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Scientists who work across disciplines often dread the question, “What is your field of expertise?” A geographer working in an environmental science department or a social scientist working in an ecology department might find it difficult to articulate how their research, knowledge, and professional networks fit within established fields to colleagues long accustomed to their institutions’ disciplinary expectations and norms.

Most academic structures are still largely organized around relatively narrow disciplinary perspectives, even as the world’s biggest challenges require interdisciplinary solutions.

These moments of discomfort may seem trivial, but they signal a systemic barrier for many scientists and for scientific innovation and problem-solving: Most academic structures are still largely organized around relatively narrow disciplinary perspectives, even as the world’s biggest challenges require interdisciplinary solutions. Addressing natural hazards, biodiversity loss, poverty, and food insecurity simultaneously, for example, depends on scientists collaborating across fields and engaging with partners in other sectors of society.

This issue is not just one of semantics, especially for younger scientists and others who regularly experience its effects. Departments incentivized to select against interdisciplinary science and the absence of clear institutional “homes” for interdisciplinary scientists can create challenges for hiring, evaluation, and promotion. It can also reduce researchers’ sense of professional belonging and increase their feelings of being an imposter, which can affect their ability to contribute and even lead to the loss of scientific talent to other career paths.

Experiences in the field of land system science reflect broader tensions with interdisciplinarity across academic science. Researchers studying land system science, as we do, often find that their work resists neat disciplinary labels. Because this field encompasses the many ways that people and nature interact across Earth’s land surface and how these interactions shape global challenges like biodiversity loss, it can be difficult to describe the field in terms of preexisting academic departments and to identify appropriate funding sources and publication venues.

Here we share experiences navigating tensions that have come with pursuing interdisciplinary science, and we describe how one global interdisciplinary science community, the Global Land Programme (GLP), became a home for our work. Communities such as the GLP not only bring people together but also help create new pathways for turning research into solutions.

Our experiences also suggest practical lessons and actionable steps—especially for early-career scholars—for finding or building supportive communities that span fields and sectors, foster belonging, spark scientific innovation, and connect science to society.

Perceived Deficiencies Versus Demonstrated Proficiencies

As interdisciplinary scientists working across institutions around the world, we’ve seen firsthand the tribulations of bridging silos. Colleagues have often questioned our scientific skills and seen us as outsiders. Some have asked whether our interdisciplinary doctoral degrees “count” as legitimate academic credentials or told us that our research “isn’t science.” Even after establishing our careers, we’ve heard comments such as “Your research doesn’t fit into this science foundation’s remit.”

These critiques can be especially harsh for researchers who already encounter structural barriers within scientific institutions [Liu et al., 2023; Bentley and Garrett, 2023; Woolston, 2021; Carrigan and Wylie, 2023]. Having other people—particularly colleagues around whom you work—define you by perceived deficiencies rather than demonstrated proficiencies is hardly constructive for advancing research into complex challenges.

The scientific literature reveals a disconnect between policy-level acceptance of interdisciplinarity and its practical adoption within academic and research institutions.

National- and international-level policies are increasingly encouraging interdisciplinary research. The European Union, for example, is adopting integrated One Health policy approaches that recognize the interconnections of human, animal, plant, and environmental health and require collaboration across previously distinct disciplines and sectors.

Yet the scientific literature reveals a disconnect between policy-level acceptance of interdisciplinarity and its practical adoption within academic and research institutions, showing that the barriers we’ve faced are widely shared [Andrews et al., 2020; Berkes et al., 2024]. Such obstacles include skepticism from peers, disciplinary prejudice, and funding and department structures that privilege individual, siloed fields. We often must frame research proposals as either social science or natural science, for example, because work that straddles or combines both rarely gets funded.

Unsupportive responses from funding agencies, departments, and colleagues can be demoralizing when added to the background stresses of academia. On the other hand, opportunities to commiserate and trade tips with others can be lifelines. Building communities of interdisciplinary scientists is thus essential, especially for younger scholars who often face the steepest barriers with disciplinary divides [Haider et al., 2018].

Discovering a Global Community

To thrive as an interdisciplinary scientist, one might need to “feel comfortable being uncomfortable” [Marx, 2022]. Achieving such confidence requires mentorship and peer relationships in community. In each of our cases, the GLP provided the professional and emotional support that we greatly needed to feel fulfilled in our careers.

