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Young forests regrowing from land where mature woodlands have been cut down have a key role to play in removing billions of tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and combating climate change, a new study reveals.

A new study led by a University of California, Irvine scientist reveals that airlines can make smarter tradeoff decisions to cut aviation's warming impact. The research, published in the journal Nature, offers hopeful news for the future of air travel and climate action.

Irina Marinov, associate professor at the Department of Earth and Environmental Science, leads a research community focused on understanding global climate impacts, risks, and vulnerabilities to enable local action.

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

Roots play a role in the weathering and breakdown of rocks, but to what extent is largely unknown. Osorio-Leon et al. [2025] use an ingenious field setup to measure gasses and water constituents around deep roots in sandstone bedrock soils. They find that they can only reproduce their measurements with a reactive transport model when they include the CO2 production that is expected from root respiration or microbial respiration around roots.

The authors further show that the export of weathered solutes from the bedrock by water flow is enhanced by more than 40% through this deep root action. These results reveal that deeply rooted trees are important contributors to hardrock breakdown and ultimately stream chemistry. 

Citation: Osorio-Leon, I. D., Rempe, D. M., Golla, J. K., Bouchez, J., & Druhan, J. L. (2025). Deep roots supply reactivity and enhance silicate weathering in the bedrock vadose zone. AGU Advances, 6, e2025AV001692. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025AV001692

—Marc F. P. Bierkens, Editor, AGU Advances

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Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface

Compared to single-channel meandering rivers, multichannel braided rivers are often found in environments with sparse vegetation and coarse, shifting bars of sediment. Past research has called the way in which the paths of braided rivers shift over time “chaotic” because their migration depends on many factors, including river shape and changing water levels.

However, because the migration of individual channel threads can affect the likelihood of hazards like flooding or erosion, understanding this migration is critical to protect the residents, structures, and ecosystems surrounding these complicated waterways.

Li and Limaye examined a 180-kilometer span of the Brahmaputra-Jamuna River, a river in Bangladesh whose channels have been well resolved through satellite imagery.

Scientists—and many of the 600,000 people living in the islands between the river channels—already know that the river’s water levels are high during the summer months’ monsoon season and low but consistent from January to March. But this research team used a statistical method called dynamic time warping to map long-term changes in the river channels’ sizes, shapes, and routes between 2001 and 2021. This technique allowed them to calculate how much and how quickly the centerlines of channel threads shifted. They then applied an existing model developed for meandering rivers to see whether it could also predict the movement of braided channel threads.

They found that the Brahmaputra-Jamuna River’s movements were more predictable than previously realized. About 43% of its channels moved gradually, rather than abruptly, during the study period. On average, these channel threads migrated more quickly than most meandering rivers, at a rate of about 30% of their width per year. In some cases, the rate of this migration was closely related to the curvature of the channel thread, and across the board, it was weakly related to channel thread width.

These findings have important implications for future research on braided river channels, the authors say. Knowing that at least some channel threads migrate coherently might inform erosion and flooding mitigation efforts for braided river regions, especially those in densely populated areas. (Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024JF008196, 2025)

—Rebecca Owen (@beccapox.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Owen, R. (2025), Coherent, not chaotic, migration in the Brahmaputra-Jamuna River, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250237. Published on 2 July 2025. Text © 2025. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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Northern peatlands could seriously complicate efforts to cool the planet, especially after a temporary overshoot of the 1.5°C global warming limit, according to new IIASA-led research.

This is an authorized translation of an Eos article. Esta es una traducción al español autorizada de un artículo de Eos.

Source: Geophysical Research Letters

Hace 56 millones de años, durante el Máximo Térmico del Paleoceno-Eoceno (PETM, por sus siglas en inglés), las temperaturas globales aumentaron más de 5°C durante 100,000 años o más. En ese tiempo, se liberaron entre 3,000 y 20,000 petagramos de carbono a la atmósfera, lo que provocó una grave alteración de los ecosistemas y de la vida marina a nivel global, y dio lugar a un prolongado estado de efecto invernadero.

Se espera que el calentamiento global antropogénico actual también altere el ciclo del carbono terrestre durante miles de años. Entre 1850 y 2019, se liberaron aproximadamente 2,390 petagramos de dióxido de carbono (CO₂) a la atmósfera y con el uso continuo de combustibles fósiles, es posible que en los próximos siglos se liberen otros 5,000 petagramos. Sin embargo, las estimaciones sobre la duración de esta alteración varían considerablemente, desde unos 3,000 hasta 165,000 años.

