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In an age of rising sea levels, as polar ice sheets melt in a climate warmed by fossil fuel emissions, climate modelers are racing to understand what the future might hold for coastlines around the world. But uncertainties about how fast polar ice might melt make predicting coastal inundation difficult. Now, scientists think they've helped make one of those uncertainties, the material conditions underneath the Greenland ice sheet, smaller.

Around the world, phytoplankton in the upper ocean help to cycle key nutrients and regulate Earth's climate by absorbing carbon dioxide. These photosynthesizing organisms rely on dissolved iron as an essential micronutrient, meaning that when iron levels drop, phytoplankton activity drops, too.

Sophisticated new chemical analysis of gases trapped in rocks for millions of years has cast new light on the origin of the gold deposits beneath Scotland and Ireland. The finding, made by team of scientists led by Professor Fin Stuart from the University of Glasgow, could help pinpoint the location of buried deposits of the treasured metal in the future.

Want to find schools in satellite images? Researchers say you can spot them by looking at tree cover because schools stand out as rectangular holes in the urban canopy.

Even though access to nature offers a variety of health and social benefits for students, researchers at the University of California (UC), Davis have found that trees on school grounds are declining across California. Declining tree canopy at schools can raise temperatures to dangerous levels, forcing kids to miss out on the benefits of spending time outside.

The researchers also conducted a field study to show how much schoolyard trees influence temperature. “Our motivation is thinking about a kid of around 8 years old playing in the schoolyard with their friends,” said UC Davis urban forestry scientist Luisa Velasquez-Camacho. “It’s very nice, but when you translate this scenario to Sacramento or the Central Valley at 2:00 p.m. in the hottest months, this is a nightmare because they don’t have natural shade.”

“Shade Is King”

To track changes in tree cover at schools, the researchers examined CalFire (California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) tree canopy maps for more than 7,200 urban schools in California between 2018 and 2022. By quantifying the tree cover, they found that 85% of the schools had experienced tree loss over that time span, and some Central Valley school districts lost 25% of their tree cover. Schools had less than half the tree cover of surrounding urban areas. The results were published in Urban Forestry and Urban Greening.

“I can’t say the results are surprising,” said Kevin Lanza, an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health science at UTHealth Houston who wasn’t involved in the study. He said the findings align with existing studies on urban forestry and noted that trees can be lost in schools to make way for building expansions or because the cost of maintaining them is prohibitive. “Schools are more stressed than ever,” he said.

Scientists collected data such as temperature, radiation, and wind at children’s height. Credit: Emily C. Dooley, UC Davis

The researchers wanted to do more than document the loss of tree cover in schools; they wanted to investigate the health cost of losing those trees. To that end, said Alessandro Ossola, an ecologist at UC Davis and a coauthor of the research, “we took to the streets” in the summer of 2025, spending long days collecting weather data at school playgrounds across California.

The researchers deployed sensors collecting data on air temperature, humidity, radiation, and wind placed at children’s height around each playground. Using these data, they were able to calculate the thermal index, which is a measure of how the environment feels to a human body.

Then, they walked a sensor-laden cart around each playground—racking up over 200 miles (322 kilometers) over the summer—to map out microclimates. The researchers also scanned thermal radiation from common playground surfaces, including dry and irrigated grass, mulch, asphalt, and rubber.

Researchers walked a sensor-laden cart over 200 miles (322 kilometers) this summer while studying California playground temperatures. Credit: Jael Mackendorf, UC Davis

Although the team hasn’t fully analyzed the data yet, early results indicate that rubberized surfaces, often found around playground equipment, are particularly dangerous for reflecting radiation. “It was ridiculous for us to stay out there in the afternoon, even as adults. A kid is much closer to the ground,” Ossola said.

They saw the heat index reach 120°F (54°C) at some schools, and a single tree could drop surface temperatures by as much as 30°F (17°C) compared to direct sunlight. But while the air temperature often wasn’t dramatically different between direct Sun and shade, the thermal index dropped considerably under the shade because of the effects of radiation.

“Shade is king.”

“Shade is king,” said Lanza, and while artificial shade is better than nothing, trees can lower temperatures even more because the water vapor produced by evaporation from the tree leaves absorbs even more heat.

