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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.

A new study of Antarctica has found that since 1996, its ice sheet has lost 12,820 square kilometers (nearly 5,000 square miles) of ice—nearly enough to cover the state of Connecticut, or 10 cities the size of Greater Los Angeles.

The study, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, evaluated the retreat of the ice sheet’s grounding line over the past 30 years. A grounding line is the point at which continental ice (grounded on bedrock) meets a floating ice shelf, and as such serves as a good measure of the advance and retreat of ocean-terminating glaciers.

Since 1992, scientists have been monitoring the movement of grounding lines with synthetic aperture radar (SAR), the “gold standard for documenting ice sheet stability,” said Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine, and coauthor of the new paper, in a statement. 

Data from multiple SAR-equipped satellites showed that about 77% of Antarctica’s coastline remains stable, but the unstable portions—West Antarctica, the Antarctic Peninsula, and portions of southern East Antarctica—are losing ice much faster as Earth’s climate warms.

Grounding line changes from 1992-2025 show quicker ice loss along West Antarctica, parts of the Antarctic Peninsula, and southern East Antarctica. Credit: Rignot et al. 2026, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2524380123

Glaciers in West Antarctica have retreated the farthest: In the last 30 years, Pine Island Glacier retreated 33 kilometers (20.5 miles), Thwaites Glacier—often called the Doomsday Glacier for its potential contribution to sea level rise—retreated about 26 kilometers (16.2 miles), and Smith Glacier retreated about 42 kilometers (26.1 miles). 

 
Related

•  Read the paper: Thirty Years of Glacier Grounding Line Retreat in Antarctica
 

“Where warm ocean water is pushed by winds to reach glaciers, that’s where we see the big wounds in Antarctica,” Rignot said. Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers, for instance, began their retreats in the 1940s, when a prolonged El Niño event likely brought warmer-than average temperatures to the Southern Ocean.

Though warm ocean waters mostly explain the retreats along West Antarctica, large retreats along the northeast side of the Antarctic Peninsula are more difficult to interpret, according to the authors. There, “we don’t have evidence for warm water,” Rignot said. “Something else is acting—it’s still a question mark.”

The data provided in the new paper offer future ice sheet scientists critical benchmarks to test how accurate their own models and projections of Antarctic ice loss are, Rignot said. “If a model can’t reproduce this record, the modeling team will need to go back to the drawing board.”

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

Ionic Compounds: Worth Their Salt? Salt of the Earth: Vast Underground Salt Caverns Are Preserving Our History—and Just Might Power Our Future How the Rise of a Salty Blob Led to the Fall of the Last Ice Age Insights for Making Quick Clay Landslides Less Quick Snowball Earth’s Liquid Seas Dipped Way Below Freezing Episodic Tales of Salt What Salty Water Means for Wild Horses

In spring 2025, torrential rains fell on central Romania’s Harghita County in Transylvania, causing the waters of the Corund River to flood its banks. Speaking to reporters at a press conference in early May, county prefect Petres Sandor estimated that the river, which winds through towns nestled in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, had swelled to more than a hundred times its normal flow.

The river had also begun to seep into the Praid salt mine, home to one of the largest salt reserves in Europe and the economic lifeblood of surrounding communities.

In the weeks that followed, access to the Praid mine was suspended, staff and nearby households were evacuated, and the underground dams built in haste to stave off flooding collapsed. Officials made efforts to redirect the river and save the mine, but the damage had been done: By July, the flooded mine was forced to close indefinitely.

Transylvania’s Praid salt mine was one of the region’s most popular tourist destinations, attracting half a million visitors annually.

Romans were the first to mine for salt at Praid beginning around the 2nd century CE. When the area was under Hapsburg rule in the mid-1700s, larger-scale extraction began, and it continued until the mine’s recent closure, producing up to 100,000 metric tons of salt per year at its peak.

But in the modern era, Praid was not only an operational salt mine. It was also one of the region’s most popular tourist destinations, attracting half a million visitors a year to repurposed caverns that housed—nearly 122 meters (400 feet) belowground—a medical center; an Orthodox church; a movie theater; a museum; and an adventure park featuring arcades, zip lines, and a planetarium.

Before it flooded in spring 2025, Romania’s Praid salt mine was a hugely popular tourist destination that housed amenities including a planetarium, a movie theater, a medical center, and an Orthodox church. Credit: Thomas Hackl/Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0

There are two main categories of caverns formed via salt extraction, and both possess unique properties. These include pure, dry air, very low permeability, and—given the right conditions—structural stability. Some caverns, like Praid, are by-products of rock salt mining that began millennia ago and continues today. Others have been intentionally created for storage purposes, with the by-product being the salt.

Around the world, these properties have made salt caverns ideal for storing anything from archival film footage to the United States’ Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Other uses are on the horizon. As the global community grapples with the need to alter its energy habits in the face of climate change, it may be that at least one clean energy solution lies right beneath our feet.

Old Salt

Between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, humans began cultivating crops and domesticating animals. As diets changed for both humans and their livestock, the need for large quantities of salt grew.

“Previously, with hunter-fisher-gatherers, salt came into the diet mostly through meat, nuts, and small fruits,” said E. Cory Sills, associate professor of geography at the University of Texas at Tyler. “But with a move to more carbohydrate-based diets, salt needed to be found and manufactured.”

And once the use of salt as a food preservative became widespread, an industry was born, with efforts to find and mine the mineral cropping up across Asia, Central America, and Europe.

The world’s oldest salt mine is said to be Hallstatt, near the Austrian village of the same name (meaning “salt town”). In fact, Neolithic peoples likely settled at Hallstatt, located in a high Alpine valley, thanks to the presence of salt, as most communities at that time opted for the fertile plains.

Artifacts uncovered at Hallstatt include a deer antler pickaxe that dates to 5000 BCE.

Artifacts uncovered at Hallstatt include a deer antler pickax that dates to what were perhaps the earliest salt extraction efforts, around 5000 BCE, as well as textiles, human remains, and the oldest known wooden staircase in Europe. Researchers date the start of organized salt mining in the region to around 1500 BCE, and the activity contributed to the wealth of the community for more than a thousand years. Findings at Hallstatt reveal the progression of early mining activity, which by 400 BCE included tunnels more than 198 meters (650 feet) deep.

Salt mining operations in Europe developed further during the Middle Ages, particularly in western Poland and what is now Romania. Centuries later, as nations industrialized, technology helped miners dig deeper and identify where to drill. “Due to modern technology since World War II, geophysical equipment like ground-penetrating radar can look into the Earth and detect salt domes,” said Sills.

Some mines, like Hallstatt, have continued to produce salt. In both active and discontinued mines, the process of hewing away at walls of the mineral over the course of millennia, centuries, or mere decades has resulted in enormous underground caverns that, as it turns out, have some savory benefits.

We’re Not on the Surface of Kansas Anymore

“We will store anything that’s not illegal, flammable, or explosive.”

Nearly 200 meters (650 feet) below the grassland near Hutchinson, Kan., 20 hectares (50 acres) of hollowed-out salt caverns store government records, private assets, beloved film reels and movie props, and much more.

“We will store anything that’s not illegal, flammable, or explosive,” said Jeff Ollenburger, president of Underground Vaults & Storage (UV&S), which has operated a storage facility in the Hutchinson salt mine since 1959. At the company’s inception, the space was primarily used to store oil and gas records. Today its storage possibilities are limited only by the dimensions of its elevator—approximately 2.5 × 1.3 meters (8 × 4 feet).

UV&S has operated a storage facility in the Hutchinson salt mine since 1959. The company transports items including film reels, movie props, and government records down into its storage bays via its elevator, which measures about 2.5 × 1.3 meters (8 × 4 feet). Credit: Courtesy of UV&S

The Hutchinson mine, along with its companion museum, Strataca—which exhibits movie paraphernalia such as a shirt worn by James Dean in Giant, costumes from The Matrix, and props from Men in Black—is perhaps the United States’ most well known example of a rock salt mine living a second life.

But salt mines in Europe and other parts of the world have also carved out alternate existences.

Like Praid, the Wieliczka salt mine in Poland is a major tourist destination, though traditional mining operations there have largely ceased. Among the attractions for its more than 1 million visitors each year are a saline lake, elaborate salt sculptures and friezes, banquet halls, and entire chapels carved into the rock—much of it lit by multitiered salt-crystal chandeliers.

Salt caverns around the world have been repurposed in a variety of ways. Colombia’s Salt Cathedral exists in a former salt mine in Zipaquirá about 180 meters (600 feet) underground. Credit: Bernard Gagnon/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Other tourist destinations include Colombia’s Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá and Romania’s Turda salt mine, once used as an air raid shelter and for cheese storage and now a theme park complete with a Ferris wheel and an amphitheater.

Among its many materials, DeepStore, in England’s Winsford salt mine, holds the fashion archive of Laura Ashley, including hand-painted wallpaper, clothing, and other items spanning the company’s 70-year history. With his Memory of Mankind project, Austrian artist Martin Kunze aims to save modern human heritage from potential oblivion by transferring the accumulated digital record onto ceramic tablets to be stashed for safekeeping at Hallstatt.

Salt mines have been used as both storage sites for radioactive waste and—as with Praid—medical centers and health spas that tout the underground environment’s alleged therapeutic properties, including air that helps to absorb bodily toxins. In Belarus, the National Speleotherapy Clinic makes use of underground salt caverns, claiming to provide relief for patients with respiratory ailments and allergic diseases.

