EOS

Imagery is now available that shows the aftermath of 3.1 km long landslide that killed about 90 people in West Bandung.

On 24 January 2026, a major landslide occurred on the flanks of Gunung Burangrang (Mount Burangrang) in West Bandung, Indonesia. The search has been long and painstaking, but it is thought that 92 people were killed. There were 23 reported survivors.

AFA Channel has posted some very good drone footage of the landslide to Youtube (excuse the dramatic music and the incorrect headline):-

Planet Labs have also captured a good satellite image of the site. I have overlain this onto the Google Earth DEM:-

Satellite image of the 24 January 2026 landslide on Gunung Burangrang in Indonesia. Image copyright Planet Labs, used with permission.

By way of comparison, this is the site prior to the landslide (image from February 2025):-

Google Earth image of the site of the 24 January 2026 landslide on Gunung Burangrang in Indonesia.

And here is a slider to allow a comparison between the images:-

This appears to have been a deep-seated, probably structurally-controlled failure on high, very steep slopes of Gunung Burangrang, which has then transitioned into a channelised flow. There is considerable entrainment along the track. The landslide is about 3.1 km long and up to 150 m wide.

There has been considerable discussion in Indonesia about the role of logging and mining in the causation of these large landslide events, but in this case neither are apparent in the source area. Institut Teknologi Bandung has a nice article about causation of this landslide, which notes that the underlying geology is volcanic. Loyal readers of this blog will recognise the frequency with which intense rainfall triggers devastating landslides in volcanic materials.

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to the wonderful people at Planet Labs for providing access to the satellite imagery.

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

This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.

For close to a century, geoscientists have pondered a mystery: Where did Earth’s lighter elements go? Compared to amounts in the Sun and in some meteorites, Earth has less hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and sulfur, as well as noble gases like helium—in some cases, more than 99 percent less.

Some of the disparity is explained by losses to the solar system as our planet formed. But researchers have long suspected that something else was going on too.

Recently, a team of scientists reported a possible explanation—that the elements are hiding deep in the solid inner core of Earth. At its super-high pressure—360 gigapascals, 3.6 million times atmospheric pressure—the iron there behaves strangely, becoming an electride: a little-known form of the metal that can suck up lighter elements.

Electrides, in more ways than one, are having their moment.

Study coauthor Duck Young Kim, a solid-state physicist at the Center for High Pressure Science & Technology Advanced Research in Shanghai, says the absorption of these light elements may have happened gradually over a couple of billion years—and may still be going on today. It would explain why the movement of seismic waves traveling through Earth suggests an inner core density that is 5 percent to 8 percent lower than expected were it metal alone.

Electrides, in more ways than one, are having their moment. Not only might they help solve a planetary mystery, they can now be made at room temperature and pressure from an array of elements. And since all electrides contain a source of reactive electrons that are easily donated to other molecules, they make ideal catalysts and other sorts of agents that help to propel challenging reactions.

One electride is already in use to catalyze the production of ammonia, a key component of fertilizer; its Japanese developers claim the process uses 20 percent less energy than traditional ammonia manufacture. Chemists, meanwhile, are discovering new electrides that could lead to cheaper and greener methods of producing pharmaceuticals.

Today’s challenge is to find more of these intriguing materials and to understand the chemical rules that govern when they form.

Electrides at High Pressure

Most solids are made from ordered lattices of atoms, but electrides are different. Their lattices have little pockets where electrons sit on their own.

Normal metals have electrons that are not stuck to one atom. These are the outer, or valence, electrons that are free to move between atoms, forming what is often referred to as a delocalized “sea of electrons.” It explains why metals conduct electricity.

The outer electrons of electrides no longer orbit a particular atom either, but they can’t freely move. Instead, they become trapped at sites between atoms that are called non-nuclear attractors. This gives the materials unique properties. In the case of the iron in Earth’s core, the negative electron charges stabilize lighter elementsat non-nuclear attractors that were formed at those super-high pressures, 3,000 times that at the bottom of the deepest ocean. The elements would diffuse into the metal, explaining where they disappeared to.

In an experiment, scientists simulated the movement of hydrogen atoms (pink) into the lattice structure of iron at a temperature of 3,000 degrees Kelvin (2,727 Celsius), at pressures of 100 gigapascals (GPa) and 300 GPa. At the higher pressure (right) an electride forms, as indicated by the altered distribution of the hydrogen observed within the iron lattice — these would represent the negatively charged non-nuclear attractor sites to which hydrogen atoms bond, forming hydride ions. Duck Young Kim and his coauthors think that the altered hydrogen distribution at higher pressure in these simulations is good evidence that an electride with non-nuclear reactor sites forms within the iron of Earth’s core. Credit: Knowable Magazine, adapted from I. Park et al./Advanced Science 2024

The first metal found to form an electride at high pressure was sodium, reported in 2009. At a pressure of 200 gigapascals (2 million times greater than atmospheric pressure) it transforms from a shiny, reflective, conducting metal into a transparent glassy, insulating material. This finding was “very weird,” says Stefano Racioppi, a computational and theoretical chemist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, who worked on sodium electrides while in the lab of Eva Zurek at the University at Buffalo in New York state. Early theories, he says, had predicted that at high pressure, sodium’s outer electrons would move even more freely between atoms.

The first sign that things were different came from predictions in the late 1990s, when scientists were using computational simulations to model solids, based on the rules of quantum theory. These rules define the energy levels that electrons can have, and hence the probable range of positions in which they are found in atoms (their atomic orbitals).

Simulating solid sodium showed that at high pressures, as the sodium atoms get squeezed closer together, so do the electrons orbiting each atom. That causes them to experience increasing repulsive forces with one another. This changes the relative energies of every electron orbiting the nucleus of each atom, Racioppi explains—leading to a reorganization of electron positions.

This graphic shows alternative models for metal structures. At left is the structure at ambient conditions, with each blue circle representing a single atom in the metallic lattice consisting of a positively charged nucleus surrounded by its electrons. The electrons can move freely throughout the lattice in what is known as a “sea of electrons.” Earlier theories of metals at high pressures assumed a similar structure, with even greater metallic characteristics (top, right), but more recent modeling shows that in some metals like sodium, at high pressure the structure changes (bottom, right) to a system in which the electrons are localized (dark blue boxes) between the ionic cores (small light blue circles)—an electride. This gives the structure very different properties. Credit: Knowable Magazine, adapted from S. Racioppi and E. Zurek/Ar Materials Research 2025

The result? Rather than occupying orbitals that allow them to be delocalized and move between atoms, the orbitals take on a new shape that forces electrons into the non-nuclear attractor sites. Since the electrons are stuck at these sites, the solid loses its metallic properties.