Once trees are lost, planting and maintaining replacement trees until they grow big enough to offer shade are a major hurdle. The researchers suggested that after their full analysis, the results could help guide schools on where to plant new trees and what species of trees will provide the greatest benefits.

Finding a Schoolyard Shade Strategy

Finding ways to manage temperatures is vital for children’s development because if temperatures rise too high, students are forced to remain inside, and for many, recess is their only chance to be in nature. Time spent in nature increases well-being and helps build healthy physical activity habits. UC Davis researchers are also conducting studies that suggest time outside can improve academic performance.

“It’s a matter of reenvisioning trees as an asset that can be budgeted.”

Lanza also noted that “low-income and Black and Latino communities are seeing larger losses of canopy than other communities,” indicating that the impacts of losing time in nature are likely not equitable across populations.

The ongoing work by universities and Green Schoolyards America, a nonprofit partner in this research, aims to use the findings to advocate for strategic investments in trees and other plants to improve students’ time spent outside. “It’s a matter of reenvisioning trees as an asset that can be budgeted,” Ossola said. “If we are negating these opportunities to be close to nature, we are missing the bus, not just for academic outcomes but also in terms of public health in the future.”

—Andrew Chapman (@andrewgchapman.bsky.social), Science Writer

This news article is included in our ENGAGE resource for educators seeking science news for their classroom lessons. Browse all ENGAGE articles, and share with your fellow educators how you integrated the article into an activity in the comments section below.

Citation: Chapman, A. (2025), California schools are feeling the heat, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250458. Published on 11 December 2025. Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Source: Geophysical Research Letters

Around the world, phytoplankton in the upper ocean help to cycle key nutrients and regulate Earth’s climate by absorbing carbon dioxide. These photosynthesizing organisms rely on dissolved iron as an essential micronutrient, meaning that when iron levels drop, phytoplankton activity drops, too.

However, the full details of dissolved iron dynamics in the upper ocean are unclear, limiting our understanding of the effects on phytoplankton ecology, nutrient cycling, and the climate.

Now, Bates and Hawco report a new analysis of dissolved iron levels in the upper ocean near Hawaii. Between 2020 and 2023, they collected seawater samples on 21 separate research cruises to Station ALOHA (A Long-Term Oligotrophic Habitat Assessment), a marine research site located 100 kilometers north of Oahu, Hawaii. Back in the lab, they measured levels of dissolved iron and other elements in the samples and compared samples collected during different seasons.

The analysis reconfirmed a well-documented increase in dissolved iron levels at Station ALOHA in the springtime, which is caused by an annual increase in dust carried to the site by winds from Asia. However, the new data also revealed a previously undetected spike in dissolved iron in the winter that could not be explained by dust deposition.

Further analysis of the samples, including measurements of ratios between titanium and aluminum levels, suggested that the wintertime iron peak may have a far more local source: the Hawaiian Islands themselves. It is possible that increased wintertime rainfall boosts runoff of sediment from the islands, which is then transported to Station ALOHA by wintertime swells.

The researchers also used the new data to estimate that despite seasonal fluctuations in concentration, dissolved iron tends to cycle through the upper ocean at a relatively steady rate, with each molecule being replaced about every 5 months. Prior estimates reported turnover rates of anywhere from days to decades.

These findings could help improve understanding of phytoplankton’s various ecological roles, including nitrogen cycling and carbon uptake. (Geophysical Research Letters, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025GL118095, 2025)

—Sarah Stanley, Science Writer

Citation: Stanley, S. (2025), Wintertime spike in oceanic iron levels detected near Hawaii, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250462. Published on 11 December 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.

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

The Nankai subduction zone in southwest Japan has produced multiple M8+ earthquakes over the past 300 years, including the 1707 M8.7 Hōei earthquake, the 1944 M8.1 Tōnankai earthquake, and the 1946 M8.1 Nankaidō earthquake. As one of the most extensively studied subduction zones in the world, it has been the focus of numerous Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) expeditions aimed at improving our understanding of its seismogenic and tsunamigenic behavior.

Faulkner et al. [2025] compile all available laboratory friction data from Nankai Trough scientific drilling samples and integrate them with routine IODP mineralogical analyses. The dataset spans three transects—Kumano, Muroto, and Ashizuri—and includes material from 26 drilling sites. The experiments cover a wide range of slip velocities, from micrometers per second to meters per second, allowing systematic inversion of key frictional parameters.