Comprender cuánto tiempo se vio afectado el ciclo del carbono durante el PETM podría ofrecer pistas clave sobre la gravedad y duración de las alteraciones derivadas del cambio climático antropogénico. Investigaciones previas, basadas en registros de isótopos de carbono, estimaban que el PETM duró entre 120,000 y 230,000 años. Ahora, Piedrahita et al. sugieren que este evento de calentamiento se prolongó por casi 269,000 años.

La evidencia del PETM se encuentra en el registro geológico como una marcada disminución en las proporciones de isótopos estables de carbono. Este descenso se divide en tres fases, cada una representando distintas etapas de alteración y recuperación del ciclo del carbono. Las estimaciones previas sobre el final de esta disminución han variado ampliamente debido al ruido presente en los datos sobre los que se basan.

En esta nueva investigación, los científicos analizaron seis registros sedimentarios con edades bien establecidas en trabajos previos: un registro terrestre de la cuenca Bighorn en Wyoming y cinco registros sedimentarios marinos de diversas localidades. En lugar de basarse únicamente en datos sin procesar, como en trabajos anteriores, aplicaron un enfoque probabilístico que considera las incertidumbres analíticas y cronológicas, lo que permitió restringir con mayor precisión el intervalo temporal del PETM.

En particular, el estudio sugiere que el periodo de recuperación tardó mucho más de lo que indicaban las estimaciones anteriores—más de 145,000 años. Según los autores, este tiempo extendido de recuperación durante el PETM indica que los escenarios futuros de cambio climático podrían afectar el ciclo del carbono por más tiempo del que predicen la mayoría de los modelos actuales. (Geophysical Research Letters, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL113117, 2025)

—Rebecca Owen (@beccapox.bsky.social), Escritora de ciencia

This translation by Saúl A. Villafañe-Barajas (@villafanne) was made possible by a partnership with Planeteando and Geolatinas. Esta traducción fue posible gracias a una asociación con Planeteando y Geolatinas.

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The collapse of tropical forests during Earth's most catastrophic extinction event was the primary cause of the prolonged global warming which followed, according to new research.

The deadly, record-breaking heat wave that hit the Pacific Northwest in June 2021 continues to be the subject of intense interest among scientists, policymakers and the public.

In the 1997 action film "Dante's Peak," Pierce Brosnan plays the role of a volcanologist sent to investigate seismic activity beneath a long-dormant volcano.

A new paper (Faral et al. 2025) provides details of a seismically-triggered landslide cascade and tsunami that killed up to 12,000 people.

On 22 November 1815, a very significant landslide disaster occurred in Bali, in what is now Indonesia, killing between 10,000 and 12,000 people. A very interesting new paper (Faral et al. 2025) in the journal Geomorphology has sought to investigate and understand this catastrophe.

The event, which occurred on Buyan-Bratan caldera, was triggered by the Mw=7.3 1815 Bali earthquake offshore. This triggered a translational landslide near the peak of the caldera. To provide a context, this is a Google Earth image of the site:-

Google Earth image of the site of the 22 November 1815 Gejer Bali disaster.

This image shows the steep caldera at the top, with the steep slopes down to the sea.

Faral et al. (2025) have identified the location of the initial failure. This is surprisingly clear on the Google Earth imagery:-

Google Earth image of the source zone of the 22 November 1815 Gejer Bali disaster.

The failure was a translational landslide – the source zone is so clear because it was left steep slopes in the rear scar and the lateral scarps, which now have dense vegetation. These lateral scarps are 30 to 35 m tall, delineating a landslide with a source area of 2.38 km2 and a volume of about 64 million cubic metres. Descriptions of the event highlight that the area had been subject to “intense and prolonged rainfall”, which may have contributed to the instability.

Faral et al. (2025) have undertaken detailed work to understand the characteristics of the landslide as it travelled the c.17 km to the coast. I think the initial path is quite easy to spot on the imagery:-

Google Earth image of the source zone and possible initial track (my own interpretation) of the 22 November 1815 Gejer Bali disaster.

Lower down the path becomes much less clear, but Faral et al. (2025) have used a range of mapping and stratigraphic techniques to try to understand it. In an earlier paper (Faral et al. 2024), the team has also mapped the c.15 villages that historical records indicate were destroyed by the landslide. They conclude that the initial failure transitioned into a debris avalanche and then a debris flow, eroding saturated sediment from the lower slopes and spreading laterally. This huge landslide moved enormous blocks of rock – one of which is 9 metres long for example – that are now scattered on the lower slopes.