Adding to this theoretical work, Racioppi and Zurek collaborated with researchers at the University of Edinburgh to find experimental evidence for a sodium electride at extreme pressures. Squeezing crystals of sodium between two diamonds, they used X-ray diffraction to map electron density in the metal structure. This, they reported in September 2025, confirmed that electrons really were located in the predicted non-nuclear attractor sites between sodium atoms.

Just the Thing for Catalysts

Electrides are ideal candidates for catalysts—substances that can speed up and lower the energy needed for chemical reactions. That’s because the isolated electrons at the non-nuclear attractor sites can be donated to make and break bonds. But to be useful, they would need to function at ambient conditions.

Several such stable electrides have been discovered over the last 10 years, made from inorganic compounds or organic molecules containing metal atoms. One of the most significant, mayenite, was found by surprise in 2003 when material scientist Hideo Hosono at the Institute of Science Tokyo was investigating a type of cement.

Mayenite is a calcium aluminate oxide that forms crystals with very small pores—a few nanometers across—called cages, that contain oxygen ions. If a metal vapor of calcium or titanium is passed over it at high temperature, it removes the oxygen, leaving behind just electrons trapped at these sites—an electride.

Unlike the high-pressure metal electrides that switch from conductors to insulators, mayenite starts as an insulator. But now its trapped electrons can jump between cage sites (via a process called quantum tunnelling)—making it a conductor, albeit 100 to 1,000 times less conductive than a metal like aluminum or silver. It also becomes an excellent catalyst, able to surrender electrons to help make and break bonds in reactions.

By 2011, Hosono had begun to develop mayenite as a greener and more efficient catalyst for synthesizing ammonia. Over 170 million metric tons of ammonia, mostly for fertilizers, is produced annually via the Haber-Bosch process, in which metal oxides facilitate hydrogen and nitrogen gases reacting together at high pressure and temperature. It is an energy-intensive, expensive process—Haber-Bosch plants account for some 2 percent of the world’s energy use.

The company estimates that this will avoid 11,000 tons of CO2 emissions annually—about equal to the annual emissions of 2,400 cars.

In Haber-Bosch, the catalysts bind the two gases to their surfaces and donate electrons to help break the strong triple bond that holds the two nitrogen atoms together in nitrogen gas, as well as the bonds in hydrogen gas. Because mayenite has a strong electron-donating nature, Hosono thought mayenite would be able to do it better.

In Hosono’s reaction, mayenite itself does not bind the gases but acts as a support bed for nanoparticles of a metal called ruthenium. First, the nanoparticles absorb the nitrogen and hydrogen gases. Then the mayenite donates electrons to the ruthenium. These electrons flow into the nitrogen and hydrogen molecules, making it easier to break their bonds. Ammonia thus forms at a lower temperature—300 to 400° C—and lower pressure—50 to 80 atmospheres—than with Haber-Bosch, which takes place at 400 to 500° C and 100 to 400 atmospheres.

In 2017, the company Tsubame BHB was formed to commercialize Hosono’s catalyst, with the first pilot plant opening in 2019, producing 20 metric tons of ammonia per year. The company has since opened a larger facility in Japan and is setting up a 20,000-ton-per year green ammonia plant in Brazil to replace some of the nation’s fossil-fuel-based fertilizer production. The company estimates that this will avoid 11,000 tons of CO2 emissions annually—about equal to the annual emissions of 2,400 cars.

There are other applications for a mayenite catalyst, says Hosono, including a lower-energy conversion of CO2 into useful chemicals like methane, methanol or longer-chain hydrocarbons. Other scientists have suggested that mayenite’s cage structure also makes it suitable for immobilizing radioactive isotope waste in nuclear power stations: The electrons could capture negative ions like iodine and bromide and trap them in the cages.

Mayenite has even been studied as a low-temperature propulsion system for satellites in space. When it is heated to 600°C in a vacuum, its trapped electrons blast from the cages, causing propulsion.

Organic Electrides

The list of materials known to form electrides keeps growing. In 2024, a team led by chemist Fabrizio Ortu at the University of Leicester in the UK accidentally discovered another room-temperature-stable electride made from calcium ions surrounded by large organic molecules, together known as a coordination complex.

“You put something in a milling jar, you shake it really hard, and that provides the energy for the reaction.”

He was using a method known as mechanical chemistry—“You put something in a milling jar, you shake it really hard, and that provides the energy for the reaction,” he says. But to his surprise, electrons from the potassium he had added to his calcium complex were not donated to the calcium ion. Instead, what formed “had these electrons that were floating in the system,” he says, trapped in sites between the two metals.

Unlike mayenite, this electride is not a conductor—its trapped electrons do not jump. But they allow it to facilitate reactions that are otherwise hard to get started, by activating unreactive bonds, doing a job much like a catalyst. These are reactions that currently rely on expensive palladium catalysts.

The scientists successfully used the electrideon a reaction that joins two pyridine rings—carbon rings containing a nitrogen atom. They are now examining whether the electride could assist in other common organic reactions, such as substituting a hydrogen atom on a benzene ring. These substitutions are difficult because the bond between the benzene ring carbon and its attached hydrogen is very stable.

There are still problems to sort out: Ortu’s calcium electride is too air- and water-sensitive for use in industry. He is now looking for a more stable alternative, which could prove particularly useful in the pharmaceutical industry to synthesize drug molecules, where the sorts of reactions Ortu has demonstrated are common.

Still Questions at the Core

There remain many unresolved mysteries about electrides, including whether Earth’s inner core definitely contains one. Kim and his collaborators used simulations of the iron lattice to find evidence for non-nuclear attractor sites, but their interpretation of the results remains “a little bit controversial,” Racioppi says.

