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Recently, a government minister in the Northern Territory, pitching a plan to make Darwin "the data center capital of the globe," suggested it might be a good idea to pump out groundwater to keep Earth's spin steady. If we don't, she said, we might risk "flipping the poles again."

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Parts of Western Europe are experiencing some of their worst wildfires in modern history amid one of the continent’s hottest-ever starts to the summer—during a severe drought.

These weather extremes are interconnected as dry and hot conditions fuel worsening flames, particularly in France and Spain. Roughly 330,000 people there have been forced to flee their homes this month—one of the largest evacuations in Europe since World War II. In France’s Bordeaux region, an intense blaze created its own weather system known as a fire cloud, which could trigger lightning that sparks new flames.

With another heat wave in the region this week, firefighters are scrambling to contain as many of the fires as they can before conditions worsen. The United States and Canada in recent weeks have also contended with a deadly mix of heat, fire and smoke that blanketed skies and worsened air quality across vast portions of the Northeast and Midwest regions of America.

Scientists and officials say these intertwined extremes are supercharged by climate change—and a warning of what’s to come if greenhouse gas emissions continue to surge.

“Fire-Breathing Dragon of Clouds”

So far this year, wildfires in southwestern France have burned through about 287,000 acres. In the southwest Gironde region, one blaze alone has scorched an area four times the size of Paris, triggering widespread evacuations near Bordeaux, the wine capital of the world.

“The fires which ⁠⁠are hitting our country have reached a level previously unheard of,” French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu wrote on X ⁠⁠on Saturday.

The largest fire in Gironde is so intense that it formed a pyrocumulonimbus, a large storm cloud generated when intense heat from a fire rises high enough in its smoke plume to meet cooler air in the upper atmosphere. There, moisture condenses to form a cloud. While that doesn’t often produce precipitation that could put out the fires, it can form something that makes them worse: lightning. NASA has referred to these micro-weather systems as the “fire-breathing dragon of clouds.”

“It’s a David-versus-Goliath scenario: The idea is that, at some point, we’ll find a weak spot and strike there.”

“Imagine a campfire so large and hot that the smoke rising off it turns into a storm-like cloud,” Theodore M. Giannaros, a fire meteorologist at the National Observatory of Athens, told The Associated Press.

While fire clouds have been seen in Canada, the U.S. and Australia, officials say they are unprecedented in France. These conditions have made the large fire in Gironde exceptionally difficult to fight, Agence France-Presse reported.

“We don’t know how the blaze will spread; the fire front is constantly shifting. We cannot fight it directly,” Lt. Col. Eric Brocardi, the spokesman for the National Firefighters Federation of France, told AFP. “It’s a David-versus-Goliath scenario: The idea is that, at some point, we’ll find a weak spot and strike there.”

Authorities say that fire has stabilized but is not fully contained, and a heat wave this week could stoke the flames once more or help fuel new fires. Meanwhile, in Spain’s Madrid region, multiple fires have forced about 79,000 people from their homes as hundreds of firefighters attempt to douse the flames with water-dropping aircraft and cut dry underbrush to limit the spread. Fires have also burned in the United Kingdom, including a blaze that broke out at the iconic Arthur’s Seat hill formation in Scotland’s capital city of Edinburgh.

Inside Scoop: My colleague Johnny Sturgeon, who is based in London, saw the Edinburgh fire’s impact firsthand on a recent visit. I asked him to share what he witnessed:

As I cycled along Edinburgh’s winding roads to watch the World Cup final with friends, plumes of gray drifted up from the city’s world famous Arthur’s Seat. A few hours later, as Spain was crowned champion, crews were still out battling to contain Scotland’s latest wildfire.

In many ways, however, the sight of smoke and the news of another raging inferno were unsurprising.

Heat waves have plagued the U.K. since the popular hiking spot was last ablaze in May. And as parts of the country now face this year’s fourth heat wave, many other public parks are an arid yellow, devoid of recent rain and utterly dry. Little wonder to many Brits that almost 20 significant wildfires were burning across England and Wales by mid-July.

While major blazes continue in Scotland’s Cairngorms National Park—with a major incident declared and hundreds of villagers told to evacuate this weekend—the fire in the nation’s capital was brought under control not long after the football’s final whistle. The land, however, is scarred. The once-green bushes are gone, charred-black stains left in their place.