As current or former members of the GLP’s Scientific Steering Committee, we are admittedly biased toward the program’s merits. Nonetheless, having come from different scientific backgrounds, career stages, and geographies, we believe that our collective experiences illustrate how global cross-disciplinary communities can cultivate a supportive culture and amplify the reach and impact of community members’ science.

The GLP emerged in the mid-2000s as a successor to earlier global change research projects focused on land use and land cover, with the goal of bringing together natural and social scientists to study land systems as coupled human-environment systems [de Bremond et al., 2019]. Since then, it has become the reference community for land system science, as well as a home for scientists whose work was falling through disciplinary cracks.

Speakers discuss the GLP’s Science Plan during the 5th Open Science Meeting in 2024. Credit: Ximena Fargas

The organization has been guided by a unifying programmatic framework—articulated in its Science Plan—that incorporates knowledge across disciplines to address pressing global challenges (e.g., biodiversity loss, food insecurity, and poverty). The Science Plan, reevaluated and updated every 5 years, offers a living, collaborative road map of interdisciplinary research priorities—a rarity in academia, where competition for resources and rewards often leaves scientists reluctant to share ideas.

This road map enables researchers to orient their work toward impactful cross-disciplinary research themes and projects. It also outlines the GLP’s core priorities and analytical perspectives, drawing on a range of viewpoints and knowledge, which can guide us to develop shared ideas of what is possible.

The Global Land Programme’s activities have built a culture of mutual respect that values ecological and cultural context and encourages engagement with a broad range of perspectives.

Over time, the collaborative spirit of the GLP’s members has resulted in a rich interdisciplinary community of land system scientists that provides a space for them to reflect on dimensions of academic life other than research (as exemplified, e.g., by this article). Besides offering a supportive professional environment, apart from the skepticism we often encounter in more discipline-specific settings, the GLP’s activities have built a culture of mutual respect that values ecological and cultural context and encourages engagement with a broad range of perspectives.

The GLP has also delivered tangible results for science and society. GLP scientists have advanced modeling of land use going back millennia, contributed to global biodiversity assessments (e.g., in support of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services), codeveloped new visions for land systems, and made datasets that help track land use changes, such as deforestation, publicly available. The GLP also works to translate land system science into forms relevant for policy and practice. For example, GLP scientists authored “Ten Facts About Land Systems for Sustainability,” a framework intended to inform both research and policy understandings of sustainable land governance.

What began as a space for researchers from across disciplines to connect around land system challenges has become an engine for both scientific innovation and societal relevance. This success adds to our trust in the GLP’s approach to supporting researchers in the often-challenging space of interdisciplinary science.

If You Don’t Have a Community, Make One

For interdisciplinary scientists lacking a home, one path forward is to build a new community of researchers with shared interests.

We were fortunate to find the GLP early in our careers, as not all scientists have access to such communities. But the comfort and confidence that come with belonging should not—and need not—depend on luck. For interdisciplinary scientists lacking a home, one path forward is to build a new community of researchers with shared interests.

Establishing a community of practice within a broader existing organization or research community or even creating a new forum for social networking can provide a space that empowers scientists, including early-career researchers, to navigate interdisciplinary work by connecting with peers who share related interests and challenges.

Experiences from existing communities of practice suggest that these spaces tend to work best when they grow organically [Watkins et al., 2018]. Making it easy for people to join, observe, and participate at their own pace helps create welcoming entry points and encourages such growth. Allowing people to gradually step in, share perspectives, and assume roles and responsibilities strengthens the common dynamic that often develops in these communities, in which a core of more active members is surrounded by a larger group of less active, though still involved, members.

In practice, many scientific communities thrive by communicating through simple and familiar platforms, such as mailing lists, online forums and channels, and recurring online meetups, which lower barriers to participation across institutions and regions. Reaching out to existing societies or research networks—AGU or FLARE (Forests & Livelihoods: Assessment, Research, and Engagement), for example—for guidance on coordination or to help gain visibility or seed funding can also help burgeoning communities avoid reinventing the wheel.

Furthermore, mentorship from people who have built research communities from the ground up in adjacent fields can be valuable for advising groups on how to grow and address challenges. Knowledgeable mentors can also help groups understand how to sustain a community, an aspect that is often critical to long-term viability.

