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A new study has uncovered how tiny differences in boron atoms can help scientists better predict the long-term behavior of glass used to store hazardous waste. The findings, published in Environmental and Biogeochemical Processes, could improve forecasts of how radioactive materials are released from storage over thousands of years.

Methane is a greenhouse gas that is more than 25 times as potent as CO2 in warming the Earth. Reducing methane emissions is necessary to reduce the impact of global warming.

Around the world, we are already witnessing the detrimental effects of climate change, which we know will only become more severe. Extreme weather events such as heavy rainfall, tropical cyclones, and heat waves are projected to intensify, and this will negatively impact both human society and natural ecosystems.

From January to April, strong winds blowing south from the Atlantic side of Panama through gaps in the Cordillera mountain range typically travel over the country and push warm water away from Panama’s Pacific coast. This displacement allows cold, nutrient-rich water to flow up from the depths, a process called upwelling. The Panama Pacific upwelling keeps corals cool and nourishes the complex marine food webs that support Panama’s fishing industry and economy.

In 2025, for the first time on record, this upwelling didn’t occur, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

During the upwelling period early in the year, ocean temperatures near the coast typically fall to a low of about 19°C, said Andrew Sellers, a marine ecologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. This year, the coastal waters reached just 23.3°C at their coolest.

Waning Winds

Sellers said the Panama Pacific upwelling has likely been happening since the isthmus formed millions of years ago. The phenomenon has been recorded at low resolution for 80 years, and scientists have 40 years’ worth of more detailed records.

The team has identified “a shocking extreme event.”

Scripps Institution of Oceanography climate scientist Shang-Ping Xie, who has studied the weather patterns that usually cause the Panama Pacific upwelling but was not involved with this research, said the team had identified “a shocking extreme event.”

Annual upwelling moderates water temperature along the coast and triggers plankton blooms that nourish marine food webs and Panama’s economy. About 95% of the fish the country catches comes from the Pacific side, and most of that marine life is supported by upwelling, said Sellers.

Sellers said that though tropical upwelling plays a critical role in supporting marine food webs and fisheries, it’s understudied. Indeed, it was a happy accident that the research team was able to obtain measurements in 2025. Sellers says the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute maintains a network of temperature sensors near the coast but does not regularly monitor the temperature of deeper waters. Early this year, the Max Planck Institute research vessel S/Y Eugen Seibold was in the region as part of its mission to study the relationship between the atmosphere and the ocean, and it provided high-resolution temperature measurements, including in deeper waters, during the upwelling failure.

The Panama Pacific upwelling typically causes a rise in chlorophyll concentrations (blue = low concentrations and red = high concentrations) and a phytoplankton bloom, nourishing the area’s rich marine life, as seen here in February 2024. Credit: Aaron O’Dea

These measurements allowed the research team to see that deeper waters offshore were cold as usual but that those waters didn’t make their way to the coast. The cause seems to be a dramatic change in wind patterns in early 2025: Winds hailing from the north were both shorter in duration and 74% less frequent during the study period than in typical years.

Rippling Consequences

“Given how important upwelling is to that region, it’s hard to imagine there wouldn’t be a loss of primary productivity,” the growth of phytoplankton that sustains the ocean’s food chains, said Michael Fox, a coral reef ecologist at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. “Upwelling sets the stage for the base of the food web.”

Some models have predicted that climate change will cause upwelling in temperate zones such as California to strengthen, but the dynamics in the tropics are more of a mystery. The Panama Pacific upwelling is strongly influenced by the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Sellers says changes in ENSO might be affecting local dynamics in Panama.

“Studies like this one should motivate people to pay more attention to ocean-atmosphere dynamics in the tropics.”

“Studies like this one should motivate people to pay more attention to ocean-atmosphere dynamics in the tropics,” Fox said.

Sellers said this year’s unprecedented upwelling failure is likely to have adverse effects on the country’s vibrant Pacific marine life, but Panama does not collect extensive data on its fisheries. The team is now examining the exception—a dataset related to small fish such as sardines and anchovies—to see whether the lack of upwelling affected those fish.

Xie said the Smithsonian team hasn’t yet provided enough data to evaluate what caused this year’s unusual wind patterns and whether climate change made the upwelling failure more likely. Early this year, La Niña would likely have raised the pressure on the Pacific side of the country, which would have weakened the winds. But Xie said that La Niña is a frequent phenomenon and it alone can’t explain the unprecedented weather seen in Panama this year. He said something likely happened that changed pressure levels on the country’s northern Atlantic side as well. But more research is needed to say for sure.

