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A new artificial intelligence (AI) model developed by Israeli researchers promises to revolutionize wildfire prediction, with a particular focus on lightning-induced blazes that are growing increasingly common due to climate change. The new AI model can predict where and when lightning strikes are most likely to cause wildfires, achieving more than 90% accuracy—a first in wildfire forecasting.

Eutrophication and oxygen depletion are well-known threats to the ecological balance of the Baltic Sea, which is increasingly under pressure due to climate change. In this context, large saltwater inflows from the North Sea play a crucial role. They transport oxygen-rich water into the deeper layers of the Baltic Sea, counteracting oxygen deficiency and so-called dead zones.

An international study led by the University of Eastern Finland and the Finnish Meteorological Institute has demonstrated that the formation and properties of lower-atmosphere clouds are highly sensitive to changes in atmospheric aerosol concentrations.

A research team, led by Professor Sung-Deuk Choi from the Department of Civil, Urban, Earth, and Environmental Engineering at UNIST, has developed a novel assessment technique to accurately identify the sources and spatial-temporal distribution of atmospheric mercury. The study has been published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials.

For decades, satellites have played a crucial role in our understanding of the remote polar regions. The ongoing loss of Antarctic ice, due to the climate crisis, is, sadly, no longer surprising. However, satellites do more than just track the accelerating flow of glaciers toward the ocean and measure ice thickness.

The El Niño and Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is one of the most influential interannual climate phenomena in the global ocean-atmospheric system, with profound impacts on weather patterns, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region.

The year may have started with a dry spell, but the end of California's storm season has brought more fresh snow to the Sierra Nevada, pushing the state's snowpack to 96% of average on April 1, when the snow season typically reaches its peak.

Estimates of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from volcanoes may have been significantly underestimated, according to new research by The University of Manchester.

When Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai, an underwater volcano near Tonga in the South Pacific Ocean, erupted in 2022, scientists expected that it would spew enough water vapor into the stratosphere to push global temperatures past the 1.5 C threshold set by the Paris Accords. A new UCLA-led study shows that not only did the eruption not warm the planet, but it actually reduced temperatures over the Southern Hemisphere by 0.1 C.

In a gliding avalanche, the entire snowpack slides down a suitable substratum such as grass or slabs of rock. Such avalanches are always released naturally. This requires the snow on the ground to become moist. In winter, this happens from below, when residual heat from summer is still stored in the ground.

Researchers have made a new discovery that changes our understanding of Earth's early geological history, challenging beliefs about how our continents formed and when plate tectonics began.

People along the densely populated Pacific coasts are exposed to strongly fluctuating rainfall patterns: In East Asia, heavy rain falls in summer, and flooding is already one of the climate risks in this region today. The western U.S., on the other hand, is often hit by extreme drought in summer, and the question of how much precipitation the winter will bring is fundamental to appropriate preventive measures.

Mountain snowpacks accumulate snow throughout the winter, building up stores of water that will supply communities across the American West throughout the long dry season.

An international team of geoscientists, marine geologists, climatologists, and environmental specialists has found that lingering El Niño events have increased in frequency over the past 7,000 years. In their study published in Nature Geoscience, the group analyzed oxygen isotopes trapped in Pacific Ocean corals and used the findings to create a simulation showing occurrences of El Niño events and their lengths over time.

Coal-fired power plants in India—responsible for generating 73.4% of the country’s electricity—are bad for the country’s wheat. A new study shows that nitrogen dioxide (NO2) emitted from the plants can affect agricultural productivity on farms up to 100 kilometers away and reduce crop yields for wheat and rice in particular.

“Our primary finding here is that nitrogen dioxide emissions from the coal electricity generation sector are associated with meaningful crop loss in certain parts of India.”

Farms across the states of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal are especially vulnerable to NO2 emissions. Research indicated that annual crop yield losses in these states exceeded 10% over what was expected between 2011 and 2020.

“Our primary finding here is that nitrogen dioxide emissions from the coal electricity generation sector are associated with meaningful crop loss in certain parts of India,” said Kirat Singh, one of the study authors and a Ph.D. student at the Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford University.

Making the Model

To understand the relationship between coal plant emissions and crop productivity, Singh and his fellow researchers gathered data on the presence of nitrogen dioxide from the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) on board the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite. They integrated other satellite data on vegetation as well as datasets on electricity generation and weather.

The scientists were ultimately confronted with the challenge of teasing apart the source of the gas. “We built a model to determine what portion of total can be linked to emissions from coal power plants,” Singh said. The model uses changes in wind direction to try to isolate pollution that can be linked to emissions from specific sources, he explained.