Climate Connection

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, called the fires in the region “the most painful expression of a climate emergency” and has urged the government to better plan for global warming impacts.

“The scientific evidence linking increasingly extreme fire weather, as well as increasingly extreme wildfires themselves, to climate warming is clear.”

Climate scientist Daniel Swain echoed this warning in a recent post on X.

“The conspicuous overlap between record-breaking warmth, dryness, and/or low snowpack and these fires is simply not a coincidence. The scientific evidence linking increasingly extreme fire weather, as well as increasingly extreme wildfires themselves, to climate warming is clear,” said Swain, an expert on extreme weather based at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources.

As a continent, Europe is heating up twice as fast as the global average, according to the European Union’s Copernicus climate service. And researchers say climate change’s fingerprints are all over the extreme weather that has hit Western Europe so far this summer. A recent attribution study found that the severity of the intense heat waves in the region, which I have covered in recent newsletters, would have been impossible without climate change.

The fallout from fires and heat have disrupted daily life in Spain and France in a slew of ways: families forced from their homes, crowded evacuation shelters, the final route of the famed Tour de France cycling competition shortened.

In the United States, firefighters are working to contain 92 large fires stoked by hot and dry weather, particularly out West. Smoke billowing from the region and British Columbia is once again forecast to blanket skies across the U.S. and Canada this week, the Washington Post reports.

But the most severe consequences of this hot, fiery summer have been far deadlier. In the United States, five wildland firefighters have died in recent weeks from injuries sustained while fighting or responding to blazes. Between June 17 and July 2, France recorded more than 5,700 excess deaths as parts of the country baked under a heat wave that regularly brought temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. More than 10 people have died in Europe’s wildfires since the start of July, The New York Times reports.

“These are difficult hours,” Sánchez said at a Monday news conference while discussing the fires. “This climate emergency is exceeding every threshold and scale that scientists have long warned all of Spain and Europe about.”

More Top Climate News

People are betting in prediction markets over wildfire outcomes, which experts say could create perverse incentives to commit arson, Laura Paddison reports for CNN. During the Los Angeles County wildfires in 2025, for instance, users on online prediction markets traded on a variety of factors, such as how many acres would burn and where the fire would spread. Fire researchers fear the implications of this trade market, not only for the crimes it could encourage but for the ways it could distance people emotionally from the suffering of others and the danger of these events.

President Donald Trump said last week that more than 200 businesses and politicians signed a voluntary pledge to help ensure Americans aren’t footing the bill for the steep rise in electricity costs associated with data centers, Brad Plumer and Maxine Joselow report for The New York Times. First announced by Trump in February, the “ratepayer protection pledge” aims to put the onus on tech companies to pay a greater portion of costs associated with the facilities that help power artificial intelligence. Though the pledge is largely symbolic, the Times reports, big players have signed on, including utilities like NextEra Energy and Southern Co. and some data center developers.

Researchers in Florida are bringing pieces of coral from underwater nurseries ashore ahead of a possible bleaching event this summer, Marta Lavandier and Tammy Webber report for The Associated Press. Due primarily to marine heat waves and bleaching, elkhorn corals in Florida are functionally extinct in the wild. Scientists have been propagating them in nurseries offshore, but decided to take them to a facility on land before bleaching could disrupt this effort.

Inside Climate News reporter Lauren Dalban contributed translation for this article.

—Kiley Price (@kileyprice.bsky.social), Inside Climate News

Author(s): Abhishek K. Jha, Manthan Verma, Shashwat Nirgudkar, and Mahendra K. Verma

We performed numerical simulations of two-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic (2D MHD) turbulence on an 81922 grid with mean magnetic fields B0=0,1, 3, 6, and 10. The energy spectra and fluxes of Elsässer variables are in better agreement with Kolmogorov-like phenomenology (k−5/3) than Iroshnikov-Kraich…

[Phys. Rev. E 114, 015223] Published Fri Jul 31, 2026

Permafrost in the Arctic stores large quantities of organic carbon. When frozen ground thaws or coastal sections erode, this carbon can enter the sea, where microorganisms can break it down and convert it into climate-damaging greenhouse gases. The extent to which this carbon actually enters the atmosphere, however, and how much remains in the ocean have hardly been quantified to date.

In Taiwan, a large rockslide last month, the Wanlixi landslide, has blocked a river, creating a barrier lake with a volume of about 6 million cubic metres.

