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Thousands of small earthquakes, detected for the first time by a machine-learning process, reveal the distinct, razor-sharp edge of the Yakutat microplate as it subducts beneath the North American plate.

The plumbing systems of volcanoes are vast and complex. But they aren't consistent, even in the same volcano. A Cornell-led collaboration found very different mechanisms behind two historic eruptions of Mount Etna in Italy. Understanding these dynamics—combined with the techniques that revealed them—can help geologists assess the risk of future eruptions.

Large volcanic eruptions may have played a bigger role in triggering historical famines across China than previously understood, according to a new study that traced links between eruptions, climate disruption, and food shortages over more than four centuries.

The ShakeAlert earthquake early warning system has been rapidly expanding since its launch in 2021. Now, researchers at University of Washington affiliated Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN) have finished all planned installations, bringing the two-state total to 569 seismic monitoring stations spread across Washington and Oregon.

Source: Earth’s Future

Mangrove forests straddle the edge of land and sea along some tropical and subtropical coastlines. These trees and shrubs have distinctive tangles of roots that trap sediment and produce organic matter, forming dense soils and efficiently storing carbon. Though mangroves cover only 1% of Earth’s surface, they store a whopping 15% of global ocean carbon in their trapped soils.

Their location along coastlines means mangroves are at the mercy of changing sea levels and sediment availability. Rising sea levels can drown mangroves or push them landward. At the same time, sediment supplies, belowground root growth, and organic matter accumulation can help build up mangrove soils, allowing forests to keep pace with sea level rise. So over time, will mangroves keep locking carbon into their soils, or will they start losing it?

Iwantoro et al. created a new model that examines the links between coastal processes to investigate vegetation growth and carbon accumulation in mangrove forests.

The researchers modeled a simplified tidal embayment to explore how different rates of sea level rise and sediment supplies would affect the mangroves. In these experiments, they found that carbon accumulation can increase at specific locations as waters rise because the increased water can lead to more mangrove growth—a result that matches existing data. However, when looking at landscape scales, they found sea level rise generally reduces total carbon sequestration through mangrove loss and soil erosion. The results showed that rising sea levels can alter mangroves from carbon storage sinks to carbon emitters.

The findings demonstrate that local trends in carbon sequestration may not be representative of larger-scale outcomes in mangrove forests. The study shows that understanding coastal landscapes as an interconnected system is crucial to understanding how mangroves can respond to climate and human-induced pressures, the researchers say. However, new assessments and approaches are needed to better understand future mangrove vulnerabilities. (Earth’s Future, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EF006984, 2026)

—Sarah Derouin (@sarahderouin.com), Science Writer

Citation: Derouin, S. (2026), Mangroves may be losing their grip on carbon storage as sea levels rise, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260144. Published on 5 June 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.

Source: AGU Advances

Asteroids and planetesimals regularly bombarded Earth between about 4.6 billion and 3.5 billion years ago, in the Hadean and Archean eons. Because few rocks today are more than 4 billion years old, our understanding of the planet’s environment during that time is limited. However, samples from the Moon and its cratered surface hint at the period’s rate of cosmic impacts.

Early asteroid strikes were responsible for significant changes in Earth’s crust, which was primarily basalt-like at the time. The shock waves from collisions fractured the crust and increased porosity, allowing fluids and gases to move through the rocks. Prior research suggests that the resulting hydrothermal systems—such as the network of geysers around Yellowstone National Park—provided the environment for the origin and evolution of early life on Earth.

Alexander et al. explored how surface impacts during the Hadean and Archean allowed fluids and gases to maneuver through crustal environments. The authors built a large suite of impact simulations with the iSALE shock physics code, toggling parameters such as basalt crust thickness, geothermal gradients, and the presence or absence of a 5-kilometer-deep ocean. The simulations detailed how collisions on the surface shaped permeability in the crust. They then integrated a model for ancient bombardment data to understand the cumulative effects of repeated strikes over time.

The results indicate that prior to 4.3 billion years ago, impacts may have made the crust far more permeable, particularly in its top 8 kilometers. From the simulations, the authors inferred that the size of permeable regions was dependent on impact energy, and that geothermal gradients and rock composition in the crust affected the degree of fragmentation after impact. These porous domains formed potential settings for prebiotic chemistry within the early crust.

The research is the first comprehensive study of impact-generated permeability in early Earth’s outermost layer. The results provide a novel framework for evaluating how bombardment influenced hydrothermal circulation and geochemical alteration during the Hadean and Archean eons, with implications for our understanding of life’s origin and evolution in Earth’s earliest days. (AGU Advances, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV002097, 2026)

—Aaron Sidder, Science Writer

Citation: Sidder, A. (2026), Cosmic bombardment created potential for prebiotic chemistry, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260180. Published on 5 June 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.

Freshwater from melting Antarctic glaciers may be influencing the Southern Ocean in ways scientists have largely overlooked. New research, published in Frontiers in Marine Science, has found that glacial meltwater is not confined to the ocean's surface, as previously assumed, but can also be detected much deeper in coastal waters along the Western Antarctic Peninsula.

Storm Dave, which swept across northern Europe over the Easter weekend, is an example of what new research from the University of Gothenburg has revealed. Spring storms forming over the North Atlantic have become more common than they were 80 years ago, and this is due to climate change.

A new study led by Professor Mark Trimmer of Queen Mary University of London, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, explains how increases in natural methane emissions will be maximized under future climate warming.