This compilation shows that the frictional strength of these materials is generally lower than typical Byerlee friction and decreases with increasing clay content. However, the tendency for materials to weaken at higher slip rates—a key condition for earthquake nucleation—does not clearly correlate with clay abundance. Frictional stability analyses indicate a broad spectrum of possible fault-slip behaviors, from slow slip to earthquake-like failure, consistent with observations in nature. Overall, the findings highlight significant natural heterogeneity in frictional properties within a subduction environment and provide new constraints on the frictional characteristics of the shallow Nankai margin.

Citation: Faulkner, D. R., Zhang, J., Okuda, H., Bedford, J. D., Ikari, M. J., Schleicher, A. M., & Hirose, T. (2025). Synthesis of the laboratory frictional properties of a major shallow subduction zone: The Nankai Trough, offshore SW Japan. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 130, e2025JB031613. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025JB031613

—Alexandre Schubnel, Editor-in-Chief, JGR: Solid Earth

Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

As part of the EU project ECOTIP, an international team of researchers, including the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon, has analyzed the sea off Greenland more comprehensively than ever before. The key question: How is the area developing in the face of climate change and environmental pollution? Most of the samples were examined in the Hereon laboratories.

Recent fieldwork by Griffith University researchers has highlighted an African country that is facing a rapidly escalating environmental crisis as severe gully erosion—locally termed "mega gullies"—advances across valuable agricultural landscapes.

SummaryTo understand the melt source of hotlines with asynchronous volcanoes, we investigate the lithospheric structure of the Cameroon Volcanic Line (CVL), an intraplate hotline without age progression stretching from the Atlantic Ocean into Central Africa. We analyze Bouguer gravity anomalies from the World Gravity Model 2012 using the 2‐D power spectrum techniques and 2-D forward modeling to estimate the crustal and lithospheric thickness. We find: (1) thin crust (20–30 km) beneath the oceanic CVL; (2) thick crust (30–43 km) beneath the continental CVL and the Oubanguides Belt, and thicker crust (43–50 km) beneath the Congo Craton; (3) thin lithosphere (90–120 km) beneath the oceanic CVL and thinner lithosphere (75–90 km) beneath the continental CVL; and (4) thicker lithosphere (150–234 km) beneath the Congo Craton. Our seismically constrained forward models reveal a delaminated body beneath the continental CVL and a sharp transition from thick lithosphere beneath the Congo Craton to thin lithosphere beneath the Oubanguides Belt. We interpret that the thin lithosphere beneath the continental CVL is a result of lithospheric delamination. The delaminated body in the uppermost mantle deflects rising mantle plume material, resulting in the Y-shaped distribution of continental volcanoes. Edge-Driven Convection (EDC) resulting from the sharp gradient in lithospheric thickness between the Congo Craton and the Oubanguides Belt focuses the plume material beneath thin lithosphere, producing the continental CVL. The southern volcanoes of the continental CVL are formed from the southward deflection of plume material by the delaminated body, with melt ascent facilitated by the lithospheric-scale Central African Shear Zone. The northward-directed plume material forms the distinct Biu Plateau, and the eastward-deflected plume material forms the Adamawa Plateau. With a continuous influx of plume material beneath the thin continental lithosphere, for mass to be conserved, part of the plume material defiles the gradient of the thicker oceanic lithosphere adjacent to the Congo Craton to flow oceanward. The oceanward flow of plume material is modulated by upwellings from EDC, producing the oceanic CVL, which explains the oceanward decrease in the timing of the onset of volcanism. We therefore conclude that only the continental CVL lacks age progression resulting from the complex interaction of the rising plume with the delaminated body and the lithospheric architecture.

