / flood suddenly struck the Rasuwagadhi border crossing point between Tibet and Nepal, causing extensive damage. The Himalayan Times reports that there are nine confirmed victims, with a further 19 people missing, in Nepal. Xinhua reports that eleven people are missing in Tibet, but it is unclear as to whether the Nepal figures include these people.

The scale of the event is impressive. All India Radio has posted this video to Youtube:-

Meanwhile, the Nepali Times has reported that the bridge at the at the Rasuwagadhi border crossing point was destroyed, along with a significant part of the infrastructure at that location. Four hydroelectric schemes have been damaged or destroyed (Rasuwagadi, Trisuli III, Trisuli and Benighat), removing 8% of Nepal’s generation capacity.

Rasuwagadhi is located at [28.27875, 85.37808], on the Bhote Kosi river. It is going to be important to understand what has happened to cause this flood. There is speculation that this was a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF), which is very possible. It could also have been the collapse of a landslide dam or a high altitude landslide that transitioned into a debris flow. I’ll keep an eye on the satellite imagery over the coming days, but at the peak of the monsoon, it may take some time to get a clear image.

Kirsten Cook of the Université Grenoble Alpes has posted to Bluesky some seismic data from a station near to Kathmandu (a long distance downstream of Rasuwagadhi), which shows the flood:-

thehimalayantimes.com/nepal/rasuwa…Another destructive Himalayan flood, this time transboundary. And like most of these, we can see the seismic signals created by the flood at a DMG station near Kathmandu. The flood is visible seismically about an hour before it arrived at the Nepali border…

— Kristen Cook (@kristencook.bsky.social) 2025-07-08T21:07:08.342Z

The annual time period in which cross-border trade between Tibet and Nepal is possible is short, so the damage to the border infrastructure is likely to have significant implications for Nepal. The loss of the electricity generating capacity is likely to be a greater issue in the long term.

I have highlighted previously that I am concerned that the risks associated with these catastrophic landslides / floods in Himalayan valleys are not being adequately considered. This is the third time in four years that such an event has caused massive damage to power generation infrastructure (after the 2021 Chamoli event and the 2023 Sikkim event). The investment cases for these projects much be increasingly difficult to justify, which will have a range of significant wider economic implications.

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

Atmospheric models describing climate change rely on accurate depictions of chemical transport. Prather [2025] examines the different ways to define the troposphere, a highly chemically heterogeneous domain influenced by a range of chemical sources and sinks, from lightning, wildfires, and pollution to convection and rainfall.

The author builds on previous work proposing the use of the artificial age-of-air tracer e90. After calibrating the e90 tracer, Prather demonstrates its application in calculating the mass of the troposphere and troposphere ozone values, using output from UC Irvine’s chemical transport model, ozonesondes representing northern and southern mid-latitudes and the tropics, and satellite ozone profiles. This work presents a practical demonstration of the calibration of an age-of-air tropopause that could potentially be applied more widely in other models or other age-of-air tracers.  

Citation: Prather, M. J. (2025). Calibrating the tropospheric air and ozone mass. AGU Advances, 6, e2025AV001651. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV001651

—Kristina Vrouwenvelder, Executive 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.

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

Incoming radiation from the Sun is balanced by reflected and emitted radiation from Earth, but greenhouse gases trap radiation in Earth’s atmosphere, causing energy to accumulate in the atmosphere, oceans, and land.

Mauritsen et al. [2025] discuss how recent work analyzing Earth’s energy imbalance reveals that it is increasing much faster than predicted and is now almost double what has been predicted by climate models. The current discrepancy between the measured energy imbalance and that predicted by climate models is likely caused by a decrease in Earth’s solar reflectivity, possibly because models have not correctly accounted for sea surface temperature patterns or effects of aerosol particles.

Understanding these changes in Earth’s energy imbalance and their effects on global warming is critical to science and policy. However, these measurements rely heavily on several satellites scheduled for decommissioning, threatening our understanding of our climate future.

Citation: Mauritsen, T., Tsushima, Y., Meyssignac, B., Loeb, N. G., Hakuba, M., Pilewskie, P., et al. (2025). Earth’s energy imbalance more than doubled in recent decades. AGU Advances, 6, e2024AV001636. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024AV001636

—Kristina Vrouwenvelder, Executive Editor, AGU Advances

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Source: Global Biogeochemical Cycles

The ocean absorbs carbon from the atmosphere, but exactly how much is uncertain. For instance, estimates from the 2023 Global Carbon Budget ranged from 2.2 billion to 4 billion metric tons of carbon per year. One source of this uncertainty may be that the effects of bubbles have not been incorporated into air-sea carbon flux estimates, according to Rustogi et al.

When waves break, they create multitudes of tiny bubbles that carry gases such as carbon dioxide back and forth between the atmosphere and water. Models used to evaluate how fast this exchange occurs typically rely on measurements of wind speed, assuming that wind speed directly relates to the prevalence of bubble-forming waves. However, waves can be affected by other factors as well, meaning this assumption doesn’t always hold.