The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, show that in certain regions heavily exposed to coal emissions, yields are more than 10% lower than they would have been in the absence of emissions from coal-fired power plants.

Agricultural Benefits for Improving Air Quality

This is a case of direct toxicity, said Jennifer Burney, a professor of environmental social sciences and Earth system science at Stanford’s Doerr School who was not involved in the study. “The plant might be taking [NO2] in through stomata or protecting itself against it by not respiring,” said Burney, who has conducted several studies assessing the impact of air pollution on agriculture.

In addition to acting as a toxin itself, nitrogen oxide is also one of the precursors of ground-level ozone, a major component of smog, according to Lisa Emberson, an environmental pollution biologist in the Department of Environment and Geography at the University of York. “Ozone is formed as sunlight drives chemical reactions between nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds such as methane,” she said. In her own research, Emberson has found that ozone pollution also affects the nutritional content of grains.

The study strengthens the links between air quality and India’s food security and economic progress, its authors conclude. “For Indian policymakers and regulators, these findings mean that there are potentially very substantial, and previously unaccounted-for, agricultural benefits from improving air quality through controlling emissions at coal power plants,” Singh said.

—Pragathi Ravi (@pragathi_r24), Science Writer

Citation: Ravi, P. (2025), Emissions from coal-fired power plants may lower crop yields in India, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250120. Published on 2 April 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.

Researchers have found salts in samples from asteroid Ryugu. Combined with similar salty discoveries from asteroid Bennu, the finding suggests that aqueous incubators of life’s first ingredients may have been relatively common in the early solar system.

Astrochemists have found sugars and nucleotide bases outside of Earth before, but an extraterrestrial environment in which these ingredients could combine—and possibly create life—remained elusive. The salts lifted from the two asteroids are evidence that just such an incubator (salty liquid water) existed in the early solar system.

The results from Ryugu were reported in Nature Astronomy in November 2024, and those from Bennu were reported in January 2025. The parallel discoveries paint a compelling picture of the early solar system.

“We can now say, for the first time, that 4.5 billion years ago—long before most of us thought it could happen—we had both the ingredients and the environment in which the early stages of organic evolution towards life could begin,” said Tim McCoy, a curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History who studied the Bennu samples. Such evolution “didn’t happen on a large, icy moon or a large, warm planet like Earth. It was actually happening in asteroids at the birth of the solar system. From day one of the solar system, we were seeing this organic evolution.”

Avoiding the Elements

Meteorites, typically fragments of larger space rocks, are exposed to moisture as they fall to Earth. When this happens, any water-soluble materials they may have had react and disappear. The atmosphere, McCoy said, is “actually removing some of what was there to start with.” That means meteorites themselves are not always reliable for studying whether their parent bodies contained water.

Two recent space missions sought to bring back regolith directly from asteroids. JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Hayabusa2 visited Ryugu in 2019, returning samples in 2020. NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) collected samples of Bennu in 2020 and returned to Earth in 2023.

“Meteorites have been studied for about 150 years. But nobody had found such kind of salts, so we are surprised.”

Most researchers think common, carbon-rich asteroids like Ryugu and Bennu, known as C-type asteroids, contain water and organic material left over from the formation of the solar system.

Toru Matsumoto, an astromaterials scientist from Kyoto University, and his colleagues found thin white veins in tiny samples from Ryugu. Using electron microscopy and radiation X-ray analysis, they identified the minerals and their chemical compositions.

The Ryugu sample showed a composition remarkably similar to that of samples from Bennu. Both asteroids contain clays, iron oxides, iron sulfides, and carbonates, suggesting they were altered by water.

The Ryugu samples also contained sodium carbonate salts. “Meteorites have been studied for about 150 years,” Matsumoto said. “But nobody had found such kind of salts, so we are surprised.”

Aqueous Evidence

Salty water provides a unique environment for the development of life. A sodium-rich solution with minimal calcium allows phosphate to stay in the solution, which is important because phosphate combined with sugar forms the backbone of RNA and DNA. Sodium-rich solutions can also catalyze chemical reactions between organics and precipitate minerals that act as templates for those reactions.

Evaporite salts such as sodium carbonate are the last minerals to precipitate out of salty water. Their presence on Ryugu suggests that “there were really large volumes of water on this asteroid, which is kind of weird, because it’s a small rock floating in space, so it’s not going to have [an] actual ocean on it,” said Prajkta Mane, a planetary scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Texas who was not involved with the research.

“These two sample sets really provide our first glimpse of a portion of the solar system that was previously poorly sampled.”

“In order to get something like these evaporites, you have to have a pocket of water that’s evaporating,” McCoy said. “I don’t think we had any proof of that before, and now we do.”

