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The external review of the Mount Maunganui Beachside Holiday Park landslide is extremely critical of the local authority in their approach to the management of the well-documented landslide hazard and risk at the site.

The external review commissioned by Tauranga City Council (TCC) into the 22 January 2026 Mount Maunganui Beachside Holiday Park landslide released its report today. It has been extensively covered in the New Zealand media. The conclusions are quite devastating for TCC, but are also likely to have wider implications for the management of risk from natural hazards across New Zealand.

The 22 January 2026 landslide at Mount Maunganui in New Zealand. Image from the TCC external review.

It is important to remember the terms of reference of this external review, which was undertaken by Hon. Paul Davison KSO KC:

“the external review examines the facts, timeline and decision-making processes leading up to the landslide, the adequacy of risk assessments and monitoring systems, and any lessons or improvements needed to strengthen future safety. The external review is separate from the Government Inquiry and the investigations currently being undertaken by the Coroner, Police and WorkSafe.”

So this review does not look at the initiation of the landslide – that will come in due course – it is really about the management of the risk. The conclusions are summarised in this section of the report (p. 204):-

What this Review does find is that this tragedy was, in the end, preventable. I do not mean by that that anyone could have known that this slope would fail at this moment, on this particular morning — no one could. I mean something more deeply troubling: that the hazard was known, that an effective and inexpensive means of managing the risk it posed had twice been recommended, and that the Council had every opportunity to put it in place. Had it done so, the most consequential decision of 22 January — whether to move people away from the foot of the slope — would not have been left to the unaided judgement of whoever happened to be on site that morning. It would have been made in advance, against defined criteria that the readily observable conditions of that day would plainly have met. What was required was not extraordinary foresight. It was the robust operational processes and discipline required of a well-run organisation: that a known risk to life be owned by someone, recorded, escalated, and followed through until an effective means of mitigating it was in place, and that those left in charge of the campground were equipped to recognise the danger, and ready to act quickly and effectively if ever required.

The report highlights that multiple studies showed that the risk to life at the campsite was unacceptably high – indeed, by some calculations the impact of this event was lower than had been feared. This is primarily because individuals at the site recognised that the risk was high and started to raise the alarm. If the Mount Maunganui Beachside Holiday Park landslide had occurred in the early hours of the morning the toll would probably have been higher.

There is little in this report with which I disagree, and the consequences for TCC are likely to be serious. I’m unsure as to the detail of the New Zealand judicial system, but in the UK this report would open the path to both civil and criminal court action, with the latter potentially occurring at both the institutional and individual level.

If there is one thing that worries me, it is that the the report does not fully recognise that early warning systems and evacuation plans are not a magic bullet. There is strong evidence from multiple settings that they can be dogged by uncertainty, equipment failures, false alarms and a lack of willingness from individuals to respond in the way that is planned.

But that is not an excuse for failing to have such a system in place.

Apart from the direct impact on TCC and its members, this report is likely to have profound implications for landslide risk management in New Zealand. Take this recommendation for example:

“For every populated site controlled by TCC, exposed to a natural-hazard risk to life assessed as Medium or higher, TCC should require — not merely consider — the development and maintenance of a Trigger Action Response Plan. The TARP should: be capable of immediate implementation in a simple initial form (for example, staged evacuation of defined runout zones when rainfall exceeds a defined return interval threshold over a defined duration), and be refined over time as a living document; link specific, observable or measurable triggers — defined rainfall thresholds, antecedent soil-moisture, and visible signs such as turbid water from the toe of a slope, tension cracking, bulging or changes in seepage — to specific, staged actions up to and including full evacuation; empower designated site personnel to act on a trigger immediately, without needing approval from someone higher in the TCC organisation; identify who holds each responsibility and the communication and escalation protocol; and recognise that evacuation/avoidance is a higher-order control than engineered consequence-reduction.”