During World War II, Nazis stashed looted valuables in salt mines like Austria’s Altaussee, as the mines were protected from allied bombs and inclement weather. Thousands of paintings and artifacts were eventually recovered from these sites by an international group of curators and historians known as the Monuments Men.

A decade later and an ocean away, an American veteran of the same war was one of several local business leaders seeking a safe place to store physical records in Hutchinson, according to Ollenburger of UV&S. The veteran recalled the recovery of artifacts from salt mines in Europe and suggested using caverns from the local mine, which had been operating since the 1920s, for storage.

The mine is located within a salt deposit known as the Hutchinson Salt Member, which covers more than 95,000 square kilometers (37,000 square miles) at depths of between 152 and 305 meters (500–1,000 feet). It was once believed that the salt in this region was found in isolated pockets, said Ollenburger. But drilling and modern technology revealed the true extent of the deposit, which was formed around 275 million years ago, when shallow seas evaporated under the extremely dry, hot conditions of the Permian (~298.9–252 million years ago).

The Hutchinson Salt Company, owner of the mine in which UV&S operates, extracts rock salt that is primarily used for deicing roads in winter. This form of mining leaves behind large cavities that are ideal for storage, with natural temperatures of around 20°C (68°F) and 45% humidity. UV&S currently occupies 50 of approximately 900 available acres, with individual storage bays that are each about the size of a football field.

And the Hutchinson Salt Company is still mining, Ollenburger said. “We will never run out of space.”

Because Hutchinson was developed as a rock salt mine only within the past century, its planners selected the location in part to avoid a fate like Praid’s.

Elsewhere in the United States, salt mines may contend with differing levels of humidity, moisture, and temperature, Ollenburger said. “We just do not” face such issues, Ollenburger said, “because of the geology above us.”

The Hutchinson mine, Ollenburger said, is incredibly stable. “It’s a very inert, safe environment to be in,” he said. “And it’s very elastic. We’ve had small earthquakes from time to time in the region, and the whole salt cavity kind of moves together.”

The same properties that make salt caverns ideal for preserving archival documents and film reels also lend themselves to storing an entirely different kind of treasure: the resources that fuel the world.

A Subterranean Solution

In 1888, the modern practice of solution mining began in New York, and several years later it was put into use in China. Canada took up the practice in the mid-20th century, and it’s now a widespread method of salt production. Solution mining involves drilling a well into a deposit, pumping freshwater through it to dissolve the salt, and then removing the resulting brine. Salt’s low permeability and porosity, combined with a natural plasticity that enables self-healing of fractures, means the resulting cavern is airtight and watertight.

Solution mining is still practiced in parts of the Hutchinson deposit today. The brine might be used in chemical processes or mineral production. Or it might be disposed of.

That’s because a number of the caverns created by solution mining—and their storage possibilities—have themselves become the purpose of the practice.

When it comes to energy storage, salt caverns are fairly agnostic. In the United States, caverns along the Texas and Louisiana coastlines are used to store the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the form of 402 million barrels of crude oil. Elsewhere in the United States, as well as in Europe and China, salt caverns are reservoirs for natural gas. Because hydrocarbons like oil can accumulate around salt domes, caverns are also manufactured to store waste from nearby oil fields.

But applications for salt caverns that target more sustainable energy sources are also being put into practice.

Near the city of Changzhou in China’s Yangtze River Delta, development of what will be the world’s largest compressed air energy storage (CAES) facility has been underway since 2022. CAES optimizes existing sustainable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, by using the energy captured during higher production phases (i.e., periods of high sunlight or strong wind) to compress air. That air is then injected into a storage facility. When demand for energy peaks or when solar and wind production is low, energy generated by releasing the compressed air through turbines can fill the gaps.

Compressed air energy storage (CAES) facilities, such as this Hydrostor facility, store energy generated by wind and solar power in the form of compressed air, sometimes storing it in underground caverns. Credit: Hydrostor

CAES is a cleaner energy alternative that can contribute to power grid stability in part because of its capacity for longer-term energy storage relative to battery-based systems. And one key to the technology’s success lies in resilient, leakproof salt caverns.

The CAES facility in Changzhou, known as the Jintan Salt Cave CAES Project, entered its second phase in early 2025. The salt cavern facility, created using solution mining, is expected to have an annual output of approximately 924 gigawatt-hours of energy per year. In the United States, this would power around 84,000 homes per day.

Another CAES project, Nengchu-1 in the central Chinese province of Hubei, began operations in January 2025 and will have an output of around 319 gigawatt-hours of energy annually. Unlike Jintan, Nengchu-1 repurposes the existing caverns of an abandoned underground salt mine.

Though salt caverns meet the strict geological requirements of CAES facilities, more widespread use of the technology faces other hurdles. In addition to site limitations and the high cost of development, CAES poses safety risks including combustion and fire.

A Home for Hydrogen

Salt caverns are also ideal for storing hydrogen, another clean energy alternative. Like CAES, hydrogen energy solutions leverage solar and wind power and the favorable properties of salt caverns. During highly windy or sunny periods, energy generated by wind turbines or solar grids can be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen can then be stored in salt caverns and converted back to electricity during peak demand hours.

Not all caverns are created equal.

But not all caverns are created equal.

Solution mining in a salt dome creates cylindrical caverns ideal for storing and later delivering gaseous hydrogen, which can be used to supplement energy supplies when demand is high.

Unlike a salt dome, which is formed by salt tectonics and gravity and has a more vertical structure and homogenous composition, a salt bed like Hutchinson is characterized by horizontal layers of varying solubility and strength. Here, solution mining operations can be subject to geological constraints, explained Tingwei “Lucy” Ko, research assistant professor with the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin. Until drilling begins, no one knows how much the composition of a salt bed may vary, or where its weak layers are located. That variability, said Ko, “can cause a cavern to collapse.”

As with caverns used for storing other hydrocarbon reserves—such as those along the Gulf Coast of the United States—these reservoirs targeted for greener energy are created for storage purposes, and the resulting brine may wind up in leach ponds or saline aquifers, a practice that comes with its own environmental cost.

In fact, balancing the costs and benefits of hydrogen storage requires consideration of multiple factors, including safety. Hydrogen is highly flammable and must be stored under very high pressure, bringing the risk of combustion. Frequency of access is also a concern.

“If you use hydrogen as a fuel and you need to withdraw and inject the gas frequently, that could compromise geochemical properties,” Ko said.

Still, the benefits could be significant when it comes to cultivating a decarbonized and stable energy supply.

“With solar and wind, there’s a lot of curtailment, a lot of wasted energy and not enough capacity,” said Ko. “Geologic storage is a pretty great option.”

In some regions, including Utah, seen here, solution mining in salt domes leaves behind caverns that are used to store hydrogen. Credit: Archaeopoda/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Currently, there are only a handful of locations globally where salt cavern hydrogen storage has been put into practice, including the Gulf Coast, Texas, Utah, and the United Kingdom and Germany. All are areas where extensive salt domes are present. Which brings another issue to the surface: geology itself.

“Salt is not everywhere,” said Ko. “And it’s not always in the same place as wind turbines.”

Mining the Future

Without its economic lifeline, the town of Praid is looking to lure visitors with new experiences that take advantage of the region’s outdoor, gastronomic, and wellness offerings.

Like other incidents that came before it, the Praid flooding showed that there’s still much to learn about mitigating disaster in salt mines. And while technology is easing the way toward more widely spread energy storage in salt caverns, there remain enormous—and costly—challenges to overcome.

For Ollenburger, the future of salt cavern storage is filled with possibility.

“We’re finding new ways to offer storage to clients who might need different things,” he said. UV&S has built refrigerated storage panels for film industry clients who require their materials to remain at even lower temperature and humidity levels. The company has also discussed using the space for data centers, a need that will only increase with the rapid growth and development of artificial intelligence.

“What we have is an immense amount of space,” Ollenburger said, “and we’re trying to figure out how best to use it.”

—Korena Di Roma Howley (@korenahowley), Science Writer

Citation: Howley, K. D. R. (2026), Salt of the earth: Vast underground salt caverns are preserving our history—and just might power our future, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260025. Published on 2 March 2026. Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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

The study of tectonic modifications is essential to understand how Earth’s surface changes over time, shaping mountains, oceans, and continents. It is also crucial for predicting natural hazards like earthquakes and volcanoes. The lithosphere of cratons – ancient and stable continental regions – carry a long history of tectonic modifications that are revealed by increasingly available Earth observations.

Yang et al. [2026] use ambient noise tomography to reveal deep (about 60 kilometers) seismic low velocity anomalies beneath the Illinois and Michigan basins. These perturbations are attributed to lithospheric modifications leading to an uplift of the terrestrial crust of about 3.5 kilometers in the late Paleozoic to the early Mesozoic. The findings present links between geodynamic drivers and geological records and offer implication to improve our understanding of how deep Earth processes shape the surface environment and therefore landscape evolution.

Citation: Yang, X., Peng, L., Stevens Goddard, A., & Liu, L. (2026). Lithospheric delamination below the North American midcontinent ceased subsidence in cratonic basins. AGU Advances, 7, e2025AV002051. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV002051

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

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

An occupied vehicle was crushed, but the person in the car escaped unhurt.