SummaryInferring the spatio-temporal distribution of slip during earthquakes remains a significant challenge due to the high dimensionality and ill-posed nature of the inverse problem. As a result, finite-source inversions typically rely on simplified assumptions. Moreover, in the absence of ground-truth measurements, the performance of inversion methods can only be evaluated through synthetic tests. Laboratory earthquakes offer a valuable alternative by providing “simulated real data” and ground truth observations under controlled conditions, enabling a more reliable evaluation of source inversion procedures. In this study, we present static and quasi-static slip inversion results from data recorded during laboratory earthquakes. Each event is instrumented with 20 accelerometers along the fault, and the recorded acceleration data are used to invert for the slip history. We consider two different types of Green’s functions (GF): simplistic GF assuming a homogeneous elastic half-space and realistic GF computed by finite element modeling of the experimental setup. The inversion results are then compared to direct observations of fault slip and rupture velocity obtained independently during the experiments. Our results show that, regardless of the GF used, the inversions fit well with the data and result in small formal uncertainties of model parameters. However, only the inversion with realistic GF yields slip distributions consistent with the true fault slip measurements and successfully recovers the distribution of rupture velocity along the fault. These findings emphasize the critical role of GF selection in accurately resolving slip dynamics and highlight an important distinction in Bayesian inversion: while posterior uncertainty quantification is essential, it does not guarantee accuracy, especially if forward modeling uncertainties are not properly accounted for. Thus, confidence in inversion results must be paired with careful modeling choices to ensure physical reliability.

Some wildfires are so intense, they create their own weather—thunderstorms driven by heat that hurtle smoke as high as 10 miles into the sky like giant chimneys.

Asier Madarieta, a researcher in the EHU's HGI (Water Environmental Processes) group, has analyzed how the Earth's crust is being compressed and deformed in the field where Eurasia and Africa meet in the Western Mediterranean. His work contributes towards understanding this complex contact field better as well as opening the door to identifying the faults and structures that could lead to earthquakes or deformations on the peninsula.

For the first time, scientists have resolved extremely intense tropical cyclones and their effect on the ocean carbon cycle in a global Earth system model. Using two category-4 hurricanes in the North Atlantic as examples, the study reveals a cascade of physical-biogeochemical effects including uptake of carbon dioxide and regional-scale phytoplankton bloom. The results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Amazon rainforest is slowly transitioning to a new, hotter climate with more frequent and intense droughts—conditions that haven't been seen on Earth for tens of millions of years.

An international research team may have found an explanation for seismic anomalies, the noticeable deviations in the behavior of earthquake waves, in Earth's inner core.

The March 28, 2025, Myanmar earthquake is giving scientists a rare look into how some of the world's most dangerous fault systems behave, including California's San Andreas Fault. Earthquakes are notoriously messy and complex, but this one struck along an unusually straight and geologically "mature" fault, creating near-ideal conditions for researchers to observe how Earth releases energy during a major continental rupture.

New Jersey is parched top to bottom.

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

Using a combination of innovative approaches including observations and models, Platt and Dugan [2025] demonstrate how post-winter storm pulses of road salt lead to high concentrations of toxic substances in runoff water.

Surprisingly, the authors find that dilution is not an effective solution in this case, as discharge and snowfall magnitudes do not significantly impact concentrations. Key factors instead include the amount of road salt applied, land use, groundwater recharge and the base flow index. Thus, under conditions of increased groundwater recharge, road salt is stored in groundwater rather than running off.

However, this is not good news either, as it contributes to legacy effects. The authors use a random forest model with available data to show that smaller, ecologically important streams in the study region are at risk, providing a map of potential regions of road salt lightning strikes.

Citation: Platt, L. R. C., & Dugan, H. A. (2025). Episodic salinization of midwestern and northeastern US rivers by road salt. Water Resources Research, 61, e2024WR039496. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024WR039496

—Stefan Kollet, Editor, Water Resources Research

Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Scientists of all stripes know the value of collecting and using data to answer research questions about everything from microscopic life to Earth system processes to space physics. But what about the value of data shedding light on peers within their own research communities?

Such data can help scientists better understand the makeup of their field and help them find and connect with colleagues. Compiled into an up-to-date, worldwide directory of researchers in a given discipline, for example, they could help people search for employment opportunities, identify possible collaborators, and suggest potential reviewers for papers and proposals.

These data can also help scientists who are early in their careers or otherwise less visible within their community to gain recognition. And they can be used to identify emerging research areas and trends indicating fields that are thriving or declining—important information not only for scientists themselves but also for funding bodies, oversight committees, and policymakers.

Researchers may have ideas of the approximate size and composition of their community, but hard numbers and comprehensive information are difficult to come by.

Researchers may have ideas of the approximate size and composition of their community based on conferences they attend and journal articles they read, but hard numbers and comprehensive information are difficult to come by. Demographic surveys conducted by professional societies or funding agencies typically provide incomplete information, because not everybody responds to them, they may cover single countries only, and they’re performed infrequently.

