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A research team led by Professor Zhang Qinghong and Li Rumeng from the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Peking University (PKU) School of Physics, has found that hailstorms in China have surged since the Industrial Revolution, likely due to human-driven climate warming. The study, published in Nature Communications in September 2025, combines historical records, meteorological data, and artificial intelligence to track long-term hailstorm trends.

Small mountain ponds high in the tropical Andes may be playing an outsized role in global climate change, according to new research led by scientists at the University of North Carolina.

Microorganisms in the Black Sea can produce large amounts of the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O). However, this gas never reaches the atmosphere because it is swiftly consumed by other microorganisms, which convert it to harmless dinitrogen gas (N2). Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology have now investigated this process and identified the key players involved.

With heat waves among Europe's deadliest climate hazards, a team of scientists led by CMCC has developed a prediction system capable of providing helpful information four to seven weeks before summer, which gives valuable time to improve preparedness.

In a new study published in Global Change Biology, Prof. Zhang Yuanming's team from the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has unveiled a previously underestimated factor in greenhouse gas emissions from arid environments: hydroxyl radicals, often dubbed "free radicals."

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.

Current emissions trajectories look set to warm the world by as much as 2.8°C (5.04°F) above preindustrial levels by 2100, according to a report released today by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

While some progress has been made on global emissions cuts, much more ambitious changes are necessary to avoid the worst of climate change’s effects.

The UNEP Emissions Gap Report is an annual stocktake of the gap between countries’ emissions reduction plans and actions needed to keep Earth’s temperature below the 1.5°C (2.7°F) warming limit set by the Paris Agreement, a legally binding international climate change treaty. Limiting warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F) will significantly reduce the losses, damages, and deaths from climate change, according to the UN.

“Years of grossly insufficient action from richer nations and continued climate deception and obstruction by fossil fuel interests are directly responsible for bringing us here.”

This year’s report found that though the predicted global temperature increase has fallen slightly since last year, and the emissions gap has narrowed, improvements were not nearly enough to avoid serious climate consequences. Additionally, the formal withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement in January is expected to wipe out 0.1°C (0.18°F) of projected improvements. 

Even if every pledged country’s plans to reduce emissions (called Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs) are fully realized, the world is still projected to warm up to 2.5°C (4.5°F) by 2100.  

The “ambition and action” that was expected from countries’ updated climate pledges this year “did not materialize,” Inger Andersen, executive director of UNEP, wrote in the report.

The report’s findings are “alarming, enraging and heart-breaking,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a statement. “Years of grossly insufficient action from richer nations and continued climate deception and obstruction by fossil fuel interests are directly responsible for bringing us here.”

The report finds that the world is virtually certain to exceed 1.5°C (2.7°F) of warming by 2100 if current policies continue (data suggests it already has, temporarily), and that there’s just a 21% chance of staying below 1.5°C (2.7°F) if current NDCs and net-zero pledges are realized. Keeping average global warming under 1.5°C (2.7°F) remains technically possible, but requires an ambitious global emissions cut of 55% from 2019 emissions levels by 2035, according to the report.

 
Related

•  Read the Emissions Gap Report 2025: Off Target
•  U.N. Sees Slight Progress on Climate Action, Partly Offset by the U.S.
•  Union of Concerned Scientists: UN Report Confirms Planetary Warming Will Breach 1.5 Degrees Celsius, Richer Nations Primarily to Blame
•  1.5°C: What It Means and Why It Matters
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
 

Current NDCs “have barely moved the needle,” the authors wrote.

The past year was another record-breaking year for the climate, with multiple annual reports on climate change finding concerning climate indicators reaching record-breaking levels. Ocean heat and wildfire-related tree cover loss are at all-time highs, deadly weather disasters have surged, and atmospheric warming is showing signs of acceleration. Global greenhouse gas emissions in 2024 were 2.3% higher than in 2023, more than four times higher than the annual average growth rate.

A Lack of Ambition 

The Emissions Gap Report, along with other climate change reports released in October, is expected to inform discussions at the annual UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP30), which will begin next week in Belém, Brazil. 

