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Experts have warned that extensive storm damage caused to one of South Devon's most iconic routes is likely to become more frequent as global sea levels rise and the impacts of extreme wave events increases. Members of the University of Plymouth's Coastal Processes Research Group have been conducting detailed measurements and visual assessments along Start Bay for the past 20 years.

Since 10 January 2026, the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research (SLF) has received reports of hundreds of "whumpfs" (i.e., sounds indicating a collapse in the snowpack) and of remote triggering events—unmistakable signs of a critical avalanche situation involving a weak snowpack. A whumpf is where snow sports enthusiasts cause a fracture in a weak layer of the snow, which within seconds propagates as a crack across the terrain. If the crack reaches steep terrain, this may trigger an avalanche—a remote triggering event.

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

Heading into the Milan-Cortina 2026 Olympics, skiers and snowboarders were already adjusting to a ban on fluorinated waxes long prized for making their equipment faster. Last week, the Winter Games saw their first enforcement of that rule, which is aimed at protecting public health and the environment.

South Korean cross-country skiers Han Dasom and Lee Eui-jin were disqualified from the women’s sprint event on 10 February. That came one day after Japanese snowboarder Shiba Masaki was disqualified from the men’s parallel giant slalom. In all three cases, routine testing found banned compounds on their equipment.

The so-called “fluoro” waxes provide a “really ridiculous speed advantage.”

For decades, elite snow sports athletes have relied on waxes with fluorocarbons that are exceptional at repelling water and dirt. Former U.S. cross-country racer Nathan Schultz told Grist the so-called “fluoro” waxes provide a “really ridiculous speed advantage,” especially in warmer conditions like those experienced at these Games.

But these waxes also contained PFAS, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. This class of 15,000 so-called “forever chemicals” are notorious for never breaking down. Studies have linked exposure to PFAS to thyroid disease, developmental problems, and cancer, and research has found elevated levels in ski technicians who regularly handled the waxes. PFAS have also been detected in soil and water near ski venues, including wells drawing from aquifers in Park City, Utah, suggesting broader environmental contamination.

Amid growing concern over the environmental impacts and the risks to skiers, their technicians, and others, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, or FIS, called for a ban in 2019. The prohibition took effect in 2023, and applies to all events governed by the federation, including nordic, alpine and freestyle skiing, ski jumping, and snowboarding.

Officials test multiple points on each competitor’s equipment, using a technique known as Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy to detect fluoros. If a given spot on a ski or snowboard turns green, it passes. A red result indicates the presence of the banned substance. Three or more red spots leads to disqualification.

Representatives for the Japan team did respond to comment. A spokesperson for the Korea Ski Association initially told the South Korean news agency Newsis that the organization was “perplexed” by the results. “They tested negative in all previous international competitions with no prior issues,” they said. “We will consult experts from wax and ski manufacturers to investigate whether the issue lies with the wax or skis.”

In an emailed statement, the Korean Olympic Committee told Grist that fluorine was detected in what it believed to be fluorine-free waxes. “The Ski Association has purchased [fluorine]-free wax products, so it will protest,” wrote the spokesperson. The team will also replace the wax and check the skis again after cleaning to “prevent recurrence.”

It is unclear if a protest was ever officially filed or what the outcome was. The Korean team declined to elaborate and FIS did not immediately respond to Grist’s questions. But unlike some infractions, like those related to doping, discipline for unintentional fluoro use generally applies only to the event in question. The Korean athletes competed again Thursday in the 10-km freestyle event, finishing 73rd and 80th.

This time the results stood.

Correction 24 February 2026: An earlier version of this story accidentally referred to fluoride instead of fluorine in one paragraph.

—Tik Root, Grist

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/accountability/the-olympics-just-saw-its-first-forever-chemical-disqualifications/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org.

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

Of all the ground impacts induced by large earthquakes, liquefaction often feels to be the most neglected. The costs can be savage, and the long term implications wide ranging.

In this context, a very interesting paper (Valkaniotis et al. 2026) has been published in the journal Engineering Geology, which documents the liquefaction induced by the 29 March 2025 Mw=7.7 Mandalay earthquake in Myanmar. Given the challenges of fieldwork in this highly contested area, the work has been conducted medium resolution remote sensing.

It is an excellent study that demonstrates that liquefaction was extremely wide-ranging. The authors have documented 18,000 locations in which liquefaction has occurred, with the distribution being controlled by both proximity to the rupture (and not to the epicentre) and by the geology. The presence of thick deposits of Holocene fluvial materials, which occur widely in this area, allowed extensive liquefaction to occur.