The need for workforce demographic data was highlighted in the recent National Academies’ Decadal Survey for Solar and Space Physics, which specifically called (in recommendation 4-1) for U.S. federal agencies to fund collection of this information to help determine the state of the profession.

An underused resource for this data collection is hiding in plain sight: the body of scientific articles produced by the research community. By combining the metadata from these articles with Open Researcher and Contributor IDs (ORCIDs) that uniquely identify authors, it is possible to extract accurate, current information about researchers and their work.

HelioIndex is a new, automated online directory that uses this approach to offer an evolving snapshot of the global community in the field of solar and heliospheric physics (SHP) [Young, 2025]. HelioIndex’s methods are generalizable and can be applied as long as researcher ORCIDs are widely used in research publications, meaning it offers a model for developing similar tools in many other scientific fields.

The Who, What, Where, and How Much of SHP

SHP includes science focused on all aspects of the Sun, from its interior through its atmosphere, out into the solar wind, and all the way to the outer edge of the heliosphere. HelioIndex currently identifies more than 2,300 active SHP researchers in about 60 countries, offering information about these scientists’ geographic distribution, institutional affiliations, areas of expertise (derived from journal article keywords), and publication records.

Figure 1 offers a glimpse of how HelioIndex can be used to consider geographic trends, for example, showing the 10 countries with the most researchers included in the directory. As of July, the United States had the largest share at 29.1%, followed by China and the United Kingdom.

Fig. 1. Tallies of HelioIndex authors located in the 10 most-represented countries in July 2025 and July 2022 are shown here, along with the corresponding percentages of the total number of authors.

Updated twice a month using freely available publication data, HelioIndex always provides the most recent data, but figures from earlier dates can be used to track changes over time. Figure 1 also compares the current numbers of researchers in HelioIndex in the top 10 countries with the corresponding numbers from 3 years earlier and shows how each country’s proportional share of the SHP community has changed during that time.

From July 2022 to July 2025, China, India, and the United States, for example, saw standout increases of 42%, 39%, and 33%, respectively, in their numbers of SHP researchers. The increases contributed to these countries’ growing shares of the global total population of SHP scientists during this 3-year period. Meanwhile, growth in several European countries in the top 10 has been smaller, leading to generally decreased shares of the overall community population.

These numbers demonstrate that overall, SHP as a field is growing. The extent of growth shown in different countries may help early-career scientists to decide where to pursue their careers. The data may also be valuable to national funding bodies for assessing their countries’ competitiveness and determining whether funding levels are appropriate.

An important function of HelioIndex is to enhance the visibility of researchers and their work, especially researchers who have few opportunities for recognition.

At the other end of the scale from the top 10 countries, almost half of the countries are represented in HelioIndex with five or fewer SHP researchers. An important function of HelioIndex is to enhance the visibility of researchers and their work, especially researchers in countries with smaller SHP research communities or who have few opportunities for recognition. Greater visibility can foster new collaborations and research directions and help researchers to prosper and develop research communities in their countries.

The publication and ORCID data used in HelioIndex also enable users to better understand publishing trends within the SHP community. For example, these data allow calculation of the average annual number of first-authored, refereed (FAR) articles per person across all HelioIndex authors.

Knowing this average—currently 0.68, which equates to about two FAR papers every 3 years—is valuable for managing expectations in the field. It may reassure young researchers feeling pressure to publish frequently to advance in their careers that success does not necessarily require such a rapid publishing pace. Meanwhile, if a researcher submits a grant proposal claiming their project will yield 10 FAR papers in a 3-year period, the HelioIndex data suggest that a reviewer considering the proposal would have a right to be skeptical!

Fig. 2. The distribution of career ages—a metric estimated from the publication date of an author’s first first-authored, refereed paper—across all HelioIndex authors, as of July 2025, is currently weighted toward early-career-stage researchers.

A “career age” can also be estimated for each HelioIndex author, using the publication date of their first FAR paper as age 0. This leads to a plot of age distributions (Figure 2), with vertical lines indicating boundaries between early-, middle-, and senior-career categories. The current median career age of all authors in HelioIndex is 9.9 years.

The age distribution and calculated career ages seemingly skew toward younger ages, likely because ORCIDs came into use only in 2009. Whereas most articles published since then will be linked to authors’ ORCIDs and thus included in the HelioIndex data, older articles may be missing for some researchers. However, it is clear from the long tail of the distribution that many senior authors have manually updated their ORCID records.