Eventually the landslide reached the sea, and there are reports of a local tsunami. Faral et al. (2025) psotualte that this was most likely generated by the landslide rather than by the original earthquake. They note that there are no known deposits from the tsunami, which supports the notion of a smaller, localised event.

The 22 November 1815 Gejer Bali disaster was a very significant event that warrants more attention – I thank the authors of the two papers from highlighting and investigating this most fascinating disaster. I’m left pondering how we could anticipate a similar event. The nature of this type of initial failure seems hard to determine in advance, given its seismic origin, and the behaviour of the flow is also very difficult to forecast. Thus, such events represent a massive challenge in managing landslide risk.

References

Faral, A., Lavigne, F., Sastrawan, W.J. et al. 2024. Deadliest natural disaster in Balinese history in November 1815 revealed by Western and Indonesian written sources. Natural Hazards 120, 12011–12041 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-024-06671-5.

Faral, A. et al. 2025. Field evidence of the greatest disaster in Balinese history: The 1815 Geger Bali multi-hazard event in Buleleng. Geomorphology, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geomorph.2025.109903.

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AbstractSeismic inversion translates seismic data into subsurface elastic property models, enabling geophysicists to better understand underground rocks and fluids. Due to the inherently ill-posed nature of this inverse problem, accurately capturing the uncertainty associated with the solution is essential for reliable interpretations. Traditional Bayesian inversion methods, such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and Laplace approximations, have been employed for this purpose but face significant limitations in terms of scalability and computational efficiency for large-scale problems. Combined with deep learning, Variational Inference (VI) has emerged as a promising alternative, striking a balance between computational efficiency and flexibility (i.e. the ability to approximate complex posterior distributions). However, selecting an appropriate proposal distribution remains a key challenge, as it directly influences the quality of the estimated posterior distribution. In this study, we extend IntraSeismic, an implicit neural representation (INR)-based framework for seismic inversion applications, to Bayesian inversion using VI with different parameterizations of the proposal distribution. We introduce two methods: B-IntraSeismic (BIS), which uses a mean-field Gaussian proposal, and B-IntraSeismic with Conditional Normalizing Flows (BIS-Flow), which utilizes a mean-field unparameterized proposal distribution to better capture deviations from Gaussianity in the posterior distribution. These methods are evaluated on a synthetic dataset (Marmousi) and two field data (Volve and Sleipner). Our results indicate that both BIS and BIS-Flow can accurately capture structural details and produce high-resolution mean models and standard deviation maps. BIS-Flow is also shown to be able to model complex posterior distributions, offering a more comprehensive characterization of uncertainty while maintaining computational feasibility.

AbstractThe phenomenon of elastic wave conversions, where acoustic, pressure (P-) waves are converted to elastic, shear (S-) waves, and vice-versa, is commonly disregarded in seismic imaging. This can lead to lower-quality images in regions with strong contrasts in elastic parameters. While a number of methods exist that do take wave conversions into account, they either deal with P- and S-waves separately, or are prohibitively computationally expensive, as is the case for elastic Full-Waveform Inversion. In this paper an alternative approach to taking converted waves into account is presented by extending Full Wavefield Migration (FWM) to account for wave conversions. FWM is a full-wavefield inversion method based on explicit, convolutional, one-way propagation and reflection operators in the space-frequency domain. By applying these operators recursively, multi-scattering data can be modelled. Using these operators, the FWM algorithm aims to reconstruct the reflection properties of the subsurface (i.e. the ‘image’). In this paper, the FWM method is extended by accounting for wave conversions due to angle-dependent reflections and transmissions using an extended version of Shuey’s approximation. The resulting algorithm is tested on two synthetic models to give a proof of concept. The results of these tests show that the proposed extension can model wave conversions accurately and yields better inversion results than applying conventional, acoustic FWM.

A new study delivers a stark warning that Central Asia has overshot its environmental safety limits concerning land footprint and biosphere integrity. The study, led by Prof. Duan Weili from the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, provides a comprehensive sustainability assessment and identifies Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as priority areas for environmental management.

In their paper published in Science of the Total Environment, researchers from IIASA and Lviv Polytechnic National University in Ukraine presented a novel approach to measure and understand human pressure on planet Earth. The researchers explored how carbon emissions can be translated into measures of "stress" and "strain" to derive new insights into how the planet is changing.