Sodium and other metals in Group 1 and Group 2 of the periodic table of elements—such as lithium, calcium and magnesium—have loosely bound outer electrons. This helps make it easy for electrons to shift to non-nuclear attractor sites, forming electrides. But iron exerts more pulling power on its outer electrons, which sit in differently shaped orbitals. This makes the increase in electron repulsion under pressure less significant and thus the shift to electride formation difficult, Racioppi says.

Electrides are still little known and little studied, says computational materials scientist Lee Burton of Tel Aviv University. There is still no theory or model to predict when a material will become one. “Because electrides are not typical chemically, you can’t bring your chemical intuition to it,” he says.

“The potential is enormous.”

Burton has been searching for rules that might help with predictions and has had some success finding electrides from a screen of 40,000 known materials. He is now using artificial intelligence to find more. “It’s a complex interplay between different properties that sometimes can all depend on each other,” he says. “This is where machine learning can really help.”

The key is having reliable data to train any model. Burton’s team only has actual data from the handful of electride structures experimentally confirmed so far, but they also are using the kind of modeling based on quantum theory that was carried out by Racioppito create high-resolution simulations of electron density within materials. They are doing this for as many materials as they can; those that are confirmed by real-world experiments will be used to train an AI modelto identify more materials that are likely to be electrides — ones with the discrete pockets of high electron density characteristic of trapped electron sites. “The potential,” says Burton, “is enormous.”

—Rachel Brazil (@rachelbrazil.bsky.social), Knowable Magazine

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

Earth froze over 717 million years ago. Ice crept down from the poles to the equator, and the dark subglacial seas suffocated without sunlight to power photosynthesis. Earth became an unrecognizable, alien world—a “snowball Earth,” where even the water was colder than freezing.

In Nature Communications, researchers reported the first measured sea temperature from a snowball Earth episode: −15°C ± 7°C. If this figure holds up, it will be the coldest measured sea temperature in Earth’s history.

For water to be that cold without freezing, it would have to be very salty. And indeed, the team’s analysis suggests that some pockets of seawater during the Sturtian snowball glaciation, which lasted 57 million years, could have been up to 4 times saltier than modern ocean water.

“We’re dealing with salty brines,” said Ross Mitchell, a geologist at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “That’s exactly what you see in Antarctica today,” he added, except that snowball Earth’s brines were a bit colder than even the −13°C salty slush of Antarctica’s ice-covered Lake Vida today.

Past Iron

The Sturtian snowball was a runaway climate catastrophe that occurred because ice reflects more sunlight than land or water. Ice reflected sunlight, which cooled the planet, which made more ice, which reflected more sunlight and so on, until the whole world ended up buried under glaciers that could have been up to a kilometer thick.

This unusual time left behind unusual rocks: Rusty red iron formations that accumulated where continental glaciers met the ice-covered seas. To take snowball Earth’s temperature, the team devised a new way to use that iron as a thermometer.

Scientists used information about the iron in formations like this one to estimate the temperature of Earth’s ocean 717 million years ago. Credit: James St. John/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Iron formations accumulate in water that’s rich in dissolved iron. Oxygen transforms the easily dissolved, greenish “ferric” form of iron into rusty red “ferrous” iron that stays solid. That’s why almost all iron formations are ancient, relics of a time before Earth’s atmosphere started filling with oxygen about 2.4 billion years ago, or from the more recent snowball Earth, when the seas were sealed under ice. Unable to soak up oxygen from the air or from photosynthesis, snowball Earth’s dark, ice-covered seawater drained of oxygen.

Iron-56 is the most common iron isotope, but lighter iron-54 rusts more easily. So when iron rusts in the ocean, the remaining dissolved iron is enriched in the heavier isotope. Over many cycles of limited, partial rusting—like what happened on the anoxic Archean Earth—this enrichment grows, which is why ancient iron formations contain isotopically very heavy iron compared to iron minerals that formed after Earth’s atmosphere and oceans filled with oxygen.

Snowball Earth’s iron is heavy, too, even more so than iron formations from the distant, preoxygen past. The researchers realized that temperature could be the explanation: Iron minerals that form in cold water end up istopically heavier. We don’t know exactly how hot it was when the ancient iron formations accumulated, but it was likely warmer than during snowball Earth, when glaciers reached the equator. Using a previous estimate of 25°C for the temperature of Archean seawater, the team calculated that the waters that formed the snowball Earth iron formations would likely have been 40°C colder.

“It’s a very interesting, novel way of getting something different out of iron isotope data,” said geochemist Andy Heard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who was not involved in the study. “It’s a funny, backwards situation to be in where you’re using even older rocks as your baseline for understanding something that formed 700 million years ago.”

In part because of that backward situation, Heard thinks the study is best interpreted qualitatively as strong evidence that seawater was really cold, but maybe not that it was exactly −15°C.

The team also analyzed isotopes of strontium and barium to determine that snowball Earth’s seawater was up to 4 times saltier than the modern ocean. Jochen Brocks of the Australian National University, who wasn’t involved in the study, said the researchers’ results align with his own salinity analysis of snowball Earth sediments from Australia based on a different method. Those rocks formed in a brine that Brocks thinks was salty enough to reach −7°C before freezing. Another group reaching a similar conclusion using different methods makes that extreme scenario sound a lot more plausible, he said.

“It was very cool to get the additional confirmation it was actually very, very cold,” he said.

—Elise Cutts (@elisecutts.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Cutts, E. (2026), Snowball Earth’s liquid seas dipped way below freezing, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260048. Published on 4 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’ Vox is a blog from AGU’s Publications Department.

Meteorological tsunamis, or meteotsunamis, are long ocean waves in the tsunami frequency band that are generated by traveling air pressure and wind disturbances. These underrated phenomena pose serious threats to coastal communities, especially in the era of climate change.

A new article in Reviews of Geophysics explores all aspects of meteotsunamis, from available data and tools used in research to the impacts on coastal communities. Here, we asked the authors to give an overview of these phenomena, how scientists study them, and what questions remain.

In simple terms, what are meteorological tsunamis or “meteotsunamis”?

Meteotsunamis are tsunami-like waves that are not generated by earthquakes or landslides, but by atmospheric processes.

Meteotsunamis are tsunami-like waves that are not generated by earthquakes or landslides, but by atmospheric processes. Their formation requires a strong air pressure or wind disturbance—typically characterized by a pressure change of 1–3 hectopascals over about five minutes—that propagates at a “perfect” speed, allowing long ocean waves to grow. In addition, coastal bathymetry must be sufficiently complex to amplify the incoming waves.

