New research, published Thursday (Jan. 15) in the journal Science, revealed that the Pioneer Fragment — a leftover bit of an oceanic plate that disappeared under the North American Plate some 30 million years ago — is now stuck to the floor of the Pacific Ocean and is moving northwest along with that plate.

This is happening at a spot called the Mendocino triple junction, where California's famous San Andreas Fault abuts the Cascadia subduction zone. Along the San Andreas, the North American and Pacific plates move alongside one another. At Cascadia, which extends from Cape Mendocino, California, to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, the Juan de Fuca and Gorda oceanic plates dive below North America. That tectonic motion is capable of setting off earthquakes of magnitude 9 and above, according to the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.

Some evidence suggests that earthquakes in the Cascadia subduction zone might trigger earthquakes along the San Andreas, a possibility that would widen the danger from the Cascadia fault.

While the new findings don't make the risk clear, said study first author David Shelly, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado, they are a step toward understanding this relationship.

The Pioneer Fragment "does increase the area of contact between what’s effectively the Pacific Plate and the subduction zone," Shelly told Live Science.

Shelly and his colleagues probed the Mendocino triple junction using tiny low-frequency earthquakes and tremors — a kind of seismic shiver that originates deep in the crust and can't be felt without sensitive seismometers. "They’re teeny-tiny events but they often occur on the biggest faults," Shelly said.

By analyzing these events, the researchers determined the direction of subtle plate motions. At Mendocino, the Pacific Plate is sliding northwest against the North American Plate, bumping against the Gorda Plate as it pushes under North America. It's a complex situation, and there are competing explanations for exactly where all the pieces are and where the faultlines run.

Shelly and his colleagues found that the situation is even more complex, because a surprise piece of long-gone Farallon Plate still has an influence on the triple junction. This ancient tectonic plate started subducting under North America 200 million years ago, during the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea. The Juan de Fuca is one remnant of the Farallon. But now, the researchers found that another remnant got stuck to the Pacific plate. This remnant, the Pioneer Fragment, isn't subducting but rather moving sidelong against the continent.

Meanwhile, bits of the Gorda Plate that got scraped off onto the North American Plate as the two ground together have now seemingly been passed back to the Gorda like a "tectonic hot potato" and may be diving back below North America, Shelly said.

This bit of geological messiness may explain why one of the largest triple junction quakes, the 1992 Cape Mendocino earthquake, had a shallower origin than scientists expected. Because of the extra bits and pieces, "the fault may not be following the oceanic crust itself. It may be shallower than that," Shelly said.

Beyond increasing the surface area of the Pacific Plate that interacts with Cascadia, the Pioneer Fragment might have the potential to cause earthquakes itself. Between the fragment and the North American Plate is a nearly horizontal fault, like the icing in a layer cake.

"We don’t know whether that fault can generate large earthquakes, but it is a fault that isn’t currently in the hazard models," Shelly said. "So it’s something we need to consider in the future."

The ice sheet, which spans more than 5.4 million square miles (14 million square kilometers), shrouds underlying mountains, valleys, lakes and basins, according to a new study published in the journal Science on Thursday (Jan. 15).

This polar landscape below the ice has long been one of the inner Solar System's least mapped planetary surfaces, the team wrote in the study. Geological features shape how ice flows from below, sculpting the glacial surface, and a clearer picture of this process could help scientists predict how ice changes in response to warming.

Yet much about the landscape under the ice has been uncertain, because ground and air surveys are difficult in the region. Scientists often estimate information between distant or irregular survey points, for example, which can miss valleys in the bedrock that guide ice flow.

In the new study, researchers addressed this gap by combining high-resolution satellite images of the ice sheet surface with ice thickness measurements, and an ice flow analysis based on the physics of how ice flows over bedrock. The scientists integrated these data to create a continent-scale map of Antarctica's topography under the ice.

The extensive map revealed features 1.2 to 18.6 miles (2 to 30 kilometers) beneath the ice sheet that were previously unknown or unclear to science, such as river channels stretching hundreds of miles, which could be traces of the landscape predating the ice sheet.

The map also uncovered sharp transitions between highland and lowland terrain, suggesting tectonic boundaries. In one region where previous air surveys had predicted an ancient river landscape covered by ice, the new map actually identified deep valleys underneath.

The map enables scientists to observe how the ice sheet has evolved and interacted with underlying topography. Visualizing the processes affecting these glaciers can improve models of ice sheets and make projections of climate change-driven ice melt and sea-level rise more exact.

Antarctica quiz: Test your knowledge on Earth's frozen continent

Humanity's food system depends on tiny pores on plants' leaves. These microscopic pores, called stomata (from the Greek word for mouth) regulate how much carbon dioxide a plant consumes and how much oxygen and water vapor it breathes out.

"It's very important for us to understand stomata better," study co-author Andrew Leakey, a plant biologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told Live Science. "I, and many other people, are looking to find ways to use either breeding or biotechnology to alter the way stomata are performing in order to produce better crops, in particular ones that need less water."

Specialized cells surround the pore openings, and they expand and contract to open and close the stomata. But scientists still don't know exactly how individual stomata regulate what the plant moves in and out.

"Despite the fact that we have studied stomata for a very, very long time, and we do know a great deal about them, we really struggle to connect understanding the amount of these oxygen, water and carbon going in and out of the stomata with how many stomata there are, how big they are, and how they open," Leakey said.

To understand this process better, researchers developed the Stomata In-Sight tool, which they described in a study published Nov. 17, 2025 in the journal Plant Physiology. The Stomata In-Sight instrument combines a microscope, a system to measure the stomatal gas flux, and machine-learning image analysis. "It measures the collective activity of thousands upon thousands of stomata in terms of these carbon dioxide and water fluxes," Leakey said.

To use Stomata In-Sight, small pieces of leaf are placed in a climate-controlled chamber about the size of a human palm, which is connected to a gas exchange system, Leakey explained. Researchers can change the conditions inside the chamber to see how the stomata respond to variations in temperature, water availability and other parameters. The microscope sits outside the chamber, looking in, while the machine-learning analysis identifies stomata from the microscope's images, speeding up analysis.

It has taken the team several years to develop the new tool. A major issue was that tiny vibrations — such as the fan in a gas-exchange system — can lead to blurry images. "This actually took us about five years, and we had probably three prototypes that failed when we got to the final solution," Leakey said.

The team has already used the system to look at the stomata of maize (Zea mays) and other crops. It also used the insights about stomata to engineer sorghum (Sorghum bicolor, a type of plant cultivated for grain) to use less water. They identified the genes responsible for the density of stomata on sorghum leaves and engineered plants with more spread-out stomata.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has patented the technology, and while it is not commercially available, Leakey hopes that there may be companies interested in producing the instrument for other research groups.

Not all scientists are convinced, however. Alistair Hetherington, an emeritus professor of botany at the University of Bristol in the U.K., doubts that the new tool will revolutionize the study of stomata.

"We have been able to use conventional microscopy to measure changes in stomatal aperture for well over hundred years, confocal microscopy for probably 25 years, and the so-called gas exchange techniques for 50 years," he told Live Science. The new study puts the techniques together, but researchers are likely to stick to "tried and tested existing techniques that deliver," Hetherington added.

Nevertheless, Leakey is looking at improving the tool to broaden its usefulness. The main challenge at the moment is that watching the stomata "breathe" is very time consuming. "When you're looking through the microscope, you see on average two to three stomata in the little piece of leaf you're looking at," he explained. "But you actually need to measure 40 or 50 stomata in order to account for the variation." This has to be done manually.

Also, it can take a few minutes for stomata to respond to changing conditions. This means that scientists have to wait for the stomata to finish opening or closing before they take another image.

"It's quite labour intensive, but it's possible we could use robotics and artificial intelligence to turn it into a production-line process," he said. "There's a lot of excitement in the scientific community about how we can accelerate biological research using those sorts of tools."

This means subsidence is becoming the main driver of land loss, coastal flooding and saltwater intrusion at river deltas — surpassing the impacts of sea-level rise from climate change. Researchers also found that groundwater extraction is the biggest cause of subsidence at deltas globally, with urban expansion and declines in rivers' sediment loads contributing to the overall sinking trend.

Deltas are facing a "double burden" of sea-level rise and sinking land that increases the risk of catastrophic flooding and displacement for millions of people in some of the world's biggest cities, the study's authors warn.

"To our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive, high-resolution, delta-wide assessment of contemporary land subsidence ever conducted at the global scale," co-author Manoochehr Shirzaei, an associate professor of geophysics and remote sensing at Virginia Tech, told Live Science in an email. "Across the deltas we analyzed, groundwater storage change emerged as the single most influential anthropogenic factor explaining subsidence patterns in many systems."

Shirzaei and his colleagues used data from the Sentinel-1 satellite to examine subsidence at 40 of the world's largest river deltas between 2014 and 2023. Sentinel-1 captures changes in ground elevation resulting from subsidence, as well as sediment deposition and erosion, according to the study, which was published Wednesday (Jan. 14) in the journal Nature.

Of the 40 deltas, 18 had average annual subsidence rates greater than the current rate of global sea-level rise, which is about 0.16 inches (4 millimeters) per year.

Zooming in, the researchers found that every studied river delta except the Rio Grande Delta was in some places sinking faster than global sea levels are rising. In 38 deltas, more than 50% of the delta area sank during the study period, and in 19 of them — including the Mississippi Delta, the Nile Delta and the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta — more than 90% of the delta area had subsided.

The worst-affected deltas in the study were the Chao Phraya Delta in Thailand, the Brantas Delta in Indonesia and the Yellow River Delta in China. These showed average sinking rates of about 0.3 inches (8 mm) per year — double the rate of global sea level rise.

Two main points arose from the study, Shirzaei said. "First, land subsidence often exceeds sea-level rise as the dominant driver of relative sea-level rise in river deltas today, meaning that many coastal risks are increasing faster than climate-only projections suggest. Second, there is a profound mismatch between risk and capacity: the deltas sinking fastest are often in regions with the least resources to respond."

River deltas are home to between 350 million and 500 million people around the world. They host 10 of the world's 34 megacities, along with vital infrastructure such as ports, meaning the impacts of subsidence and sea-level rise — such as shoreline retreat and more frequent floods — are immense.

And these huge populations are themselves a driver of subsidence, because cities pile enormous weight onto the land, compressing the soil. Huge populations typically also require massive amounts of water, which exacerbates groundwater pumping. This causes further compaction of the soil.

"In rapidly urbanizing deltas, urban growth can substantially exacerbate land sinking," Shirzaei said. However, groundwater extraction for all purposes, including agriculture and industry, remains the biggest cause of subsidence at deltas, he said. "Groundwater pumping is a well-known local driver of subsidence, but what stood out was how consistently dominant it appears at the global scale, even when compared alongside other major anthropogenic pressures."

Another cause of subsidence is a reduction in the amount of sediment that rivers flush into the ocean due to dams and other river-control strategies. Sediment delivery can offset subsidence and sea-level rise to some extent, but human modifications to natural river flow have disturbed this balance. For example, about 1,900 square miles (5,000 square kilometers) of land has been lost in the Mississippi River Delta since 1932 due to the combined effects of dams, levees and erosion.

The main drivers of subsidence at river deltas are human-made, which presents an opportunity for intervention, Shirzaei said. "One of the most important messages of the study is that subsidence is often manageable," he said.

Alongside efforts to limit climate change, countries should consider reducing groundwater extraction and replenishing aquifers with floodwater or treated wastewater, Shirzaei said. Controlled flooding and sediment diversions can help increase sediment deposition. And restricting heavy infrastructure in the areas most prone to subsidence could also help slow subsidence, he said.

"When combined with flood protection and climate adaptation, these measures can significantly reduce long-term risk," he said.

A23a is an oddity among icebergs. The megaberg, dubbed the "queen of icebergs," broke off from Antarctica's Filchner-Ronne Ice Sheet in the summer of 1986, but quickly became stuck in place when its submerged bottom caught on the seafloor. It remained trapped for most of the last four decades, barely shrinking in size due to its close proximity to its parent ice shelf. However, A23a finally broke free from its seafloor tether in 2020 and began drifting away from Antarctica.

Its subsequent journey has been eventful. First, the hefty ice mass was trapped again, this time in a massive ocean current, or gyre, which caused it to spin in place for months. Then, after breaking free from the vortex in December 2024, the dizzy berg made a beeline for the island of South Georgia, sparking fears among researchers that it would ground again and trigger a potential ecological disaster for the island's resident penguins. However, this worst-case scenario was avoided when A23a began to break apart in May 2025, shortly before reaching the island.

Since then, the largest remaining chunk of the iceberg has drifted further north into the South Atlantic Ocean, where warmer waters circulating down from South America are taking their toll.

New photos, captured on Dec. 26 by NASA's Terra satellite, reveal a completely unrecognizable version of A23a. The iceberg, which is now around a third of its original size, is shown covered with pools of blue water encircled by thick borders of white ice, dubbed "ramparts." In the image, A23a is also flanked by a pool of gray sludge, known as ice melange, which has likely leaked out from under the iceberg. It is also further surrounded by hundreds of smaller bergs that have broken off its edges.

The "blue mush" visible on A23a is made up of melt ponds, which form when surface ice loses its structural integrity, Ted Scambos, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a NASA statement. These ponds align into streaks, likely caused by the "weight of the water sitting inside cracks in the ice and forcing them open," Scambos added.

The cracks likely run parallel to grooves on the iceberg's underside, which were carved into the ice by centuries of movement over the ground while still attached to the Filchner-Ronne Ice Sheet, Walter Meier, a senior research scientist at the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC), said in the statement. "It's impressive that these striations still show up after so much time has passed," added Chris Shuman, a retired glaciologist formerly with the University of Maryland.

The vibrant striations may have already started to disappear, according to another photo, snapped on Dec. 27 by an unnamed astronaut onboard the International Space Station. This subsequent image shows a more uniform pool of blue water on the iceberg's surface (see below).

It is currently unclear how much of A23a remains or if it has already begun to disappear fully.

Due to its persistent massive size, A23a has repeatedly held the title of "world's largest iceberg" throughout its long lifespan.

It most recently regained the title in June 2023, when the previous largest iceberg, A-76A, broke apart; then, it lost the accolade again in September 2025, shortly after its encounter with South Georgia. (Some outlets have misreported that A23a remains the world's largest iceberg, likely due to an outdated page from Guinness World Records.)

The world's current largest iceberg is now D15A, which has a surface area of around 1,200 square miles (3,100 square kilometers), according to NSIDC, making it a few hundred square miles smaller than A23a at its peak.

For more incredible satellite photos and astronaut images, check out our Earth from space archives.

You can often read rude and even vulgar comments under online newspaper articles about the purpose of the seismological profession when people in their post-earthquake trauma realize that seismologists don't forecast like meteorologists do, such as forecast hail or tornadoes with high accuracy.

An approximate answer to these comments could be given with the following targeted question: "We still can't beat malignant diseases, but should we stop researching because of that?"

We are used to discussions about earthquake causes after every event, particularly in the places where the world's earthquakes occur. There are discussions about their frequency, and quite often, there are those who claim they could recognize the coming earthquake in something else. Whether it's a full moon, a planetary conjunction, too much rainfall, bone pain, overexploitation of the planet's resources or greed, people tend to believe that earthquakes have simpler explanations than physical forces in the interior of the Earth and, of course, that they can be predicted.

Let's travel to California in the 1970s and 80s, to a small, picturesque town of only 18 inhabitants — Parkfield — located between San Francisco and Los Angeles, near the central part of the San Andreas Fault. You’re probably wondering why. Well, this small town is known to the seismological world for its turbulent geological history. Namely, on average, significant earthquakes have occurred in Parkfield every 22 years since the middle of the 18th century.

But it was fascinating that the recorded seismograms for the earthquakes of 1922, 1934 and 1966 were almost identical, one wiggly seismogram line to the other. In addition, the 1934 and 1966 earthquakes had foreshocks — about 17 minutes before the main shock — whose seismograms also looked very similar.

You wonder how such a thing is even possible. Such similarity of seismograms is possible only if the same fault surface is always activated and recorded with the same instrument at sufficiently long waves. Of course, the shorter the waves, the greater the differences. In other words, you have a source — an earthquake and a receiver — a seismometer at fixed locations, and waves propagating between them through the same material. So, you have a perfect natural laboratory and an experiment set up in it. You just have to wait long enough.

Scientists, therefore, had good maps in hand to investigate the mechanisms of earthquakes that recur from time to time on an active, well-monitored fault. Since the mid-1980s, they have installed a whole arsenal of instruments near Parkfield and along the fault: powerful seismographs, then strainmeters, which measure rock deformation at a depth of 650 feet (~200 meters) along the fault, magnetometers for measuring the intensity of the magnetic field, creepmeters, which measure displacements on the surface along the fault, and other scientific "weaponry." They forecasted with 90 to 95% confidence that the next earthquake there would occur between 1985 and 1993. Some of the key questions were:

1. How is stress distributed in space and time on the fault due to the action of tectonic forces before and after the earthquake?

2. Do earthquakes repeat at an average time interval, or is each earthquake unique, a story in itself?

3. How do the structure of faults and surrounding rocks affect the nucleation of smaller earthquakes and the possibility of larger ones and their distribution in time and space?

They wondered what the deformation we measure on the surface could tell us about the stress distribution on the fault, and they hoped for a positive result — confirmation of the predictions for earthquake occurrences between 1985 and 1993. They waited and waited. In those years, I worked once a week with colleagues at the U.S. Geological Survey California office in Menlo Park, in the northwestern part of Silicon Valley, where I was able to observe some scientists involved in the experiment.

Eventually, a magnitude 6.0 earthquake did happen in Parkfield, but not until 2004. We greeted the most watched and studied earthquake in human history with a huge question mark above our heads; it occurred 11 years after its forecasted time. Devastating. That’s why the "Parkfield Experiment" left a bitter taste of disappointment in the mouth. But, as they say, only those who dare to fail eventually succeed. Research continued.

Why is earthquake prediction so tricky? Each fault is different — some of them we know about, but many we don't — earthquake catalogs don't go back far enough, and, after all, underground architecture is entirely invisible to us.

We do not know how deep the fault reaches, whether it is a flat or curved surface, whether its surface is smooth or rough, whether and where it touches other faults, the chemical composition of the rocks on one and the other side of the fault, or their physical properties, for example, strength and porosity. We do not know precisely how the deformation we observe on the surface of the Earth can be related to the deformation and stress in the depth of the fault. We also do not know many other factors. A forecast can be made, but by its very nature, it must be probabilistic and taken with a grain of salt. So, how do we proceed?

Not everything is so negative. The first good news is that seismic hazard maps exist in most countries. They are well made, but of course, they must be constantly updated. The other good news is that, based on fundamental knowledge of physics and the propagation of seismic waves through the interior and across the surface of the Earth, we can predict how the ground and some buildings will behave during an earthquake, and that is already a major benefit.

This is possible because of basic science and seismological research on the nature of the subsurface, in a similar way that radiologists can illuminate the inside of the human body. Ironically, earthquakes help us because they serve as a source of waves illuminating the Earth's interior. It is possible to predict infrastructure behavior during earthquakes due to the development of engineering, construction, computer science and numerical methods. Either way, those hazard maps serve as input for engineers, builders and insurance companies.

In the end, the most positive thing is that modern studies involving laboratory models and artificial intelligence are being carried out across the world, aimed in the direction that one day we will be able to predict earthquakes. Certainly not without major investment in science and technology, which will need to continue to develop. This might even take us to the point where we will have to place thousands or millions of microsensors on every fault in the Earth's interior and then monitor the strain in real time.

In a way, we will have a "crystal ball" — an insight into the dynamics and future behavior of faults. In fact, we are already doing it today, but we have only scratched the surface of the Earth with the help of satellites. InSAR, LIDAR and GPS are just some of the networks and methods that give us an insight into where the Earth's crust is most stressed from surface deformations.

The stress or tension build-up mechanism on a fault is still under investigation. It is most likely that the hot rocks of the Earth's continental crust beneath approximately 9.3 miles (15 kilometers) of depth are ductile, and this rock mass "flows" at a higher speed than on the surface, but without earthquakes, and the upper part of the crust therefore bends and the stress along the fault surface increases. However, how this stress is distributed in space is not yet known.

Furthermore, laboratory experiments at high pressures and temperatures give us insight into how hard rocks are and how strain and stress are related. The chemical and physical structure of the soil is examined by drilling around the fault. Old tree trunks are explored, and excavations are made to detect historical earthquakes on rock samples.

Investments are made in studying the deeper interior of the Earth and the mechanism of earthquakes using seismic waves and tomography methods. Investments are also made in mathematical geophysics, as well as in machine learning and improved techniques for processing enormous amounts of digital data. Investments are also made in alarm systems based on the detection of P waves. Even a few seconds of warning before the arrival of S waves can be crucial to saving people and infrastructure. Likewise, investments are being made in modern construction resistant to earthquakes.

But the conclusion is that, unless you want to move to stable parts of the continents, somewhere in Siberia, to the northernmost, permanently frozen parts of Canada, or the remote regions of the Australian Outback seldom struck by earthquakes, we need to learn to live with earthquakes.

Adapted from When Worlds Quake: The Quest to Understand the Interior of Earth and Beyond. Copyright © 2026 by Hrvoje Tkalčić. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

This striking satellite photo shows rippling ribbons of ethereal ice swirling like turbulent clouds on the surface of Lake Michigan, alongside a snow-covered Chicago. The wintery scene occurred during an extreme cold snap triggered by changes to the polar vortex, experts say.

The greater Chicago region is home to around 9.5 million people and is near the southernmost end of Lake Michigan — the third-largest of the Great Lakes, which covers an area of around 22,300 square miles (57,750 square kilometers) across Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan.

Between Jan. 19 and Jan. 24, 2025, the Windy City and other parts of the eastern U.S. were hit by an unusual cold snap, partially triggered by a sudden expansion of the polar vortex — the persistent area of cold, low-pressure air circulating high in the stratosphere above the Arctic. During this time, temperatures in Chicago fell to as low as minus 33 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 36 degrees Celsius), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

This sudden drop in temperature, coupled with strong offshore winds, caused ice to form around the coastline and be pushed outward, creating the beautiful swirls. These flowing ribbons look a lot like clouds when viewed from above, but they are entirely ice, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

In total, around 20% of Lake Michigan was covered by ice when the satellite photo was taken, which is just above average for the time of year, according to NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL).