The GLP was initiated as researchers working on different issues related to land began to connect, forging collaborations that eventually grew into a global network, which itself now comprises a variety of smaller networks, including working groups and regional (nodal) offices. The recently created Early Career Network, launched through webinars and other online communications, is providing a space where young scholars are encouraged to create their own governance structures and articulate what they need in terms of capacity building from the larger community.

Members of the GLP’s Scientific Steering Committee visit an agave farm in Oaxaca in 2024. Credit: Rieley Auger

Growing the GLP has not always been an easy process, however. Sustaining the community has required continually maintaining support and funding from multiple institutions. To date, much of the growth has relied on volunteer work, with members of the GLP’s Scientific Steering Committee, working groups, and nodal offices providing unpaid service above and beyond their existing professional responsibilities. This arrangement of distributed labor underscores the importance of effective coordination for maintaining connections and momentum across the network.

The experiences of the GLP and other groups show that new interdisciplinary communities can start small and run largely on volunteer energy, which we recognize is not something all researchers—especially those early in their career—have to spare. If the communities can then reach a critical mass of participants, they may be able to secure institutional support and professional coordination to help them thrive over the long term.

Harnessing Interdisciplinarity

We came to realize that with our expertise, we can generate innovative ideas that advance science at the intersections between disciplines.

Earlier in our careers, we used to internalize criticisms about not belonging or excelling in any one discipline. Then we came to realize that with our expertise, we can generate innovative ideas that advance science at the intersections between disciplines. Indeed, people with interdisciplinary profiles can fill critical research gaps—and should be seen as assets, not liabilities. Many universities and funders understand this truth at the leadership level, but challenges remain in how interdisciplinarity is evaluated within departments and by hiring, promotion, and grant review panels.

To help move the needle, we actively characterize ourselves as interdisciplinary land system scientists in our tenure and promotion documents, preferring to own the position and emphasize its strengths, rather than to shy away from it. Individuals acting on their own, however, may have only limited influence. That is why building and sustaining communities is so important: They create the collective weight needed to demonstrate value, shift norms, and motivate institutional change.

Within community-building efforts, it is key to create space for participation from researchers with varied backgrounds and experiences. The GLP supports this approach through its distributed subnetworks, including working groups and regional nodes, and by convening international Open Science Meetings on different continents that bring together hundreds of scientists every few years. GLP members frequently present on the program’s work as well as strategies and approaches at other conferences, helping spread the word about the value of growing interdisciplinary communities.

As more researchers connect across disciplinary and geographic boundaries, the scientific enterprise will be better positioned to pursue sustainable solutions that address complex, urgent problems to secure livelihoods and food security for the global population and to safeguard our planet’s biodiversity and environmental health.

References

Andrews, E. J., et al. (2020), Supporting early career researchers: Insights from interdisciplinary marine scientists, ICES J. Mar. Sci., 77(2), 476–485, https://doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsz247.

Bentley, A., and R. Garrett (2023), Don’t get mad, get equal: Putting an end to misogyny in science, Nature, 619, 209–211, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02101-x.

Berkes, E., et al. (2024), Slow convergence: Career impediments to interdisciplinary biomedical research, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A., 121(32), e2402646121, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2402646121.

Carrigan, C., and C. D. Wylie (2023), Introduction: Caring for equitable relations in interdisciplinary collaborations, Catalyst Feminism Theory Technosci., 9(2), 1–16, https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i2.41070.

de Bremond, A., et al. (2019), What role for global change research networks in enabling transformative science for global sustainability? A Global Land Programme perspective, Curr. Opinion Environ. Sustainability, 38, 95–102, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2019.05.006.

Haider, L. J., et al. (2018), The undisciplinary journey: Early-career perspectives in sustainability science, Sustainability Sci., 13, 191–204, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-017-0445-1.

Liu, M., et al. (2023), Female early-career scientists have conducted less interdisciplinary research in the past six decades: Evidence from doctoral theses, Humanit. Soc. Sci. Commun., 10(1), 918, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02392-5.

Marx, V. (2022), Cross-disciplinary ways to connect and blend, Nat. Methods, 19(10), 1149, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-022-01622-z.

Watkins, C., et al. (2018), Developing an interdisciplinary and cross‐sectoral community of practice in the domain of forests and livelihoods, Conserv. Biol., 32(1), 60–71, https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12982.

Woolston, C. (2021), Discrimination still plagues science, Nature, 600(7887), 177–179, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-03043-y.