These annual conferences are notorious for falling short of global climate goals, and a challenging geopolitical environment could make ambitious action even less likely. Political will worldwide is lacking—fewer than one-third of parties to the Paris Agreement even submitted their required updates to their emissions reduction plans by this year’s September deadline. 

“This is where the new jobs are, this is where the economy goes…this is where the future lies.”

These new NDCs “have done little to increase ambition,” the report states. Some countries’ newly submitted NDCs are less ambitious than their current policies’ emissions projections.

Still, low-carbon technology, climate governance frameworks, and progress on climate legislation have advanced substantially, and “these developments position the international community far more favourably to accelerate climate ambition and action than a decade ago,” the authors wrote.

While such acceleration is urgent, it also “makes sense,” Andersen said in a press conference. “This is where the new jobs are, this is where the economy goes … this is where the future lies.”

Andersen called on leaders at COP30 to understand that it falls upon them to pick up the work of climate mitigation and deliver on Paris Agreement targets.

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

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about science or scientists? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org. Text © 2025. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

A seemingly unending sheet of ice covers most of Antarctica, but there’s a hidden network of liquid lakes lying beneath. These subglacial lakes affect the flow of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, which in turn dictates how rapidly ice enters the ocean and contributes to global sea level rise.

Researchers recently discovered 85 previously unknown subglacial lakes in Antarctica in which water levels are changing. These results, which boost the number of active lakes tabulated under the White Continent by nearly 60%, were published in Nature Communications.

Way, Way Down

“The whole column of ice above the lake needs to go somewhere.”

Subglacial lakes exist at the interface between the bottom of the ice and the continent’s underlying bedrock. The average thickness of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is roughly 4,000 meters, so subglacial lakes in Antarctica are way down there, said Sally Wilson, lead author of the paper and a glaciologist at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. “These lakes are really deep.”

Their waters don’t freeze, thanks to gentle frictional heating from the movement of the Antarctic Ice Sheet and also from heat imparted from Earth’s interior.

Wilson and her colleagues recently used satellite data to look for signs of Antarctic subglacial lakes. The researchers mined archival data collected by CryoSat-2, a European Space Agency satellite launched in 2010 to measure changes in the thickness of polar ice sheets. The team looked for changes in the height of the ice surface caused by subglacial lakes either filling or draining. “When they fill, the ice surface above the lake moves up. The whole column of ice above the lake needs to go somewhere,” said Wilson. “It’s kind of like a blister under the ice sheet.”

A Census of Lake Activity

Wilson and her collaborators analyzed CryoSat-2 radar altimetry data collected from 2010 to 2020 over the margins of Antarctica. The vertical resolution of CryoSat-2 data is a few centimeters at best, and the team found 85 regions that changed in height not by centimeters but rather by meters. Those robust signals very likely correspond to active subglacial lakes, the team concluded.

A new study relying on archival CryoSat-2 data identified 85 lakes beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Credit: ESA (Data source: Wilson, S. et al., 2025)/ESA

That makes sense, said Leigh Stearns, a glaciologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who was not involved in the research. “There’s really nothing else that could cause the kinds of elevation changes that they’re seeing.”

Wilson and her colleagues found that 50 of the lakes they discovered exhibited both filling and draining behavior. And 10 of those lakes exhibited a complete cycle of filling and draining. On average, it took several years for lakes to fill and also several years for them to drain, the team noted.

To their surprise, the researchers found that individual lakes didn’t always fill and drain to the same level. The ice above a lake known as Whillans_180 in West Antarctica, for instance, uplifted, then subsided, then uplifted again by roughly 5 meters. However, after this consistent pattern, the ice then subsided only by about half that amount before beginning to uplift yet again, Wilson and her colleagues found.

The team also noted five regions across Antarctica where the lakes they discovered appeared to be connected. The researchers inferred such a connection by observing upstream draining events in some lakes that were nearly contemporaneous with downstream filling events in other nearby lakes.

