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Publication date: Available online 12 January 2026

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): Charles Galdies, Stephen M. Brincat, Marek Bucek

Publication date: Available online 12 January 2026

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): Hok Sum Fok, Zhongtian Ma

Publication date: Available online 12 January 2026

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): Donghao Song, Hu Ming, Yajing Wang

How much fresh water is in the United States? It's a tough question, since most of the water is underground, accessible at varying depths. In previous decades, it's been answered indirectly from data on rainfall and evaporation. Knowing how much groundwater is available at specific locations is critical to meeting the challenges of water scarcity and contamination.

Global average temperatures in 2025 were the third hottest on record, surpassed only by 2024 and 2023, according to an analysis published by Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit climate research organization.

According to the analysis, last year’s global average temperature was about 1.35°C–1.53°C (2.43°F–2.75°F) greater than the 1850–1900 average. The previous year, 2024, was 1.46°C–1.62°C (2.63°F–2.92°F) above the preindustrial baseline, while 2023 was 1.48°C–1.60°C (2.66°F–2.88°F) above the baseline.

The report’s authors called the exceptional heat of the past 3 years a “warming spike” that may indicate an acceleration in the rate of climate change. “The warming observed from 2023 through 2025 stands out clearly from the long-term trend,” said Robert Rohde, chief scientist at Berkeley Earth, in a statement. 

Such a spike may also indicate that the past warming rate is no longer a reliable predictor of future warming, the authors wrote.

“2023, 2024, and 2025 collectively cause us to rethink” Earth’s warming rate, Rohde said in a press briefing. Whether warming is accelerating or not, Earth’s temperature is rapidly exceeding key thresholds, such as the Paris Agreement limit of 1.5°C (2.7°F), he said.

Scientists say the exceptional warming observed in the past 3 years could be evidence of accelerating warming. Credit: Berkeley Earth, CC BY-NC 4.0

“The overall trends in temperature are very consistent” among international agencies that track global temperature.

The report aligns with an analysis from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) that also concluded that 2025 was the third-hottest year in the global temperature record. NOAA-NCEI calculated that the year was 1.17°C (2.11°F) above the 20th-century global average.

“There are different methodologies for how the global temperature [reports] are created, but the science behind it, the data behind it, by and large, are all shared,” said Karin Gleason, a climate scientist and chief of the monitoring section at NOAA-NCEI.

“The overall trends in temperature are very consistent” among international agencies that track global temperature, she said.

What’s Causing the Spike?

While global average temperatures have been increasing for more than a century, the past 3 years’ warming spike is notably extreme relative to the mostly linear trend of the past 50 years. 

“The magnitude of this recent spike suggests additional factors have amplified recent warming beyond what we would expect from greenhouse gases and natural variability alone.”

“The magnitude of this recent spike suggests additional factors have amplified recent warming beyond what we would expect from greenhouse gases and natural variability alone,” Rohde said.

The report suggested that reductions in cloud cover and changes to atmospheric aerosols, particularly as a result of new regulations on sulfur pollution from ships in 2020, may be partly to blame for the spike. The Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption in 2022 may have also contributed to warming, though further research is needed to fully understand the eruption’s effects, the report stated.

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a climate phenomenon that affects heat storage in the ocean, contributed to extreme heat in 2023 and 2024 during the El Niño phase, but remained in a weak La Niña condition for much of 2025. Such a condition would typically be expected to slightly cool global temperatures. Without the effect of La Niña, it’s possible 2025 would have been the hottest year ever recorded, Gleason said.

Gleason pointed out that a similar “warming spike” occurred in 2015 and 2016 as a result of a strong El Niño.

Humanity Faces the Heat

According to Berkeley Earth’s report, about 770 million people across the world experienced their local hottest year ever in 2025. The majority of the large population centers affected by this record-breaking heat were in Asia.

No place on Earth recorded the locally coldest year ever.

An estimated 770 million people experienced the locally hottest year ever recorded in 2025. Credit: Berkeley Earth, CC BY-NC 4.0

The report came as estimates from the Rhodium Group, a think tank, showed that the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions increased by 2.4% in 2025 after 2 years of decline. The United States experienced its fourth-hottest year ever recorded in 2025, according to an analysis from Climate Central, a nonprofit climate change research group, and another analysis by NOAA-NCEI. 