Meteotsunamis are less well known and, fortunately, are generally less destructive than seismic tsunamis. Nonetheless, they can reach wave heights of up to 10 meters and can be highly destructive. One of the most damaging events occurred on June 21, 1978, in Vela Luka, Croatia, where damages amounted to about 7 million US dollars at the time. Meteotsunamis can also cause injuries and fatalities, as unfortunately occurred on January 13, 2026, during the recent Argentina meteotsunami.

What kinds of hazards do meteotsunamis pose to humans and society?

Meteotsunamis are characterized by multi-meter sea level oscillations and, at times, strong currents. As a result, they can flood waterfront areas and households, while strong currents may break ship moorings and disrupt maritime traffic, as occurred in 2014 in Freemantle, Australia. An even greater danger comes from rip currents, which can sweep swimmers away from shore. A notable example is the July 4, 2003, meteotsunami that occurred under clear skies along the beaches of Lake Michigan and claimed seven lives.

Figure 1. Photos from the 1978 Vela Luka meteotsunami, with labeled eyewitness wave height and household’s damage inventory. Credit: Vilibić et al. [2025], Figure 12

How do scientists observe, measure, and reproduce meteotsunamis?

Much of the information on meteotsunamis comes from post-event observations. Following exceptionally strong events, scientists often visit affected locations to conduct field surveys, interview eyewitnesses, collect photos and videos, and estimate the extent and height of the meteotsunami along the coast. More precise information comes from coastal tide gauges and ocean buoys, as well as meteorological observations with at least minute-scale resolution.

Unfortunately, standard atmospheric and oceanic observing systems do not commonly operate at such high temporal resolution. For example, one of the oldest national networks—the UK tide gauge network operating for decades—still uses 15-minute sampling intervals. At the same time, most national meteorological services measure atmospheric variables at 10-minute or even hourly resolution, which is insufficient for meteotsunami research. Nevertheless, some oceanic and meteorological networks do provide appropriate sampling intervals, and even data from school-based or amateur networks can be valuable for research.

In addition, numerical modeling of meteotsunamis is now standard practice and includes both atmospheric and oceanic components. However, accurately reproducing meteotsunami-generating atmospheric processes—and thus meteotsunamis themselves—remains challenging. Addressing this issue and developing more accurate, high-resolution models is a key task for the modeling community.

Why has research on meteotsunamis shifted from localized to a global approach?

Figure 2. Map with known occurrences of meteotsunamis. Size of the star is proportional to the meteotsunami intensity. Credit: Vilibić et al. [2025], Figure 4

The strength of meteotsunamis strongly depends on coastal bathymetry. Within a specific bay, wave heights can reach several meters, while just outside the bay they may be only a few tens of centimeters. For this reason, meteotsunamis were historically observed and studied mainly at individual locations, known as meteotsunami hot spots. Over the past few decades, however, advances in monitoring and modeling capabilities, along with easier global dissemination of scientific results, have revealed that the same phenomenon occurs worldwide. Moreover, the recent availability of hundreds of multi-year, minute-scale sea level records has enabled researchers to conduct global studies and quantify worldwide meteotsunami patterns.

What are the primary ways that meteotsunamis are generated?

The generation of a strong meteotsunami requires (i) an intense, minute-scale air-pressure or wind disturbance that propagates over long distances (tens to hundreds of kilometers), (ii) an ocean region where energy is efficiently transferred from the atmosphere to the ocean, for example through Proudman resonance—a process in which long ocean waves grow strongly when the speed of the atmospheric disturbance matches the speed of tsunami waves, and (iii) coastal bathymetry capable of strongly amplifying long ocean waves. Funnel-shaped bays are particularly prone to meteotsunamis. These events can also be generated by explosive volcanic eruptions, such as the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai eruption in January 2022, which produced a planetary-scale meteotsunami.

How is climate change expected to influence meteotsunamis?

At present, this is not well understood. Only two published studies exist, and both suggest a possible increase in meteotsunami intensity in the future due to an increased frequency of atmospheric conditions favorable for meteotsunami generation. However, no global assessment is currently available, as climate models are still unable to reliably reproduce the kilometer- or sub-kilometer-scale processes required to simulate meteotsunamis.

What are some of the recent advances in forecasting meteotsunamis?

Some progress has been made, but effective forecasting and early-warning systems for meteotsunamis remain far from operational. Improvements in atmospheric numerical models—currently the main source of uncertainty in meteotsunami simulations and forecasts—are expected in the coming decades, particularly through the development of new parameterization schemes that better represent turbulence-scale processes.

How does your review article differ from others that have covered meteotsunamis?

Our review introduces a new class of meteotsunamis generated by explosive volcanic eruptions.

The most recent comprehensive review of meteotsunamis was published nearly 20 years ago, making this review a timely synthesis of the substantial advances made over the past two decades. In addition, our review introduces a new class of meteotsunamis generated by explosive volcanic eruptions, such as the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai event in January 2022. Such events were previously only sporadically noted, as the last comparable eruption occurred in 1883 with the Krakatoa volcano. Finally, recent findings show that meteotsunamis—much like seismic tsunamis—can radiate energy into the ionosphere, where it can be detected using ground-based GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) stations. This discovery opens a new avenue for future meteotsunami research.

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

Many challenges remain in the observation, reproduction, and forecasting of meteotsunamis. Most are closely linked to technological advancements, such as (i) the need for dense, continuous, minute-scale observations of sea level and meteorological variables across the ocean and over climate-relevant time scales, (ii) increased computational power, since sub-kilometer atmosphere–ocean models require enormous resources, potentially addressable through GPU acceleration or future quantum computing, and (iii) the development of improved parameterizations for numerical models at sub-kilometer scales. Ultimately, extending research toward climate-scale assessments of meteotsunamis is essential for accurately evaluating coastal risks associated with sea level rise and future extreme sea levels, which currently do not account for minute-scale oscillations such as meteotsunamis.