While lake ice is common in January, the extent of ice on Lake Michigan doesn't normally peak until February or March. It is also more common to see uniform sheets of ice rather than the flowing patterns visible in this image.

In this case, the darker, wispy ice near the lakeshore likely accumulated into thicker offshore constructs with rough edges that appear more white when viewed from above, Jia Wang, an ice climatologist at GLERL, told the Earth Observatory.

Other Great Lakes were also impacted by the cold snap, including Lake Erie, which saw up to 80% of its surface frozen, according to GLERL. Erie's ice was so thick and emerged so quickly that a Canadian cargo freighter was trapped in place for three days, according to the New York Times.

This is not the first time that satellite photos have revealed something unusual about Lake Michigan. In 2024, aerial images helped researchers identify more than 40 mysterious craters scattered across the lake's bed, which currently have no definitive explanation.

The low temperatures and strong winds around Chicago can also cause other unusual winter sights, such as bizarre chess piece-like sand sculptures along Lake Michigan's beaches, known as "hoodoos," which form when frozen chunks of sand are exposed to strong gusts.

For more incredible satellite photos and astronaut images, check out our Earth from space archives.

The winner is older than the dinosaurs: The Finke River in Australia, or Larapinta in the Indigenous Arrernte language, is between 300 million and 400 million years old.

This network of streams and channels extends more than 400 miles (640 kilometers) across Northern Territory and South Australia. The arid conditions in the center of the continent mean the river flows only intermittently; most of the year, it exists as a string of isolated water holes. However, a combination of geological records, weathering profiles and radionuclide measurements in the surrounding sediments and rocks has enabled scientists to date this river system to the Devonian (419 million to 359 million) or Carboniferous (359 million to 299 million) period.

One of the strongest pieces of evidence for its ancient age is a geological anomaly called cross-axial drainage, said Victor Baker, a geomorphologist at the University of Arizona. Rather than flowing parallel to resistant rock structures, such as quartzite, the Finke River cuts across these tough mineral formations as it passes through the MacDonnell Ranges in central Australia.

Flowing water always takes the easiest path, making it counterintuitive that a river would flow against these hard rocks rather than alongside them. Consequently, the presence and origin of this cross-axial drainage reveal crucial details about the historic course of the Finke.

"There is some suggestion that there was a preexisting drainage that was flowing as this range was building up," Baker told Live Science. "It's called antecedence — basically, the river is there before the mountains form and as the crust is being thrust up, the river is cutting down."

The MacDonnell Ranges (or Tjoritja in Arrernte) formed as part of the Alice Springs Orogeny — a tectonic mountain-building event that occurred 300 million to 400 million years ago — making the Finke at least as old as these mountains.

Later evidence comes from erosion and weathering, which generate specific chemical profiles. This information indicates how and where the surface interacted with the atmosphere and water flow through time. Using the radioactive signatures of certain isotopes (elements with different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei), scientists can also infer the ages of these rocks. Because radioactive isotopes decay at a fixed rate, it's possible to estimate when rocks formed by working backward from the relative proportions of different isotopes. Together these data points create a roadmap for piecing together the history and evolution of the Finke River.

But rivers are constantly in flux, with some growing bigger from year to year and others drying up completely. So why has the Finke system lasted so long?

"Rivers can disappear if a massive influx of sediment overwhelms them (e.g., volcanic eruptions) or if topography changes so dramatically that the flowing water takes a new course across the landscape (e.g., glacial advance and retreat)," Ellen Wohl, a geologist at Colorado State University, told Live Science in an email.

Additionally, "rivers can cease to flow because of climate change and/or human consumptive use of water," Wohl said. "Long duration is promoted by tectonic stability and lack of glaciation during the Pleistocene" (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago).

In the case of the Finke, Australia has been an unusually stable landscape for a very long time. Resting in the middle of the Australian Plate, the continent has experienced virtually no significant tectonic activity for the past several 100 million years, Baker explained. Consequently, the Finke River system has been able to develop and expand almost uninterrupted for most of its history.

As for the future, it's difficult to say how much longer the Finke will last.

"Long-persisting [rivers] will probably continue to persist," Wohl said. However, "many rivers in dry lands" — such as the Finke — "are highly altered by human consumptive water use."

This, she added, "is likely to increase in future as global water consumption continues to rise and global warming makes many dry regions even drier."

If the Finke ever dries up, the runner up may be the New River, which today is about 300 million years old, Baker said, and runs through Virginia, West Virginia and North Carolina.

What's inside Earth quiz: Test your knowledge of our planet's hidden layers

The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) kept plasma — the high-energy fourth state of matter — stable at extreme densities, which was previously seen as a major obstacle in the development of nuclear fusion, according to a statement released by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"The findings suggest a practical and scalable pathway for extending density limits in tokamaks and next-generation burning plasma fusion devices," study co-lead author Ping Zhu, a professor in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Science and Technology in China, said in the statement.

Nuclear fusion offers the potential for near-limitless clean energy. In other words, energy without much nuclear waste or climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions released by burning fossil fuels. The new findings, published Jan.1 in the journal Science Advances, could bring our species one step closer to unlocking this energy source, which some researchers claim we could harness within decades.

However, nuclear fusion technology has been in development for more than 70 years, and it's still very much an experimental science, with reactors typically consuming more energy than they can produce. Meanwhile, climate scientists are calling for deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions now as the impacts of climate change are already being felt around the world. Nuclear fusion is therefore unlikely to represent a practical solution to the current climate crisis — but could power our world in the future.

Fusion reactors are designed to fuse two light atoms into a single heavy atom via heat and pressure. By doing so, they generate energy in a similar way to the sun. However, the sun has a lot more pressure than Earth's reactors, so scientists compensate by corralling hot plasma at temperatures far hotter than the sun.

China's EAST is a magnetic confinement reactor, or tokamak, designed to keep plasma continuously burning for prolonged periods. The reactor heats plasma and traps it inside a donut-shaped chamber using powerful magnetic fields. Tokamak reactors have yet to achieve fusion ignition, which is the point at which the fusion process becomes self-sustaining, but the EAST reactor has been increasing the amount of time it can maintain a steady, highly confined loop of plasma.

One hurdle for fusion researchers is a density limit called the Greenwald Limit, beyond which plasma typically becomes unstable. This limit is a problem because, while higher plasma densities enable more atoms to whack into one another, thereby lowering the energy cost of ignition, instability also kills the fusion reaction.

To overcome the Greenwald limit, scientists at EAST carefully managed the plasma's interaction with the reactor's walls by controlling two key parameters upon starting the reactor: the initial fuel gas pressure and the electron cyclotron resonance heating, or the frequency at which electrons in the plasma absorbed microwaves. This kept the plasma stable at extreme densities of 1.3 to 1.65 times beyond the Greenwald Limit — much higher than the tokamak's usual operational range of 0.8 to 1, according to the study.

This isn't the first time the Greenwald Limit has been breached. For example, the U.S. Department of Energy's DIII-D National Fusion Facility tokamak in San Diego broke through the limit in 2022, and in 2024, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Wisconsin announced that they had maintained a stable tokamak plasma at about 10 times the Greenwald Limit using an experimental device.

However, the breach at EAST enabled the researchers to heat the plasma to a previously theorized state called the "density-free regime" for the first time, where the plasma remained stable as the density increased. The research is based on a theory called plasma-wall self organization (PWSO), which proposes that a density-free regime could be possible when the interaction between the plasma and the reactor's walls is in a carefully balanced state, according to the statement.

Progress made at EAST and in the U.S. will inform the development of new reactors. China and the U.S. are both part of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) program, which is a collaboration between dozens of countries to build the world's largest tokamak in France.

ITER will be another experimental reactor designed to create sustained fusion for research purposes, but could pave the way for fusion power plants. The ITER reactor is expected to begin producing full-scale fusion reactions in 2039.

As its name suggests, the Avenue of the Baobabs is a road in Madagascar that’s lined with towering baobab trees. The trees are the remnants of a tropical forest that once sprawled across the island, and in the modern era they are listed as a natural monument by Madagascar's government.

The Avenue of the Baobabs is made up of endangered Grandidier's baobabs (Adansonia grandidieri) — one of six endemic baobab species in Madagascar. The trunks of Grandidier's baobabs typically grow around 80 feet (24 meters) tall and 10 feet (3 m) wide, but the biggest specimen ever recorded was a 98-foot (30 m) giant with a diameter of 36 feet (11 m), according to the plant sciences faculty at the University of California, Davis.

Grandidier's baobabs have such huge trunks because they store water. However, water doesn't gush out if you drill a hole into a baobab; rather, the trees store water in their cells, in order to grow new leaves and maintain their structure, according to the Baobab Foundation.

The Avenue of the Baobabs is an unpaved road between Morondava and Belo Tsiribihina, two towns close to Madagascar's west coast. About 20 to 25 Grandidier's baobabs line a short stretch of the road, but 25 more trees of the same species grow scattered among rice paddies and meadows just a short distance away — and there are hundreds of baobabs in the surrounding landscape.

Baobabs evolved in Madagascar between 41 million and 21 million years ago, a 2024 study found. Most of the baobab species that exist today remain in Madagascar, but two species — A. digitata and A. gregorii — are found in continental Africa and Australia, respectively. It's unclear how the baobabs got there, but researchers have proposed that the fruits may have crossed the oceans on currents or been transported by humans.

In Madagascar, baobabs are called "renala" or "reniala," meaning "mother of the forest." The name points to evidence suggesting that the baobabs that give their name to the Avenue of the Baobabs only recently became isolated trees; thousands of years ago, they stood in a dense tropical forest.

Today, baobabs in Madagascar face extinction threats from illegal logging, fires and climate change. Nevertheless, the trees play a central role in Malagasy culture, featuring in local legends such as that of the "Baobab Amoureux," or "Loving Baobabs" — two intertwined trees that are said to embody a pair of star-crossed young lovers who were forced to marry other people.

Discover more incredible places, where we highlight the fantastic history and science behind some of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth.

The Prudhoe Dome, now a 1,640-foot (500-meter) thick ice cap covering 965 square miles (2,500 square kilometers) of northwestern Greenland, melted under the warmer temperatures of the early Holocene, exposing the sediment beneath.

As similar temperatures are predicted by the end of the century, this could lead to significant ice loss over time. The Greenland Ice Sheet, currently the single biggest contributor to sea level rise, would add 24 feet (7.3 meters) to average global sea levels if all its ice were to melt.

"When all you see is ice in all directions, to think of that ice being gone in the recent geological past and again in the future is just really humbling," lead author Caleb Walcott-George, a geologist at the University of Kentucky, said in a statement.

After the end of the last ice age about 11,700 years ago, temperatures at Greenland climbed to higher than current averages, leading to widespread ice melting. But the effects of the changing climate on the extent of the ice sheet are difficult to determine, since much of the evidence that points to ice coverage — or lack thereof — during the Holocene is buried beneath existing ice today.

In the new study, published Monday (Jan. 5) in the journal Nature, scientists drilled through the Prudhoe Dome to collect sediment from beneath the ice sheet. Then, they used infrared light to measure how long the sediments had been buried under the dome without being exposed to sunlight.

The sediment last saw the sun about 7,100 years ago, the team found. That means that the ice must have fully melted at that point in order to expose the dust and rock underneath. Chemical signatures in the ice column suggest that none of the ice was left over from the last ice age, and that the dome fully melted and reformed in the years since.

Summer temperatures were 5.4 to 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit (3 to 6 degrees Celsius) warmer in the Early and Middle Holocene than they are now. Major climate models such as the CMIP6 predict that by 2100, summer temperatures could rise to about the same values. That warming could have a major impact on the Greenland Ice Sheet, the researchers wrote in the study.

But it's not yet clear how long temperatures had to remain that high to fully melt the ice of Prudhoe Dome. Limiting the amount of future warming might help curtail melting at the ice sheet, the researchers wrote.

The early Holocene "is a time known for climate stability, when humans first began developing farming practices and taking steps toward civilization. So for natural, mild climate change of that era to have melted Prudhoe Dome and kept it retreated for potentially thousands of years, it may only be a matter of time before it begins peeling back again from today's human-induced climate change," study co-author author Jason Briner, a geologist and paleoclimatologist at the University at Buffalo, said in the statement.

Additional ice cores taken from elsewhere in Greenland could help map just how far the ice sheet retreated during the Holocene's warmer spell, providing a better insight into how it might respond in the future, and how sea levels might rise as a result. "We have very reliable, numerical models that can predict the rate of melting, but we also want real, observational data points that can tell us indisputably that X amount of warming in the past led to X amount of ice being gone," Briner said.

Study co-author Joerg Schaefer, a research professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, added that the findings will help show which parts of the Greenland Ice Sheet are most vulnerable — which is critical for predicting local sea level rise. "This new science field delivers this information via direct observations and is a game-changer in terms of predicting ice-melt," he said in the statement.

This intriguing astronaut photo shows off a series of rippling sandbanks surrounding a pair of small islands in the Bahamas. The submerged swirls were partly carved out by a coral reef lurking on the edge of a hidden ocean "drop-off."

The Bahamas is made up of more than 3,000 islands and smaller cays interspersed with coral reefs, fast-flowing tidal channels and shallow underwater structures, known as sand banks. These features collectively make the islands "one of the most recognizable places on Earth for astronauts," according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

This photo shows a series of intricate sandbanks and a shallow barrier-like coral reef in the waters surrounding two diminutive islands — Carter's Cays (lower left) and Strangers Cay (upper right). The islands are two of the northernmost landmasses in the Bahamas, located around 125 miles (200 kilometers) east of Florida. (For context, Strangers Cay is around 2.2 miles (3.6 km) across at its widest point.)

The sand banks, which can be seen winding in and around the two cays like ribbons, have been sculpted by decades of unchanged ocean currents, causing sand to pile up in the same place over time.

But the coral reef — which cuts across the bottom right corner of the image and has waves breaking across its far edge — is much older, having likely built up over several millennia.

The largest and most prominent sandbank, which looks like a giant U-shape in the center of the image, lies directly opposite a large gap in the coral reef. This is no coincidence: The break in the reef has created a strong and sustained tidal flow that has pushed the sand much further backward, according to the Earth Observatory.

These sand swirls are fairly small compared with some of the larger sandbanks in the region. The biggest is the Great Bahama Bank, which covers an area of around 80,000 square miles (210,000 square kilometers) off the Exuma Islands in the central Bahamas and supports a massive seagrass ecosystem.

These features frequently draw comparisons to abstract paintings or the Northern Lights, due to their shape and captivating glow, when viewed from above. However, their supposed luminosity is actually just an optical illusion caused by their proximity to the ocean's surface. In some areas, the sand is likely only around 6.5 feet (2 meters) below the waves, according to the Earth Observatory.

If you look closely at the ocean's surface in the image, you will also notice that the water to the upper left of the islands is very light and covered with shimmering streaks, while the bottom right corner of the image — beyond the reef — is darker and exhibits traditional wave patterns.

This is the result of a steep drop-off in the deep ocean just beyond the coral reef, similar to the one depicted in the film "Finding Nemo." Beyond this point, ocean currents create the swells that many people see from the window of an airplane. But behind the reef, the wind sculpts the ocean's surface into subtle streaks instead.

This drop-off is also why there are no sandbanks visible beyond the reef.

For more incredible satellite photos and astronaut images, check out our Earth from space archives.

Until now, only a very few have been found in the Antarctic. In a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, I present evidence for hundreds of these quakes in Antarctica between 2010 and 2023, mostly at the ocean end of the Thwaites Glacier — the so-called Doomsday Glacier that could send sea levels rising rapidly if it were to collapse.

A recent discovery

A glacial earthquake is created when tall, thin icebergs fall off the end of a glacier into the ocean.

When these icebergs capsize, they clash violently with the “mother” glacier. The clash generates strong mechanical ground vibrations, or seismic waves, that propagate thousands of kilometres from the origin.

What makes glacial earthquakes unique is that they do not generate any high-frequency seismic waves. These waves play a vital role in the detection and location of typical seismic sources, such as earthquakes, volcanoes and nuclear explosions.

Due to this difference, glacial earthquakes were only discovered relatively recently, despite other seismic sources having been documented routinely for several decades.

Varying with the seasons

Most glacial earthquakes detected so far have been located near the ends of glaciers in Greenland, the largest ice cap in the Northern Hemisphere.

The Greenland glacial earthquakes are relatively large in magnitude. The largest ones are similar in size to those caused by nuclear tests conducted by North Korea in the past two decades. As such, they have been detected by a high-quality, continuously operating seismic monitoring network worldwide.

The Greenland events vary with the seasons, occurring more often in late summer. They have also become more common in recent decades. The signs may be associated with a faster rate of global warming in the polar regions.

Elusive evidence

Although Antarctica is the largest ice sheet on Earth, direct evidence of glacial earthquakes caused by capsizing icebergs there has been elusive. Most previous attempts to detect Antarctic glacial earthquakes used the worldwide network of seismic detectors.

However, if Antarctic glacial earthquakes are of much lower magnitude than those in Greenland, the global network may not detect them.

In my new study, I used seismic stations in Antarctica itself to look for signs of these quakes. My search turned up more than 360 glacier seismic events, most of which are not yet included in any earthquake catalogue.

The events I detected were in two clusters, near Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers. These glaciers have been the largest sources of sea-level rise from Antarctica.

Earthquakes at the Doomsday Glacier

Thwaites Glacier is sometimes known as the Doomsday Glacier. If it were to collapse completely it would raise global sea levels by 3 meters (10 feet), and it also has the potential to fall apart rapidly.

About two-thirds of the events I detected — 245 out of 362 — were located near the marine end of Thwaites. Most of these events are likely glacial earthquakes due to capsizing icebergs.

The strongest driver of such events does not appear to be the annual oscillation of warm air temperatures that drives the seasonal behavior of Greenland glacier earthquakes.

Instead, the most prolific period of glacial earthquakes at Thwaites, between 2018 and 2020, coincides with a period of accelerated flow of the glacier's ice tongue towards the sea. The ice-tongue speed-up period was independently confirmed by satellite observations.

This speed-up could have been caused by ocean conditions, the effect of which is not yet well understood.

The findings suggest the short-term scale impact of ocean states on the stability of marine-terminating glaciers. This is worth further exploration to assess the potential contribution of the glacier to future sea-level rise.

The second largest cluster of detections occurred near the Pine Island Glacier. However, these were consistently located 60–80 kilometers [37 to 50 miles] from the waterfront, so they are not likely to have been caused by capsizing icebergs.

These events remain puzzling and require follow-up research.

What's next for Antarctic glacial earthquake research

The detection of glacial earthquakes associated with iceberg calving at Thwaites Glacier could help answer several important research questions. These include a fundamental question about the potential instability of the Thwaites Glacier due to the interaction of the ocean, ice and solid ground near where it meets the sea.

Better understanding may hold the key to resolving the current large uncertainty in the projected sea-level rise over the next couple of centuries.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Remember to log in to put your name on the leaderboard; hints are available if you click the yellow button!

More science quizzes

• US national parks quiz: How many of the 63 can you name?
• Gold and gems quiz: What do you know about sparkly treasures made by nature?
• US volcano quiz: How many can you name in 10 minutes?

Spotted Lake — also known as Khiluk Lake in the local Indigenous Nsyilxcən language — is a soda lake named after strange circles that appear on its surface in the summer.

The lake is incredibly rich in minerals, including sodium sulfates, calcium, magnesium sulfate — which is also known as Epsom salt — and trace amounts of silver and titanium. As temperatures rise every spring and summer, most of the water in the lake evaporates and minerals that were dissolved precipitate, leaving a pitted, white crust that looks like a giant doily.

The mineral crust exists year-round and can be seen beneath the water outside of summer, but the best time to see it is in the hotter months. Spotted Lake has no outlet, meaning evaporation is the only process that removes water from the lake. Precipitation and runoff from the surrounding hills increase the water level periodically, which also brings more minerals that crystallize into the crust.

Spotted Lake is a soda lake, meaning it is extremely salty and alkaline. Soda lakes typically form in closed basins, where minerals leach from surrounding rocks and become highly concentrated.

The lake is 2,300 feet (700 meters) long and 820 feet (250 m) wide. The darker spots in the mineral crust are shallow brine pools, beneath which there are more solidified minerals. These pools can appear blue, green or yellow, depending on the light, the makeup of the crust underneath, and the presence of algae. They can also change size and shape as the crust crystallizes and dissolves.

Geologist Olaf Pitt Jenkins described the texture and smell of the brine at Spotted Lake in a 1918 paper, writing: "The brine itself in the pools was so strong that it was very heavy and very slimy like the white of an egg, and had an offensive odor."

Jenkins visited Spotted Lake because, starting in 1916, the lake's minerals were extracted to make ammunition during World War I. However, Spotted Lake's history and cultural significance goes back much further than that.

For centuries, the Syilx People of the Okanagan Nation have considered Spotted Lake a sacred place of healing. According to their belief, each circle in the lake has unique medicinal properties.

After World War I, the land where the lake sits was acquired and privately owned for about 40 years. But in 2001, the federal government bought back the land for the benefit of the Okanagan Nation. The Syilx People still protect Spotted Lake today, and access to the water is restricted for the general public. A viewing area guarantees good views of the lake, however.

Discover more incredible places, where we highlight the fantastic history and science behind some of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth.

Tropical forests are home to more than half of the world's terrestrial biodiversity and store large quantities of global carbon. A lot of this carbon is held in their roots below ground. However, climate change is pushing up temperatures in these forests and is expected to bring extreme droughts.

In a new study, published Nov. 21 in the journal New Phytologist, scientists investigated what happens to the roots of trees in tropical forests when they are deprived of water for a long time.

The results are part of the Panama Rainforest Changes with Experimental Drying (PARCHED) experiment, in which scientists set up 32 plots in four different areas in Panama's tropical forests. Each of the four forests has distinct characteristics, such as tree species, soil nutrient availability and rainfall.

The scientists erected clear roof structures above the plots that excluded 50% to 70% of the rainfall from reaching the forest floor. The structures "look like partial greenhouse roofs," study co-author Daniela Cusack, an ecosystem ecologist at Colorado State University, told Live Science. She has been leading the PARCHED experiment since 2015. The researchers also dug trenches around the plots, which they lined with thick plastic so that the roots could not access water from outside the plots.

The researchers used three methods to find out what was happening with the trees' roots.

They sampled soil cores four times a year for five years. The cores extended about 8 inches (20 centimetres) below the surface. The researchers also had root traps, which are mesh columns filled with soil. Every three months, they checked how many roots had grown into these columns.