The exceptional warming underscores “how essential sustained monitoring is to understanding [climate] changes in real time,” Kristen Sissener, executive director of Berkeley Earth, said in a statement. “Continued investment in high-quality, resilient, and robust open climate data is critical to ensuring that governments, industry, and local communities can respond based on evidence, not assumptions.”

The Berkeley Earth report predicted that global temperature trends in 2026 will be similar to those of 2025, with 2026 expected to be roughly the fourth-warmest year since records began. 

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

14 January: This story has been updated to include information from a Berkeley Earth press briefing.

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2026), The past 3 years have been the three hottest on record, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260031. Published on 14 January 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 storing of the very first heritage cores in Antarctica marks a pivotal moment for the Ice Memory project launched in 2015 by CNRS, IRD, the University of Grenoble-Alpes (France), CNR, Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Italy) and the Paul Scherrer Institute (Switzerland).

In the icy reaches of the Svalbard archipelago, a quiet revolution in marine restoration is underway. Researchers are building a digital twin of the region—an interactive, data-rich simulation designed to help researchers and restoration teams understand how climate change is affecting Arctic coastlines and how its impacts might be reduced.

A study published in Nature shows that many of the world's major river deltas are sinking faster than sea levels are rising, potentially affecting hundreds of millions of people in these regions.

Scientists on Wednesday sealed ancient chunks of glacial ice in a first-of-its-kind sanctuary in Antarctica in the hope of preserving these fast-disappearing records of Earth's past climate for centuries to come.

Lightning has captured people's fascination for millennia. It's embedded in mythology, religion and popular culture. Think of Thor in Norse mythology or Indra in Hinduism.

Devastated by widespread fires, Victoria has declared a state of disaster. More than 500 structures have reportedly been destroyed and 1,000 agricultural properties have been affected. Tragically, there has also been one fatality.

Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Machine Learning and Computation

The Indonesian Throughflow carries both warm water and fresh water from the Pacific into the Indian Ocean. As the only low-latitude current that connects the two bodies of water, it plays a key role in ocean circulation and sea surface temperature worldwide.

The current is as complex as it is important: The seas surrounding Indonesia are home to deep basins and sills and a hodgepodge of ocean processes that make the Indonesian Throughflow difficult to measure. On-the-ground—or, rather, on-the-sea—observations are scarce as well because such observational systems are expensive and difficult to design and maintain.

Wang et al. combined artificial intelligence (AI) modeling techniques with observing system simulation experiment design concepts. Their method used sea surface height measurements to predict the behavior of this influential current and its individual passages and estimate which strait has the greatest effect on the current’s behavior.

The researchers developed a deep learning model that uses two types of networks to conduct observing system simulation experiments. The first, called a convolutional neural network (CNN), is often used for image classification and, in this case, was used to extract trends from data about the Indonesian Throughflow. The second, called a recurrent neural network (RNN), is most commonly used to sort through sequential data. In this work, the RNN processed the trends identified by the CNN and analyzed their changes over time. The approach proved to be much less computationally costly than running a traditional observing system simulation experiment.

The results recapitulated observed water transport trends and showed that sea surface height is a key predictor of conditions in some of the shallower straits between Indonesian islands. The Maluku Strait emerged as a passage where water conditions have a strong influence on the entire system and thus as a strong candidate for future monitoring efforts, the researchers found. Combining information about the Maluku and Halmahera Straits was even more effective at predicting system-wide conditions. (Journal of Geophysical Research: Machine Learning and Computation, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025JH000808, 2025)

—Saima May Sidik (@saimamay.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Sidik, S. M. (2026), AI sheds light on hard-to-study ocean currents, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260027. Published on 14 January 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 number of wildland fires burning in the Arctic is on the rise, according to NASA researchers. Moreover, these blazes are burning larger, hotter, and longer than they did in previous decades.

This is an authorized translation of an Eos article. Esta es una traducción al español autorizada de un artículo de Eos.

A medida que la producción mundial de plástico se ha disparado, pequeños fragmentos de plástico se han infiltrado en los ríos, el hielo marino e incluso en nuestros cerebros. De acuerdo con un nuevo estudio, cuando las minúsculas fibras y los fragmentos se filtran en el suelo, cambian la forma en que este interactúa con el agua.

