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SummaryGeophysical joint inversion offers a robust approach for integrating diverse geophysical datasets, leveraging their complementary information to mitigate the nonuniqueness inherent in individual data inversion. This approach thereby enhances model consistency and improves subsurface characterization. In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of three-dimensional (3D) joint inversion of gravity, magnetic and magnetotelluric (MT) data for deep geothermal exploration. We first implemented a reweighting optimization strategy for gravity and magnetic data to increase the vertical resolution of jointly inverted models of potential data. Subsequently, we integrated the optimized gravity and magnetic inversion scheme with MT data using a cross-gradient constraint for comprehensive joint inversion. Synthetic experiments validated the effectiveness of our developed reweighting optimization strategy and joint inversion scheme, demonstrating improved structural resolution and model reliability compared to separate inversions. Finally, we applied the methodology to the Yanggao geothermal field in northern Datong Basin, China, to assess its applicability for deep geothermal exploration. The joint inversion approach, offering an advantage over separate inversions, provides enhanced subsurface characterization by more accurately delineating hydrothermal pathways and potential geothermal reservoirs of the geothermal system within the investigated area.

SummaryLocal seismic topographic amplification of rock slopes is a primary cause of earthquake-induced damage in mountainous engineering. To resolve the scattering of plane SH waves by individual rock slopes, this study introduces an analytical model derived from the Uniform Theory of Diffraction. Conventional wave function expansion methods (WFEM) often struggle with non-closed free boundary conditions across varying elevations and tend to suffer from series divergence under high-frequency incidence. This approach precisely partitions the slope into two semi-infinite ideal wedge domains sharing a common face, reconstructing the generalized geometric wave field through rigorous global ray tracing. Second-order coupled diffraction terms with a slope-diffraction correction are introduced to describe the two-way interaction between the slope crest and toe, while the UTD transition functions ensure continuity of the wavefield across shadow boundaries. Systematic numerical evaluations in both frequency and time domains reveal a frequency-selective interference mechanism with distinct spatial variability. Under horizontal grazing incidence, energy is strongly focused on the leeward face, while the back-slope forms a high-frequency seismic shadow zone due to intense destructive interference between direct and secondary diffracted waves. At certain oblique incidence angles, repeated scattering of broadband waves between the slope crest and toe leads to strong local resonance in the slope region. Findings indicate that the location of maximum dynamic response shifts sensitively with the incident wavefront inclination. The results show that the maximum amplification does not always occur at the slope crest, highlighting the importance of incidence angle in seismic microzonation and site planning for mountainous areas.

When high or low tide occurs, the water does not necessarily rise and fall uniformly along the entire coastline. In fact, the height of the tide in a bay can vary by up to one meter (3 feet) from one location to another just a few kilometers away.

A new study suggests that El Ninos—the natural climatic chaos agent that pops up periodically and spikes global temperatures—are getting stronger because of human-caused climate change.

body {background-color: #D2D1D5;} Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news that impacts science and scientists today.

A new era of space exploration began today with the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Roman is poised to solve one of the fundamental mysteries of the universe: what it’s made of.

“There’s something really fundamental that we don’t understand about the nature of our universe itself, and Roman is purpose-built to address and provide the data that we need to address these questions,” Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist and an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a 27 August interview on NASA’s Curious Universe podcast.

Roman launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:26 a.m. local time on 30 August. The telescope is named after NASA’s first chief of astronomy, Dr. Nancy Grace Roman (1925–2018). Roman was also the first woman to be a NASA executive and is widely considered to be the “Mother of the Hubble Space Telescope” for her work to make that pioneering telescope a reality.

A Universe to Discover

Roman is a NASA mission and received instrumentation and science support from the Centre national d’études spatiales in France, the European Space Agency, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany. The telescope has a field of view 100 times that of the Hubble Space Telescope and is capable of capturing much more detail in a single glimpse.

Roman is expected to probe deep into the early universe and study more than a billion galaxies. In doing so, scientists hope to create 3D maps of the evolving universe.

Nancy Grace Roman stands next to a scale model of the Hubble Space Telescope outside the Hubble control center. Credit: NASA

“One of the motivations for Roman was the discovery that our universe is not just expanding, but that expansion is accelerating,” McEnery said. “That was crazy. It’s like if you were to throw a ball in the air, and instead of the ball coming back down, it just keeps shooting away.”