A Community-Specific Resource

HelioIndex differs from other resources that contribute to professional networking in that it serves a particular research community.

HelioIndex differs from other resources that contribute to professional networking such as ORCID, Scopus, and LinkedIn in that it serves a particular research community.

The procedure for populating HelioIndex begins with scheduled, automatic queries of recent scholarly literature—as captured in NASA’s Astrophysics Data System (ADS) bibliographic database—for articles related to SHP. Articles are likely to be flagged if they, for example, reference prominent review papers, mention a major SHP observatory or spacecraft, or include certain keywords (e.g., “solar flare”).

For each article found by the queries, the names and ORCID identifiers of the authors are gathered and added to a master list of potential HelioIndex authors. As journals generally do not have standard formats for specifying author affiliations, HelioIndex uses custom software to extract institution names and countries from affiliation information through string matching. (Affiliations listed in HelioIndex are updated routinely based upon an author’s most recent publication.)

Authors are included in HelioIndex based on meeting specific keyword criteria and publication criteria. Most journals require authors to assign several keywords to their articles to indicate the area of research to which their work belongs. For inclusion in HelioIndex, it is required that at least 15% of an author’s keywords across all their published articles contain “solar,” “Sun,” or “interplanetary.” This approach has proven effective in distinguishing SHP scientists from scientists in neighboring fields such as stellar physics and magnetospheric physics.

The publication criteria include having at least one refereed article published within the past 3 years, at least one FAR paper in their career, a career age of at least 2, and at least six total points (authorship of a FAR paper counts as two points and coauthorship of a paper counts as one point). These criteria have been chosen so that HelioIndex, at least initially, primarily represents the community of SHP researchers who have earned a doctoral degree and are part of the professional workforce.

Of course, it is difficult to ensure that the directory includes everyone it should in the SHP community. Using the criteria above, for example, it is possible that some early-career researchers—who perhaps haven’t published enough research yet—may be unintentionally excluded. Such issues can be overcome, however, because as the directory’s creator (and part of the SHP community myself), I can readily assess its completeness and adjust query parameters as needed, and I can directly respond to questions about or requests to be added to HelioIndex.

Listed authors can also check their own data, identify omissions or errors, and request not to be listed by name (though in such cases, their geographic and publication data still count toward the general statistics, such as shown in Figures 1 and 2, to maintain completeness).

Scientists Finding Scientists

In addition to providing basic demographic data about the current community of SHP scientists, HelioIndex can serve many other functions. Students and other researchers exploring career options can quickly assess where scientists in the SHP community are concentrated (or not) and use the keyword data to determine with whom their expertise and interests match. They can also browse publication lists to determine scientists’ interests, activity levels, and collaborators.

HelioIndex can also be used to identify potential reviewers for a submitted journal article by matching authors’ keywords to those used in the article. This usage allows an author (or journal editor) to suggest reviewers they may otherwise not have considered, helping diversify the reviewer pool and raise the visibility of peers. This use of HelioIndex may also benefit program managers at funding agencies looking for scientists to sit on review panels.

In just the few months since HelioIndex was publicly announced, traffic to it has been robust and feedback from users has been largely positive. In September and October, for example, the site received a combined 14,651 unique visitors—higher-than-expected traffic considering the modest size of the SHP community. Individuals have commented, for example, that HelioIndex has revealed researchers and research they weren’t previously aware of, and that it helps scientists “grasp the global view of the community of Solar Physics and Heliophysics in the world,” in the words of one midcareer scientist. These early indications suggest that HelioIndex is providing valuable services to many in this community, and seemingly even to many outside it.

The basic mechanics and principles of HelioIndex can be readily applied to develop similar resources for other scientific fields, no matter their size or scope.

Beyond SHP, the basic mechanics and principles of HelioIndex can be readily applied to develop similar resources for other scientific fields, no matter their size or scope, although specific aspects of the literature queries and keyword criteria would need to be adjusted. The initial article search, for example, would need to be modified to cover relevant journals and keywords. The keyword search would need updating too; to distinguish volcanologists from geoscientists in neighboring fields, say, the keyword search could require “volcano.” (Requiring “Earth” as well could help exclude those who study volcanoes elsewhere, such as on Mars or Io.) Author publication criteria could also be revised if, for example, average publishing trends in other fields differ from those in SHP.