To assess the role of bubbles in air-sea carbon exchange in more detail, scientists applied a recently developed “bubble-mediated gas transfer theory” to the ocean. As with other models, the bubble-mediated approach incorporates wind strength, but uniquely, it also accounts for wave conditions that form gas-carrying bubbles. The researchers compared the results from their new model to a simpler, wind-only model that ignores the effect of bubbles.

The two models yielded similar estimates for total annual ocean carbon storage, but the bubble-mediated model showed much higher variability, both seasonally and regionally; in some instances, local fluxes it indicated differed by 20%–50% from the wind-only model. The bubble-mediated model also suggested that intense wave activity in the Southern Hemisphere leads to much higher carbon storage than in the relatively calm Northern Hemisphere—a difference that’s not obvious in the wind-only model.

That north-south difference could have implications for interpreting and projecting carbon cycle dynamics in a changing climate. With average wind speeds and wave heights likely to increase with global warming, it is essential to anticipate accurately how these changes will influence ocean carbon storage, the authors say.

The work is also important for marine carbon dioxide removal projects aiming to enhance carbon uptake to mitigate climate change effects, they note. A prerequisite for these efforts is quantifying how much carbon the ocean takes up naturally. Without a comprehensive understanding of the processes affecting uptake, the impacts of such interventions may be vastly under- or overestimated. (Global Biogeochemical Cycles, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GB008382, 2025)

—Saima May Sidik (@saimamay.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Sidik, S. M. (2025), More bubbles means more variation in ocean carbon storage, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250244. Published on 8 July 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.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

When wildfires devastated a wide swath of Los Angeles last winter, officials warned residents of several ZIP codes not to drink the water, or boil it first if they must. They worried that soot, ash, and other debris from the blazes might have infiltrated the groundwater, or that damaged pipes might allow toxins into the supply. The last of these “do not drink” orders was lifted last month.

At their peak, those pollutants can be found at levels up to 103 times higher than before the fire. There also can be 9 to 286 times as much sediment in water after a fire. 

But the first large-scale study of post-wildfire water quality has found that pollution created by such a blaze can threaten water supplies for eight years—far longer than previous studies indicated. Researchers at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science, or CIRES, at the University of Colorado Boulder analyzed 100,000 samples from 500 watersheds across the western United States. They found “contaminants like organic carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen, and sediment” throughout those that had burned. At their peak, those pollutants can be found at levels up to 103 times higher than before the fire. There also can be 9 to 286 times as much sediment in water after a fire.

The findings have great implications for water systems as they prepare for a world in which fires like those that burned in Los Angeles and, more recently, North Carolina and a great swath of Canada, grow more common. One in six people in the United States lives in a wildfire risk zone, and forested watersheds provide water to almost two-thirds of municipalities in the U.S., making water systems everywhere vulnerable.

“I’ve had a lot of conversations with different utilities and water managers in the West, and every single one of them are concerned about wildfire impacts,” said Carli Brucker, lead author of the study, published on 23 June. But, she added, what they don’t have is longer-term data. “I’m hoping that this research provides these concrete numbers that can really back up water managers’ concerns, and turn those concerns into real funding that they can start putting towards climate resilience. Strong evidence can be really helpful in securing funding.”

Water utilities in the LA area addressed the threat posed by the fires that burned in January in the short term by flushing water mains and pipes. Officials with the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power said they are conducting ongoing water testing in the Palisades area, and are offering free water quality testing to any resident that wants it.

“These urban fires are creating these unprecedented challenges that treatment plants can’t really deal with,” Brucker said. “Burning buildings and businesses and roads and cars, it creates all these contaminants that are just way more dangerous and way more difficult to deal with.”

Even years after a fire, a major rainfall can trigger a mudslide, unearthing contaminants.

Across the locations the researchers analyzed, contamination levels varied widely. In general, post-fire pollution was worse in heavily forested or heavily urbanized areas. The “most dramatic spikes” in pollutants like phosphorus, nitrate, organic carbon and sediment generally occurred in the first few years after a fire, according to researcher Ben Livneh.

“We found the impacts to be really persistent,” Livneh wrote in The Conversation. “We saw significantly elevated levels of nitrogen and sediment for up to eight years following a fire.” Even years after a fire, a major rainfall can trigger a mudslide, unearthing contaminants. Beyond polluting groundwater, that can cause unexpected environmental issues. “Nitrogen and phosphorus act like fertilizer for algae. A surge of these nutrients can trigger algal blooms in reservoirs, which can produce toxins and create foul odors,” Livneh said.

There are several ways to fight these threats to water supply.

“The first line of defense is just diversifying water sources,” Brucker said. Ideally, a utility would draw from several watersheds, so it has a backup in the event one of them is impacted by a fire, she said. They also can build additional sedimentation basins to increase their capacity for sediment handling.