Cosmologists theorize that around 75% of the universe is composed of a mysterious substance called dark energy that is pushing space-time itself apart. One way of measuring the impact of dark energy, and thereby narrowing down just what dark energy might be, is to track the expansion history of the universe. This can be done by mapping the locations and distances of supernovae across the universe and measuring how quickly they are receding from us.

“We can best do that with something that has a huge view because when you’re measuring the property of a large chunk of the sky, you can be reasonably confident you’re understanding how the universe itself is behaving, rather than the vagaries of a particular small group of galaxies in one particular spot,” McEnery said.

Roman will also add to our knowledge of dark matter, which makes up about 20% of the universe and is mostly understood through its invisible gravitational effects on light as it passes near galaxies.

Scientists expect Roman to discover as many as 200,000 exoplanets in the Milky Way.

On the opposite end of the astrophysical paradigm are exoplanets. Roman is designed to find “an awful lot of them,” McEnery said.

The telescope is equipped with three ways to detect exoplanets: by monitoring starlight for dips as an orbiting planet passes in front (transit method), by watching for spikes in starlight as a foreground planet wanders past (microlensing), and by blocking a star’s light to see the glow from the planet itself (direct imaging).

Astronomers currently know of more than 14,000 confirmed and candidate exoplanets. Through these three methods, scientists expect Roman to discover as many as 200,000 exoplanets in the Milky Way.

What’s more, each detection method is best at detecting different subsets of exoplanets, so Roman can help provide a more complete picture of exoplanet populations, which can help astronomers understand how exoplanets form.

After Launch

The telescope’s primary mission is 5 years, with an expected lifetime of 10 years.

Roman scientists will spend the next three months ensuring Roman reaches its distant orbit and testing the telescope’s systems. The team expects the first science images to be released in early 2027. Those images will likely offer stunning views of familiar places of the sky to demonstrate Roman’s capabilities.

 
Related

•  All About the Roman Space Telescope
•  Who was Nancy Grace Roman?
•  More from Roman’s Senior Project Scientist
 

But one of the most anticipated early looks will be Roman’s first deep field survey. Like its predecessors from Hubble, Roman’s deep field will reveal millions of distant galaxies hidden within a seemingly blank patch of the sky. Those surveys will look as far back into the early universe as Hubble’s do, but they will be more than 1,500 times larger. McEnery said it would take more than half a million 4K TVs to fully display Roman’s largest survey.

“It’s the equivalent of covering 45 city blocks,” she said. “You can think about Mount Rushmore, but Mount Rushmore is too small. You would need to fully cover El Capitán with 4K TVs to fully display Roman’s largest survey. I don’t think we should do that, but it gives you a sense of how amazing this survey is going to be.”

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

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about science or scientists? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org. 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.

Fracking, the injection of high-pressure fluid to fracture rock and release oil or gas, can trigger earthquakes. While some sites generate small tremors beforehand that may provide an early warning, others produce few or none.

The devastating floods that have swept through the Nepal–Tibet border region are first and foremost a human tragedy. Hundreds of people have died or remain missing. But as scientists begin to reconstruct what happened, the event also exposes something fundamental about the way we understand natural hazards in high mountain regions. Mountains and rivers do not reset after an extreme event.

Rock weathering, the breakdown and dissolving of rocks and minerals caused by their exposure to water, air and biological life, is a major regulator of Earth's atmospheric CO2 levels and climate. Throughout Earth's history, rock weathering has been faster during warm periods with increased atmospheric CO2 levels.

In May 1992, a group of scientists gathered at the edge of Marble Canyon in northern Arizona, where the Colorado River has cut into Permian sandstone to form cliffs that rise hundreds of feet above the water. The occasion was the First International Workshop on Paleoflood Hydrology, organized by Vic Baker of the University of Arizona. For Baker and his colleagues, the canyon walls were not just scenery. They were a kind of archive.

Here, sediment deposits mark the high-water lines of floods that surged through the canyon centuries before any stream gauges were there to measure them. In particular, Baker and his colleagues studied slackwater deposits, fine-grained sediments emplaced by floodwaters in sheltered alcoves and tributary mouths.