One aspect that I found particularly interesting, and highly informative, is the comparison of the utility of satellite images with different resolutions for mapping liquefaction features. In particular, they show that 10 metre resolution Sentinel 2 images are useful for mapping liquefaction. So, I thought I’d take a look at the utility of Planet Labs imagery in this context.

One example that Valkaniotis et al. (2026) provide lies at [22.311, 96.012]. The Planet Labs image below shows this area as of 16 March 2025, a few days before the Mandalay earthquake:-

Satellite image of an area of Myanmar prior to the 2025 Mandalay earthquake. Image copyright Planet Labs, used with permission, collected on 16 March 2025.

And this is the same area on 31 March 2025, three days after the eartuqkae:-

Satellite image of an area of Myanmar after the 2025 Mandalay earthquake. Image copyright Planet Labs, used with permission, collected on 31 March 2025.

And here is a slider to compare the two images:-

Images by Planet Labs.

In the second image, there are hundreds of areas of exposed fluvial deposits (the light coloured patches) that are not present in the first image. These are the areas of liquefaction mapped by Valkaniotis et al. (2026). I think there may also be some locations in which lateral spreads are visible too, but this is less clear.

This is a fascinating finding, which will be very helpful in assessing post-seismic impacts in the future.

The extant of the liquefaction after the 2025 Mandalay earthquake is very interesting. At the end of the day, studies like this provide insight into the response of the ground to large earthquakes, and in turn this is intended to allow us to build resilience to these events. Valkaniotis et al. (2026) conclude their article as follows:-

“The 2025 Mandalay event serves as a reminder that liquefaction remains one of the most devastating secondary hazards associated with strong earthquakes, especially in densely populated floodplains with complex dynamic fluvial histories. The insights gained from this inventory can not only enhance national seismic resilience efforts in Myanmar but also contribute to the better understanding of liquefaction behavior in large strike-slip earthquakes worldwide.”

Quite.

Reference and acknowledgement

Valkaniotis, S. et al. 2026. Regional-scale inventory and initial analysis of liquefaction triggered by the 2025 Mw 7.7 Mandalay earthquake, Myanmar. Engineering Geology,
363. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enggeo.2026.108543.

Many thanks to the wonderful people at Planet Labs for providing access to the satellite imagery.

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

Northern Japan, especially the island of Hokkaido, is home to some of the snowiest cities in the world. Sapporo, the island's largest city and host of an annual snow festival, typically sees more than 140 days of snowfall, with nearly six meters (20 feet) accumulating on average each year. The ski resorts surrounding the city delight in the relatively dry, powdery "sea-effect" snow that often falls when frigid air from Siberia flows across the relatively warm waters of the Sea of Japan.

Yesterday, an international team of researchers from various disciplines set off aboard the German research vessel METEOR for an expedition along the west coast of Africa, led by the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel. The expedition focuses on two poorly understood phenomena: the Benguela upwelling system off the coasts of Angola and Namibia, which partly operates independently of the wind, and the recurring marine heat waves known as Benguela Niños, which have a significant impact on the local climate and cause flooding in Angola and Namibia.

Forecasting earthquakes presents a serious challenge on land, but in the oceans that cover around 70% of Earth's surface it is all but impossible. However, the vast network of undersea cables that crisscross the world's seas could soon change this. As well as transmitting data around the planet, they can also monitor the tectonic movements that cause earthquakes and tsunamis.

SummaryIn recent years, distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) has enabled the observation of strain over tens of kilometres at metre-level intervals by using optical fibre as a sensor. This study presents an analytical solution for the cross-spectrum of ambient noise with DAS data acquired from arbitrarily shaped and/or multiple fibre-optic cables, with the aim of estimating subsurface S-wave velocity structures using the spatial autocorrelation (SPAC) method. Our formulation accounts for both isotropic and anisotropic wave incidence. The analytical cross-spectrum depends on the angles between the horizontal direction connecting the two measurement points and the axial strain directions at the two points. This study demonstrates that both Rayleigh and Love waves contribute to the cross-spectrum, and that their contributions vary in a complex manner depending on the cable geometry, seismic velocity structure, interstation distance between observation points, and source amplitudes. By using this analytical solution, an integrated analysis combining the SPAC method and the ambient noise tomography method is applicable to DAS data acquired from arbitrarily shaped and/or multiple cables. In addition, the analytical expression considering anisotropic wave incidence will be useful for correcting travel-time anomalies caused by source heterogeneity. The application of our formulation to DAS data from winding or multiple cables will facilitate high-resolution and precise imaging of the three-dimensional structure.

