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Australia's ocean territory is vast and covers an area more than 1.5 times the nation's landmass. Within these waters is a diversity of resources, marine species and habitats. And they're deep. Excluding Antarctic waters, 70% of Australia's ocean territory is deeper than 1,000 meters (3,281 feet), and nearly 50% is deeper than 3,000 meters (9,843 feet).

When Hanna Rae Martens visits the solar park she studies in northern Germany, she finds meadow pipits perched on the panels. They launch off to catch insects, then return, using the panels like tree branches.

This solar park, built on rewetted peatland, hosts a more diverse bird community than adjacent drained farmland, according to a new study in Ecological Solutions and Evidence. The findings suggest that combining peatland restoration with solar energy development could benefit birds.

Healthy peatlands hold large quantities of organic matter and, as a result, store more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem type.

In drained peatlands, on the other hand, that stored carbon is released to the atmosphere, presenting a major climate problem. In Germany, 95% of peatlands are degraded, and they account for 37% of all annual agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Globally, drained peatlands emit 5% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gases. That is roughly twice what air travel produces.

Installing solar panels on rewetted peatland is one proposed [solution]: The land gets restored while landowners earn income from energy production.

Rewetting peatlands reduces emissions, but it also makes most crops impossible to grow, reducing the land’s economic prospects. Installing solar panels on rewetted peatland is one proposed way to resolve that: The land gets restored while landowners earn income from energy production.

Martens, a peatland ecologist at the University of Greifswald, led what she says is one of the first studies to examine what that setup means for birds. She and her colleagues tracked bird species at the solar park and at nearby drained grassland throughout the 2024 breeding season.

An Unusual Flock

The team used six low-cost AudioMoth recorders at the solar park and six at the drained grassland site. From March through October 2024, each recorder captured 40-second audio clips of the landscape every 4 minutes. The team generated a large dataset that was then run through BirdNet, an open-source neural network trained to identify bird species from their calls. To reduce false positives, the researchers applied species-specific confidence thresholds before counting any detection.

The solar park attracted a mix of species, including some typically found in wetlands, wooded edges, and urban areas. “The presence of wetland species like reed bunting and the endangered meadow pipit shows that the solar park is truly rewetted,” Martens said. “But we also recorded species like Eurasian tree sparrow and tree pipit, which are not typically found in peatlands. They all appear to use the structure of the solar panels.”

A solar park built on rewetted peatland hosts a more diverse bird community than adjacent drained farmland, new research suggests. Credit: Wattmanufactur, CC BY

Though the overall number of species was similar across both sites, the solar park scored significantly higher on two standard diversity indices—the Shannon and Simpson indices. In other words, it hosted a more even and consistently present community of common species.

Promising, with Caveats

Outside scientists said the results were worth attention but cautioned against reading too much into them.

“I think this is a great idea to study,” said Michael Schummer, an associate professor of wetland wildlife at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry who was not involved in the research. But he pointed to a methodological concern: The audio recorders inside the solar park were spaced as close as 90 meters apart, below the 250-meter minimum standard for bird monitoring surveys. At that distance, multiple recording stations may capture sounds from the same bird territory, potentially inflating diversity estimates.

“Just as we want more biodiversity in the world, I think we need more diversity in our landscapes.”

Guido Bakema, a soil scientist at Wageningen University who was also not part of the study, raised a separate issue. The study, he said, compared the rewetted solar park to drained grassland but not to a rewetted peatland without solar panels, raising the question of whether it was the rewetting or the solar panels that accounted for the change in bird diversity. “It would be better if they had separated this,” he said.

The authors acknowledged these limitations directly, agreeing that a lack of replicates in this study means that the effects of rewetting and the addition of solar panels cannot be isolated. However, at the time of the study, no other operational rewetted peatland solar park existed nearby for comparison.

Martens is already working to address those gaps. She has expanded her research to five sites this year and plans to examine how design choices such as panel height, spacing, and row width affect which species show up.