On 1 March 2026, a very dramatic rockfall occurred in Fjæra in Etne in Vestland county, Norway. The rockfall, which originated on a steep rock slope on the flanks of Åkrafjorden, did not kill anyone, but it crushed a pick-up truck (see below). This event is a near-miss in terms of fatalities.

The rockfall was captured on video from the other side of the fjord. This has been posted to media sites and to Reddit:-

Rockfall in Norway crushing a road, a car, and then some
byu/SjalabaisWoWS inWTF

The aftermath was captured in a photo that has been released by the owner of the vehicle, Frode Mæland:-

The aftermath of the 1 March 2026 rockfall Fjæra in Etne in Norway. Image released by Frode Mæland.

Unbelievably, the car was occupied at the time of the rockfall, but the person (Christian Lee) was unharmed.

It appears that the location of this event at Fjæra is [59.87357, 6.38121], although this is unconfirmed.

The road is now closed for further investigation.

Return to The Landslide Blog homepage Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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In the summers of 2016 and 2017, a small research team endured harsh conditions on the Greenland Ice Sheet to gather data about the aerosols above it. These tiny particles carry crucial information about the elements that contribute to glacial ice loss, making them invaluable in the fight against climate change.

In a new study published in Environmental Science and Technology, this team reported that aerosols contain significant amounts of mineral dust, which can feed phosphorus to hungry, ice-melting algae.

“This study’s findings are important,” said Jasper Kok, an atmospheric physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved with the research. “The Arctic is warming several times faster than the global average,” he explained, and this warming exposes more bare soils that will only increase dust emissions.

Dusty Fieldwork

Prior research found that mineral dust contains significant quantities of phosphorus, a key growth factor for many species of dark-colored algae. Because dark-colored algae infiltrate snow and glaciers, decreasing their albedo and forcing them to absorb more sunshine, understanding the mechanics of dust delivery is imperative for accurately measuring glacial melt and estimating the impact of ongoing climate change.

“Most climate models omit this high-latitude dust,” said Kok.

To better understand how mineral dust affects the Greenland Ice Sheet, researchers captured aerosols and took measurements from ice cores and snow samples at a location north of Kangerlussuaq in southwest Greenland.

“To my knowledge, this is the first study to conduct real-time aerosol measurements on the Greenland Ice Sheet and connect those results to the algal blooms forming on the ice.”

“We were in a tent camp approximately 35 to 100 kilometers into the Greenland Ice Sheet,” said Liane Benning, a biogeochemist at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences in Germany and coauthor of the study. “We were there for up to 5 to 6 weeks to get these samples.”

The collected materials enabled the researchers to scrutinize dust above and within the glacier, which would, in turn, allow them to determine the dust’s origin, composition, and how many algae it could feed.

Scanning electron microscopes revealed the aerosols were primarily composed of mineral dust from the southern end of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which aligns with past research showing that area is a great producer of dust emissions. The quantity within the aerosols suggests the dust contains enough phosphorus to fuel massive algal blooms within the ice sheet.

“To my knowledge this is the first study to conduct real-time aerosol measurements on the Greenland Ice Sheet and connect those results to the algal blooms forming on the ice,” said Jenine McCutcheon, a geomicrobiologist at the University of Waterloo in Canada and lead author of the study. “Local Greenlandic locations near the coast are the most likely source, which matches our geochemical analyses.”

Microbes on the Move

But the results also revealed something else. In addition to mineral dust, the aerosols contained soot, fungi, and different species of algae specialized to living in ice and snow. The researchers detected one species of glacial ice algae, Ancylonema nordenskioeldii, that is well-known to reduce glacial albedo and increase melting.

The study suggests ice-melting microbes may be blown across the ice sheet, allowing them to penetrate areas previously unexposed to microbes. “These organisms can be picked up by wind,” explained McCutcheon, “which may provide a means for these algae to be transported to new locations on the ice.”

New research finds that phosphorus (P), along with other minerals, is transported to the Greenland Ice Sheet from bare soil downwind. Credit: McCutcheon et al., 2026, https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.5c13873, CC BY 4.0

Because other high-latitude environments are similarly pilloried by nutrient-rich dust, the study has wider implications for the Arctic, said Kok. “This study underscores the need to include this dust for more accurate predictions of how the Greenland Ice Sheet, and the Arctic more broadly, will evolve in the future.”

McCutcheon agreed. “While these results won’t stop ice mass loss, they will help us better understand how melting will progress in the future,” she said.

—Taylor Mitchell Brown (@tmitchellbrown.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Brown, T. M. (2026), Greenland dust delivers nutrients to ice-melting algae, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260069. Published on 27 February 2026. Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

More than 2 billion people live within 50 kilometers of a coastline and are extremely vulnerable to climate hazards such as excessive rainfall and flooding.

A new study in Nature Communications shows how marine heat waves can worsen excess rainfall in coastal areas, potentially exacerbating flooding and its associated losses, including of human lives. Researchers found that from 1982 to 2022, between 5% and 25% of extreme rainfall events in coastal areas occurred downwind of nearby marine heat waves. Compared to events that weren’t downwind of marine heat waves, these rainfall events saw about 20%–30% more rain on average, as well as a 30% increase in fatalities.

“This is a serious concern because marine heatwaves not only intensify general rainfall but also exacerbate extreme rainfall events,” said Zhengguang Zhang, corresponding author of the new study and a climate scientist at the Ocean University of China in Qingdao, via email. Marine heat waves are happening more often and lasting longer, increasing the possibility that coastal rainfall and weather may be affected even more dramatically as the climate changes.

New Insights from Existing Data

In the study, the researchers define marine heat waves as those occurring when the sea surface temperature of an area exceeds 90% of the average value recorded over several decades for a period longer than 5 days. These heat waves can devastate marine ecosystems, and the ecological damage can have knock-on effects, causing massive losses to people and economies that depend on the ocean.

“This study beautifully reframes existing information [such as satellite data] in the context of marine heat waves and shows that coastal rainfall can clearly be impacted by these heat waves.”

The researchers combed through various long-term satellite and climate databases, such as NOAA’s Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature dataset, to build global maps of sea surface temperatures. They used these sea surface temperature maps to locate marine heat waves and linked them to excessive rainfall events in land areas as far as hundreds of kilometers downwind.

“This study beautifully reframes existing information in the context of marine heat waves and shows that coastal rainfall can clearly be impacted by these heat waves,” said Alex Sen Gupta, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, who was not involved in the study.

From Hot Water to Excess Rain

Marine heat waves can vary widely in both their temperature and spatial extent, ranging from roughly 100,000 square kilometers—about the size of Iceland—to several million square kilometers or more. To compare heat waves with such different sizes, shapes, and characteristics, the researchers turned to mathematics.

“Marine heatwaves are characterized by a warm core with temperatures decreasing gradually outward, and Gaussian functions (a common mathematical tool) are often used to describe this kind of heat diffusion,” said Zhang. Using a Gaussian fit allowed the researchers to summarize and extract robust measures of scale and temperature gradients from noisy observational data and compare many marine heat waves and their effects on wind and rainfall.

“We found that marine heatwaves have the ability to influence the atmosphere above them and enhance rainfall downwind,” Zhang said. Areas downwind of marine heat waves experienced more frequent and more intense extreme rainfall, which the study defined as rain events that ranked among the wettest 1% of all rainy days in a particular land area. These extreme rain events peaked within the radius of the heat wave, which could sometimes stretch for hundreds of kilometers, and usually within 1–3 days of the heat wave forming.

The study analyses also yielded clues about how marine heat waves may be causing excess rain in downwind areas. The warm waters of a marine heat wave force the air above to mix violently, increasing atmospheric turbulence and strengthening winds. As these warm, wet winds move through and away from the marine heat wave, they collide with existing air and are forced upward, carrying their extra moisture with them. The rising, moisture-rich air then produces heavy rainfall, often over land downwind of the marine heat waves.

Connections Made, but Uncertainties Remain

Though the study clearly connects marine heat waves and downwind precipitation, the precise physical pathways involved may be more varied than they first appear, according to Sen Gupta.

“I don’t think the analysis necessarily distinguishes between different mechanisms as to how marine heat waves are impacting extreme rainfall events on land,” he said. For example, Sen Gupta noted that the study emphasized the importance of temperature gradients within marine heat waves as a key driver of rainfall downwind. “But temperature maximums within the heat waves may influence downwind rainfall just as much as temperature gradients.”

“Almost all the marine heatwave-related flood events that killed over a hundred people occurred in developing countries.”

Although the study builds a connection between marine heat waves and extreme rainfall, it does not establish a causal link between the heat waves and floods. “Establishing a direct connection is highly challenging due to the complexity of flooding, which is influenced by a lot of factors including topography, surface runoff, and even groundwater,” Zhang said. However, 10%–30% of flood events during the period covered in the study occurred downwind of a marine heat wave.

“Also, what we do not show in the paper is that, almost all the marine heatwave-related flood events that killed over a hundred people occurred in developing countries,” said Zhang. “Coastal communities, especially in developing countries, should incorporate marine conditions into their forecasts of extreme events, which may allow for a more accurate assessment of the severity of extreme rainfall or floods.”