Over the course of decades, Baker, together with collaborators and students, developed methods to read the Marble Canyon deposits. Researchers used hydraulic models to back-calculate past flood discharge and used radiocarbon dates to pinpoint when floods occurred. Their analyses revealed floods that were nearly twice the size of those captured by the instrumental record and that recurred far more frequently than engineers had assumed [Greenbaum et al., 2014].

Baker and his collaborators also mapped out statistical frameworks to translate their data into flood frequency estimates that present-day engineers and water managers could use.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation put those data to use, incorporating the long flood history written on the canyon walls into formal hazard assessments for dam safety and infrastructure design on the Colorado River. The logic was straightforward: The biggest, most destructive floods are also the rarest, which means they are routinely missing from the short instrumental records engineers rely on, leading to dangerous underestimates of risk.

Expanding the Field in Breadth and Depth

In the decades since Baker helped establish paleoflood hydrology as a discipline, the field has expanded to encompass a much wider range of settings and methods, including boulder berms in mountain rivers, alluvial fills in lowland valleys, tree ring “flood rings” in riparian (riverbank) forests, detrital layers on stalagmites in caves, and historical archives stretching back centuries in regions with long written records, to name just a few.

The study of riverine flooding represents just one of several fields that use geological records to improve hazard assessments.

A landmark synthesis by Wilhelm et al. [2019] documented this methodological diversity across flood settings worldwide. Each approach requires its own deep disciplinary expertise and preserves different aspects of flood history. The approaches vary considerably in the precision and accuracy of the estimates they produce, and not all have matured to the point where their outputs can be directly incorporated into formal hazard assessments in the way Baker’s analyses of slackwater deposits were.

Moreover, the study of riverine flooding represents just one of several fields that use geological records to improve hazard assessments. Want to reconstruct the history of tropical cyclones and coastal storms? Paleotempestology uses sediment cores from coastal ponds and sinkholes, and isotopic signatures preserved in tree rings, to do just that. Need to understand how often a fault experiences a major earthquake? Paleoseismology reads fault scarps, liquefaction features, disturbed stratigraphy, and tsunami deposits to find out.

Each of these fields has its own methods, its own archives, its own hard-won expertise—its own Vic Bakers. And each faces the same fundamental challenge: translating qualitative or semiquantitative evidence of past events into the precise, uncertainty-bounded estimates that planners, engineers, and risk managers can use.

A Proposed Center for Paleoenvironmental Records of Extreme Events

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) [2026] (“A Synthesis Center for Paleoenvironmental Records of Extreme Events”) represents a welcome and timely recognition that these fields have something important to offer. Despite decades of progress, the report finds, these long-term records of extreme events remain underused by the agencies, industries, and communities that manage risk.

The report proposes a new center with a mandate to “focus on the integration, synthesis, and translation of paleoenvironmental data.” The report envisions this work carried out through mission-oriented working groups spanning academia, government, and industry. This is a laudable structure, given how disconnected these communities’ incentives and timelines often are.

But this framing raises a fundamental question: Is the primary barrier to translation really a lack of synthesis? Or is it that most of these records have not yet reached the standard that made Baker’s analysis of slackwater deposits useful to the Bureau of Reclamation?

The answer, I would argue, is that the quality of the records themselves represents a fundamental barrier to bridging the translational gap. The report recognizes this, at least implicitly, by distinguishing “Tier 1” records (those that provide quantitative, precise estimates of past hazard magnitudes directly comparable to instrumental data) from lower-quality records. It also acknowledges that such records are rare.

Across most settings and hazard types, the majority of existing records of paleoenvironmental hazards fall short of the Tier 1 standard.

Across most settings and hazard types, the majority of existing records of paleoenvironmental hazards fall short of the Tier 1 standard. This matters enormously, as incorporating paleoflood estimates with large errors into flood frequency analysis increases uncertainties rather than reducing them [Reinders and Muñoz, 2021].

Records need to meet a quality threshold—roughly 20% error or less—to help rather than hurt. Synthesizing records that fall below that threshold widens the translational gap instead of closing it.

In addition to quality, these records face a second challenge that resists synthesis: They are, by their very nature, site-specific. What gets recorded at a given site depends on factors that can vary enormously over short distances—the geometry of a canyon, the height and orientation of a beach barrier, the elevation of a tree in a floodplain.

Two nearby sites on the same river can preserve fundamentally different flood histories, not because the floods were different, but because local geomorphic conditions controlled what was recorded and preserved. This site specificity is simply how these archives work.

