This eye-catching astronaut photo mosaic shows a rare "sunglint" transforming a snaking reservoir into a giant silver river.

The winding waterway at the heart of this image is a section of Lake Powell in southern Utah. The artifical reservoir starts around 70 miles (110 kilometers) southwest of the town of Moab and ends roughly 60 miles (100 km) northeast of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. When full, Lake Powell holds up to 1.2 billion cubic feet (33.3 million cubic meters) of water, making it the second-largest reservoir in the U.S. — close behind the nearby Lake Mead, which stretches across the Arizona-Nevada border.

Lake Powell is located on the Colorado River, inside a steep ravine known as Glen Canyon. The reservoir emerged in the 1960s, following the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam, which caused water levels to rise by around 200 feet (60 meters) over the next two decades. In addition to generating hydroelectric power, the artificial lake has become a popular tourist destination. (Lake Mead is also located along the Colorado River and was created by the construction of the Hoover Dam.)

This image mosaic, which stitches together several astronaut photos into a single image, was captured during a sunglint, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. This phenomenon occurs when sunlight bounces off a reflective surface directly into the line of sight of an observer in orbit, such as a satellite or an astronaut, giving the object a metallic, mirror-like gleam.

Normally, this effect would be visible only across a small section of the lake. But by combining photos taken as the sunglint moved along the reservoir's length, the entire body of water was illuminated.

The reservoir is named after John Wesley Powell, an explorer and former director of the U.S. Geological Survey, who mapped out Glen Canyon and other parts of the Colorado River in the late 1860s. Powell was particularly captivated by Glen Canyon, which contained a "labyrinth of overhanging cliffs, hanging gardens, sweeping river bends, and natural arches set amidst a backdrop of colorful buttes and mesas," Earth Observatory representatives wrote.

Powell later described his recollections of the canyon. "Past these towering monuments, past these mounded billows of orange sandstone, past these oak-set glens, past these fern-decked alcoves, past these mural curves, we glide hour after hour, stopping now and then, as our attention is arrested by some new wonder," Powell wrote in his 1875 book "Canyons of the Colorado."

Some of the sights that Powell marveled over still exist, including many smaller canyons that branch off the reservoir and are cast in deep shadow. A similar effect is seen in sections of Utah's Green River, a tributary of the Colorado River that has long perplexed geologists due to its ability to flow "uphill."

From above, one of the canyon's most striking geological features ‪—‬ a large, doughnut-shaped depression known as The Rincon ‪—‬ is visible as a dark ring surrounding a bend along one of the widest sections of the lake. This rusty doughnut, which is up to 3 miles (5 km) across, is a former section of the Colorado River that dried out thousands of years ago when part of the canyon collapsed, enabling water to bypass the rocky loop.

However, many of the other wonders that Powell described have been lost beneath the reservoir's elevated water level. These include a side canyon dubbed the Music Temple, which was shaped in a way that gave it remarkable acoustic properties, according to the Earth Observatory.

During periods of drought, when the reservoir's water levels temporarily drop, other lost geological treasures can be exposed. For example, in 2023, researchers found rare fossils from a mammal-like Jurassic creature lurking beneath the lake's high-water line.

In recent years, some environmental groups have petitioned to drain Lake Powell and return Glen Canyon to its former glory as the "heart of the Colorado River," according to Newsweek. Such a change may help to alleviate pressure on the rest of the river, which has lost a significant amount of water in recent decades. But experts told Newsweek that this is unlikely to happen.

See more Earth from space

On Sept. 20, the Antarctic ozone hole peaked at 10.6 million square miles (27.4 million square kilometers), the second-largest size ever observed for this time of the year.

The last time the ozone hole was this big was in October 2015, when it reached a whopping 10.8 million square miles (27.9 million square km), records from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service show. So why is the hole in the ozone layer — the shield that protects life on Earth from harmful ultraviolet solar radiation — so big this year, despite other clues telling scientists that it is recovering as expected from the damage human-made chemicals did in the 20th century?

The ozone hole's extent is due to extremely low temperatures in the stratosphere, but it's also possible that we could be seeing a new long-term trend of large, persistent holes, experts told Live Science.

"This year's ozone hole shouldn't be a cause for alarm," Hannah Kessenich, a postdoctoral physicist at the University of Otago in New Zealand who predicted the 2026 ozone hole's extent using satellite data and a computer model, told Live Science in an email. "However, there are still many unanswered questions. It's something we need to keep a close eye on."

Accurate predictions

The latest figures from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service indicate that the size of Antarctica's ozone hole has dropped to around 8.9 million square miles (23 million square km) since Sept. 20, making it unlikely that this year will break the 2015 record. However, scientists think the hole will remain large and fluctuate over the next few weeks, Kessenich said.

Antarctica's ozone hole expands every year during the Southern Hemisphere's winter and spring. It typically reaches its maximum size between mid-September and early October, when temperatures are still freezing in the stratosphere and sunlight illuminates the frozen continent for the first time after months of darkness. The hole then shrinks again until late January as surrounding ozone-rich air mixes into the depleted region.

Antarctica's ozone hole was caused by emissions of ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) between the 1930s and late 1980s. These chemicals increased concentrations of chlorine in the stratosphere, thereby promoting a reaction that depletes the ozone layer. While countries signed the Montreal Protocol to phase out CFC use beginning in 1989, major CFCs have atmospheric lifetimes of 50 to 100 years, so the hole's recovery could take six decades, researchers estimate.

The ozone layer is particularly vulnerable above Antarctica due to the frigid conditions in the polar stratosphere. Temperatures below minus 108 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 78 degrees Celsius) trigger the formation of high-altitude clouds, whose icy surfaces turn inactive chlorine into its ozone-destroying form in the presence of sunlight. These conditions don't exist to the same extent in the Arctic, because warmer air from the midlatitudes mixes more readily with cold Arctic air than with Antarctic air, thereby blocking the formation of high-altitude clouds.

Changes in the polar vortex

This year's large ozone hole is caused by a very strong polar vortex, a wall of wind that encircles Antarctica and the Southern Ocean in the winter, trapping cold air above the continent. The polar vortex created colder-than-usual conditions in the stratosphere over Antarctica, accelerating the growth of the ozone hole.

Researchers haven't detected an increase in reactive chlorine, but the colder polar vortex has triggered more ozone depletion than usual, said Susan Solomon, a professor of chemistry and environmental studies at MIT who pioneered the study of Antarctica's ozone hole in the 1980s.

This size of this year's ozone hole is most likely a product of natural variability in atmospheric dynamics, Kessenich said.

"We expect ups and downs in the size of the hole from year to year," Solomon told Live Science in an email. "A year or a few years of bigger or smaller holes doesn't tell us anything about ozone loss or recovery; it is just variability. We have to look at the longer term trends, and those metrics continue to tell us that the ozone hole is slowly recovering as expected."

It's also reassuring that the ozone hole, while large, isn't as "thin" as in years past. The hole's extent is calculated based on the area above the continent with ozone values below 220 Dobson units, a measure of how many ozone molecules occur in a vertical column through Earth's atmosphere. Although the area of this year's ozone hole is huge, ozone values haven't dropped as low as in previous big-ozone-hole years, suggesting that there is less ozone "missing" from the hole compared with those years, Kessenich and her colleagues wrote in The Conversation.

But there's also the possibility that we've shifted to a new long-term trend of big ozone holes persisting until late spring, Kessenich said. Changes in global atmospheric dynamics unrelated to CFCs could be making longer-lived holes more likely, she and her colleagues wrote in the article.

There is also some evidence that climate change will strengthen the Antarctic polar vortex over time, which could lead to colder temperatures in the stratosphere and greater ozone losses in the spring, Kessenich said. If this year's polar vortex stays robust, the ozone hole could remain large well into November, she noted.

"It's too soon to tell what has been driving dynamical variability in recent years, but more research is needed," she added.

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This year's exceptionally strong El Niño has brought a rare gift to Chile's Atacama Desert: rain. In one of the driest places on Earth, that rare moisture has awakened millions of seeds and bulbs that can remain dormant underground for years, transforming the landscape into a spectacular carpet of color.