El estudio, publicado en la revista Vadose Zone Journal, midió la retención de agua y la conductividad en suelos de tres regiones de Alemania con y sin cuatro microplásticos diferentes. Los investigadores encontraron que una concentración de plástico de solo el 0.4% en masa puede cambiar la velocidad con que el agua fluye a través del suelo, dependiendo tanto del tipo de plástico como del tipo de suelo. Según los autores, es probable que las propiedades hidráulicas alteradas se deban a la naturaleza hidrófoba del plástico y a que las partículas de microplástico cambian la disposición de los gránulos individuales del suelo.

Las pequeñas partículas del suelo se adhieren entre sí formando grumos. Los espacios entre estos grumos forman conductos por los que circulan agua, nutrientes y las raíces de las plantas. El tamaño y la distribución de estos espacios afectan al drenaje del suelo y a su capacidad de retención de agua, lo que tiene implicaciones para el crecimiento de las plantas.

“Las características hídricas de un suelo indican la rapidez con la que el agua se drena a través del suelo, lo que afecta a los cultivos y a los acuíferos.”

“Las características hídricas del suelo indican la rapidez con la que el agua se drena a través del suelo, lo que impacta cultivos y acuíferos”, menciona la autora principal del estudio, Katharina Neubert, científica especializada en suelos del Forschungszentrum Jülich en Alemania.

Investigaciones anteriores han mostrado que los microplásticos pueden alterar la estructura del suelo y sus propiedades hidráulicas, pero cada uno de esos estudios examinó sólo un tipo de suelo o un tipo de plástico. El nuevo estudio es el primero en evaluar cómo múltiples tipos de microplásticos afectan a múltiples tipos de suelo.

Los investigadores colectaron suelo de tres regiones agrícolas distintas de Alemania, que tenían diferentes texturas, niveles de carbono y niveles de pH. Después, obtuvieron cuatro microplásticos ampliamente usados variando en tamaño entre 300 micrómetros y 5 milímetros: polietileno, polipropileno, poliestireno y poliéster. Descompusieron las partículas más grandes en una licuadora y luego mezclaron cada plástico con cada tipo de suelo en una concentración del 0.4% en peso. En combinación con un control libre de plástico para cada tipo de suelo, se obtuvieron 15 combinaciones únicas de suelo y microplásticos.

Los autores vertieron cada mezcla en un cilindro metálico conectado a un dispositivo de succión para ver la rapidez con la que la succión extraía el agua del suelo. Realizaron la prueba en suelo húmedo y seco, ya que el nivel de humedad también influye en la rapidez con la que el agua se drena a través del suelo.

Desenterrando una relación matizada

Los cuatro microplásticos alteraron las tasas de flujo del agua en al menos uno de los suelos, pero la magnitud y la dirección del efecto variaron considerablemente. Por ejemplo, las fibras de poliéster, comúnmente desprendidas de algunos tipos de ropa, aumentaron la velocidad a la que fluía el agua a través de un suelo en más de un 50% cuando estaba húmedo, pero redujeron la tasa de flujo en más de un 50% en condiciones secas.

“Es muy difícil hacer una afirmación general sobre cómo cambia el suelo con los microplásticos.”

“Todos los resultados dependen del contexto”, afirma Rosolino Ingraffia, científico especializado en suelos de la Università degli Studi di Palermo en Italia, que no participó en la investigación. “Es muy difícil hacer una afirmación general sobre cómo cambia el suelo con los microplásticos”.

Otro estudio reciente en el que Neubert participó como coautora mostró cómo las diferencias en las tasas de flujo podrían traducirse en la agricultura. Ella cultivó plantas de trigo en los mismos tres tipos de suelo con y sin dos microplásticos: polietileno y poliéster. Los resultados fueron igualmente complicados, ya que el plástico añadido aumentaba, disminuía o no afectaba al crecimiento de las raíces, dependiendo de la combinación.

La concentración de plástico del 0.4% utilizada en ambos estudios es mucho mayor que la que albergan la mayoría de los campos agrícolas en la actualidad, según Neubert e Ingraffia. Por ejemplo, las tierras cultivables que han sido tratadas con biosólidos durante una década presentan concentraciones más cercanas al 0.002%. Sin embargo, los cálculos basados en la tasa actual de acumulación de microplásticos sugieren que muchas zonas podrían alcanzar esta concentración del 0.4% en 50 o 60 años, añadió Ingraffia.