“Just as we want more biodiversity in the world, I think we need more diversity in our landscapes,” she said.

—Larissa G. Capella (@CapellaLarissa), Science Writer

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Citation: Capella, L. G. (2026), For the birds: Solar panels over peatlands may increase avian biodiversity, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260229. Published on 15 July 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.

In the aftermath of the devastating July 4, 2025, floods that took 139 lives in Central Texas, an associate professor at The University of Texas at Austin set out to make a new type of outdoor flood alarm: a low-tech, loud alarm that anyone could "set and forget"—just like a smoke detector.

Author(s): Benjamin Wang, Henry Fetsch, and Nathaniel J. Fisch

The fast ignition paradigm previously developed for inertial confinement fusion is here extended to magnetized linear inertial fusion. The authors’ model showcases fast ignition’s potential to lead to more practical, cost-effective, and engineering-wise viable magnetized linear inertial fusion designs.

#AdvancingField #ClearMotivation

[Phys. Rev. E 114, 015211] Published Wed Jul 15, 2026

SummaryHigh-frequency (> 1Hz) coda waves consist of multiply scattered seismic energy that follows direct body wave arrivals and exhibit high sensitivity to small-scale lithospheric heterogeneities and attenuation. The decay and shape of coda wave envelopes are mainly influenced by intrinsic attenuation, associated with irreversible energy loss due to anelastic processes, and scattering attenuation, resulting from wave redirection caused by heterogeneity. However, these two effects are strongly coupled in observations, making their separation challenging. Here, we apply a Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder (CVAE) to 28,393 high-frequency, vertical-component coda wave envelopes recorded across the eastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau. By conditioning the model on epicentral distance, the trained CVAE extracts two latent variables that characterize the dominant envelope-shape variations independent of the first-order distance effect. The first latent variable mainly modulates P/S amplitude ratio and post-peak decay behavior, showing trends qualitatively consistent with intrinsic attenuation effects. Its spatial distribution reveals lower values within the stable Sichuan Basin and high values across the tectonically active Tibetan Plateau side, consistent with previous attenuation studies. The second latent variable primarily controls envelope broadening and peak delay, consistent with scattering-related energy redistribution. Its spatial pattern suggests enhanced scattering-related broadening in the region affected by loose sedimentary cover in the basin and fault-related fracturing in the plateau. The synthetic data test further supports the qualitative interpretation of the latent variables, while also showing cross-sensitivities between them. These results indicate that the CVAE can extract attenuation-related envelope-shape features, rather than directly decoupling intrinsic and scattering attenuation parameters. Our findings demonstrate the potential of CVAE-based approaches for extracting physically interpretable attenuation-related patterns from large coda envelope datasets in tectonically complex regions.

SummaryAccurate three-dimensional (3D) density models aid dynamics and oil exploration, yet inversion in complex regions faces non-uniqueness and noise. Due to the non-uniqueness and noise sensitivity of the solution process, accurately resolving spatial density variations from gravity data remains a major challenge. Wavelet decomposition is applied to the separation of gravity signals, and inverting the processed signals can effectively reduce non-uniqueness. However, wavelet multiscale decomposition can suffer from inter-layer crosstalk and boundary blurring due to incomplete signal separation. To address this, we proposed the Layered-Integrated Density Inversion Method (LID). The process begins with a layered inversion using wavelet decomposition. This integrated model serves as the initial model in the subsequent simulated annealing inversion. Simulation experiments showed that the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of the LID results is 0.056 g/cm3, representing a 63.47% improvement over the traditional method, which is based on wavelet layered inversion. In noise resistance experiments, the RMSE of the LID results was 0.077 g/cm3, a 54.67% improvement over the traditional method. Applying the method to the South China Sea (SCS) using Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite vertical gravity gradient data, we identified three prominent geological features: (1) traces of seafloor spreading along the mid-ocean ridge of the SCS; (2) fractures generated during subduction of SCS plate; (3) anomalous signals detected southeast of Palawan, which possibly correspond to remnants of the Paleo-Pacific plate. These findings align with existing theoretical models, providing independent evidence for rift dynamics and post-spreading crustal evolution of this passive continental margin.