Author Information

Laura Vang Rasmussen (lr@ign.ku.dk), Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark; Rachael Garrett, Department of Geography and Conservation Research Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K.; A. Sofia Nanni, Instituto de Ecología Regional, Horco Molle, Yerba Buena, Argentina; also at Facultad de Ciencias Naturales e Instituto Miguel Lillo, Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina; Navin Ramankutty, School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada; and Ariane de Bremond, Global Land Programme, Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park

Citation: Rasmussen, L. V., R. Garrett, A. S. Nanni, N. Ramankutty, and A. de Bremond (2026), Creating communities to help interdisciplinary scientists thrive, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260058. Published on 13 February 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.

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

Quartz is widely thought to control the mechanical strength of Earth’s continental crust, but measuring its strength at high pressure and temperature has long been challenging.

Medina et al. [2026] deform polycrystalline α-quartz at crustal pressure and temperature conditions while directly monitoring stress inside the sample using in situ synchrotron X-ray diffraction. Unlike traditional experiments that rely on external load measurements, this approach derives stress from lattice strain within the quartz itself, avoiding long-standing uncertainties related to friction corrections. The results show that quartz strength varies systematically with temperature, transitioning from lattice-resistance–controlled plasticity below 800 °C to dislocation creep at higher temperatures.

Remarkably, the new measurements are broadly consistent with classic deformation experiments despite the very different experimental techniques. The data also show little pressure dependence over the tested conditions, suggesting that temperature plays the dominant role in controlling quartz strength in much of the crust. These findings provide a more reliable experimental foundation for flow laws used to model crustal deformation, earthquakes, and mountain-building processes.

Citation: Medina, D. A. J., Kaboli, S., Patterson, B. M., & Burnley, P. C. (2026). Strength α-quartz: New results from high pressure in situ X-ray diffraction experiments. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 131, e2025JB032753. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025JB032753

—Jun Tsuchiya, Editor, JGR: Solid Earth

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.

The Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet, with average temperatures increasing by about 4°C in the last four decades. A new study, led by the University of Exeter, shows peatlands have expanded since 1950, with some peatland edges moving by more than a meter a year. The work has been published in Global Change Biology.

A new collaborative study, led by University of Utah Professor of atmospheric sciences Kevin Perry, provides policymakers, agency leaders, and the public with the most comprehensive assessment to date of potential dust control options for the Great Salt Lake, as declining water levels continue to expose vast areas of lakebed to wind erosion.

In NW India, rainfall in the 2025 monsoon was 27% above the long term average. Over 2,500 people were killed in India and Pakistan by landslides and floods as a result.

In India and Pakistan, the 2025 summer monsoon generated unusual amount of landslide activity. I described some of these events along the way, most notably in India. In Pakistan, it is much harder to get a good picture of the events that occur in the higher mountain areas.

A new open access paper (Sana et al. 2026) in the journal Landslides provides an initial commentary on these events. By their calculation, 1,528 people were killed in floods and landslides in India and 1,006 were killed in Pakistan.

The paper provides a description of some of the more serious events, which is in itself very helpful, but the most interesting aspect is the consideration of the underlying causes. Across all of India, the total monsoon rainfall was 10% above the long term average, but in Northwest India, which was most seriously impacted area, rainfall was 27% above the long term average. In addition, there was an unusually large number of shorter duration extreme rainfall events, which were primarily responsible for the landslides and floods. This graph, from Sana et al. (2026), provides the 2026 monsoon rainfall record for Mandi district in Himachal Pradesh, for example:-

Rainfall data for the monsoon months of June to August 2025 for Mandi district highlighting cloudburst events. Graph from Sana et al. (2026).

An example of these shorter rainfall events occurred in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province between 14 and 25 August 2025, when a succession of cloudbursts triggered landslides and floods in Buner, Swat, Shangla, Mansehra and Dir districts, killing 504 people and leaving thousands more homeless.

But Sana et al. (2026) also remind us that rainfall alone is not the cause of these landslides and floods. Vulnerability has also increased dramatically – for example, there has been a sharp decline in forest cover across much of the area. There has also been growth in urban areas, often with poor planning control, meaning that much of the population is occupying more hazardous locations. And, as I have noted before, poor quality infrastructure development (especially road building) is driving instability across large swathes of hillslopes, rendering them vulnerable to the changed rainfall patterns.