These observations hint at a complicated hydrological network beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet, said Wilson. Tracing how water moves under ice has long been a holy grail of polar science, she said. “Identifying the lakes is one thing. But actually tracking the movement of water is an entirely different ball game.”

Have Lakes, Will Lubricate

Water flowing from subglacial lakes can have a significant effect on glaciers in the vicinity. “It can lubricate the bed of the glacier and potentially make it flow faster,” said Wilson. “That contributes to sea level rise.”

“Being able to look at something on the surface to infer what’s happening at the bed is really exciting.”

The freshwater present in subglacial lakes can also change local ocean currents when it eventually drains to the ocean. The mere presence of freshwater can furthermore affect the many marine organisms that live around an ice shelf, said Wilson.

Finding these new subglacial lakes offers a window of sorts into what’s happening deep beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet, said Stearns. “Being able to look at something on the surface to infer what’s happening at the bed is really exciting.”

An unexpected trove of archival satellite data made this work possible, Wilson and her collaborators noted.

CryoSat-2 in particular has vastly over-delivered—its nominal mission was supposed to be only three and a half years; it’s still going strong, more than 15 years later. “It’s way outlasted its expected mission lifetime,” said Wilson. Such long-term records are particularly valuable because they can be used to trace gradual changes in polar regions, she said.

“We should be putting money and effort into keeping these datasets alive.”

—Katherine Kornei (@KatherineKornei), Science Writer

Citation: Kornei, K. (2025), Satellite data reveal changing lakes under Antarctic ice, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250412. Published on 4 November 2025. Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets

Trapped in a gravitational push and pull between Jupiter and other Jovian moons, Io is constantly being stretched and compressed. Heat generated by these contortions has melted pockets of the moon’s interior so much that Io is our solar system’s most volcanically active body.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) recently opened up new opportunities to get to know Io. Using data from its Near Infrared Spectrograph—which sees wavelengths corresponding to different compositions and temperatures—de Pater et al. have made new discoveries about Io’s volcanoes and atmosphere.

The researchers first looked at Io in November 2022 and found an extremely energetic volcanic eruption in the vicinity of the lava flow field Kanehekili Fluctus. These observations revealed, for the first time, that some volcanoes on Io emit an excited form of sulfur monoxide gas, confirming the team’s 2-decade-old hypothesis. JWST also detected an increase in thermal emissions at the massive lava lake in Loki Patera, generated by the lake’s thick, solid surface crust sinking into the molten lava beneath.

Nine months later, in August 2023, the researchers had another chance to peer at the same two regions on Io with JWST. Just as in 2022, Io was in Jupiter’s shadow, making it possible to capture emissions at wavelengths that might otherwise be obscured by sunlight.

The new images captured infrared thermal emissions from the same two regions. However, lava flows from the 2022 Kanehekili region’s eruption had spread to cover more than 4,300 square kilometers—about 4 times the area they covered in 2022. At Loki Patera, a new crust had formed and cooled, in keeping with the lake’s behavior over the past few decades.

The new images also captured sulfur monoxide emissions in Io’s atmosphere above Kanehekili Fluctus—as well as above two other regions without a clear volcanic association, which the researchers attribute to “stealth volcanism.” In another first, the 2023 images revealed sulfur gas emissions at wavelengths never before seen in Io’s atmosphere. Instead of being concentrated in patchy spots like the sulfur monoxide was, the sulfur gas was distributed more evenly across part of the northern hemisphere.

The data suggest that these sulfur emissions did not come from sulfur atoms spewed out of volcanoes but were mainly produced by electrons from Io’s plasma torus—an area around its orbit with high levels of charged particles—penetrating Io’s mostly sulfur dioxide atmosphere and thereby exciting sulfur atoms upon impact. The angle at which JWST observed Io, combined with the northern hemisphere’s location relative to the plasma torus, explained why the detected emissions were concentrated over the northern hemisphere. Alongside data from the Keck Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope, the new findings suggest this plasma torus–atmosphere system remains quite stable over decades. (Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024JE008850, 2025)

—Sarah Stanley, Science Writer

Citation: Stanley, S. (2025), Webb Telescope spies Io’s volcanic activity and sulfurous atmosphere, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250366. Published on 4 November 2025. Text © 2025. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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

Space weather impacts caused by interplanetary disturbances of solar origin, such as coronal mass ejections, are coupled to Earth’s ionized upper atmosphere by electric currents travelling along magnetic field lines (field-aligned currents). These have historically been difficult to routinely measure with high spatial resolution of global coverage, with the best global monitoring to date from the AMPERE project, driven by IRIDIUM-Next telecommunications satellite data (drawn from six orbital planes).