—Adityarup Chakravorty (chakravo@gmail.com), Science Writer

Citation: Chakravorty, A. (2026), Marine heat waves can increase coastal rainfall, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260068. Published on 27 February 2026. Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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

In January 2025, a series of devastating wildfires swept through Los Angeles, causing widespread and catastrophic damage to critical infrastructure, displacing entire communities, and inflicting severe harm on the surrounding environment.

Landsat image of the Eaton fire on 14 January 2025. Brown and red colors display burned areas. Credit: Li et al. [2026], Figure 1e

By leveraging fire and emissions observations from remote satellites, Li et al. [2026] document the fire spread thus revealing how the fire moved after ignition and reached the urban settlements. In particular, the timing of the fire spread provides innovative information and supports the development of management strategies to cope with analogous future events. Interestingly, the authors found that residential fires released less carbon monoxide (CO) emissions per unit of radiative energy with respect to vegetation fires. The authors conclude that the observed dynamics of fire emissions and their linkage to fire intensity by new satellites open new opportunities to improve air quality forecasting.  

Citation: Li, F., Zhang, X., Cochrane, M., Kondragunta, S., & An, S. (2026). Fire spread, intensity, and emissions observations by multiple satellites: The southern California wildfires of January 2025. AGU Advances, 7, e2025AV002064. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV002064

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

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Heavy rainfall in the Zona da Mata area of Brazil has triggered multiple landslides. Over 50 people have been killed.

Over the period of 23 and 24 February 2026, extremely intense rainfall struck the Zona da Mata area of Minas Gerais (MG), Brazil, triggering landslides and flooding. The most seriously affected area was the city of Juiz de Fora, but Uba also suffered extensive flooding.

It is clear that the majority of fatalities occurred as a consequence of landslides, although the mainstream media persists in describing the event as flooding. Reports suggest that 54 people have been killed with a further 14 still missing.

Poder360 has posted some drone footage of the aftermath of this disaster to Youtube:-

This footage includes two damaging landslide sites. This is the first:-

The aftermath of one of the landslides triggered by the 23 – 24 February 2026 rainfall event in Juiz de Fora, Brazil. Still from a video captured by Viory and posted to Youtube by Poder360.

There are three landslides here, all in close proximity. The crown of the landslides appears to be in less steep, deforested terrain. The landslides appear to be in deeply weathered soil, and they are shallow in nature. The proximity of the houses to the foot of the slope is notable – and there are many other houses built on the slope.

The second site is somewhat different:-

The aftermath of another of the landslides triggered by the 23 – 24 February 2026 rainfall event in Juiz da Fore, Brazil. Still from a video captured by Viory and posted to Youtube by Poder360.

In this case, it appears that a flow down a gully on the upper slope has expanded onto the lower slope, entraining a large amount of material to form a significant landslide. Again, the landslide appears to involve a considerable volume of weathered material.

Judging by media images, there are many more landslides across the city.

That there is a high level of landslide risk in Juiz de Fora is well established. Indeed, in 2021 the Geological Survey of Brazil (CPRM) published a report (in Portugese) whose translated title is “Diagnosis of the population in areas of geological risk,  Juiz de Fora“. This identified 304 locations of high or very high landslide risk, comprising 16,436 households.

Given that the rainfall on 23-24 February 2026 was at a record level, the disaster was all but inevitable.

Reference

Lana, J.C and Marcussi, M.C.R. 2021. “Diagnóstico da população em áreas de risco geológico, Juiz de Fora, MG”. Publicação do Serviço Geológico do Brasil – CPRM. 15 pp.

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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.

After large reductions in staffing last year, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is now seeking to hire more employees.

The National Science Board, which determines NSF policies, met on 25 February. At the meeting, NSF’s chief management officer, Micah Cheatham, said the agency is seeking approval to bring staffing numbers up to “at least” a level allowed by President Trump’s federal FY26 budget request. Cheatham did not say how many staff members the agency was seeking to hire.

In 2025, NSF faced multiple waves of staffing reductions, first from a Department of Government Efficiency-related executive order on “workforce optimization,” then three additional rounds via a deferred resignation program that offered employees the choice to enter a period of administrative leave followed by resignation or retirement. In total, NSF lost 18.3% of its workforce between September 2024 and October 2025. 

“Today, we are at about 1,300 on [pay]rolls,” Cheatham said at the board meeting, “which is too low.” 

Cheatham said the 2025 staff reductions reduced the ratio of executives to nonexecutives, which he called “extreme,” and reduced bureaucratic distance between staff. “Most employees at this time last year had five layers of management between the heads of the agency and themselves. Now, today, most employees just have three layers,” he said.

 
Related

•  NSF Plans to Boost Staffing, Halve Grant Solicitations
•  The State of the Science 1 Year On: The Federal Workforce
•  The State of the Science 1 Year On: Academia and Research
•  Watch: National Science Board 496th Meeting
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
 

In June, NSF was also evicted from its headquarters in Alexandria, Va.. Since then, staff have been working remotely and out of multiple other government buildings.

Uncertainty over the agency’s funding, fear of retaliation, and lack of job stability led to a loss of expertise and an uptick in early retirement and resignation, a July letter from NSF employees alleged. 

Regardless, Brian Stone, NSF chief of staff and acting director, said changes to the agency last year were an opportunity to “fix things that needed to be changed.”

Fewer Grant Solicitations

At the meeting, Cheatham announced that in addition to hiring more staff, NSF also plans to cut the number of grant solicitations—opportunities offered by NSF to apply for research funding—from the current count of more than 200 to 100 or fewer. He said that fewer solicitations would reduce workload for NSF staff and also help applicants better manage their time. 

“The fewer solicitations you have, the less time grant applicants have to figure out which of our pigeonholes they fit into,” he said. “Reducing administrative burden is part of the President’s management agenda.”

Over the past year, thousands of NSF grants were terminated, spurring legal challenges. And recently, applicants for NSF’s major graduate research award noticed their applications had been returned without review, even though their proposals seemingly qualified for the program solicitation.

In the meeting, Dorota Grejner-Brzezińska a geodetic engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a member of the National Science Board, questioned whether fewer solicitations would result in fewer scientists receiving awards. 

Stone, in response, said that solicitations would be broader and that NSF was developing ways to better route solicitations so that they are reviewed by the correct staff.

—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 © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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Giant Jupiter-like planets dominate the star systems they inhabit. In our own solar system, Jupiter itself is more massive than all other planets, dwarf planets, asteroids, and comets put together. Current theories suggest it shaped phenomena and features stretching from the size of Mars to the very existence of the asteroid belt.

These effects are even more powerful among the rare exoplanet specimens known as “hot Jupiters”: massive worlds orbiting much closer to their host stars than Mercury does to the Sun. Unlike other known star systems (including our own), most hot Jupiter systems don’t have inner rocky planets.

Now, a new article by Juliette Becker in The Astrophysical Journal provides a possible explanation for why many hot Jupiter and other exoplanet systems look the way they do and might even help elucidate the formation of our own solar system.

“We are approaching the point of a unified giant planet formation model, which is super exciting.”

“One of the biggest open questions in planet formation theories is, Where do hot Jupiters come from?” said Becker, a planetary scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

In the new paper, she argues that the history of giant planets—and their sibling worlds—is very contingent on specific factors that determine whether the giant planets become hot Jupiters, warm Jupiters (at roughly Mercury’s distance from the Sun), or cold Jupiters (like the one in our solar system). In particular, Becker’s model shows that most hot Jupiters likely formed via an abrupt disturbance caused by a passing star or other massive object, while warm Jupiters move through their star systems via a slower process. The abrupt disturbance scenario also explains why inner planets are missing in hot Jupiter systems; the catastrophic migration of massive planets likely ejects them into interstellar space.

“The first formal question in the field of exoplanets was how hot Jupiters form,” said Brandon Radzom, a planetary scientist working jointly at Indiana University and the California Institute of Technology who was not involved in the research. “Three decades later, it feels like this field is maturing. We are approaching the point of a unified giant planet formation model, which is super exciting.”

Not Like Us

The first exoplanet discovered around an ordinary star was the hot Jupiter 51 Pegasi b, identified in 1995. As of 13 February 2026, astronomers have identified 6,107 exoplanets, of which only a few hundred are hot Jupiters. The precise number isn’t certain, partly because there isn’t a consensus on where the division lies between “hot” and “warm” Jupiters, but data and theory suggest only about 0.5% of exoplanets are hot Jupiters.

“They’re pretty rare, and that’s interesting because it tells us something about planet formation and evolution,” Radzom said.

Despite their rarity, the combination of large mass, large size, and small orbit makes hot Jupiters easier to observe than more common exoplanets. Solar system–like exoplanets (including cold Jupiters) are quite difficult to spot because their size and orbital paths make them much fainter. Instead, a large number of known exoplanets are “super-Earths”: presumably rocky worlds more massive than Earth, orbiting in the same general part of their star systems as our inner planets.

According to current planetary research, super-Earths and other rocky worlds form close to their stars, while gas giants like Jupiter form in the outer parts of a star’s protoplanetary disk of gas and dust. They first form as a dense icy core, then accrete hydrogen and other gases until they reach a large size and mass.

“I think Jupiter could have become a hot Jupiter. Luckily for us, it didn’t.”