As the ADS database is not currently complete for the Earth sciences or other fields outside of astrophysics, an alternative source for publication data, such as Web of Science or Scopus, may be needed. Furthermore, the approach of designing custom software to pull affiliation information from articles into HelioIndex, which worked well for the relatively small SHP research community, may be more challenging for larger fields with many more institutions represented.

HelioIndex demonstrates that scientific article metadata are a rich resource that can be efficiently and effectively mined to complement the sporadic data collected through researcher surveys. With a baseline of consistent and reproducible demographic data, geographic, temporal, and subject matter trends can be identified, providing a variety of valuable information about and for research communities.

References

Young, P. R. (2025), HelioIndex: A directory of active researchers in solar and heliospheric physics, Sol. Phys., 300, 77, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-025-02488-y.

Author Information

Peter Young (peter.r.young@nasa.gov), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Citation: Young, P. (2025), Shining a light on the people behind solar science, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250457. Published on 10 December 2025. Text not subject to copyright.
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

When exposed to environmental stressors like high ocean temperatures and excessive solar radiation, corals bleach and die. Coral reefs collapse, and their benefits—increased biodiversity, protection from coastal erosion, and local economic activity—also disappear.

Some researchers think stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), one of the most well-studied methods of climate intervention, may help mitigate some of the effects coral bleaching when used in tandem with reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. SAI describes a process in which aerosols such as sulfur dioxide are injected into the stratosphere to reduce incoming solar radiation.

To find out whether SAI could help corals, researchers led by physical oceanographer Gouri Anil of Louisiana State University modeled future heat stress on shallow coral reefs with and without the intervention.

Anil and her fellow researchers found that SAI could help many vulnerable reefs survive through 2060, giving researchers and lawmakers time to develop more lasting solutions to mitigate climate change. Anil and the research team will present their results on 15 December at AGU’s Annual Meeting 2025 in New Orleans.

Cool Atmosphere, Warm Waters

Anil’s team calculated the heat stress that shallow equatorial reefs across the globe would experience under a moderate climate change scenario with surface sea temperature data from the United Nations’ World Conservation Monitoring Centre and the Community Earth System Model–Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model version 6 (CESM-WACCM6).

The model used in the study is one of the best suited for this type of climate research, according to Alan Robock, a climatologist at Rutgers University who was not involved in the study. Built with data from volcanic eruptions, CESM2-WACCM6 is able to evaluate SAI as a similar release of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere.

The modeling showed that without any intervention, nearly all the coral reefs studied would experience a fatal amount of heat stress by 2060. Certain coral species and coral reefs in central Polynesia and the tropical east Pacific, which are exposed to the most sunlight, were particularly vulnerable.

When the researchers simulated a scenario that included SAI, however, the sustainability of shallow equatorial reefs through 2060 improved. Every year, the models showed only 10% of the reefs’ area would be at risk of bleaching if SAI was implemented beginning in 2035.

SAI Side Effects

Though SAI may reduce heat stress on coral reefs, researchers said, it could have consequences that require more research to fully understand.

For example, sulfur dioxide can react with water and other substances in the atmosphere to form sulfuric acid aerosols. These aerosols eventually precipitate, Robock said. “It’s going to fall out of the atmosphere to produce acid rain, acid snow.”

“What we’re trying to do is get this information out to people who make these decisions so that they know exactly what could happen.”

Precipitation also means that regular injections of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, likely by specialized planes, would be required to maintain SAI’s cooling effect, Robock explained. “You need to put gas continually into the atmosphere—the amount that would be falling out at steady state.”

And while the new model points to SAI contributing to reduced heat stress on coral reefs, it doesn’t consider other factors that could affect their survival, including ocean acidification, according to Anil. The researchers are currently working on models that incorporate variables like this.

“What we’re trying to do is not advocate for climate intervention,” Anil said. “What we’re trying to do is get this information out to people who make these decisions so that they know exactly what could happen.”

—Albert Chern, Science Writer

10 December 2025: This article has been updated to correct the climate intervention method mentioned in the headline.

Citation: Chern, A. (2025), Could stratospheric aerosol injection help save corals from bleaching?, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250463. Published on 10 December 2025. Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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