The third method involved using small cameras to watch how the roots grew. When the PARCHED experiment was set up, the researchers sank acrylic tubes about 4 feet (1.2 meters) into the ground. These tubes have gaps at regular intervals with cameras looking into the soil.

All four forests, despite being different from each other, showed similar responses to a slowly drying environment.

Chronic drying significantly reduced the quantity of fine surface roots, reducing water and nutrient availability, but the trees had a number of strategies to survive a chronic drought.

"The trees compensated for the surface-root dieoff by sending fine roots down deep into the soil, presumably for moisture acquisition," Cusack said.

"It's not enough root growth to compensate for the carbon or biomass loss," she said. It's more like a "rescue strategy for trees to maintain their hydraulics and physiological function."

At the same time, surface roots were more likely to be colonized by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. This type of fungi forms a symbiotic relationship with plants and increases the availability of water and nutrients.

The remaining surface roots appear to attract more of these fungi to improve their access to nutrients, Cusack said.

Daniela Yaffar, who was not involved in this research but studies roots in tropical forests at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the U.S., welcomed the study but said that more research was needed to understand how roots behaved in other tropical forests.

"While some species have long been adapted to drier environments, these adaptations typically evolve over extended periods," she told Live Science. "The emerging challenge is that tropical forests, especially in regions unaccustomed to such dry conditions, may experience significant shifts and not enough time to adapt."

Species that are less able to adapt to more extreme droughts may decline or disappear from the ecosystem, she said.

Cusack warned that the root adaptation was not a bulwark against climate change. "Our five-year study is pretty short in terms of the lives of tropical forests," she said. "We don't know how long the forest can sustain these adaptations."

Lead author Amanda Cordeiro, a researcher at the University of Minnesota, who was a PhD candidate at Colorado State University during the study, told Live Science the next steps will be to assess the long-term consequences of the root changes, and how it impacts the overall ecosystem in terms of carbon storage and plant fitness. "For example, it is currently unclear whether increased deeper root production can help tropical forests withstand ongoing chronic drying beyond a few years," she said.

Much of the discussion about the melting of massive ice sheets during a time of climate change addresses its effects on people. That makes sense: Millions will see their homes damaged or destroyed by rising sea levels and storm surges.

But what will happen to Antarctica itself as the ice sheets melt?

In layers of sediment accumulated on the sea floor over millions of years, researchers like us are finding evidence that when West Antarctica melted, there was a rapid uptick in onshore geological activity in the area. The evidence foretells what’s in store for the future.

A voyage of discovery

As far back as 30 million years ago, an ice sheet covered much of what we now call Antarctica. But during the Pliocene Epoch, which lasted from 5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago, the ice sheet on West Antarctica drastically retreated. Rather than a continuous ice sheet, all that remained were high ice caps and glaciers on or near mountaintops.

About 5 million years ago, conditions around Antarctica began to warm, and West Antarctic ice diminished. About 3 million years ago, all of Earth entered a warm climate phase, similar to what is happening today.

Glaciers are not stationary. These large masses of ice form on land and flow toward the sea, moving over bedrock and scraping off material from the landscape they cover, and carrying that debris along as the ice moves, almost like a conveyor belt. This process speeds up when the climate warms, as does calving into the sea, which forms icebergs. Debris-laden icebergs can then carry that continental rock material out to sea, dropping it to the sea floor as the icebergs melt.

In early 2019, we joined a major scientific trip – International Ocean Discovery Program Expedition 379 – to the Amundsen Sea, south of the Pacific Ocean. Our expedition aimed to recover material from the seabed to learn what had happened in West Antarctica during its melting period all that time ago.

Aboard the drillship JOIDES Resolution, workers lowered a drill nearly 13,000 feet (3,962 meters) to the sea floor and then drilled 2,605 feet (794 meters) into the ocean floor, directly offshore from the most vulnerable part of the West Antarctic ice sheet.

The drill brought up long tubes called “cores,” containing layers of sediments deposited between 6 million years ago and the present. Our research focused on sections of sediment from the time of the Pliocene Epoch, when Antarctica was not entirely ice-covered.

An unexpected finding

While onboard, one of us, Christine Siddoway, was surprised to discover an uncommon sandstone pebble in a disturbed section of the core. Sandstone fragments were rare in the core, so the pebble’s origin was of high interest. Tests showed that the pebble had come from mountains deep in the Antarctic interior, roughly 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) from the drill site.

For this to have happened, icebergs must have calved from glaciers flowing off interior mountains and then floated toward the Pacific Ocean. The pebble provided evidence that a deep-water ocean passage – rather than today’s thick ice sheet – existed across the interior of what is now Antarctica.

After the expedition, once the researchers returned to their home laboratories, this finding was confirmed by analyzing silt, mud, rock fragments, and microfossils that also came up in the sediment cores. The chemical and magnetic properties of the core material revealed a detailed timeline of the ice sheet’s retreats and advances over many years.

One key sign came from analyses led by Keiji Horikawa. He tried to match thin mud layers in the core with bedrock from the continent, to test the idea that icebergs had carried such materials very long distances. Each mud layer was deposited right after a deglaciation episode, when the ice sheet retreated, that created a bed of iceberg-carried pebbly clay. By measuring the amounts of various elements, including strontium, neodymium and lead, he was able to link specific thin layers of mud in the drill cores to chemical signatures in outcrops in the Ellsworth Mountains, 870 miles (1400 km) away.

Horikawa discovered not just one instance of this material but as many as five mud layers deposited between 4.7 million and 3.3 million years ago. That suggests the ice sheet melted and open ocean formed, then the ice sheet regrew, filling the interior, repeatedly, over short spans of thousands to tens of thousands of years.

Creating a fuller picture

Teammate Ruthie Halberstadt combined this chemical evidence and timing in computer models showing how an archipelago of ice-capped, rugged islands emerged as ocean replaced the thick ice sheets that now fill Antarctica’s interior basins.

The biggest changes happened along the coast. The model simulations show a rapid increase in iceberg production and a dramatic retreat of the edge of the ice sheet toward the Ellsworth Mountains. The Amundsen Sea became choked with icebergs produced from all directions. Rocks and pebbles embedded in the glaciers floated out to sea within the icebergs and dropped to the seabed as the icebergs melted.

Long-standing geological evidence from Antarctica and elsewhere around the world shows that as ice melts and flows off the land, the land itself rises because the ice no longer presses it down. That shift can cause earthquakes, especially in West Antarctica, which sits above particularly hot areas of the Earth’s mantle that can rebound at high rates when the ice above them melts.

The release of pressure on the land also increases volcanic activity – as is happening in Iceland in the present day. Evidence of this in Antarctica comes from a volcanic ash layer that Siddoway and Horikawa identified in the cores, formed 3 million years ago.

The long-ago loss of ice and upward motions in West Antarctica also triggered massive rock avalanches and landslides in fractured, damaged rock, forming glacial valley walls and coastal cliffs. Collapses beneath the sea displaced vast amounts of sediment from the marine shelf. No longer held in place by the weight of glacier ice and ocean water, huge masses of rock broke away and surged into the water, producing tsunamis that unleashed more coastal destruction.

The rapid onset of all these changes made deglaciated West Antarctica a showpiece for what has been called “catastrophic geology.”

The rapid upswell of activity resembles what has happened elsewhere on the planet in the past. For instance, at the end of the last Northern Hemisphere ice age, 15,000 to 18,000 years ago, the region between Utah and British Columbia was subjected to floods from bursting glacial meltwater lakes, land rebound, rock avalanches and increased volcanic activity. In coastal Canada and Alaska, such events continue to occur today.

Dynamic ice sheet retreat

Our team’s analysis of rocks’ chemical makeup makes clear that West Antarctica doesn’t necessarily undergo one gradual, massive shift from ice-covered to ice-free, but rather swings back and forth between vastly different states. Each time the ice sheet disappeared in the past, it led to geological mayhem.

The future implication for West Antarctica is that when its ice sheet next collapses, the catastrophic events will return. This will happen repeatedly, as the ice sheet retreats and advances, opening and closing the connections between different areas of the world’s oceans.

This dynamic future may bring about equally swift responses in the biosphere, such as algal blooms around icebergs in the ocean, leading to an influx of marine species into newly opened seaways. Vast tracts of land upon West Antarctic islands would then open up to growth of mossy ground cover and coastal vegetation that would turn Antarctica more green than its current icy white.

Our data about the Amundsen Sea’s past and the resulting forecast indicate that onshore changes in West Antarctica will not be slow, gradual or imperceptible from a human perspective. Rather, what happened in the past is likely to recur: geologically rapid shifts that are felt locally as apocalyptic events such as earthquakes, eruptions, landslides and tsunamis – with worldwide effects.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In many earthquakes, the subsurface moves more than the surface. But the quake on the Sagaing fault was different because the surface moved just as much as the rocks miles deep, a new study shows. This was likely because the Saigang Fault dates back to between 14 million and 28 million years ago.

"Over that vast time, the rough edges and bends in the fault have been ground down," first author Eric Lindsey, a geoscientist at the University of New Mexico, said in a statement. "Because it is so smooth and straight, the earthquake rupture could travel very efficiently across a huge distance."

When the magnitude 7.7 quake hit on March 28, it ruptured about 300 miles (500 kilometers) of ground — a remarkably long surface rupture. Typically, Lindsey said, earthquake ruptures are more on the order of 19 to 37 miles (30 to 60 km). This rupture came with very severe shaking, and more than 5,400 people died.

Because of the infrastructure damage from the quake and ongoing armed conflict in Myanmar, Lindsey and his colleagues turned to satellite imagery to study the event. They used both optical imagery and radar data from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-2 satellites to track ground motion down to a fraction of an inch.

Their findings, published Dec. 8 in the journal Nature Communications, showed that the earthquake was very efficient in transferring its energy up to the surface. Quakes originate deep underground. In the case of the Myanmar quake, the rupture started 6 miles (10 km) or so deep. Most of the time, the underground movement doesn't entirely transfer to the surface — a phenomenon called "shallow slip deficit." (Slip is the movement of one side of the fault against the other.) In the Myanmar quake, there was no shallow slip deficit.

"The massive amount of slip that happened miles underground was transferred 100% to the surface," Lindsey said.

The ground surface on one side of the fault moved 10 to 15 feet (3 to 4.5 meters) in relation to the other. This movement was even caught on camera in a first-of-its-kind video.

Because of the efficiency of the energy transfer from deep underground to the surface, a quake on a mature fault like the one that hit Myanmar may cause more ground shaking than a quake on a more jagged fault line, Lindsey explained.

"The significance lies in safety," he said. "This earthquake showed us that mature faults can be much more efficient at transmitting energy to the surface than younger ones, which has direct implications for how we build infrastructure to withstand the 'Big One' in the United States."

Continental drying is a long-term decline in fresh water availability across large land masses. It is caused by accelerated snow and ice melt, permafrost thaw, water evaporation and groundwater extraction. (The report's definition excludes meltwater from Greenland and Antarctica, the authors noted.)

"We always think that the water issue is a local issue," lead author Fan Zhang, global lead for Water, Economy and Climate Change at the World Bank, told Live Science in a joint interview with co-author Jay Famiglietti, a satellite hydrologist and professor of sustainability at Arizona State University. "But what we show in the report is that ... local water problems could quickly ripple through national borders and become an international challenge."

Continents have now surpassed ice sheets as the biggest contributor to global sea level rise, because regardless of its origin, the lost fresh water eventually ends up in the ocean. The new report found this contribution is roughly 11.4 trillion cubic feet (324 billion cubic meters) of water each year — enough to meet the annual water needs of 280 million people.

"Every second you lose four Olympic-size swimming pools," Zhang said.

Far-reaching impacts

The report was published Nov. 4 by the World Bank. Its results are based on 22 years of data from NASA's GRACE mission, which measures small changes in Earth's gravity resulting from shifting water. The authors also compiled two decades' worth of economic and land use data, which they fed into a hydrological model and a crop-growth model.

The average amount of fresh water lost from continents each year is equivalent to 3% of the world's annual net "income" from precipitation, the report found. This loss jumps to 10% in arid and semi-arid regions, meaning that continental drying hits dry areas such as South Asia the hardest, Zhang said.

This is a growing problem. In a study published earlier this year, Zhang, Famiglietti and their colleagues showed that separate dry areas are rapidly merging into "mega-drying" regions.

"The impact is already being felt," Zhang said. Regions where agriculture is the biggest economic sector and employs the most people, such as sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, are especially vulnerable. "In sub-Saharan Africa, dry shocks reduce the number of jobs by 600,000 to 900,000 a year. If you look at who are the people being affected, those most hard hit are the most vulnerable groups, like landless farmers."

Countries that don't have a large agricultural sector are also indirectly affected, because most of them import food and goods from drying regions.

The consequences for ecosystems are dramatic, too. Continental drying increases the likelihood and severity of wildfires, and this is especially true in biodiversity hotspots, the report found. At least 17 of the 36 globally recognized biodiversity hotspots — including Madagascar and parts of Southeast Asia and Brazil — show a trend of declining freshwater availability and have a heightened risk of wildfires.

"The implications are so profound," Famiglietti told Live Science.

The biggest culprit

Currently, the biggest cause of continental drying is groundwater extraction. Groundwater is poorly protected and undermanaged in most parts of the world, meaning the past decades have been a pumping "free-for-all," Famiglietti said. And the warmer and drier the world gets due to climate change, the more groundwater will likely be extracted, because soil moisture and glacial water sources will start to dwindle.

However, better regulations and incentives could reduce groundwater overpumping. According to the report, agriculture is responsible for 98% of the global water footprint, so "if agriculture water use efficiency is improved to a certain benchmark, the total amount of the water that can be saved is huge," Zhang said.

Globally, if water use efficiency for 35 key crops, such as wheat and rice, improved to median levels, enough water would be saved to meet the annual needs of 118 million people, the researchers found. There are many ways to improve water use efficiency in agriculture; for example, countries could change where they grow certain crops to match freshwater availability in different regions, or adopt technologies like artificial intelligence to optimize the timing and amount of irrigation.

Countries can also set groundwater extraction limits, incentivize farmers through subsidies and raise the price of water for agriculture. Additionally, the report showed that countries with higher energy prices had slower drying rates because it costs more to pump groundwater, which boosts water use efficiency.

Overall, water management at the national scale works well, according to the report. Countries with good water management plans depleted their freshwater resources two to three times more slowly than countries with poor water management.

Virtual water trade

On the global scale, virtual water trade is one of the best solutions to conserve water if it is done right, Zhang said. Virtual water trade occurs when countries exchange fresh water in the form of agricultural products and other water-intensive goods.

Global water use increased by 25% between 2000 and 2019. One-third of that increase occurred in regions that were already drying out — including Central America, northern China, Eastern Europe and the U.S. Southwest — and a big share of the water was used to irrigate water-intensive crops with inefficient methods, according to the report.

There has also been a global shift toward more water-intensive crops, including wheat, rice, cotton, maize and sugar-cane. Out of 101 drying countries, 37 have increased cultivation of these crops.

Virtual water trade can save huge amounts of water by relocating some of these crops to countries that aren't drying out. For example, between 1996 and 2005, Jordan saved 250 billion cubic feet (7 billion cubic meters) of water by importing wheat from the U.S. and maize from Argentina, among other products.

Globally, from 2000 to 2019 virtual water trade saved 16.8 trillion cubic feet (475 billion cubic meters) of water each year, or about 9% of the water used to grow the world's 35 most important crops.

"When water-scarce countries import water-intensive products, they are actually importing water, and that helps them to preserve their own water supply," Zhang said.

However, virtual water trade isn't always so straightforward. It might benefit one water-scarce country but severely deplete the resources of another country. One example is the production of alfalfa, a water-intensive legume used in livestock feed, in dry regions of the U.S. for export to Saudi Arabia, Famiglietti said. Saudi Arabia benefits from this exchange because the country isn't using its water to grow alfalfa, but aquifers in Arizona are being sucked dry, he said.

Reasons for optimism

The solutions identified in the report fall into three broad categories: manage water demand, expand water supply through recycling and desalination, and ensure fair and effective water allocation.

If we can make those changes, sustainable fresh water use is "definitely possible," Zhang said. "We do have reason to be optimistic."

Famiglietti agreed that small changes could go a long way.

"It's complicated, because the population is growing and we're going to need to grow more food," he said. "I don't know that we're going to 'tech' our way out of it, but when we start thinking on decadal time scales, changes in policy, changes in financial innovations, changes in technology — I think there is some reason for optimism. And in those decades we can keep thinking about how to improve our lot."

Some of the views expressed in this article are not included in the World Bank report. They should not be interpreted as having been endorsed by the World Bank or by its representatives.

But the urgency with which Muller, a climate scientist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria in Klosterneuburg, considers such atmospheric puzzles has surged in recent years. As our planet swelters with global warming, storms are becoming more intense, sometimes dumping two or even three times more rain than expected. Such was the case in Bahía Blanca, Argentina, in March 2025: Almost half the city’s yearly average rainfall fell in less than 12 hours, causing deadly floods.

Atmospheric scientists have long used computer simulations to track how the dynamics of air and moisture might produce varieties of storms. But existing models hadn’t fully explained the emergence of these fiercer storms. A roughly 200-year-old theory describes how warmer air holds more moisture than cooler air: an extra 7 percent for every degree Celsius of warming. But in models and weather observations, climate scientists have seen rainfall events far exceeding this expected increase. And those storms can lead to severe flooding when heavy rain falls on already saturated soils or follows humid heatwaves.

Clouds, and the way that they cluster, could help explain what’s going on.

A growing body of research, set in motion by Muller over a decade ago, is revealing several small-scale processes that climate models had previously overlooked. These processes influence how clouds form, congregate and persist in ways that may amplify heavy downpours and fuel larger, long-lasting storms. Clouds have an “internal life,” Muller says, “that can strengthen them or may help them stay alive longer.”

Other scientists need more convincing, because the computer simulations researchers use to study clouds reduce planet Earth to its simplest and smoothest form, retaining its essential physics but otherwise barely resembling the real world.

Now, though, a deeper understanding beckons. Higher-resolution global climate models can finally simulate clouds and the destructive storms they form on a planetary scale — giving scientists a more realistic picture. By better understanding clouds, researchers hope to improve their predictions of extreme rainfall, especially in the tropics where some of the most ferocious thunderstorms hit and where future rainfall projections are the most uncertain.

First clues to clumping clouds

All clouds form in moist, rising air. A mountain can propel air upwards; so, too, can a cold front. Clouds can also form through a process known as convection: the overturning of air in the atmosphere that starts when sunlight, warm land or balmy water heats air from below. As warm air rises, it cools, condensing the water vapor it carried upwards into raindrops. This condensation process also releases heat, which fuels churning storms.

But clouds remain one of the weakest links in climate models. That’s because the global climate models scientists use to simulate scenarios of future warming are far too coarse to capture the updrafts that give rise to clouds or to describe how they swirl in a storm — let alone to explain the microphysical processes controlling how much rain falls from them to Earth.

To try to resolve this problem, Muller and other like-minded scientists turned to simpler simulations of Earth’s climate that are able to model convection. In these artificial worlds, each the shape of a shallow box typically a few hundred kilometers across and tens of kilometers deep, the researchers tinkered with replica atmospheres to see if they could figure out how clouds behaved under different conditions.

Intriguingly, when researchers ran these models, the clouds spontaneously clumped together, even though the models had none of the features that usually push clouds together — no mountains, no wind, no Earthly spin or seasonal variations in sunlight. “Nobody knew why this was happening,” says Daniel Hernández Deckers, an atmospheric scientist at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá.

In 2012, Muller discovered a first clue: a process known as radiative cooling. The Sun’s heat that bounces off Earth’s surface radiates back into space, and where there are few clouds, more of that radiation escapes — cooling the air. The cool spots set up atmospheric flows that drive air toward cloudier regions — trapping more heat and forming more clouds. A follow-up study in 2018 showed that in these simulations, radiative cooling accelerated the formation of tropical cyclones. “That made us realize that to understand clouds, you have to look at the neighborhood as well — outside clouds,” Muller says.

Once scientists started looking not just outside clouds, but also underneath them and at their edges, they found other small-scale processes that help to explain why clouds flock together. The various processes, described by Muller and colleagues in the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, all bring or hold together pockets of warm, moist air so more clouds form in already-cloudy regions. These small-scale processes hadn’t been understood much before because they are often obscured by larger weather patterns.

Hernández Deckers has been studying one of the processes, called entrainment — the turbulent mixing of air at the edges of clouds. Most climate models represent clouds as a steady plume of rising air, but in reality “clouds are like a cauliflower,” he says. “You have a lot of turbulence, and you have these bubbles [of air] inside the clouds.” This mixing at the edges affects how clouds evolve and thunderstorms develop; it can weaken or strengthen storms in various ways, but, like radiative cooling, it encourages more clouds to form as a clump in regions that are already moist.

Such processes are likely to be most important in storms in Earth’s tropical regions, where there’s the most uncertainty about future rainfall. (That’s why Hernández Deckers, Muller and others tend to focus their studies there.) The tropics lack the cold fronts, jet streams and spiraling high- and low-pressure systems that dominate air flows at higher latitudes.

Supercharging heavy rains

There are other microscopic processes happening inside clouds that affect extreme rainfall, especially on shorter timescales. Moisture matters: Condensed droplets falling through moist, cloudy air don’t evaporate as much on their descent, so more water falls to the ground. Temperature matters too: When clouds form in warmer atmospheres, they produce less snow and more rain. Since raindrops fall faster than snowflakes, they evaporate less on their descent — producing, once again, more rain.

These factors also help explain why more rain can get squeezed from a cloud than the 7 percent rise per degree of warming predicted by the 200-year-old theory. “Essentially you get an extra kick … in our simulations, it was almost a doubling,” says Martin Singh, a climate scientist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Cloud clustering adds to this effect by holding warm, moist air together, so more rain droplets fall. One study by Muller and her collaborators found that clumping clouds intensify short-duration rainfall extremes by 30 to 70 percent, largely because raindrops evaporate less inside sodden clouds.

Other research, including a study led by Jiawei Bao, a postdoctoral researcher in Muller’s group, has likewise found that the microphysical processes going on inside clouds have a strong influence over fast, heavy downpours. These sudden downpours are intensifying much faster with climate change than protracted deluges, and often cause flash flooding.

The future of extreme rainfall

Scientists who study the clumping of clouds want to know how that behavior will change as the planet heats up — and what that will mean for incidences of heavy rainfall and flooding.