I write on the morning after the decision by the frankly nonsensical decision by the Trump government to reverse the 2009 endangerment finding regarding greenhouse gases, an event that will be judged harshly by future generations. However, in the medium term, this will further exacerbate the issues of increasing rainfall intensities, which drive these horrific events.

It is really helpful that Sana et al. (2026) have provided this intial commentary and analysis of the 2025 monsoon landslides and floods. I will look forward to seeing more detailed analyses in due course.

Reference

Sana, E., Kritika & Kumar, A. 2026. Preliminary investigation of rainfall-induced landslides and related damages by the 2025 extreme monsoon in the Northwestern Himalayan region. Landslides. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-026-02703-2

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.

Researchers from the Aerospace Information Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, have developed a high-resolution daily atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) dataset covering China from 2016 to 2020. The dataset offers new insights into the spatiotemporal variations of column-averaged dry-air CO2 mole fraction (XCO2). The work is published in the journal Scientific Data.

SummarySeismoelectromagnetic (SE) signals are created in wet poroelastic media by electrokinetic conversions occurring at the pore scale. Two of these signals are frequently investigated: a co-seismic wavefield, bounded to the propagating seismic waves, and an electromagnetic (EM) wave created when a seismic wave passes through the interface between two porous media. Driven by the possibility offered by the SE signals in terms of vertical resolution, compared with seismic reflection methods, a restricted number of authors studied how a thin layer, or a combination of thin layers, can modify SE signals. In this context, the present work presents original experimental and numerical data as a means to further investigate the relation between the thickness of a layer and the EM interface-generated response (IR). In addition, the fact that the IR is very sensitive to contrasts in fluid conductivity, whereas seismic waves are not, is an appealing characteristic of SE exploration. Consequently, we explored the influence of the pore-fluid electric conductivity, combining experimental and numerical methodologies. We identified a strong similarity in how layer thinning affects both seismic waves and IR signals. Moreover, we observed that the maximum enhancement of an IR signal occurs when the layer thickness is approximately half the P-wave wavelength (λP) in the layer. When analysing the influence of fluid conductivity, we showed that the electrokinetic theory adopted in this study provides satisfactory predictions for the waveforms and amplitudes observed experimentally. Finally, we extrapolated our experimental results with field-scale simulations in order to understand how the effects observed experimentally translate to georesources applications.

SummaryOcean-bottom seismometers (OBSs) are reliable instruments to record ground motions and acoustic signals on the sea floor. Precise timing of the data is essential for most seismological analyses. The internal clocks of the OBSs are not GNSS-controlled, so the clock drift mainly caused by ageing of the quartz crystal and temperature effects must be corrected. As part of the BRAVOSEIS experiment, eight OBSs were deployed in the Antarctic Bransfield Strait for 13 months. All OBSs suffered from a large (-15.3 to 5.4 s) and non-linear (-1.2 to -0.6 s residual to linear drift) clock drift. We used noise cross-correlations to determine the clock drift. The parameters for data pre- and post-processing such as filtering and normalisation had to be selected carefully. Overlapping correlation windows were stacked to derive daily Green’s functions. The time shift between consecutive days was calculated and distributed linearly over the data to obtain a continuous data set without gaps or overlaps. Airgun shots were used to constrain the cumulative clock drift of one station without initial synchronisation. Two onshore stations served as GNSS-controlled reference for four OBSs in the northern part of the Central Bransfield Basin. A different noise regime prevailed in the southern part of the basin; therefore, two already corrected OBSs from the northern part were used as reference stations for the southern OBSs. In this way, the clock drift of all OBSs could be corrected accurately.

SummarySpectral induced polarization (SIP) is a promising technique for detecting microbial activity in porous media, yet its interpretation remains limited by the absence of mechanistic models that account for microbial cell structure. In this study, we present a new semi-analytical model for the electrical polarization of microbial cells that treats both the cell plasma and the surrounding medium as electrolytes, and accounts for the cell membrane as well as the influence of the charged surface structures of the cell. We validate our model through numerical simulations based on the Poisson–Nernst–Planck equations. The model builds upon the membrane capacitance model by Sun and Morgan and integrates surface conductivity effects via the O’Konski model and low-frequency polarization using an adapted Dukhin–Shilov approach. The agreement between the numerical results and our new semi-analytical model is good. The model accounts for three dominant polarization mechanisms: (1) diffuse layer polarization at low frequencies (102–104 Hz), (2) membrane-related capacitive effects at intermediate frequencies (105–107 Hz), and (3) Maxwell-Wagner-type polarization at high frequencies (107–109 Hz). In experimental studies, polarization of bacteria typically appears at frequencies around 0.05 and 20 Hz. As the characteristic frequency of polarization processes usually decreases with increasing polarization length scales, the remaining discrepancy between model and experimental observations suggests that measured signals may be influenced by cell aggregates, biofilms, or metabolic byproducts. Our findings provide a foundation for a mechanistic understanding of microbial polarization and highlight the need for future work to extend the model to conglomerates of microbial cells.