Known locally as "desierto florido," or "flowering desert," the phenomenon is one of nature's most remarkable transformations. Patches of purple, pink, white, red and yellow now spread across hillsides and plains that for much of the year appear almost completely lifeless.

"It is a unique phenomenon; there are more than 200 plant species," Jorge Carabantes, head of the Protected Areas Department at the National Forest Corp. (CONAF) in Chile, told The Associated Press. "This is a flowering event that is obviously extraordinary and unusual, very different from other blooms that occur elsewhere on the globe."

Typically, the Atacama gets just 0.6 inches (15 mm) of rain a year. But thanks to the super El Niño, record levels of rain fell between July and August in several Chilean regions, including levels not seen since the 1950s, with some areas receiving more than 7 inches (190 millimeters), Carabantes told the AP.

While this unprecedented precipitation has caused flooding in some areas of Chile, it's created a 6,560-square-mile (17,000 square kilometers) swath of flowering blooms across the Atacama Desert. This is the most extensive desert bloom since 1997, CONAF representatives told the AP.

For photographers and tourists, the landscape is breathtaking, with bright colors contrasted against the dark Atacama mountains and Chile's cloudless skies. But the bloom is fleeting; by the end of the Southern Hemisphere's spring, many of the flowers will disappear, leaving behind seeds and bulbs waiting for the next extraordinary rains.

Here are five photos from Getty Images photographer Javier Torres that showcase the beauty of this rare event.

RELATED STORIES

—Bloom entombed in amber is the largest fossilized flower ever found

—Atacama Desert's center dried out 20 million years earlier than previously thought — before the Andes formed

—Hidden 'biosphere' of extreme microbes discovered 13 feet below Atacama Desert is deepest found there to date

The first animals may have appeared on Earth hundreds of millions years earlier than their fossils suggest, a new modeling study suggests.

Previously, the earliest fossil evidence of animals dated to around 574 million years ago, during the Ediacaran period (635 million to 538 million years ago). In the new paper, a research team argues that we can't just rely on the spotty fossil record, and suggests that animals first appeared up to 200 million years earlier than the oldest known animal fossils.

In the study, published Friday (Oct. 2) in the journal Science Advances, the researchers argue that the absence of animal fossils in some exceptionally well-preserved ancient rocks doesn't mean the animals were absent from history. Instead, they suggest that the fossil record may be missing a key chapter of animal evolution, potentially pushing the origins of animals back to between 800 million and 700 million years ago.

This would place the emergence of animals deep within the Neoproterozoic era (1 billion to 539 million years ago), possibly before or during some of Earth's most extreme ice ages.

Even though scientists haven't found undisputed animal fossils from the Neoproterozoic, that doesn't mean animals didn't live at that time. Fossils can be absent from rocks for several reasons, including because scientists are looking in the wrong places or the conditions were unsuitable for creating fossils, making it difficult to determine the earliest evolved animals.

"Until that evidence becomes available, the precise birth date of the animal kingdom remains uncertain," study co-author Ross Anderson, an associate professor of natural history at the University of Oxford, said in a statement.

Where are the animals?

Until now, most researchers relied on the well-preserved rocks from the Ediacaran period, including the roughly 590 million-year-old Weng'an Biota in China, to investigate the timing of animal evolution. Because rock deposits there contain uniquely preserved microscopic organisms but no definitive animal fossils, experts have sometimes treated them as a kind of upper limit for when animals could have evolved.

"So the game is basically how much does it predate our first fossil discovery by and what happened in that evolutionary black box between when they actually originated versus when we get our first fossil window," Karma Nanglu, an assistant professor of evolutionary paleobiology at the University of California, Riverside who wasn't involved with the study, told Live Science.

But the researchers wondered whether other fossil sites from known animal periods actually had evidence of animal fossils.

To find out, Anderson and his colleagues studied more than 140 samples from the Kheseen Biota in Mongolia, which is more than 40 million years younger than the 590 million-year-old Weng'an Biota deposit. Given that it's a younger deposit, the researchers hypothesized that there should be evidence of animal life left in the rock. Using electron scanning microscopy, the researchers saw microscopic fossils preserved in extraordinary detail, including tiny, spherical organisms and embryo-like structures containing internal cells.

Yet, despite the quality of preservation, the researchers couldn't identify any of the microfossils as animals. That's important, because by the time the Kheseen Biota was deposited, animals were present elsewhere on Earth.

"The Kheseen Biota breaks the argument that the exceptional microfossils of Weng'an mean we would have seen animal fossils in the assemblage had they existed at the time," Anderson said. "The Kheseen microfossils are just as well-preserved, yet animals continue to be absent — despite the fact we know at that point they existed."

Using molecular clocks

Given the absence of fossil evidence, Anderson and his collaborators turned to another common method used to date ancient life: molecular clocks. Molecular clocks estimate when evolutionary lineages diverged by comparing genetic differences among living organisms and combining those differences with rates of genetic change. For example, if two bird species have five DNA changes and one DNA change takes about 1 million years to accumulate, scientists could estimate that the two species diverged around 5 million years ago.

"Molecular clocks are useful when we don't have a particularly good fossil record for a group of interest or a time period of interest," Nanglu said.

When the analysis was constrained by the younger Weng'an deposit, the estimated origin of animals was comparatively recent. When they used older geological constraints — specifically rock formations in Norway, Australia and Arizona deposited between around 850 million and 730 million years ago that have been used in the past for trying to find animals' early ancestors, the timeline changed. By comparing modern animal DNA to reference dates from the fossil record along with evolutionary rates of change — their estimate shifted back by roughly 200 million years, to between about 800 million and 700 million years ago.

"Pre-Ediacaran animal body fossils still elude us, and this analysis does not prove that animals existed 800 million years ago," study first author Orin Lole Durbin, a doctoral student of paleobiology at Virginia Tech who was a University of Oxford undergraduate at the time of the study, said in the statement. "Meanwhile, our molecular-clock analyses show how much further back their evolutionary history could extend."

Could animals have lived before "Snowball Earth"?

There are other clues that animals may have a longer history.

Chemical fossils, or biomarkers, have been interpreted as evidence consistent with sponges living at least 650 million years ago, tens of millions of years prior to the oldest known animal fossils.

If animals did originate 800 million years ago, their emergence would also intersect with the Cryogenian period, which began around 720 million years ago as part of the Neoproterozoic era. During this interval, Earth experienced enormous glaciations often referred to as "Snowball Earth."

Although there is no definitive answer to whether animals survived this uncertain time, the researchers plan to search additional Neoproterozoic rocks with different environments and preservation conditions to find more evidence for their analysis.

"Fossils themselves are by definition kind of hidden from general sight," Nanglu said."Beyond that there's an even more hidden world, and that has a lot of potential to tell us about animal origins."

Think you know about natural selection? Try your hand at our evolution quiz!

This year's "super" El Nino means the U.S. will likely face a higher risk of stormy weather and flooding, so experts are recommending Americans stock up on food.

And flooding is just one of the natural disasters people will face — many people are at risk of wildfires, power outages or earthquakes. While some disasters are unexpected, preparation can make a significant difference in how much they impact peoples' daily lives.

But is anyone actually prepared for the worst?

Levels of preparedness vary widely. Some may keep an emergency kit stocked with food, water and first-aid supplies, while others may have an evacuation plan, emergency contacts or designated meeting place for their household. And others do nothing at all. Although a recent study revealed there's no single place on Earth that's best prepared for global disaster, there are steps people can take to feel well equipped.

Experts recommend stocking up on food supplies and other essentials, especially in areas that might be more disaster prone. But how prepared are you? Answer our poll below, and share how you've prepared for emergencies or what you have in your disaster kit in the comments.

A powerful "Kelvin wave," triggered by this year's super El Niño, is creeping up the Pacific coast of Central and North America and will soon reach California's shores, where it could raise sea levels by up to 1 foot (30 centimeters) for months, researchers warn.