However, giant planets don’t eat up every bit of material in the protoplanetary disk. Models show they lose some of their orbital momentum to the remaining gas and dust, which brings them closer to their host star, a slow process known as disk migration. This is one possible way to make hot and warm Jupiters.

Another way to move Jupiter-like planets toward their host stars is tidal migration, which involves gravitational perturbation from a nearby star—because many stars form in clusters—or another giant planet in the same star system. This interference can knock planets into extremely elliptical orbits that carry them close to their host star, the same process that steers comets close to the Sun. However, Jupiter-like worlds are much bigger than comets, and the tidal forces acting on them circularize their orbits over time, resulting in hot Jupiters.

Becker’s model showed that the few hot Jupiters with companion planets probably formed via disk migration, while those without companion planets very likely came about via tidal migration. Using a similar analysis, she found that many warm Jupiters could not have formed via tidal migration within the lifetime of the universe.

“I think Jupiter could have become a hot Jupiter,” Becker said. “Luckily for us, it didn’t. For a Jupiter-mass planet to become a hot Jupiter, it would require an extra-giant planet or a stellar companion or something else that would perturb [its orbit].”

Instead, many researchers think Jupiter formed about 3.5 times as far from the Sun as Earth is, drifted closer to the Sun via disk migration, then was tugged to its current position through a gravitational push and pull between the Sun and Saturn, a hypothesis known as the Grand Tack. While Becker’s paper didn’t address the Grand Tack, she found intriguing patterns that could help scientists understand how every giant planet forms and migrates, which indirectly could reveal something about our own Jupiter—and Earth.

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

Citation: Francis, M. R. (2026), Rare hot Jupiters could reveal how all giant planets form, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260070. Published on 26 February 2026. Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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

Large earthquakes often release energy in complex ways, and some even produce boomerang ruptures that reverse direction within seconds during the same event. Such reversals can lead to stronger shaking because the fault releases energy in several bursts instead of in one continuous motion. Previously, this behavior was assumed to require geometrically complex faults with bends or branches.

Sun and Cattania [2026] show instead that faults can naturally alternate between continuous sliding and brief, traveling pulses of slip. When a rupture transitions between these modes, it can spontaneously generate a backward-moving front that fills in gaps in the slip. Boomerang earthquakes can occur on simple, straight faults when three common conditions coincide: velocity-weakening friction, rupture starting from one end rather than the center, and faults large enough for the rupture to propagate into regions of lower stress. Their model predicts that earthquakes with slower rupture speeds and lower stress drops are more prone to produce these reversals, consistent with characteristics observed in real events (e.g., the 2016 Moment Magnitude (Mw) 7.1 Romanche and 2021 Mw 7.0 Taitung earthquakes).

Because these conditions are widespread in nature, boomerang earthquakes may be far more common than we can usually detect, and the findings provide physical clues for identifying these hard-to-detect events. Although the study is theoretical, its results offer important insight into why large earthquakes behave in unexpectedly complex ways and how this complexity can influence seismic hazard.

Citation: Sun, Y., & Cattania, C. (2026). Back-propagating earthquakes on simple faults. AGU Advances, 7, e2025AV001649. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV001649

—Marcos Moreno, Editor, AGU Advances

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

The dynamics of interactions between aerosols and clouds are far from being completely understood and, therefore, it is a source of uncertainty in climate modeling. In Im et al. [2026], a call is issued to integrate into climate models, through data assimilation, the innovative and massive information provided by satellite remote sensing, ground, and airborne observations. Machine learning is proposed as a valuable resource to improve our capability of integrating several sources of information and exploring new retrieval algorithms. Furthermore, machine learning provides the means to set up climate model emulators to speed up climate modeling. The authors call for a global effort to profit from renewed international cooperation to advance our understanding of aerosol-cloud interactions, with the target of reducing uncertainty of climate projections.

Contributions to global mean surface temperature (GSAT) change (1750-2019) from individual forcing components, including uncertainties as assessed by the IPCC AR6. Credit: Im et al. [2026], Figure 1 (left panel)

Citation: Im, U., Samset, B. H., Nenes, A., Thomas, J. L., Kokkola, H., Dubovik, O., et al. (2026). Aerosol-cloud interactions: Overcoming a barrier to projecting near-term climate evolution and risk. AGU Advances, 7, e2025AV001872. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV001872   

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

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

Subseasonal forecasts have skill due to the existence of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), which modulates convection in the tropics while moving eastward along the equator. In a new study, Marsico et al. [2026] use a data-driven model to identify two modes of the MJO — a fast-MJO mode, with a 45-day period, and a slow-MJO mode, with a 70-day period. These two modes interact constructively and destructively and when combined can reproduce the well-known characteristics of the MJO. The authors find that if these modes and their combination are identified in subseasonal forecasts, the skill of the MJO forecasts can be improved by approximately one week, which would significantly improve the forecast skill.

Citation: Marsico, D. H., Albers, J. R., Newman, M., Gehne, M., Dias, J., Kiladis, G. N., et al. (2026). Modal interference drives Madden-Julian Oscillation evolution and predictability. Geophysical Research Letters, 53, e2025GL118062. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025GL118062  

—Suzana Camargo, Editor, Geophysical Research Letters

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How much money is climate change costing humanity? The social cost of carbon, a term for the monetary damages caused by excess carbon emissions, provides one answer. 

That calculation has traditionally disregarded the impacts that climate change has on the ocean—until now.

“Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.”

“Once you see it, you cannot unsee it,” said Bernie Bastien-Olvera, a climate change scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Bastien-Olvera is the lead author of a new paper published in Nature Climate Change that reevaluates the social cost of carbon, taking into account climate change’s effects on marine ecosystems. The study found the social cost of carbon nearly doubled when impacts on the ocean were considered.

“We usually think of the ocean economy as much, much smaller than the land-based economy. So the idea that climate change’s impacts on it could be as big as [they are] on land, where all of our infrastructure and people live, is surprising,” said James Rising, a climate economist at the University of Delaware who was not involved in the new study. 

Involving the Ocean

Calculations of the social cost of carbon typically consider the economic impacts of climate change on property, agricultural productivity, and human health. Ocean elements, if they’re included at all, are usually limited to the ability of the ocean to absorb carbon.

Both the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the U.S. EPA have published reports emphasizing the need for marine ecosystem representation in calculations of the social cost of carbon. 

“It’s so huge a gap,” Bastien-Olvera said. “It’s very well-documented that the oceans are a big missing piece in the social cost of carbon.”

Climate change is having a clear effect on ocean elements, regardless of whether those elements are included in calculating the social cost of carbon. As greenhouse gas emissions rise, marine chemistry is changing, and oceans are heating up, leading to interrelated phenomena, including ocean acidification, a loss of coral reefs, extreme weather events, and ecological imbalances. 

Bastien-Olvera and a team of scientists from seven countries integrated recent literature about the impacts of climate change on marine ecosystems and economies into the Regional Integrated Climate-Economy model (RICE50+) traditionally used to calculate the social cost of carbon. The researchers incorporated impacts on fisheries and marine agriculture, corals, mangroves, and seaports into the model, projecting costs under multiple climate change scenarios. 

“It’s a very significant component to the total social cost of carbon.”

When impacts on marine ecosystems and infrastructure were considered, the social cost of carbon jumped to $97 per ton of carbon dioxide,nearly double the cost when only terrestrial ecosystems were included, which was calculated at $51 per ton of carbon dioxide. “It’s a very significant component to the total social cost of carbon,” Rising said. 

Bastien-Olvera considers this number conservative because his team accounted for only a few of the ways that climate change is affecting oceans. “There’s a very, very long list of things that are not yet represented,” such as the existence value of deep-sea animals, the benefits of coastal protection from kelp forests, and the habitat offered by seagrasses, he said. 

Modeling Marine Ecosystem Services

Economists calculating the monetary value of nature use so-called substitution parameters to evaluate how a natural system—like a coral reef—could be replaced with capital inputs from humans. Some benefits of natural systems, such as corals’ ability to protect shorelines from flooding, require fairly straightforward substitutions. Other benefits, like simply knowing that coral reefs exist and are beautiful, are much more difficult to put a price on.

Rising said that the current study used simple substitution parameters to evaluate intangible elements such as enjoyment. He said more research on climate change’s impacts on the ocean is needed to help models better reflect the different economic values of different marine ecosystems.

Overall, the paper’s authors “do a really convincing job” and use “very reasonable economic steps” to estimate the social cost of carbon, Rising said. 

Rising said the new paper could have an immediate policy impact for governments and organizations that use estimates of the social cost of carbon and is a great first step for other scientists attempting to estimate the measurement. 

“What these authors have done is give us a framework for thinking about further improvements, and it’s going to be exciting,” he said.

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

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2026), With the ocean included, the social cost of carbon doubles, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260067. Published on 25 February 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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Source: AGU Advances

The Amazon is the world’s largest tropical rainforest, typically storing more carbon than it releases into the atmosphere each year. But in 2023, global high-temperature records accompanied droughts and heat waves across South America, disrupting that stable pattern.

Botía et al. combined carbon dioxide measurements and global atmospheric data to calculate the Amazon rainforest’s 2023 carbon balance using several data sources, including vegetation and atmospheric models, remote sensing data of fire emissions, vegetation indices, and proxies for gross primary productivity (a measure of how much carbon an ecosystem takes up for photosynthesis). The researchers compared the Amazon Basin–scale patterns to local flux measurements of carbon dioxide from the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory, located in the central Amazon in northern Brazil.