Sellers’s team is preparing to gather more detailed measurements of marine life effects in early 2026, in case upwelling fails again. They are planning to assess the population of barnacles and other sessile invertebrates, which rely on plankton whose populations burgeon during upwelling.

Though the Eugen Seibold’s mission is set to end in 2026, Sellers said he’s determined to perform extensive water temperature measurements early next year, with or without a research vessel. “Sensors are cheap, and we can get more of them,” he said.

“In coming years, we’ll know if this is going to be a recurring issue,” Sellers said. “If it is, it’s going to be a hard hit to the economy.”

—Katherine Bourzac (@bourzac.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Bourzac, K. (2025), Panama’s coastal waters missed their annual cooldown this year, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250382. Published on 15 October 2025. Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Source: GeoHealth

Lead is a neurotoxin that can damage multiple body systems and lead to learning and developmental problems. The element has been phased out of use in paint, gasoline, and other industrial applications for decades, but it can persist for years in the soil. Children, who can be particularly vulnerable to lead poisoning, can accidentally ingest and inhale lead particles when they play in contaminated areas.

Even though one in four U.S. homes likely has soil lead levels over the recommended safety limits, no major U.S. city includes systematic soil monitoring as part of its lead prevention services, and blood testing often happens only after exposure.

Chicago is one city with many homes built before 1978—the year the U.S. government banned the use of lead-based paint—and its industrial history means that many residents could be living with elevated blood lead levels (EBLL) because of the prevalence of lead in the surrounding soil. Testing soil for lead is one way to predict which communities are most at risk for childhood lead exposure.

Thorstenson et al. analyzed 1,750 soil samples from Chicago’s 77 community areas. The researchers then used these data with the EPA’s Integrated Exposure Uptake Biokinetic model (IEUBK) to estimate how much lead children are likely to have in their blood. Comparing these data to actual EBLL findings from the Chicago Department of Public Health and accounting for factors such as household income, the age of housing, and the housing’s proximity to industrial land, the researchers built a comprehensive map that identifies the Chicago communities most at risk for soil lead exposure.

More than half of the citywide soil samples showed lead levels above the EPA’s recommended threshold of 200 parts per million—with some hot spots rising above 300 parts per million. When matched with the modeling from IEUBK, an estimated 27% of children across the city are at risk of EBLL. In the hot spot areas, that risk rises to 57%.

These findings suggest that though median household income is the strongest predictor of EBLL prevalence, soil lead levels are also a significant predictor. Systematic soil testing could become a crucial way to reduce children’s risk of lead exposure in contaminated areas, the authors say. (GeoHealth, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025GH001572, 2025)

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

Citation: Owen, R. (2025), Chicago soil maps childhood lead exposure risk, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250377. Published on 15 October 2025. Text © 2025. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Author(s): Djamel Benredjem and Jean-Christophe Pain

This study investigates the ionization and excitation processes induced by electron impact between two configurations or superconfigurations. Rate coefficients are calculated for transition arrays or supertransition arrays rather than level-to-level transitions. Special attention is given to a serie…

[Phys. Rev. E 112, 045209] Published Wed Oct 15, 2025

Author(s): Wei-Ping Zhang, Fang-Ping Wang, Lan-Xin Shi, and Wen-Shan Duan

The paper addresses the dynamics of solitary waves in binary complex plasmas, focusing on charge diagnostics for dust particles and its relevance for plasma research, space physics, and fusion applications. The paper uses the reductive perturbation method to derive the Korteweg–de Vries equation for…