Kelvin waves are a well-known, planetary-scale ocean phenomenon, but this particular forecast has experts worried because it will likely amplify the damage from severe storms, storm surges, flooding and coastal erosion that the record-shattering El Niño is expected to bring this winter.

In general, a Kelvin wave is a swell wave that spans thousands of miles and balances Earth's rotation, David Webb, a physical oceanographer at the National Oceanography Centre in the U.K., told Live Science in an email. But the waves generated during El Niño years are not normal Kelvin waves, because they cause oscillations of a boundary within the ocean as well as a height increase at the surface. In particular, these waves trigger the border between warmer, less-dense surface water and colder, denser bottom layers to move up and down within about 330 feet (100 m). For this reason, these El Niño-driven waves are called internal Kelvin waves.

Internal Kelvin waves are triggered by changes in surface winds around the equator in the far-western Pacific Ocean. Specifically, westerly wind bursts weaken the background trade winds that blow from South America toward Asia, thereby allowing warm water and elevated sea states that occur in the far-western Pacific to slowly "slosh" eastward.

In this case, "the generation process will have involved changes in the winds at different locations and at different times, so it may not be a particularly clean single wave — possibly a bit messy," Webb said.

Once an internal Kelvin wave kicks off, researchers can track its advance along the equator and predict when it will hit the South American coastline. The wave can't go farther east than that, so it spreads into two branches — known as coastal trapped waves — that continue north and south for thousands of miles at a speed of around 6 mph (10 km/h). This means California is not uniquely exposed to the current wave; all of the countries and regions that border the eastern Pacific Ocean are vulnerable, Webb said.

In California and elsewhere, the influence of the internal Kelvin wave will be in addition to the tides, regardless of whether El Niño sparks storm activity there. "What is most likely to be seen is a period, or maybe a few weeks, when the normal [pattern] of tides and tidal currents is distorted, with both high and low tides being higher than normal," Webb said, adding that tides could rise by "tens of centimeters," or about a foot.

The problem is that higher tides magnify the impacts of storms, which are more likely in some parts of the U.S. during an El Niño, Kate Huckelbridge, executive director of the California Coastal Commission, wrote in a Sept. 11 memo. The memo was sent to warn coastal California homeowners and residents to prepare for extreme conditions, such as flooding.

"A key observation from past El Niño events is that the most damaging storms are often those that coincide with the highest tides," Huckelbridge wrote. "Storms that peak during high tides are far more likely to cause damage than if the same storm peaked during low tide."

Storms alone can raise coastal sea levels by more than 3 feet (1 m), Webb noted, and sea levels have already increased by at least 8 inches (20 cm) due to climate change. Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in response to experts' weather predictions so the state could mobilize equipment and resources before storms strike, The Guardian reported Monday (Sept. 28).

Several internal Kelvin waves can occur within a single El Niño event, with the largest waves typically recorded in the winter. However, Webb said he doubts there will be more than one full wave this time.

Donald Trump cannot make clean energy expensive again. He can only make Americans pay extra for it. His tariffs do just that. But cost declines work like a ratchet. Every solar factory built and every panel installed pushes costs down the curve. The global price floor just keeps falling.

Which means that despite Trump's best efforts to prop up fossil fuels, America will transform its electricity system. The question is how fast. And that speed is up to us.

Since 2015, most of the new power built in America has been clean. This year, 93% of new electricity capacity is expected to come from solar, wind and batteries. That is not because of any president. It is because clean energy is the cheapest way to add electricity to the grid.

The problem is what was built before. Today, 57% of America's power is generated from burning fossil fuels, compared to just 43% from clean sources. Even with solar and wind dominating new builds, our legacy system still uses dirty energy, which takes time to replace.

The first step is getting rid of coal, which already can't compete with clean energy. Coal generates about one-sixth of our power, yet 99% of American coal plants are more expensive to keep open than it would cost to replace them with new solar, wind, and storage. In Michigan, the Trump administration ordered an aging coal plant to stay open past its planned retirement. That single decision costs consumers $600,000 a day. On Sept. 11, a federal court rejected the order.

Despite Trump's attempts to revive a dying industry, the coal industry remains in deep decline – down 43% since 2010. Coal cannot compete on cost or reliability. Without expensive government welfare, coal is on its way out.

Gas plants are responsible for much of the remaining electricity emissions. Solar, wind and batteries are increasingly cost-competitive with gas. Even without subsidies, solar paired with batteries is now cheaper to build and run than a new gas plant. And we know how to put up clean energy fast: the solar industry tripled its annual build rate in just six years.

Skeptics raise two objections. First, rising electricity demand from AI, data centers and electrification means that we can't generate enough power with clean energy alone, and therefore we need to keep gas on the grid. Second, Trump's hostility — namely expiring tax credits and tariffs on solar panels and batteries — will stall the build-out.

Energy demand growth is real. Proposals for new gas plants to power data centers have surged. But more than three-quarters of this gas plant pipeline is still early stage, and many projects have been delayed. Supply backlogs on gas turbines stretch toward the 2030s. Meanwhile, new solar plants and batteries can go up in under two years. This makes building such capacity the fastest, cheapest solution to rising electricity consumption.

As for Trump: his administration won't be around forever. And rising electricity prices have become a central issue in this year's midterms. Politicians promising affordability will turn to the cheapest way to power households: clean energy. And the market will keep the transition moving no matter who's in the White House.

In the meantime, there is plenty we can do at the state and local level to speed things up. One strategy is removing barriers to plug-in solar. In Germany, more than a million households have installed "balcony solar," which are panels that plug into a wall outlet, bypassing permits or utility paperwork. Utah legalized plug-in solar last year, and California's legislature just approved it too. Pair that with simple plug-in batteries, and ordinary people can generate and store their own clean energy at home.

We can also use electric machines to soak up power when it's fossil-free. That happens in the middle of the day, when cheap solar floods the system. With the right controls, an electric water heater can also be a battery: heat the tank at noon, and tonight's shower is stored sunshine. Heat pumps can pre-cool or pre-heat a home before evening the same way. Charge electric cars at work and your commute is solar-powered.

And none of this requires the federal government. States can make midday power cheap, or even free, and pay households to shift their usage. Cities can write building codes that make flexible electric machines the default replacement. Do that at scale and we can serve growing demand with the grid we already have.

No single choice transforms the electricity system on its own. But the energy transition has always moved in waves: it dips, then surges back stronger. Millions of people pushing in the same direction is exactly how the next wave builds.

So is a clean grid realistic? Yes. The only real question is how fast we replace the old one. And that's largely up to us.

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.

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Earth's life-support systems are in peril — and they're getting worse — but although the window for action is closing, we still have a chance to give our planet a sustainable future, a new report finds.

The report, called "Planetary Health Check 2026," was written by more than 60 scientists and assessed the state of interconnected natural systems, or planetary boundaries, upon which Earth's stability and resilience depend. When these boundaries are crossed, researchers say there's an increasing risk of serious and irreversible harm.

According to the report, seven of the nine identified planetary boundaries have already been breached, including climate change, ocean acidification and biosphere integrity. Niklas Kitzmann, lead editor of the report, likened assessing these planetary boundaries to giving Earth a blood test — and getting alarming results.

"If you had a patient with a blood test that looks like this, you would send them to the ICU right away," Kitzmann, a researcher in the Planetary Boundaries Science Lab at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, which publishes the report, told Live Science.

Specific ecosystems highlighted in the report include the Amazon rainforest, which is in danger of passing a devastating tipping point, and the seafloor, which is being damaged by bottom trawling and faces the developing threat of deep-sea mining. There's also plenty on extreme weather events fueled by climate change, as well as forever chemicals, species loss and more. However, the authors believe we can still heal our ailing planet if we act fast.

"We still have a window to turn this around, but we do have to start bending the curves on emissions and on nature degradation within the next few years," Kitzmann said. "We're rapidly running out of time."

Planetary health check

The Planetary Boundaries Science Lab publishes a Planetary Health Check around this time each year, coinciding with Climate Week. The 2026 edition isn't marked by significant boundary changes as it was last year, but it finds that the state of the breached boundaries continues to worsen.