—Ivica Vilibić (Ivica.vilibic@irb.hr, 0000-0002-0753-5775), Ruđer Bošković Institute & Institute for Adriatic Crops, Croatia; Petra Zemunik Selak (0000-0003-4291-5244), Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries, Croatia; and Jadranka Šepić (0000-0002-5624-1351), Faculty of Science, University of Split, Croatia

Editor’s Note: It is the policy of AGU Publications to invite the authors of articles published in Reviews of Geophysics to write a summary for Eos Editors’ Vox.

Citation: Vilibić, I., P. Zemunik Selak, and J. Šepić (2026), Tsunamis from the sky, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO265002. Published on 3 February 2026. This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author(s). Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Roughly half a century ago, the burgeoning field of marine cartography revealed a curious sight: Mid-ocean ridges punctuate the seafloor, their geographic highs running over our planet like the seams on a baseball. These features mark where Earth’s tectonic plates are diverging and magma is upwelling.

Researchers sent a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to a mid-ocean ridge system deep in the Norwegian Sea and discovered unusually high levels of molecular hydrogen dissolved in the hydrothermal fluids there. That hydrogen, which can help fuel microbial activity, is likely arising from the degradation of organic matter, the team concluded. These results were published in Communications Earth and Environment.

Pulling Apart

Many of our planet’s mountain ranges are built by the convergence of tectonic plates. But there are also regions on Earth where tectonic plates are diverging. In those places, magma from the planet’s interior is rising toward the surface. Many of those so-called spreading sites happen to be located in ocean basins, and the result is a mid-ocean ridge: a range of underwater volcanoes.

Thanks to their volcanic origin and underwater locales, mid-ocean ridges are characterized by a chemically potent amalgam of seawater, seafloor sediments, and magmatic material. But relatively few mid-ocean ridge systems have been explored in detail, partly because many lie beneath thousands of meters of water. “There’s still much more to learn about these systems,” said Alexander Diehl, a geochemist at MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen in Germany.

In 2022, a team led by MARUM researchers studied the Knipovich Ridge system off the coast of Svalbard. This mid-ocean ridge is known for being particularly slow spreading—its tectonic plates are diverging at only about 14 millimeters per year. (Fingernails grow about twice as fast.) Slow-spreading sites tend to get less research attention than fast-spreading sites, said Diehl. The reason is the latter tend to have larger supplies of upwelling magma and therefore more hydrothermal venting, he explained.

The 2022 cruise aboard the R/V Maria S. Merian revealed previously unknown fluid escape sites—including iconic black smokers—and an array of microbes that thrived in the utter absence of sunlight. Researchers used an ROV to collect hydrothermal fluids emanating from four vent sites along the Knipovich Ridge. Unfortunately, however, the sampling devices aboard the vehicle were not gas tight, and some of the dissolved gases escaped. “The concentrations of volatiles were not quantified correctly,” said Diehl.

A Second Chance

“They maintain pressure inside the sampler not only during recovery but also in the laboratory.”

But 2 years later, scientists got a second chance to visit the Knipovich Ridge. Diehl was one of the researchers who joined a 2024 cruise, again aboard R/V Maria S. Merian, to revisit the slow-spreading site. This time, the team brought gas-tight devices known as isobaric fluid samplers. “They maintain pressure inside the sampler not only during recovery but also in the laboratory,” said Diehl.

Diehl and his colleagues collected 160-milliliter samples of hydrothermal fluids from several vent sites on the Knipovich Ridge at a depth of roughly 3,000 meters. The team then analyzed the samples on board the R/V Maria S. Merian. The team recorded high levels of silica, alkaline pH levels, and low concentrations of metals like iron and manganese consistent with other hydrothermal systems where fluids circulate through sediments. But to their surprise they also noted unusually high levels of molecular hydrogen. There was more than twice the highest amount that had ever been recorded in any sediment-hosted hydrothermal vent.

Hydrogen is important to many life-forms in the deep ocean that don’t receive sunlight, said Jeff Seewald, a geochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass., not involved in the research. “A lot of organisms can use it.” (Seewald developed the concept for the isobaric fluid samplers that Diehl and his colleagues used on their 2024 cruise.)

A Double Whammy

Finding so much hydrogen on the Knipovich Ridge baffled Diehl and his team. High concentrations of hydrogen typically arise in hydrothermal systems dominated by ultramafic rocks from the mantle, whereas the vents that Diehl and his colleagues studied were surrounded by terrestrial sediments sloughed off from the fjords of Svalbard.

Diehl and his team ran computer simulations and found that the high concentrations of molecular hydrogen could be explained by terrestrial sediments. The culprit, the researchers concluded, was the degradation of organic matter entrained in those sediments. Those reactions likely played a role in producing much of the hydrogen the team measured.

“You could potentially generate a significant amount of hydrogen, which could then be utilized by microbes.”

The hydrothermal system on the Knipovich Ridge is a powerhouse of hydrogen production, Seewald said. Finding similar systems on ocean worlds could have implications for life beyond Earth, he added. “You could potentially generate a significant amount of hydrogen, which could then be utilized by microbes.”

In the future, Diehl hopes to join another cruise to return to the Knipovich Ridge. It’s a fascinating site to visit, even if only vicariously, he said. “It’s a lot of fun to sit behind the pilots of the ROV.”

—Katherine Kornei (@KatherineKornei), Science Writer

Citation: Kornei, K. (2026), A mid-ocean ridge in the Norwegian Sea pumps out hydrogen, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260045. Published on 3 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.

Just 1 gram of soil can host billions of microorganisms and thousands of species of bacteria, fungi, and viruses, some of which drive essential processes like nutrient cycling. Because soil is home to nearly 60% of all living organisms, from microbes to mammals, some researchers have described it as the most biodiverse habitat on Earth. Soil microbes can also affect human heath, including by harboring pathogens and contributing to the development of antibiotic resistance.

As the climate continues to change, soil and its many inhabitants are facing changes, too. Yet by some estimates, about 99% of soil microorganisms have not yet been studied.

“Soil is one of the last frontiers on Earth.”

“Soil is one of the last frontiers on Earth,” said biologist Ava Hoffman, a senior scientist at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Washington State.

A group of educators, researchers, and students from dozens of institutions have teamed up to create the first-of-its-kind soil microbiome map of the United States. Though the effort is in its preliminary stages, researchers have already cataloged more than 1,000 previously unknown strains of bacteria and other microbes. The team discussed the work in a commentary published in Nature Genetics.

