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New research by Monash University and the ARC Center of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century analyzed close to three decades of weather data during the coral bleaching season and identified the prevalence of "doldrum days," and the absence of the trade winds, as a key factor in the mass bleaching events threatening the Great Barrier Reef.

Geologists from Heriot-Watt are part of an international research team that has confirmed why the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake off northeast Japan behaved in such an extreme and destructive way.

Wildfires are devastating events that destroy forests, burn homes and force people to leave their communities. They also have a profound impact on local ecosystems. But there is another problem that has been largely overlooked until now. When rain falls on the charred landscapes, it increases surface runoff and soil erosion that can last for decades, according to a new study published in Nature Geoscience.

What's the shape of water? In 2022, NASA launched the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite to answer this question by precisely measuring the height and extent of bodies of water. Virginia Tech geoscientists are using the same satellite to ask a related question: How is water shaping the land?

It is well known that discarded cigarette butts release nicotine, heavy metals and other toxins into the environment, including natural water systems. Less understood, however, is what happens to the plastic-based filters that shed these chemicals.

The long-term health of the ocean off the coast of Southern California, and the health of the region's freshwater streams and rivers and lakes, soon could hinge on the Trump administration's definition of a single word: ditch.

New research indicates that over 100,000 landslides were triggered by a single rainstorm.

Back in July 2023, the remnants of Typhoon Doksuri swept across northern China, bringing exceptional rainfall. I briefly covered this at the time, but there was a lack of clear information about the impacts.

A technical note has been published in the journal Landslides in the last few days (Xie et al. 2026) [this link should allow you to access the paper behind the paywall), which provides greater clarity on what occurred. And the picture is remarkable.

The authors have undertaken detailed mapping of the landslides triggered by Typhoon Doksuri, identifying 104,555 landslides. The authors describe this as “the largest rainfall-induced landslide event in North China to date”.

To give an idea if the scale of this event, the image below shows just a small part of the affected area, centred on [39.9530, 116.04518]. This is a Planet Labs image captured on 25 July 2023, just before the rainfall:-

Satellite image of a part of northern China before Typhoon Doksuri. Image copyright Planet Labs, captured on 25 July 2023, used with permission.

And here is the same area after Typhoon Doksuri:-

Satellite image of a part of northern China after Typhoon Doksuri. Image copyright Planet Labs, captured on 16 August 2023, used with permission.

And here is a slider to allow the images to be compared:-

Images copyright Planet Labs, used with permission.

The situation will be familiar to regular readers of this blog – intense rainfall has triggered multiple shallow landslides in steep terrain, which have then coalesced to form channelised debris flows with high mobility and a long runout. Note the way that these debris flows have entered the populated area – in some cases the damage looks very serious:-

Satellite image of a part of northern China after Typhoon Doksuri showing debris flows in populated areas. Image copyright Planet Labs, captured on 16 August 2023, used with permission.

These landslides were triggered by extreme rainfall – Xie et al. (2026) suggest that some areas received over 400 mm in a seven day period, and over 200 mm in 24 hours.

It was not the aim of this paper to consider the cost of these landslides, but this must have been substantial. A paper in Mandarin (Yang et al. 2023) on the meteorology of this event notes that:

“According to incomplete statistics (as of August 10, 2023), the continuous heavy rainfall affected 3.8886 million people in 110 counties (cities, districts) of Hebei Province, causing direct economic losses of 95.811 billion yuan, 29 deaths, and 16 missing persons. It is necessary to review and summarize the precipitation characteristics and weather causes of this event to provide a reference for forecasting extreme torrential rainstorms in North China.”

This translates to US$13.7 billion.

References
Xie, C., Huang, Y., Xu, C. et al. 2026. Over 100,000 landslides triggered by typhoon-induced rainfall in North China in July 2023. Landslides. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-026-02698-w

Yang, X. et al. 2023. Evolution characteristics and formation of the July 2023 severe torrential rain on the eastern foothills of Taihang mountains in Hebei Province.
Meteorological Monthly, 49, 1451-1467. (in Chinese). https://doi.org/10.7519/j.issn.1000-0526.2023.102301

Thanks as ever to the kind people at Planet Labs for providing access to their amazing imagery.