Whilst this recommendation is TCC specific, it is inevitably going to have implications across all local authorities in New Zealand. The country inevitably has many, many sites in which “natural-hazard risk to life” is medium or above. This recommendation is going to require a very extensive revisit of risk management at those locations. In a country with a small population and a very large, hazard-prone landmass, that is going impose a major burden.

It is worth noting that TCC has “today accepted the findings and recommendations from the external review into the landslide at Mount Maunganui Beachside Holiday Park on 22 January 2026”.

The reverberations of the tragic Mount Maunganui Beachside Holiday Park landslideare going to continue for a long time.

Return to The Landslide Blog homepage Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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Large earthquakes can dramatically reshape mountain landscapes by triggering thousands of landslides and rapidly accelerating erosion. However, the reasons why some mountain regions experience intense, long-lasting erosion after large earthquakes while others show only limited responses have been poorly understood.

SummaryThe Alpine-Himalayan orogen preserves geological remnants of subducted lithosphere from the Paleotethys and Neotethys oceans and intervening microcontinents. This orogenic belt displays distinct segments separated by discontinuities aligned with paleo-transform faults, reflecting laterally varying ocean opening and closure histories. We investigate how upper and lower mantle slab remnants imaged by seismic tomography may correlate with Paleo- and Neotethyan subduction zones, focusing on the Anatolian, Aegean, and Iranian segments. Using plate tectonic reconstructions in a mantle reference frame, we predict slab subduction timing, amount, and location and make a semi-quantitative dimensional comparison with seismic tomographic images beneath the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. We identify three major Neotethyan slabs: the Pontides and Egypt slabs detached in the Late Cretaceous and now occupy the upper lower mantle. The Cyprus slab remains mainly in the upper mantle in which it overturns. To account for subducted lithosphere that reconstructions predict, we interpret that the Cyprus slab lies overturned in the lower mantle down to ∼1000 km. We interpret a large lower mantle anomaly volume between 2200-1500 km (the Herodotus anomaly) as representing Paleotethyan lithosphere that subducted between ∼240-180 Ma. Our reconstruction-tomography comparison suggests that current slab positions likely reflect past detachment locations, while geometries indicate paleo-trench absolute motions, including a Late Cretaceous same-dip, double subduction configuration. Slabs associated with Aegean, Anatolian, Iranian, and Tibetan segments define stable mantle provinces with boundaries aligned with transform-related orogenic segmentation, implying minimal paleo-longitudinal mantle flow since the Early Mesozoic. Our findings indicate upper and lower mantle structure primarily results from near-vertical slab sinking after detachment since the Triassic, without evidence for deflection by lateral components of mantle convection.

SummaryAs the demand for European domestic mineral resources increases, exploration is increasingly focused on deeper and covered targets, often located in populated regions. In such environments, the application of electromagnetic (EM) techniques is severely challenged by anthropogenic infrastructure. Metal-bearing structures, including power lines, pipelines, railway tracks, and mine shafts, can strongly distort the EM fields, producing significant artefacts in both the measured data and the resulting inversion models, thereby biasing or hindering geological interpretation. These effects currently limit EM investigations in inhabited areas, despite their potential for non-invasive and efficient exploration of challenging subsurface targets. Focusing on semi-airborne electromagnetic (sAEM) data, we develop a data-driven approach to address infrastructure-related effects. By inverting affected data for the distribution of infrastructure currents, we account for the full coupling between the EM transmitter, the conducting Earth, and the metal infrastructure. In sAEM field experiments, involving a grounded dipole transmitter and an airborne receiver system, we study the distortion by self-built infrastructure and investigate both measured currents in infrastructure as well as its EM coupling. We validate the functionality of our current inversion approach by reproducing the measured currents in a simplified 1D scenario. With a synthetic 3D study, mimicking a sAEM campaign in the presence of infrastructure, we find that the current inversion approach is capable of separating and correcting for infrastructure effects even if the true resistivity distribution of the subsurface is unknown. In particular, other conductive subsurface structures can be resolved well, even directly below infrastructure. On a small sAEM field data example, affected by the impact of a metal-built conveyor belt and pipeline, we demonstrate the applicability of this framework for real-world scenarios.