Minerals form the building blocks of almost everything on Earth. They are made up of crystals—regular, repeating atomic structures that fit together like a three-dimensional pattern. When minerals deform, their normally ordered crystal lattices develop linear imperfections known as dislocations. These are small breaks or shifts in the atomic arrangement that allow crystals to change shape under stress. Some deformed crystals contain large numbers of dislocations, while in others they are sparse and searching for them is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

While most of the world's glaciers are retreating as the climate warms, a small but significant population behaves very differently—and the consequences can be severe. A team of international scientists, led by the University of Portsmouth, has carried out a comprehensive global analysis of surging glaciers, examining the hazards they cause and how climate change is fundamentally altering when and where these dramatic events occur.

Publication date: Available online 10 February 2026

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): Khiri Abubakr Khalf, Teoh Ying Jia, Nordiana Mohd Muztaza, Nur Azwin Ismail, Abdulrahman Idris Augie, Abdulrasheed Adamu Hassan, Sirajo Abubakar, Sadiq Bukar Musty

Publication date: Available online 9 February 2026

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): Guoyu Li, Yu Cao, Samantha L. Lima, Hang Chen, Yangfei Huang, Bryan C. Pijanowski

Publication date: Available online 9 February 2026

Source: Advances in Space Research

Author(s): Yanpu Mu, Hao Fu, Yizhen Zheng, Yuefeng Li, Xudong Pan

It is well documented that the Gulf Stream plays a pivotal role in the climate system through its transfer of heat, which ultimately supplies warmth to northern latitudes in the North Atlantic. What remains less well understood is how the Gulf Stream influences the climate system by transporting nutrients and carbon. These materials stimulate plankton growth, which in turn plays a vital role in naturally absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

There's been a seismic shift in science, with scientists developing new AI tools and applying AI to just about any question that can be asked. Researchers are now putting actual seismic waves to work, using data from the world's largest repository of earthquake data to develop "SeisModal," an AI foundation model designed to explore big questions about science. The effort, known as Steel Thread, involves researchers from five national laboratories operated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

For obvious reasons, it would be useful to predict when an earthquake is going to occur. It has long been suspected that large quakes in the Himalayas follow a fairly predictable cycle, but nature, as it turns out, is not so accommodating. A new study published in the journal Science Advances shows that massive earthquakes are just as random as small ones. A team of researchers led by Zakaria Ghazoui-Schaus at the British Antarctic Survey reached this conclusion after analyzing sediments from Lake Rara in Western Nepal.

Bright streaks of material trickle down the slopes of many of Mercury’s craters, but scientists have struggled to understand how these geologically young features, called slope lineae, appeared on a seemingly dead world. Now, researchers have used machine learning to analyze more than 400 slope lineae in the hope of understanding the streaks’ origin.

The analysis of images from NASA’s decade-gone MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging) mission showed that lineae seem to stream from bright hollows on the sunward side of crater slopes and mainly appear on craters that punched through a thin volcanic crust to a volatile-rich layer beneath. The lineae, the team theorized, could have formed when that exposed layer heated up and released volatiles like sulfur to drip downslope.

“We have these modern data science approaches now—machine learning, deep learning—that help us look into all those old data sets and find completely new science discoveries in them,” said Valentin Bickel, a planetary geomorphologist at Universität Bern in Switzerland and lead researcher on the study.

Streaks and Stripes

MESSENGER orbited Mercury from 2011 to 2015, and observations from those 4 years remain some of the best data we have on our solar system’s smallest planet.

The images revealed that although there is not a lot of geologic activity happening today, the planet remains chock-full of oddities.