SeaCast is an innovative high-resolution forecasting system for the Mediterranean that harnesses AI to deliver faster and more energy-efficient predictions than traditional models. Unlike existing global AI models, which operate at lower resolutions and primarily rely on ocean data, SeaCast integrates both ocean and atmospheric variables, capturing complex regional dynamics. A paper describing the system is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Human-driven climate change intensified rainfall that triggered Spain's deadliest natural disaster in a generation when flash floods hit the Valencia region in 2024, a new study showed on Tuesday.

On a cool spring morning in a northern forest, the ground feels soft underfoot. Mist hangs between the trunks, and the air smells of wet leaves and old humus; the slow alchemy that keeps a forest alive. Beneath the surface, billions of microbes break down organic matter and hair-thin roots exhale, releasing steady pulses of carbon dioxide. This process, known as soil respiration, is one of the largest carbon fluxes on the planet, usually so stable it feels almost like a steady heartbeat.

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

River terraces are archives of past environmental and climate change as they form when rivers erode into alluvial plains, leaving behind an elevated flat surface. A sequence of terraces can take tens to hundreds of thousands of years to develop, thus they potentially hold important information over the period of formation. This is the case for the extensive terraces in southern Patagonia.

Through mechanistic models of terrace formation, Ruby et al. [2026] both isolate and combine the key drivers of terrace formation and connect them with the observed terrace shapes. Some terrace shapes were shown to form only under a specific combination of model parameters. This opens a new quantitative way to reveal past tectonic, climatic, and environmental conditions and how these have changed using terraces.  

Citation: Ruby, A., McNab, F., Schildgen, T. F., Wickert, A. D., & Fernandes, V. M. (2026). How sediment supply, sea-level, and glacial isostatic oscillations drive alluvial river long-profile evolution and terrace formation. AGU Advances, 7, e2025AV002035. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV002035

—M. Bayani Cardenas, Editor, AGU Advances

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

Deep inside the Greenland ice sheet are giant swirling plume-like structures. These have puzzled scientists for over a decade, but UiB researchers now believe they have cracked the mystery by applying the same mathematics used to understand how continents drift apart.

New research from the University of Copenhagen suggests that volcanic eruptions during the Ice Age may have triggered sudden climate change by disrupting the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), causing temperatures to fluctuate between hot and cold for thousands of years. The study contributes missing pieces to our understanding of what could cause Northern Europe's radiator to shut down.

An international team featuring faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York has drilled the longest ever sediment core from under an ice sheet, providing a record stretching back millions of years that will help climate scientists forecast the fate of the ice sheet in our warming world.

Drained peatlands in Finland can become carbon sinks within just 15 years of restoration, suggests a study published in Restoration Ecology. The findings are a stark contrast to another recent publication that suggests the switch from source to sink can take hundreds of years.

Finland will submit a biodiversity restoration plan to the European Commission this September, and what to do about the country’s 5 million hectares of drained peatland will likely be a hot topic. Teemu Tahvanainen, the author of the new study and a plant ecologist at the University of Eastern Finland (Itä-Suomen Yliopisto), said the upcoming deadline motivated him to add to the conversation.

Moreover, if the country is to one day achieve carbon neutrality, it “cannot neglect those areas,” said peatland ecologist Anke Günther from Universität Rostock, in Germany, who was not involved in the new paper.

Like a Forest with No Air

To understand why pristine peatlands are powerful carbon sinks, imagine a forest without any air between the trees, said Günther. That’s how densely the mosses that make up peat are packed together.

To understand why pristine peatlands are powerful carbon sinks, imagine a forest without any air between the trees, said Günther. That’s how densely the mosses that make up peat are packed together. In some places, peatlands can cover millions of hectares and be meters deep. All told, they contain massive amounts of plant matter and therefore massive amounts of carbon—about a third of the total carbon found on Earth.

Peatlands are waterlogged, which largely prevents the peat from decomposing, but also limits how well trees and other plants can grow. Forestry and agricultural companies, governments, and private landowners often dig trenches to drain off some of the water, making the land available for other uses. But draining peat exposes it to oxygen, which then allows microbes to break it down, releasing carbon dioxide.

Rewetting stops these carbon emissions, but it can also cause others, explained soil scientist Jens Leifeld from the Swiss federal research institute Agroscope, who was not involved in the new study. For example, any trees growing in a drained peatland will die upon rewetting, and their deaths will release carbon dioxide if the trees aren’t harvested. Moreover, rewetting shifts the peatland’s microbial population from aerobic microbes to anaerobic, increasing methane emissions. Studies have produced conflicting answers when asking how restoring peatlands affects carbon emissions. “There was no agreed opinion,” Leifeld said.

