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Rock-ice avalanche flume experiments reveal a non-linear hillslope erosion rule governed by ice-content

Earth and Planetary Science Letters - Tue, 08/26/2025 - 19:10

Publication date: 15 October 2025

Source: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 668

Author(s): Xuanmei Fan, Liyang Jiang, Junhan Du, John D. Jansen, Yu Deng, Qiang Xu

High-resolution record of global cooling during a large Mississippian positive carbon isotope excursion

Earth and Planetary Science Letters - Tue, 08/26/2025 - 19:10

Publication date: 15 October 2025

Source: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 668

Author(s): Noah T. Anderson, Kristin D. Bergmann, Matthew G. Braun, Elizabeth M. Griffith, Matthew R. Saltzman

Modern-like seawater δ<sup>18</sup>O in the mesoproterozoic: Insights from triple oxygen isotopes of chert

Earth and Planetary Science Letters - Tue, 08/26/2025 - 19:10

Publication date: 15 October 2025

Source: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 668

Author(s): Bokai Dai, Chenqing Li, Haoran Ma, Bing Shen, Yongbo Peng, Xiaobin Cao

Experimental constraints on the shock history of CI chondrites and Ryugu grains

Earth and Planetary Science Letters - Tue, 08/26/2025 - 19:10

Publication date: 15 October 2025

Source: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 668

Author(s): Toru Nakahashi, Masaaki Miyahara, Akira Yamaguchi, Takamichi Kobayashi, Hitoshi Yusa, Masashi Miyakawa, Naotaka Tomioka, Yuto Takaki, Takaaki Noguchi, Toru Matsumoto, Akira Miyake, Yohei Igami, Yusuke Seto

Highly oxidized exogenous materials in Chang’e 6 sample returned from the lunar farside South Pole-Aitken basin

Earth and Planetary Science Letters - Tue, 08/26/2025 - 19:10

Publication date: 15 October 2025

Source: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 668

Author(s): Haiyang Xian, Shan Li, Yiping Yang, Jianxi Zhu, Xiaoju Lin, Jiaxin Xi, Wenlin Yang, Yao Xiao, Yonghua Cao, Chenyi Zhao, Miaomiao Zhang, Le Zhang, Yanqiang Zhang, Akira Tsuchiyama, Mang Lin, Hongping He, Yi-Gang Xu

New pressure-temperature-time constraints on initial India-Asia collision from eastern Himalayan syntaxis eclogite-facies metamorphic rocks

Earth and Planetary Science Letters - Tue, 08/26/2025 - 19:10

Publication date: 15 October 2025

Source: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 668

Author(s): WangChao Li, Qiang Wang, Richard M. Palin, Long Zhang, XiuZheng Zhang, Weiwei Xue, Tongyu Huang, Erkun Xue

Decoupling short- and long-term methane seepage dynamics: high-resolution insights from <em>Pyrgo</em> spp. δ¹³C records at Woolsey Mound, Gulf of Mexico

Earth and Planetary Science Letters - Tue, 08/26/2025 - 19:10

Publication date: 15 October 2025

Source: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 668

Author(s): G. Babineaux, D. Oppo, G. Panieri, K. Thirumalai, L. Macelloni

Subsurface structure of a buried Eratosthenian crater on the far-side of the Moon

Earth and Planetary Science Letters - Tue, 08/26/2025 - 19:10

Publication date: 15 October 2025

Source: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 668

Author(s): Ling Zhang, Chunyang Zhao, Xintong Dong, Shaoping Lu, Yi Xu, Yuqi Qian, Shuo Han, Zhijun Huo, Rui Gao

The complexity of water freezing under reduced atmospheric pressure

Earth and Planetary Science Letters - Tue, 08/26/2025 - 19:10

Publication date: 15 October 2025

Source: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 668

Author(s): Petr Brož, Vojtěch Patočka, Frances Butcher, Matthew Sylvest, Manish Patel

Thermodynamics of Fe-S-O-C-H liquids: Implications for the Martian core

Earth and Planetary Science Letters - Tue, 08/26/2025 - 19:10

Publication date: 15 October 2025

Source: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 668

Author(s): Jac van Driel, Lidunka Vočadlo, John Brodholt

Electrostatic detachment of dust from the lunar surface: Microscopic fluctuations could be the key