In Taiwan, a large landslide has blocked the Wanli river in Hualien County. The hazard is being actively monitored by the Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency, who are referring to it as the Wanlixi landslide.

The landslide dam was first spotted on 21 June 2026. There is a Planet Labs image from 20 June 2026 that shows the slope was intact (although there were many signs of deformation – I may return to this next week), so the timing of the failure is 20-21 June 2026.

The location of the landslide is 23.78859° N, 121.27236° E (for machine readable text that is: [23.78859, 121.27236] ). This is a few kilometres north of the large Matai’an landslide that occurred last year.

The Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency are posting a daily update on the landslide on their webpage (in Mandarin, but Google Translate works fine). The 30 July 2026 update includes this image:-

Aerial image of the Wanlixi landslide and lake as of 30 July 2026. Image from the Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency, Taiwan,

The Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency report that as of 31 July 2026 the lake volume is 6.1837 million cubic meters. As the image above shows, the lake has overtopped the dam but at present the natural spillway is in a stable overflow state. Rainfall input to the system at the moment is low.

The lake is being actively monitored 24 hours a day and downstream communities are aware of the potential need for action. The lake is not on the scale of some that I have featured on this site, but the Taiwan government is being appropriately cautious in managing the risk. This Google Map shows the downstream geography (the landslide is at the location of the marker to the northwest of the map):-

Google Map of the area downstream of the Wanlixi landslide.

Note that the Matai’an landslide is also clearly visible in this image.

Return to The Landslide Blog homepage 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.

SummaryContinental intraplate regions exhibit slow deformation yet host destructive earthquakes, posing fundamental questions about strain partitioning far from plate boundaries. Here we combine a refined GNSS velocity field and elastic block modeling to investigate the Datong basin–range system in North China, a key intraplate deformation zone at the intersection of major fault systems and Quaternary volcanism. We find that left-lateral shear (∼2 mm/yr) and NW–SE extension (∼1 mm/yr) are accommodated across multiple faults and coherent block rotations, indicating broadly distributed deformation rather than localization on a single structure. Integration with mantle tomography reveals a low-velocity anomaly beneath Datong, suggesting that upwelling-driven thermal weakening augments far-field stresses from India–Asia collision and Pacific plate rollback. This deep–shallow coupling implies non-negligible seismic hazard and highlights the role of mantle dynamics in intraplate deformation.

SummaryLaterally distributed conductive bodies and intervening resistive regions within the transient electromagnetic (TEM) sensitivity region can produce anomalously enhanced responses over resistive zones. When interpreted with standard one-dimensional (1D) inversion, this response pattern can lead to laterally misplaced conductive anomalies. We refer to this family of inversion artefacts as array effects, because they arise when a subsurface array of conductive and resistive features jointly contributes to the measured TEM response, causing 1D inversion to recover conductive anomalies at incorrect lateral positions. The underlying physical cause is the conductive–resistive alternation mechanism: spatially separated conductive regions, interleaved with resistive gaps, can jointly influence the measured response, causing 1D inversion to place conductive anomalies into, or towards, intervening resistive regions. This produces severe artefacts in inversion models and can mislead geological interpretation. Such conditions may occur in geological settings characterized by repeated lateral electrical heterogeneity, provided that the electrical contrast and spacing are appropriate. Using smoke-ring theory and 3D numerical modelling, we investigate how these effects arise and propose the Instantaneous Smoke Ring Footprint (InSR-Footprint) as a practical criterion for model design and effect identification. Finally, we present field evidence for array effects in SkyTEM data acquired over a coastal dune environment in the Netherlands.

Two of the world's most fire-prone regions have followed strikingly different wildfire trajectories despite both experiencing a warming climate. Burned forest area has surged across the U.S. Southwest, while eastern Australia has not seen the same increase.

Coastal cities are at increasing risk of compound flooding events, such as when heavy rainfall and storm surges occur simultaneously during hurricanes. However, the processes that contribute to urban compound flooding aren't well understood at smaller scales.

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.

Over the past 2 weeks, large wildfires in southwestern France and central Spain have burned 255,000 hectares, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and created extremely poor air quality even hundreds of kilometers away. Though firefighters have now contained the major fires, a forecasted heat wave and windy weather threaten to worsen the situation. 

Climate change played a role in creating the conditions for these fires to burn and spread, a new analysis has found.