One of those strange phenomena is the existence of slope lineae streaking down from the rims of many of Mercury’s craters. The higher-resolution MESSENGER images show that Mercury’s lineae are made of bright material and are geologically young, with crisply defined edges and no small craters superimposed on top. But planetary scientists had not conducted any systematic analysis of lineae before now, focusing instead on understanding the planet’s similarly bright, but more numerous, hollows.

“The first things we as geologists like to do is put things on a map.”

Bickel and his team sought to fill that knowledge gap. Their machine learning tool looked at more than 112,000 MESSENGER images with spatial resolutions finer than 150 meters (492 feet), identified 402 individual lineae, and cataloged their properties in a uniform way.

“The first things we as geologists like to do is put things on a map,” Bickel said.

Most of MESSENGER’s high-resolution images cover the northern hemisphere, Bickel explained, so most (93%) of the lineae the team cataloged were in the north. Ninety percent of lineae are located within craters. They are hundreds or thousands of meters long, are less than 20 meters (65 feet) tall, and are located on steeper-than-average crater slopes. Most lineae extend from young, bright hollows or hollow-like features.

But the most telling commonality among lineae is that they prefer the side of craters facing the equator, which is the side that receives the most sunlight.

The MESSENGER mission imaged slope lineae in Mercury’s craters on 1 August 2012 (left) and 19 October 2013 (right). Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/Carnegie Institution of Washington

That trend led the researchers to their theory of how lineae form. An impact exposes Mercury’s shallow but volatile-rich bedrock layer. Insolation, or heat from the Sun, draws out volatile gases in those rocks, and those volatiles then slowly drip down the crater wall, leaving bright deposits behind.

“The fact that lineae are on slopes that are facing the Sun implies that insolation might play a role in activating the process,” Bickel said. “And whenever insolation is so prominent, that implies that volatile material is involved. And in Mercury’s case has to come from the subsurface.”

The team published these results in Communications Earth and Environment.

Making a More Complete Map

Susan Conway, a planetary geomorphologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Nantes, France, said planetary scientists have long accepted that Mercury’s hollows are produced by the loss of subsurface volatiles.

“Given that the slope lineae often originate at what appear to be hollows on the crater wall and have the same colour as them, the inference that slope lineae are also linked to volatile loss makes sense,” Conway wrote in an email.

Across the solar system, “slope lineae are pretty common,” added Conway, who was not involved with this research. “Several different kinds have been documented on Mars—slope streaks believed to be dust avalanches, recurring slope lineae whose formation is still debated and could be related to volatiles.” Granular flows on the Moon as well as lineae on Ceres and some icy moons in the outer solar system also resemble those on Mercury.

But a good 10% of Mercury’s known lineae don’t appear within craters, and conversely, there are plenty of craters with hollows that don’t have lineae. Other mechanisms are likely at work there, Bickel said.

“BepiColombo will image the whole surface at a resolution that would enable us to see most slope lineae.”

Thankfully, planetary scientists won’t have to wait long to test this theory. The BepiColombo spacecraft will arrive at Mercury in November and will begin science operations in early 2027. The joint mission from the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency will image more of the planet’s surface than MESSENGER did and at a consistently higher spatial resolution.

Bickel and other Mercury scientists expect that BepiColombo will image more slope lineae across the planet, including smaller lineae, dimmer lineae, and lineae at southern latitudes. It will likely reimage some lineae-dense locations and reveal whether the streaks have changed in the 16 years since MESSENGER’s last images. And it may even capture repeat snapshots of a few locations, allowing scientists to see whether lineae change on short timescales.

“BepiColombo will image the whole surface at a resolution that would enable us to see most slope lineae,” Conway said. “We’ll get a complete picture of their spatial distribution, which will enable us to better test the volatile-driven hypothesis.”

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer

Citation: Cartier, K. M. S. (2026), Oozing gas could be making stripes in Mercury’s craters, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260052. Published on 12 February 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.

Fast ice, also called landfast sea ice, is a relatively short-lived ice that forms from frozen seawater and attaches like a “seatbelt” to larger ice sheets. It can create 50- to 200-kilometer-wide bands that last anywhere from a few weeks to a few decades and act as a site for valuable geochemical processes, breeding grounds for emperor penguins, and a protective buffer between caustic Antarctic winds and waters and inland bodies of ice.

In new research published in Nature Communications, scientists found that buried sediments can track the long-term growth of Antarctic fast ice—and that the ice’s freezing and thawing may be linked to cycles of solar activity. Given that this ice plays a significant role in protecting Antarctica’s larger ice sheets, the research could have major implications for understanding the ongoing impacts of climate change in Antarctica.