Earth and Planetary Science Letters - Tue, 08/26/2025 - 19:10

Publication date: 15 October 2025

Source: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 668

Author(s): Trinesh Sana, S.K. Mishra

Garnet as a reliable timekeeper in Archean polymetamorphic terranes

Earth and Planetary Science Letters - Tue, 08/26/2025 - 19:10

Publication date: 15 October 2025

Source: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 668

Author(s): Jonas Kaempf, Chris Clark, Tim E. Johnson, Mudlappa Jayananda, Martin Hand, Krishnan Sajeev

An abrupt change in source materials for Chinese loess deposits at the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary: Insights from K isotopes and modeling

Earth and Planetary Science Letters - Tue, 08/26/2025 - 19:10

Publication date: 15 October 2025

Source: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 668

Author(s): Jun Mu, Jiawei Da, Hu Yang, Junfeng Ji, Lianwen Liu, Weiqiang Li

Editorial Board

Earth and Planetary Science Letters - Tue, 08/26/2025 - 19:10

Publication date: 15 October 2025

Source: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Volume 668

Author(s):

Tiny marine protist shells reveal clues for how ice ages start

Phys.org: Earth science - Tue, 08/26/2025 - 16:40
What leads to lower atmospheric CO2 during ice ages is a question that has puzzled scientists for decades, and it is one that UConn Department of Marine Sciences Ph.D. student Monica Garity and co-authors are working to understand. By looking at patterns of carbon storage in the deep ocean, the researchers shed new light on this decades-old question. Their results are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Simpler models can outperform deep learning at climate prediction

Phys.org: Earth science - Tue, 08/26/2025 - 16:04
Environmental scientists are increasingly using enormous artificial intelligence models to make predictions about changes in weather and climate, but a new study by MIT researchers shows that bigger models are not always better.

Extreme heat could become a regular feature of New Zealand's summers by the 2050s

Phys.org: Earth science - Tue, 08/26/2025 - 15:54
New research has revealed New Zealand is on track for a major spike in extreme heat, with heat waves that currently hit once a decade potentially striking every other summer.

Fallout from the Fires

EOS - Tue, 08/26/2025 - 13:49
From Devastation to Data

Some effects of wildfire are immediately apparent: burned vegetation, smoldering ruins, dissipating smoke. As such, the massive Palisades and Eaton Fires cut charred wakes through western Los Angeles County that remain long after firefighters contained the blazes earlier this year.

This month, we shadow geoscientists investigating the fires’ less tangible, if no less serious, consequences for regional air, soil, and water quality.

Where There’s Fire, There’s Smoke,” writes Emily Dieckman in her profile of air quality following the fires—and where there’s smoke, there are particulates, including organic compounds, toxic chemicals, and hazardous dust and ash.

For Earth scientists, the liminal space between what is urban and what is wild is crucial for understanding postfire debris flows and the ground below. As profiled by Kimberly Cartier, these researchers consider the L.A. fires to be a case study of “how this urban-rural interface is changing and what…recovery looks like.”

Watersheds, those ever-changing interfaces between earth and water, are no less fraught, writes Grace van Deelen in “Scrambling to Study Smoke on the Water.” Scientists are documenting how ash-laden runoff is changing, if only ephemerally, both freshwater and marine ecosystems.

Perhaps the most elusive and powerful consequences of the fires are their effects on human health. And in places like Los Angeles, writes Dieckman, “Access to Air-Conditioning May Affect Wildfire-Related Health Outcomes.” The L.A. fires are yet another test case for extreme events augmented by a warming climate. The importance of thoughtful, science-based policy has never been more relevant for the health of both our planet and ourselves.

—Caryl-Sue Micalizio, Editor in Chief

Citation: Micalizio, C.-S. (2025), Fallout from the fires, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250311. Published on 26 August 2025. Text © 2025. 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.

When Disaster Science Strikes Close to Home

EOS - Tue, 08/26/2025 - 13:48
From Devastation to Data

Over 24 days in January, the Eaton and Palisades fires burned nearly 38,000 acres of Los Angeles County. Whole neighborhoods were destroyed, 29 people died, and thousands were displaced. The conditions that led to the fires were estimated to be 35% more likely because of climate change, and damage to public and private infrastructure made the blazes among the costliest wildfire disasters in U.S. history.

In the wake of the fires, multiple local, state, and federal disaster response agencies mobilized to contain the flames, document dangers, and communicate those findings to the public. Agencies’ emergency response playbooks are tried and tested and often require interagency cooperation.