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.

On Wednesday, January 14, 2026, the coolest library on Earth was inaugurated at the Concordia station, Antarctica. Samples from glaciers rescued worldwide are now beginning to be stored there for safekeeping. This will allow, among other things, future generations to continue studying traces of past climates trapped under ice, as glaciers on every continent continue to thaw out at a fast pace.

As Earth warms due to climate change, oceans are heating up, becoming more acidic, and losing oxygen. These changes threaten marine life, food webs, and global fisheries. Scientists agree that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is essential, but current efforts are not enough to keep global warming below the 1.5–2 degrees Celsius targets set by the Paris Agreement. Because of this, researchers are exploring climate intervention strategies as possible additions to emissions cuts.

Intrinsic water-use efficiency (iWUE) reflects how efficiently plants assimilate carbon relative to water loss at the leaf level. While widely studied using carbon isotope and gas-exchange measurements, most existing knowledge is derived from local observations.

Curtin University researchers have demonstrated a new way to uncover the ancient history of Australia's landscapes, which could offer crucial insights into how our environment responds to geological processes and climate change and even where deposits of valuable minerals may be found.

Most people can imagine why a shrinking Great Salt Lake would mean unhealthy dust storms for the Wasatch Front, or why refilling the lake through water conservation could reduce dust exposure. Now, there is a data-based modeling tool to visualize it, hosted at the University of Utah's Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy.

Reliable predictions of how the Earth's climate will respond as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increase are based on climate models. These models, in turn, are based on data from past geological times in which the CO2 content in the Earth's atmosphere changed in a similar way to today and the near future. The data originate from measurable indicators (proxies), the interpretation of which is used to reconstruct the climate of the past.

While a wealth of nutrient export models exists, a knowledge gap persists regarding how climate and land-use changes specifically drive dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) export in subtropical catchments.

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

Asteroids, moons, and comets near Earth act like fossils from the time when our solar system first formed. In a new article, de Kleer et al. [2025] explain how a powerful telescope called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has changed the way scientists study these small worlds. ALMA can detect very weak thermal emission (heat) signals, allowing researchers to map the surface features of asteroids and accurately measure the masses of distant objects beyond Neptune, known as Kuiper Belt Objects.

ALMA is also used to study gases released by volcanic eruptions on Jupiter’s moon Io and probe the thick atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan. The review emphasizes the study of isotopes, which are slightly different forms of the same chemical element. These isotopes act like chemical fingerprints, helping scientists track how elements such as nitrogen and sulfur have changed over time. By comparing these local measurements with observations of young planetary systems around other stars, scientists can better understand how the ingredients for life survived the violent process of planet formation.

Citation: de Kleer, K., Brown, M. E., Cordiner, M., & Teague, R. (2025). Satellites and small bodies with ALMA: Insights into solar system formation and evolution. AGU Advances, 6, e2025AV001778. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV001778

—Xi Zhang, Editor, AGU Advances

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.

Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences

Human activities add large quantities of nitrogen to the environment, much of which gets washed into streams and rivers. These waterways transport some of that nitrogen to the oceans, but they also remove a significant portion of it through a process called denitrification: Microbes facilitate a series of chemical reactions that turn nitrate into dinitrogen gas, which is then released into the atmosphere.

Existing research, largely in streams, shows a wide range of denitrification rates, but the factors affecting this process aren’t fully quantified, especially in rivers. Pruitt et al. compared denitrification rates in a stream and a river across three seasons to study how the process varies across waterway scales.

The researchers took hourly water samples from the Tippecanoe River and the Shatto Ditch in Indiana over 36-hour periods in spring, summer, and fall. They used open-channel metabolism and a membrane inlet mass spectrometry–based model to study how rates of denitrification fluctuated in both waterways as the seasons changed. They found the stream had higher denitrification rates per square meter than the river in all seasons. They attribute this in part to higher nitrate levels in the stream, as well as a proportionally greater contribution of microbial activity on the streambed. However, when the researchers scaled up, the denitrification rate in rivers per kilometer of channel length was equal to or even higher than that of streams.