Some models suggest that clouds (and the convection that gives rise to them) will clump together more with global warming — and produce more rainfall extremes that often far exceed what theory predicts. But other simulations suggest that clouds will congregate less. “There seems to be still possibly a range of answers,” says Allison Wing, a climate scientist at Florida State University in Tallahassee who has compared various models.

Scientists are beginning to try to reconcile some of these inconsistencies using powerful types of computer simulations called global storm-resolving models. These can capture the fine structures of clouds, thunderstorms and cyclones while also simulating the global climate. They bring a 50-fold leap in realism beyond the global climate models scientists generally use — but demand 30,000 times more computational power.

Using one such model in a paper published in 2024, Bao, Muller and their collaborators found that clouds in the tropics congregated more as temperatures increased — leading to less frequent storms but ones that were larger, lasted longer and, over the course of a day, dumped more rain than expected from theory.

But that work relied on just one model and simulated conditions from around one future timepoint — the year 2070. Scientists need to run longer simulations using more storm-resolving models, Bao says, but very few research teams can afford to run them. They are so computationally intensive that they are typically run at large centralized hubs, and scientists occasionally host “hackathons” to crunch through and share data.

Researchers also need more real-world observations to get at some of the biggest unknowns about clouds. Although a flurry of recent studies using satellite data linked the clustering of clouds to heavier rainfall in the tropics, there are large data gaps in many tropical regions. This weakens climate projections and leaves many countries ill-prepared. In June of 2025, floods and landslides in Venezuela and Colombia swept away buildings and killed at least a dozen people, but scientists don’t know what factors worsened these storms because the data are so paltry. “Nobody really knows, still, what triggered this,” Hernández Deckers says.

New, granular data are on their way. Wing is analyzing rainfall measurements from a German research vessel that traversed the tropical Atlantic Ocean for six weeks in 2024. The ship’s radar mapped clusters of convection associated with the storms it passed through, so the work should help researchers see how clouds organize over vast tracts of the ocean.

And an even more global view is on the horizon. The European Space Agency plans to launch two satellites in 2029 that will measure, among other things, near-surface winds that ruffle Earth’s oceans and skim mountaintops. Perhaps, scientists hope, the data these satellites beam back will finally provide a better grasp of clumping clouds and the heaviest rains that fall from them.

Research and interviews for this article were partly supported through a journalism residency funded by the Institute of Science & Technology Austria (ISTA). ISTA had no input into the story.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for Knowable Magazine’s newsletter.

This incredible astronaut photo shows the unusual point where a hefty non-retreating glacier, a pristine turquoise lake and a murky green "river" perfectly converge at the intersection of three valleys in Argentina.

The trio of hydrological features — the Perito Moreno Glacier, Lago Argentino and Brazo Rico — lie at the heart of Los Glaciares National Park, which covers an area of around 2,300 square miles (6,000 square kilometers) in the Santa Cruz province of southern Argentina, near the country's border with Chile.

The aerial photo doesn’t just show off these three aqueous entities in a single frame; if you look closely, it also reveals the point where the trio touch in a slim channel along the western edge of the Magallanes Peninsula — the rocky outcrop that lies between the lake and the river, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

In this photo, the waters of Lago Argentino and Brazo Rico are likely in direct contact with each other (as in the photo below). But their waters do not readily mix because they have different densities, due to their respective concentrations of suspended particulate matter, according to a 2022 study.

But every four to five years, the glacier's tongue juts forward, colliding with the Magallanes Peninsula and temporarily damming the Brazo Rico. When this happens, the surface of the murky body of water rises by up to 100 feet (30 meters) until a pressure build-up causes the icy dam to spectacularly "rupture," the Earth Observatory previously reported.

Perito Moreno is the largest glacier in Patagonia, which includes parts of Argentina and Chile. It is approximately 19 miles (30 km) long with ice up to 200 feet (60 m) thick. In total, the glacier holds roughly the same amount of water as 360,000 Olympic swimming pools, according to back-of-the-envelope calculations.

The glacier is "non-retreating," meaning that it is not shrinking despite rising atmospheric temperatures triggered by human-caused climate change. This is extremely rare nowadays, and Perito Moreno is frequently cited as one of the "world's last major non-retreating glaciers." However, a recent study hints that it may finally be starting to shrink.

Lago Argentino is the largest freshwater lake in Argentina, covering a total area of around 550 square miles (1,425 square km). The section visible in the astronaut photo is the lake's southernmost arm. It contains glacial meltwater filled with rocky particles released by the glaciers' constant movements, collectively known as "glacier milk," which gives the water its striking turquoise color.

The lake's northernmost arm also connects to the Upsala Glacier, which is currently in full retreat.

Brazo Rico, meaning "rich arm" in Spanish, is also technically part of Lago Argentino. However, it has become increasingly isolated from the rest of the lake due to repeated damming by the Perito Moreno glacier, making it behave more like a river than part of a lake.

The frequent icy obstruction is also responsible for Brazo Rico's insipid color, which is the result of sediment dislodged by its movements. The continued rising and falling of the river's surface has also carved out a border around its edges where no trees can grow.

Eagle-eyed viewers may have also spotted the narrow road winding across the Magallanes Peninsula and along the Brazo Rico's northern edge (just above the tree line): One can only imagine the extraordinary views you'd get to experience driving along there.

For more incredible satellite photos and astronaut images, check out our Earth from space archives.

Now, experts plan to test these newfound bugs inside a "planetary simulation chamber" that could reveal whether these microbes, or ones with similar adaptations, could survive a trip through space to Mars, possibly contaminating the alien worlds on arrival.

Earlier this year, scientists identified more than two dozen previously unknown bacterial species lurking in the Kennedy Space Center cleanrooms in Florida, where NASA assembled its Phoenix Mars Lander in 2007. The discovery showed that despite constant scrubbing, harsh cleaning chemicals and extreme nutrient scarcity, some microbes evolved a suite of genetic tricks that allowed them to persist in these punishing environments.

"It was a genuine 'stop and re-check everything' moment," study co-author Alexandre Rosado, a professor of Bioscience at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, told Live Science about the findings, which were described in a paper published in May in the journal Microbiome. While there were relatively few of these microbes, they persisted for a long time and in multiple cleanroom environments, he added.

Identifying these unusually hardy organisms and studying their survival strategies matters, the researchers say, because any microbe capable of slipping through standard cleanroom controls could also evade the planetary-protection safeguards meant to prevent Earth life from contaminating other worlds.

When asked whether any of these microbes might, in theory, tolerate conditions during a journey to Mars' northern polar cap, where Phoenix landed in 2008, Rosado said several species do carry genes that may help them adapt to the stresses of spaceflight, such as DNA repair and dormancy-related resilience. But he cautioned that their survival would depend on how they handle harsh conditions a microbe would face both during space travel and on Mars — factors the team didn't test — including exposure to vacuum, intense radiation, deep cold and high levels of UV at the Martian surface.

To explore that question, the researchers are now building a planetary simulation chamber at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia to expose the bacteria to Mars-like and space-like conditions, Rosado said. The chamber, now in its final assembly phase, with pilot experiments expected to begin in early 2026, is engineered to mimic stresses such as the low, carbon-dioxide-rich air pressure of Mars, high radiation, and the extreme temperature swings the microbes would face during spaceflight. These controlled environments will allow scientists to investigate how hardy microbes adapt and survive under combinations of stresses comparable to those encountered during spaceflight or on the Martian surface, said Rosado.

'Cleanrooms don't contain 'no life"

NASA's spacecraft-assembly cleanrooms are engineered to be hostile to microbes — a cornerstone of the agency's efforts to prevent Earth organisms from hitchhiking to worlds beyond Earth — through continuously filtered air, strict humidity control and repeated treatments using chemical detergents and UV light, among other measures.

Even so, "cleanrooms don't contain 'no life,'" said Rosado. "Our results show these new species are usually rare but can be found, which fits with long-term, low-level persistence in cleanrooms."

During the Phoenix lander's assembly at the Kennedy Space Center's Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility, a team led by study co-author Kasthuri Venkateswaran, who is a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, collected and preserved 215 bacterial strains from the cleanroom floors. Some samples were gathered before the spacecraft arrived in April 2007, again during assembly and testing in June, and once more after the spacecraft moved to the launch pad in August, according to the study.

At the time, researchers lacked the technology to classify new species precisely or in large numbers. But DNA technology has advanced dramatically in the 17 years since that mission, and today scientists can sequence almost every gene these microbes carry and compare their DNA to broad genetic surveys of microbes collected from cleanrooms in later years. This allows scientists "to study how often and for how long these microbes appear in different places and times, which wasn't possible in 2007," said Rosado.

Further analysis revealed a suite of survival strategies. Many of the newly identified species carry genes that help them resist cleaning chemicals, form sticky biofilms that anchor them to surfaces, repair radiation-damaged DNA or produce tough, dormant spores — adaptations that help them survive in tucked-away corners or microscopic cracks, the study reports. This makes the microbes "excellent test organisms" for validating the decontamination protocols and detection systems that space agencies rely on to keep spacecraft sterile, Rosado said.

From a broader research standpoint, Rosado said the next step is coordinated, long-term sampling across multiple cleanrooms using standardized methods, paired with controlled experiments that measure microbes' survival limits and stress responses, said Rosado.

"This would give us a much clearer picture of which traits truly matter for planetary protection and which might have translational value in biotechnology or astrobiology," he said.

Often overlooked, these "hidden" volcanoes erupt more often than most people realise. In regions like the Pacific, South America and Indonesia, an eruption from a volcano with no recorded history occurs every seven to ten years. And their effects can be unexpected and far-reaching.

One volcano has just done exactly that. In November 2025, the Hayli Gubbi volcano in Ethiopia has erupted for the first time in recorded history (at least 12,000 years that we know of). It sent ash plumes 8.5 miles into the sky, with volcanic material failing in Yemen and drifting into air space over northern India.

You don't have to look far back in history to find another example. In 1982, the little-known and unmonitored Mexican volcano El Chichón erupted explosively after lying dormant for centuries. This series of eruptions caught authorities off-guard: hot avalanches of rock, ash and gas flattened vast areas of jungle. Rivers were dammed, buildings destroyed, and ash fell as far as Guatemala.

More than 2,000 people died and 20,000 were displaced in Mexico's worst volcanic disaster in modern times. But the catastrophe did not end in Mexico. The sulphur from the eruption formed reflective particles in the upper atmosphere, cooling the northern hemisphere and shifting the African monsoon southwards, causing extreme drought.

This alone would test the resilience and coping strategies of any region. But when it coincided with a vulnerable population that was already experiencing poverty and civil war, disaster was inevitable. The Ethiopian (and East African) famine of 1983-85 claimed the lives of an estimated 1 million people. This brought global attention to poverty with campaigns like Live Aid.

Few scientists, even within my field of Earth science, realise that a remote, little-known volcano played a part in this tragedy.

Despite these lessons, global investment in volcanology has not kept pace with the risks: fewer than half of active volcanoes are monitored, and scientific research still disproportionately focuses on the well-known few.

There are more published studies on one volcano (Mount Etna) than on all the 160 volcanoes of Indonesia, Philippines and Vanuatu combined. These are some of the most densely populated volcanic regions on Earth – and the least understood.

The largest eruptions don't just affect the communities around them. They can temporarily cool the planet, disrupt monsoons and reduce harvests across entire regions. In the past, such shifts have contributed to famines, disease outbreaks and major social upheaval, yet scientists still lack a global system to anticipate or manage these future risks.

To help address this, my colleagues and I recently launched the Global Volcano Risk Alliance, a charity that focuses on anticipatory preparedness for high-impact eruptions. We work with scientists, policymakers and humanitarian organisations to highlight overlooked risks, strengthen monitoring capacity where it is most needed, and support communities before eruptions occur.

Acting early, rather than responding only after disaster strikes, stands the best chance of preventing the next hidden volcano from becoming a global crisis.

Why 'quiet' volcanoes aren't safe

So why do volcanoes fail to receive attention proportionate to their risk? In part, it comes down to predictable human biases. Many people tend to assume that what has been quiet will remain quiet (normalcy bias). If a volcano has not erupted for generations, it is often instinctively considered safe.

The likelihood of an event tends to be judged by how easily examples come to mind (this mental shortcut is known as availability heuristic). Well-known volcanoes or eruptions, such as the Icelandic ash cloud from 2010, are familiar and can feel threatening, while remote volcanoes with no recent eruptions rarely register at all.

These biases create a dangerous pattern: we only invest most heavily after a disaster has already happened (response bias). El Chichón, for instance, was only monitored after the 1982 catastrophe. However, three-quarters of large eruptions (like El Chichón and bigger) come from volcanoes that have been quiet for at least 100 years and, as a result, receive the least attention.

Volcano preparedness needs to be proactive rather than reactive. When volcanoes are monitored, when communities know how to respond, and when communication and coordination between scientists and authorities is effective, thousands of lives can be saved.

Disasters have been averted in these ways in 1991 (at Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines), in 2019 (at Mount Merapi in Indonesia) and in 2021 (at La Soufrière on the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent).

To close these gaps, the world needs to shift attention towards undermonitored volcanoes in regions such as Latin America, south-east Asia, Africa and the Pacific – places where millions of people live close to volcanoes that have little or no historical record. This is where the greatest risks lie, and where even modest investments in monitoring, early warning and community preparedness could save the most lives.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Colombia's Coconucos volcanic chain is a high mountain ridge pockmarked with at least 14 volcano craters. These craters form a line that runs northwest-to-southeast, offering striking aerial views and images.

Twelve volcanoes in the Coconucos volcanic chain have summits higher than 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) above sea level. The tallest volcano, at about 15,400 feet (4,700 m) above sea level, is the Pan de Azúcar, which until a few decades ago was permanently covered in snow.

The second-tallest volcano in the chain, known as Puracé, is Coconucos's only active volcano and one of the most active volcanoes in Colombia. Puracé, meaning "fire mountain" in the Quechua family of languages, stands 15,260 feet (4,650 m) high and sits at the northwesternmost end of the chain. Its last eruption was in early December 2025, when the volcano spewed gas and ash up to 3,000 feet (900 m) into the sky and showered nearby areas with fine debris. Colombian authorities issued an alert on Nov. 29 and the outburst continued Monday (Dec. 15).

Puracé showed signs of activity in 2022 and 2023, but the volcano's last recorded eruption before the most recent one was in 1977. The last measurements before the 2025 eruption showed that Puracé's crater has a diameter of 1,640 feet (500 m).

The Coconucos volcanic chain is located in Puracé National Park in the Andes mountains. The region is a misty grassland ecosystem known as páramo, with temperatures ranging between 37 and 65 degrees Fahrenheit (3 to 18 degrees Celsius). Snow was widespread on mountain tops in Puracé National Park until a century ago, but this is rare nowadays, according to Colombia's national parks website.

Several of Colombia's most important rivers originate in Puracé National Park, including the Cauca, Magdalena, Patía and Caquetá. The national park is peppered with sulfur springs and clear lagoons, attracting tourists and hikers.

The Coconuco people have traditionally inhabited, and continue to live in, the region.

Discover more incredible places, where we highlight the fantastic history and science behind some of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth.

Researchers have compiled a detailed map of seasonal rhythms around the world, which shows that some physically close regions have dramatically different timing for seasonal variations such as the start and end of the growing season. These differences could contribute to high biodiversity in certain ecosystems, the development of new species and even the different types of coffee harvested in Colombia, the team said.

"Seasonality may often [be] thought of as a simple rhythm — winter, spring, summer, fall — but our work shows that nature's calendar is far more complex," study co-author Drew Terasaki Hart, an ecologist and data analyst at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Australia, said in a statement. "This is especially true in regions where the shape and timing of the typical local seasonal cycle differs dramatically across the landscape. This can have profound implications for ecology and evolution in these regions."

The idea of a simple, seasonal growing pattern works well for plants that grow at high latitudes, such as those in much of Europe and North America, researchers wrote in the study, published Aug. 27 in the journal Nature. But it doesn't work quite as well in arid or tropical ecosystems.

In the study, Terasaki Hart and his colleagues used 20 years' worth of satellite data that captured how plants reflected infrared light throughout the year to map vegetation's growth cycles around the world.

Areas on the slopes of mountains in tropical regions or that have a balmy Mediterranean climate frequently exhibited seasonal asynchrony, or differences in their seasonal cycles across short distances, the team found. In these areas, the availability of light and water was more important for the local plants' growth cycles than the temperature.

"Our map predicts stark geographic differences in flowering timing and genetic relatedness across a wide variety of plant and animal species," Terasaki Hart said in the statement. "It even explains the complex geography of coffee harvest seasons in Colombia — a nation where coffee farms separated by a day's drive over the mountains can have reproductive cycles as out of sync as if they were in opposite hemispheres."

These starkly different niches over short distances could explain why tropical regions have such high biodiversity, the team wrote in the study. Plant and animal species on different seasonal cycles would slowly diverge, reproducing at different times and possibly forming new species after many years.

The results could help explain how species evolve in other ecosystems, such as in river or ocean environments, as well as how environments are adapting to climate change, the researchers wrote in the study.

"We suggest exciting future directions for evolutionary biology, climate change ecology, and biodiversity research, but this way of looking at the world has interesting implications even further afield, such as in agricultural sciences or epidemiology," Terasaki Hart added.

This striking satellite photo captured a rare spectacle earlier this year, when "one of the driest places on Earth" experienced a rare snowstorm. This freak event temporarily turned the barren, rocky landscape white — and briefly shut down one of the world's most powerful radio telescopes.

The Atacama Desert is a roughly 40,500-square-mile (105,000 square kilometer) non-polar desert, located within a 1,000-mile-long (1,600 km) strip of land nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountains in northern Chile. It is the world's oldest non-polar desert, having remained semi-arid for at least 150 million years. And it is home to the sunniest spot on Earth, the Altiplano Plateau, which experiences sunlight levels equivalent to those on Venus.

The desert is also widely considered to be one of the driest places on Earth, alongside other hyperarid spots, such as Antarctica and the Sahara. Some areas currently experience as little as 0.002 inches (0.5 millimeters) of rain annually, according to Guinness World Records. Previous research has hinted that parts of the Atacama went nearly 400 years without any recorded rain, between 1570 and 1971.

On June 25, a rare snowstorm hit Atacama after a "cold-core cyclone" unexpectedly drifted down from the north, covering over half the desert with white powder, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

The satellite photo above shows a section of the desert in the Chajnantor Plateau, which rises to around 16,000 feet (5,000 meters) above sea level. This area is home to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory — an array of more than 50 radio dishes that scour the "Dark Universe." (ALMA itself is not visible in the aerial photo.)

This area is well-suited to astronomical research because it is remote, dry and well-elevated, which reduces interference and maximizes the amount of data telescopes like ALMA can collect. But when the snow settled over the observatory, it temporarily forced ALMA into "survival mode," meaning that the dishes were repositioned to stop them from accumulating snow, halting observations.

The icy dust may have also affected the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope, located around 530 miles (850 km) southwest of ALMA, but to a lesser extent, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. The newly constructed Vera C. Rubin Observatory is also located in Atacama, near the SOAR telescope, but was not affected by the storm.

The snow did not last long, and most of it had disappeared by July 16. In some places, the sunlight was so intense that the snow likely sublimated, or turned directly from solid to gas, before it melted, according to the Earth Observatory.

This is not the first time that snow has fallen in the Atacama. Similar events also occurred in 2011, 2013 and 2021.

The region has also experienced several intense bouts of rain in recent years. When this happens, it can trigger deadly mudflows. In March 2015, at least 31 people were killed after heavy rainfall triggered Atacama's largest ever flood, according to a 2016 study.

Rain can also cause desert flowers, which normally appear in spring, to unexpectedly bloom during winter months, creating fields of vibrant petals to sprout up around the desert. This most recently happened in 2024, after a surprise rain shower caught the plants off guard.

Precipitation is rare in the Atacama for two reasons. Firstly, it sits within the "rain shadow" of the Andes, which block clouds moving in from the east. And second, cold ocean currents off the region's western Pacific coastline prevent water from evaporating into the air over the desert. This makes Atacama inhospitable to most lifeforms, aside from hardy desert flowers and extreme microbes that live well below its dry surface.

However, the recent instances of extreme precipitation in the region could be a sign that human-caused climate change is making it more likely for snow and rain to fall there. If this continues, the Atacama may one day no longer be one of the driest places on Earth.

For more incredible satellite photos and astronaut images, check out our Earth from space archives.

Cores collected from beneath the southern Atlantic Ocean show that this rubble — which formed through volcanic activity and spread across the ocean floor over millions of years — stores between two and 40 times as much carbon dioxide as the upper crust at the bottom of the ocean, according to research published Nov. 24 in the journal Nature Geoscience. The findings may help scientists better understand how Earth's climate changed in the past.

Over millions of years, carbon cycles through the planet's crust and atmosphere. Volcanic activity in mid-ocean ridges — underwater mountain ranges where tectonic plates spread apart — releases carbon dioxide into the ocean and atmosphere, and forms volcanic rocks on the seafloor. But the ocean acts as a sink for carbon dioxide, too.

"Ocean basins are not just a container for seawater," study co-author Rosalind Coggon, an ocean crust researcher at the University of Southampton in the U.K., said in a statement. "Seawater flows through the cracks in the cooling lavas for millions of years and reacts with the rocks, transferring elements between the ocean and rock. This process removes CO2 from the water and stores it in minerals like calcium carbonate in the rock."

That mineral-laden volcanic rubble, known as breccia, could help scientists understand how undersea processes might have impacted how much carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere millions of years ago, and how that carbon dioxide might have affected the global climate.

In the new study, Coggon and her colleagues drilled deep into the Earth's crust on the seafloor in the southern Atlantic Ocean to collect some for further study. "Our drilling efforts recovered the first cores of this material after it has spent tens of millions of years being rafted across the seafloor as Earth's tectonic plates spread apart," Coggon said.

The team collected cores from a chunk of 61 million-year-old crust that included sediments and breccias. The cores were porous and crumbly, and the various rubble pieces had calcium carbonate growths in the open spaces, on their ends and between fragments of the core.

Carbon dioxide that had been converted into carbonate minerals through reactions with seawater made up an average of 7.5% of the weight of the core, the team found. That's anywhere from two to 40 times higher carbon dioxide content than any previously collected samples of the upper ocean crust held. The breccias could store as much as 20% of the carbon dioxide released when the underlying crust formed, the researchers wrote in the study.

The breccias act "as a sponge for carbon in the long-term carbon cycle," Coggon said.