Within this massive, coordinated effort in postfire monitoring and response, where have non-agency scientists with relevant skills and a desire to help fit in?

This is a question Michael Lamb has wrestled with this year. Lamb is a geomorphologist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena who was evacuated from his home and left without power for several days when the Eaton Fire tore through Altadena.

Lamb, who researched debris flow patterns after the 2009 Station Fire in the Angeles National Forest, wondered how to apply his knowledge to help with this latest disaster, and whether he should. He worried that members of his lab group, by inserting themselves into the disaster response apparatus, might inadvertently confuse official communications or make it harder for first responders to do their jobs.

“We don’t want to take time away [from agency scientists], especially when they’re in the middle of the emergency management part of work,” Lamb said.

Lamb wasn’t alone in his concern, or in his desire to help. The areas of Los Angeles County affected by the Palisades and Eaton fires are home to a high concentration of scientists who work or study at the area’s many scientific institutions. Some of them study fires and fire impacts and realized they could help, while many outside that niche were surprised to find that their work might have new, immediate applications close to home.

Scientists Spot Need

When the Palisades Fire was still burning in early January, Adit Ghosh watched the coverage at home on television. Ghosh, an Earth science graduate student at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, had helped evacuate his in-laws and some of his friends from at-risk areas and couldn’t go in to work because campus was closed.

“They were showing the fires nonstop,” Ghosh recalled of news reports. In one broadcast, the camera zoomed in on a house in Mandeville Canyon near Topanga State Park. “I saw it on TV catching fire and then burning to the ground.”

“He took us to this house. Then it clicked. This is the house that I saw burning on TV.”

By the third week in January, Ghosh was back in his geochemistry class. His adviser, who works closely with the professor teaching the course, suggested a way for Ghosh and his fellow graduate students to contribute to the ongoing efforts to understand contamination in water runoff. They were eager to help in whatever ways they could.

That weekend, Ghosh went out with a team of other USC students to collect water runoff in burned areas. They hoped to analyze the samples for chemicals that might prove harmful to human and environmental health. A helpful resident showed the team around the burned area, pointing out places they might collect samples from.

A home burned by the Palisades Fire. Credit: Adit Ghosh

“He took us to this house,” Ghosh said. “Then it clicked. This is the house that I saw burning on TV.”

The postfire landscape and environmental conditions can change rapidly. Many scientists felt a sense of urgency to collect samples of ash, dust, soil, and water, as well as to study sediment and debris built up along the mountainside, because much of these data are considered “perishable,” Lamb explained.

In an area burned by the Palisades Fire, a University of Southern California student collects water runoff from a drainpipe. Credit: Adit Ghosh

Lamb’s team rushed to obtain flight permits and conduct drone flyovers of debris channels along the San Gabriel Mountains above Altadena. Knowing that weather reports anticipated rain soon after the fires, debris flow researchers wanted to obtain postfire, prerain lidar scans of the channels’ topographies to better understand how debris accumulates and what conditions can trigger dangerous flows.

If measurements weren’t taken quickly enough, information about immediate postfire impacts could be washed away. They shared their results with disaster response agencies and affected communities.

Serendipitous Science

In the wake of such a disaster, doing something, anything, to help others can be a powerful tool of healing and recovery.

“As soon as they were safe, people really wanted to contribute,” said Kimberley Miner, a climate scientist and representative of NASA’s Disasters Response Coordination System (DRCS) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. NASA and JPL coordinated to fly the Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer 3 (AVIRIS-3) instrument to survey damage immediately after the fire.

The first AVIRIS-3 flight on 11 January was serendipitous, explained Robert Green, principal investigator for AVIRIS-3 at JPL. The instrument had already been installed on a plane and approved to fly over a completely different area. The team was able to divert the flight path to cover the Eaton burn area instead.

“There were folks working out of hotel rooms [on all of that imagery] while they were evacuated.”

“There were folks working out of hotel rooms while they were evacuated,” Miner said. On some science teams, only one or two people had not been displaced.

The AVIRIS team has been on the scene after some of the most infamous disasters in modern U.S. history. The team flew an earlier version of the instrument over the ruins of the World Trade Center after the terrorist attack on 11 September 2001 to look for asbestos and residual hot spots burning under the rubble. After the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, AVIRIS-3 data yielded the first estimates of how much oil had been released into the Gulf of Mexico.