SummaryPermeability is a critical parameter for reservoir characterization and hydrocarbon development, yet its accurate prediction remains a challenge. Pore structure, as the intrinsic factor governing both the elastic and hydraulic transport properties of rocks, serves as a bridge between these properties and facilitates permeability prediction from well logs and seismic data. To accurately describe the variation in the physical properties of tight sandstone reservoirs with pressure, our study aims to construct a physical model that relates rock elastic properties with permeability. We developed a dual-porosity rock physics model by coupling David & Zimmerman’s pore-structure inversion method with Dienes’s percolation theory. Our model divides the pore space into pressure-insensitive stiff pores and pressure-sensitive compliant microcracks. By inverting the microcrack density and aspect ratio distribution-which evolve with pressure-from elastic wave velocities, we quantitatively predict permeability variations using Dienes statistical percolation model. To validate this model, we measured porosity, permeability, and P- and S-wave velocities on four tight sandstone samples under effective pressures of 5 to 50 MPa. The results show that the proposed model accurately captures the evolution of both elastic parameters and permeability with effective pressure, demonstrating strong predictive capability for the experimental data. The significance of this study lies in achieving a quantitative relation between elastic and transport properties by explicitly characterizing the pore structure and integrating percolation theory, which is then calibrated with real experiment data, thereby providing solid physical basis for better prediction of reservoir permeability using acoustic logs and seismic data.

Scientists have found evidence that a colossal cliff stretching thousands of kilometers across ancient North America may have exposed the heart of the Grand Canyon nearly a billion years before it was carved by the Colorado River.

For all that day-to-day weather forecasts have improved, it remains a challenge to forecast events that might happen once in 1,000 years—like the deadliest heat waves.

The Kakhovka Dam in southern Ukraine was destroyed on June 6, 2023. The event unleashed a catastrophic flood that forced thousands of residents to evacuate their communities as water levels rose 10 feet (3 meters) above normal.

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

The Arctic Report Card, an annual, peer-reviewed evaluation of the state of our warming Arctic, will still be published this year despite a lack of financial or logistical support from NOAA. 

On 10 August, editors of the Arctic Report Card were informed that NOAA will no longer support its publication, meaning the agency will not provide the report with coordinating editors, coordinate its external peer review, or fund the report’s web presence, publicity, graphics, or summary video. 

After a meeting of non-NOAA editors and chapter authors, however, the Arctic Report Card team has decided to move forward with publishing the 2026 report. Many of the report’s authors had been well into their work on their chapters when they learned that NOAA would no longer support that work.

“While many of the details are not final, we will be producing an ARC sans NOAA this year,” Rick Thoman, an Arctic scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and an editor of the 2026 report, wrote in a message to Eos. Thoman said the team is not yet sharing which organization will host the 2026 Arctic Report Card, but that there has been a “tremendous outpouring of support for the Arctic Report Card, from individuals to large organizations.”

 
Related

•  Government Pulls Funding for the Arctic Report Card
•  Amid the Arctic’s Hottest Year, Arctic Science Faces a Data Deficiency
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
 

He said the team plans to move forward with the original plan to present the report’s findings in a press conference at the 2026 AGU Annual Meeting in San Francisco, Calif. this December. Thoman also said the group of editors and authors is “pursuing multiple avenues” to produce the report’s graphics and summary video, and that they are planning to establish a non-NOAA website to serve as a long-term home for the Arctic Report Card in future years. 

“A lot of what we’re doing right now is, ‘How do we get this year’s report card out?’” he said. “But we are looking at the longer term, [also].”

The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP), part of the Arctic Council (an international Arctic policy and research collaboration), previously found reviewers and carried out the review process for the report. According to Thoman, AMAP has committed to providing that service for the 2026 report card. 