“But all of these things cost a lot more,” Brucker said. And it’s difficult to convince strained utilities in Western states—already dealing with things like water shortages—to spend money on wildfire mitigation without numbers. Rural communities, in particular, often rely on single-source water systems and limited funding, which makes responding to emergencies much more challenging.

“Utilities don’t usually have these sorts of process improvements in place, unless they have a good reason,” she said. “I’m hoping this research can point to—this is a pretty good reason to start planning for and trying to budget for those resilience improvements.”

—Sophie Hurwitz (@hurwitz.bsky.social), Science Writer

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/wildfires/pollution-from-wildfires-can-contaminate-our-water-for-up-to-eight-years-new-study-finds/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Takao Doi’s dream is to go to the Moon and plant a tree. The former astronaut is inspired by ancient wooden shrines and temples in Kyoto, Japan, that have lasted more than a thousand years.

“If we can use wood in space, we might be able to have sustainable space development forever,” said Doi, a professor at Ryukoku University.

The idea of a wooden space age gained traction last year with the launch of LignoSat, the world’s first wooden satellite to reach orbit. LignoSat, developed by Doi, a group of Kyoto University scientists, and logging company Sumitomo Forestry, is a CubeSat—a type of minisatellite that is relatively inexpensive and easy to construct. LignoSat’s structure is meant to reduce its environmental impact because wood is a renewable material and creates less pollution when it burns up on reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.

“We think wooden satellites orbiting around the Earth are the future.”

LignoSat was deployed from the International Space Station (ISS) last year by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and stayed in space for 116 days.

Doi and his colleagues are using what they learned to develop LignoSat-2, which they expect to launch in 2028. And they’re not alone—at least one other group is also developing a wooden satellite.

“We think wooden satellites orbiting around the Earth are the future,” Doi said.

Raphaela Günther, an aerospace engineering Ph.D. student at Technische Universität Dresden in Germany who is not involved in the LignoSat project, said she considers the work from the Kyoto University team to be a “small breakthrough” in renewable space materials research.

Lessons Learned

The first LignoSat was a 10-centimeter cube made of magnolia wood panels assembled with traditional wooden joinery. An aluminum frame reinforced the structure.

LignoSat used a traditional joinery method called the blind miter dovetail joint. Credit: Kyoto University

The LignoSat mission had five goals: to measure strain on the wooden structure, to measure temperature inside the satellite, to demonstrate how permeable wood is to magnetic fields in space, to analyze the effects of space radiation on wood, and to establish two-way communication with scientists on the ground.

After the satellite was deployed from the ISS on 9 December 2024, though, scientists in Kyoto weren’t able to communicate with it.

Orbital data from the U.S. Department of Defense show the satellite stayed in one piece during its time in space, proving wooden satellites can work, Doi said. But without the ability to communicate with the satellite, the other four missions weren’t able to be completed, either.

“Unfortunately, we didn’t receive any of the information we wanted to know about,” Doi said.

An analysis indicated that the loss of communication could have been caused by two failures: First, any or all of the three switches needed to activate the satellite system and deploy its antenna may not have turned on, and second, the computer program used in the system may not have started up as expected, Doi said. “We are still analyzing what happened, but we now have two reasons to further investigate.”

Despite the lack of communication, Doi recognized two achievements in the LignoSat mission. First, it demonstrated that a wooden satellite can exist in orbit without falling apart. Second, it streamlined the review process for wooden spacecraft. NASA must complete a safety review of all satellites that head to the ISS, he explained, and now that such a review was completed for LignoSat, reviews for subsequent wooden satellites will be simpler.

LignoSat-2 will have both an external antenna and an internal antenna and will be twice the size of the first LignoSat. Credit: Kyoto University

The Kyoto University team plans to build LignoSat-2 to be twice the size of LignoSat, with two communication systems (one inside the structure and another attached to its surface). Installing the antenna inside the satellite body reduces the drag of the structure as it orbits Earth, Doi said.

“Even if the antenna is not deployed, which might have been the cause of LignoSat 1’s communication problems, we may be able to use this second communication system to communicate with [LignoSat-2],” Doi said.

Finnish space technology company Arctic Astronautics is also thinking about wood in space. In 2021, they and Finnish company UPM Plywood developed the WISA Woodsat, a 10-centimeter birch plywood CubeSat. The satellite contains a suite of sensors meant to gather information about how outer space affects wooden spacecraft. It has a deployable camera, a “selfie stick” meant to take photos of itself in space and allow the team on the ground to monitor it visually.

The WISA Woodsat contains a suite of sensors meant to measure how outer space will affect its materials. It also has a selfie stick. Credit: Arctic Astronautics/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

“There is a niche for these kinds of satellites, and the basic research is extremely interesting,” said Jari Mäkinen, cofounder of Arctic Astronautics and initiator of the WISA Woodsat project. “It’s totally possible that when we see these satellites flying, we realize important information [about how plywood acts in space].”