Even in the context of those disasters, Green said that flying over the L.A. burn scars was “heartbreaking and poignant.”

“It’s especially poignant, I would say, because it is a local disaster,” Green said. “But for 9/11, the Gulf oil spill, or wherever we contribute, our team is committed to offer information via this unique spectroscopy to be helpful.”

The first AVIRIS-3 flyover provided some of the first aerial data assessing the scope of the fires. NASA’s DRCS provided those data to federal and state disaster response teams, and those data helped justify and expedite approval for subsequent flyovers.

Getting Involved but Not Being in the Way

As official emergency responders worked to contain the fires and rapidly document the damage, collecting samples from the air, ground, rivers, or ocean outside of those efforts presented logistical quandaries.

The USC team that Ghosh worked with to collect water runoff samples had been organized within his department and went out on its own volition. But getting to sample sites was a challenge.

“We’re trying to focus on whatever we can get our hands on, essentially, because access is really hard,” he said earlier this year. In some burned areas where runoff sampling would have yielded important science results, for example, the National Guard had restricted access to prevent looting.

“Even in sites that are open, the residents still didn’t really want us hanging around over there. And understandably, because their house almost burnt down,” Ghosh said. When members of his team encountered resistance from residents, he said, they respectfully moved to another location.

“Something that we can try to help with more as research scientists is to think about real forward-looking measurements.”

Lamb said that his research group considered a broad range of science that they might contribute before contacting government agencies operating in the area. “We reached out via email to people…leading debris flow hazard teams and just said, ‘We are interested in helping. These are some of the capabilities we have. We also don’t want to get in the way. Please let us know if this can be of help.’”

Lamb’s team was told it could help by monitoring the accumulation of sediment and debris in ravines on the slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains, and they gained approval to fly drones over certain landslide-prone areas. Those aerial lidar measurements will be helpful in assessing the ongoing risk of debris flows and landslides and also in monitoring for future hazards.

“Emergency managers and the federal agencies are mostly tasked with trying to deal with the immediate situation,” Lamb said. “Whereas something that we can try to help with more as research scientists is to think about real forward-looking measurements.”

Their lidar flights focused on areas of burned mountainside rather than on urban areas. “It’s sad to say, but in some of the areas that were really devastated by the fires, there aren’t homes there [anymore] to be damaged by the debris flows,” Lamb said.

Working with Their Communities

The public messaging that agencies provide is critical for residents to find out about the immediate risks they face, but non-agency scientists also have found ways to engage these communities deeper in the scientific discoveries that are helping them stay safe.

As crews started containing the fires, scientists at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLA) recognized the need to collect and analyze samples of the ash, not only for the immediate emergency response but also to curate a catalog that scientists could use for longer-term and future studies. Because they have a small staff, the museum’s team solicited community members for ash samples rather than going in to the field themselves.

“They just lost their homes. They want to be treated with respect.”

“We didn’t want to reach out right away, because that would appear as insensitive and not really caring about the people but rather more caring about the science,” said Aaron Celestian, curator of mineral sciences at NHMLA. But once it started raining, they couldn’t wait any longer.

The museum’s community science team approached their existing community partners about collecting ash and found that people were already doing it themselves. The team pivoted, instead showing people how to collect ash without risking personal health or contaminating the samples.

“We didn’t want anybody to do anything that would have any kind of health effects on them long term,” Celestian said. “We had to develop a protocol that could be understood by the community at large, and so that we get the best kind of science out of it in the end.”

Celestian analyzed his first sample on 27 January, measuring the chemical composition of forest ash. He plans to compare the results with those from urban ash.

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County mineral sciences curator Aaron Celestian prepares one of the collected ash samples for total element analysis to reveal its chemical composition. The whole process takes about 2 hours. Credit: Aaron Celestian/Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County

Then came the question of how to communicate the results. Celestian and the museum’s communications team came up with a two-pronged approach. First and foremost, they consulted with the community member who sent in the ash sample. “They get to decide on how they want their samples to be treated and communicated with everybody else,” Celestian said.

With a resident’s permission, the ash sample was entered into a museum collection for other scientists to check out and analyze. They received 11 samples for the collection.

“Even though I’m collecting the data, it really is their property,” Celestian said. “That’s a big part of making them feel comfortable, making them feel confident in the results.”