When most people hear the phrase "ocean acidification," they think of coral reefs, shellfish or declining fisheries. Those concerns are real. But while working on our recent research, I found myself asking a different question: What if ocean acidification is telling us something much bigger than the health of marine ecosystems?

Ocean tides push upstream along coastal rivers, in some cases reaching hundreds of kilometers (hundreds of miles) inland. These inland stretches are known as tidal rivers, and they're the scene of complex interactions between the river current and tidal oscillations. When rivers flood, tidal dynamics can sometimes add to a river's height, increasing overall peak water levels and amplifying flooding.

Methane (CH4) is a potent greenhouse gas whose concentration in the atmosphere has risen sharply in recent decades. Wetlands are the largest natural source of methane to the atmosphere, but large uncertainties remain about how much methane comes from wetlands and how these emissions may increase in response to a changing climate. Tropical wetlands, including those in the Amazon, produce substantial amounts of methane, but accurately estimating their emission sources and magnitudes remains difficult. One reason is the lack of measurement data, especially in the tropics, where extensive cloud cover interferes with satellite observations and ground-based measurements are sparse.

In the heart of the Congo Basin's Cuvette Centrale, a large depression that hosts the world's largest tropical wetland complex, lie two vast, shallow blackwater lakes, Lake Tumba and Lake Mai Ndombe. Together, they are roughly the size of 420,000 football fields.

Many parts of Western Europe are currently wilting under a heat wave. These blistering spells can last for a week or more, and although they are common in most summers, it is difficult to predict how long they will last.

Source: AGU Advances

Ocean tides push upstream along coastal rivers, in some cases reaching hundreds of kilometers inland. These inland stretches are known as tidal rivers, and they’re the scene of complex interactions between the river current and tidal oscillations. When rivers flood, tidal dynamics can sometimes add to a river’s height, increasing overall peak water levels and amplifying flooding.

This heightening mechanism occurred in China’s Yangtze River, where disastrous floods in both 1954 and 2020 were aided by tides. To learn more, Guo et al. combined data on river discharge and tides from both flood periods, along with a tidal model, to explore how interactions between the river and incoming tides conspired to create anomalously high water levels.

The authors found that peak water levels in both floods occurred around 1 to 2 weeks after peak river discharge during perigean spring tides when both the Sun and Moon are in optimal positions to create high tides. They hypothesize that peak river discharge rates suppress subharmonic tidal amplitudes, while intermediate rates of discharge allow for greater amplitudes and therefore higher water levels. Additionally, river water takes some time to fully move downstream, meaning that water levels are higher in the days following floods, adding to the effects of tidal inflows.

Comparing the two floods, the authors noted that channel deepening caused by sediment depletion from the Three Gorges Dam helped create higher water levels in 2020 than in 1954. Additionally, higher sea levels in 2020 helped water move upstream, also contributing to peak water levels.

Looking to other tidal rivers around the world, the authors say that cumulatively, more than 3,380 kilometers of tidal rivers are potentially exposed to floods caused by similar mechanisms. Other rivers, such as the Mekong and the Amazon, also see similar tidal subharmonics, meaning the same forces could conspire to create extra-large floods as swollen rivers and incoming ocean water combine. (AGU Advances, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV002247, 2026)

—Nathaniel Scharping (@nathanielscharp), Science Writer

Citation: Scharping, N. (2026), How tides and river water combine to amplify floods, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260230. Published on 14 July 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.

A Florida State University paleoclimatologist led the creation of a global database hosting thousands of seawater isotope measurements collected over almost 50 years that will aid scientists in generating more accurate climate reconstructions and predictions.