By collecting samples from 40 sites across the country and analyzing them with DNA sequencing tools used in human genomic study, researchers are working to build a broader understanding of the microbial “dark matter” in the soil under our feet. At the same time, the project is connecting faculty and students into a nationwide network of soil researchers.

Soil Brings Us Together

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when community and connection were lacking, the members of the Genomic Data Science Community Network (GDSCN) met virtually. They wanted to create a research project that would excite faculty and students about genetics and data without requiring too much lab equipment, and they wondered how that might be done.

It would be done by sampling soil, said Hoffman, one of the study’s authors. “It was really a way to get faculty from all over the place involved and able to answer the questions they were interested in.”

The GDSCN created the BioDiversity and Informatics for Genomics Scholars (BioDIGS) initiative to address some of the knowledge gaps in soil biodiversity as well as train students and faculty in genomic data science by including participants from a range of institutions, from research-focused universities to community colleges.

Students at United Tribes Technical College collect soil samples at their campus in Bismarck, N.D. Credit: Emily Biggane

To take part in the project, participants are sent preassembled soil collection kits. Participants obtain permission to sample soil from their chosen sites—such as college campuses, parks, urban corridors, hiking trails, and spaces with local significance—and follow a specific protocol for sample collection. Students and faculty members then capture the GPS coordinates and images from each site and choose 16–24 sampling spots within a 100-meter area.

After collecting the soil, participants send their samples to Johns Hopkins University. From there, the samples are routed to labs at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York for genome sequencing and to the University of Delaware for chemical testing. Resulting data are uploaded to national research databases.

“One thing that is important is to bridge that disconnect between a sample as a data point on screen and its place of being: where it came from, how it got to the lab, and its story,” said cellular and molecular biologist Emily Biggane, one of the study’s authors and a research faculty member at the United Tribes Technical College’s Intertribal Research and Resource Center in North Dakota. “That connection is really important for our students. The land is something that’s honored and celebrated. Our students are very interested in learning about the soil that supports us.”

Unearthing Information

The soil sites sampled in the project ranged from the playgrounds and parks of Baltimore to a former Superfund site in Georgia, from urban Seattle to land under development at a college campus in Bismarck, N.D. “Understanding how different clades of bacteria vary across all our sites and how they vary with things like heavy metal concentration and pH and climate—that’s been pretty cool to see,” Hoffman said.

Continued sampling across these sites—and others that may become part of later incarnations of the project, as it continues to grow—can also help researchers understand how soil microbial communities respond to the effects of climate change. “Repeated sampling across sites in North America may help us to discover fragile soil ecosystems where microbial communities are undergoing rapid change,” Marie Schaedel, a soil microbiologist at Oregon State University who was not involved in the research, said in an email to Eos.

“At the end of the day, documenting soil biodiversity is not a problem that a single scientist can solve. We need a ton of people to do this.”

“Citizen science research like this benefits both science and society. It increases the amount of data on microbiomes in diverse soil habitats,” said Schaedel. “It also has the potential to motivate the next generation of researchers by making the research accessible and personal.”

While this project advances understanding of soil biodiversity, education is an important aspect of the work as well. More than 100 students participated in the first round of soil collection and research. Through hands-on sampling, data analysis, and interdisciplinary collaboration, students are gaining an understanding of the ways that ecology, climate, and human health intersect through soil, Hoffman said. The more microbial and bacterial genomes that are assembled, the greater the chance of discovering the next pathogen or the next cure is, she added. “At the end of the day, documenting soil biodiversity is not a problem that a single scientist can solve. We need a ton of people to do this.”

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

Citation: Owen, R. (2026), Nationwide soil microbiome mapping project connects students and scientists, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260046. Published on 3 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: Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth

The deformation of Earth materials can occur either in a “brittle” manner, mediated by fractures whose propagation radiates elastic waves, or through “intracrystalline plasticity,” governed by the motion of crystalline defects and generally considered to be largely aseismic. However, within the “brittle–plastic transition,” these mechanisms are expected to coexist. Moreover, if intracrystalline defect propagation is sufficiently rapid and accompanied by stress release, it may also theoretically generate elastic waves.

O’ Ghaffari et al. [2026] present the first experiments in which optical, mechanical, and acoustic measurements are acquired simultaneously during the propagation of intracrystalline defects (twin boundaries) in calcite single crystals. High-speed imaging, reaching up to 12,500 frames per second, is combined with multiple ultrasonic sensors sampling up to 50 million samples per second, allowing deformation processes to be resolved across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales.

The experiments capture the evolution of both brittle microcracks and crystal-plastic twins as they propagate through the crystal. Direct comparison of image sequences and acoustic records demonstrates that these two deformation mechanisms generate distinct ultrasonic signals. In particular, subtle differences in waveform characteristics are linked to the physical nature of the defect source. This distinction provides a new basis for separating brittle and plastic deformation signals in acoustic emission data. The results have important implications for laboratory studies and for interpreting acoustic monitoring data in geological and other semi-brittle materials.

Citation: O’ Ghaffari, H., Peč, M., Cross, A. J., Mittal, T., & Mok, U. (2026). Brittle and crystal-plastic defect dynamics of calcite single crystals. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 131, e2025JB032846. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025JB032846

—Marie Violay, Associate Editor, JGR: Solid Earth

Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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An unusual failure has occurred on a cut slope adjacent to a key road in Greece.

On 2 February 2026 a major, fascinating landslide occurred on the A5 Ionian motorway between Arta and Amfilochia in Greece. The location appears to be [39.07754, 21.09861]. The news site ekathimerini has a story providing the details, which includes this extraordinary image of the aftermath of the landslide:-

The 2 February 2026 landslide on the Ionian motorway in Greece. Image from ERT via ekathimerini.

I believe that the Google Earth image below shows the configuration of the site in 2023:-

Google Earth image showing the site of the 2 February 2026 landslide on the Ionian motorway in Greece.

So, this is a large cut slope that appears to have been formed in about 2015 (based on Google Earth imagery). The failure is quite complex, with most of the landslide moving as a large block (which has fractured in the late stage of movement). There is a large displacement on the far side of the landslide (in the photograph view), so there has been some rotation around an approximately vertical axis. The landslide does not appear to have been conventionally rotational.