They found that the forest released between 10 billion and 170 billion kilograms of carbon into the atmosphere in 2023 (including fire-related emissions), turning the ecosystem into a small net carbon emitter. The change was most pronounced in the second half of the year, likely driven by climate warming and high sea surface temperatures in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The warming atmosphere and seas, along with an extended dry season, were likely compounded by the transition from La Niña to El Niño conditions.

However, despite an increase in drought-driven fires in the southern Amazon and an extended fire season, fire-related emissions from the rainforest were within the long-term (2003–2023) average in 2023. This level of fire-related emissions indicated that the rainforest’s change from a carbon sink to a carbon source was caused by the rainforest’s vegetation absorbing less carbon during drought conditions, rather than by fire-induced carbon release.

The rainforest’s record-breaking switch from a carbon absorber to a carbon emitter accounted for up to 30% of worldwide tropical carbon emissions in 2023, the researchers say. The findings suggest that the Amazon could become an overall carbon source faster than previously predicted. However, the authors note that the research so far is not conclusive, and the possibility of the ecosystem recovering exists as well. (AGU Advances, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV001658, 2026)

—Madeline Reinsel, Science Writer

Citation: Reinsel, M. (2026), Drought drove the Amazon’s 2023 switch to a carbon source, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260059. Published on 25 February 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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A landslide that killed four people in Turkey was associated with progressive failure of a slope with known stability issues. Final failure was triggered by heavy, but not exceptional, raifall.

On 8 December 2024, a fatal landslide occurred on the Güngören hillslope in Artvin, northeastern Türkiye. The failure, which occurred at 3:05 am local time, lowed across the D010 (E70) Black Sea coastal road, killing four people. I blogged about this landslide at the time, but now a detailed analysis (Görüm et al. 2026) has been published in the journal Landslides. The paper is both Open Access and published under a Creative Commons Licence, which is very helpful for those of us who write blogs.

The Güngören hillslope is located at [41.337634, 41.26327]. This image, from Görüm et al. (2026), shows the aftermath of the landslide:-

The aftermath of the a fatal landslide occurred on the Güngören hillslope in Artvin, northeastern Türkiye. Image from Görüm et al. (2026) .

Görüm et al. (2026) describe this landslide as a debris avalanche with a length of 522 m, a width of 250 m and an elevation difference of 287 m. It has a volume of about 100,000 m3. There have been previous landslides on this slope, one of which (in 2006) was fatal.

The landslide was associated with heavy rainfall (80 mm/day), but this was not exceptional, which means that the history of the slope is important in terms of the development of progressive failure. Görüm et al. (2026). They have used InSAR to show that the slope was deforming in the two years leading up to the failure, with rates in the range of 60 mm per year. Just 23 days before the Güngören hillslope failed, the 15 November 2024 Mw=4.7 Pazar (Rize) earthquake occurred about 45 km from the site. The calculated peak ground accelerations on the Güngören hillslope were low, but this may have played a role in the development of the final failure.

Görüm et al. (2026) also highlight two potentially important human factors in the occurrence of the landslide. First, the slope was quarried in the period leading up to 2006 for construction materials for the Black Sea Coastal Road. Notably, the fatal 3 April 2006 landslide was triggered by quarry blasting. One person died.

Second, the construction of the Black Sea Coastal Road may have destabilised the slope, perhaps through excavation at the toe.

Of course further instability on this slope seems likely, so Görüm et al. (2026) recommend ongoing monitoring of the site.

Reference

Görüm, T., Tanyaş, H., Yılmaz, A. et al. 2026. Fatal debris avalanche on an anthropogenically disturbed, earthquake-perturbed slope during antecedent rainfall. Landslides. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-026-02713-0.

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Just as meteorologists routinely predict temperature changes, storm trajectories, and other weather patterns, ecologists also forecast how ecosystems and environmental conditions can change in the near future. These ecological forecasts are rooted in scientific understanding of how natural systems behave and react, providing predictions of the future of ecosystems along with information about associated uncertainties.

Ecological forecasts offer tangible, practical insights. For example, they can estimate grass availability and quality for livestock and predict red tides along a coastline. They can support decisionmaking across society, guiding strategies for managing farms, forests, and fisheries, as well as for monitoring invasive or endangered species, assessing water quality, and implementing nature-based climate solutions. These forecasts can also influence everyday choices, such as when to take allergy medication during pollen season, whether to avoid the beach because of harmful algal blooms, and whether to reconsider a move to an area at risk of wildfires.

Ecological forecasts are increasingly vital today as we face rapid environmental changes and catastrophic biodiversity losses.

Demand for ecological forecasts is growing as more decisionmakers and natural resource managers recognize the importance of ecosystem services such as carbon storage, pollination, natural hazard mitigation, cultural benefits, and the provisioning of water, food, and other natural resources. Critically, these forecasts—produced by a community of researchers and practitioners across academia, government agencies, and industry—are increasingly vital today as we face rapid environmental changes and catastrophic biodiversity losses.

Iteratively developing forecasting models improves their predictive capabilities and scientific understanding of the systems they’re modeling. Weather forecasting models, for example, have seen tremendous improvements in accuracy and reliability over the past few decades, largely because meteorologists use them to generate and test hypotheses about atmospheric dynamics multiple times a day across millions of locations.

By comparison, ecological forecasting capabilities remain underdeveloped, partly because it is a much younger field that has received less sustained focus. Ecological forecasts also encompass a greater variety of processes and timescales. For example, some researchers model coupled physical, biogeochemical, and ecological processes across large regions to forecast forest productivity decades into the future, while others must incorporate highly localized weather conditions to predict stream dissolved oxygen levels just a day ahead.

U.S. Geological Survey scientist Jenny Briggs measures the trunk of a tree killed by mountain pine beetles. Such measurements inform ecological forecasting, which can help foresters to predict and respond to future insect outbreaks. Credit: U.S. Geological Survey, Public Domain

These complexities have contributed to the lack of a unified or standardized system for ecological forecasting. As a result, various organizations, such as federal and state agencies, industry groups, and academic institutions, have independently developed their own boutique forecasting systems.

Some diversity in approaches is essential for innovation, especially in an evolving and multidisciplinary field. But the absence of a unified system, shared infrastructure, and scalable practices often creates unnecessary duplication and inefficiencies that can hamper the scientific community’s ability to generate critical ecological predictions reliably. It may also limit our ability to deepen understanding of the environment. In brief, the current state of ecological forecasting often falls short of meeting societal needs.

Plenty of Data, but Barriers to Forecasting Remain

During a series of meetings held from 2020 to 2022 and organized by the Ecological Forecasting Initiative (EFI), representatives from U.S. federal agencies concluded that the primary bottlenecks to providing actionable ecological forecasts do not stem from technical or scientific shortcomings of current ecological models or from data availability. Instead, the challenges lie in generating routine forecasts efficiently and in effectively communicating them to end users.

A primary barrier to efficient ecological forecast generation is the limited interoperability among forecasting systems [Geller et al., 2022]. Different systems use different data and metadata formats, modeling approaches, and workflow structures. Such diversity is not unique to forecasting, but the requirements of operationalizing a model, such as real-time data access, fault-tolerant workflows, and translating output to decision-relevant metrics, amplify the difficulties posed by noninteroperable systems.

The lack of standardization among forecasting systems slows—and in many cases prevents—the development of robust, scalable forecasts.

The lack of standardization slows—and in many cases prevents—the development of robust, scalable forecasts. It also limits their reuse across platforms, reducing their overall effectiveness. Adopting shared tools and standards across the ecological forecasting community would signal that the field of ecological forecasting is maturing, helping to build trust and encourage adoption by decisionmakers.

A second major barrier to efficiency is redundancy among different ecological forecasting efforts. Many agencies and institutions tackle similar forecasting problems using different tools and workflows, often without coordination. This duplication of effort wastes valuable time, labor, and computational power, and the absence of shared infrastructure and protocols leads teams to re-create processes and datasets instead of building on existing efforts. For example, organizations and research groups often maintain their own in-house workflows for downloading gridded weather forecasts, converting these data to more user-friendly formats, and ingesting them into their forecasting models and tools.

Shifting away from boutique approaches to reusable, community-developed workflows could substantially improve interoperability and reduce redundancy in ecological forecasting. Using shared tools, developed and improved by many contributors, can also lower the time, effort, and cost needed to launch new forecasts. Maintaining workflows based on these tools is often more affordable, easier to manage, and less prone to errors than sustaining separate, individually built systems [Fer et al., 2021]. This collaborative approach also fosters innovation as improved tools and techniques are adopted by a community of users, rather than only for specialized individual projects that may not justify the investment to develop the tools.

Without effective collaboration, the ecological forecasting community may miss valuable opportunities to combine the diverse expertise and resources.

Inefficiencies and the lack of interoperability in ecological forecasting often arise because many researchers work in isolation, limited by technological and institutional siloing. These silos restrict the exchange of knowledge, data, and tools. Without effective collaboration, the ecological forecasting community may miss valuable opportunities to combine the diverse expertise and resources found in academia, government, and industry.