The analysis, from World Weather Attribution, indicates that climate change made France and Spain’s fire-prone conditions much more likely: at least twice as likely in southwestern France and at least 20 times as likely in central Spain. Extreme heat and a widespread drought in Western Europe, both linked to climate change, created “tinderbox conditions,” the authors write.

“What we’re seeing in France and Spain isn’t just bad luck, it is a clear sign of the escalating impacts of anthropogenic warming,” said Clair Barnes, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and one of the authors of the analysis, in a press release.  

“We’ve seen repeatedly how climate change increases hot, dry, flammable conditions that are extremely conducive to wildfires. What’s unique about this case is that it’s still early in the season – and with another heatwave looming, these findings are extremely scary,” she said.

July wildfires have burned over a quarter of a million hectares (shaded in red) in Spain and France, as shown by European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) data. Climate change made these fires more likely. Credit: World Weather Attribution

Attribution studies typically compare weather and climate observations from the real world with a simulated, theoretical world in which the climate has not warmed. Through this method, scientists can get an idea of how likely a certain event would have been without climate change. 

World Weather Attribution, an international climate science partnership, said the researchers’ analysis used a “super-rapid” protocol that analyzed historical weather observations. Researchers compared this year’s fire weather conditions to the maximum fire weather conditions recorded in previous summers and simulations of conditions in a pre-industrial climate (a world without substantial anthropogenic climate change). 

Surface soil moisture anomalies relative to the 1991-2020 baseline in Spain and southeastern France show “weather whiplash”—a wet December, January, and February followed by a dry June and July. Credit: World Weather Attribution A historic heat wave in June put much of France under temperatures far above those of a 1991-2020 baseline. Credit: World Weather Attribution

Researchers determined that in France, drought-affected man-made pine woodlands created particularly suitable fuel for wildfires to spread rapidly. In Spain, a wet winter caused a spike in plant growth. When severe drought and high temperatures followed in spring and summer, a large volume of biomass became highly flammable fuel. This so-called “weather whiplash” is becoming “an increasingly important driver of wildfire risk in western Europe,” the authors write. 

Two previous attribution analyses by World Weather Attribution this summer found that Europe’s June heatwave and summer drought were both made more likely by climate change. A similar June heatwave would have been about 3.5°C (6.3°F) degrees cooler in 1976, for example, according to their analysis. 

“While this observation-based attribution study is well-designed and relies on established scientific literature,” the “super-rapid” protocol is limited in two ways, wrote Danielle Touma, a climate scientist at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the study, in an email.

First, it’s difficult to assess the role of internal climate variability (natural fluctuations in the climate unrelated to climate change) without climate modeling, and second, it’s hard to assess the impact of increased carbon dioxide emissions on plant growth that could fuel fires. Still, “the methods that they use are well established for climate change-induced increases to temperatures and evaporative demand, which can lead to droughts,” she wrote.

 
Related

•  Read the Analysis: “Climate Change Increases Likelihood of Compounding Drivers of Severe Wildfire Conditions in France and Spain”
•  We’re Getting Better at Knowing When Climate Change Is to Blame, National Academies Report Says
 

Confidence in attributing events to climate change is highest for extreme temperature events, followed by precipitation events and drought. Scientists have relatively lower confidence in attributing wildfires to climate change due to the many drivers of fires. However, the science surrounding attribution studies has greatly improved over the past decade, according to a recent report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. 

“These mega-fires show how fast climate-driven extreme heat and dry landscapes can turn wildfires into devastating national disasters,” said Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in a press release. 

“Humanity continuing to burn colossal amounts of coal, oil and gas is baking our planet, making these conditions more dangerous, and these megafires more deadly and destructive. But the solutions are equally clear: All countries must move faster from fossil fuels to renewables and protect people from worsening climate impacts, from wildfires, to megastorms and floods, to droughts hitting food production,” he said. 

—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 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.

Summer days featuring conditions that promote wildfire ignition, intensity and spread have more than doubled across large parts of the Iberian Peninsula, France, Italy and Greece since 1981, according to a study in Scientific Reports. The findings suggest that hotter, drier weather is increasing wildfire risk across Southern Europe, despite fewer fires occurring in the region since the 1980s.

When catastrophic wildfires capture global headlines, such as the unprecedented blazes sweeping through southern Europe this summer or the devastating 2019–20 "Black Summer" in Australia, they are almost always preceded by severe drought. Dry vegetation and parched landscapes are necessary ingredients for infernos.