The researchers also observed different seasonal denitrification patterns. In the stream, denitrification rates were highest in spring and lower in summer and fall, whereas in the river, denitrification rates were highest in the fall, followed by spring, and very low in summer. Fertilizer application and higher precipitation rates in spring likely drive the stream dynamics, they suggest, whereas higher rates of ecosystem respiration increasing denitrifier activity in the fall may explain the pattern seen in the river.

Additionally, nitrogen gas concentrations varied by hour, the authors report, which could help explain the large range of rates found by previous studies. They recommend that future work use both the open-channel method and an in situ chamber assay and compare the two sampling methods. The authors also suggest that separating incomplete from complete denitrification could be valuable to explore the release of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere. (Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025JG009044, 2025)

—Nathaniel Scharping (@nathanielscharp), Science Writer

Citation: Scharping, N. (2026), Denitrification looks different in rivers versus streams, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260029. Published on 16 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.

Source: Global Biogeochemical Cycles

A critical part of Earth’s carbon cycle is the sinking of particulate organic material from the ocean’s surface to its depths. Much of that material is classified as “marine snow,” which is primarily made of snow-sized (>0.5 mm) detrital organic matter and phytoplankton.

Siegel et al. participated in a field campaign in the northeast Atlantic Ocean during the demise of the spring phytoplankton bloom during May 2021. They set out to observe how both physical processes, such as turbulence created by storms, and biological processes, such as consumption by animals and microbes, affected marine snow dynamics. The researchers used three research vessels, three instrumented gliders, a Lagrangian float, and 10 water-following surface drifters to measure the size distribution and characteristics of marine snow particles in the upper 500 meters of the water column.

The researchers found that near the ocean’s surface, turbulence induced by intense storms caused the breakdown of marine snow particles that later aggregated during calmer conditions. The succession of multiple storm events helped to foster the downward movement of marine snow through the water column. Below a depth of 200 meters, consumption by zooplankton and other organisms drove the removal of the snow particles and their breakdown into smaller ones. The combination of these processes affected how quickly particles sank through the water column and therefore the timescales over which the sinking organic carbon was sequestered from the atmosphere.

Over the course of the experiment, the researchers found that the marine snow particles became fluffier, larger, and more porous, and more marine snow appeared in the water column overall. Additionally, the average particle sinking velocity above 200 meters of depth increased from roughly 17 meters per day to almost 100 meters per day, likely attributable to the increase in the particle size of the marine snow aggregates.

The results highlight how both abiotic and biotic processes affect how marine snow moves through the water column. That understanding could have implications for how scientists quantify the effects of the ocean’s biological pump within the planet’s carbon cycle, the researchers say. (Global Biogeochemical Cycles, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025GB008676, 2025)

—Madeline Reinsel, Science Writer

Citation: Reinsel, M. (2026), Marine snow grows faster and fluffier as it sinks, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260030. Published on 16 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.

Scientists have discovered there is more to Antarctica than meets the eye. A new map of the landscape beneath the frozen continent's ice sheet has revealed a previously hidden world of mountains, deep canyons and rugged hills in unprecedented detail.

Editors’ Vox is a blog from AGU’s Publications Department.

Advancing our understanding of climate change and its impacts requires a multidisciplinary effort to generate, evaluate, and integrate reliable climate records at appropriate spatiotemporal scales. Reliable and traceable climate observations are essential for evidence-based climate governance.

Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) serve as the foundation for monitoring the Earth system. For instance, ECVs such as the Earth Radiation Budget and Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) provide critical information on energy exchanges within the Earth system, underpinning assessments of long-term variability and anthropogenic influences.