The WISA Woodsat itself is nearly ready for launch, Mäkinen said, but Arctic Astronautics still needs permitting from Finnish space authorities to proceed. He’s hopeful the launch will take place next year. “We will fly as soon as possible,” he said.

A Sustainable Space Industry

For Doi, the wooden CubeSats are just the beginning. “Let’s create a space timber industry” reads the translation of the bio of the research team’s X (formerly Twitter) account. Doi said he imagines a future where wood overtakes aluminum as the primary material for satellites.

Wood is cheaper, easier to use, and lighter than conventional spacecraft materials. Its use as a potential material could both push the space industry toward using more wood and make space development more accessible to countries with fewer resources, Günther said.

A wooden space age could shrink the environmental footprint of the space industry, too. When aluminum satellites fall back into Earth’s atmosphere, they burn, creating aluminum oxide particles. These particles, sometimes smaller than 1 micrometer, may destroy ozone, disrupt atmospheric processes, and even alter Earth’s magnetic field, some scientists suggest. When wood burns, it generates only carbon dioxide, biodegradable ash, and water vapor.

And though scientists don’t fully understand all the possible ways that particles from decomposing metal or wooden spacecraft interact with the upper atmosphere, the decomposition products of wood are easier to assess because they are already major drivers of atmospheric processes, Günther said.

“It’s not a question if we do or if we don’t” begin to use more sustainable spacecraft materials, she said. “I think we have to.”

With a few hundred tracked objects returning to Earth each year, reentering metal spacecraft are not currently a major environmental problem. But as the space industry quickly grows, it’s crucial to look for more ecofriendly materials, Doi said. Replacing even a small portion of parts on future satellites with wood could significantly reduce pollution, Mäkinen said.

Wood poses challenges for spacecraft engineers, too. Because it’s grown naturally, it has defects and doesn’t behave homogeneously, meaning “the behavior of the material in three different directions is not the same,” Günther said. Her own research is working to create spacecraft materials made of wood fibers and binding material that behave more consistently.

“It’s not a question if we do or if we don’t” begin to use more sustainable spacecraft materials, she said. “I think we have to.”

Mäkinen agreed that wood provides many environmental and technical advantages but said large space companies have likely invested enough in their current manufacturing processes that a large-scale shift to wood as a satellite material is unlikely without pressure from space authorities. “I hope that I’m wrong,” he said.

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

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2025), A new satellite material comes out of the woodwork, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250241. Published on 7 July 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 regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.

On 3 June, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a 940-page spending bill containing President Donald Trump’s domestic policy agenda. After the Senate passed the bill 2 days ago, it cleared the House by a four-vote margin and it will now head to Trump’s desk to be signed into law.

The bill provides trillions of dollars in tax cuts, boosts the fossil fuel industry, and dismantles incentives for clean energy, fulfilling Trump’s campaign promise to remake the U.S. energy economy in favor of oil and gas. 

“Congress has betrayed the working people of this country. This budget bill is the largest-ever transfer of wealth from working families to the ultra-rich and one of the most environmentally destructive pieces of legislation in U.S. history,” said Collin Rees, U.S. campaigns manager at Oil Change International, a clean energy advocacy group, in a statement. 

 
Related

•  How the G.O.P. Bill Will Reshape America’s Energy Landscape
•  A List of Nearly Everything in the G.O.P. Bill, and How Much It Would Cost or Save
•  Chart: ​‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ would cause energy bills to go up in every state
• The Most Perverse Part of the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
 

Some of the provisions that most concerned renewable energy and environmental advocates ultimately did not make it into the bill. A tax on future wind and solar projects was removed; the bill no longer mandates the scale of public land sales; and tax credits for companies building nuclear, hydroelectric, and geothermal power plants were not targeted by the bill, according to the New York Times. 

“America, get ready for a safer, stronger, more affordable, and Energy Dominant future,” Doug Burgum, secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, wrote on X. According to a 25 February report from the Clean Energy Buyers Association, repealing clean energy tax credits, which the bill calls for, would raise electricity prices for U.S. residents by nearly 7% on average by 2026.

Contained within the bill are provisions related to climate, energy, and Earth science that would: 

• Phase out tax credits that have been in place for decades incentivizing wind and solar power projects. “We’ll continue to build out renewables, but we’ll build out a lot slower,” David Carrol, chief renewables officer for ENGIE North America, a major power plant developer, told the New York Times. 
• Repeal tax credits for consumers who buy new or used electric cars, as well as incentives for businesses to buy electric trucks.
• Postpone fees on methane leaks from oil and gas operations.
• End tax credits for homeowners to upgrade energy efficiency in their homes. In 2023, 3.4 million Americans took advantage of these incentives, according to Rewiring America, an electrification advocacy nonprofit.
• Provide tax breaks for oil and gas producers.
• Rescind unspent funding from President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. 
• Mandate that millions of additional acres of federal land be made available for mining. 
• Provide tax breaks for U.S. producers of metallurgical coal (a form of coal used to make steel) and lower royalty rates for coal companies that mine on federal lands.
• Mandate oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico, the American West, and Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Reserve.