This disconnection leads to fragmented knowledge bases and isolated advancements, making it difficult to develop cohesive and integrated approaches to ecological forecasting. By working together to improve the technical foundations, or cyberinfrastructure, of ecological forecasting, we could substantially enhance our ability to anticipate changes in ecosystems and support improved decisionmaking.

Learning from Success Stories

Examples of how shared cyberinfrastructure can enhance predictions about ecosystems come from both within and outside the ecological forecasting community. For instance, decades of sustained funding and incremental improvements for weather forecasting infrastructure, led by agencies such as NOAA’s National Weather Service, have enabled scalable, robust systems that transform vast amounts of data into reliable and actionable forecasts. These forecasts support decisionmaking across government, industry, and the public, informing choices related to safety, planning, resource management, and more.

A notable example of shared cyberinfrastructure advancing ecological science is the National Ecological Observatory Network’s (NEON) Ecological Forecasting Challenge [Thomas et al., 2023; Thomas and Boettiger, 2025]. This initiative welcomed forecasting experts and students to use large-scale environmental data from NEON and forecasting models to predict ecological changes at 81 sites across the United States.

Since the challenge launched in 2021, more than 82 million forecasts have been processed by the shared cyberinfrastructure, enabling synthesis of forecast skill across dozens of models and ecosystems. For example, air temperature emerged as a crucial predictor in lake water temperature and dissolved oxygen forecasts [Olsson et al., 2025], and the ability to forecast spring leaf out accurately in deciduous forests varied with how fast green-up occurred (leaf out predictions are harder to make where green-up is faster) [Wheeler et al., 2024].

A migratory barn swallow (Hirundo rustica) rests on a branch in Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge, in Wyoming. By combining traditional bird banding surveys with radar technology and machine learning, researchers can now forecast bird migrations more accurately (e.g., with BirdCast). These forecasts benefit bird conservation efforts and help enhance public safety during migration seasons. Credit: Tom Koerner/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Public Domain

Numerous other examples demonstrate the value of cyberinfrastructure for ecological forecasting, as well as related services and decisionmaking [e.g., White et al., 2019; Zwart et al., 2023]. However, many of these initiatives have been one-off projects that lack sustainability or broad applicability. To reduce the community’s reliance on specialized cyberinfrastructure and methods and to ensure interoperability across systems, it is crucial that the ecological forecasting community develop and adopt standards and protocols for data management, model inputs and outputs, and workflows [Dietze et al., 2023; Geller et al., 2022]. Establishing these conventions will enhance data consistency and efficient data analysis, facilitate dissemination of forecasted data, and support creation of shared, reusable tools.

Overcoming Obstacles to Build Forecasting Infrastructure

During a 2024 EFI workshop focused on synthesizing best practices for cyberinfrastructure, participants agreed on key design principles that should be adopted, such as common metadata standards, the use of open-source technologies, and modular and scalable architecture. However, they also recognized that establishing infrastructure that adheres to these best practices faces obstacles and institutional challenges, including technical complexity, organizational silos and resource constraints, and a lack of centralized leadership.

The technical skills required to develop ecological forecasts can present a steep learning curve for ecologists.

The technical skills required to develop ecological forecasts, such as in software development, cloud architecture, and data management, can present a steep learning curve for ecologists. To bridge this skills gap, the ecological forecasting community could adopt mentoring programs in which ecologists collaborate with cyberinfrastructure and open-source technology experts to build skills needed for automated forecast systems. Integrating software development and cloud technologies into higher education curricula would introduce these concepts early in ecological training. And embedding dedicated software engineers within forecasting teams—rather than expecting domain scientists to develop technical expertise alongside their core responsibilities—would distribute the technical workload needed for creating forecast systems.

Institutional culture and siloed structures often incentivize short-term, competitive research focused on novel science, rather than development of stable, iterative, and reusable forecasting approaches. In addition, differing missions and policies among agencies and between agencies, industry, and academic institutions can unintentionally hinder collaboration.

Overcoming these barriers could involve building broad, transdisciplinary communities of practice that bring together ecologists, modelers, information technology professionals, and decisionmakers. Such communities can foster collaboration, align incentives, and promote the adoption of best practices for ecological forecasting. Grassroots efforts like the EFI and more formal structures such as the Interagency Council for Advancing Meteorological Services offer complementary models for this kind of engagement.

By connecting individuals with complementary expertise, these communities can facilitate knowledge exchange, establish shared standards, advocate for cyberinfrastructure investment, and codevelop robust forecasting tools that address real-world ecological challenges. In addition, the success of shared cyberinfrastructure ultimately relies on leaders within agencies, industry, and academia championing these efforts—leaders whom grassroots communities can help identify and support. Such leaders can emerge at any level of an organization, from graduate students to professors and from technicians to directors.

A strong community and clear leadership are especially important now, as the systems supporting ecological forecasting are rapidly transitioning to cloud computing, which offers both opportunities and challenges. Cloud platforms offer unprecedented scalability, enabling high-resolution models, real-time data assimilation, and automated forecast pipelines. Cyberinfrastructure design principles, such as modularity, align well with cloud-based architecture because modular designs allow components to scale independently based on demand, isolate failures to prevent system-wide crashes, and promote reusability across different cloud-based projects.

The progress seen in weather forecasting demonstrates what becomes possible when scientific communities invest in shared infrastructure, open standards, and sustained collaboration.

However, as organizations deepen their reliance on commercial cloud services, they may face higher costs and increased dependence on vendors. To mitigate these risks, institutions could collaborate on shared strategies that balance the benefits of cloud-native tools with the stability and autonomy of maintaining selected on-premises resources, particularly for predictable, long-running workloads that are more cost-efficient to host locally.

The progress seen in weather forecasting demonstrates what becomes possible when scientific communities invest in shared infrastructure, open standards, and sustained collaboration. For example, the average 3-day hurricane track error decreased from about 220 miles (354 kilometers) in 2000 to roughly 70 miles (113 kilometers) today, a testament to the power of improved models, data systems, and coordinated expertise [Ritchie, 2024].

Ecological forecasting could similarly see transformative gains, but success hinges on establishing a unified, community-driven framework of best practices to overcome barriers and develop a robust shared cyberinfrastructure. Ultimately, this collective effort will enhance the reliability and impact of ecological forecasts, empowering decisionmakers to better manage natural resources, anticipate environmental change, and safeguard public well-being.

Acknowledgments

We thank David Watkins for a helpful review of an earlier version of the manuscript. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. government.

References

Dietze, M. C., et al. (2023), A community convention for ecological forecasting: Output files and metadata version 1.0, Ecosphere, 14(11), e4686, https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.4686.

Fer, I., et al. (2021), Beyond ecosystem modeling: A roadmap to community cyberinfrastructure for ecological data‐model integration, Global Change Biol., 27(1), 13–26, https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15409.

Geller, G. N., et al. (2022), NASA Biological Diversity and Ecological Forecasting: Current state of knowledge and considerations for the next decade, p. 201, NASA, Washington, D.C., cce-signin.gsfc.nasa.gov/files/announcements/announcement_271.pdf.

Olsson, F., et al. (2025), What can we learn from 100,000 freshwater forecasts? A synthesis from the NEON Ecological Forecasting Challenge, Ecol. Appl., 35(1), e70004, https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.70004.

Ritchie, H. (2024), Weather forecasts have become much more accurate; we now need to make them available to everyone, Our World in Data, archive.ourworldindata.org/20251125-173858/weather-forecasts.html.

Thomas, R. Q., and C. Boettiger (2025), Cyberinfrastructure to support ecological forecasting challenges, ESS Open Arch., https://doi.org/10.22541/essoar.175917344.44115142/v1.

Thomas, R. Q., et al. (2023), The NEON Ecological Forecasting Challenge, Front. Ecol. Environ., 21(3), 112–113, https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2616.

Wheeler, K. I., et al. (2024), Predicting spring phenology in deciduous broadleaf forests: NEON phenology forecasting community challenge, Agric. For. Meteorol., 345, 109810, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2023.109810.

White, E. P., et al. (2019), Developing an automated iterative near‐term forecasting system for an ecological study, Methods Ecol. Evol., 10(3), 332–344, https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13104.

Zwart, J. A., et al. (2023), Near‐term forecasts of stream temperature using deep learning and data assimilation in support of management decisions, J. Am. Water Resour. Assoc., 59(2), 317–337, https://doi.org/10.1111/1752-1688.13093.

Author Information

Jacob A. Zwart (jzwart@usgs.gov), U.S. Geological Survey, San Francisco, Calif.; Cameron Thompson, Northeastern Regional Association of Coastal Ocean Observing Systems, Portsmouth, N.H.; Hassan Moustahfid, U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System, NOAA, Silver Spring, Md.; Jessica Burnett, NASA, Washington, D.C.; and Michael Dietze, Boston University, Boston, Mass.

Citation: Zwart, J. A., C. Thompson, H. Moustahfid, J. Burnett, and M. Dietze (2026), How to accelerate advances in ecological forecasting, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260066. Published on 24 February 2026. Text not subject to copyright.
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Right now, more than 1.5 miles (2.46 kilometers) below the surface at the South Pole, lie two seismometers—the deepest of their kind—built to withstand the extreme pressure, cold, and magnetic interference in one of Earth’s harshest environments.