[Phys. Rev. E 112, 045210] Published Wed Oct 15, 2025

SummaryIn the analysis of Induced Polarization (IP) data, it is commonly assumed that induction effects (IE) are negligible. However, at higher frequencies, this assumption becomes increasingly invalid, posing challenges for IP measurements. High-frequency induced polarization (HFIP) extends the conventional IP frequency range beyond 100 kHz, allowing estimation of ice content by capturing the characteristic decrease in permittivity of water ice. This study focuses on the interpretation of HFIP data while accounting for IE. We modified an existing one-dimensional simulation code to evaluate HFIP responses over frozen ground with ice, both with and without the influence of IE. Our results demonstrate that IE can distort HFIP measurements in typical permafrost conditions, potentially obscuring the characteristic polarization behavior of water ice. two-dimensional IP inversion codes that account for IE are not routinely available. Even if they were, the simultaneous presence of IE and IP would likely complicate their application. We therefore propose to remove IE from the data, with the aim to use well-established two-dimensional SIP inversion routines. For this purpose, we implemented a one-dimensional inversion routine that includes IE as a frequency-dependent correction factor. The method is based on fitting a layered model to the data. Comparing the responses with and without IE, we calculate a correction factor which is subsequently used to remove IE from the original dataset. The method is conservative in the sense that features not well matched by the one-dimensional inversion are preserved and no information gets lost. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method with synthetic data, as well as field datasets from an unfrozen site in Germany, and from permafrost peatlands in Scandinavia. We provide evidence from reciprocal measurements that cable coupling effects, not included in the correction procedure, have been effectively minimized by the acquisition system. We further show that high-frequency phase shifts are strongly influenced by IE, and that the correction methodology successfully restores the spectral response. By applying the approach to a measured dataset, we demonstrate that two-dimensional inversion of the corrected data with a well-established code is both feasible and robust. The resulting model deviates markedly from that obtained with uncorrected data, highlighting the critical role of the correction procedure for reliable interpretation.

Lightning-induced wildfires are severe natural disasters. However, because of the regionality and random nature of lightning, there is still an incomplete understanding within the scientific community regarding the characteristics of lightning that cause fires.

A team led by Prof. Liu Xueyan from the Institute of Geochemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a new plant-soil nitrogen isotope process model that quantifies the fractional contribution of three nitrogen forms (nitrate, ammonium, and dissolved organic nitrogen) to the total nitrogen in global terrestrial plants.

The lyrics of traditional Okinawan songs were found to record past climate and geological history of the Ryukyu Islands (21st-century Okinawa Prefecture, Japan), according to a new study by a University of Hawai'i at Mānoa Earth scientist and fellow Ryukyuan music practitioners. Their study was published today in Geoscience Communication and was selected as an Editor's Choice article by the journal's publisher.

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.

Today, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., laid off 550 people, a roughly 11% reduction of its workforce.

“This week’s action, while not easy, is essential to securing JPL’s future by creating a leaner infrastructure, focusing on our core technical capabilities, maintaining fiscal discipline and positioning us to compete in the evolving space ecosystem,” JPL director Dave Gallagher wrote in a brief statement released on 13 October. Layoffs were spread across the technical, business, and support areas.

Gallagher said that this workforce reduction is part of a reorganization that began in July and is not related to the current government shutdown that began on 1 October. A 10 October court filing by the White House Office of Management and Budget did not include NASA among the agencies targeted for layoffs by the Trump administration during the ongoing shutdown, reported Space News.

 
Related

•  Read the statement from JPL Director Dave Gallagher
•  JPL announces that hundreds of employees will be laid off Tuesday
•  Whistleblower report: “The Destruction of NASA’s Mission”
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
 

JPL is a research and development laboratory federally funded by NASA. While the current government shutdown continues, NASA has been directed to operate and plan as if the appropriations bill passed by the House of Representative is in effect, which would fund NASA (and most JPL projects) at nearly the same level as the current fiscal year.

Federal whistleblowers, however, have come forward with evidence that NASA leadership has been operating as if the President’s Budget Request (PBR)—not the appropriations bill—is in effect, directing mission wind-down operations and staff reductions under the assumption of a 20% overall budget cut. Some of that lost spending would affect JPL’s ability to plan, build, and operate Earth science missions and space exploration spacecraft.

Despite vocal support from the Trump administration and NASA leadership about putting humans on the Moon again and eventually on Mars, the PBR would also cancel the Mars Sample Return program, which would pick up and return to Earth sample capsules collected and deposited by the Perseverance rover. Analysis of those samples would provide critical support to any future human exploration mission to Mars.

Kevin Hicks, a systems engineer who formerly operated rovers at JPL, said that Perseverance’s budget is being reduced by two-thirds, “just enough to technically keep it going and not get the full PR backlash of canceling a working rover,” he wrote.

Credit: Kevin Hicks (@astro-cowboy.bsky.social) via Bluesky

This is the fourth round of layoffs at JPL since the beginning of 2024, including an 8% reduction in staff that affected mostly engineering-related positions. The mood among current and former JPL employees is grim. Several people commented on a JPL Reddit forum that they expect more layoffs in the future.

“Today was very somber on lab. It felt like everyone [was] grieving,” one Redditor wrote on 13 October. Several other posters echoed that sentiment. “We tried to keep a positive, but realistic attitude and we even took a final group photo in front of the JPL concrete logo. However, there’s no whitewashing the ‘doomsday-eve’ feeling that’s looming over all our heads.”