Neubert espera que su investigación dé lugar a regulaciones que impidan que los microplásticos alcancen esos niveles. Alemania planea eliminar progresivamente el uso de lodos de depuradora ricos en nutrientes como fertilizantes en la mayoría de los campos agrícolas, en parte debido a la preocupación por la contaminación plástica, afirmó. Un estudio identificó esta práctica como una de las principales fuentes de microplásticos en el suelo de Alemania.

Es importante mantener el plástico fuera del suelo porque “aún no sabemos qué consecuencias tiene para nuestros suelos”, dijo Neubert.

—Mark DeGraff (@markr4nger.bsky.social), Escritor científico

This translation by Saúl A. Villafañe-Barajas (@villafanne) was made possible by a partnership with Planeteando and Geolatinas. Esta traducción fue posible gracias a una asociación con Planeteando y Geolatinas.

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.

New research from Adelaide University suggests the power of the ancient Tethys Ocean might have shaped Central Asia's topography during the Cretaceous period.

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

The Tianshan Mountains in Central Asia have produced more than 100 large earthquakes in the past three centuries, showing that many faults in the region are still active. Chang et al. [2025] use the complete set of available GNSS (satellite-based positioning) measurement data, from 936 stations, to map how the crust is currently deforming. From these measurements, surface strain rates are calculated and, using novel inversion methods, an estimate of the seismic potential can be provided.

The authors find that most deformation (about 70%) is concentrated in the western Tianshan, where mapped faults accommodate roughly 60% of this strain. By comparing these results with the history of past earthquakes, the study identifies 20 fault segments with a “deficit”, that is, capable of producing future earthquakes of magnitude 7 or larger.

This work provides the first region-wide model of slip deficit and seismic potential for Tianshan and offers information that can directly improve seismic hazard assessments in Central Asia. The findings are especially timely following the 2024 Mw 7.0 Wushi earthquake.

Citation: Chang, F., Fang, J., Dong, S., Yin, H., Rollins, C., Elliott, J. R., & Hooper, A. J. (2025). Geodetic strain rates, slip deficit rates, and seismic potential in the Tianshan, Central Asia. Geophysical Research Letters, 52, e2025GL118470. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025GL118470   

—Fabio A. Capitanio, Editor, Geophysical Research Letters

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.

Europe and western North America will experience more frequent and severe crop droughts as Earth warms, even in places where yearly rainfall increases.

SummaryUnderstanding subsurface fluid distribution in volcanic reservoirs is critical for geothermal energy development, critical mineral exploration, and forecasting eruptions. Here, we use travel-time tomography to image the seismic velocity structure beneath Aluto volcano, the first pilot geothermal project in Ethiopia, located in the Main Ethiopian Rift. Using seismic data recorded from January 2012 to January 2014, we invert for the 3D P-wave (Vp), S-wave (Vs), and Vp/Vs ratio. To reduce the non-uniqueness in interpretation, we also compare our results with previously published work on attenuation tomography and magnetotelluric images. Elevated Vp/Vs ratios (at 0 km below sea level (bsl)) around productive geothermal wells suggest high fluid content and/or elevated temperature. Vp/Vs values above 1.8 are observed along the caldera rims and hydrothermal vents, indicating fault and fracture systems as primary fluid conduits. High Vp/Vs below 6 km bsl likely reflects high-temperature areas or the presence of partial melt. In contrast, low Vp/Vs (<1.5), low Vp, and average to high Vs beneath the caldera at around 5 km bsl is interpreted as a crystallised body with over-pressurised gas volume formed during phase separation and transported upward through fractures and fault systems, accumulating at shallower levels. These findings highlight fluid pathways through the caldera rims and faults, with volatile-rich partial melt at greater depth beneath the caldera centre. Travel-time tomography thus offers a valuable constraints on subsurface fluid distribution and is valuable tool in geothermal exploration.

Dr. Rowan Martindale, a paleoecologist and geobiologist at the University of Texas at Austin, was walking through the Dadès Valley in the Central High Atlas Mountains of Morocco when she saw something that literally stopped her in her tracks.

Underground environments like soil and aquifers teem with microbial life. These tiny microbes play a big role in cycling nutrients and breaking down or transforming pollutants. However, scientists still struggle to reliably model how microbes grow and decay.