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An occupied vehicle was crushed, but the person in the car escaped unhurt.

On 1 March 2026, a very dramatic rockfall occurred in Fjæra in Etne in Vestland county, Norway. The rockfall, which originated on a steep rock slope on the flanks of Åkrafjorden, did not kill anyone, but it crushed a pick-up truck (see below). This event is a near-miss in terms of fatalities.

The rockfall was captured on video from the other side of the fjord. This has been posted to media sites and to Reddit:-

Rockfall in Norway crushing a road, a car, and then some
byu/SjalabaisWoWS inWTF

The aftermath was captured in a photo that has been released by the owner of the vehicle, Frode Mæland:-

The aftermath of the 1 March 2026 rockfall Fjæra in Etne in Norway. Image released by Frode Mæland.

Unbelievably, the car was occupied at the time of the rockfall, but the person (Christian Lee) was unharmed.

It appears that the location of this event at Fjæra is [59.87357, 6.38121], although this is unconfirmed.

The road is now closed for further investigation.

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

New geological data indicate that marine life is somewhat resilient to warming in the tropics. Chris Fokkema, Earth scientist at Utrecht University, discovered that tropical algae were largely unaffected by a number of periods of global warming of up to 1.5 degrees Celsius in the distant past. These unicellular organisms form the basis of food webs and are generally very sensitive to rising temperatures. Previous studies of periods of even greater warming showed a dramatic decline in these organisms. "Somewhere beyond those 1.5 degrees, a tipping point occurs."

How much will heat, flooding, drought and storms increase as a result of human-induced climate change? In a groundbreaking study, climate researcher Gottfried Kirchengast and his team at the University of Graz have developed a new method for computing the hazards from extreme events: it can compute all relevant hazard metrics for events such as heat waves, floods and droughts in any region worldwide with unprecedented information content.

Most countries will not achieve climate neutrality through greenhouse gas emission reductions alone; carbon sinks are also needed to offset unavoidable emissions. Researchers are discussing technical solutions, such as applying silicate-rock powder to arable land. This process, known as enhanced rock weathering (ERW), can bind carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The extreme weather events and resulting destruction that have hit New Zealand this summer are not only signs of a changing climate. They also highlight the now indispensable role of remote sensing satellite technology.

SummaryBasaltic flows and sills of the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP) along the eastern North American seaboard have been proposed to be present in buried Mesozoic basins. Their offshore distribution is poorly constrained, yet the strong magnetic and gravity signature produced by basaltic rocks means it should be possible to map them using magnetic and gravity surveys. We conducted forward modeling using existing magnetic and gravity data to identify Mesozoic basins and basaltic units offshore. Onshore and offshore basins containing CAMP basalts in forward models generally predict the best fit with observed magnetic and gravity data. A positive magnetic anomaly over the New York Bight Basin suggests it may contain multiple basalt flows at depths > 2500 m, and scenario testing indicates the Long Island Basin possibly hosts at least one flow. The newly identified Central Bight Basin is unlikely to contain basaltic units, although the adjacent East Coast Magnetic Anomaly may be overwhelming potential basalt signatures within the basin. Deeper basement structures and/or possible interbasinal basalt likely influence existing data, therefore higher-resolution aeromagnetic and marine gravity surveys are needed to constrain CAMP basalt presence in offshore basins.