SummaryOceanic transform faults (TFs) are fundamental elements of plate tectonics and have traditionally been viewed as conservative strike-slip boundaries. Seafloor observations and numerical modelling suggest the existence of extensional stress, however how it manifest at depth remains unknown. Moreover, slow-slipping TFs are often associated with thin crust and possible exposures of serpentinised peridotite near the seafloor. Here we apply full waveform inversion (FWI) to a 12-km offset seismic dataset across the Romanche TF, the largest TF on the Earth. We use source-receiver reciprocity and downward continuation to emulate a split-spread ocean bottom cable survey geometry from one-sided surface streamer data, bringing the refracted waves ahead of reflections while accounting for rough seafloor topography. We then perform travel time tomography followed by FWI to the downward-continued data to derive a high-resolution crustal model. The resolution is about 0.7 km horizontally and 0.4 km vertically, down to 3.5–4 km depth from the seafloor. Our results reveal low P-wave velocity in the upper 3 km, suggestive of basaltic origin, and no evidence for high velocities characteristic of serpentinised peridotite on the valley floor. Moreover, we image inward dipping normal faults extending to ∼4 km depth, forming a flower-like structure. Regional earthquake data reveal strike-slip mechanisms along the transform and normal-faulting near the RTI, with strike-slip hypocenters aligning with interpreted faults. These features suggest that the Romanche TF resembles a trans-tensional regime with a deep-rooted strike-slip fault in the middle, accommodating local strain deformation.

SummaryAdvances in satellite gravimetry technologies have enabled the integration of increasingly diverse mission datasets for high-resolution static gravity field modeling. However, during the construction of regularization matrices for stabilizing Spherical Harmonic Coefficients (SHCs), conventional regularization methods generally neglect significant correlations among SHCs, primarily due to heterogeneous noise characteristics of observations from different missions. To address this limitation, we propose a Full Signal Variance-Covariance (FSVC) regularization method by constructing a full regularization matrix based on a priori gravity anomaly signal amplitudes. Applying this method to combined normal equations integrating GOCE SGG, GRACE, and Swarm observations yield three solutions under different constraint strategies: a Kaula diagonal constrained solution (Tongji-GMMG2025S-KLA), a Diagonal Signal Variance-Covariance (DSVC) regularized solution (Tongji-GMMG2025S-DSVC) derived from the diagonal elements of the FSVC matrix, and the FSVC-regularized solution (Tongji-GMMG2025S-FSVC). Our analyses demonstrate that: Based on FSVC analysis, the proposed FSVC regularization method exhibits overall superior performance compared to the diagonal regularization approach, particularly when the prior model incorporates terrestrial gravity data. Even when using the Kaula-constraint solution as the prior model, quantitative evaluations in both spectral and spatial domains demonstrate that the FSVC-regularized solution still exhibits significantly improved performance relative to diagonal regularization schemes. In the degree range 151–300, the Tongji-GMMG2025S-FSVC model reduces cumulative geoid error degree variances by 9.28 per cent and 9.58 per cent compared to the Tongji-GMMG2025S-KLA and Tongji-GMMG2025S-DSVC solutions, respectively, indicating more effective suppression of medium- to high-degree noise. Spatial comparisons with the XGM2019 model further show reduced gravity anomaly discrepancies, with the FSVC solution achieving the lowest global standard deviation (4.94 mGal). Notably, this improvement is particularly evident in the Indonesia region, which is characterized by complex land-sea distributions. Independent validation using GNSS/Leveling data demonstrates that the FSVC-regularized solution overall higher accuracy than the diagonal-constrained solutions. In particular, the Tongji-GMMG2025S-FSVC model exhibits a distinct advantage, achieving noise reductions of 9.15 per cent and 8.53 per cent relative to the Tongji-GMMG2025S-KLA and Tongji-GMMG2025S-DSVC solutions in the Canadian region, respectively. In conclusion, the proposed FSVC regularization approach proves highly effective in suppressing high-degree noise and enhancing the accuracy of satellite-only static gravity field solutions. This improvement highlights the potential applicability of the proposed approach for future multi-satellite gravity mission integration.

Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) have, for the first time, been able to record a debris flow over a distance of two kilometers at the Illgraben (VS). The study reveals where and how waves form within the flow and what happens when they pass over check dams.

Publication date: 1 June 2026

Source: Advances in Space Research, Volume 77, Issue 11

Author(s): Zhaowei Yu, Wanchun Chen, Wenbin Yu, Shilei Zhao

Publication date: 1 June 2026

Source: Advances in Space Research, Volume 77, Issue 11

Author(s): Zeyu Bao, Yi Deng, Weipeng Li, Yangyang Cui

Publication date: 1 June 2026

Source: Advances in Space Research, Volume 77, Issue 11

Author(s): Keke Shi, Xingchen Liu, Yining Zhi, Chuang Liu

Publication date: 1 June 2026

Source: Advances in Space Research, Volume 77, Issue 11

Author(s): Xiaoyi Wang, Zhaoyue Chen

Publication date: 1 June 2026

Source: Advances in Space Research, Volume 77, Issue 11

Author(s): Tianji Chen, Xue Bai, Shuaibing Deng, Dongying Ma, Haoze Chen, Shuiyuan Wu

Publication date: 1 June 2026

Source: Advances in Space Research, Volume 77, Issue 11

Author(s): Peilin Li, Chengyuan Liu, Guodong Xu

Publication date: 1 June 2026

Source: Advances in Space Research, Volume 77, Issue 11

Author(s): Tianji Chen, Jun Jiang, Xiaoyi Wang

Publication date: 1 June 2026

Source: Advances in Space Research, Volume 77, Issue 11

Author(s): Jiahao Qin, Hongxia Wang, Xudong Gao, Qian Wang, Jun Jiang