A powerful heat wave has been gripping large parts of southern Europe and North Africa, pushing air temperatures beyond seasonal norms and triggering widespread health and wildfire alerts. Among the hardest-hit countries are Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, and Algeria.

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.

Today, President Trump is visiting a new immigration detention facility built on a disused airstrip in the Florida Everglades. On 27 June, environmental groups sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Florida Division of Emergency Management, and Miami-Dade County, seeking a temporary restraining order to stop the construction and opening of the facility.

The lawsuit from Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity argues that the facility’s construction did not undergo environmental reviews legally required under the National Environmental Policy Act. The groups assert that constructing the facility, transporting and housing thousands of people on site, and then flying them directly from the facility to other locations, will undermine decades of work spent restoring and protecting the Everglades’ delicate ecosystem.

“The site is more than 96% wetlands, surrounded by Big Cypress National Preserve, and is habitat for the endangered Florida panther and other iconic species. This scheme is not only cruel, it threatens the Everglades ecosystem that state and federal taxpayers have spent billions to protect,” Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, said in a statement.

“The Miccosukee Tribe is opposed to the use of our ancestral lands in Big Cypress as a detention facility.”

A spokesperson for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that the facility “will have no impact on the surrounding environment” and that they will oppose the lawsuit in court.

DeSantis and other state officials have claimed emergency powers to commandeer Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport and build the migrant facility in roughly a week. Given the nickname “Alligator Alcatraz,” the detention facility is made of tents, trailers, and other temporary buildings and is designed to hold up to 5,000 people detained by DHS and ICE.

Immigration and human rights activists have raised additional concerns about housing thousands of people in tents and trailers at the height of a hot and humid Florida summer and during what is likely to be an above-normal hurricane season. Others are concerned about the environmental impact of a crowded detention center near an aquifer that supplies drinking water to the surrounding area.

 
Related

•  The lawsuit
•  Environmental groups sue to block opening of “Alligator Alcatraz” migrant detention center in Florida Everglades
•  Native leaders blast construction of Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ on land they call sacred
•  Get Involved: AGU Science Policy Action Center
 

Indigenous tribes also vehemently oppose the construction of the facility on the land, which is sacred to the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida and the Seminole Tribe of Florida. There are 19 traditional Miccosukee and Seminole villages in Big Cypress, as well as ceremonial and burial grounds and other gathering sites.

Talbert Cypress, Chairman of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, stated, “Rather than Miccosukee homelands being an uninhabited wasteland for alligators and pythons, as some have suggested, the Big Cypress is the Tribe’s traditional homelands….The Miccosukee Tribe is opposed to the use of our ancestral lands in Big Cypress as a detention facility.”

Groups of environmental, Indigenous, immigration, and human rights activists protested outside the facility on 28 June. More protests are expected today as the facility opens and the president visits.

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

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New research has, for the first time, tracked ice shelf, sea ice and ocean swell wave conditions over multiple years in the lead-up to three large-scale iceberg "calving" events in Antarctica, revealing common patterns.

A patch of the Atlantic Ocean just south of Greenland is cooling while much of the world warms. The origin of this "cold blob" has been linked to weakening ocean currents that help regulate global climate—called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). A team of scientists led by Penn State has found a weakening AMOC impacts not just the ocean but also the atmosphere, and that these two factors may contribute equally to the cold anomaly.

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

Clouds are a major source of uncertainty in atmospheric predictability and simulating them accurately remains a challenge for large-scale models. Bogenschutz et al. [2025] evaluate a new high-resolution model called the Simple Cloud-Resolving E3SM Atmosphere Model (SCREAM) developed by the United States Department of Energy (DOE), which is designed to better capture cloud and storm processes. The authors use a fast, small-scale version of the model and compare its output to modern real-world observations from the DOE’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program.

The model performed better at higher resolutions but still struggled with certain cloud types, especially mid-level “congestus” clouds that form between shallow and deep convection. SCREAM also tended to shift too abruptly from shallow clouds to intense storms, and its performance depended on how finely the vertical layers of the atmosphere were represented.

These results help pinpoint key weaknesses in the model’s treatment of clouds and turbulence. The new library of ARM cases added in this work will help guide future improvements to SCREAM and support more accurate simulations of cloud processes.

Citation: Bogenschutz, P. A., Zhang, Y., Zheng, X., Tian, Y., Zhang, M., Lin, L., et al. (2025). Exposing process-level biases in a global cloud permitting model with ARM observations. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 130, e2024JD043059. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024JD043059

—Yun Qian, Editor, JGR: Atmospheres

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