These variables are estimated from satellites, ground networks, and models, producing vast datasets whose usefulness depends not on size, but on quality, consistency, and careful integration. As measurement coverage is uneven, instruments differ in calibration, and techniques can yield conflicting results. Thus, transforming raw data into reliable information requires rigorous quality control and collaboration across scientific and technical disciplines.

International frameworks such as the WMO Integrated Global Observing System (WIGOS) set standards for measurement, documentation, uncertainty reporting, and open data sharing. These systems promote traceability and reliability—ensuring the ability to track how each data point was produced and processed—so that scientists can reproduce analyses and policymakers can trust the results. In addition, emerging approaches, including physics-informed Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL), enable enhanced detection of patterns, anomaly identification, and quality control in large, heterogeneous datasets. Thereby they are strengthening the role of ECVs in monitoring system integrity.

Moreover, geodetic observations of sea-level rise, cryospheric changes, and solid Earth deformation illustrate the key role of multidisciplinary ECV analysis. By providing a holistic understanding of environmental change, these data streams are foundational for developing next-generation predictive tools, including Earth’s Digital Twin, to monitor global and local dynamics.

In this context, the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) plays a key role by fostering global collaboration to develop interdisciplinary ECVs that are traceable and reliable. GCOS supports efforts to advance climate science by ensuring high-quality data, which is vital for informed climate action and adaptive policy development. Through innovation and interdisciplinary approaches, this framework enables more effective responses to the challenges posed by climate change.

This special collection serves as a venue for contributions that shed light on the role of continuous monitoring of ECVs, coupled with rigorous quality assurance, as a foundation for policy decisions, ultimately bridging the gap between technical observation and actionable climate governance. We especially welcome novel research that advances the methodologies required to demonstrate how robust, traceable data can empower society to build resilience against a changing climate. Contributions will include (but not be limited to) research into: best practices in observation, collection, and processing and curation of data. It can also include physics-informed machine and deep learning methods to identify relationships and feedback loops between atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere, as well as evidence-based policies and remediation measures.

This is a joint special collection between Earth and Space Science, JGR: Machine and Computation, and Earth’s Future. Manuscripts can be submitted to any of these journals depending on their fit with each journal aims and scope. Submissions are now open and welcome until 7 March 2027.

—Jean-Philippe Montillet (Jean-Philippe.Montillet@pmodwrc.ch, 0000-0001-7439-7862), Physikalisch-Meteorologisches Observatorium Davos World Radiation Center, Switzerland; Graziella Caprarelli (Graziella.Caprarelli@usq.edu.au, 0000-0001-9578-3228), University of Southern Queensland, Australia;  Gaël Kermarrec (0000-0001-5986-5269), Leibniz Universitat Hannover, Germany; CK Shum (0000-0001-9378-4067), Ohio State University, United States; Ehsan Forootan (0000-0003-3055-041X), Aalborg University, Denmark; Jan Sedlacek (0000-0002-6742-9130), Physikalisch-Meteorologisches Observatorium Davos World Radiation Center, Switzerland; Elizabeth Weatherhead (0000-0002-9252-4228), University of Colorado at Boulder, United States; Orhan Akyilmaz (0000-0002-8499-2654), Istanbul Technical University, Turkey; Wolfgang Finsterle (0000-0002-6672-7523), Physikalisch-Meteorologisches Observatorium Davos World Radiation Center, Switzerland; Yu Zhang, Ohio University, United States; Enrico Camporeale (0000-0002-7862-6383), University of Colorado Boulder, United States; and Kelly K. Caylor (0000-0002-6466-6448), University of California, Santa Barbara, United States

Citation: Montillet, J-P., G. Caprarelli, G. Kermarrec, CK. Shum, E. Forootan, J. Sedlacek, E. Weatherhead, O. Akyilmaz, W. Finsterle, Y. Zhang, E. Camporeale, and K. K. Caylor (2026), Bridging the gap: transforming reliable climate data into climate policy, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO265001. Published on 16 January 2026. This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author(s). 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.

Research reveals when and why ancient tropical seas transitioned from oxygen oases to marine dead zones, providing clues to the long-term evolution of oceanic environments.