In 2025, ocean acidity levels became so high that a research team concluded that ocean acidification had become the seventh — and most recent — planetary boundary to be breached. The other six breached boundaries are freshwater change, land system change, climate change, modification of biogeochemical flows, introduction of novel entities, and change in biosphere integrity. The remaining two boundaries — stratospheric ozone depletion and increase in atmospheric aerosol loading — remain at safe levels, at least globally, according to the report.

The researchers essentially have a traffic light system for assessing the risk to planetary boundaries, with green representing a safe operating space; yellow/orange representing a breach and an increasing risk, with the system no longer considered within safe limits; and red representing the danger zone, with a likely risk of severe, irreversible damage. These categories are designed to account for uncertainty, but there's inherent uncertainty baked into assessments of complex natural systems.

Of the breached boundaries, ocean acidification, freshwater change and land system change sit in the increasing risk category, while climate change, modification of biogeochemical flows, introduction of novel entities and change in biosphere integrity are in the danger zone, according to the report.

Boundaries in the danger zone

One of the report's key takeaways is that all of the planetary breaches are now becoming increasingly apparent. Kitzmann said the researchers are seeing extreme events like heat waves increase in frequency and severity all over the world. He also noted that they've seen consequences such as glacial loss, marine heat waves and severe coral bleaching.

"The Earth is sending us her invoices for the breaching of these planetary boundaries," Kitzmann said.

Although much of the report was gloomy, Kitzmann stressed that there's still hope. He argued that positive momentum is building in the renewable energy transition, especially as the costs of solar power technology decrease, and that there's more social awareness and international treaties that protect oceans and land.

"It's not enough yet, it's not sufficient, but we shouldn't think that this is a completely unsolvable problem," Kitzmann said. "It is very much in the process of being solved, and we just need to step on the accelerator right now and make sure that these solutions that we have get implemented as quickly as we possibly can."

This striking satellite snap shows a giant, "sponge-like" dome towering over central Brazil. The dark monolith and the rare biome that covers it are key to the region's famed hot springs.

The imposing oval structure, which is around 12 miles (20 kilometers) long and 7 miles (12 km) across, is known as the Caldas Novas dome, or Serra de Caldas, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. It is located in southeast Goiás state and towers up to 1,000 feet (300 meters) above the surrounding landscape, although an optical illusion known as relief inversion may cause some viewers to see the raised land as a bowl-like depression.

The monolithic feature, which one 2004 study predicted could be at least 600 million years old, gets its name from the town of Caldas Novas, which is visible in the satellite image, sandwiched between the dark-green dome and Lake Corumbá, an artificial reservoir created by a nearby hydroelectric dam. The town is home to around 100,000 people but receives hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, many of whom travel there to bathe in its famous hot springs.

The dome is blanketed by savanna known as the Cerrado, which covers around a quarter of Brazil and is the second-most-abundant biome in South America, behind rainforests like the Amazon.

This biome is a tropical savanna. It is much more ecologically diverse than most savannas and is often described as a mix of woodland, grassland and wetland.

The Cerrado readily soaks up rainwater, making the dome act like a giant sponge. The collected liquid percolates through the monolith's inner structure, refilling submerged groundwater reservoirs that help feed the nearby hot springs with a regular supply of warm water, even throughout the region's dry season, according to the Earth Observatory.

The Cerrado is often called the "cradle of waters" in Brazil because of its role in recharging groundwater and feeding major rivers across the country. It also helps to feed several waterfalls around the dome's edges (see below).

Unlike most thermal baths, the hot springs surrounding Caldas Novas are not heated by volcanic activity. Instead, water within deep fractures in the rock is "heated by Earth's naturally higher temperatures at depth before it circulates back to the surface," Earth Observatory representatives wrote.

Many experts previously thought the monolith was formed by an ancient "magmatic intrusion," in which molten rock burst through the planet's crust. However, a 2021 study largely disproved this theory, suggesting instead that the structure was most likely created by other geological processes, instead.

The dome and its surroundings are protected as part of Caldas Novas State Park, which was established in 1970. It is home to several unique species, including the red-legged seriema (Cariama cristata) birds, the pequi tree (Caryocar brasiliense), and the wolf's plant (Solanum lycocarpum), according to the Earth Observatory.

But the park's main purpose is to protect the Cerrado covering the dome. In recent decades, large swaths of the biome have been cleared across South America to make way for more agricultural land, similar to the deforestation that plagues the Amazon rainforest.

You can see this issue in the satellite photo. The region surrounding the dome was likely once covered with the Cerrado, but it is now a patchwork of farms and fields.

See more Earth from space

Researchers have warned all summer that this year's El Niño could be record-breaking and fuel extreme weather across the globe. Earlier this month, the U.K. Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs urged people in Britain to stock up on food, bottled water and other basic supplies to prepare for potential severe storms this winter.

"We're about to experience probably the largest El Niño that has ever been seen," Dame Angela Eagle told The Guardian on Sept. 3. "If you’ve got a store of a bit of food that can keep you going for a while before the emergency services can get to you, you’re going to be a lot better off than if you haven't."

But could extreme weather really limit access to food in the U.K., and should people in the U.S. heed the same advice?

In the U.K., El Niño typically brings wetter-than-average conditions in the fall and early, cold winters. The latest forecasts suggest the U.K. will be stormy from November to January, and parts of the U.S. could also see heavy rainfall throughout winter, so it may be sensible to store enough food to last a few days at home in case of flooding or power outages, experts told Live Science. But that effort to stock up could be complicated by another problem: El Niño could cause a surge in food prices, experts added.

"El Niño events are typically associated with food price inflation in the historical record," Michael Hinge, a senior economist at the nonprofit organization Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED), told Live Science in an email. "Keeping reasonable household stocks is one sensible step to offset short-term disruption, but becomes more difficult if food becomes less affordable."

Unprecedented conditions

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), this year's El Niño has reached "super" status. As of Sept. 27, sea surface temperatures in a region of the Pacific Ocean known as Niño 3.4 have risen 5.7 degrees Fahrenheit (3.15 degrees Celsius) above average and are continuing to rise. A typical El Niño increases temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region by 2.8 to 3.6 F (1 to 2 C) above average, tops.

El Niño is the warm phase of a multiyear natural climate pattern. It occurs when warm water in the western tropical Pacific Ocean migrates eastward along the equator toward the coast of South America. This boosts global temperatures, triggering deluges of rainfall and floods in regions like southwestern Europe, the southern U.S. and East Africa, while places such as northern South America, southern Africa and Indonesia are more likely to experience drought.

This year's El Niño will be the strongest that's ever been recorded, because it is piling extra heat onto unparalleled levels of human-driven global warming. Estimates show that sea surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region, located in the central equatorial Pacific Ocean, could reach 7.2 F (4 C) above average by November.

El Niño is expected to peak by early 2027 and persist until at least March. As a result, unusually stormy conditions seem likely in the U.K. and the southern U.S., so the suggestion to stock up on essentials is likely good advice for Americans, Hinge said.

Hinge said it is common advice to stock 1 gallon (4 liters) of water per person per day, ideally for a week. For food, it's good to collect a few cans per person of beans, fish, vegetables and fruit, as well as pasta, rice, oats, peanut butter and preserved milk. Additionally, people should have on hand a manual can opener and a camping stove with fuel, he said.

"All of the above will depend upon dietary needs, local prices and consumer preferences," Hinge added. "These can be consumed if not needed towards the end of their shelf life, and then restocked, to minimize the cost and waste."

Impact on food prices

The main El Niño-related threat to food access in high-income countries like the U.K. and the U.S. is not extreme weather happening locally. Rather, people in these countries may be limited in what they can afford due to El Niño's impacts on agriculture in other regions, Hinge said.

El Niño can benefit crops in some areas, such as the southern U.S. and Peru, but it has a devastating influence on yields in many other places, including the Indian subcontinent and West Africa, where the weather pattern affects the monsoon. The impact is already visible in India, which is now on course for its weakest monsoon in two decades and about 15% less rain than average.