“They just lost their homes,” he emphasized. “They want to be treated with respect,” he said, adding that the samples “are really like a family member’s ashes.”

At the same time, Celestian recognized the importance of transparency and that timely information can not only protect people but also help them feel confident in their safety. He began live-streaming his analysis on social media and his blog using anonymized samples.

“People want to know,” Celestian said.

Lamb’s group took a similar approach. They shared their lidar data directly with emergency response managers so they could be incorporated into official responses. They also communicated directly with the public. Lamb had been scheduled to give a public science talk in late January, and he decided to center the science of postfire debris flows.

“I was going to talk about something completely different, and I changed the topic last minute because of this very heightened community interest in understanding what’s happening in the mountains,” Lamb said. Nearly 900 people showed up to listen.

Strong, and Mixed, Emotions

Having a way to help after a disaster—whether through distributing supplies or figuring out whether playground soil has elevated lead levels—can aid community recovery and empower personal healing. In some, it can also evoke a sense of duty.

“I think we have a responsibility to use our skill sets to help the greater Los Angeles area where we live,” Ghosh said. Logically, he knew that sampling water runoff and analyzing it for harmful chemicals is an important part of postfire recovery. But sometimes, it didn’t feel like enough.

“You go up there and you’re collecting water, and people have almost lost their homes,” Ghosh said. “It feels like, ‘Why the hell are you collecting water?’ It may not seem in the moment as important a thing to do. I definitely felt that.”

Studying the risks from these fires “does feel more personal.”

Some residents questioned what the sampling team was doing and whether they were focusing on the right problems. “But we also had neighbors who were like, ‘Thank you so much for doing this, coming out and helping us understand whether we can drink our water, or whether it’s safe to be out,’” Ghosh said. “In fact, some people even let us in to their house, and [we] collected tap water from their house.” Ghosh and his colleagues shared the results of those in-home water tests directly with the homeowners when they got them.

“It’s a lot of mixed emotions,” he added.

Studying the risks from these fires “does feel more personal” for local scientists, Lamb said. “We know people that live in those areas. There’s faculty from Caltech and graduate students that live there, and postdocs and friends. It’s very close to where we live and work. It certainly adds more motivation to try to do anything that we can to help.”

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@AstroKimCartier), Staff Writer

Citation: Cartier, K. M. S. (2025), When disaster science strikes close to home, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250315. Published on 26 August 2025. Text © 2025. 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.

Where There’s Fire, There’s Smoke

EOS - Tue, 08/26/2025 - 13:41
From Devastation to Data

Gale Sinatra and her husband fled their Altadena, Calif., home on 7 January with little more than overnight bags, taking just one of their two cars.

“We thought we were going to be gone overnight,” Sinatra said. “We thought they’d get the fire under control and we’d get back in.”

When the couple did return, weeks later, it was to dig through the rubble of their former home, burned to the ground by the Eaton Fire.

Though they escaped with their lives, health hazards were not behind Sinatra, her husband (who chose not to be named for this story), and others from their neighborhood. The Eaton and nearby Palisades fires filled the Los Angeles Basin with a toxic haze for days, and cleanup efforts threatened to loft charred particles long after the fires were out.

Teams of scientists from across the country, along with community members, monitored air quality in the weeks following the fire, seeking to learn more about respiratory health risks and inform community members about how to protect themselves.

Urban Fires Versus Wildfires

Inhaling smoke from any fire can be harmful. Smoke contains hazardous components, including volatile organic compounds (VOCs), emitted by burning vegetation and products such as paint and cleaning supplies; and particulate matter, such as dust and soot.

About 90% of the particulate matter (PM) in wildfire smoke is PM2.5, or particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter—small enough to enter the bloodstream and deep areas of the lungs.

These instruments are used by Michael Kleeman to monitor air quality from the back of a car in Victory Park in Altadena, as far north as he can go in the area without entering the evacuation zone. Credit: Michael Kleeman

Urban wildfires present their own dangers, because they burn not just through trees and other vegetation but through homes and infrastructure as well.

When Sinatra returned to her former home, she was struck by everything the fire had burned, from her jewelry to her car. “I just found it very eerie standing in my kitchen, going, ‘Where’s my refrigerator?’” she said. “How do you melt an entire refrigerator?”