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

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

Groundwater commonly contains methane, but the amount of this important greenhouse gas that can escape to surface waters or the atmosphere is highly uncertain. A team from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry and University of Jena has shown that microbes in groundwater significantly reduce methane emissions, as revealed in a study published in PNAS.

Throughout most of Earth's geological history, its paleoclimate has remained hospitable to life—largely thanks to continental silicate weathering, which acts as a long-term planetary thermostat.

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides scientists with a powerful new tool for monitoring and predicting tectonic activity deep beneath the seafloor at mid-ocean ridges—vast underwater mountain chains that form where Earth's tectonic plates diverge.

Greenland is being twisted, compressed, and stretched. This happens due to plate tectonics and movements in the bedrock, caused by the large ice sheets on top melting and reducing pressure on the subsurface.

Earth's Ediacaran Period, roughly 630 to 540 million years ago, has always been something of a magnetic minefield for scientists.

Coral reefs face myriad challenges, from ocean acidification to warming seas to destructive fishing activities. Sometimes, reefs can rebound from these ecological harms—but only if the coral species assembled on a reef can maintain the required growth rates.

A revised estimate of coral growth rates, published in Nature, suggests that tropical western Atlantic reefs are losing their capacity to build upward. Without upward reef growth, rising seas threaten to drown these reefs and cancel out the benefits they offer to coastal communities, such as minimizing flood damage. Researchers found that reef growth rates at essentially all the 400 sites analyzed won’t be enough to keep up with sea level rise by 2100.

“It’s very critical that we get a handle on what these rates are to be able to adequately gauge the scale of the problem.”

“It’s very critical that we get a handle on what these rates are to be able to adequately gauge the scale of the problem,” said Cody Clements, a coral reef ecologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who was not involved in the new study. “We have a lot of work ahead of us.”

“Unfortunately, the estimates are worse than before,” said Rich Aronson, a coral reef ecologist at the Florida Institute of Technology who was not involved in the new paper but works closely with its authors. 

Eroding Reefs

Coral reefs grow when corals secrete calcium carbonate, a hard material that forms their exoskeletons.

Scientists can use knowledge of the species that make up a coral reef to estimate its vertical stacking porosity—how much vertical space a reef can build with a given amount of calcium carbonate. 

The skeletons of branching corals, for example, tend to accumulate in an arrangement with more empty space, leading to more upward growth than other corals, such as flat corals, might achieve with the same amount of calcium carbonate.

However, the relationship between coral assemblage and vertical growth ability has so far been poorly defined, said Chris Perry, a coastal geoscientist at the University of Exeter and lead author of the new study. 

The studied reefs “are going to have zero capacity, really, to be able to track future sea level rise.”

Perry and his research group wanted a better estimate. They gathered 66 images of fossilized coral reefs from the tropical western Atlantic and analyzed how those reefs grew over time on the basis of the species of corals within. Then, they applied their revised estimates of growth to previously collected data on the ecology and carbonate production of 400 sites at three reef systems in the tropical western Atlantic: the Mexican Mesoamerican Reef, the Florida Keys, and Bonaire. 

The adjusted estimate of growth revealed a bleaker picture of reef health than the scientists anticipated: Researchers found that on average, reefs at all sites were growing at a sluggish pace—less than 1 millimeter per year—with an average growth rate decline of 12.4% when compared to previous estimates. On average, global sea levels are rising by about 4.5 millimeters per year.

The new calculations are particularly stark for reefs dominated by branching coral species, Didier De Bakker, a coral reef ecologist at the University of Exeter and a coauthor of the new study, wrote in an email. 

If corals can’t grow, they shrink, falling victim to erosion by other marine creatures such as fish and sea urchins. Eventually, corals unable to keep up with sea level rise are drowned, unable to access sufficient light to continue growing at all.

The studied reefs “are going to have zero capacity, really, to be able to track future sea level rise,” Perry said. 

Corals at Limones Reef in the Mexican Caribbean suffered a bleaching event in 2023. Credit: Lorenzo Álvarez-Filip

In general, the new estimates of the link between assemblage type and vertical growth “revise our estimate downward” of how well corals will be able to keep up with sea level rise, Aronson said. The results also align with a 2023 study by Aronson and others that found reef growth in Panama’s Gulf of Chiriquí, part of the Pacific Ocean, is likely already unable to keep up with sea level rise. 