That samples from both Bennu and Ryugu contain salts suggests that watery environments were common in the outer solar system, where the asteroids’ parent bodies likely formed. “Processes that occurred on one likely occurred on many or most similar asteroids, and likely [on] icy moons,” McCoy said. The salts resemble those recently discovered on the dwarf planet Ceres and on icy moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, which likely host subsurface oceans.

“These two sample sets really provide our first glimpse of a portion of the solar system that was previously poorly sampled,” McCoy said.

—Molly Herring (@mollyherring.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Herring, M. (2025), Asteroid samples suggest a solar system of ancient, salty incubators, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250122. Published on 2 April 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.

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

Climate models predict that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) – a major conveyor-like system of ocean currents in the Atlantic – will weaken under global warming scenarios, causing major shifts in climate patterns. To build confidence in these projections, it is valuable to test how capable the models are at capturing past AMOC behavior.

One method used for reconstructing the strength of the AMOC over the past 100,000 years has been the measurement of the ratio of protactinium (231Pa) to thorium (230Th) isotopes preserved in seafloor sediments that have built up, layer-upon-layer, over time. Although often simplistically linked to changes in AMOC strength, the 231Pa/230Th ratio preserved in deep-sea sediments is controlled by a vast array of biogeochemical, sedimentological, and oceanographic factors.

Scheen et al. [2025] take an important step forward by modeling the behavior of these isotopes in an Earth system model of intermediate complexity that includes many of the key environmental processes affecting these isotopes. Their results largely support the traditional interpretation of some of the iconic 231Pa/230Th records, but they also reveal the sometimes-counterintuitive behavior of this proxy system, thus cautioning us to recognize its full complexity. The results are also used to suggest optimal locations for developing new 231Pa/230Th reconstructions. The model presented by the authors should not be treated as the final word, since – necessarily – it is still a simplified representation of a very complex system, yet they are to be commended for advancing our interpretation of a proxy system oft viewed as a key tool for constraining past AMOC behavior. 

Citation: Scheen, J., Lippold, J., Pöppelmeier, F., Süfke, F., & Stocker, T. F. (2025). Promising regions for detecting the overturning circulation in Atlantic 231Pa/230Th: A model-data comparison. Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, 40, e2024PA004869. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024PA004869

—David Thornalley, Associate Editor, Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology

Text © 2024. 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.

A simulation on the origin and evolution of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) has been conducted by a PKU research team led by Nie Ji, Associate Professor of the School of Physics; and Hu Yongyun, Dean of the Institute of Ocean Research, along with a research team from National Natural Science Foundation of China.

The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides.

In March 2025, I recorded 37 fatal landslides globally (excluding those triggered by earthquakes), costing 90 lives. The 2004-2016 average number of fatal landslides in March reported by Froude and Petley (2018) was 28.3 landslides, so 2025 is running considerably above the long term mean. However, it is lower that the total recorded for 2024 (49 landslides).

As usual, the best way to present the data is using pentads – five day blocks. Pentad 18 extends to the end of March. This is the cumulative total number of fatal landslides for 2025, with the 2004-2016 average and 2024 plotted for comparison:-

The cumulative total number of fatal landslides for 2025 by pentad, with 2024 and 2004-2016 for comparison. Author’s own data, published under a CC licence.

As the data shows, towards the end of the winter, 2025 was plotting above 2024. However, this has now changed, although the difference is small. 2024 was characterised by a marked increase around at pentad 23 (which starts on 21 April), reflecting the start of the rainy season in the key parts of the Northern Hemisphere, so April 2025 will be very interesting. In general, this acceleration in landslide rate does not start until about pentad 30 (which starts on 26 May).

I also recorded one fatal landslide triggered by an earthquake, which occurred in Hutabarat village, North Sumatra, Indonesia, triggered by a M = 5.6 earthquake. Two people were killed. An unknown number of people may also have been killed by landslides in the earthquake and its aftershocks in Myanmar, but this is very uncertain.

Particularly notable in March 2025 has been a series of landslides, alongside flooding, in Ecuador. This has had a high social cost.

As always, I am happy for others to use this fatal landslide data and the figure, but please attribute to me and cite Froude and Petley (2018). Contact me if you want the data for 2004-2016.

Reference

Froude M.J. and Petley D.N. 2018. Global fatal landslide occurrence from 2004 to 2016. Natural Hazards and Earth System Science 18, 2161-2181. https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-18-2161-2018

Return to The Landslide Blog homepage Text © 2023. 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.

Researchers have discovered that the underside of the North American continent is dripping away in blobs of rock—and that the remnants of a tectonic plate sinking in Earth's mantle may be the reason why.