The ocean absorbs roughly a quarter of humanity's carbon dioxide emissions each year. Understanding how that happens, and how it might change, is essential for predicting our climate's future. To do that, scientists need models that simulate not just the ocean's physical processes, such as currents and temperature, but the full web of biological and chemical processes that move carbon through the water column.

A 113-million-year-old marine murder mystery may finally be solved. Using chemical clues locked inside microscopic fossils, Northwestern University scientists found evidence that ocean acidification drove one of the largest extinction events in the history of planktic foraminifera—tiny shell-building organisms that help regulate Earth's carbon cycle.

Sea-surface salinity, the concentration of dissolved salts in the upper layer of the ocean, is much more than a measure of how salty the sea is. It responds rapidly to changes in rainfall, evaporation, river discharge and, specifically in polar regions, the melting and formation of sea ice. Salinity is both an important driver of ocean circulation and a tracer of the movement of water masses and surface currents.

Before rain falls, the moisture that forms it may have traveled anywhere from just a few kilometers to hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away. It usually begins as water that evaporated from oceans, lakes, forests or fields. According to a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, rain in parts of the United States is increasingly arriving from farther away.

For around 12,000 years, the Earth has been in the Holocene epoch, a warmer period following a glacial period. During this epoch, however, there have been around 22 abrupt cold phases, each lasting up to several centuries and leading to the expansion of glaciers.

Source: Geophysical Research Letters

Coastal cities are at increasing risk of compound flooding events, such as when heavy rainfall and storm surges occur simultaneously during hurricanes. However, the processes that contribute to urban compound flooding aren’t well understood at smaller scales.

To better understand how different drivers of flooding interact near coastal cities, Xu et al. used the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) with the River Dynamical Core (RDycore) shallow-water equation library built to simulate extreme flooding events. Their modeling highlights the importance of rural runoff for urban flooding events, the researchers say, while also underlining the continued role of coastal wetlands in blunting the dangers of compound flooding events.

The authors simulated 2011’s Hurricane Irene in the Delaware River basin. Using the kilometer-scale E3SM configuration allowed them to simulate flood dynamics at the building scale in many cases. They looked to see how factors such as runoff sources, interactions between rainfall and storm surge, and sea level rise affected flooding in urban areas near the coast. The biggest factor in severe flooding was topography, the authors say, especially in surrounding rural areas, where topographic features can funnel water toward cities. Features like the elevation change between outlying and urban areas and the connectivity of drainage systems had a significant effect on the severity of urban flooding.

Storm surges are predicted to become worse as sea levels rise, intensifying compound flooding. In their model, the authors re-created this effect but noted that most of the expanded flooding under sea level rise occurred in coastal wetlands, which acted to absorb much of the surge. This result is an indication of how valuable these ecosystems are for nearby urban areas, the authors say. (Geophysical Research Letters, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026GL122550, 2026)

—Nathaniel Scharping (@nathanielscharp), Science Writer

Citation: Scharping, N. (2026), How water flows toward cities during hurricanes, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260250. Published on 30 July 2026. Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

The role of weather and environmental conditions in malaria transmission has long been recognized. Rainfall, temperature, and standing water all influence the life cycle of the female Anopheles mosquito, which spreads the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum. But what drives the conditions that make malaria outbreaks more or less likely?

A new study published in Communications Medicine found that temperatures in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans influence malaria risk in Malawi by altering the country’s environmental conditions. The researchers identified soil moisture as the key link connecting distant ocean temperature patterns to local malaria transmission.

Their work forms the basis for a potential forecasting tool, a much-needed innovation in a country like Malawi, where malaria remains one of the most prevalent infectious diseases, accounting for 7 million morbidity cases and 36% of outpatient visits in 2025.

Unlike rainfall and temperature, which fluctuate from day to day, sea surface temperatures evolve more slowly, making them potentially useful as malaria early-warning systems.

“In Malawi, there haven’t been a lot of studies on early warning signs for malaria transmission. So this was a first step in that direction.”

“In Malawi, there haven’t been a lot of studies on early warning signs for malaria transmission. So this was a first step in that direction,” said Maxwell Elling, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder and lead author of the study. “The idea is to incorporate all these factors that have a strong relationship with malaria and build a sort of statistical forecast that can help you, months in advance, to make a prediction of malaria incidence for that period.”