Site specificity means that such records resist the kind of broad synthesis that works well for more standardized data types. Aggregating them in a database does not produce a clean regional picture of hazard frequency and magnitude. Rather, it produces a collection of site-specific stories that require deep disciplinary expertise to interpret, compare, and contextualize.

A Path Forward: Investing in Methods and People

There are promising methodological pathways to elevate records toward a quality that practitioners can use. My lab, which focuses on hydrologic extremes across a range of settings and timescales, has worked on integrating paleoenvironmental records with physical model simulations. Such simulations enable researchers to move beyond qualitative or semiquantitative evidence and toward precise, uncertainty-bounded estimates of hazard magnitude. Other frontiers exist across geochronology, proxy development, and statistical frameworks.

In paleoflood hydrology, hydraulic models can simulate the water levels, velocities, and depositional conditions associated with floods. This ability links sediment properties directly to flood magnitude and reduces uncertainties in paleoflood estimates [Reinders et al., 2023].

The number of labs actively producing high-quality paleoenvironmental records of extreme events, and advancing the methodologies to improve them, remains small.

In paleotempestology, overwash deposits in coastal ponds record when hurricanes occurred, but not their tracks or magnitudes. Coastal hydrodynamic and morphodynamic models offer a promising path to fill that gap, back-calculating storm surge magnitudes from the sedimentary deposits that storms leave behind. Site-specific factors such as sea level change and barrier morphology present real challenges, but the approach shows promise and warrants sustained investment.

Developing these methods requires a strong professional cohort. Here, the field faces a compounding challenge. The number of labs actively producing high-quality paleoenvironmental records of extreme events, and advancing the methodologies to improve them, remains small. This means there are few graduate students and postdoctoral researchers trained in these approaches, few experienced reviewers for papers and proposals, and a limited capacity to evaluate whether new work is actually meeting the quality threshold that translation of paleoenvironmental data requires.

The NASEM report itself names education and training as a core function of the proposed center, envisioning opportunities for postdoctoral researchers, students, and visiting scholars. Training researchers who understand both the science and the needs of practitioners—those who speak the languages of both sedimentology and flood frequency analysis, for example, or stratigraphy and storm surge modeling—is exactly what government agencies and industry partners need, and exactly what would make a center so valuable.

A Center Worth Building

A center dedicated to paleoenvironmental records of extreme events is an idea worth pursuing. Its design, however, will determine whether it actually closes the translational gap it aims to address.

What such a center could accomplish would differ fundamentally from what any single lab can. One group can advance one method for one hazard type, but a center could convene parallel working groups across hazard types, drawing together expertise currently dispersed across a small number of labs and sustaining training pipelines beyond the durations of individual grants. The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis and the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center are both National Science Foundation–funded synthesis centers built on a convening structure. They offer templates for how such a center might be organized and hosted.

I recommend that such a center explicitly prioritize methods development and workforce training alongside synthesis and translation.

I recommend that such a center explicitly prioritize methods development and workforce training alongside synthesis and translation.

This means funding graduate and postdoctoral fellowships and sabbatical residencies that convene early-career scientists, established researchers, and practitioners. Working together, these groups can develop approaches to elevate records toward more effective translation across disciplines and professions.

It means establishing working groups organized around specific hazard types and methodological approaches, each charged with developing and disseminating best practices and evaluating what it takes to produce records that practitioners can use.

And it means recognizing that these same sectors have a direct stake in this investment. Such partners include the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the insurance and catastrophe risk industries. These sectors need researchers trained to speak the languages of both science and industry, and cofunding a center that produces them would serve the interests of both communities.

The scientists who gathered at Marble Canyon in 1992 had spent decades building the foundation that made their work useful. The proposed center offers an opportunity to accelerate that process across a much wider set of hazards and settings, but only if it invests in the foundation first.

References

Greenbaum, N., et al. (2014), A 2000 year natural record of magnitudes and frequencies for the largest Upper Colorado River floods near Moab, Utah, Water Resour. Res., 50(6), 5,249–5,269, https://doi.org/10.1002/2013WR014835.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) (2026), A Synthesis Center for Paleoenvironmental Records of Extreme Events, 132 pp., Natl. Acad. Press, Washington, D.C., https://doi.org/10.17226/29290.