SummaryGeocenter motion, defined as the displacement of Earth’s center of mass relative to its center of figure, is crucial for maintaining the International Terrestrial Reference Frame origin and quantifying large-scale mass redistribution. However, whether observing geocenter motion by tracking satellite orbits or inferring it using geophysical models, accurately acquiring such subtle motions imposes stringent requirements on the consistency and precision of both tracking data and geophysical models. This study improves geocenter motion estimates derived from the combination of GRACE/GRACE-FO time-variable gravity (TVG) and Ocean Bottom Pressure (OBP) models (the GRACE-OBP method) in two ways. First, we apply a forward modelling technique to mitigate land–ocean leakage in GRACE/GRACE-FO TVG fields, which demonstrably outperforms empirical coastline buffer-zone corrections in controlled simulation experiments. Second, we introduce the Bayesian Three-Cornered Hat (BTCH) method to optimally combine geocenter series derived from multiple GRACE solutions and two independent OBP models (ECCO2 and MPIOM), producing an improved geocenter product without requiring a ground-truth reference. Uncertainty analysis shows that the noise level is governed primarily by the GRACE solution, and that BTCH provides a clearer advantage over equal-weighted averaging when the number of input series is limited, reducing the noise level by about 30 per cent. After restoring atmospheric and oceanic contributions, our improved geocenter series shows good agreement with the CSR SLR-derived geocenter product. Although uncertainty levels vary among individual solutions, the estimated annual and secular trend signals are broadly consistent and show limited sensitivity to the choice of GRACE TVG solution and OBP model. Using the improved geocenter series, we revisit the annual geocenter oscillation and its drivers; the results indicate that cryospheric mass variability and land-ocean mass exchange (i.e. sea-level fingerprints) provide non-negligible contributions to the annual geocenter cycle and improve consistency with observations. Finally, the improved geocenter series yields the lowest uncertainty in degree-1 mass variations, with a global RMS of 0.55 mm. Incorporating these degree-1 terms into mass budget assessments yields secular trends of 38.8 Gt/yr for the Antarctic Ice Sheet and 0.57 mm/yr for global mean ocean mass, highlighting the need for accurate geocenter corrections to support reliable long-term climate monitoring.

A research team at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) has analyzed 40 years of data covering about 1,500 tropical cyclones and discovered that average rain rates surge by more than 20% in the 60 hours before landfall. The study is also the first to clearly identify the physical mechanisms behind this increase, showing that rising humidity over coastal areas and enhanced land-sea frictional contrasts strengthen convection, intensifying rainfall ahead of landfall. The results provide valuable insights for improving coastal disaster preparedness and early-warning systems.

Particles in the atmosphere, known as aerosols, cool the climate by acting as cloud condensation nuclei. The more cloud droplets form around these particles, the less sunlight penetrates a cloud. This cools the climate, although this process is outweighed by the much stronger greenhouse effect.

A leading climate scientist has sought to set the record straight over "demonstrably incorrect" claims made in a major U.S. government report that misrepresented his work and downplayed the role of human activity in global warming.

Wildfires in the northern boreal forests of Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia may be more damaging to the climate than previously thought, a new UC Berkeley-led study suggests. That's because these fires don't just burn through trees; they can also penetrate deep into the carbon-rich layers of soil underneath many boreal forests, releasing carbon that has been accumulating for hundreds or even thousands of years.

The Cascadia Subduction Zone is unusually quiet for a megathrust fault. Spanning more than 600 miles from Canada to California, the fault marks the convergence of the Juan de Fuca and North American plates. While other subduction zones produce sporadic rumblings as the plates scrape past each other, Cascadia shows very little seismic activity, fueling assumptions that the plates are locked together by friction.

Changes in rainfall within global monsoon regions affect the livelihoods of billions. For years, climate models have suggested that the fingerprint of human-caused climate change on monsoons would become visible by a certain time. But what if that timeline is wrong? A new study published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences suggests the signal may not emerge until a full decade later than previously estimated.

The South China Sea Throughflow (SCSTF) serves as a critical oceanic conveyor belt for heat and freshwater, mediating water exchanges between the South China Sea (SCS) and the Pacific and Indian oceans while regulating key processes such as heat and salt budgets, eddy activities, and marine biogeochemical cycles. It also plays a pivotal role in modulating the Indonesian Throughflow (ITF) and shaping climate variability across the Indo-Pacific. However, long-term direct observational data of the SCSTF have long been scarce, leaving its long-term changes under climate change and associated driving mechanisms poorly understood.

A research team led by University of Tsukuba has developed a new method to estimate long-term debris supply from steep slopes by measuring debris accumulated on decades-old abandoned roads. Debris supplied by rockfall and related slope processes is a key factor controlling the frequency and magnitude of debris flows. However, estimating the amount of debris supplied over several decades has been technically challenging.

Japan is an archipelago with diverse climate zones and complex topography that is prone to heavy rain and flooding. Add the growing effects of global warming. These disaster risks are heightened with an increased frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events. Thus, predicting when and where these events might strike is crucial for future-proofing vulnerable infrastructure, especially in rural areas.

Cities are rapidly becoming the defining residential space of human life. Over 55% of the global population lived in urban areas in 2018, a proportion projected to reach nearly 68% by 2050, according to the United Nations (UN).