“This bill will be the most transformational legislation that we’ve seen in decades in terms of access to both federal lands and federal waters,” Mike Sommers, chief executive of the American Petroleum Institute, told CNBC. “It includes almost all of our priorities.”

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

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org. Text © 2025. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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body {background-color: #D2D1D5;} Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.

A group of EPA scientists who signed an open letter voicing their dissent from Trump administration policies have been placed on administrative leave.

The letter, addressed to EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, was published 30 June.

As of Thursday afternoon, all 620 signatories are listed as anonymous. However, initially, more than 300 were identified as EPA staffers, and 170 of those staffers chose to be named, according to the Washington Post. Now, about 140 of them have been placed on administrative leave, according to The Hill, E&E News, The New York Times, and other outlets.

“The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November,” wrote EPA press secretary, Brigit Hirsch, in a statement.

 
Related

•  Declaration of Dissent
•  EPA places staffers who signed ‘dissent’ letter on leave
•  EPA puts 139 employees on leave who criticized administration
• E.P.A. Suspends 144 Employees After They Signed a Letter Criticizing Trump
• Roughly 140 EPA staffers who signed ‘dissent’ letter are put on leave
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
 

Marie Owens Powell, president of American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, EPA’s largest union, told E&E News that EPA’s actions were “disgraceful” and an “obvious retaliation for individuals expressing their beliefs. She added that the union is investigating its options for legal recourse.

As of Thursday afternoon, the letter also has 4,597 “supporters and endorsers” who had added their name to a running list. The letter outlines five primary concerns:

• That the EPA is undermining public trust by “promot[ing] misinformation and overtly partisan rhetoric.” The letter calls out the use of politicized terms such as “green slush funds” and “clean coal” in EPA messaging.
• That the EPA is ignoring scientific consensus to benefit polluters. The letter states that the “administration’s actions directly contradict EPA’s own scientific assessments on human health risks” related to mercury, asbestos, greenhouse gases, and PFAS.
• That the EPA is reversing previous progress made to protect vulnerable communities. The letter references environmental justice staffers being placed on leave earlier this year and billions of dollars of cancelled grants.
• That the EPA has dismantled the Office of Research and Development (ORD). The letter suggests that placing ORD scientists in regulatory program offices “will make EPA science more vulnerable to political interference” and that budget cuts will leave the office “unable to meet the science needs of the EPA and its partners and will threaten the health of all Americans.”
• That the EPA has promoted a culture of fear. The letter cites comments from private speeches, reported by ProPublica, in which Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought stated, “We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.” And, “We want to put them in trauma.”

—Emily Dieckman (@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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As winter gives way to spring, seasonal snowpack in the American West begins to melt.

Though some of that melt flows over and through shallow alpine soil, new research shows that much of it sinks into bedrock where it percolates for years before resurfacing. Fresh snowmelt makes up less than half of the water in the region’s gushing spring streams, according to the study.

The new finding could improve water resources forecasts. Hydrologic models, which inform the forecasts, largely overlook groundwater contributions and assume the spring’s heavy flows come directly from seasonal snowmelt.

The authors of the study, published in Communications Earth & Environment, used a radioactive isotope of hydrogen known as tritium to measure when the water in 42 western U.S. catchments fell as precipitation.

They found that during late winter, when rain and snowmelt were scarce and streams were fed primarily by groundwater, the water fell as precipitation an average of 10.4 years ago. Even during spring, when the same streams were overflowing with fresh runoff, their chilly waters had an average age of 5.7 years, still indicating significant contributions from groundwater.

A Subterranean Bucket

Hydrologic models typically simulate mountains as impermeable masses covered with a thin sponge of alpine soil, said the study’s first author, Paul Brooks, a hydrologist at the University of Utah. The sponge can absorb some water, but anything extra will quickly drain away.

“Snowmelt is being recharged into groundwater and is mobilizing groundwater that has been stored over much longer [periods].”

However, over the past few decades, scientists have uncovered a steady stream of hints that mountains may store huge volumes of water outside their spongy outer layer. Many high-elevation creeks carry dissolved minerals similar to those found in groundwater, suggesting a subterranean origin. Scientists studying healthy alpine ecosystems in arid conditions have wondered whether plants were tapping into a hidden reservoir of water.

Though snowmelt and rainfall immediately increase streamflow, the relationship is not intuitive. “What appears to be happening is that snowmelt is being recharged into groundwater and is mobilizing groundwater that has been stored over much longer [periods],” said James Kirchner, a hydrologist at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich who was not involved in the research.

In areas where the mountains were made of porous sandstone, waters monitored in the new study were much older. In one such stream, the average age of water in winter was 14 years.

Mountains are “more like a bucket with a sponge on top.”

The authors were able to convincingly demonstrate the age of the flows because they used tritium, Kirchner said. Though scientists have previously used tritium to date water from individual streams and large bodies such as oceans and lakes, this study is the first to use tritium to date alpine groundwater and snowmelt across multiple catchments, Brooks said.