Science for Stakeholders

Having support from NOAA gave the report a heightened credibility for stakeholders, said Walter Meier, a sea ice scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and a longtime author of the report’s sea ice chapter. “NOAA has had a strong reputation for providing high quality data, high quality observations, analysis, and research,” he said. “When you have that NOAA stamp of approval, people trust in that.” 

“I’m confident that the science will be of the same high quality.”

Still, he said not much would change about the scientific content of the report once it is hosted by a new organization. “I’m confident that the science will be of the same high quality,” he said. “I don’t feel there will be any loss [of quality], which is really the most important part.”

The report being outside of NOAA’s purview also “allows much more flexibility in language,” for the authors, Thoman said. He added that creating an Arctic Report Card without NOAA may allow the report to be more internationally focused than it has been previously.

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

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? 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.

Growing up in New Jersey, Emily Wilson regularly passed tidal marshes without giving them much thought. They were part of the coastal landscape—stretches of green and blue she saw from the road.

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

The U.S. Forest Service has moved forward with a rule to withdraw protections from 45 million acres of pristine national forests by rescinding the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) first announced its intent to rescind the Roadless Rule in June 2025 and it has now taken the next step to do so.

In today’s announcement, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins claimed that the Roadless Rule increases wildfire risk by preventing land managers from maintaining national forests.

“For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our communities,” Rollins said in a statement. “Today, we filed a proposal to restore authority to local forest managers who know the land best, removing the barriers that have kept them from doing the work the land demands. It’s time to turn the page on the failed roadless rule and return our forests to health and productivity.”

However, this justification is not backed up by data. Research has shown that nearly 85% of wildland fires begin with human activity, either accidentally or deliberately. What’s more, human-caused fires are much more destructive than naturally-caused fires from, for example, lighting strikes. Building roads would bring more people into former wildlands, thereby increasing wildfire risk despite the increased access for maintenance, several forest experts told the New York Times.

The Trump Administration “is trying to walk away from the most successful land conservation policy in modern U.S. history.”

“The truth is that roadless forests are our greatest defense against wildfire,” David Jenkins, president of the nonprofit Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship, said in a media statement. “Not only are old growth forests naturally resistant to fire, but 90% of all wildfires in the U.S. occur within a half mile of a road. Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false.”

Most of the inventoried roadless areas are in western states, with more than 95% located in Alaska, Arizona, California, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. However, the proposed rule does not apply to Colorado and Idaho, which have state-specific roadless regulations.

Some suspect that the administration’s true intent is not to reduce wildfire risk but to drastically increase logging production.

“The Trump administration is moving to gut our most iconic national forests by giving loggers and drillers free rein to turn them into industrial wastelands. It is trying to walk away from the most successful land conservation policy in modern U.S. history,” Andrew Wetzler, senior vice president for nature at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement.

Jenkins added, “This is one of the most boneheaded and fiscally irresponsible actions this administration could take. The agency doesn’t have the budget to take care of the 368,000 miles of roads already riddling our national forests. In fact, there is currently a $10.8 billion maintenance backlog.”

 
Related

•  Trump Administration Moves to Allow Logging in Pristine National Forests
•  Read the Forest Service’s Proposal
•  Context from Eos: USDA Moves to Rescind Roadless Rule Protecting 45 Million Acres of Wild Area
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
 

The Roadless Rule was enacted by the Clinton administration in 2001 to prevent logging and development on millions of acres of pristine forest across the country. For 25 years, this rule has protected crucial habitats for migratory species, headwaters for municipal water supplies, and old-growth forests which act as significant carbon sinks. If the rule was rescinded, those forests and the ecosystem services they provide would be at risk.

“Once we cut a road through these forests, we don’t get their values back,” Wetzler said. “The forest fragments. The streams and rivers are degraded by runoff. Iconic wildlife struggles to find suitable habitat. And we get stuck with even more roads in a vast network the agency already can’t maintain.”