“Climate drivers like moisture and temperature don’t just affect the survival rates and habitats of vectors like mosquitoes but also of the pathogens themselves, including malaria parasites,” said Jessie Abbate, an infectious disease ecologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study.

“These pathogens also have a range in which the weather is favorable for their development,” Abbate said. “So understanding how climate drivers influence changes in the weather and environment is hugely important.”

The team combined 19 years of district-level malaria records from Malawi with satellite and atmospheric datasets tracking sea surface temperatures, rainfall, and soil moisture. They then searched for ocean regions whose temperature fluctuations most strongly coincided with changes in malaria incidence.

“Oceans set off wave-like distributions and pressure that drive global winds,” Elling said. “So we wanted to ascertain how these factors influence weather changes in Malawi.”

Two Oceans, Two Effects

Two regions stood out: the tropical Atlantic Ocean and the central Indian Ocean. The researchers found that the two oceans exerted nearly opposite effects on Malawi’s climate.

When the tropical Atlantic was warmer than average, atmospheric circulation patterns transported warm, moist air into southeastern Africa. Rainfall increased, soils became wetter, and malaria incidence tended to rise.

“By and large, wind from the Atlantic drives the kind of environments that mosquitoes like: It’s warmer, more humid, and the soils are moist,” Elling said.

A warmer Indian Ocean produced a different outcome. Although warmer conditions were associated with some increases in rainfall, the additional heat also increased evaporation, drying out soils and creating conditions that were generally less favorable for mosquito breeding and malaria transmission.

Although previous studies have linked soil moisture to malaria transmission, soil moisture has received far less attention than rainfall and temperature.

“Products have been out there to analyze temperature and precipitation for decades,” Elling said. “But with soil moisture, the apparatus for monitoring, like satellite products, is relatively new.”

In the study, soil moisture emerged as the environmental variable most closely aligned with malaria incidence across Malawi.

“Soil moisture…tells us more about water sitting on the ground, which is an essential influence on the development of mosquitoes and their ability to transmit malaria.”

Unlike rainfall alone, soil moisture reflects the combined effects of precipitation, evaporation, and other land surface processes, making it a more direct measure of mosquito breeding conditions.

“Two main climate and environmental factors that these mosquitoes care about are temperature and standing water,” Elling said. “Soil moisture accounts for standing water better than just precipitation. It tells us more about water sitting on the ground, which is an essential influence on the development of mosquitoes and their ability to transmit malaria.”

Abbate agreed, arguing that as long as a link between soil moisture and infectious disease has been established, as in this study, “soil moisture is a much stronger predictor than precipitation. Because after precipitation events, it is the humidity of the soil that determines how much of that water sits in the ground and affects the development of the mosquitoes.”

A Drier Future but Not Necessarily Less Malaria

The researchers also examined what future climate change could mean for Malawi, a country that has already been described as “on the frontline of the climate crisis.” Using projections from nine global climate models, they found a consistent drying trend across the country by the end of the century. Average soil moisture declined by about 6% under a moderate-emissions scenario and roughly 11% under a high-emissions scenario, though the models disagreed on the magnitude of the change.

However, they cautioned that a drier future would not necessarily mean less malaria. Instead, transmission could shift geographically, becoming less likely in some regions while increasing in others.

Abbate also noted that the practical applicability of these long-term predictions depends on a range of factors, in part because pathogens and vectors can evolve over the course of 10 to 20 years.

“So regardless of how much mapping we do, it may not be what the future actually is,” she said. “A more practical approach would be to keep watching where the risk is increasing per time and shifting resources to those regions.”

More broadly, the researchers emphasized that climate is only one factor shaping malaria risk. Housing quality, health care access, socioeconomic conditions, and public health interventions also influence transmission and would need to be considered in any forecasting system.

Still, by showing that soil moisture connects large-scale climate variability to local transmission conditions, the work suggests that malaria outbreaks may be predictable months before they occur.

—Toluwalogo Niji-Olawepo (@Toluwalogo_), Science Writer

Citation: Niji-Olawepo, T. (2026), Distant oceans may help predict malaria risk in Malawi, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260243. Published on 30 July 2026. Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

A new framework to cool urban areas which integrates AI-driven technical solutions with cooling schemes that are acceptable and doable for the host community, has been proposed by QUT Urban AI Hub researchers.