Lower crop yields in countries like India raise food prices around the world. For example, dry conditions in India triggered by the 2023 El Niño prompted a temporary restriction on exports of rice, which boosted the cost of this staple food globally. And food prices will jump again this year, adding to the increases caused by the Russia-Ukraine and Iran wars, Hinge said.

Many of the outcomes of this year's El Niño won't be felt until after it has peaked, so the effect on food prices could be drawn out. "Given that this year's El Niño is unprecedented there is a high risk of serious large regional shocks which could seriously impact food access" for months or even years to come, Hinge said.

The U.S. is less vulnerable to surging food prices than the U.K., because the U.S. is the biggest exporter of food globally. Overall, unless a serious catastrophe occurs, food imports won't fall in high-income countries, but hunger and poverty will likely rise worldwide, Hinge said.

El Niño's impact on the U.K. and other similar countries will be mostly economic, said Richard Allan, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading in the U.K. However, the humanitarian consequences in more vulnerable regions should remind us that climate change is making the world less safe for everyone, he said.

"It is only possible to prepare and adapt to a certain degree to mounting damage from weather extremes, melting ice and sea level rise in a warming world, that heighten during El Niño," Allan said. The sure-fire way to mitigate these effects is to ramp up collective efforts to transition away from greenhouse gas emissions, he said.

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Newly discovered iron minerals could be the missing link in how water is stored in the deepest parts of Earth's mantle and transported to the upper layers, recent research reveals. The findings are crucial for understanding the mantle's motion, volcanic activity and the workings of other rocky planets, the study authors say.

The researchers discovered the iron minerals, called iron oxyhydroxides, by squishing mineral samples between two tiny diamond anvils while zapping them with a laser.

The two iron minerals are stable at the conditions found at the boundary between Earth's core and its mantle (the planet's middle layer), which is under "more than a million times the pressure we feel at the surface," Steve Jacobsen, a mineralogist and professor of Earth science at the University of Colorado Boulder who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

The new minerals contain as much as 15% water by weight. "If you add up all the H and O atoms in the formula and combine them into H2O, just a five-pound piece of the stuff would contain a pint of liquid water," Jacobsen added. "If this material existed in the early Earth, spread out across the base of the mantle, even just a few percent of it would potentially be enough to supply the formation of the oceans."

A tectonic mystery

Earth contains multiple layers, like an onion. The crust is the thinnest layer (the onion skin), and it moves around very slowly on top of a giant ocean of molten rock called the mantle (the juicy part of the onion). Deep in the heart of that ocean is the planet's core, like an onion's center, if the center of the onion were made of superheated iron and nickel crushed under the weight of a planet.

Water in the mantle makes the molten rock stretchier, which means the mantle can change its shape and convect. That's a big part of why Earth has plate tectonics ‪—‬ without water in the mantle, the material is too stiff to move around and drag the planet's crust with it. We know there's water in the mantle; however, we don't know exactly what the water in the mantle is doing.

There are two main theories for how water gets into Earth's mantle. The first is through subduction: When one tectonic plate sinks under another, it brings water from the surface into the mantle. The second is primordial water, left over from the planet's formation, that's stored near the boundary between Earth's core and the lower mantle.

The newly discovered minerals match both major theories for how Earth got its mantle water. They're dense enough to sink all the way to the bottom of the mantle, which fits with subduction and provides a way for water to enter Earth's core. The iron minerals are also strong enough to withstand the extremely high-energy impacts that they would have experienced if they were present while Earth was forming.

The mantle's convection could bring these minerals from near the core to close to the surface in large mantle plumes, where the minerals would melt and release their water, thus completing the water cycle in the mantle and contributing to volcanic hotspots at the surface. This process has implications for water cycles and theories of how other rocky planets and exoplanets ‪—‬ especially the weird ones that are mostly molten rock ‪—‬ formed.

Although the study, published Sept. 8 in the journal Nature Geoscience, doesn't prove that these minerals are taxiing water around the mantle, knowing that the iron minerals exist provides a pathway for the first time. The newly discovered minerals might also explain mysterious, extremely dense regions deep inside Earth ‪—‬the "ultra-low seismic velocity patches we see sitting on top of the core-mantle boundary," Jacobsen added.

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Editor's note: This article was updated at 06:31 EDT on Sept. 24 with news that Polo had intensified back to a Category 5 storm.

A Pacific cyclone dubbed Polo exploded from a tropical storm into a powerful Category 5 hurricane in less than 24 hours on Tuesday (Sept. 22), with winds reaching speeds of 180 mph (290 km/h). The storm, drifting off the southwest coast of Mexico, was downgraded to a Category 4 storm on Wednesday (Sept. 23) but intensified back to Category 5 as of Thursday (Sept. 24) morning, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC).

As Polo moves northwest, it is expected to drive torrential rainfall on parts of Mexico's southwest coast, with up to 8 inches (20 centimetres) in some areas. Although the storm is not predicted to make direct landfall, the NHC has warned that heavy rain may produce life-threatening flooding and mudslides, as well as extremely hazardous ocean conditions.

Polo is one of the strongest hurricanes on record in the Eastern Pacific, second only to Hurricane Patricia in 2015, according to Accuweather. But what causes a hurricane like Polo to intensify so rapidly? And what role has the "super" El Niño played in the storm's development?

How El Niño contributed

"Rapid intensification of tropical cyclones is something we see several times per year across the globe," Julian Heming, an environmental scientist and researcher at the U.K.'s Met Office, told Live Science in an email. "The main requirements are high sea temperatures, low wind shear and upper air conditions which allow air to escape quickly from the top of the hurricane."

Hurricane Polo intensified rapidly as it moved over exceptionally warm Pacific waters associated with an extremely strong "super'" El Niño that has taken hold off the Pacific since June.

El Niño is a naturally occurring climate pattern that develops in the tropical Pacific Ocean, typically every two to seven years. It begins when waters in the eastern tropical Pacific become unusually warm. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration identifies El Niño conditions when these waters are at least 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit (0.5 degrees Celsius) above average, alongside changes in winds, surface pressure and rainfall that are consistent with the phenomenon.

El Niño events are then classified by strength, ranging from weak to very strong. Although "super El Niño" is not a scientific term, it refers to a very strong El Niño, where the warming of sea surface temperatures is higher than 2C above normal.

The unusually warm ocean supplied Hurricane Polo with abundant heat and moisture, while very moist air and weak winds higher in the atmosphere allowed thunderstorms to organize and strengthen without being disrupted, Hemming said.

Polo also developed a compact, well-defined core, which concentrated the storm's energy into a relatively small area and enabled it to intensify extremely quickly. Together, these conditions created an efficient atmospheric "heat engine" that allowed Polo to strengthen at an exceptional rate.

"Polo's rapid and sudden growth is testament to the dominance of this year's so-called super El Niño, which set a record on Monday as the most extreme on record and has amplified a number of extreme weather events globally," Heming said.

The latest data from the World Meteorological Organization suggests that the current El Niño could be the strongest on record and last until at least February 2027. This will lead to more extreme weather, pushing some areas into drought while others experience stronger storms, rainfall and flooding.

If the system moves northward, Southern California could see intense rainfall and coastal regions may experience hazardous rip currents and large swells. As of Thursday morning, the NHC reports the core of the storm is expected to stay offshore and move towards the northwest. However, "There is currently a lot of uncertainty in the long term as to whether Polo will move further out to sea or turn north-eastwards towards Mexico," Heming said.

Earth's continents are losing fresh water much faster than scientists thought, mostly because aquifer pumping in regions like northern India, southern Iran and parts of the U.S. is 45% more pronounced, on average, than previous estimates suggested, new research shows.

The study used satellite data to map freshwater trends across the globe between 2002 and 2025. Thanks to a high-resolution rendering method, researchers revealed regional gains and reductions in terrestrial water storage that were 33% more marked, on average, than in previous studies. The amount of fresh water lost was much higher than the gains overall, highlighting the urgent need for better water management to stave off a global water crisis.