In recent years, the number of satellites in low-Earth orbit has increased significantly; the OneWeb constellation has seen over 1,300 additional launches from 2019 to 2024. This recent mega-constellation uses 12 orbital planes, with a tighter distribution of satellites along each orbital plane.

By using the engineering data from these satellites, Archer et al. [2025] demonstrate that this data set can be used to derive global field-aligned currents at unprecedented resolution, showing that non-science grade instrumentation and commercial satellites have enormous potential scientific utility. The work performed here also highlights the challenges that need to be addressed with industry partners if the scientific community is to enable further advances with these platforms, and in turn provide datasets for space weather research and operations applications, helping protect critical infrastructure.

Citation: Archer, M. O., Evans, V., Eastwood, J. P., Camus, L.-A., Waters, C. L., Brown, P., & Armogathe, F. (2025). First detection of field-aligned currents using engineering magnetometers from the OneWeb mega-constellation. Space Weather, 23, e2025SW004573. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025SW004573

—Steven K. Morley, Editor, Space Weather

Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Author(s): S. Isayama, S. Matsukiyo, T. Sano, and S. H. Chen

This study addresses particle acceleration up to relativistic energies via a nonlinear evolution of a large-amplitude Alfvén wave. A multistage process is observed in numerical particle-in-cell simulations. The results provide insights into coherent wave-particle interactions in collisionless plasmas with potential implications for the understanding of high-energy cosmic-ray generation in astrophysical environments such as pulsar magnetospheres, accretion disks, and relativistic jets.

#AdvancingField

[Phys. Rev. E 112, 055201] Published Tue Nov 04, 2025

Author(s): A. A. Mironov, E. G. Gelfer, I. I. Tupitsyn, A. Beck, M. Jirka, O. Klimo, S. Meuren, G. Oberreit, T. Smorodnikova, R. Taïeb, S. Weber, C. Riconda, M. Grech, and S. V. Popruzhenko

The inclusion of the process of multiple ionization of atoms in high-intensity electromagnetic fields into particle-in-cell (PIC) codes applied to the simulation of laser-plasma interactions is a challenging task. In this paper, we first revisit ionization rates as given by the Smirnov-Chibisov and …

[Phys. Rev. E 112, 055202] Published Tue Nov 04, 2025

It is reported that 51 people have been killed by a series of debris flows in Kenya, triggered by heavy rainfall.

On 31 October 2025, heavy rainfall triggered a series of large landslides in the vicinity of Chesongoch in Elgeyo Marakwet County, Kenya. To date, 26 people are known to have been killed and it is believed that a further 25 are missing, although continued heavy rainfall has led to a suspension of the rescue efforts.

Chesongoch is located at [1.12864, 35.64426]. Immediately to the west lies the Elgeyo Escarpment, a part of the Great Rift Valley.

This is a Planet satellite image of the area captured on the day of the landslides, but before the rainfall arrived:-

The site of the 31 October 2025 landslides at Chesongoch, in Elgeyo Marakwet county, Kenya. Image copyright Planet, used with permission, dated 31 October 2025.

And here is the same area on 3 November 2025, after the disaster:-

The aftermath of the 31 October 2025 landslides at Chesongoch, in Elgeyo Marakwet county, Kenya. Image copyright Planet, used with permission, dated 3 November 2025.

And here is a slider to allow comparison:-

Images copyright Planet.

Note that the post-disaster image is a composite of two images taken at different times on 3 November, which is why there is a cloud with an apparently strange linear edge in the centre of the image.