Reinders, J. B., and S. E. Muñoz (2021), Improvements to flood frequency analysis on alluvial rivers using paleoflood data, Water Resour. Res., 57(4), e2020WR028631, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020WR028631.

Reinders, J. B., et al. (2023), A hydraulic modelling approach to study flood sediment deposition in floodplain lakes, Earth Surf. Processes Landforms, 48(4), 756–769, https://doi.org/10.1002/esp.5515.

Wilhelm, B., et al. (2019), Interpreting historical, botanical, and geological evidence to aid preparations for future floods, WIREs Water, 6(1), e1318, https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1318.

Author Information

Samuel E. Muñoz (s.munoz@northeastern.edu), Department of Marine and Environmental Sciences, Northeastern University, Nahant, Mass.; and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston

Citation: Muñoz, S. E. (2026), Prioritizing quality before synthesis in paleoenvironmental hazard science, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260275. Published on [DAY MONTH] 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.

Author(s): A. W. Klemmer, S. E. Kreher, T. M. Hutchinson, E. P. Yu, T. J. Awe, C. L. Rousculp, D. H. Dolan, B. T. Hutsel, K. C. Yates, K. J. Swanson, J. J. Iratcabal, A. Dahal, and B. S. Bauer

Metal conductors pulsed with intense electrical current are of fundamental importance to physics and engineering, yet their motion, equation-of-state (EOS), and electrical conductivity during the solid-liquid phase transition are not fully understood. Photon Doppler velocimetry (PDV) measurements of…

[Phys. Rev. E 114, 025210] Published Fri Aug 28, 2026

Author(s): A. W. Klemmer, S. E. Kreher, T. M. Hutchinson, E. P. Yu, T. J. Awe, C. L. Rousculp, D. H. Dolan, B. T. Hutsel, K. C. Yates, K. J. Swanson, J. J. Iratcabal, A. Dahal, and B. S. Bauer

In current-driven metal loads, a nonlinear magnetic-diffusion wave carries current and Joule heating inward from the electrical skin-depth layer, coupling the electromagnetic drive to material compression, melting, and expansion. Photon Doppler velocimetry of electrically thick aluminum measures pre…

[Phys. Rev. E 114, L023202] Published Fri Aug 28, 2026

Just a few minutes of freezing and thawing can have a decisive impact on how ferrihydrite, the most reactive iron mineral in cold soils, permafrost and glaciers, transforms, according to researchers at Umeå University. As climate warming intensifies freeze-thaw cycles and extends them into new regions, ice is becoming an increasingly important driver of Earth's ecosystems.

More than 150 people are dead and hundreds more are missing after an enormous wave of water, ice, mud and rock cascaded more than 170 kilometers (106 miles) down the Bhote Koshi River valley in Nepal. The valley is the main link between Kathmandu in Nepal and Lhasa in Tibet. At least 34 Australians are missing. There was little warning.

As an El Niño of historic proportions is taking shape in the tropical Pacific, a University of Michigan study has found that El Niño events have become nearly 40% stronger in the last 40 years than they were in the preindustrial era.

Want updates from a trusted source about how climate change is shaping public health? Preference Eos in your searches! Go to Google Climate & Personal Health

The transmission of malaria—a parasitic disease transmitted by mosquitoes that affects about 250 million people globally each year—occurs between approximately 16°C (60.8°F) and 34°C (93.2°F) because of the life cycle of mosquitoes and the temperature sensitivity of the parasite they transmit.

That means a warming climate will affect where and how malaria spreads. However, scientists have been split on the question of how climate change has reshaped malaria prevalence in Africa: Some studies have suggested climate change is a substantial driver of shifting malaria prevalence, while others indicate climate change plays little or no role.

A new study published in Nature offers some clarity in that debate. After analyzing more than 50,000 malaria surveys spanning over a century and decades of climate data, researchers found that warming temperatures in sub-Saharan Africa have already made some places too hot for transmission, lowering malaria prevalence. Other regions have become better habitat for mosquitoes and their parasites over time. Researchers expect the trend to continue, amplifying changes in malaria prevalence across the continent as climate change persists.

“The story is really not [about] net aggregate effects across the large and diverse continent of Africa,” said Tamma Carleton, an environmental economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a coauthor of the new study. “This is a story about a shifting burden across space.”