Perry and De Bakker hope the data in the new study will feed into future studies modeling coastal wave exposure. “These new estimates provide a more realistic basis for projecting the vulnerability of adjacent habitats and reef-fronted urban areas,” De Bakker wrote. 

Aronson said one next step for the research would be to apply the research team’s new estimates of vertical growth to reefs elsewhere, such as those in tropical Indo-Pacific waters. There, more species of branching coral still survive, giving Indo-Pacific reefs a slightly better chance of keeping up with sea level rise, said Clements, who studies Indo-Pacific reefs.

Climate Change and Corals

As a last step to their study, the researchers used what they’d learned about reef growth at 400-plus reef sites along with various future climate warming scenarios, called Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, or SSPs, to project how reef growth rates may change as the climate warms and sea levels continue to rise.

Results predicted that more than 70% of tropical western Atlantic reefs will transition into net erosional states by 2040 under an optimistic scenario (SSP1-2.6). But if warming exceeds SSP2-4.5 (a middle-of-the-road scenario in line with current development patterns), nearly all reefs will be eroding by 2100.

“Even if you go by some of the conservative estimates that they’re using, we still have a major problem in terms of coral reef accretion rates,” Clements said. 

Reef Benefits Wash Away

Slower vertical growth means corals will have a tougher time maintaining their crest, or high point. These crests serve as wave breakers that dissipate wave energy and reduce flood damages to coastal communities. One estimate suggests that coral reefs near the U.S. coastline prevent more than $1.8 billion in damage each year.

This coral reef crest in the Mexican Caribbean dissipates wave energy and reduces beach erosion and possible flood damage. Credit: Lorenzo Álvarez-Filip

As coral growth fails to track with sea level rise, these crests fall below the water’s surface. In turn, rising seas and waves from storms face less resistance, and reefs’ protective abilities get washed away.

“It’s quite difficult to see how we turn this around without really, really aggressive action on greenhouse gas emissions.”

Reef restoration is an active area of research, with engineers and ecologists working together to create various solutions, from LEGO-like scaffolding for corals to robots that sprinkle warming reefs with cool water. Previous research by Aronson and others indicated that successful restoration could help reefs keep pace with future sea level rise.

However, restoration will be effective only if it is done in tandem with efforts to rein in climate warming, which could slow sea level rise and reduce the frequency of marine heat waves, Perry said. “It’s quite difficult to see how we turn this around without really, really aggressive action on greenhouse gas emissions.”

“We have to do something about these global-scale stressors, like climate change, or it’s not going to matter,” Clements said.

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

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Citation: van Deelen, G. (2025), As seas rise, corals can’t keep up, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250380. Published on 14 October 2025. Text © 2025. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

New laboratory research suggests that some organic molecules previously detected in plumes erupting from Saturn’s moon Enceladus may be products of natural radiation, rather than originating from the moon’s subsurface ocean. This discovery complicates the assessment of the astrobiological relevance of these compounds.

Enceladus hides a global ocean buried beneath its frozen crust. Material from this liquid reservoir is ejected into space from cracks in the ice near the south pole, forming plumes of dust-sized ice particles that extend for hundreds of kilometers. While most of this material falls back onto the surface, some remains in orbit, becoming part of Saturn’s E ring, the planet’s outermost and widest ring.

Between 2005 and 2015, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft flew repeatedly through these plumes and detected a variety of organic molecules. The detection was viewed as evidence of a chemically rich and potentially habitable environment under the ice, where molecules essential to life could be available. However, the new study offers an explanation in which radiation, not biology, is behind the presence of at least some of these organic molecules.

To test the role of space radiation, a team of researchers led by planetary scientist Grace Richards, a postdoc at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome, simulated conditions near Enceladus’s surface by creating a mixture of water, carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia, the main expected components of surface ice on Enceladus. They cooled the concoction to −200°C inside a vacuum chamber and then bombarded it with water ions, which are an important component of the radiation environment that surrounds the moon.

The radiation induced a series of chemical reactions that produced a cocktail of molecules, including carbon monoxide, cyanate, ammonium, and various alcohols, as well as molecular precursors to amino acids such as formamide, acetylene, and acetaldehyde. The presence of these simple molecules indicates that radiation could induce similar reactions on Enceladus.

Richards presented these findings at the Europlanet Science Congress–Division for Planetary Sciences Joint Meeting (EPSC-DPS 2025) in Helsinki, Finland. She and her coauthors also published a detailed report in Planetary and Space Science.