Greenland's largest glacier, Jakobshavn Glacier, may be edging closer to a critical threshold as meltwater runoff from the Greenland Ice Sheet accelerates in ways not seen in over a century, according to new research published in Climate of the Past. The study reconstructs more than 100 years of freshwater discharge flowing from the ice sheet into Disko Bay in western Greenland, revealing a striking and sustained change that began in the early 2000s.

In the summers of 2016 and 2017, a small research team endured harsh conditions on the Greenland Ice Sheet to gather data about the aerosols above it. These tiny particles carry crucial information about the elements that contribute to glacial ice loss, making them invaluable in the fight against climate change.

In a new study published in Environmental Science and Technology, this team reported that aerosols contain significant amounts of mineral dust, which can feed phosphorus to hungry, ice-melting algae.

“This study’s findings are important,” said Jasper Kok, an atmospheric physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved with the research. “The Arctic is warming several times faster than the global average,” he explained, and this warming exposes more bare soils that will only increase dust emissions.

Dusty Fieldwork

Prior research found that mineral dust contains significant quantities of phosphorus, a key growth factor for many species of dark-colored algae. Because dark-colored algae infiltrate snow and glaciers, decreasing their albedo and forcing them to absorb more sunshine, understanding the mechanics of dust delivery is imperative for accurately measuring glacial melt and estimating the impact of ongoing climate change.

“Most climate models omit this high-latitude dust,” said Kok.

To better understand how mineral dust affects the Greenland Ice Sheet, researchers captured aerosols and took measurements from ice cores and snow samples at a location north of Kangerlussuaq in southwest Greenland.

“To my knowledge, this is the first study to conduct real-time aerosol measurements on the Greenland Ice Sheet and connect those results to the algal blooms forming on the ice.”

“We were in a tent camp approximately 35 to 100 kilometers into the Greenland Ice Sheet,” said Liane Benning, a biogeochemist at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences in Germany and coauthor of the study. “We were there for up to 5 to 6 weeks to get these samples.”

The collected materials enabled the researchers to scrutinize dust above and within the glacier, which would, in turn, allow them to determine the dust’s origin, composition, and how many algae it could feed.

Scanning electron microscopes revealed the aerosols were primarily composed of mineral dust from the southern end of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which aligns with past research showing that area is a great producer of dust emissions. The quantity within the aerosols suggests the dust contains enough phosphorus to fuel massive algal blooms within the ice sheet.

“To my knowledge this is the first study to conduct real-time aerosol measurements on the Greenland Ice Sheet and connect those results to the algal blooms forming on the ice,” said Jenine McCutcheon, a geomicrobiologist at the University of Waterloo in Canada and lead author of the study. “Local Greenlandic locations near the coast are the most likely source, which matches our geochemical analyses.”

Microbes on the Move

But the results also revealed something else. In addition to mineral dust, the aerosols contained soot, fungi, and different species of algae specialized to living in ice and snow. The researchers detected one species of glacial ice algae, Ancylonema nordenskioeldii, that is well-known to reduce glacial albedo and increase melting.

The study suggests ice-melting microbes may be blown across the ice sheet, allowing them to penetrate areas previously unexposed to microbes. “These organisms can be picked up by wind,” explained McCutcheon, “which may provide a means for these algae to be transported to new locations on the ice.”

New research finds that phosphorus (P), along with other minerals, is transported to the Greenland Ice Sheet from bare soil downwind. Credit: McCutcheon et al., 2026, https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.5c13873, CC BY 4.0

Because other high-latitude environments are similarly pilloried by nutrient-rich dust, the study has wider implications for the Arctic, said Kok. “This study underscores the need to include this dust for more accurate predictions of how the Greenland Ice Sheet, and the Arctic more broadly, will evolve in the future.”

McCutcheon agreed. “While these results won’t stop ice mass loss, they will help us better understand how melting will progress in the future,” she said.

—Taylor Mitchell Brown (@tmitchellbrown.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Brown, T. M. (2026), Greenland dust delivers nutrients to ice-melting algae, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260069. Published on 27 February 2026. Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

More than 2 billion people live within 50 kilometers of a coastline and are extremely vulnerable to climate hazards such as excessive rainfall and flooding.

A new study in Nature Communications shows how marine heat waves can worsen excess rainfall in coastal areas, potentially exacerbating flooding and its associated losses, including of human lives. Researchers found that from 1982 to 2022, between 5% and 25% of extreme rainfall events in coastal areas occurred downwind of nearby marine heat waves. Compared to events that weren’t downwind of marine heat waves, these rainfall events saw about 20%–30% more rain on average, as well as a 30% increase in fatalities.