The amount of carbon dioxide that the breccias can store depends on the amount of carbon dioxide present in the ocean, the thickness of the breccia on the seafloor, and how quickly the tectonic plates at mid-ocean ridges are spreading apart, the researchers wrote in the study. Past changes in any of these values could have affected the extent to which the breccias played a role in the carbon cycle and Earth's climate.

The extra carbon stored in the lava rubble hasn't been accounted for previously, the researchers wrote in the study. The new findings could help researchers better understand the role they played in controlling Earth's past thermostat.

The bees encountered the bones while digging to their preferred depth in the soil. They stopped to build nests inside tooth and vertebra cavities, which turned out to be the perfect size, researchers found. Most of the bones the scientists recovered were from hutias — chunky rodents that look like a cross between squirrels and beavers — but a handful were the remains of an extinct type of sloth.

This is the first time that bee nests have been discovered inside preexisting nooks in fossils and only the second piece of evidence of burrowing bees nesting in a cave. Researchers previously documented examples of bees drilling into old bones to make their nests, but the new find suggests the bees readily settled in existing fossil cavities, according to the study, which was published Wednesday (Dec. 17) in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

"The cells of Osnidum almontei [the name given to the fossilized nests] appear highly opportunistic, filling all bony chambers available in the sediment deposit," the researchers wrote in the study.

The bees found the hutia bones a long time after they were deposited in the cave by Hispaniolan barn owls (Tyto ostologa), the researchers posited. Evidence shows that these owls, which are now extinct, sometimes transported hutias into the cave whole, discarding the bones as they devoured the rodents, and sometimes regurgitated pellets containing the remains of hutias they had eaten while hunting. Barn owl bones found in the cave indicate the species lived there, the researchers noted.

These piles of bones became buried over time as sediments washed into the cave from outside. And several generations of burrowing bees took advantage of this much later, even though these bees typically make their nests in the open, according to the study.

In one tooth cavity, the researchers found six nested bee nests, indicating that successive generations made their homes in the same spot after previous nests had been abandoned.

The bees may have chosen to nest in the cave rather than outside it because the surrounding landscape had little to no earth for burrowing. "The area we were collecting in is karst, so it's made of sharp, edgy limestone, and it's lost all of its natural soils," study co-author Mitchell Riegler, a teaching assistant at the University of Florida, said in a statement.

After one of the scientists' last visits to the cave, plans had been submitted to turn it into a septic storage facility.

"We had to go on a rescue mission and get as many fossils out as possible," study lead author Lazaro Viñola Lopez, a paleobiologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, said in the statement.

The plans to build a septic tank eventually fell through, but the scientists removed abundant fossils regardless. These fossils have yet to be analyzed, and the team plans to publish more studies about their finds.

This eye-catching astronaut photo shows Yellowstone's eponymous lake covered in a thick blanket of snow, making it look like a colorless, featureless void in the surrounding landscape. But below this freezing, blank expanse lies some of the most active and hottest hydrothermal vents anywhere on Earth.

Yellowstone Lake is the largest body of water in Yellowstone National Park and the largest high-elevation lake in North America, sitting at 7,733 feet (2,357 meters) above sea level, according to the National Park Service (NPS). It is around 20 miles (32 kilometers) across at its widest point and has a maximum depth of 410 feet (125 m).

The lake freezes over every winter, around late December or early January, with an ice sheet that ranges from a few inches to around 2 feet (0.6 m) thick. But the blanket of snow on top of this ice can reach up to 3.5 feet (1.1 m) deep by March, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. The lake is usually snow- and ice-free by late May or early June.

The thick covering of snow means Yellowstone Lake is remarkably resilient to human-caused climate change, maintaining its surface ice thickness despite rising atmospheric temperatures. This makes it a major outlier among high-altitude lakes across the globe.

This astronaut photo shows one of these deep snowdrifts, mostly undisturbed aside from a few islands, the largest of which is Stevenson Island.

While the surface of Yellowstone Lake may seem cold and lifeless during the winter months, the water below remains surprisingly mild thanks to a series of hydrothermal vents across its floor. This enables aquatic animals, including the lake's cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii) population — the largest of its kind anywhere in North America — to survive the long months under the ice, according to NPS.

One of the vents, right next to Stevenson Island, releases water that’s a remarkable 345 degrees Fahrenheit (174 degrees Celsius), making it hotter than Old Faithful and every other geyser or hot spring in Yellowstone National Park.

"This is much hotter than any surface hot spring at Yellowstone because the weight from the overlying lake water acts like a pressure cooker lid and allows temperatures higher than boiling to be reached," representatives from the U.S. Geological Survey wrote in an article about the lake's vents. "These are the hottest hydrothermal vents measured in a lake anywhere in the world."

The vents are powered by a giant blob of magma, around 2.6 miles (3.8 km) beneath Yellowstone National Park, which contains a surprising amount of molten rock. This magma blob acts like the cap on a gigantic volcanic bottle and will one day explode, unleashing a "supervolcanic" eruption that could be felt across the continent.

Yellowstone Lake was formed shortly after a similar eruption 640,000 years ago, which carved out the 1,500-square-mile (3,900 square kilometers) caldera that the lake currently sits within. Around 130,000 years ago, a smaller eruption then carved out the doorknob-shaped handle of the lake, dubbed West Thumb (visible near the top of the astronaut photo).

For more incredible satellite photos and astronaut images, check out our Earth from space archives.

"Typically, you have the bottom of the oceanic crust and then it would be expected to be the mantle," said study lead author William Frazer, a seismologist at Carnegie Science in Washington D.C. "But in Bermuda, there is this other layer that is emplaced beneath the crust, within the tectonic plate that Bermuda sits on."

While the origin of this layer is not entirely clear, it may explain an ongoing mystery about Bermuda, Frazer told Live Science. The island sits on an oceanic swell, where the ocean crust is higher than its surroundings. But there is no evidence of any ongoing volcanic activity creating that swell — the island's last known volcanic eruption was 31 million years ago.

The discovery of the new giant "structure" suggests the last eruption may have injected mantle rock into the crust, where it froze in place, creating something like a raft that raises the ocean floor by about 1,640 feet (500 meters).

Bermuda has long had a reputation for mystery, largely because of the Bermuda Triangle, an area between the archipelago, Florida and Puerto Rico where a supposedly unusual number of ships and aircraft have gone missing. (This reputation, however, has been largely exaggerated.) The real mystery, though, is why the Bermuda oceanic swell exists.

Island chains such as Hawaii are thought to exist because of mantle hotspots, which are places in the mantle where hot material rises, creating volcanic activity. At the point where the hotspot meets the crust, the ocean floor often buoys up. But when tectonic movement slides the crust away from that hotspot, the oceanic swell typically subsides.

Bermuda's swell hasn't subsided, despite 31 million years of volcanic inactivity there, Frazer said. There is some debate over what's happening in the mantle beneath the island, but there are no eruptions happening at the surface.

Frazer and study co-author Jeffrey Park, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Yale University, used recordings from a seismic station on Bermuda of distant large earthquakes around the world to get an image of Earth down to about 31 miles (50 km) below Bermuda. They examined places where the seismic waves from these quakes suddenly changed. This revealed the unusually thick layer of rock, which is less dense than the other rock around it.

Their findings were published Nov. 28 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

"There is still this material that is left over from the days of active volcanism under Bermuda that is helping to potentially hold it up as this area of high relief in the Atlantic Ocean," Sarah Mazza, a geologist at Smith College in Massachusetts who was not involved in the work, told Live Science.

Mazza's own research into Bermuda's volcanic history found that the types of lavas there are low in the mineral silica, which is a sign that they come from rock high in carbon. Mazza's examination of variations in zinc molecules in samples from Bermuda, published in September in the journal Geology, found that this carbon comes from deep in the mantle. It was likely first pushed there when the supercontinent Pangea formed between 900 million and 300 million years ago, Mazza said. This is different from what is seen at hotspot-formed islands in the Pacific or Indian oceans, she added. This difference may be because the Atlantic, which opened up when Pangea split apart, is a young ocean compared to the Pacific or Indian oceans, which were at Pangea's edges.

"The fact that we are in an area that was previously the heart of the last supercontinent is, I think, part of the story of why this is unique," she said.

Frazer is now examining other islands around the world to find out if there are any similar layers to the one found under Bermuda, or whether the archipelago is truly one of a kind.

"Understanding a place like Bermuda, which is an extreme location, is important to understand places that are less extreme," Frazer said, "and gives us a sense of what are the more normal processes that happen on Earth and what are the more extreme processes that happen."

Since 1978, China has planted more than 66 billion trees along its borders with Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan — and Chinese authorities plan to plant 34 billion more over the next 25 years. If they succeed, the Great Green Wall will increase Earth's forest cover by 10% since the late 1970s.

The Great Green Wall, formally known as the Three-North Shelter Forest Program, is designed to slow soil erosion and sand deposition that has been increasing since the 1950s due to huge urbanization and farmland expansion. These changes exacerbated the region's already dry conditions, which in turn created the conditions for more sandstorms. Sandstorms blow away the top layer of soil and deposit sand, degrading the land and increasing particulate matter pollution in cities.

Northern China was dry before the urbanization boom of the 1950s, because the Himalayas create a rain shadow over the country's border with Mongolia that limits precipitation in the region. This is why the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts are so enormous; combined, they cover 618,000 square miles (1.6 million square kilometers), which is slightly smaller than Alaska, according to the Royal Geographical Society.

Despite China's efforts over the past five decades, the Gobi and Taklamakan are still expanding. The Gobi Desert, for instance, swallows around 1,400 square miles (3,600 square km) of China's grassland every year. Desertification is ruining ecosystems and agricultural land, but it's also making pollution in cities like Beijing worse, according to the Royal Geographical Society.

Last year, government representatives announced China had finished encircling the Taklamakan with vegetation, which has helped stabilize sand dunes and grow forest cover from about 10% of China's area in 1949 to more than 25% today. Tree planting will continue around the Taklamakan to maintain and enlarge the forest, the representatives said.

If everything goes to plan, the Great Green Wall will be 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometers) long by 2050. The "wall" is the world's largest seeded forest — but it's still unclear just how effective it is at slowing desertification.

While some studies suggest the Great Green Wall has reduced the frequency of sandstorms, others argue this decrease is mostly due to climatic factors.

Critics say the survival rate of planted trees and shrubs is too low to show robust results, possibly because huge swathes of the wall encompass only one or two tree species — mostly poplar and willow, according to the Royal Geographical Society — making the wall susceptible to disease. For example, in 2000, 1 billion poplar trees were lost to a single pathogen in the Ningxia province.

Tree mortality is also high because China is planting trees in places that don't have enough water to grow them. Without constant human intervention, many of the trees don't survive.

"People crowded into the natural sand dunes and the Gobi to plant trees, which have caused a rapid decrease in soil moisture and the groundwater table," Xian Xue, a leading expert on erosion-driven desertification at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told National Geographic in 2017. "Actually, it will cause desertification [in some regions]."

Because it is a monoculture, the Great Green Wall also doesn't promote biodiversity in the same way that a more diverse mix of indigenous plants would. Nevertheless, the program inspired Africa's Great Green Wall, which will be a 5,000-mile-long (8,000 km) tree belt across the continent to slow land degradation and desertification.

Discover more incredible places, where we highlight the fantastic history and science behind some of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth

Scientists predict this regime will cause more frequent and extreme droughts, which could lead to mass tree dieoffs. By 2100, hot droughts could bake the Amazon for 150 days of the year, extending even into the wet season, according to a study published Wednesday (Dec. 10) in the journal Nature.

"When these hot droughts occur, that's the climate that we associate with a hypertropical forest, because it's beyond the boundary of what we consider to be tropical forest now," study lead author Jeff Chambers, a professor of geography at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement.

Scientists think a hypertropical climate last existed between 40 million and 10 million years ago, during the Eocene and Miocene periods. The average global temperature during the middle Eocene was 82 degrees Fahrenheit (28 degrees Celsius) — 25 F (14 C) warmer than the average today — and previous research suggests forests near the equator had fewer mangroves and evergreen trees.

Currently, the Amazon rainforest experiences hot drought conditions a few days or weeks of the year. But due to climate change, the region's dry season — which typically lasts from July to September — is getting longer, and the annual proportion of hotter-than-normal days is increasing.

Chambers and his colleagues analyzed 30 years of temperature, humidity, soil moisture and sunlight intensity data from a patch of forest north of Manaus, a city in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon. The researchers also examined information from sensors that measured water and sap flow inside tree trunks at this site, which helped them understand how the trees coped with drought conditions.

During droughts, trees struggled to access water and stopped absorbing carbon dioxide (CO₂), the researchers found. That's because evaporation rates surged during droughts, reducing soil moisture. Trees responded by closing the pores on their leaves that control water and gas exchange with the atmosphere, so they preserved water. But this simultaneously blocked CO₂ absorption, which in plants is necessary for tissue growth and repair.

As a result, when drought conditions were extreme, a proportion of the trees died from CO₂ starvation. And when soil moisture dropped below a threshold of 33% — meaning only one-third of the soil's pores were filled with water — trees also developed bubbles in their sap that were akin to clots in human blood vessels, preventing normal circulation inside the plants' fluid-filled xylem.

"If there are enough embolisms, the tree just dies," Chambers said. The soil moisture threshold leading to this collapse was remarkably consistent across two El Niño years in 2015 and 2023, and it matched thresholds measured at another study site in the Amazon. "That was really surprising to everyone," he said.

Annual tree mortality in the Amazon rainforest is currently just above 1%, but it could rise to 1.55% by 2100, the researchers found. This may seem insignificant, but it makes a huge difference on the scale of the entire rainforest, Chambers said.

Fast-growing trees were more vulnerable to hot droughts than their slow-growing counterparts, because they needed abundant water and CO₂ to sustain this growth. This suggests slow-growing trees, such as the yellow ipê (Handroanthus chrysanthus) and the Shihuahuaco (Dipteryx micrantha), will eventually dominate the Amazon as temperatures rise — if these trees can cope with increasing water stress and the rate of temperature change, that is.

The results indicate that rainforests in other parts of the world, such as western Africa and Southeast Asia, may also be transitioning to a hypertropical climate regime. This shift has dramatic implications for Earth's carbon cycle, because rainforests absorb huge amounts of CO₂ that would otherwise end up in the atmosphere.

The predictions of what could happen to the Amazon by 2100 assume negligible reductions in CO₂ emissions, so "it's up to us to what extent we're actually going to create this hypertropical climate," Chambers said. "If we're just going to emit greenhouse gases as much as we want, without any control, then we're going to create this hypertropical climate sooner."

The Bezymianny volcano is a dramatic, cone-shaped stratovolcano on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East. It blew itself apart in 1956, but a 2020 study found that it has nearly grown back — and eruptions like the one that created an ash plume on Nov. 26 are the reason. That study found that the mountain should achieve its pre-collapse height between the years 2030 and 2035.

Seven decades ago, Bezymianny towered at least 10,213 feet (3,113 meters) above sea level. Then, on March 30, 1956, a massive eruption blew out the slope of the volcano, collapsing the summit and turning the cone-shaped mountain into a horseshoe-shaped stone amphitheater.

Almost immediately, though, the mountain started to reform, starting as a lava dome perched in the midst of this amphitheater. Over the years, the Institute of Volcanology and Seismology in Kamchatka, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has monitored the mountain's growth with fieldwork, web cameras and observation flights. A series of photographs taken from flights between 1949 and 2017 shows that the volcano has nearly reached its previous height, the researchers reports in 2020. Between 1956 and 2017, the researchers found, the mountain added 932,307.2 cubic feet (26,400 cubic meters) of rock per day, on average, the researchers found.

"The most surprising thing was the fast growth of the new volcanic edifice," study co-authors Alexander Belousov and Marina Belousova, both volcanologists at the Institute of Volcanology, told Live Science in an email.

The volcano now produces a couple of explosive eruptions a year, on average. The late-November event featured not only a billowing ash cloud, but also hot avalanches of gas and rock known as pyroclastic flows, Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program reported Dec. 2.

As the volcano reaches its original height, the stability of its slopes is an important question, Belousov and Belousova told Live Science.

"It is known that similar edifices located inside horseshoe-shaped craters can experience one more large scale collapse and, as a result, a large scale explosive eruption," they said.

The flyover images reviewed in 2020 showed that the volcano not only sends out explosive clouds of ash and gas, but that it grows by what scientists called effusive eruptions: non-explosive flows of lava. The first of these was visible in 1977. Over time, this lava has become less rich in the mineral silica and less viscous, or goopy. Layers of this effusive lava have built up to turn Bezymianny back into a cone-shaped stratovolcano.

Researchers are still monitoring the mountain from the ground as well as by satellite, Belousov and Belousova said. Though each volcano has its own trajectory, there are many volcanoes around the world that have experienced collapse and regrowth, such as Mount St. Helens in the U.S.

"The collected dataset is very important because the obtained knowledge allows volcanologists all over the world to make long-term forecasts of the behavior of different volcanoes which experienced large-scale collapses in their history," the researchers said.

The rate of warming in the region is accelerating alongside an increase in climate-related events such as flooding and heatwaves, according to the first State of the Climate in the Arab Region report, published by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on Dec. 4.

"2024 was the hottest year on record for the Arab region — a continuation of a long-term trend," WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said in a statement. Some heat waves, she said, are "pushing society to the limits. Human health, ecosystems and economies can't cope with extended spells of more than 50° Celsius [122 F] — it is simply too hot to handle."

The Arab region covers 5 million square miles (13 million square kilometers) from Morocco to the United Arab Emirates. It contains 15 of the world's 20 most water-scarce countries. Much of the region is dry and arid, though some areas in North Africa experience wetter winters.

According to the report, the Arab region warmed about 0.77 F (0.43 C) per decade between 1991 and 2024 — twice as fast as the global average during that time period, and about twice as fast as the period from 1961 to 1990.

In the decade from 2015 to 2024, temperatures across the region were about 0.9 F (0.58 C) higher than the 1991 to 2020 average and 2.6 F (1.44 C) higher than the average from 1961 to 1990. In 2024, several countries experienced multiple heatwaves, some lasting up to two weeks. Southeastern parts of the Near East had 12 days in 2024 where the maximum temperature was at least 122 F (50 C).

In addition to heat extremes, drought affected parts of North Africa for the sixth year in a row, though this isn't outside the norm for the region. Rains that fell after long drought episodes caused flash flooding in several countries, including Morocco, Libya, Somalia and Lebanon.

"Droughts are becoming more frequent and severe in one of the world’s most water-stressed regions," Saulo said. "And at the same time, we have seen some disruptive and dangerous deluges."

Early warning systems for both severe weather and natural disasters such as flooding could help protect people in the region as these events become more frequent, according to the report.

"Multi-hazard early warning systems are more important than ever before — this is not a cost but an investment in saving lives and livelihoods," Saulo wrote in a foreword to the report. "Nearly 60% of Arab countries have such systems in place, above the global average but still not enough."

Several countries are also investing in strategies to improve water management, including seawater desalination, building new dams and creating new wastewater treatment facilities.

The report is a "qualitative step towards enhancing our collective understanding of climate patterns, associated risks and their social and economic impacts," Ahmed Aboul Gheit, Secretary-General of the League of Arab States, said in the statement.

The report also included predictions of future climate scenarios in the region from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, offering a framework in which to plan for climate impacts in the coming years.

"By incorporating climate projections, the report provides an annual snapshot of current conditions, while also serving as a strategic foresight tool that empowers the region to prepare for tomorrow's climate realities," Rola Dashti, United Nations Executive Secretary of Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, said in the statement.

But as he did, an explosion reverberated inside the well. We now know this was due to previously undetected clouds of flammable hydrogen wafting from a gas reservoir beneath the hole.

The well was plugged and temporarily abandoned. Then, in 2011, the oil and gas company Petroma (which later became Hydroma) uncemented it to examine whether they could extract hydrogen for profit. By 2012, the company had developed the well to make electricity for Bourakebougou, and the village still relies on this hydrogen for power today.

Bourakebougou's well is the world's first and only productive hydrogen well. Mixed with oxygen in fuel cells, hydrogen — the smallest and simplest molecule in existence — can generate electricity without greenhouse gas emissions and with only heat and water as byproducts. This makes hydrogen a clean source of energy, and demand for it is expected to rise fivefold by 2050 to produce microelectronics, supply industry, and power vehicles and buildings.

Hydrogen is lighter than air and very reactive, so scientists long thought it didn't accumulate inside Earth's crust in the same way fossil fuels do. But the discovery in Bourakebougou, along with more recent finds, has completely shifted this paradigm.

Resource exploration companies are now rushing to find reservoirs of natural hydrogen, also known as "gold" hydrogen. To help them, scientists have identified the key "ingredients" needed to form such accumulations. And thanks to this knowledge, techniques to boost or mimic natural hydrogen generation that were once considered impracticable are gaining traction, experts told Live Science.

"We just keep finding more and more the more we start looking for it," Geoffrey Ellis, a petroleum geochemist with the U.S. Geological Survey, told Live Science.

Paradigm shift

Hydrogen is a source of energy, but it is also a critical component of fertilizer, refined oil and rocket fuel. Industry produces almost all of its hydrogen by heating natural gas with steam to form a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide from which hydrogen can be extracted.

This method makes "gray" hydrogen, and it pumps about 1 billion tons (920 million metric tons) of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year — equivalent to 2.4% of global annual emissions. In theory, renewable energies can replace natural gas to generate "green" hydrogen, while "blue" hydrogen is made from fossil fuels but with carbon capture, meaning carbon doesn't enter the atmosphere. But these collectively make up a tiny fraction of hydrogen production worldwide.

"Hydrogen is a clean source of energy, but how you get your hydrogen is critical," Chris Ballentine, a professor of geochemistry at the University of Oxford, told Live Science.

However, a new source of hydrogen could slash the industry's carbon footprint, as it turns out that huge quantities of hydrogen can accumulate belowground. Scientists have long known that rocks in Earth's crust produce hydrogen, but experts previously concluded that the gas couldn't collect in reservoirs because only tiny concentrations of it were being found in oil and gas wells.

The discovery in Mali toppled that theory. Researchers realized that the places where companies drill for oil and gas are not the best places to find hydrogen.

Massive reservoirs, waiting to be found

The Mali discovery has kicked off a worldwide hunt for hydrogen reservoirs. But before geologists initiate costly exploration projects, they need a sense of just how much hydrogen might be lurking underground.