The post-event image shows a series of large channelised debris flows that have started on the Elgeyo Escarpment and travelled towards the east. The precise number is unclear (there are further examples to the north of the area covered by the image) because of the cloud, but there are at least five complexes in the area. These are likely to have started as shallow failures on the higher slopes, and there is considerable evidence of them eroding their channels. This is the area around Chesongoch itself, for example:-

The aftermath of the 31 October 2025 landslides at Chesongoch, in Elgeyo Marakwet county, Kenya. Image copyright Planet, used with permission, dated 3 November 2025.

Note that on the lower slopes, some of the debris flows have escaped from the channel to flow across the open hillslopes. It is likely that this accounts for some of the fatalities.

We will need to await better imagery to understand fully the initiation of these landslides, but this is a very cloudy area.

On Sunday, a further landslide hit the area, striking the town of Kipkenda [0.76202, 35.54115] to the south of Chesongoch. It is reported that two people were killed.

In April 2020, this area was affected by another series of debris flows, killing 15 people.

Reference

Planet Team 2024. Planet Application Program Interface: In Space for Life on Earth. San Francisco, CA. https://www.planet.com/

Return to The Landslide Blog homepage Text © 2023. 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.

SummaryGangwon Province, located in the central part of the Korean Peninsula, features northeast–southwest faults and tectonic structures formed by plutonic intrusions. Despite decades of geological investigations from near-surface to the upper crust in Gangwon Province, the lithospheric structure of this region remains poorly understood. The primary objective of this study is to identify velocity anomalies potentially associated with plutonic intrusions and to elucidate the formation processes and mechanisms governing the crustal and upper mantle structures in this region. We employed Helmholtz tomography to generate phase-velocity maps for periods of 10–40 s using a dense seismic network of 101 stations. These maps were subsequently inverted to obtain an S-wave velocity model from the upper crust to the uppermost mantle. Our results reveal northeast–southwest-trending low-velocity anomalies along major faults in central to northern Gangwon Province (i.e. eastern Gyeonggi Massif), extending to depths of approximately 25–30 km. These low-velocity anomalies align with the orientations of Jurassic granitoid intrusions formed through partial melting processes. Additionally, we identified other low-velocity anomalies, likely formed by Late Cretaceous intrusions, which are oriented perpendicular to the major faults. In contrast, the southeastern Gangwon Province (i.e. Taebaeksan Basin) exhibits a distinctly different velocity structure, lacking features indicative of granitic intrusions and showing low-velocity anomalies confined to shallow depths. The pronounced low-velocity anomalies observed at depths of 5–10 km in Taebaeksan Basin are attributed to a complex fault zone influenced by Permo-Triassic collisional orogeny.

High Mountain Asia (HMA), the source region of major Asian rivers, plays a vital role in sustaining downstream water and ecosystem security. Over the past 50 years, summer precipitation in HMA has exhibited a dipole pattern—drying in the south and moistening in the north.

One of the most iconic ecosystems of the Peruvian plateau, the Junín Lake basin, suffers from "critical" levels of arsenic, lead and cadmium contamination, leading to health risks including cancer, according to new analysis.

Cities around the world are working to limit emissions of climate-warming greenhouse gases, but there have been few ways of measuring whether those gases are actually decreasing in any given municipality. In new research, University of California, Irvine scientists have created an effective method to measure greenhouse gas emissions around cities—something that can help local governments gauge the effectiveness of their emission-curbing programs.

It matters where the rain that irrigates your food comes from.

Publication date: Available online 30 October 2025

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): Devin Huyghebaert, Juha Vierinen, Johan Kero, Ingrid Mann, Ralph Latteck, Daniel Kastinen, Sara Våden, Jorge L. Chau

Publication date: Available online 30 October 2025

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): Suman, Raj Mal Jat, Ram Kishor

Publication date: Available online 30 October 2025

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): Geng Gao, Wei Zheng, Yongjin Sun, Jiankang Du, Yongqi Zhao, Minxing Zhao