In January 2025, the Palisades and Eaton fires ravaged more than 150 square kilometers across cities and wildlands in Los Angeles County. Even as they were personally affected, LA-area scientists worked diligently to understand how fires at the urban-wildland interface create unique hazards via air, land, and water.

In the future, hot and dry conditions enhanced by climate change will continue to raise the risks of fires like these. The work of these scientists can provide a blueprint for rapid hazard assessment, health risk mitigation, and urban planning in other fire-prone communities.

In January 2025, the Palisades and Eaton fires ravaged more than 150 square kilometers across cities and wildlands in Los Angeles County. Even as they were personally affected, LA-area scientists worked diligently to understand how fires at the urban-wildland interface create unique hazards via air, land, and water.

In the future, hot and dry conditions enhanced by climate change will continue to raise the risks of fires like these. The work of these scientists can provide a blueprint for rapid hazard assessment, health risk mitigation, and urban planning in other fire-prone communities.

“From mattresses to carpets to paint to electronics, everything like that burns,” said Roya Bahreini, an environmental scientist at the University of California, Riverside (UCR). Bahreini is also co–principal investigator of the Atmospheric Science and Chemistry Measurement Network (ASCENT), a long-term air quality monitoring project led by the Georgia Institute of Technology, UCR, and the University of California, Davis (UC Davis).

ASCENT, which launched in 2021, has stations across the country, including three in Southern California. During the January fires in Los Angeles, which tore through not only Altadena (an unincorporated inland community) but also neighborhoods along the coast, these stations detected levels of lead, chlorine, and bromine at orders of magnitude higher than usual.

Older houses sometimes have lead paint, asbestos ceilings, or wooden decks and fences treated with preservatives containing arsenic. PVC piping contains chlorine. And flame retardant often contains brominated organic compounds. In these forms, such materials don’t necessarily pose a high risk to human health. But when they are burned and released to the air, they can be dangerous.

Smoke plumes from the Palisades Fire (left) and the Eaton Fire are seen from space on 9 January. Credit: ESA, contains modified Copernicus Sentinel dataCC ­BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Michael Kleeman, a civil and environmental engineer at UC Davis, explained that the short-term mortality associated with high PM2.5 events such as wildfires often comes in the form of a heart attack. But inhaling urban wildfire smoke or the particles kicked up from dust and ash during remediation efforts can present risks that aren’t immediately apparent. “It’s not a heart attack a day or three after the exposure. It’s, like, a cancer risk way down [the road],” Kleeman said. “The long-term exposure [risk] can be insidious.”

Air Quality Maps

Southern California is no stranger to wildfires. (Neither is Sinatra, who has evacuated several times during her 15 years in Altadena.) Frequent droughts in the Los Angeles Basin result in large swaths of parched vegetation. The infamous Santa Ana winds, which blow into the basin from the east and northeast, can cause fires to quickly grow out of control, as was the case in the Palisades and Eaton blazes.

Real-time air quality maps, such as those hosted by the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD) and U.S. EPA, pull from several sources to provide data year-round. More detailed data come from sophisticated instruments set up by the agencies themselves; South Coast AQMD hosts 32 permanent air monitoring stations throughout Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties.

The Air Quality Management District has permanent installations for monitoring air quality, but in the wake of the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, it launched supplemental efforts, gathering real-time air quality data from mobile monitoring vans. Credit: South Coast AQMD

Less detailed but more widespread data on particulate matter come from networks of off-the-shelf air quality measuring tools, such as PurpleAir monitors and Clarity Sensors, that are set up by residents or community organizations.

“It turns out that the areas that the fires were in had [a] really, really dense network of these low-cost sensors,” said Scott Epstein, planning and rules manager at South Coast AQMD. “When you combine that with our regulatory network, we had very good coverage of fine particle pollution.”

This density meant researchers could watch the Eaton and Palisades wildfire plumes as they traveled toward the coast.

An existing AQMD station in Compton, about 23 miles (37 kilometers) south of the Eaton Fire, showed highly elevated levels of toxic metals, including arsenic and lead, between 7 and 11 January as the plume passed over the area. These levels returned to normal within a few days. ASCENT instruments in Pico Rivera, about 14 miles (23 kilometers) south of the Eaton Fire, recorded a 110-fold increase in lead levels from 8 to 11 January.