On the basis of historic flows, annual precipitation, and the ages of the stream water, the mountains could store an order of magnitude more water than accounted for in current models, Brooks said. As opposed to the impermeable masses in traditional models, he explained, mountains are “more like a bucket with a sponge on top.”

This finding could change how scientists think about the alpine water cycle. “If precipitation takes, on average, years to exit as streamflow, that means that streamflow in any one year is a function of years of climate and weather,” Brooks said. That means forecasters should consider more than just the most recent snowpack when estimating spring flows and potential flooding.

But further research is needed to unearth the role mountains play in water storage. The current study is limited because it covers only snowmelt-driven streams in the arid western United States, Kirchner said. Things might work differently in wetter places, he added.

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

Citation: DeGraff, M. (2025), Years-old groundwater dominates spring mountain streams, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250238. Published on 3 July 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.

In the face of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide, the Gulf of Maine is thought to be particularly vulnerable to ocean acidification. Its vulnerability has to do with temperature: The waters of the gulf are cold, and cold water dissolves carbon dioxide more easily than warmer water does. Increased carbon dioxide decreases the pH of the ocean (making it more acidic), a concern for the health of the region’s ecosystems as well as its lucrative shellfish industry.

But determining seawater chemistry is complicated. It requires advanced equipment and the assessment of complex physical, chemical, and biological processes. Until now, no long-term data existed to put individual measurements into context, so scientists did not know how acidity in the region’s waters was trending.

Using ocean chemistry recorded in algae, researchers have now constructed a nearly 100-year history of acidity (pH) in the region. The analysis, published in Scientific Reports, shows that ocean acidification, seen around the world, has been delayed in the gulf.

The Gulf of Maine is fed by three offshore water masses: icy, acidic northern waters from the Scotian Shelf and Labrador Current and warm, alkaline Gulf Stream waters. It’s also bordered by thousands of kilometers of shoreline to the west, and its estuaries and inshore waters receive significant riverine runoff.

The group expected to see pH fluctuate in the gulf, given the different factors affecting ocean chemistry and human-driven increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, said Joseph Stewart, a geochemist from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom and study coauthor. Data from 2011 to now, collected in Maine’s Casco Bay by a local nonprofit, show an increase in acidity in that coastal area. But that time frame is too short to determine long-term trends, according to the study authors.

Ocean Chemistry Recorded in Algae

Crustose coralline algae live for about 40 years in coastal areas of the Gulf of Maine, the southern limit of their range. These cold-loving algae encrust rocks and grow in seasonal increments, leaving growth bands akin to tree rings in their calcified skeletons. They are highly sensitive to changes in pH and serve as a record for past seawater carbon dioxide concentrations.

Using samples of the algae collected from several locations, the team reconstructed a timeline that spanned from 1920 to 2018.

“We’ve been measuring temperature for a long time, but we have not been measuring seawater pH for very long. It’s a very complicated, hard measurement.”

“We’ve been measuring temperature for a long time, but we have not been measuring seawater pH for very long. It’s a very complicated, hard measurement,” said Branwen Williams, a climate scientist at Claremont McKenna College in California and coauthor of the study. “So records like this are really valuable to get a sense of the variability that exists, particularly in these areas with people,” she said.

To the researchers’ surprise, the algae recorded a historic trend of relatively low pH in surface seawater, about 7.9, with a slight increase of 0.2 pH unit over the past 40 years. (On average, ocean water currently has a pH of around 8.1.) That move toward slightly more basic conditions was counterintuitive.

“We were somewhat surprised by that result, but then it made a lot of sense when we put it in the context of how temperature was changing and how nutrients were changing, and the timing of that change that had been previously documented in other papers,” Stewart said.

Starting around 2010, waters in the Gulf of Maine warmed dramatically. The change was driven by the decreasing influence of frigid northern water masses and the rise of Gulf Stream waters, which are not only warm but also alkaline. These waters seem to act as a buffer and delay the onset of ocean acidification.

Warming Waters

Ocean circulation–driven buffering effects will, at some point, reach their limits, researchers said. The ocean’s uptake of rising amounts of atmospheric carbon will persist, however, and leave the region’s ecosystems and economy vulnerable to the effects of acidification.

Ocean acidification presents one more challenge to the gulf’s coastal economy and its commercial fisheries, which stretch from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia. Ecosystems in the Gulf of Maine already face threats from disease, warming waters, habitat degradation, and invasive species. The added threat of acidification may push individual species past their ability to persist and redefine the biotic and abiotic factors contributing to those species’ ecosystems—a tipping point.

“It’s not just pH on its own that’s going to cause the ecosystem tipping point to occur, but a combination of pH and temperature, and both of those things are changing. The more data we have to understand the systems, all those different factors, the better,” said study coauthor Michèle LaVigne, an ocean scientist at Bowdoin College in Maine.