The Role of Climate Change

To study how climate change has affected malaria prevalence, researchers borrowed methods from climate attribution research, which uses climate modeling and comparisons to a hypothetical world without human-caused climate change to determine the extent to which climate change played a role in a specific weather event. The confidence of such studies is improving for weather events, but the methods aren’t typically used to attribute public health phenomena such as malaria prevalence.

“We build on top of well-developed climate attribution science methods but face additional complexities because we’re trying to trace impacts on human outcomes,” Carleton said. In health fields, in particular, there are very few examples of studies that causally link historical anthropogenic emissions to observed health outcomes, she said. She hopes the methods presented in the new study can help other researchers further investigate the link between climate change and human health outcomes.

In their analysis, the researchers focused on childhood malaria prevalence because about 95% of global malaria cases are experienced by children between 2 and 10 years of age throughout parts of central, eastern, southern, and western Africa. Results showed that climate change has already reshaped malaria prevalence in the region since 1901.

The prevalence of childhood malaria attributable to human-caused climate change has increased in parts of Central, southern, and East Africa but decreased in West Africa from 1901 to 2014. Click image for larger version. Credit: Carlson et al., 2026, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10840-w

In particular, human-caused climate change has slightly increased malaria prevalence across Africa, adding about 1 excess case per 1,000 children since 1901. Rising temperatures have created better conditions for malaria transmission in East and southern Africa. But hotter weather in West and central Africa has made the region too hot for transmission to occur, lowering malaria prevalence.

The changes are “modest” compared to observed reductions in malaria prevalence that have occurred as a result of eradication campaigns alongside economic development, Carleton said. Erin Mordecai, an infectious disease ecologist at Stanford University who was not involved in the new research, wrote in an email that the claims in the paper about climate change driving increased malaria burden are nuanced.

“This may be subtly true, to a small extent, in some regions like southern and highland east Africa, where temperatures were previously sub-optimal. At the same time, even in these places the effects of climate change are small” compared to other drivers such as malaria control programs, she wrote.

Researchers compared real-world data on childhood malaria prevalence (blue lines) with predicted childhood malaria prevalence in a hypothetical world without climate change (gray lines). Their analysis showed climate change has played a role in increasing the disease’s prevalence in central, East, and southern Africa and has played a role in decreasing prevalence in West Africa. Click image for larger version. Credit: Carlson et al., 2026, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10840-w

To Mordecai, the most exciting aspect of the study was its confirmation of the “thermal biology of malaria transmission”—the study’s results show clear changes in transmission when temperatures go up or down. “The fact that this was predicted…and [is] now validated at such a large scale is very compelling,” she wrote.

Amplified Patterns

As the climate continues to change, the trends the researchers noticed “amplify in ways that really do start to shape the policy conversation,” Carleton said.

“It’s important to show that the burden of malaria is shifting away from those very hot places, but that also means many other threats to public health are unfolding as the temperatures get extremely, extremely hot.”

Carleton and the team projected changes in childhood malaria prevalence up to 2100 using data on past climate and disease prevalence for multiple future climate change scenarios. They found that rising temperatures will continue to reduce disease prevalence in West Africa, particularly under the highest-emissions scenario.

For the rest of Africa, rising temperatures could cause a slight increase in malaria prevalence. Still, temperatures will likely become so hot by the end of the century that the majority of the continent could see more than a 2% decrease in malaria prevalence, a projected reduction that “begins to approach the magnitude of some historical eradication programmes,” according to the authors.

By 2100, childhood malaria prevalence will further shift, as shown by this map of the projected future changes in prevalence driven by human-caused climate change. Click image for larger version. Credit: Carlson et al., 2026, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10840-w

Carleton emphasized that decreases in malaria presence in warming regions are not exactly cause for celebration—if temperatures are hot enough to halt malaria transmission, they’re hot enough to cause a lot of human suffering, too. “It’s important to show that the burden of malaria is shifting away from those very hot places, but that also means many other threats to public health are unfolding as the temperatures get extremely, extremely hot,” she said.

“Just because malaria risk is going down doesn’t mean aggregate human health and well-being is improving under a future with aggressive emissions.”

Messages for Malaria Eradication

Noticing a shifting disease burden means that policymakers and nongovernmental organizations can begin to “prepare places that have not put this disease at the top of the health priority list,” such as places where, historically, the climate has suppressed transmission, Carleton said. That’s especially important as funding for global health has been dramatically cut in recent years, she added.