“Fast ice, especially in the summertime, is suffering the same fate as overall pack ice,” said Alex Fraser, a glaciologist at the University of Tasmania, who was not involved in the study. We’ve seen a “dramatic decrease” over the past decade, he said. “We’re down to around half of the ‘normal’ [amount].”

“To understand how humans are changing the planet, we first need to know how the planet changes on its own.”

Over the past several decades, the only way for scientists to track fast ice has been through satellite data, which can reveal the ice’s history over only the past 40 or so years. This narrow range has prohibited researchers from understanding the ice’s behavior prior to human-induced climate change.

“To understand how humans are changing the planet, we first need to know how the planet changes on its own,” said Mike Weber, a geoscientist at Universität Bonn in Germany and a coauthor of the study. The new work aimed to establish a “blueprint” for how fast ice behaves in the long term, allowing researchers to better understand how the ice contracts or expands when exposed to greenhouse gas emissions.

Sediment Secrets

To better understand fast ice history, the team turned to sediment cores from Victoria Land in eastern Antarctica. By scrutinizing laminated layers within the cores, the researchers were able to pinpoint key markers that correspond to ebbs and flows in fast ice going back 3,700 years.

The team found that lighter sediment layers formed during summer months marked by prolonged ice loss, whereas darker layers formed during regular seasonal thawing. They also found evidence that different species of small organisms called diatoms grew during summer months versus thawing periods, further enabling the science team to distinguish the cycles. By combining these and other data unearthed from the sediments, the researchers identified recurring periods of open-water and low-ice conditions pinned to solar cycles—called the Gleissberg and Suess-de Vries solar cycles—that occur approximately every 90 and 240 years, respectively.

The link to solar cycling was surprising at first, but the researchers suggested the explanation is straightforward: Solar activity can influence winds over the Southern Ocean, transporting warm air over the Victoria Land coast and leading to ice melt.

“Laminated sediments are always intriguing because you know they’re hiding a message.”

“Laminated sediments are always intriguing because you know they’re hiding a message,” said Tesi Tommaso, a biogeochemist at the National Research Council of Italy’s Institute of Polar Sciences and lead author of the study. “When we realized that over long timescales, this laminated pattern was linked to solar activity, it actually made perfect sense—it was super exciting.”

In future work, the team plans to dig up deeper sediment cores to push fast ice records back even further. The data would be “incredibly informative,” said Tommaso.

“We have finally developed a high-resolution ‘time machine’ for a critical but poorly understood part of Antarctica,” Weber said. “It’s a testament to how interconnected our atmosphere, ocean, and ice really are.”

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

Citation: Brown, T. M. (2026), Sediments offer an extended history of fast ice, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260054. Published on 12 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.

Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors. Source: Earth and Space Science

Atmospheric conditions over Antarctica affect global climate cycles, and are thus critical for climate assessment. However, studying atmospheric changes in Antarctica is quite challenging as they are driven by a variety of processes at local scale not easily captured by global models. Monitoring seasonal atmospheric pressure changes is one way to keep track of the evolving Antarctic atmosphere.

Because changes in stratospheric conditions influence the flux of cosmic rays reaching Earth’s surface, Santos et al. [2025] use measurements from a water-Cherenkov cosmic-ray detector, to monitor variations in the 100-hPa geopotential height (about 15 kilometers) over the Antarctic Peninsula. After conducting a thorough statistical analysis of the data, the authors develop a simple model linking surface pressure and cosmic ray count data, validating it against observed ERA5 100-hPa geopotential height reanalysis data. The model is especially accurate in (southern hemisphere) spring, but it performs well also at other times of the year.

With their model, the authors demonstrate that water-Cherenkov cosmic-ray detectors can be reliably used as proxies for atmospheric pressure changes, thus adding a new, simple, and effective tool to monitor and study lower stratospheric dynamics over Antarctica.

Citation: Santos, N. A., Gómez, N., Dasso, S., Gulisano, A. M., Rubinstein, L., Pereira, M., et al. (2025). Cosmic ray counting variability from water-Cherenkov detectors as a proxy of stratospheric conditions in Antarctica. Earth and Space Science, 12, e2025EA004298. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EA004298

  —Graziella Caprarelli, Editor-in-Chief, Earth and Space Science

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.