The Roadless Rule itself is hugely popular, garnering around 75% public support. Nearly 626,000 public comments were submitted on the USDA’s 2025 draft proposal to eliminate the rule, with more than 99% of comments calling for the rule to stand. Former U.S. Forest Service chiefs, lawmakers, Tribal leaders, scientists, and wildland firefighters have also defended the rule.

The Forest Service’s proposal will be published in the Federal Register on 20 August, after which it will accept public comments before finalizing the rule change.

—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 how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? 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.

A study led by a Montana State University research professor reveals how climate and hydrothermal activity have shaped the vegetation, wildfire and aquatic ecosystem histories of the Yellowstone Plateau over the past 15,000 years. The results of the project were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A team of researchers reports that they may have found rock containing some of the earliest forms of microbial life on Earth. Their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes the biosignatures found in this 3.5-billion-year-old, carbon-rich, layered rock, called chert.

In recent years, the Alps have experienced devastating glacier collapses: In September 2023, a section of the Marmolada glacier in the Dolomites collapsed, resulting in the deaths of seven mountaineers. Just over a year and a half later, in May 2025, the Birch Glacier above Blatten collapsed, keeping Switzerland and the entire world in suspense.

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

Droughts are becoming an increasing global concern as their impacts intensify. Understanding how climate change affects drought frequency and severity is essential for projecting future drought risk. In this context, the question raised by Helpap et al. [2026]—”are modern droughts unprecedented?”—has a high scientific relevance. Here, 20 ensemble members from a 600-year climate simulation and reanalysis data from the period 1950-2024 are analyzed to place recent droughts in a multi-century context. It is concluded that drought extremes are intensifying more rapidly beyond the range experienced in the past than moderate droughts. Therefore, an increasing likelihood of droughts reaching unprecedented magnitudes is expected in the near future, thus highlighting the urgency for adaptation measures in water resources and environmental management.

Citation: Helpap, P., Brönnimann, S., Hand, R., Franke, J., Raible, C. C., & Stocker, B. D. (2026). Are modern droughts unprecedented? AGU Advances, 7, e2026AV002536. https://doi.org/10.1029/2026AV002536

—Alberto Montanari, Editor-in-Chief, AGU Advances

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

The mantle, a rocky layer accounting for more than 80% of Earth's volume, circulates at rates of only a few centimeters per year. This circulation drives plate tectonics and influences major geological phenomena such as earthquakes and volcanic activity. Despite its fundamental importance, the history of mantle circulation remains poorly understood because direct observations of the deep Earth are extremely limited. Currently, scientists rely on geological records of past surface movements and geophysical imaging methods, including seismic observations, to infer the mantle's structure and behavior. However, reconstructing historical mantle flow remains a major challenge.

The summers of recent years have been hot, but not unusual from a meteorological perspective. According to researchers at Leipzig University, though, the next extreme summer would far exceed anything we have experienced so far.

Massive storms like Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which caused more than $100 billion in damage, were once considered lifetime events. Increasingly, however, they are becoming the norm: a direct result of climate change, which has made large storms more frequent, intense and slower-moving, deepening their impact.

Author(s): E. S. Uchava and A. G. Tevzadze

We investigate linear perturbations of an incompressible, weakly collisional, anisotropic plasma in the low frequency limit using an extended 16-moment fluid description that retains parallel and perpendicular heat fluxes. We identify a class of linear perturbations associated with a conserved therm…

[Phys. Rev. E 114, 025206] Published Tue Aug 18, 2026

Author(s): Runze Li, Wenchao Yan, and Longqing Yi

When a high-power, femtosecond, circularly polarized (CP) laser pulse impinges on a micrometer-scale aperture in a solid foil target, it drives surface plasma oscillation on the boundary, and generates high-order harmonic vortices in the diffracted light [L. Yi, Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 134801 (2021).]…

[Phys. Rev. E 114, 025207] Published Tue Aug 18, 2026