New estimates suggest it's a staggering amount. Earth's continental crust has produced enough hydrogen over the past 1 billion years to meet society's current energy needs for 170,000 years, a recent review by Ballentine and his colleagues found. Though much of this hydrogen has escaped into the atmosphere, the figure is "a starting point for realizing that the hydrogen generation in the crust is significant," Ballentine said.

Other estimates double the figure in the Ballentine paper. Ophiolites are chunks of oceanic crust that have been thrust onto the continental crust, and some estimates suggest these ocean-crust remnants may produce as much hydrogen as the continental crust does, Ballentine said.

But how much of this hydrogen is left in Earth's crust? In 2024, Ellis and his colleagues calculated that the planet holds 6.2 trillion tons (5.6 trillion metric tons) of hydrogen, or about 26 times the amount of oil known to be left in the ground. Where these hydrogen stocks are located is largely unknown. Most are likely too deep or too far offshore to be accessed, and some reservoirs might be too small to be worth extracting — but the researchers emphasized that just 2% of the total hydrogen could supplant our current fossil fuels for 200 years.

"The potential that's down there is quite, quite large," Ellis said. What's more, natural hydrogen, unlike the type made via industrial processes, comes with built-in storage because it sits in Earth's crust. It also has a much smaller carbon footprint than manufactured hydrogen, with emissions coming only from extraction, Ellis said.

The ingredients

In January 2025, Ellis and his colleagues published a map showing where hydrogen reservoirs might exist in the lower 48 U.S. states. The researchers used gravity and magnetic signal data to estimate the composition of rocks throughout Earth's crust and determine where hydrogen may have migrated underground.

"This was the first time that anyone had attempted to do this type of mapping exercise," Ellis said.

The researchers estimated the likelihood of productive hydrogen reservoirs, known as prospectivity, based on six geological requirements that make and trap hydrogen in Earth's crust. On the map, prospectivity ranges from 0 to 1, with 0 meaning there is likely no hydrogen and 1 indicating hydrogen is very likely present.

To form a hydrogen reservoir, the first and second requirements are that a region must have abundant groundwater and hydrogen-producing rocks. The water requirement limits hydrogen production to the top 10 miles (16 kilometers) of the crust, Oliver Warr, an assistant professor of geochemistry at the University of Ottawa, told Live Science.

The best hydrogen-producing rocks are iron-rich rocks, which generate hydrogen through "hydration reactions," where water reacts with the rocks. Other good sources of hydrogen are uranium- and thorium-rich rocks, which produce alpha particles as the radioactive elements decay. These alpha particles can then split water into oxygen and hydrogen — a process known as radiolysis, Warr said.

Iron-rich rocks include basalt and gabbro. Earth's mantle, the layer beneath the crust, heats groundwater, producing steam that reacts with iron and generates hydrogen. Uranium- and thorium-rich rocks include granites, and these can trigger the radiolysis of water.

The third requirement is that the source rocks be very, very hot — between 480 and 570 degrees Fahrenheit (250 to 300 degrees Celsius), which guarantees rapid rates of reaction, Ellis said.

Fourth, the region must have reservoir rocks that can hold the hydrogen after it is produced and migrates through the crust. Reservoir rocks are typically porous sandstones, but other types of rock can also work if they are highly fragmented, Ellis said.

The fifth criterion to form a hydrogen reservoir is an impermeable "seal" to trap the gas inside the reservoir. "A thing like a shale, or maybe a salt, would be really ideal to be sitting on top of that porous rock," Ellis said. Crucially, the seal must exist when the hydrogen is produced, or else the gas escapes into the atmosphere, he said.

The sixth and final condition is that there must be minimal microbial activity where hydrogen is generated and accumulates, because microbes consume hydrogen, Warr said.

These six conditions, or ingredients, occur across all continents, Ballentine said. Currently, hydrogen companies are drilling exploratory wells mostly on the Midcontinent Rift — where North America started, but ultimately failed, to split apart 1 billion years ago — which is abundant in iron-rich rocks.

Looking ahead

Researchers are also investigating hydrogen deposits in Oman, where there are ophiolites. University of Colorado geologists are running a pilot project in the country to test the feasibility of "stimulated hydrogen" production, Ellis said.

Stimulated hydrogen production takes inspiration from what scientists have learned about the geology that makes and accumulates hydrogen. It involves injecting water into Earth's crust to kick-start either hydration reactions or radiolysis.

One year ago, people in the hydrogen industry were skeptical that stimulated hydrogen production would ever materialize, Ellis said. But now, "I've seen a big shift," he said.

If we can find natural hydrogen and extract it, the gas could reduce emissions across a wide range of sectors. For example, abundant hydrogen is found in mines, because this is where humans drill deepest into the crust, so the gas could power mining operations, Warr said.

Natural hydrogen could also slash emissions from industries such as fertilizer manufacturing. "If we can replace hydrogen generated from hydrocarbons with clean hydrogen, then we can very rapidly make a massive difference," Ballentine said.

Natural hydrogen won't solve the climate crisis, but it can mitigate some of the risks. "It needs to be one of many strategies," Warr said. "We just need to understand the true potential and how it can best be capitalized on."

Some of the key considerations for companies are whether the benefits of developing natural hydrogen reservoirs when we find them would justify the cost of building production plants on-site, or shipping the gas to the industries that need it.

"If you're remote and you find a really big gas field, it still may not be worthwhile producing it, because the costs of getting hydrogen to market are too great," Ballentine said. "There's a trade-off."

But overall, experts are optimistic. "There have been, I think, over a dozen wells that have been drilled now in the U.S.," Ellis said. "They've found a lot of hydrogen."

This incredible astronaut photo captured a unique glimpse of Alabama's eponymous river cosplaying as a golden Chinese dragon. The metallic hue of the serpentine waterway is the result of a rare optical phenomenon that is only visible from space.

The Alabama River is a 318-mile-long (512 kilometers) waterway that stretches from the state's capital, Montgomery, past cities like Birmingham and Selma, and into Mobile Bay, where it drains into the Gulf of Mexico.

The section of the river in the photo features a large U-shaped bend, known as Gee's Bend, that surrounds the small town of Boykin, which is renowned for its "vibrant folk art" that is displayed across the country, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

The river's unusual glow is the result of a rare phenomenon, known as a sunglint, which occurs when sunlight perfectly reflects off a still body of water toward an observer in space, like a massive liquid mirror. This is similar to how the surface of an ocean or lake sparkles when light bounces off it during a sunset — except the only people who can see it are astronauts.

The golden color of the sunglint helps provide greater contrast between water and land, highlighting a series of flooded zones. When combined with the river's larger bends, this makes the waterway look surprisingly like a dragon from Chinese mythology, netizens pointed out at the time.

The head of the dragon (located on the left of the image) is represented by the flooded zones of the artificial William "Bill" Dannelly Reservoir, which was created in the 1960s by partially damming the river. This 27-square-mile (70 square kilometers) reservoir generates hydroelectric power via a dam and has also become a popular fishing spot for people looking to catch crappie, bass and catfish.

The river's water levels rose higher than initially expected following the dam's construction, causing the waterway to permanently spill over into surrounding floodplains, such as at Chilatchee Creek (towards the bend in the dragon's tail) and around Gee's Bend, according to Earth Observatory.

Most bodies of water usually take on a silvery, mirror-like appearance when illuminated by sunglints, making the Alabama River's golden glow particularly noteworthy.

The unusual golden color is likely the result of atmospheric scattering of the reflected light by aerosols, dust and haze. This scatters blue wavelengths of light, giving the remaining light a more yellow hue.

Astronauts are always on the lookout for sunglints, especially over the ocean, because they can reveal hidden natural phenomena, such as gyres and internal waves, as well as human activities, such as ship wakes and oil slicks, according to the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service.

For more incredible satellite photos and astronaut images, check out our Earth from space archives.

Crowds flocked to the well for the lighting of the escaping gas, which officials had said would produce "a great pillar of flame." But when they rolled a burning bale of hay onto the well, nothing happened.

An analysis in 1905 revealed that most of the gas was nonflammable nitrogen, just 15% was methane — and a little less than 2% was a colorless, odorless, elusive element that scientists had discovered only a few decades earlier. This marked the first discovery of helium in a natural gas field.

Helium is the second-most-abundant element in the universe after hydrogen, yet it is scarce on Earth. Helium does not react with other elements, and it mostly accumulates in Earth's crust as radioactive uranium and thorium decay, which takes billions of years. Because it takes much longer to replenish helium reserves than it does to deplete them, helium is a nonrenewable resource.

The discovery in Dexter paved the way for the helium industry, which mushroomed during World War I as fighting countries realized that helium was an excellent way to lift military airships. Unlike hydrogen-filled airships, those carrying helium didn't explode when the enemy shot them down. And helium's properties, particularly its ability to be liquid at close to absolute zero (minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius), meant it could cool machine parts like engines and magnets better than any other element could.

Today, helium is an essential cooling component in nuclear reactors, rockets and medical diagnostic equipment such as MRI machines. The gas keeps fiber optics, superconductors, quantum computers and semiconductors cool, but skyrocketing demand has pushed supply chains to their limit, resulting in a global shortage that has persisted for more than a decade. Helium extraction also has a huge carbon footprint — almost equivalent to the U.K.'s per year — because currently, it is exclusively produced together with natural gas.

However, in recent years, pioneering discoveries have led to a pivotal change in scientists' understanding of the geology that helps helium accumulate. Researchers have uncovered reservoirs of primary, "carbon-free" helium — large accumulations of the gas that are highly concentrated and don't contain methane — that could revolutionize the industry.

This new understanding has fueled exploration projects in a handful of regions around the world. From Yellowstone to Greenland to the East African Rift, a helium "rush" is starting to address shortages and helium's enormous carbon footprint.

"It's a new industry," Thomas Abraham-James, co-founder and CEO of the exploration company Pulsar Helium, told Live Science.

Perfect seals, imperfect yields

After World War I, helium discoveries multiplied and the U.S. emerged as the world's leading producer. Gas wells with helium levels of 0.3% and above were tapped to fuel a growing number of industries and form a stockpile, the Federal Helium Reserve in Amarillo, Texas. (The stockpile was sold in 2024 to the industrial gas firm Messer.)

But helium has been produced only as a minor byproduct, usually found in tiny amounts mixed in with natural gases such as methane.

That's because gases like methane and carbon dioxide (CO₂) are required to transport helium from the middle part of Earth's crust to shallower regions, Chris Ballentine, a professor of geochemistry at the University of Oxford, told Live Science in an email.

Helium forms in the top 16 miles (25 kilometers) of Earth's crust when uranium and thorium break down into other radioactive elements, emitting alpha particles, or helium nuclei, in the process. These helium nuclei gain two electrons from atoms in their environment to form helium atoms, which then migrate and gradually collect in groundwater down to 10 miles (16 km) below Earth's surface, Ballentine said.

But for helium atoms to form a gas, they need to reach their "bubble point" — the concentration of a dissolved gas in a liquid required to make buoyant gas bubbles. Helium in groundwater rarely accumulates in sufficient quantities to reach this bubble point, Ballentine said. So other, more ubiquitous gases, like methane and CO₂, are typically needed to entrain helium and form the bubbles that rise toward geological traps, Ballentine said.

These geological traps are often natural gas fields. But helium also gets trapped, because natural gas fields often have strong seals, research suggests.

Natural gas reservoirs form beneath layers of fine-grained "cap" rocks "and minerals. In Australia's Amadeus Basin, for example, helium and natural gas are locked beneath a thick layer of salt, which is a "perfect" seal, Jon Gluyas, a professor of geoenergy, carbon capture and storage at Durham University in the U.K., told Live Science.

Most places, however, don't have a perfectly sealed reservoir to trap helium underground, so the gas escapes into the atmosphere. "All systems are leaky," Gluyas said. As a result, most regions with helium-producing rocks emit some helium, so "if you went out with a sensitive enough instrument, you would find it," he said.

Helium's association with natural gas means producers can extract both at the same time, but this approach has major drawbacks. For one, the helium industry currently has an indirect carbon footprint of about 350 million tons (320 million metric tons) per year, which is bigger than all but 20 countries' carbon footprints.

A second downside is that countries with natural gas deposits and the companies drilling these deposits control the world's supply of helium. The U.S. used to dominate global helium production, but Qatar took the lead in 2022. Depending on other countries for helium introduces risks related to regional geopolitics, Gluyas said. Algeria and Russia are also leading helium producers, raising similar concerns.

But the biggest problem with helium extraction is that natural gas contains minuscule amounts of helium. In the U.S., the lower profitable limit to separate helium from natural gas is 0.3%, but some countries with different production and transport methods have much smaller thresholds. For example, Algeria's Hassi R'Mel gas field contains 0.19% helium and Qatar's North Dome deposits contain 0.04% helium, yet both countries extract helium at these locations.

Groundbreaking discoveries

Data show that only about 1 in 6 natural gas reservoirs in the U.S. has helium levels higher than 0.3% and that levels above 7% are extremely rare, meaning economically useful helium concentrations are the exception in the U.S.

The trend is similar in other countries. So when scientists found a nitrogen gas reservoir that contained up to 10.4% helium in Tanzania in 2016, they were flabbergasted. The gas was bubbling out of the ground in the Rukwa Rift Basin, which is located on a divergent plate boundary called the East African Rift.

Crucially, the Rukwa Rift Basin doesn't have reservoirs of natural gas or other hydrocarbons. This was the first major confirmed discovery of a hydrocarbon-free helium reservoir, and it sparked an ongoing worldwide hunt for other such reservoirs.

Ballentine, Gluyas and Abraham-James were part of the team that made the discovery in Tanzania. "The approach we adopted essentially is similar to that which any explorer would use for petroleum — we went looking for seeps," Gluyas said. Helium seeps are "all over the show," he said, but locating them is trickier than finding petroleum because helium is odorless, colorless and usually at low concentrations.

From then on, researchers and exploration companies tried to determine whether known helium seeps led to hydrocarbon-free reservoirs with high concentrations of the noble gas. In 2021, for example, the exploration company Pulsar Helium acquired land near Babbitt, Minnesota, where a company searching for nickel had previously found gas with high helium concentrations. Pulsar Helium drilled a well down to 2,200 feet (670 meters) in early 2024 and found a huge gas reservoir with helium concentrations up to 14.5% — the highest the industry has ever seen in North America.

The other gases in the reservoir were nitrogen and CO₂. But the site contains no natural gas, so it counts as a primary helium accumulation, Pulsar Helium representatives say. CO₂ concentrations were above 70%, but the company views this as an opportunity rather than a problem, because the gas is pure enough to be used for carbonated beverages, water treatment, food preservation and medicine.

Unique geology

The more reservoirs of hydrocarbon-free helium that researchers and companies find, the more information they learn about the geology that forms these reservoirs. Shortly after the discovery in Tanzania, geologists identified five key conditions needed to form accumulations of helium without natural gas.

First, the region must have helium-producing rocks miles below the surface. The best helium source rocks are ones that contain uranium or thorium, and are usually composed entirely of crystallized minerals, Gluyas, Ballentine and their colleagues wrote in a 2024 article for the Energy Geoscience Conference Series.

That's because crystalline rocks solidify from magma cooling extremely slowly underground. This unhurried process concentrates radioactive uranium and thorium, which are unstable elements in mineral structures and therefore among the last to be incorporated. Granite is one of the best helium sources, Ballentine said.

Ideally, the rocks should also be hundreds of millions to billions of years old, because the radioactive versions of uranium and thorium that decay into alpha particles have half lives of 4.5 billion and 14 billion years, respectively, according to the article. That means it would take that long for half of a sample of those elements to decay into helium. As a result, it takes millions of years to accumulate enough helium to fill a large reservoir.

The second criterion needed to form a hydrocarbon-free helium reservoir is a heat source around the rocks.

Normally, helium is frozen in a mineral's lattice structure because that structure is "blocked" — or doesn't exchange molecules with its surroundings. For minerals to release that helium, they must exceed their "closure temperature" — the temperature at which the lattice becomes unblocked. That temperature varies, but can be above about 160 F (70 C) for one of the most common helium-containing minerals.

Often the source of heat is volcanism or geothermal heat, so hydrocarbon-free helium reservoirs typically occur in regions where there is, or once was, volcanism. Beneath the Rukwa Rift Basin, for example, eastern Africa is pulling away from the rest of the continent, causing magma to rise to the surface. Similarly, Pulsar Helium's exploration site in Minnesota sits on an ancient tear in North America's crust called the Midcontinent Rift System. This rift system started and then failed about 1.1 billion years ago, producing intense volcanic activity during the roughly 100,000 years it was active.

The third condition to form a hydrocarbon-free helium reservoir is the presence of nitrogen in groundwater, because nitrogen bubbles can transport helium upward through the crust in the same way methane and CO₂ bubbles can, while completely removing greenhouse gases.

The fourth condition is the need for relatively airtight "cap rocks" that sit near the surface above the helium-forming rocks in Earth's crust. That's because when nitrogen reaches its bubble point, it captures helium atoms and taxies them until the gases either escape into the atmosphere or are trapped. But for that to happen, the cap rocks must form an impermeable seal.

The fifth and final condition is that these cap rocks must sit atop fractured, porous "reservoir" rocks that can store gas, Ballentine, Gluyas and their colleagues wrote in the 2024 article.

The growth rate of a reservoir depends on the rates at which gases enter from below and escape via cracks in the seal, the researchers wrote. The more helium that enters a reservoir and the less that escapes through the seal, the bigger an accumulation can get. In other words, reservoirs ideally have porous or highly fragmented rocks down below, and nonporous, intact rocks above.

Helium reservoirs with impermeable seals can hold gases for long periods of geological time. For example, the link between the reservoir in Minnesota and the Midcontinent Rift System suggests helium has been building up there for 1.1 billion years.

Appraisal and development

Pulsar Helium recently announced that it will start engineering work for a helium production plant at its site in Minnesota, signaling that hydrocarbon-free, U.S.-produced helium could reach the market in just a few years.

Early this year, the company more than doubled the depth of its first well to reach the bottom of the reservoir and drilled a second well down to 5,638 feet (1,718 m). Tests over the summer showed high flow rates to the surface and stable helium concentrations of up to 8% at both wells, "providing a robust foundation for future development," Abraham-James said in a September statement. Since then, Pulsar Helium has drilled an additional well down to 3,507 feet (1,069 m) and opened two more wells.

Pulsar Helium is also progressing with a helium project in East Greenland — the first helium discovery on the island, Abraham-James told Live Science.

"What we've learned in Minnesota and elsewhere, we then applied it to Greenland and we found the helium there," he said. "Like Minnesota, its helium is not associated with hydrocarbons. We conducted a seismic survey last year, and that went some ways to mapping the reservoir."

Located about 3 miles (5 km) from the coastal settlement of Ittoqqortoormiit, the site in East Greenland looks promising for helium and geothermal energy production, which could limit the settlement's dependency on fossil fuels, Abraham-James said. Mapping in 2024 revealed a zone of crust with temperatures reaching 266 F (130 C), as well as a fractured reservoir that researchers linked to gas emissions at the surface containing up to 0.8% helium, according to a statement from Pulsar Helium.

Any helium produced in East Greenland would likely go to the local community, Abraham-James said. Similarly, helium produced in Minnesota would be sold inside the U.S. to supply MRI scanners, semiconductor fabrication and space launches, he said.

Helium shortages in the U.S. have eased somewhat since early 2024, partly thanks to additional supplies from natural gas fields, said Nicholas Fitzkee, a professor of chemistry at Mississippi State University. "But having a larger domestic supply would be valuable, because it could insulate the U.S. from geopolitical instabilities that have contributed to past helium shortages," Fitzkee told Live Science in an email.

Halfway across the globe, prospecting in Tanzania is also ongoing, with two exploration companies currently reporting helium levels of 5.5% and 2.46% at different ends of the Rukwa Rift Basin. Called Helium One Global and Noble Helium, these companies are still in the early phases of exploration, Gluyas said.

"Both Helium One and Noble Helium have successfully shown elevated concentrations of helium in the wells they've drilled," he said. But these wells don't provide a clear picture of the reservoir yet, and the reservoir may not end up fulfilling researchers' expectations.

"They could speculate, based upon the seismic information, what the geometry of the accumulation might be, but they haven't yet drilled sufficient wells to say, 'It really is that,'" Gluyas said.

Beyond Tanzania, there may be opportunities for helium exploration in India's Bakreswar-Tantloi geothermal area, which is located in the east of the country and straddles the states of West Bengal and Jharkhand. The Bakreswar-Tantloi area sits on ancient granitic rocks that are rich in uranium and therefore produce helium. The region also has a fault system and a high heat gradient as a result of ongoing tectonic activity along the Son-Narmada-Tapti rift zone, research suggests.

Closer to home, researchers are analyzing the conditions for potential helium accumulations beneath and around Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone is rooted in the Wyoming Craton, a prehistoric region of crust and upper mantle that contains 3.5 billion-year-old rocks known to produce huge quantities of helium. Thanks to Yellowstone's countless geothermal features and volcanic structures, helium may be accumulating in reservoirs beneath or peripheral to the park, although it's more likely that the gas is circulating and escaping into the atmosphere through a complex system of natural pipes.

"What's happened over the millions or hundreds of millions of years in the area in which Yellowstone occurs is that helium has been building up, and now in the last [roughly] 5 million years, the supervolcano beneath is flushing it out," Gluyas explained.

That means the chances of extracting this helium are remote, not least because of the scorching temperatures of up to 275 F (135 C) that drillers would encounter belowground. "Will your drilling equipment survive? Almost certainly not," Gluyas said.

But beyond Yellowstone, it's important for existing hydrocarbon-free helium projects to complete their evaluations and start selling the gas as soon as possible, Gluyas said. "There is a huge need for helium," he said.

However, Fitzkee sees another way forward — rolling out technologies that can recycle or lower our helium consumption. That could be through installing helium recovery systems or engineering room-temperature alternatives to current helium-hungry technologies, he added.

Topping up our helium supply is a good stopgap solution, but not a permanent fix, he argued.

"Ultimately, we cannot mine our way out of future helium shortages," he said. "Helium is non-renewable, and we have no easy way to make more at scale."

The bubonic plague pandemic, more commonly known as the Black Death, reached Europe in 1347 and quickly affected Italian port cities. The plague then spread throughout Europe over the next few years, resulting in the deaths of between 30% and 60% of the population.

Martin Bauch, a historian at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe in Germany, told Live Science in an email that one very specific aspect of the plague pandemic intrigued him: "How and why did the Black Death reach Italy from the Black Sea at precisely this moment?"