"It has become very dire in a lot of places," Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar, a hydrologist and the co-founder of the nonprofit Evergreen Resilience Institute, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.

The study also attributed the changes in freshwater storage to different human and climate drivers, said first author Mary Michael Forrester O'Neill, a researcher at the University of Maryland's Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center and the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

"Earlier studies could see broad patterns of long-term freshwater loss or gain but couldn't reliably tell how much was due to human activity versus climate swings, in part due to resolution limitations," Forrester O'Neill told Live Science in an email. "This study sharpened the picture and used geostatistical methods to rank the impacts of human causes, like irrigation and dam building, against climate factors, like rainfall and drought."

The researchers found 94 regions with above-background shifts in freshwater storage, 40 of which were influenced mainly by human land or water use, rather than climate variability and global warming. The team then focused on these 40 hotspots to pinpoint exactly where people can act to conserve water.

"Water managers and downstream communities need to know which aquifer, reservoir, or irrigation district is responsible for a given trend in large-scale freshwater storage, not just that 'somewhere in this country, water is being lost,'" Forrester O'Neill explained.

Freshwater gains in 22 regions were due to rain-fed agriculture, irrigation with surface water, reservoir impoundment and deforestation, which decreases evapotranspiration and plants' groundwater consumption, according to the study. In contrast, freshwater losses in the remaining 18 hotspots were caused by irrigation with groundwater and the construction of canals, diversions and other water infrastructure.

The findings, published Sept. 14 in the journal PNAS, show that human water use is a significant driver of water storage changes on every continent except Australia and Antarctica, where climate factors are more influential, O'Neill said. Local freshwater gains and losses may cut freshwater availability downstream or in the surrounding region, she and her colleagues noted in the study.

One example of a region that gained fresh water in the study is the area of central Russia that hosts the Boguchany Reservoir, a giant artificial lake that was filled in 2012 after the construction of a hydroelectric dam. And three stark examples of places that lost fresh water are northern India, southern Iran and the southern High Plains (a region at the intersection of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas), because these regions host major breadbaskets that tap aquifers for irrigation, O'Neill said.

The results are concerning because the places with the worst groundwater depletion overlap with areas that irrigate crops unsustainably, O'Neill said. Previous research shows that critical food-producing regions ‪—‬ such as the U.S. High Plains, California's Central Valley, northern India, Pakistan, North China and the Fertile Crescent ‪—‬ consistently overuse groundwater. "Within these regions, we found the pace of depletion is considerably more severe than earlier estimates suggested, reinforcing food security concerns," she said.

One of the novelties of the paper is its very high resolution, said Chandanpurkar, who last year led a study describing "mega-drying" regions across the world and co-authored a report on continental drying. The new study used data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission and its Follow-On successor (GRACE-FO), which have measured subtle redistributions of mass on Earth. But unlike previous studies, the new research resolved the data in high resolution, he said, like correcting blurry vision with glasses.

"This is not a brand-new method, but it's the first time they're applying it to these regional hotspots and then trying to figure out what they mean," Chandanpurkar said.

Scientists already knew that groundwater depletion and other human water uses are "quite staggering," and this study is a reminder that continental drying is "a very big deal," Chandanpurkar said. "Water is really undervalued," he said. "Giving it its proper dues would be essential for this [freshwater loss] to really be acknowledged by leaders and economists."

It's impossible to say exactly how many years or decades humans can go on consuming this much fresh water before it runs out, partly because the climate can be unpredictable and partly because it's hard to tell how much water remains in Earth's reservoirs, Forrester O'Neill said.

"GRACE satellites measure the rate of change in water mass, not the total volume stored in an aquifer, so we have no independent basis for estimating time to depletion or a timeline for systems to collapse," she said.

However, there will come a point when the cost of pumping groundwater, for example, will be too high to pay in some regions. Water table declines of just a dozen feet (a few meters) or so can cause a substantial share of wells to run dry, research shows, and the expense of drilling deeper will affect at-risk communities most of all, Forrester O'Neill said.

"We are most concerned about the rising cost and inequity of continuing to reach water that keeps retreating deeper underground, paired with strain on existing surface water resources," she said. "Of course, water-scarce regions exhibiting acute groundwater depletion are at risk, like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Türkiye, Iraq, and Libya. Another one to keep an eye on would be Mexico, simply because of the documented, progressively increasing well depth paired with the observed terrestrial water storage loss."

The crust under Italy is "unzipping" and falling away into the mantle, new research finds.

This process is the driver of much of the seismic activity in the Apennine Mountains, the long chain of peaks that runs like a spine down the Italian peninsula. This area provides a unique look into the swan song of subduction, or the movement of a slab of oceanic crust under a neighboring chunk of continental crust, said study lead author Stefano Tavani, a geoscientist at the University of Florence.

"We are experiencing the very, very late-stage to the subduction, and the tectonics is driven by a different engine, which is this unzipping," Tavani told Live Science.

The Mediterranean region, between Africa and Eurasia, is a patchwork quilt of tectonic microplates and mountain ranges, making the geology of the region extremely intricate. The big-picture geology is driven by the fact that the African plate, to the south, has been pushing northward, squeezing the crust and driving the sinking of an ancient ocean, the Tethys, into the mantle beneath the Apennine Mountains. This process has been ongoing for about 50 million years.

Along the Apennines, this process created a push-and-pull of forces. As the African plate subducted under the Eurasian plate, the boundary of the subduction zone was making its own march toward the African plate, causing the crust on the Eurasian side to stretch and thin, creating two large basins: an older one in the Mediterranean Sea west of Corsica and Sardinia, and a younger one, the Tyrrhenian Sea segment of the Mediterranean east of Corsica and Sardinia, which formed roughly 10 million years ago. Until now, the driver behind the extension creating these basins and the compressional forces building the Apennines has not been entirely clear, Tavani said.

To better understand this unusual tectonic movement, Tavani and his colleagues integrated earthquake record and ground movements from GPS and satellite measurements with the tectonic models of the plate movements and found that under the Apennines, the lower crust is peeling away and dropping into the mantle — a process called delamination. It is this delamination, and not the subduction of one plate under another, that causes most of the seismic activity in the Appennines, the researchers reported in their study published this month in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. In a few more million years, Tavani said, the lower crust will finish dropping away and the two plates will weld together.

There are other places around the world where similar processes are happening, such as in the Hellenic trench south of Greece, Tavani said. The findings "could be applied to other several systems," he said, "because in the end, it is a kind of very late-stage plate tectonics."

A newly-discovered amoeba has set the record for the hottest temperature at which complex life can thrive.

The amoeba, found in Lassen Volcanic National Park in California, grows and divides at temperatures up to 145 degrees Fahrenheit (63 degrees Celsius) and can survive brief stints in up to 158 F (70 C) environments, a new study finds. Prior to the discovery, no complex cells were known to replicate at temperatures above 140 F (60 C).

"I was very surprised," study first author Beryl Rappaport, a microbiologist at Syracuse University in New York, told Live Science. "We definitely had to go back and check to make sure that our incubators were calibrated correctly … It really was amazing."

Amoebas are single-celled organisms that move by pulling themselves forward with tendrils of cellular fluid. They are eukaryotes, which means they store their DNA inside a membrane-bound nucleus. Amoebas are neither plants, animals nor fungi, but they are more complex than prokaryotic organisms such as bacteria and archaea, which have no nucleus.

Past research had suggested that amoebas could thrive in warm geothermal springs, Rappaport said, but few of these organisms have been studied in laboratories. To investigate, Rappaport and her colleagues travelled to Lassen Volcanic National Park to collect and study these heat-loving creatures.

The team discovered the newfound amoeba in samples collected along a tributary of Hot Springs Creek inside the park. Dubbed Incendiamoeba cascadensis, or "fire amoeba from the Cascades," the species thrive at temperatures between 131 and 135 F (55 and 57 C). In fact, they stopped growing below 108 F (42 C), indicating that the amoebas need high temperatures to flourish.

Using a heated microscope that kept the amoebas toasty, the scientists watched the cells divide and replicate at temperatures as high as 145 F (63 C) — the highest temperatures known for eukaryotic cells (although prokaryotes have been known to survive temperatures as high as 250 F, or 122 C).