“We have to spend each dollar of funding in the way that can alleviate human suffering the most effectively.”

“We have really limited resources going towards prevention of this disease, and we have climate change hitting like a train…This means we have to spend each dollar of funding in the way that can alleviate human suffering the most effectively,” she said.

The projected changes in malaria prevalence could also work in tandem with malaria eradication efforts in some countries, the authors write: “The combined benefits of disease surveillance, healthcare, vector control and economic development can easily counter-balance climate change impacts in most places.”

To Mordecai, the results “highlight the critical importance of control programs for malaria, and these should be sustained even in areas where climate suitability isn’t necessarily increasing,” she wrote. Despite a warming climate, with malaria eradication methods, malaria could still be gone from most of Africa by 2050, according to the study’s authors.

—Grace van Deelen (@gvd.bsky.social), Staff Writer

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2026), Climate change will reshape malaria prevalence across Africa, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260273. Published on 27 August 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.

Source: Geophysical Research Letters

As climate change has led to more frequent high-heat events around the world, moist heat metrics such as wet-bulb temperature, which combines temperature and humidity, have become increasingly relevant. Days with both high heat and high humidity are dangerous for human health; understanding how these extreme events will change in the future is important.

Jha and Byrne examined moist heat extremes over extratropical continents using ERA5 reanalysis data (the fifth generation of reanalysis from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) and the Community Earth System Model Version 2 (CESM2) global climate model. They paid special attention to the ways dry air mixes into plumes of warm, moist air traveling upward in convective environments.

The authors simulated varying rates at which dry air mixes into these plumes rising from near Earth’s surface to the upper troposphere and found that this process, known as entrainment, exerts a significant influence on moist heat extremes outside of the tropics. The authors say this process alters the relationship between the amounts of stored energy in the air near the ground and higher up in the troposphere. This mixing of dry air into rising plumes enables the near-surface air to become more energetic through higher humidity and temperature, leading to more severe moist heat events.

Using simulations, the authors found that as climate warms and the lower troposphere becomes drier, the entrainment mechanism will continue to drive up wet-bulb temperatures at the surface, potentially leading to moist heat extremes that are even more severe.

Future work examining in more detail how global warming is changing rates of dry-air entrainment into rising plumes will be useful to better understand how wet-bulb temperatures will increase in the future, the authors say. (Geophysical Research Letters, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026GL122678, 2026)

—Nathaniel Scharping (@nathanielscharp), Science Writer

Citation: Scharping, N. (2026), How rising air plumes help spike moist heat, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260271. Published on 27 August 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.

Climate change was once something scientists warned us about, and now it's a reality we are living in. In California's Central Valley, about one-third of climate-related groundwater loss between 2003 and 2024 can be attributed to emissions from the same actors. Scientists call them the "Carbon Majors," a group of 122 corporations that are the world's largest producers of oil, gas, coal and cement.

Author(s): Audrey Farrell, Mitchell Sinclair, Yipeng Wu, Kenneth A. Marsh, Apurva Gaikwad, Navid Vafaei-Najafabadi, Marcus Babzien, William Li, Mikhail Polyanskiy, Igor Pogorelsky, Chaojie Zhang, and Chandrashekhar Joshi

We report a seeding mechanism for the current filamentation instability that was identified using an experimental platform where a relativistically intense 2-ps (full width at half maximum) long-wavelength infrared pump laser both produces and interacts with a plasma that is overdense to the pump ye…

[Phys. Rev. E 114, 025208] Published Thu Aug 27, 2026

Author(s): E. G. Gelfer, A. M. Fedotov, M. P. Malakhov, Th. Benahmed, J. Custodio, O. Klimo, and S. Weber

We develop an analytical theory of coherent (scaled quadratically with the number of particles) radiation and coherent radiation friction in a head-on collision of a dense charged particle bunch with an intense laser pulse. We demonstrate that the low-frequency coherent radiation in the forward and …

[Phys. Rev. E 114, 025209] Published Thu Aug 27, 2026

Spreading finely crushed basalt across farmland has been promoted as a relatively simple way to remove large quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But a new study led by Cornell researchers suggests the real-world potential of this method, known as enhanced weathering, may be far smaller than widely cited estimates.