Permanent air quality measuring stations like these offer one source of public information that residents like Sinatra could consult to make decisions about when to stay indoors or return to a burned area. But when the Palisades and Eaton fires broke out, researchers from AQMD and other institutions set out to supplement these efforts with more granular monitoring.

Mobilizing Quickly Melissa Bumstead (left) and Jeni Knack volunteered to gather air and ash samples in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires. Credit: Shelly Magier

In January, researchers from Harvard University; the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); the University of Texas at Austin; the University of Southern California (USC); and UC Davis launched the Los Angeles Fire Human Exposure and Long-Term Health Study, or LA Fire HEALTH.

While many Los Angeles residents, including Sinatra, were still under evacuation orders, LA Fire HEALTH researchers were traveling into evacuation zones.

One such researcher was Nicholas Spada, an aerosol scientist who headed down to Los Angeles from UC Davis on 14 January to set up four cascading impactors in Santa Monica (near the Palisades Fire), Pasadena (near the Eaton Fire), Hollywood, and West Hills. These briefcase-sized instruments act like coin-sorting machines, Spada said: They take an air sample, then sort particles into eight different size categories. They take an air sample, then sort particles into eight different size categories, ranging from 10 micrometers (about 1/9 the average width of a human hair) to 90 nanometers (about 1/1,000 the width of a human hair). The instruments collected eight samples every 2 hours until 10 February.

A cascading impactor allows scientists to “associate the particle size profiles with time,” Spada said. The instrument “picks up the changes in the smoke plumes as the fire progresses from active to smoldering to being put out, and then to the mitigation effects.”

The measurements showed that not only were toxic elements such as lead and arsenic present in the air throughout the sampling period but also a high proportion of their mass—about 25%—was in the form of ultrafine particles (on the order of nanometers). Such particles aren’t filtered by N95 masks and can penetrate deep into the body when inhaled, Spada explained.

A team of University of Texas researchers arrived in a van that doubled as a mobile laboratory on 2 February, at which point the fires were out but dust-disturbing remediation efforts had begun. They found that outdoor air quality in the weeks after the fires was back to prefire levels and within EPA guidelines. Indoor samples—especially from homes within the burn zones—showed higher levels of VOCs compared with the outdoor samples.

Neighbors Lend a Hand

Community members got in on the efforts to monitor air quality.

Southern California community members got in on the efforts to monitor air quality, too. Melissa Bumstead and Jeni Knack, codirectors of Parents Against Santa Susana Field Laboratory, worked with researchers to create and distribute flyers about appropriate measures regarding personal protective equipment, as well as a self-sampling protocol for residents who wanted to gather ash samples from their own properties.

About twice a week from 14 January to 19 February, they gathered air and ash samples in Pasadena, Altadena, Santa Monica, Topanga, and Pacific Palisades, then sent them to laboratories, including Spada’s, for testing. Arsenic in all of the ash samples and lead in about a third of them exceeded EPA regional screening levels. Spada noted in communications to residents that these screening levels are based on what’s safe for ingestion by a child and are relatively conservative.

“This is going to help people in the next iteration of fires to know what to do,” Bumstead recalled telling residents in sampling areas.

After the Ashes Sinatra lost her Altadena home in the January 2025 Eaton Fire. When she returned to dig through the rubble, she drove past “chimney after chimney after chimney with no house attached.” Credit: Gale Sinatra

The next fire, Sinatra said, is something that weighs on her as she and her neighbors consider the prospect of rebuilding.

When rain finally arrived in Southern California on 26 January, it helped extinguish the fires and tame the dust disturbed by remediation efforts, reducing the risk that people would inhale toxins.

Still, those toxins were also present in the soil and water. When Sinatra and her husband returned to the charred site of their home, they took every precaution they’d heard about from the news, the EPA, community leaders, and neighbors: They wore respirators, hazmat suits, goggles, and two pairs of gloves each to protect themselves.

Concerns about potential long-term consequences of the air they had already breathed, as well as the soil beneath them, linger as they wait for more data.

“Everyone feels there’s a significant chance of a future fire,” Sinatra said. We’re “wondering about whether it would be safe to live up there, [in] regards to the soil quality and the air quality, and whether it’s going to happen again.”

—Emily Dieckman (@emfurd.bsky.social), Associate Editor

Citation: Dieckman, E. (2025), Where there’s fire, there’s smoke, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250308. Published on 26 August 2025. Text © 2025. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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