At 158 F (70 C), the amoebas created protective shells around themselves and went dormant. The cells recovered when the researchers left them at 158 F for five minutes, then brought the temperature back down to 140 F. But the amoebas didn't survive heating to 176 F (80 C).

I. cascadensis proteins also have positively charged amino acids, or protein building blocks, on their surface, the team found. Other heat-loving prokaryotes share the same feature. This adaptation may help keep proteins stable at high temperatures, the researchers noted.

The researchers reported their findings on Tuesday (Sept. 22) in the journal Cell.

This is not the first time we have seen specialized eukaryotic life-forms survive in extreme temperatures. For example, some fungi can tolerate temperatures up to 140 F in deserts. However, these figures still pale in comparison to the scorching temperatures that some bacteria can survive, and it's not yet clear what factors prevent eukaryotes from tolerating these higher temperatures, Rappaport told Live Science.

Part of the difference in heat tolerance between heat-loving prokaryotes and eukaryotes comes from their differing ability to genetically adapt to heat stress.

"When you're a bacterium … you can reshuffle your genome" by scooping up DNA from other prokaryotes, Debashish Bhattacharya, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. That ability helps prokaryotes adapt relatively quickly to stressful environments.

But because DNA in eukaryotic cells is confined in the nucleus, "eukaryotes are not able to simply grab a bunch of genes and switch their lifestyle," at the same rates as prokaryotes, Bhattacharya said. "It takes far, far more evolutionary change to turn a eukaryote into an extremophile."

In future research, Rappaport plans to study Incendiamoeba's closest relatives to learn how they evolved to tolerate heat. Understanding these adaptations could help scientists grasp the limits of life on Earth as well as where else complex life could exist in the universe, she said.

The ongoing El Niño is breaching the "super" threshold as Earth crosses into unprecedented climate territory.

El Niño, officially underway as of June 11, is a climate pattern that's injecting extra heat into our already-warming world, threatening disruptive weather across the globe and a humanitarian crisis in some regions.

While El Niño is part of a natural multiyear climate cycle, scientists have noticed that it has been rapidly strengthening like never before, intensified by human-driven climate change, and putting stressed natural systems under extra strain.

In a new update this week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center continues to forecast a 75% chance that this El Niño event will be stronger than any previous El Niño since 1950, the earliest year from which NOAA has data to make historical comparisons. Furthermore, this El Niño appears to be going "super" ‪—‬ something that has been expected for weeks.

Weekly NOAA data from the eastern Pacific's El Niño region reveal that sea surface temperatures have reached 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit (2.1 degrees Celsius) above average, hitting the more than 3.6 F (2 C) threshold for a very strong or "super" event. Strictly speaking, NOAA uses three-month averages to categorize strength, as weekly data is more prone to temporary anomalies. But the latest data once again signals where this El Niño is heading, with NOAA forecasting a more than 90% chance of a very strong event emerging in the fall and winter.

How will El Niño impact the U.S.?

During El Niño, warmer waters gather east of the equatorial Pacific, forcing the jet stream south. The patterns associated with El Niño bring exceptionally stormy winter weather and a higher chance of rain and snow across California and Southern states, with Northern states experiencing fewer storms and a milder winter, according to the Climate Prediction Center. El Niño can also increase the risk of high-tide flooding, particularly on the West Coast, according to NOAA.

However, as with climate change in general, El Niño doesn't have the same impacts on all regions. Furthermore, while a more intense El Niño typically increases the certainty of expected impacts, they are not guaranteed.

The last "super" El Niño happened in 2015 and 2016. Associated impacts included a historic hurricane season in the central North Pacific and record drought in the Caribbean, according to Climate.gov. Before that, the last El Niño to go super was in 1997 and 1998. That winter was marked by a variety of extreme weather events, including flooding in the Southeast, an ice storm in the Northeast and tornadoes in Florida, according to a report by the National Climatic Data Center.

Already this year, tropical storms in Hawaii have been attributed to El Niño, with warming in the waters where storms typically form there, CNN reported. Meanwhile, the strengthening of El Niño in the Pacific appears to have left the Atlantic unusually calm. Ars Technica reported that the Atlantic hurricane season passed its traditional peak without a tropical storm or hurricane in what is becoming a historic period of quiet.

What is El Niño?

El Niño affects the whole planet, but it begins with unusually warm waters in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. NOAA recognizes El Niño conditions when these waters are at least 0.9 F (0.5 C) warmer than average, while wind, surface pressure and rainfall in the region are also consistent with El Niño conditions. An El Niño is then categorized based on its strength, from weak to very strong. Very strong El Niños (above 3.6 F, or 2 C, warmer than average) are nicknamed "super" El Niños, though this isn't a scientific term.

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts' El Niño models suggest that temperatures are sailing past the 2 C threshold and will exceed 6.3 F (3.5 C) by the end of the year. On Sept. 20, the daily El Niño temperature was 5.5 F (3.06 C), according to The Climate Brink. But while this year's El Niño is certainly supercharged, there's still uncertainty about its impacts.

El Niño forecast

On Sept. 3, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released a fresh set of El Niño warnings along with a Global Seasonal Climate Update, which the WMO said offers a more refined picture of expected conditions in the coming months.

"For September-November 2026, WMO multi-model forecasts indicate an increased likelihood of above-normal temperatures across almost all land areas, alongside rainfall patterns showing a pronounced and classic atmospheric response to the strong Pacific El Niño," WMO representatives wrote in a statement.

In other words, much of the world is likely to be hotter than normal, while some areas will experience more rainfall and others will see less. The most severe El Niño impacts will likely be felt outside North America.

Liz Stephens, a professor in climate risks and resilience at the University of Reading in the U.K., recently noted that the Indian monsoon season had seen less rainfall than normal and that satellite data revealed that parts of East Africa, Central America and Southeast Asia are experiencing record-dry conditions. The human impact of such weather can be devastating.

"During the large El Niño event of 1997/1998 the associated flooding in Somalia killed over 2000 people," Stephens said in a statement released Sept. 3. "With a bigger El Niño event on the way, and global temperatures now 0.7°C [1.26 F] higher and capable of holding even more moisture as a result of climate change, scientists are concerned that there is potential for even more severe flooding."

Scientists have identified a "sweet spot" in Earth's deep past when conditions were optimal for a proposed early stage of life to take hold — a phase known as the RNA World.

The sweet spot was 4.33 billion years ago, although Earth may have become suitable for the RNA World as early as 4.4 billion years ago, given that extreme bombardment by asteroids, comets and other rocky leftovers of planet formation had largely stopped by then, the researchers reported in a study published Tuesday (Sept. 22) in the journal Nature Communications.

The findings give a more precise estimate of the RNA World's onset than previous studies based on geochemical modeling, biomolecular analyses and simulations of early atmospheric chemistry did, study first author Oleg Abramov, a senior scientist at the Arizona-based Planetary Science Institute, told Live Science in an email.

"The timing is consistent with previous estimates of approximately 4.35 billion years ago, but our range of uncertainty is significantly narrower," Abramov explained, adding that "previous ranges included 4.46 to 4.26 billion years ago, and 4.45 to 3.9 billion years ago."

The RNA World is a hypothetical time in Earth's history before the emergence of the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), the single microbe from which all living things on Earth descend. RNA, or ribonucleic acid, is a single-stranded molecule that is structurally similar to DNA and performs vital functions in living cells. Scientists think the RNA World preceded the emergence of DNA; in that early epoch, RNA would have been the primary replicating substance, carrying genetic information across generations of basic lifeforms by copying itself independently.

RNA evolved into its more chemically stable cousin, DNA, sometime before the emergence of LUCA. Scientists think the RNA World first developed into an RNA-and-protein world, and that DNA then appeared in two distinct stages nicknamed the U-DNA and T-DNA worlds.