“This is a serious concern because marine heatwaves not only intensify general rainfall but also exacerbate extreme rainfall events,” said Zhengguang Zhang, corresponding author of the new study and a climate scientist at the Ocean University of China in Qingdao, via email. Marine heat waves are happening more often and lasting longer, increasing the possibility that coastal rainfall and weather may be affected even more dramatically as the climate changes.

New Insights from Existing Data

In the study, the researchers define marine heat waves as those occurring when the sea surface temperature of an area exceeds 90% of the average value recorded over several decades for a period longer than 5 days. These heat waves can devastate marine ecosystems, and the ecological damage can have knock-on effects, causing massive losses to people and economies that depend on the ocean.

“This study beautifully reframes existing information [such as satellite data] in the context of marine heat waves and shows that coastal rainfall can clearly be impacted by these heat waves.”

The researchers combed through various long-term satellite and climate databases, such as NOAA’s Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature dataset, to build global maps of sea surface temperatures. They used these sea surface temperature maps to locate marine heat waves and linked them to excessive rainfall events in land areas as far as hundreds of kilometers downwind.

“This study beautifully reframes existing information in the context of marine heat waves and shows that coastal rainfall can clearly be impacted by these heat waves,” said Alex Sen Gupta, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, who was not involved in the study.

From Hot Water to Excess Rain

Marine heat waves can vary widely in both their temperature and spatial extent, ranging from roughly 100,000 square kilometers—about the size of Iceland—to several million square kilometers or more. To compare heat waves with such different sizes, shapes, and characteristics, the researchers turned to mathematics.

“Marine heatwaves are characterized by a warm core with temperatures decreasing gradually outward, and Gaussian functions (a common mathematical tool) are often used to describe this kind of heat diffusion,” said Zhang. Using a Gaussian fit allowed the researchers to summarize and extract robust measures of scale and temperature gradients from noisy observational data and compare many marine heat waves and their effects on wind and rainfall.

“We found that marine heatwaves have the ability to influence the atmosphere above them and enhance rainfall downwind,” Zhang said. Areas downwind of marine heat waves experienced more frequent and more intense extreme rainfall, which the study defined as rain events that ranked among the wettest 1% of all rainy days in a particular land area. These extreme rain events peaked within the radius of the heat wave, which could sometimes stretch for hundreds of kilometers, and usually within 1–3 days of the heat wave forming.

The study analyses also yielded clues about how marine heat waves may be causing excess rain in downwind areas. The warm waters of a marine heat wave force the air above to mix violently, increasing atmospheric turbulence and strengthening winds. As these warm, wet winds move through and away from the marine heat wave, they collide with existing air and are forced upward, carrying their extra moisture with them. The rising, moisture-rich air then produces heavy rainfall, often over land downwind of the marine heat waves.

Connections Made, but Uncertainties Remain

Though the study clearly connects marine heat waves and downwind precipitation, the precise physical pathways involved may be more varied than they first appear, according to Sen Gupta.

“I don’t think the analysis necessarily distinguishes between different mechanisms as to how marine heat waves are impacting extreme rainfall events on land,” he said. For example, Sen Gupta noted that the study emphasized the importance of temperature gradients within marine heat waves as a key driver of rainfall downwind. “But temperature maximums within the heat waves may influence downwind rainfall just as much as temperature gradients.”

“Almost all the marine heatwave-related flood events that killed over a hundred people occurred in developing countries.”

Although the study builds a connection between marine heat waves and extreme rainfall, it does not establish a causal link between the heat waves and floods. “Establishing a direct connection is highly challenging due to the complexity of flooding, which is influenced by a lot of factors including topography, surface runoff, and even groundwater,” Zhang said. However, 10%–30% of flood events during the period covered in the study occurred downwind of a marine heat wave.

“Also, what we do not show in the paper is that, almost all the marine heatwave-related flood events that killed over a hundred people occurred in developing countries,” said Zhang. “Coastal communities, especially in developing countries, should incorporate marine conditions into their forecasts of extreme events, which may allow for a more accurate assessment of the severity of extreme rainfall or floods.”

—Adityarup Chakravorty (chakravo@gmail.com), Science Writer

Citation: Chakravorty, A. (2026), Marine heat waves can increase coastal rainfall, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260068. Published on 27 February 2026. Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.