To answer this question, Bauch and Ulf Büntgen, a geographer at the University of Cambridge, investigated climate-driven changes in the Mediterranean that could explain the sudden appearance of the Black Death in 1347. Their research was published Thursday (Dec. 4) in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

When combing through contemporaneous historical accounts, the researchers noticed reports of reduced sunshine, increased cloudiness and a dark lunar eclipse, all independently reported by observers in parts of Asia and Europe between 1345 and 1349. All of these astronomical and weather phenomena could be attributed to a large-scale volcanic aerosol layer, which has been known to cause cold spells as the sulfate aerosols reflect sunlight back into space.

Paleoclimate data gave the researchers a clue: High amounts of sulfur in polar ice cores suggested one or more eruptions of a previously unknown volcano around 1345.

"We cannot say very much about the volcanic eruption," Bauch said. "From the ice cores, we know that the eruption must have taken place in the tropics, because sulfate was found in similar concentrations in the ice of both the North and South Poles."

The researchers also looked at tree-ring data from around Europe and discovered that the summers of 1345, 1346 and 1347 were much colder than normal while the autumns were much wetter, causing soil erosion and flooding. Historical records also confirmed that changes in the environment had decreased the yield of a number of crops, including the grape harvest and grain production in Italy, requiring merchants to begin importing products from the Black Sea area to prevent famine.

"Upon return in the second half of 1347 CE, the Italian trade fleets, however, not only brought grain back to the Mediterranean harbours, but also carried the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis most likely via fleas that were feeding on grain dust during their long journey," the researchers wrote in the study.

The first cases of plague in humans were reported in Venice just a few weeks after the arrival of the last grain ships. "This initiates the typical infection cycle," Bauch said. "Rodent populations are infected first; once they die off, the fleas shift to other mammals and ultimately to humans."

Importing grain after several years' worth of volcano-induced climate change therefore prevented a Mediterranean-wide famine but also introduced the Black Death into Europe, the study authors proposed.

"This study brings in new information on the 1345 volcano, which helps explain why the Black Death — that is, the epidemic well-documented in sources from 1346 to 1350 — happened when it did," Monica H. Green, an independent scholar and expert on the Black Death who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. "But it happened how it did — with a 'plague infrastructure' of rodents and insect vectors already established — because local reservoirs had already been established."

The onset of the Black Death resulted from a unique-but-random combination of short-term factors, like climate, and long-term factors, like the grain distribution system in Italy, the researchers wrote in the study.

Even though the Black Death resulted from a rare confluence of environmental and social factors, it's important to gain a better understanding of the causes of past pandemics, the researchers wrote, because "the probability of zoonotic infectious diseases to emerge and translate into pandemics is likely to increase in both a globalised and warmer world."

This is the first time that researchers have compared what would happen to Europe's summer precipitation under different climate scenarios if the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) were to collapse.

The AMOC is a major ocean current system in the Atlantic Ocean that brings heat from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern Hemisphere and helps regulate the climate globally. Scientists have previously warned that human-linked climate change is weakening the massive current system and could be pushing it to a tipping point. (Tipping points are thresholds in Earth's climate system.)

"The AMOC actually shapes our global climate system," René van Westen, lead author on the new paper and a postdoctoral researcher in marine and atmospheric science at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, told Live Science.

These currents are why northwestern Europe has a relatively mild climate compared with southern Canada, which is at the same latitude, he said. An AMOC collapse is expected to result in much colder winter temperatures across Europe. But the AMOC also brings a lot of moisture to the continent. "The climate over Europe is both influenced by temperature, but also precipitation," van Westen said.

In the new study, the researchers ran eight simulations that extended over more than 1,000 years. Four simulations mimicked pre-industrial greenhouse gas levels, but these were theoretical because the world has already surpassed these atmospheric carbon levels.

Of the remaining four, two simulations looked at what would happen to precipitation if humanity's carbon emissions peaked in the middle of this century and then started to decline (known as RCP4.5) and small or large amounts of fresh water flooded the Atlantic Ocean.

When large quantities of fresh water flood the ocean (from melting icecaps, for example), it changes the water's salinity, density and how the water transports energy. In the RCP4.5 models, a large quantity of fresh water ultimately collapsed the AMOC, while it recovered if there was a smaller amount of fresh water.

The final two simulations modeled a high-emissions scenario, in which carbon emissions are three times higher than they are now (known as RCP8.5). The AMOC collapsed in both freshwater scenarios.

Van Westen said that two RCP4.5 options are the most realistic of the eight scenarios. "Under climate change, you're getting more evaporation and your dry season becomes drier," which is already widely known, he said. "If you add AMOC collapse on top of that, you're going to get more drought extremes."

Over the whole of Europe, dry season intensity, or the difference between how much water evaporates off the land and how much precipitation there is), increases by 8% in an RCP4.5 scenario with the AMOC still intact. But if it collapses, that intensity increases by 28%.

There is also a significant contrast between northern and southern Europe. For example, in Sweden, the dry season increases by 54% with the AMOC and 72% without the AMOC. Spain, which is already struggling with extreme drought, will see its dry season increase by 40% with AMOC and 60% without it.

These different scenarios reflect stable climates, rather than the current situation in which global temperatures are rapidly warming. "We're interested in what the mean responses are with different kinds of AMOC states in the background," van Westen said.

Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist at the University of Leipzig in Germany, welcomed the analysis of the stable state of future climates. "The beauty of these simulations is that they look at hundreds of years after everything has changed," he told Live Science.

"The transient scenario where we plan for the next 100 years is different to an equilibrium scenario. Just because we get much drier conditions in the next 50 or 100 years doesn't mean it's going to stay like this forever, depending on the scenario," he said.

The long-term view of stable conditions makes this paper "very exciting and interesting, because it gives us so much more to work with," he added.

However, Jon Robson, a professor of climate science with National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, U.K. who was not involved in the research, warned against using the study's theoretical results to predict future climates. "To get the AMOC to 'collapse' in this particular model, the authors need to add huge amounts of additional freshwater into the North Atlantic [and] that is not realistic," he told Live Science. "But it could be taken as a warning about what might be possible under the rather extreme scenario of an AMOC 'collapse'."

The overall message is clear, Stefan Rahmstorf, co-head of the research department on Earth system analysis at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, told Live Science.

"The increasing drought problems expected in any case due to global warming would be made even worse by a major AMOC weakening, and the latter looks increasingly likely," said Rahmstorf, who was not involved in the study.

"If the AMOC shuts down, this would have consequences for at least a thousand years to come — a huge responsibility for the decision makers of today."

Between 2001 and 2020, changes in vegetation cover reduced the amount of fresh water available for humans and ecosystems in the eastern monsoon region and northwestern arid region, which together make up 74% of China's land area, according to a study published Oct. 4 in the journal Earth's Future. Over the same period, water availability increased in China's Tibetan Plateau region, which makes up the remaining land area, scientists found.

"We find that land cover changes redistribute water," study co-author Arie Staal, an assistant professor of ecosystem resilience at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, told Live Science in an email. "China has done massive-scale regreening over the past decades. They have actively restored thriving ecosystems, specifically in the Loess Plateau. This has also reactivated the water cycle."

Three main processes move water between Earth's continents and the atmosphere: evaporation and transpiration carry water up, while precipitation drops it back down. Evaporation removes water from surfaces and soils, and transpiration removes water that plants have absorbed from the soil. Together, these processes are called evapotranspiration, and this fluctuates with plant cover, water availability and the amount of solar energy that reaches the land, Staal said.

"Both grassland and forests generally tend to increase evapotranspiration," he said. "This is especially strong in forests, as trees can have deep roots that access water in dry moments."

China's biggest tree-planting effort is the Great Green Wall in the country's arid and semi-arid north. Started in 1978, the Great Green Wall was created to slow the expansion of deserts. Over the last five decades, it has helped grow forest cover from about 10% of China's area in 1949 to more than 25% today — an area equivalent to the size of Algeria. Last year, government representatives announced the country had finished encircling its biggest desert with vegetation, but that it will continue planting trees to keep desertification in check.

Other large regreening projects in China include the Grain for Green Program and the Natural Forest Protection Program, which both started in 1999. The Grain for Green Program incentivizes farmers to convert farmland into forest and grassland, while the Natural Forest Protection Program bans logging in primary forests and promotes afforestation.

Collectively, China's ecosystem restoration initiatives account for 25% of the global net increase in leaf area between 2000 and 2017.

But regreening has dramatically changed China's water cycle, boosting both evapotranspiration and precipitation. To investigate these impacts, the researchers used high-resolution evapotranspiration, precipitation and land-use change data from various sources, as well as an atmospheric moisture tracking model.

The results showed that evapotranspiration increased more overall than precipitation did, meaning some water was lost to the atmosphere, Staal said. However, the trend wasn't consistent across China, because winds can transport water up to 4,350 miles (7,000 kilometers) away from its source — meaning evapotranspiration in one place often affects precipitation in another.

The researchers found that forest expansion in China's eastern monsoon region and grassland restoration in the rest of the country increased evapotranspiration, but precipitation only increased in the Tibetan Plateau region, so the other regions experienced a decline in water availability.

"Even though the water cycle is more active, at local scales more water is lost than before," Staal said.

This has important implications for water management, because China's water is already unevenly distributed. The north has about 20% of the country's water but is home to 46% of the population and 60% of the arable land, according to the study. The Chinese government is trying to address this; however, the measures will likely fail if water redistribution due to regreening isn't taken into account, Staal and his colleagues argued.

Ecosystem restoration and afforestation in other countries could be affecting water cycles there, too. "From a water resources point of view, we need to see case-by-case whether certain land cover changes are beneficial or not," Staal said. "It depends among other things on how much and where the water that goes into the atmosphere comes down again as precipitation."

According to U.S. Weather Bureau data, the air temperature at Greenland Ranch in Death Valley reached a scorching 134 degrees Fahrenheit (56.7 degrees Celsius) on July 10, 1913. This is still the highest air temperature on record, but its authenticity has been debated by meteorologists and climatologists, because — despite global warming — temperatures in the region have rarely reached 130 F (54.4 C) since 1913.

"I, along with many meteorologists and climatologists, have been quietly skeptical of the Death Valley world record our entire careers," Roy Spencer, a meteorologist and principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who recently led a study about Death Valley's world record status, told Live Science in an email.

For the study, Spencer and his colleagues analyzed July temperatures recorded at stations within 155 miles (250 kilometers) of Greenland Ranch between 1923 and 2024. The stations were 3,000 to 3,700 feet (910 to 1,130 meters) above sea level while Greenland Ranch is 178 feet (54 m) below sea level, so the researchers adjusted the data for elevation. (These were the closest stations to the ranch and provided the most reliable long-term data.) The team then compared the values and examined high-elevation July temperatures from 1913 to estimate the temperature at Greenland Ranch on that day.

They found that the air temperature at Greenland Ranch on July 10, 1913 was about 120 F (48.9 C), nowhere near 134 F. "The unusually hot temperatures measured at Greenland Ranch in early July 1913 are shown to be inconsistent with temperatures at surrounding stations," they wrote in the study, published Sept. 24 in the journal Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Many scientists were previously skeptical about Death Valley's temperature record but few really questioned it because the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) accepted it and observations from the early 1900s with which to scrutinize the Greenland Ranch data were scarce, Spencer said.

"All deserts are hot in the summer, but Death Valley is especially hot because it is below sea level," he said. "The Death Valley record has more entertainment than climatological value, with an element of 'bragging rights' from the standpoint of tourism."

The U.S. Weather Bureau installed a station to measure temperatures at Greenland Ranch in 1911. The shelter was initially placed on the edge of an irrigated alfalfa field, but subsequent photographs suggest the ranch foreman, Oscar Denton, moved it to a hotter site above bare ground without official approval or documentation, according to the study.

Denton may have done this because ranch employees were used to measuring hotter temperatures on the ranch veranda than the station was recording and he wanted their experience to be reflected in the data, the researchers wrote. The veranda had a double roof, which may have vented hot air onto the veranda, they noted.

"While the station move away from the irrigated field would not explain the excessively hot temperature measurements, especially those in the first two weeks of July 1913, they support a pattern of straying from proper observing protocol," they wrote.

Denton may have also substituted some of the station's measurements for thermometer values on the veranda, Spencer said. "Newspaper, magazine, book accounts, and even correspondence with the Weather Bureau in San Francisco from back then show that 135 deg. F or hotter temperatures were made from that veranda using one or more thermometers of unknown provenance," he said.

The findings suggest Death Valley's world record should be rescinded, although temperatures of 130 F recorded in 2020 and 2021 might help the valley keep it, Spencer said. The period from July 2 to 18, 1913 and other years in the record also show anomalously high temperatures that should be scrutinized, the researchers noted in the study.

"I would support further investigation into this by the WMO and NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information," said Dan McEvoy, an associate research professor of climatology at the Desert Research Institute who was not involved in the study.

The true story behind the value recorded on July 10, 1913 may never be known, but the study's conclusion that 134 F is incorrect is convincing and based on solid historical evidence, McEvoy told Live Science in an email.

"They are sampling from many surrounding stations, not just cherry picking one location," he said.

This intriguing astronaut photo shows a trio of ancient "black mesas", which sit side-by-side in the Sahara desert. The dark structures have enabled a series of rare sand dunes to form around them while also creating a surprising "dune-free zone."

The three mesas, or flat-topped hills, are located around 8 miles (13 kilometers) northwest of the town of Guérou in southern Mauritania, which is home to around 22,000 people. The mesas are made from sandstone and rise steeply above the surrounding plains, reaching between 1,000 and 1,300 feet (300 and 400 meters) above the ground. The largest of the trio is approximately 6 miles (9.5 km) across at its widest point, while a fourth mesa is located just north of the trio, but is positioned just out of frame.

The dark color of these circular hills is the result of "rock varnish" — a black, clay-based coating, rich in manganese and iron oxides, that forms on exposed and arid rocks over thousands of years, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. This coating was likely partly fixed in place by microorganisms and is made up of multiple micrometer-thick laminations, according to Science Direct.

To the west of the mesas (on the left of the photo) is a barren rocky plain with a surprising lack of sand dunes. But to the east of the flattened hills, you can see several sizable dunes that are seemingly flowing away from the black rocks like a rippling tail.

There are two main types of sand dunes visible in the image. The first type are rare "climbing dunes," which are the larger, ridge-like piles of sand that have piled up along the mesas' eastern walls. The second type are "barchan dunes," which are more common and make up the mesas' stripy tail. In both cases, the dunes have a distinctive reddish-yellow hue.

The sand dunes only form on the eastern side of the mesas because the wind predominantly blows from that direction, carrying sand that then gets caught on the sloped elevations surrounding the black rocks.

Sand does not accumulate to the west of the mesas because of a phenomenon known as "wind scour," which results from superfast vortices within the wind that gets squeezed in between the mesas, which blow sand away from the flattened hills, according to the Earth Observatory.

Another astronaut photo, taken in 2014, shows this odd effect over a larger area (see below). In this shot, you can see the barchan dunes extend much further away from the mesas in the photo, as well as another larger mesa further east.

During the Paleozoic era, which lasted from 541 million to 251.9 million years ago, all these mesas were likely part of a single massive rock formation that has since been broken up by millennia of water and wind erosion, according to the Earth Observatory.

This formation may have been similar to the Richat Structure — a massive set of concentric rings of rock, also known as the "Eye of the Sahara," which is located in Mauritania around 285 miles (460 km) north of Guérou.

Mesas can be found across the globe but there is a particularly high concentration of them in the Sahara, as well as throughout parts of the U.S., such as Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona, according to the National Park Service.

Elsewhere in the solar system, mesas are a prominent geological feature on Mars, having been carved out of the Red Planet by billions of years of wind erosion, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

For more incredible satellite photos and astronaut images, check out our Earth from space archives.

Researchers wanted to predict how the changing behavior of hurricanes — they are expected to become more frequent and more intense — and sea level rise as a result of climate change will alter the risks of flooding in the region over the next several decades.

Their results were sobering. "By the end of this century, the flood hazard is going to go up tremendously," study lead author Amirhosein Begmohammadi, a civil engineer who worked on the project during his postdoctoral research at Princeton University, told Live Science. To predict the risk of flooding under different carbon emission scenarios, Begmohammadi and his colleagues developed a computer model to generate a series of synthetic storms and included predictions for sea level rise.

The researchers also adjusted their model to take into account the angle at which storms hit the coast. Most hurricanes that affect the northeast move parallel to the coast, but some, like Hurricane Sandy in 2012, hit it head-on, and can cause much more damage. "Those are extreme but rare," Begmohammadi said.

The model predicts that both sea level rise and changing storm features could make extreme flood events more frequent. Historical 100-year coastal flooding could happen every year by the end of the century, while historical 500-year floods may come every 1 to 60 years under a moderate carbon emissions scenario, and every 1 to 20 years under higher emissions. In more northern areas like Connecticut and New York, sea level rise may be the main driver of the increased flood risk, while storm changes are less important. Further south, in areas like New Jersey and Virginia, both factors may contribute significantly to higher flood risks.

The findings were published Nov. 7 in the journal Earth's Future.

Jeff Ollerhead, a coastal geomorphologist at Mount Allison University in Sackville, Canada, said that the study highlights how scientific uncertainty is the least important variable in predicting future climate risks. Ollerhead, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science that the majority of the variation in models comes from the "social uncertainty" of not knowing what emissions pathway the world will go down. "We don't know what people are going to do," he said, referring to how political leaders will respond to the climate crisis. "That's the biggest uncertainty."

The new study focused on the strength and frequency of hurricanes. For the more northern stretch of the coast, said Ollerhead, the impact of sea level rise means it almost won't matter if storms become more powerful because even smaller storms will be able to cause extensive flooding. So even if the frequency and power of storms remains roughly the same, the effect of each storm will increase as sea levels continue to rise.

Hurricane Fiona, which hit Ollerhead's region of Atlantic Canada in 2022, had storm surges of close to 6.5 feet (2 meters). But if sea levels rise by 3.3 feet (1 m) over the next 50 years or so, then a storm just half as powerful could cause similar damage. "It will take much smaller events to put water in your back yard," he said. "And they might happen every couple of years."

To prepare for this new reality, people living near the coast will have to adapt to more frequent flooding. The best defence, said Ollerhead, is to move up and back — to higher ground further from the coast. But not every community will be willing or able to do so, and it will be important to update building codes to take into account the changing conditions.

"People who design for resilience do so using the 100-year events, but they're not designing for the future changes,” said Begmohammadi. "A 100-year event now is not the same as one in the future."

Now consider that the expansive Southern Ocean, which wraps around Antarctica, could one day do much the same thing. Since the Industrial Revolution kicked off, humans have dialed up the kettle to its max, adding extraordinary amounts of heat into the atmosphere, more than 90 percent of which has been absorbed by the sea. (It's also taken up a quarter of our CO₂ emissions.) Under climate change, the Southern Ocean has been storing warmth which, like your morning jolt, can't stay there forever, and will someday return to the atmosphere.

New modeling suggests that this "burp" of heat — the scientists called it that, by the way — could be abrupt. In a scenario where humanity eventually reduces its greenhouse gas emissions and then goes "net negative," finding ways to remove those planet-warming pollutants from the atmosphere, global temperatures fall. But suddenly the Southern Ocean belches its accumulated heat, leading to a rate of planetary warming similar to what humanity is causing right now. And the thermal burping would continue for at least a century.

Put another way: According to this modeling, at least, humans figure out a way to reverse climate change, only to see the Southern Ocean essentially restart it. While there would be nothing our descendants could do to stop this — since the warming would be driven by already stored heat — the calculations are yet another urgent call to reduce that pollution as quickly and dramatically as possible.

This sudden eructation is not a sure thing, however — it's the prediction of a model. But it's a step toward understanding how the planet could respond as humans continue to manipulate the climate, both warming and cooling it. "The question is: How will the climate system, and specifically the ocean, react to scenarios where we remove CO₂ from the atmosphere, and when we have a net global cooling effect?" said Svenja Frey, an oceanography PhD student at Germany's GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and coauthor of the paper.

The Southern Ocean may encircle the frozen continent of Antarctica, but it's very effective at storing heat: It alone holds around 80 percent of the warmth that's taken up by all the oceans. Some of this comes from currents that transport relatively toasty waters south, but also lots of upwelling in the Southern Ocean brings cold water to the surface to be warmed up.

The skies above the Southern Ocean are also somewhat less reflective than elsewhere around the globe. Cargo ships and industries in the Northern Hemisphere spew air pollution in the form of aerosols, which themselves bounce solar energy back into the cosmos and help brighten clouds, which reflect still more. That cooling phenomenon has vied, in a sense, with the warming that's come from the burning of fossil fuels. "That competition hasn't been as prevalent over the Southern Hemisphere, because it's this slightly more pristine atmosphere," said Ric Williams, an ocean and climate scientist at the University of Liverpool, who studies the Southern Ocean but wasn't involved in the paper.

In the scenario the researchers modeled, the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ increases by 1 percent every year until the total amount is double what the planet had before the Industrial Revolution. Then negative emissions technologies reduce the carbon concentration by 0.1 percent annually. (The study didn't look a specific techniques, but one option is direct air capture of CO₂, though this remains expensive and limited in scale.) In response, the atmosphere, land, and oceans cool.

But something starts brewing in the Southern Ocean. Its surface becomes colder, but also saltier due to the formation of new sea ice: When sea water freezes, it rejects its salt, which is then absorbed into the surrounding waters and makes the surface layer heavier. "At the same time, we have these warm, deeper waters," Frey said. "At some point, the water column becomes unstable, and that's when we have the deep convection event."

In other words, a burp. It's just one way that our planet's extraordinarily complex and intertwining systems might respond to rising and falling emissions in the centuries ahead. "There's very large uncertainty in the Earth system response to net-negative emissions — we don't understand that very well," said Simon Fraser University climate scientist Kirsten Zickfeld, who studies these dynamics but wasn't involved in the new paper. "We may well encounter surprises along the way, as this paper shows."

To be clear, in this scenario, removing atmospheric carbon significantly reduces global temperatures, even factoring in the burp. And the faster we move away from fossil fuels, the less CO₂ we'll have to remove down the line. "Doing negative emissions and reducing our carbon load in the atmosphere is a good thing," Williams said. "I would just add that, rather than do negative emissions, it's better not to do the positive emissions in the first place."