Deploying the instruments, which will be part of the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) Global Seismographic Network, was a “hail Mary” expedition because of the challenges faced, said Robert Anthony, a geophysicist in the Earthquake Hazards Program at the USGS who led the National Science Foundation (NSF)–funded project.

The new seismometers help “fill an enormous, continent-scale gap in our high-quality coverage of the Earth.”

“That they’re functioning a mile and a half deep in the ice is just incredible,” he added.

Now that the instruments have been successfully deployed, they’ll start collecting high-quality seismic information that scientists can use to measure earthquakes, detect tsunamis, and even monitor nuclear testing.

The new seismometers help “fill an enormous, continent-scale gap in our high-quality coverage of the Earth,” said Rick Aster, a seismologist at Colorado State University who was part of the technical review process for the seismometers. “Having a good distribution of stations around the world is a great thing for seismology and Earth science.”

Engineering Under Pressure

Creating seismometers that can withstand being buried in an ice sheet took years of planning, dozens of experts across many organizations, and cold, difficult work at the bottom of the world.

Each seismometer sits at the bottom of a borehole drilled as part of an NSF partnership with the USGS Albuquerque Seismological Laboratory, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which had already been installing subsurface instruments to detect subatomic particles. The holes were drilled with hot water, meaning each is still filled with water that is slowly expanding as it freezes. This “violent, chaotic process,” said Anthony, is exerting extreme pressure on the seismometers, which must be capable of withstanding up to 8,500 pounds per square inch (58,605 kilopascals)—nearly 500 times the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere at sea level.

To protect them, each seismometer is held by a pressure vessel, first created for IceCube’s dark matter experiments, that can withstand about 10,000 pounds per square inch (68,948 kilopascals). The seismometers are also protected from magnetic storms, which can be particularly intense at the poles, with a metal covering that redirects the magnetic field around the instruments. 

USGS geophysicist Robert Anthony explains why the South Pole is the perfect place for these two new instruments. Credit: USGS, Public Domain

A scientific instrument company called Nanometrics helped the team determine how to mount the seismometers within the pressure vessels, while IceCube adapted their existing methods to create a system to allow the instruments to receive GPS signals far below the ice sheet’s surface.

“There’s such a high chance of failure, so many things that can go wrong, that it’s amazing that they both were installed and that they’re both functional.” 

The team finally had a fully operational product in July 2025, just 2 months before the shipping deadline to get the equipment to Antarctica. If their engineering solutions had taken just a month longer, the project may not have gone forward, Anthony said. In the 2 months before shipping, the instruments underwent extensive testing at the Albuquerque Seismological Laboratory, Michigan State University, and the University of Wisconsin. 

Anthony said he expects the seismometers, deployed during the Antarctic summer on 30 December and 9 January, to freeze fully into the ice within the next few months. Having them deployed is a “huge relief,” said David Wilson, director of the USGS Global Seismographic Network and a geophysicist involved in the project. “There’s such a high chance of failure, so many things that can go wrong, that it’s amazing that they both were installed and that they’re both functional.” 

Seismological Knowledge

The two seismometers will be able to record the movement of the planet after large earthquakes and pick up fainter signals with greater fidelity than any previously deployed instruments. The South Pole is the only place on Earth where seismometers can make such observations without distortion from Earth’s rotation. 

Also, the depth and location of the instruments mean they’re far from any surface noise, such as human activity, ocean waves, or wind. Even changes to atmospheric pressure, such as when storms roll in, can affect seismic data. The deeper seismometers are placed, the less those changes affect the instruments. Firn—dense snow in the process of compressing to glacial ice—also dampens surface noise.

Aster likens the installation of the instruments to astronomers trying to find the darkest sky to observe. “This is a vibrational sensor looking for the vibrationally quietest part of the world,” he said.

And because both seismometers will be frozen into the ice sheet, they will be extremely still and will remain so for a very long time. With such stable seismometers, “you can record minute ground motions, on the order of almost the size of an atom—very, very tiny ground motions,” Anthony said. 

The data from the seismometers could answer long-held questions about seismic activity in Antarctica, such as how its ice sheet is moving over bedrock. In places, the ice sheet could be sticking and slipping “in a way that we can observe at a new level of fidelity” using the new seismometers, Aster said. The instruments will also capture unique measurements of the seismic activity of icebergs off Antarctica’s coast and volcanoes in West Antarctica, he said.

The installation of these instruments showcases the value of having a U.S. science presence in Antarctica, Aster added. The South Pole station provides “an absolutely unique and world-class capability” for the U.S. scientific enterprise, he said.

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

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2026), These South Pole seismometers will detect vibrations 1.5 miles under the ice, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260064. Published on 23 February 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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Three people were killed in a major failure at a privately owned garbage dump on Friday. Earlier reports of 50 deaths are now believed to have been erroneous.

On 20 February 2026, the Philippines suffered another major garbage landslide, following the tragic events that occurred at Binaliw in Cebu on 8 January 2026, which killed 35 people. This most recent event occurred at Rodriguez in Rizal.

The location of 20 February 2026 landslide is reported to be Sitio 1B Harangan, Barangay San Isidro in Rodriguez. I believe that the landfill is at [14.77036°, 121.15283], although this is unconfirmed. This is a Google Earth image of the site from April 2025:-

Google Earth image of the likely site of the 20 February 2026 garbage landslide at Rodriguez in the Philippines.

PTV has a news article about this event, which includes mobile phone footage, apparently of the aftermath of the landslide. This is a still from that footage:-

The aftermath of the 20 February 2026 garbage landslide at Rodriguez in the Philippines. Still from a video posted to Facebook by PTV.

One person has been confirmed to have been killed in this landslide, and another two are missing. Early reports of up to 50 people being buried have now been dismissed.

The provincial Governor, Nina Ricci Ynares, has written to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to request a probe into the event. The landfill was reportedly owned and operated by International Solid Waste Integrated Management Specialist, Inc. (ISWIMS), a private company.

There is a lack of high quality research on garbage landslides, despite their substantial impacts. However, Zhang et al. (2020) provided an interesting review of 62 examples from 22 different countries. They concluded that the following were the most common causes of garbage landslides:-

• High landfill leachate level (40% of recorded cases);
• Inadequate compaction (23%)
• Insufficient bearing capacity of the foundation (19%)
• Low shear strength of the interface between the liner and the garbage (11%)
• Rapid release of landfill gas (6%).

It will be interesting to determine the cause of the garbage landslide at Rodriguez, but I would start with an examination of the compaction of the garbage and the management of water / leachate at the site.

Reference

Zhang, Z. et al. 2020. Global study on slope instability modes based on 62 municipal solid waste landfills. Waste Management & Research: The Journal for a Sustainable Circular Economy, 38 (12). https://doi.org/10.1177/0734242X209534.

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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.

At a 20 February event in Kentucky, the Trump administration announced a final action to loosen pollution restrictions for coal-burning power plants, including limits on emissions of mercury, a hazardous neurotoxin.

The move was originally put forward in June, alongside a proposal to repeal federal limits on power plant carbon emissions.

The new rollback eliminates parts of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) finalized under the Biden administration. The 2024 updates strengthened limits on mercury and other hazardous air pollutant emissions from coal-burning power plants. 

As a result of the repeal, coal-burning power plants will be allowed to emit more than twice as much mercury as they currently do. Specifically, they will no longer need to adhere to the limit of 1.2 pounds of mercury per trillion British thermal units of heat input (lb/TBtu) and instead must comply with the previous mercury release limit (set during the Obama administration in 2012) of 4.0 lb/TBtu.

“Weakening critical clean air safeguards will harm public health.”

The repeal also relaxes limits on emissions of arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead, and nickel from coal-burning power plants.

The announced rollback shows that the “EPA is letting the dirtiest, least efficient coal plants in the country off the hook,” Joseph Goffman, who worked as an administrator in the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation during the Biden administration, told The New York Times. 

In the final rule, the Trump EPA argued that the move will reduce “unwarranted compliance costs” for utilities operating coal-burning power plants. The agency estimated the change would save companies up to $670 million between 2028 and 2037, but did not explain how it arrived at that estimation. 

“The Trump E.P.A. is committed to fulfilling President Trump’s promise to unleash American energy, lowering costs for families, ensuring clean air for ALL Americans and fulfilling the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment,” wrote Brigit Hirsch, an EPA spokesperson, in an email to The New York Times. 

 
Related

•  Trump EPA to Weaken Rule Limiting Harmful Mercury, Air Toxics From Coal Plants
•  E.P.A. Plans to Loosen Mercury Rules for Coal Plants, Documents Show
•  Read more about the EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards  
•  Read the Final Repeal
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center

High levels of mercury exposure cause human health harms, including impairment to the nervous system, brain damage and developmental delays in children. Coal plants are responsible for nearly half of the United States’ mercury emissions, according to the EPA. The Biden administration’s EPA had predicted that its amendments to MATS would create health benefits worth $300 million over 10 years.

The repeal adds to a list of actions by the current EPA deregulating the coal industry.

The EPA’s action “will contribute to thousands of additional deaths, asthma attacks, and learning disabilities,” Matthew Davis, a former EPA scientist and policy expert at the League of Conservation Voters said in a statement. “Weakening critical clean air safeguards will harm public health.”

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

Correction, 20 February 2026: This article was updated to reflect information in the EPA’s final repeal.

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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