Increasing the Resolution

Tahvanainen modeled peatland restoration with greater temporal resolution than in previous studies. Rather than assume that parameters such as methane emissions and decomposition of forest litter will remain the same after rewetting, he predicted how these parameters will vary in the years and decades following.

His take-home message: Restoration can cool the climate in as little as a couple of decades. “I’m saying that it can, which sounds a little bit ambiguous on purpose,” he added. There are many variables his approach can’t account for, he said, such as how climate change will progress and the state of a peatland prior to restoration.

“The results make sense to me in a way that other studies didn’t always.”

“The results make sense to me in a way that other studies didn’t always,” said Günther. It seemed implausible to her that the carbon sequestered through a bit of tree growth would compensate for the vast amount of carbon released from draining a peatland.

But rewetting also has consequences the model doesn’t consider, Leifeld pointed out. For example, rewetting changes the color of the landscape in the winter, taking it from the dark color of a forest to the white color of open snow. Snow reflects more sunlight than trees, which cools Earth.

Only field studies can truly answer the question of how rewetting peatlands will affect their greenhouse gas emissions, said forest ecologist Paavo Ojanen from Natural Resources Institute Finland. These studies are ongoing, but they require following peatlands for years. Until they’re complete, “we don’t have the real measurements,” he said.

For now, Tahvanainen said his work adds nuance to studies reporting that peatland restoration won’t bring climate mitigation in the next hundred years. That’s “just way too strongly put,” he said.

—Saima May Sidik (@saimamay.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Sidik, S. M. (2026), Restored peatlands could become carbon sinks within decades, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260060. Published on 17 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.

Tropical forests help to generate vast amounts of rainfall each year, adding weight to arguments for protecting them as water and climate pressures increase, say researchers. A new study led by the University of Leeds has put a monetary value on one of forests' least recognized services as a source of rainfall to surrounding regions, finding that each hectare generates 2.4 million liters of rain each year—enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

Author(s): I. A. Nikolaeva, D. E. Shipilo, G. E. Rizaev, A. V. Koribut, T. A. Dick, D. V. Pushkarev, M. V. Levus, Ya. V. Grudtsyn, N. R. Vrublevskaya, N. A. Panov, O. G. Kosareva, L. V. Seleznev, and A. A. Ionin

We used filamentation of 940 nm, 90 fs, up to 6.5 mJ pulse to measure the spatial and spectral distributions of the second harmonic with 10−9 conversion efficiency in comparatively long focusing geometry (40 cm and 100 cm focal lengths, ≥1 cm filament), as well as spectral distributions of the secon…

[Phys. Rev. E 113, 025206] Published Tue Feb 17, 2026

A massive gully has been developing over the last two decades at Pondok Balik. It now covers an area of over 3 hectares.

In Indonesia, a massive and rapidly developing gully is causing considerable concern. Located at Pondok Balik in Central Aceh Regency, Aceh province, this feature has been developing since 2004. Reuters has an excellent gallery of images that is worth a view. There is a really good summary of the history of this gully on The Watchers website too.

There is some nice drone footage of this feature in this SindoNews report on Youtube:-

The location of this very large gully is [4.72374, 96.73117]. This is a Google Earth image of it, captured in June 2025:-

Google Earth image from June 2025 of the massive gully at Pondok Balik in Indonesia.

By comparison, here is an image from February 2015:-

Google Earth image from February 2015 2018 of the massive gully at Pondok Balik in Indonesia.

And here is a slider to compare the two, showing the raid development of the gully:-

Google Earth images

The gully is reportedly developing in loose volcanic materials, which are prone to rapid erosion when disturbed and saturated. In Indonesia, rainfall totals are high.

There are concerns about potential damage to the road seen in the image and to high voltage electricity pylons running through the area. It is proposed to seek to manage the hazard by reinforcing the soil and managing surface and subsurface water. This will not be straightforward or cheap.

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.

The Amazon rainforest is of crucial importance to the Earth's ecosystem, given its capacity to store substantial amounts of carbon in its vegetation. In 2023, the region experienced unusually high temperatures, reaching 1.5°C above the 1991–2020 average, accompanied by unusual levels of atmospheric dryness from September to November. These conditions were caused by warmer water temperatures in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that resulted in diminished moisture transport from the Atlantic to South America, and led to drought in the second half of 2023. An international research team, led by Santiago Botia at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, studied how these extreme conditions affected the Amazon rainforest's ability to absorb and store carbon.