Contrary to conventional geological thinking, the Hawaiian mantle plume has gotten hotter by about 250°C (480°F) over the past 47 million years. This discovery, led by Earth scientists at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, reverses the long-held idea that hotspots start out very hot and progressively cool over time. The study, published recently in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, also found that heat surges produced the two largest volcanoes along the Northwestern and Main Hawaiian Island chain.

After a typhoon surprised a research cruise, scientists took advantage of the unique sampling opportunity to reveal rapid changes in bacterioplankton communities and biogeochemical cycling.

SummarySeismic moment tensors provide simple representations of a wide range of event types, including earthquakes, volcanic events, landslides, and explosions. Estimating the six parameters of a seismic moment tensor is subject to inaccuracies in the assumed Earth model, whether it is characterized by a simple layered structure (1D) or by heterogeneities (3D). Using recorded data and seismic wavefield simulations in 3D Earth models, we estimate double-couple and full moment tensors using MTUQ software, and then we quantify the differences among moment tensors due to the different Earth models. We establish new capabilities for implementing 3D Earth models from the EarthScope Earth Model Collaboration (EMC) into the wave propagation code SPECFEM3D Globe. The three workflow components—EMC, SPECFEM3D Globe, and MTUQ—are publicly available, thereby maximizing possibilities for access, reproducibility, and future enhancements. We demonstrate the source estimation workflow in the region of Alaska, using 5earthquakes and 53D Earth models. Using misfit measures from the moment tensor estimation, we can quantify the performance of both the moment tensor and also the underlying Earth model. For this limited data set of 5 well-recorded events, we demonstrate how to examine basic questions of source variability, tomographic model evaluation, and the reliability of non-double-couple components of moment tensors. The procedures enable quantification and visualization of moment tensor uncertainties due to Earth models, while also offering direct comparison of tomographic models with an independent reference set of data.

SummarySeismic anisotropy observations can constrain flow and deformation in the lowermost mantle (D″). D″ deformation is often attributed either to changes of mantle flow from mostly horizontal to upwelling near deep mantle plumes or edges of the two antipodal large low-velocity provinces (LLVPs), or to strong deformation in slab-dominated deep mantle regions. A unified understanding of deep mantle flow and its drivers, however, is still developing. We investigate D″ anisotropy beneath Australia using a novel approach combining array processing and shear-wave splitting measurements applied to core-traversing seismic waves which reflect off the underside of the core-mantle boundary up to two times (called SKS, S2KS, and S3KS). Strong differences in splitting between pairs of phases that sample the upper mantle in a similar way but sample different portions of the D″ layer (e.g., SKS-SKKS or SKS-S3KS) can be interpreted as due to a contribution from lowermost mantle anisotropy to the splitting of one or both phases. Using this approach, we detect strong anisotropy in two locations at the southwestern edge of the Pacific LLVP, which we attribute to a change from mostly horizontal to upwelling flow. One of these locations coincides with a previously suggested mantle plume that has not yet reached the surface. We also identify anisotropy south of Australia, where seismic velocities are faster than average and slab remnants may be present. Beneath much of the Australian continent itself, we see little or no evidence for splitting discrepancies, which may be evidence for isotropic, or only weakly anisotropic, lowermost mantle. Our study region thus uniquely showcases seismic anisotropy in diverse deep mantle environments, associated with a possible deep mantle plume, the edge of the Pacific LLVP, and potential remnant slab material.

Japan is well known for its large earthquakes, but not all regions show the same patterns of earthquake activity. One way to understand which places tend to experience large or small earthquakes is the b-value, a key statistical measure long used by researchers to understand seismicity and assess earthquake occurrence patterns.

The lava that buried entire neighborhoods during the 2018 Kīlauea eruption was composed of nearly 80% gas bubbles near its source. A recent study shows that those bubbles played a central role in controlling how fast and far the lava traveled and that lava flow models need to account for bubbles to more accurately forecast where lava will stop.

Earth scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have published an international study showing that major earthquakes in Southeast Asia can affect regional relative sea-level projections.