This and other studies provide insight into acidification trends, but the challenge of understanding and addressing competing factors influencing ocean pH feels intractable, said Damian Brady, an oceanographer at the University of Maine who was not involved in the study. “The dynamics are such that we have these countervailing forces all the time. We have these rises in total alkalinity from offshore source water, increases in temperature, while also, we as a species increase the carbon dioxide that goes in there,” he said. “It’s really complex.”

—Kimberly Hatfield, Science Writer

Citation: Hatfield, K. (2025), Warming Gulf of Maine buffers ocean acidification—for now, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250239. Published on 3 July 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.

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

Waves in the polar jet stream over eastern North America are often responsible for cold air outbreaks and extreme winter storms. A 1990-2010 increase in jet stream waviness has, controversially, been linked to unusually rapid warming in the Arctic and has been thought to foreshadow a rise in extreme weather as climate change progresses. However, the United States “warming hole” —an enigmatic 1958-1988 cooling trend centered over the eastern U.S.— has also been linked to an increase in jet stream waviness several decades before the 1990s shift in waviness. This timing difference raises questions about whether the jet stream behavior since the 1990s is historically unusual.

Chalif et al. [2025] leverage information from long-term climate reconstructions and find that the jet stream was wavier than it is today during many periods of the 20th century and was the dominant factor driving the winter warming hole. The results highlight the strong relationship between jet stream waviness and eastern U.S. climate, and question whether accelerated Arctic warming is responsible for recent jet stream waviness.

Citation: Chalif, J. I., Osterberg, E. C., & Partridge, T. F. (2025). A wavier polar jet stream contributed to the mid-20th century winter warming hole in the United States. AGU Advances, 6, e2024AV001399. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024AV001399

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

Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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In April 2025, I recorded 41 fatal landslides that cost 107 lives.

I’m somewhat behind with posting updates on global fatal landslides due to other workload pressures – please accept my apologies. Please be assured that I’m still collecting the data and that I will make a summary available as soon as I can.

Somewhat belatedly, here is a summary for April 2025 (the same report for the previous month is available here). As always, a reminder that this is a dataset on landslides that cause loss of life, following the methodology of Froude and Petley (2018). At this point, the monthly data is provisional.

The headlines are as follows. In April 2025, I recorded 41 fatal landslides that cost 107 lives. The April Average for 2004 to 2016 is 28 fatal landslides, so this is once again substantially above the long term mean. In the exceptional year of 2024, I recorded 40 landslides, so as at 30 April 2025, the cumulative total is proving to be comparable to the prior year. This is a little bit surprising.

Loyal readers will know that my preferred way of displaying these data is using pentads – 73 five day blocks over the course of the year. The end of April takes us to pentad 24:-

The number of fatal landslides to the end of April 2025, displayed in pentads. For comparison, the long term mean (2004 to 2016) and the exceptional year of 2024 are also shown.

As the graph shows, the cumulative total number of fatal landslides to the end of April 2025 has tracked in a very similar way to April 2024. The trend is very substantially higher than for the long term average. But note also that 2024 saw a very early transition to the much higher event rate through the Northern Hemisphere summer (in 2024 this occurred in the latter part of April, the norm is at least a month later). At the end of April 2025, it was too early to tell whether this would be replicated.

I find this continued high rate of global fatal landslides through April 2025 quite surprising, but global temperatures have remained high. As the US Government dismantles its climate infrastructure (an act of pure vandalism), we are increasingly reliant on data being provided elsewhere. Fortunately, the European Copernicus Clime Change Service system remains wonderful and fully available. This shows that:

“April 2025 was the second-warmest April globally, with an average ERA5 surface air temperature of 14.96°C, 0.60°C above the 1991-2020 average for April. April 2025 was 0.07°C cooler than the record April of 2024, and 0.07°C warmer than the third warmest of 2016.”

Thus, the high event rate for fatal landslides may be associated with the continued high global temperatures, and thus high peak rainfall intensities, through the early part of 2025.

Reference

Froude M.J. and Petley D.N. 2018. Global fatal landslide occurrence from 2004 to 2016. Natural Hazards and Earth System Science 18, 2161-2181. https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-18-2161-2018

Return to The Landslide Blog homepage Text © 2023. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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body {background-color: #D2D1D5;} Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.

In the latest move in a months-long attack on climate science funding, the Trump administration released a budget document on 30 June that calls for zero funding for climate research and the elimination of a slew of NOAA services, including the agency’s climate laboratories, regional climate data efforts, tornado and severe storm research, and partnerships with other institutions.

The budget, proposed for fiscal year 2026, also calls for a reduction in NOAA’s full-time staff by more than 2,000 people. 

The Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) would be eliminated under the proposed budget. OAR coordinates and performs NOAA’s climate and weather research.

“With this termination, NOAA will no longer support climate research grants,” the proposal states.