Enceladus and Beyond

The new research raises the question of whether the organic molecules detected in Enceladus’s plumes truly come from the moon’s buried ocean, whether they are formed in space, or whether they form close to the surface after the plumes leave the Enceladean interior.

While the finding doesn’t exclude the possibility of a habitable ocean on Enceladus, Richards urges caution in assuming a direct link between the presence of these molecules in the plumes, their origin, and their possible role as precursors to biochemistry.

“I don’t necessarily think that my experiments discredit anything to do with Enceladus’s habitability.”

“I don’t necessarily think that my experiments discredit anything to do with Enceladus’s habitability,” Richards said.

However, she added, “when you’re trying to infer this ocean composition from what you’re seeing in space, it’s important to understand all the processes that go into modifying this material.” Apart from radiation, these processes include phase changes, interactions with the moon’s ice walls, and interactions with the space environment.

“We need a lot of experiments of that type,” said planetary scientist Alexis Bouquet, a French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) researcher at L’Université d’Aix-Marseille who wasn’t involved in the study. “They demonstrated that you can produce a certain variety of species in conditions that are relevant to the south pole of Enceladus.”

Bouquet highlighted the importance of simulating these environments in a lab for planning future missions to Enceladus and for interpreting the much-anticipated data from current missions to Jupiter’s icy moons. These missions are NASA’s Europa Clipper, which will explore Europa, and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer), which will visit all three of the giant planet’s moons with subsurface oceans: Ganymede, Calisto, and also Europa.

The intense radiation around Jupiter makes these experiments especially relevant. “Radiation chemistry for Europa or the Jovian moons in general [is] a big deal, a bigger deal than in Enceladus,” Bouquet says.

Another Story Completely

As Richards’s work questions the origin of organic compounds around Enceladus, researchers keep adding more molecules to the puzzle.

After a new analysis of data gathered during one of Cassini’s close approaches to Enceladus in 2008, researchers led by planetary scientist Nozair Khawaja at the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Stuttgart reported the discovery of new types of organic molecules, seemingly emanating from the icy vents. They include ester and ether groups and chains and cyclic species containing double bonds of oxygen and nitrogen.

On Earth, these molecules are essential links in a series of chemical reactions that ultimately produce complex compounds needed for life. And while these molecules could have an inorganic origin, “they increase the habitability potential of Enceladus,” Khawaja said. The findings appeared in Nature Astronomy.

Khawaja’s team’s analysis suggests that complex organic molecules are present in fresh ice grains just expelled from the vents. During its last flyby, Cassini got as close as 28 kilometers to the moon’s surface.

After modeling the plumes and the icy grains’ residence times in space, they think that the ice grains sampled by Cassini did not spend a lot of time in space, likely just “a few minutes,” Khawaja said. “It is fresh.”

This short duration in space questions whether space radiation had enough time to produce the organic molecules Khawaja detected. Just a few minutes would not be long enough for such complex chemistry to take place, even in a high-radiation environment.

“Big grains coming from the surface full of organics? That is much harder to explain through radiation chemistry,” Bouquet said.

While the types of experiments performed by Richards “are valuable and take the science to the next level,” Khawaja said, “our results tell the other story completely.”

Back to Enceladus

Both studies reinforce the complexity of Enceladus’s chemistry, upholding it as a prime target in the search for extraterrestrial life, or at least life’s building blocks. Enceladus has all three prerequisites for life: liquid water, an energy source, and a rich cocktail of chemical elements and molecules. Even if the subsurface ocean is out of reach—it lies at least a few kilometers beneath the ice close to the poles—the plumes offer the only known opportunity to sample an extraterrestrial liquid ocean.

Studies for a potential ESA mission dedicated to Enceladus are already underway, with plans that include high-speed flybys through the plumes and, potentially, a lander on the south pole. The insights from both recent studies will help researchers design the instrumentation and guide the interpretation of future results.

“There is no better place to look for [life] than Enceladus,” Khawaja said.

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

Citation: Barbuzano, J. (2025), Space radiation can produce some organic molecules detected on icy moons, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250383. Published on 14 October 2025. Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Author(s): Min-Seok Kim, Jeong-Hyun Lee, Jung-Eun Choi, and Chin-Wook Chung

The effect of the Ramsauer-Townsend effect, a quantum mechanical phenomenon, is investigated by generating an ultralow electron temperature plasma (Te<1 eV) in a weakly magnetized inductively coupled argon plasma using a dc-biased grid. In the ultralow electron energy regime, the Ramsauer-Townsen…

[Phys. Rev. E 112, 045208] Published Tue Oct 14, 2025