To me, this suggests failure on an existing plane of weakness in the slope. The news report indicate that the landslide occurred after heavy rainfall.

This is a Google Streetview of the landslide site from September 2023:-

Google Streetview image showing the site of the 2 February 2026 landslide on the Ionian motorway in Greece.

It appears that the slope has rockbolts, which suggests that there was an awareness of the potential for instability. Perhaps they were insufficiently long to prevent this failure? The presence of the rockbolts may explain why the landslide moved as a predominantly intact block, though.

The Ionian motorway is now closed. There are similar slopes along the road, so the investigation of this failure may have wider implications.

Return to The Landslide Blog homepage Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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At a natural underwater laboratory off the coast of Papua New Guinea, researchers examined what happens to a diverse reef ecosystem as it experiences gradually increasing levels of ocean acidification. They found that as the pH decreased, complex branching corals, soft corals, and young corals died off. In their place grew hardy boulder corals and non-calcium-based algae.

One thing the team didn’t find: a specific tipping point at which corals began to die off.

“That was something we really hoped to be able to detect from the data,” said Sam Noonan, a coral reef ecologist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) in Townsville and lead researcher on a new study reporting the work. “Do you have this increase in acidification and everything seems fine, and then species start falling off a cliff? But that was not the case at all. With every little increase, we saw a smooth decline.”

These observations, which took place near a volcanic seep that leaks carbon dioxide (CO2) into the ocean from the seafloor, provide a preview of how reefs around the world could respond as the ocean absorbs increasing quantities of atmospheric CO2.

Researchers placed instruments like this one at 37 locations along the volcanic seep to measure the water’s pH. Credit: © AIMS | Katharina Fabricius, CC BY 3.0 AU A Natural Coral Laboratory

The ocean is the world’s largest carbon sink. As atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to rise, the ocean absorbs more and more of that carbon, which makes seawater more acidic. Oceanographers and marine ecologists have observed for decades that falling marine pH levels disturb delicate marine ecosystems, like coral reefs, around the world.

Coral reef scientists have observed in laboratory settings that acidic seawater makes it harder for corals to build the carbon-based limestone skeletons that support complex branching corals.

“Even the most advanced of these experiments, however, cannot fully capture the incredible complexity of a real-world coral reef, where biodiverse flora and fauna are interacting in an ever changing array of environmental conditions,” said Ian Enochs, a coral ecologist at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in Miami.

To overcome those limitations, Noonan and his AIMS colleagues traveled to Milne Bay on the southeastern coast of Papua New Guinea, which is home to a diverse and thriving coral reef ecosystem. It’s also home to a volcanic seep that releases nearly pure CO2 gas from vents in the seafloor.

A reef like this one is “a natural laboratory that allows us to understand how real coral reefs respond to acidification.”

A reef like this one is “a natural laboratory that allows us to understand how real coral reefs respond to acidification,” Enochs said. Enochs was not involved with the new research.

The scientists spent more than a decade measuring the ambient properties of the seawater throughout the reef and documenting, via a proxy called aragonite saturation, how acidity changes on the basis of proximity to a seep. Aragonite saturation levels across the seep match values predicted to occur by 2100 under a wide range of carbon emission scenarios.

The team set up 37 monitoring stations at locations along the reef that experience gradually rising levels of CO2. Those stations measured seawater properties like temperature, light exposure, current, and, of course, acidity. Divers documented coral diversity, the abundance of juvenile corals, and the types of algae that grew around each of the stations.

In laboratory experiments, “you have a control reef, and then you have an acidified reef, and it’s just A versus B,” Noonan said. “In this study, we have 37 stations across this gradient to look at community change on a continuum. There’s no data out there like that.”

In locations along the reef where ocean pH was at ambient levels, like this location hundreds of meters away from the volcanic seep, the reef exhibited high structural complexity, abundant branching corals and soft corals, and many small young corals. This location was used as a control site. Credit: © AIMS | Katharina Fabricius, CC BY 3.0 AU

At stations more than 500 meters (1,640 feet) from the volcanic seep, the reef hosted a diverse array of complex branching corals, soft-bodied corals, and juvenile corals. Closer to the seep, stations recorded progressively lower pH levels and the complex and delicate corals died off. The only surviving corals were hardier boulder corals (genus Porites), which have thick layers of tissue between the water and their skeletons. There were also fewer juvenile corals and more non-carbon-based algae as acidity rose.

“You can visually see it when you’re swimming around these systems,” Noonan said, and the data back up those observations. “It seems that some species are more susceptible than others. Those with a really high surface area and a thin tissue layer seem to be really affected.”

“Those species that are most affected seem to be the most ecologically important.”

“The problem is those species that are most affected seem to be the most ecologically important,” he added. “They’re the ones that provide shelter for the literally millions of species that live on coral reefs. All the fish and little crustaceans, they all rely on these things for habitat, and they’re the ones that are really starting to drop out first.”

These results were published in Communications Biology in November 2025.

An Ongoing Problem

“This paper is important because it offers another glimpse into the future of reefs under acidification, one that is entirely independent from prior experiments and other investigations of similar sites,” Enochs explained. “What the authors found, however, is remarkably similar to what we’ve observed in our experimental tanks, and at other naturally acidified sites from all over the world.”

“It’s the similarity of these stories that gives these findings the greatest power, parallel lines of evidence all pointing to the same thing.”

“It’s the similarity of these stories that gives these findings the greatest power, parallel lines of evidence all pointing to the same thing,” Enochs added.

Millions of people depend on reef ecosystems to support fisheries, feed coastal communities, protect coastal infrastructure from waves and storm surge, and sustain tourism and local economies. What’s more, “lower coral cover means less shelter for the exceptional biodiversity of a reef, and a loss of species, many of which are still unknown to science,” Enochs said. “When I read this paper and I see how acidification impacts these reefs, I think about what it could mean for other reef ecosystems and the communities they support.”

Noonan said that this volcanic seep is a simple proxy for ocean conditions under a future climate scenario, but it’s not a perfect one. Sunlight and temperature were pretty constant across the reef, which was good for isolating the effects of CO2 but not realistic for most reef ecosystems.

Future work could consider those additional variables to see whether there is a true acidification tipping point for corals. But Noonan also brought up a more concerning possibility.