The proposed NOAA budget for 2026 contains the literal line:Total, Climate Research: $0www.commerce.gov/sites/defaul…

— Robert Rohde (@rarohde.bsky.social) 2025-06-30T23:25:38.113Z

“The idea [that] these labs would be completely wiped out is surreal and dangerous,” Dan Powers, executive director of CO-LABS, a science advocacy group, told Colorado Public Radio. 

The proposal would also eliminate funding for all of OAR’s climate and weather cooperative institutes—partnerships between the agency and other research institutions, including universities. One such partnership is the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaiʻi, an atmospheric research station best known for its measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Another is the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder, which houses the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The center tracks critical snow and ice observations used to monitor the impacts of climate change. The center had already halted maintenance for some of its data products after losing support from NOAA in May.

It is difficult to describe just how disastrous it would be if just-released NOAA budget proposal (or even large portions) were to be enacted: It would involve a wholesale dismantling (decimation, really) of entities relevant to weather, climate, & ocean research & prediction.

— Daniel Swain (@weatherwest.bsky.social) 2025-07-01T17:18:29.000Z

Additional programs slated to lose funding include the National Sea Grant College Program, the National Oceanographic Partnership Program, Species Recovery Grants, Climate Competitive Research, and Regional Climate Data and Information. 

The proposal also calls for the elimination of some environmental restoration and research programs, including the Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund, which had been used to restore 3,624 acres (1,467 hectares) of salmon habitat and enable salmon to travel hundreds of miles to their spawning streams in 2023, according to Oregon Public Radio. 

 
Related

•  NOAA FY26 Proposed Budget
•  New NOAA Document Spells Out Further Deep Trump Cuts
•  Proposed NOAA Budget Would Shutter Boulder’s World-Class Climate Research Laboratories
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
 

Whether the proposed budget becomes a reality will be decided by Congress.

The future of much of NOAA’s climate and weather research and monitoring has been uncertain for months as the agency has decommissioned datasets, put some of its weather alert services on hold temporarily, and faced layoffs. 

In June, the agency announced that data from three satellites used in monitoring hurricanes would not be available to researchers after 30 June. Then, on the day of the deadline, they reversed course, extending the data availability through 31 July. Scientists expressed concern that extending the data availability still would not mean the data would be available during the peak hurricane months of August, September, and October.

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

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org. Text © 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.

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

Roots play a role in the weathering and breakdown of rocks, but to what extent is largely unknown. Osorio-Leon et al. [2025] use an ingenious field setup to measure gasses and water constituents around deep roots in sandstone bedrock soils. They find that they can only reproduce their measurements with a reactive transport model when they include the CO2 production that is expected from root respiration or microbial respiration around roots.

The authors further show that the export of weathered solutes from the bedrock by water flow is enhanced by more than 40% through this deep root action. These results reveal that deeply rooted trees are important contributors to hardrock breakdown and ultimately stream chemistry. 

Citation: Osorio-Leon, I. D., Rempe, D. M., Golla, J. K., Bouchez, J., & Druhan, J. L. (2025). Deep roots supply reactivity and enhance silicate weathering in the bedrock vadose zone. AGU Advances, 6, e2025AV001692. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV001692

—Marc F. P. Bierkens, Editor, AGU Advances

Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface

Compared to single-channel meandering rivers, multichannel braided rivers are often found in environments with sparse vegetation and coarse, shifting bars of sediment. Past research has called the way in which the paths of braided rivers shift over time “chaotic” because their migration depends on many factors, including river shape and changing water levels.

However, because the migration of individual channel threads can affect the likelihood of hazards like flooding or erosion, understanding this migration is critical to protect the residents, structures, and ecosystems surrounding these complicated waterways.

Li and Limaye examined a 180-kilometer span of the Brahmaputra-Jamuna River, a river in Bangladesh whose channels have been well resolved through satellite imagery.

Scientists—and many of the 600,000 people living in the islands between the river channels—already know that the river’s water levels are high during the summer months’ monsoon season and low but consistent from January to March. But this research team used a statistical method called dynamic time warping to map long-term changes in the river channels’ sizes, shapes, and routes between 2001 and 2021. This technique allowed them to calculate how much and how quickly the centerlines of channel threads shifted. They then applied an existing model developed for meandering rivers to see whether it could also predict the movement of braided channel threads.

They found that the Brahmaputra-Jamuna River’s movements were more predictable than previously realized. About 43% of its channels moved gradually, rather than abruptly, during the study period. On average, these channel threads migrated more quickly than most meandering rivers, at a rate of about 30% of their width per year. In some cases, the rate of this migration was closely related to the curvature of the channel thread, and across the board, it was weakly related to channel thread width.

These findings have important implications for future research on braided river channels, the authors say. Knowing that at least some channel threads migrate coherently might inform erosion and flooding mitigation efforts for braided river regions, especially those in densely populated areas. (Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024JF008196, 2025)

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

Citation: Owen, R. (2025), Coherent, not chaotic, migration in the Brahmaputra-Jamuna River, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250237. Published on 2 July 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.