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

In August 2025 more than 2,600 participants from United Nations Member States gathered — for the fifth time — to negotiate a deal to end plastic pollution, but failed to bridge fundamental divides over binding versus voluntary measures. Nations with a vested interest in oil and plastics production that call themselves the "like-minded group" insist that the treaty cover only plastic recycling and consumption and oppose curbs on production.

Clearly, the problem of plastic pollution in land and marine environments isn't going away. This series looks at some approaches to dealing with it, starting with the development of alternative materials.

We constantly see images of unsightly plastic pollution — rivers clogged with floating rafts of debris so dense you can't see the water, beaches piled with plastic trash rendering them unfit for even walking on, plastic bags fluttering from roadside vegetation. Aesthetics alone make a compelling case that something must be done.

But unsightliness is the least of many problems with plastic pollution.

In a paper published July 2025 in the journal Nature, scientists presented an inventory of 16,325 known plastic chemicals and identified more than 4,200 as chemicals of concern — meaning they're toxic, do not naturally break down in the environment, or accumulate in organisms. Released throughout the plastic life cycle, these chemicals constantly expose people and environments, often with serious consequences.

These chemicals are intentionally or unintentionally added across the plastics life cycle, from extraction of raw materials to end of life, says Susanne Brander, associate professor in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences at Oregon State University's Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station.

"There is no way to predict how many chemicals are in an individual plastic item," she says. "The biggest take-home is that it's not like there is one type of plastic that is safe. All have these mixes that are potentially problematic." Only 6% of all plastic chemicals are regulated internationally, and about 1,000 are subject to national regulations.

Once out in the world, plastic physically breaks down into ever smaller particles. Pieces less than 5 millimeters across, called microplastics, have long been recognized as the prevalent form of plastic pollution in marine and coastal environments. Toxic and endocrine-disrupting chemical substances adhere to the surface of microplastics, a process known as adsorption. Marine birds and plankton-eating organisms such as fish and corals ingest microplastics and introduce these chemicals into the food chain. Recent studies have found microplastics in human organs and tissues, with effects including cell aging, changing gene expression, increasing oxidative stress, and inflammation.

Now researchers report that nanoplastics are present in the ocean in amounts comparable to microplastics. Nanoplastic particles have diameters less than one micrometer (a human hair is about 100 micrometers thick). The uppermost layer of the North Atlantic contains an estimated 27 million metric tons (almost 30 million U.S. tons) of these particles.

At this smaller size, materials behave differently. Lacking buoyancy, particles may "rain" down into ocean depths. They can cross cell barriers in the human lung and intestine and may affect biological systems at the cellular or even molecular level.

Making a better plastic

An oft-floated solution to plastic pollution involves making the materials biodegradable — meaning they are naturally broken down by organisms like bacteria or fungi into water, carbon dioxide and biomass, such as soil. The rate at which this happens depends on the type and number of organisms and factors like temperature, light, and exposure to air. "Compostable" refers to materials that biodegrade relatively quickly under specific, human-driven conditions.

The current draft of a proposed United Nations global plastic treaty suggests making plastics biodegradable as much as possible. The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recommends redesigning plastic products using principles of green chemistry and engineering.

But this must be done correctly, stress the authors of a June 2025 letter in the journal Science. Most current "biodegradable" plastics are composites of bio-resourced materials — natural materials like wood and other fibers — and petrochemical-based materials. The letter points to research showing that when these materials weather they release potentially harmful chemicals into the environment. Those include terephthalic acid and bisphenol A, which have been shown to cause genetic, reproductive, and immune disruption.

Developers of biodegradable plastics, the letter goes on, must identify how these toxic ingredients degrade and design the materials for controlled and complete degradation.

Other scientists, including Brander, have urged phasing toxic chemicals out of plastic production altogether.

Another issue is the difficulty of separating the individual components in fossil-fuel based composite materials. As a result, most items made from them are landfilled or incinerated at the end of their service life rather than recycled or composted. Scientists note that changing the design and choice of materials could help address that.

But there also can be issues with the source of the "bio" side of these materials.

One, polylactic acid (PLA), is made from corn or sugarcane. The Plastic Pollution Coalition reports that these feedstocks often require intensive agricultural practices, contributing to problems such as deforestation and water pollution. Bioplastics make up only 1% of global plastics but require about 800,000 hectares (nearly 2 million acres) of arable land. Further, these materials typically are produced and manufactured in industrial facilities that run on fossil fuel.

Cellulose diacetate (CDA) is a bioplastic made from wood pulp treated with acetic acid, already used in consumer goods like straws and food wrappers. Research presented at a 2009 workshop on microplastic marine debris hosted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggested that very little CDA-based material biodegraded in marine environments. However, subsequent studies have showed that microbes can break it down in soil, wastewater, and the ocean.

Brander points out that testing of biobased plastics shows they break down into micro- and nanoparticles just like other plastics and can contain the same chemical mixtures. She adds that the way scientists test the degradation of these materials can be problematic.

"When I read papers about how about how [a material] breaks down completely, those claims often bear out in the lab," she says. "But in the real world, there may not be the right temperature or conditions. We need to think about conditions beyond the lab."

Scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts recently did just that, using a tank of continuously flowing seawater from Martha's Vineyard Sound — which replenished natural microbes and nutrients — and controlling variables like temperature and light to mimic the natural coastal marine environment.

They tested foamed and solid CDA in this setup for several months and found that the foam version degrades much faster, according to Collin Ward, a marine chemist at WHOI and senior author on the paper.

"Foaming the material makes more surfaces for microbes to attach to, which accelerates degradation," Ward says. Microbes turn the material into food, creating carbon dioxide and water as byproducts.

The work focused on conditions in the coastal ocean, as that is where much plastic ends up, but the material also biodegraded in other conditions.

"It's a promising technology," Ward says. "CDA won't replace every piece of Styrofoam used, but it is a priority to find alternatives for materials highly leaked into the environment." His paper reports that about 15% of all plastic collected in beach surveys globally in 2022 was plastic foam take-out containers.

CDA still has drawbacks, though. Like other forms of plastic, its production is often energy-intensive and generates chemical waste. Applying the principles of green chemistry and engineering to CDA manufacturing could partly address these issues.

The source of the cellulose also is a potential drawback to CDA, just as with PLA. One way to minimize that problem would be for manufacturers to sustainably source wood pulp through programs such as the Forest Stewardship Council Chain of Custody certification. Using materials such as industrial or food waste or feedstock produced on marginal agricultural land also would be more sustainable.

Cost may be CDA's main drawback.

"The CDA material costs more to make than plastic," Ward says. "Consumers have to decide whether they want to keep the status quo of normalized plastic pollution or are willing to invest in technologies to reduce the amount."

Of course, plastic pollution itself has a cost, and healthy ecosystems have economic value. According to Ward, economic analyses show significant savings from switching to material that doesn't persist as pollution. One study estimates that diverting plastic packaging material that currently ends up in the ocean would put around $80 to $120 billion back into the global economy.

Any alternative plastic has a significant drawback, though: perpetuating the concept of single-use items. Even if it degrades in weeks or months instead of decades, that is still a lot of trash piling up. Tellingly, the first recommendation of the National Academies report and a major goal of the proposed UN treaty is to reduce plastic production.

One way to do that is to focus on essential uses for plastic. Consider that the average plastic bag is used for 12 minutes.

"Do we really need to make something that is used for 12 minutes and then thrown away?" asked Brander. "Let's use plastic for things that keep people alive, versus for carrying groceries."

Individuals and businesses reducing their demand for single-use plastic could go a long way toward solving this problem.

And there is still hope for the treaty, Brander says, with new delegates and a new chair in place. An editorial in Science suggests an alternative negotiating process, perhaps led by a convener other than the UN. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), for example, initiated and facilitated the process 50 years ago that led to the international treaty known as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

But whatever happens with the treaty, and wherever design and engineering take plastics in the future, solving plastic pollution will take effort, Brander stresses. "There is not a quick fix where we can maintain this lifestyle without an impact."

This story was originally published by The Revelator.

Recognizing that climate change is immediate, close, and affecting people's way of life is one of the key messages we need to communicate to spur them to act.

Despite efforts from bad faith actors trying to spread misinformation and disinformation, the public overwhelmingly accepts that much more urgently needs to be done to address climate change. But in order to meaningfully limit warming, we need to enact policies that will alter the lives of billions of people.

And this needs to begin with individual action — getting people to care enough to alter their behavior around climate change. If enough people realize that climate change will affect them personally and start engaging on an individual level, we might see a turn in the political tide that ends with the real, large-scale changes needed to limit rising global temperatures.

In the social satire fiction film Don't Look Up, two astronomers are tasked with telling the world that a comet twice the size of the dinosaur-ending meteor was imminently going to hit Earth. In a tense exchange, a morning talk show host seeks to minimize the risk:

Kate Dibiasky: I'm sorry... Are we not being clear? We're trying to tell you that the entire planet is about to be destroyed.

Brie Evantee: Well it's uh, you know, it's something we do around here. We just keep the bad news light.

The film was widely praised for satirizing responses to the global climate crisis, including from climate scientist Peter Kalmus. We wanted to find out if there are ways we can present information about climate change that lifts people into action, rather than keeping the "bad news" at arms length.

Getting people to act

We recruited more than 3,000 participants across six countries to see what would make them more or less motivated to help climate causes. Pro-environmental actions are often costly — incurring financial, time and physical effort. We wanted to find out how people weigh up these costs with the benefits for the planet and whether we can use psychology to spur the meaningful behavior shifts needed.

We did this by creating a physically demanding task that earned donations to a climate action charity, and compared that with a non-environmental, food cause: ending world hunger. Before doing the task, some participants saw different messages and pictures designed by psychology experts to try and boost their motivation to take climate action. One group of participants didn't see any of these messages to give us a baseline measure.

Interestingly, the participants who didn't see any of the pro-environment messages were more likely to make an effort for the food cause than the climate. This finding was relatively consistent across the six countries we worked with: Bulgaria, Greece, Nigeria, Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S..

We then tested which of the messages promoted pro-climate behaviors.

What worked well:

Psychological distance: Climate change was presented as an immediate, local threat, and participants reflected on how it affects them personally.

System justification: Climate change was presented as a threat to participants' way of life and encouraged pro-environmental behaviour as patriotic.

What didn't work so well:

Scientific consensus: Participants saw a message and graphic emphasizing that 99% of climate scientists agree climate change is real and caused by humans.

Binding moral foundations: Participants read a message invoking national pride, loyalty, and authority to support clean energy and climate action.

It's personal

The findings confirm some things that we know to be true about human behavior. It's the same reason why people have a greater connection to news that is local to their area, or to their interests. When it's personal, when it's close, when it affects our usual way of life, it lands.

To better motivate people to take climate action now, our new study suggests that closing the psychological distance between individuals and the generalized, vague threat of climate change affecting the world at large is among the most motivating factors we need to employ.

When rising water levels affect another country, the uncomfortable truth is that our brains are wired to take the threat less seriously because it affects another group of people that we aren't as well connected to. However, if it affects people or places that we know and love, it makes it personal and closer to home.

People are also motivated to protect their status quo and current way of life. Sometimes this can be a barrier against changing our behavior. But we found flipping this psychology can motivate action. When rising water levels increase the risk that our property is going to be flooded — because events that were previously likely to happen once in 100 years are increasingly common — to protect our way of life requires us to take action, rather than do nothing.

When the once in 100-year flood has happened for the third time in as many years and water is pouring under the door, it is personal and it's at home.

We know addressing climate change will require systemic change from governments and business. But we need to start somewhere, and getting people to see the changes happening around them may just be a small step that leads to major shifts. Our homes are all at risk if we don't try.

Opinion on Live Science gives you insight on the most important issues in science that affect you and the world around you today, written by experts and leading scientists in their field.

The eye-catching image is remarkably reminiscent of another photo, taken in March 2023, which captured a near-identical red ring that briefly appeared over the same place.

Nature photographer Valter Binotto captured both of the rings over Possagno, a small town of around 2,200 people in northern Italy. The latest luminous halo was snapped on Nov. 17 at around 10:45 p.m. local time, and it appears to be slightly fainter than the one from two and a half years ago.

The red rings are actually examples of a rare lightning-related phenomenon dubbed "emission of light and very low-frequency perturbations due to electromagnetic pulse sources," or ELVEs, which occur during particularly intense thunderstorms, Spaceweather.com reported.

People rarely notice ELVEs because they are almost impossible to see with the naked eye. They flash in the sky for around one thousandth of a second, which is around 100 times quicker than it takes to blink. Therefore, photographers like Binotto either have to get really lucky or come equipped with special devices attached to their cameras to spot them.

ELVEs form when powerful lightning bolts shoot electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) up toward space, where they collide with the ionosphere — the ionized part of the upper atmosphere that stretches between 50 and 400 miles (80 and 644 kilometers) above the ground. Once there, they excite nitrogen molecules, which briefly give off red light, similar to how auroras form. (Although red auroras are the result of oxygen, not nitrogen.)

"The red ring marks the spot where the EMP hit Earth's ionosphere," Binotto told Spaceweather.com. In this case, the EMP was released by a lightning bolt with an electrical current of approximately 303 kilo-amperes, which is between 10 and 30 times higher than an average thunderstorm discharge, he added.

Given the rarity of ELVEs, which were discovered only in the 1990s from photos taken by NASA's space shuttles, you may be wondering what is so special about Possagno that causes these rings to appear there so often. And the answer is: nothing.

Instead, these photos are merely the result of Binotto's skill and experience in photographing ELVEs, and it is only a coincidence that he happened to take them both from the same place.

ELVEs are massive and appear high up in the atmosphere, meaning that they can be photographed from anywhere within a radius spanning hundreds of miles. In the latest photo, for example, the ELVE resulted from a thunderstorm near Vernazza, around 185 miles (300 km) south of Possagno. The 2023 ring was triggered by a storm near Ancona, around 174 miles (280 km) southeast of the northern town (see below).

The latest red halo likely spanned around 125 miles (200 km) across and appeared at an altitude of around 60 miles (100 km) above the ground, according to Spaceweather.com.

ELVEs, sprites and gigantic jets

ELVES are just one of several rare optical phenomena that are collectively known as transient luminous events (TLEs), which are all linked to specific types of lightning strikes.

Other TLEs include red "jellyfish" sprites, made of zig-zagging plasma tendrils that streak through the ionosphere, and upward-shooting "gigantic jets," which are towering blue-colored lights that can often be seen from space.

The electrical fields of ELVEs can also act as particle accelerators, creating X-rays, relativistic electrons and "terrestrial gamma ray flashes," according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. These secondary effects pose no risk to people on the ground, but remain of great interest to scientists who can use them as a proxy for studying powerful cosmic rays.

However, it is unclear if the ELVES photographed by Binotto produced any of these effects.

Hayli Gubbi, a volcano in the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, erupted at around 8:30 a.m. UTC (3:30 a.m. EST) on Nov. 23. By 8 p.m. UTC (3 p.m. EST), the explosive phase of the eruption had stopped, according to the Toulouse Volcanic Ash Advisory Center (VAAC) in France.

This is the first time Hayli Gubbi is known to have erupted in the Holocene — the present geological epoch that began at the end of the last ice age, around 11,700 years ago. Generally, if a volcano hasn't erupted in the Holocene, it is considered extinct.

The area where the volcano sits, however, is largely understudied, so past eruptions may have gone unnoticed.

Hayli Gubbi is the southernmost volcano in the Erta Ale Range, a chain of volcanoes in the Afar region. The range is part of the East African Rift System, where a major tectonic plate that makes up most of Africa is splitting in two. Though Hayli Gubbi has lain dormant for millennia, the Erta Ale volcano from which the range takes its name has been continuously active since at least 1967.

Arianna Soldati, a volcanologist at North Carolina State University, told Scientific American: "So long as there are still the conditions for magma to form, a volcano can still have an eruption even if it hasn’t had one in 1,000 years, 10,000 years."

The ash cloud from the eruption reached at least 45,000 feet (13,700 meters) in height and initially blew northeast over Yemen and Oman. Throughout Monday (Nov. 24) the plume continued northeast, billowing across northern India and into parts of China.

The Toulouse VAAC detected the volcanic plume via satellite and issued several updates on its progress before transferring responsibility for issuing advisories to the Tokyo VAAC Monday evening. Satellites captured images of the eruption from space.

No casualties have been reported, but one local official expressed concern over the impacts of the eruption on farmers and livestock in the region.

"While no human lives and livestock have been lost so far, many villages have been covered in ash and as a result their animals have little to eat," Mohammed Seid, a local administrator, told the Associated Press.

Ahmed Abdela, a resident of the nearby village of Afdera, told the Associated Press that the eruption "felt like a sudden bomb had been thrown with smoke and ash."

Sistema Ox Bel Ha, meaning "three paths of water" in the local Mayan language, is a gigantic submerged labyrinth that runs for at least 326 miles (524 kilometers) underground, according to the Investigation Center of the Aquifer System of Quintana Roo (CINDAQ). This makes it the longest submerged system and the second-longest cave system in the world, after the 426-mile-long (686 km) Mammoth Caves in Kentucky.

The Yucatán Peninsula is home to several massive cave systems because it has a thin layer of top soil covering limestone, which is soluble, enabling rain water to quickly pass through into caverns below the surface, according to a 2020 study. This is also the reason why the region has few rivers or streams.

The caverns form through a process called karstification, in which rain water dissolves calcium carbonate from the limestone. In the case of Ox Bel Ha, this process is supercharged as the fresh water meets salt water that's entered the system from the ocean.

The fresh and salt water form distinct layers and meet at a point in the cave water called the halocline. This line varies in Ox Bel Ha, varying from 33 feet (10 meters) near the coast, where there is more salt water, to 66 feet (20 m) deep further inland. CINDAQ estimated that 27% of the system is salt water and 73% fresh water. This fresh water feeds the vast Maya aquifer, which is the only source of drinking water in the region.

The karstification process can cause cavern roofs to collapse, creating an exposed pool or sinkhole, known as a cenote. Ox Bel Ha has at least 160 cenotes, and they are important water sources for animals and ecosystems, according to CINDAQ. The organization has recently recorded a number of species around the cenotes, such as cougars (Puma concolor), jaguars (Panthera onca) and various deer and other animals.

The system also supports a range of creatures below the surface. In 2018, scientists discovered that the subterranean system supports its ecosystem with methane. Methane forms below the jungle floor and then migrates down into the caves, where microbes and bacteria consume it. These in turn become food for cave-dwelling crustaceans as well as several species of fish, including an eyeless albino cave fish.

Ox Bel Ha runs near the historical Maya town of Tulum. The ancient Maya believed that cenotes were gateways to Xibalba, the Maya underworld, and these pools, along with those of the nearby Sistema Sac Actun, have yielded a number of important archaeological finds.

Most notably, researchers found the remains of a 25- to 30-year-old woman, named Eve of Naharon, whose remains may date to 13,700 years ago — potentially making these the oldest human remains found in the Americas. However, a 2021 review noted that this date has not been replicated or verified. Evidence suggests the woman was deliberately placed on the cave floor, which wasn't flooded at that point, although this also isn't clear, a 2020 study noted.

Ox Bel Ha's system is under threat from construction and developments, including the Maya Train and Tulum International Airport, and it already runs under a number of urban areas, CINDAQ said. This makes studying and mapping the vast underwater system critically important, CINDAQ added.

Discover more incredible places, where we highlight the fantastic history and science behind some of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth

Specifically, these cracks can heal speedily after what geologists call slow slip events. This is when the deformation- and stress-induced movement between two sides of a fault occurs over days, weeks or months, rather than over seconds or, for the largest earthquakes, minutes.

Slow slip events are "silent" earthquakes in which the slip happens much more slowly and doesn't radiate the strong waves that can make regular earthquakes dangerous, said study lead author Amanda Thomas, a professor of geophysics at the University of California, Davis.

"Slow slip events and regular earthquakes can occur on the same major fault systems, but they typically happen at different depths and under different physical conditions," Thomas told Live Science in an email. "What determines whether the fault slips slowly or suddenly is the fault frictional behavior and the effective stress on the fault."

Thomas and her colleagues studied slow slip events deep in the Cascadia subduction zone, a "megafault" where the Juan de Fuca Plate slides under the North American Plate. Cascadia experiences lots of these slow slip events and has an exceptional seismic monitoring network, making it one of the best places in the world to study this phenomenon, Thomas said.

The megafault is capable of unleashing magnitude 8 and 9 earthquakes. "In subduction zones like Cascadia, large earthquakes occur in shallow, colder rocks, while slow slip happens deeper where temperatures and pressures are much higher and fluids are abundant," Thomas explained.

Cascadia's slow slip events are unusual in that they sometimes rupture the same zone repeatedly during a single event. Within just a few hours, one area of the fault can break multiple times, which suggests both that stress is reloaded quickly and that a "healing" process occurs between ruptures. "That repeated re-activation is one of the puzzles our study set out to explain," Thomas said.

The results were published Nov. 19 in the journal Science Advances.

Because the depths of Cascadia are inaccessible, the researchers re-created in the lab the conditions thought to exist deep within the subduction zone. They loaded a silver capsule with powdered quartz and a trickle of water to mimic rocks and deep fluids, respectively. The team then welded the capsule shut, heated it to about 930 degrees Fahrenheit (500 degrees Celsius), and put it under a pressure 10,000 times higher than atmospheric pressure for up to 24 hours.

Next, the researchers used electron microscopy to glean what had happened to the quartz powder. They found that the mineral grains had been welded together, even in samples that had been "cooked" for only a few hours.

"Fault healing depends strongly on temperature, pressure, and the presence of fluids," Thomas said. "In our experiments, these conditions produced measurable strengthening within hours."

Regular earthquakes typically occur in shallower regions of the crust, so it takes much longer — years to decades — for fractures to heal. "Our results suggest the same basic process can operate across the crust, but the timescales change depending on the environment," Thomas said.

The other part of the puzzle addressed in the study is how stress is reloaded so rapidly during slow slip events in Cascadia. The subduction zone experiences low-frequency earthquakes, which are small seismic events triggered in bursts when the same area ruptures again and again. These bursts overlap with ocean tide cycles, suggesting tidal changes can cause a fault to re-rupture just hours after it has repaired itself.

"In Cascadia, rapid healing means that parts of the deep fault can re-strengthen quickly enough to be re-activated multiple times during one slow slip cycle," Thomas said. "That affects how we model slow slip and how we interpret the signals we use to monitor the deep fault."

Fault healing is also an important consideration in shallower regions, including those known to cause major earthquakes. Repair processes should be included in the next generation of models, as they could improve our understanding of earthquake risks, Thomas said.