“This has been ongoing since the Industrial Revolution, so perhaps there were tipping points and we’re already past them.”

“This has been ongoing since the Industrial Revolution, so perhaps there were tipping points and we’re already past them,” he suggested. There’s no way to know, as scientists lack data on past ocean acidification.

Regardless, “these changes are ongoing and occurring now,” he added. “We’re starting to detect significant, statistical changes in these communities at [acidification] values that we’re expecting within the next 20 to 30 years on coral reefs. It’s not end of the century stuff.”

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

Citation: Cartier, K. M. S. (2026), Coral diversity drops as ocean acidifies, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260047. Published on 2 February 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

There are a few things scientists know for sure about how Earth grows warmer: For instance, when there’s more carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, that CO2 traps heat. This means that during an ice age, less CO2 is present in Earth’s atmosphere.

“One of the fundamental questions in our field was, ‘Where did that CO2 go during ice ages, and where did it come from when the planet warmed?’”

“One of the fundamental questions in our field was, ‘Where did that CO2 go during ice ages, and where did it come from when the planet warmed?’” said Ryan Glaubke, a paleoceanographer and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona.

Scientists had their suspicions: The ocean was the obvious culprit because it’s enormous and is known to exchange CO2 with the atmosphere. But for CO2 to be stored in the ocean for long periods, it would need to be in cold, salty, dense water far beneath the ocean’s surface. Until now, scientists had no way to prove that salinity levels in the deep ocean were linked to changes in atmospheric CO2 over the scale of ice ages.

Now, new research published in Nature Geoscience seems to confirm what many researchers have long thought was the case: A giant “blob” of salty ocean water kept carbon dioxide locked deep in the ocean during the last ice age, and the blob released that CO2 during an upwelling event 18,000 years ago.

Unusual Upwelling

During his graduate studies at Rutgers University, Glaubke and his fellow researchers collected sediment cores from the seafloor. Sediment cores are long, thin cylinders of mud with successive layers that reflect periods in Earth’s history.

Normally, when scientists collect sediment cores, they use them to learn about past conditions near the ocean’s surface. Single-celled creatures called foraminifera (or forams, for short) live and build their shells near the ocean’s surface. When these creatures die and sink to the ocean floor, their shells become part of the seafloor sediment and provide a record of the composition of the upper ocean.

This team, however, gathered sediment cores from an unusual site on the boundary of the Indian and Southern oceans. In this spot, off the coast of Western Australia, waters from deep in the ocean upwell to the surface.

“It’s really hard to look at the bottom of the ocean from the surface,” said Liz Sikes, a paleoceanographer at Rutgers, a coauthor of the paper, and Glaubke’s former Ph.D. adviser. “But the thing is, these planktic forams are in a place in the ocean where the water that’s at the surface has just returned to the surface and it still retains most of its deep-water qualities.”

Gathering sediment cores from this location meant the scientists could gain an understanding not just of how the upper ocean changed in the past but of how the waters that rose from the bottom of the ocean had also changed.

“What we found, rising from the deep ocean to the surface, was not only this geochemical fingerprint for old carbon that remained at the bottom of the ocean, but at the exact same time, we see this increase in upper ocean salinity by around 2 parts per thousand, which is a very large scale change,” Glaubke said. “That is one of the really important contributions of this paper, I think, which is that it provides this support for this ‘salty blob’ kind of retention mechanism.”

From Glacial to Interglacial

Patrick Rafter, a chemical oceanographer who did not contribute to this paper but was involved with measuring the radiocarbon levels in the collected sediment cores, said he was already convinced that salinity must play an important role in the rate of global ocean overturning, so the results were “not surprising” to him. He noted that the study was rigorous and careful, in that the researchers replicated their anomalous findings with multiple planktic species.

“It’s like any kind of mystery: The more evidence you get supporting it, the more likely you are to think maybe it’s real.”

“It’s like any kind of mystery: The more evidence you get supporting it, the more likely you are to think maybe it’s real,” he said. “So far, the evidence that exists suggests this is a solid finding that we should consider when trying to explain glacial-interglacial climate change.”

Furthermore, the upwelling waters of the Southern Ocean help sustain a global conveyor belt of currents, including the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. During an ice age, these currents tend to be more sluggish. The strengthening of these currents is an important piece in moving the planet out of an ice age.

“We make the argument that not only is this water mass releasing carbon to the atmosphere and kind of warming the planet, but the salt that then gets entrained in the global conveyor belt probably played a really important role in flipping that switch from glacial mode to interglacial mode,” Glaubke said. “So there’s this dual contribution that the salty blob might be making to ending the last ice age.”

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

Citation: Gardner, E. (2026), How the rise of a salty blob led to the fall of the last ice age, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260044. Published on 2 February 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.

Whilst I was skiing in the French Alps last week, there were a couple of significant landslides. The highest profile event was the vast and intriguing landslide at Niscemi in Sicily (located at [37.14176, 14.38524]), which is a failure on a very large scale. The rear scarp is about 1.2 km long, for example.

In terms of loss of life, the more consequential event occurred at the Rubaya coltan mine complex in the Democratic Republic of Congo on 28 January 2026 (approximate location is [-1.55938, 28.88349]). Reuters has a good report about this event – obtaining good information is very challenging as the area is not controlled by the government. The mining news site Discovery Alert reports that at least 227 people were killed and 20 were injured, but further people were thought to be buried in the debris. It is likely that the final death toll will not be determined.

This is the second massive landslide at the Rubaya complex in less than a year – a landslide on 19 June 2025 is thought to have killed over 300 people.

Al Jazeera has a report from May 2025 that describes the desperate conditions under which the artisanal miners at Rubaya work.

APT has a video on Youtube that apparently shows the aftermath of the landslide at Rubaya:-

This is a still from that video:-

The aftermath of the 28 January 2026 landslide at the Rubaya mining complex in the DRC. Still from a video posted to Youtube by APT.

Assuming that the landslide is the large area on the centre right of the image, it is easy to see how mining on the lower slope can trigger instability. Note also the area on the left of the image, where there is a large tension crack across the slope.

As yet, satellite imagery of the Rubaya area is not available since the landslide, so it is not yet possible to identify the exact location of the failure. I will keep an eye on this over the coming days.

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