While researchers have suggested alternative and hybrid scenarios for the emergence of life on Earth, the RNA World is a leading hypothesis, Abramov said. To determine when it might have existed, he and his colleagues built a computer model of Earth's interior that simulated how giant impacts on the planet's surface between 4.5 billion and 3.5 billion years ago affected conditions in the crust and Earth's overall compatibility with life.

"We constructed an impact bombardment model constrained by observables such as the lunar cratering record," Abramov said. "We examined both detrimental effects of impacts, such as temperature-induced degradation of key biomolecules, and effects conducive to life, such as generation of hydrothermal systems."

The model showed that space rocks measuring hundreds of miles across — an order of magnitude larger than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, but far smaller than the impactor that created the moon — went on slamming into Earth and sterilizing its surface until 4.4 billion years ago. Life could not have survived such intense bombardment, which probably triggered widespread melting of the crust, ocean vaporization, extreme temperature gradients in the crust and continuous showers of burning material and rock-vapor rain at the surface, Abramov said.

However, the conditions stabilized after 4.4 billion years ago. And as a result, hydrothermal vent clusters appeared within the near-surface crust that concentrated the ingredients for RNA, including nucleotides, short amino-acid chains called peptides and fat-like compounds known as lipids, Abramov said.

"These criteria point to the Earth becoming suitable for an RNA World between 4.4 and 4.3 billion years ago, with optimal conditions at approximately 4.33 billion years ago," he said.

The results suggest there was a gap of roughly 130 million years between the heyday of the RNA World and the emergence of LUCA, which scientists think lived about 4.2 billion years ago. However, there are still large uncertainties around both events, so the interval could be as big as 240 million years, Abramov noted.

"The duration of the RNA World is highly uncertain, and our study did not explicitly constrain it," he said.

Mysterious trenches stretching for miles across the vast Nullarbor Plain in Australia are the surface scars of huge ancient caves collapsing deep underground, according to new research.

"They look like some kind of river channel, but they start and end so abruptly that it triggered us to investigate them," Matej Lipar, a researcher at the Anton Melik Geographical Institute in Slovenia and first author of the study, told Live Science.

The Nullarbor Plain is an arid, flat, almost-treeless expanse in southern Australia. Nestled between the Great Victoria Desert and the Great Australian Bight coast, it has existed for more than 14 million years. Along the eastern edge of the Nullarbor Plain are five long trenches with similar north-to-south orientations. They range from several miles to more than 12 miles (20 kilometers) long, span 330 to 1,640 feet (100 to 500 meters) wide and extend between 3 and 30 feet (1 to 9m) deep.

Despite their large size, the trenches aren't always easy to spot. "You don't really notice them when you are on the Nullarboor because they are really flat," Lipar said.

How the trenches formed wasn't clear. There is no evidence that they were created by the wind, Lipar noted. And it's.unlikely that they were carved out by flowing water, because unlike typical valleys, the trenches don't have connected streams or other signs that water once flowed through them, Lipar explained.

To investigate the mysterious trenches' origin, Lipar and his colleagues ran exaggerated digital models of the terrain to make the trenches easier to see and identify where the team needed to focus. Then, they used an imaging technique called electrical resistivity tomography ‪—‬ which measures how electrical currents flow through the ground ‪—‬ to distinguish rock from sediment.

The results revealed that the trenches were dips at the top of what seemed almost like canyons stretching down more than 130 feet (40 m) below the surface. They were filled with sediment, with sand dominating the upper layers and higher proportions of fine particles of silt and clay below that.

When the team looked at a database of known caves, they found that some big, deep caves were lined up along the trenches. The accessible ones can often be reached via sinkholes — also known as dolines — and contain massive passages that can stretch for hundreds of metres. Their similar orientation to the trenches suggests the caves were formed in the porous, karst limestone area by groundwater flowing toward the coast during the Oligocene (33.9 million to 23 million years ago) and Early Miocene (23 million to 16 million years ago), Lipar said.

"Over time, the cave roofs progressively collapsed, causing sagging of overlying material, eventually creating these shallow depressions at the surface," Lipar said. The work was published Sept. 17 in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.

"What this also tells you is that when the trenches end, we might still have a cave that hasn't collapsed yet," Lipar said, and that might help us locate big caves that have never been seen by human eyes before.

The team confirmed their ideas by entering Clay Dam Cave, which is accessible by a sinkhole within a trench, finding that its sagging strata and sandy sediment infill matched what they'd detected in the other trenches.

"The authors skillfully show that the linear depressions along the margin of the Nullarbor Plain are probably the surface expression of the progressive collapse of ancient underground cavities," Andrea Zerboni, an Earth scientist at the University of Milan who wasn't involved in the study, told Live Science.

The fact that some trenches are fragmented implies this process is ongoing, and there might be more collapses in the future, Lipar said.

Maximilian Dröllner, a geoscientist at the University of Göttingen in Germany who wasn't involved in the study, told Live Science that the work "could help identify similar caves elsewhere and may be particularly valuable for the study of caves and potentially habitable environments on other planetary bodies."

Similar features have been seen in other deserts, including parts of the Arabian Peninsula, where networks of collapsed caves can be recognized at the surface as elongated depressions, Zerboni noted.

And beyond Earth the implications could be particularly intriguing. "Elongated depressions on Mars have often been interpreted as collapsed lava tubes," Zerboni said. "However, this study shows that superficially similar structures may also result from the collapse of underground systems formed by karst-like rock-alteration processes."

This insight might help scientists pinpoint good places to look for signs of extraterrestrial life. "Subsurface cavities are among the most promising environments in which past life — or traces of it — might have been protected from radiation, extreme temperatures and surface weathering," Zerboni said.

This intriguing astronaut photo shows a bright-white, salty surprise lurking at the summit of a giant volcano in the Sahara. The ancient, lava-covered peak also holds hidden, shadowy waterways, despite its extremely arid environment.

Emi Koussi (also known as Emi Koussou) is a pyroclastic shield volcano in northern Chad. It's located within the Tibesti Massif, a volcanic mountain range that straddles the border between Chad and Libya. The volcano's dome-shaped cone is up to 43 miles (69 kilometers) across and reaches a maximum elevation of 11,204 feet (3,415 meters) above sea level, making it the tallest peak in the Sahara, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

Emi Koussi is classified as extinct, and there are no historical records of it erupting, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program. However, scientists know that it was once highly active because its gradual slopes are covered with ancient lava. Some experts think this once-molten rock is around 2 million years old and likely flowed with low viscosity, "more like motor oil than toothpaste," Earth Observatory representatives previously wrote.

At the volcano's summit lies a complex caldera system that spans up to 9 miles (15 km) across and is covered with various volcanic vents and cones (see photos below). A second, smaller crater, dubbed Era Kohor, lies at the caldera's southern end.

Nestled within Era Kohor, a thick crust of brilliant-white salt covers the lowest part of the caldera's floor. This crystal layer, which reaches up to 3,300 feet (1,000 m) across, reflects light in such a way that astronauts commonly confuse it for snow, which rarely falls in the area.

The salty compound, known as natron, is a mix of sodium carbonate decahydrate, sodium bicarbonate, sodium chloride and sodium sulfate. It was left behind by an ancient salty lake that once filled Era Kohor but has long since evaporated.

This is not the only notable natron deposit in the Tibesti Massif. Around 150 miles (240 km) northwest of Emi Koussi (also in northern Chad) lies a volcanic caldera known as Trou au Natron (or Doon Orei), which contains a layer of the salty substance that is arranged with a pair of cones in a way that makes it look like a giant skull when viewed from above. This unusual deposit lies next to another hefty volcano, dubbed Toussidé, which is also covered with tendrils of ancient lava.

While Emi Koussi's ancient activity was mostly centered at its summit, a pair of volcanic cones can be seen on the mountain's northern flank. The lava that quickly flowed from these openings likely helped to create a series of ravines between the mountain and a volcanic plateau, dubbed Tarso Ahon, which is partly visible in the top left of the photo.

These ravines are very narrow and deep, meaning they are near-permanently cast in shadow and much cooler than their surroundings. As a result, they can often hold liquid water, despite the Tibesti Massif receiving as little as 0.8 inches (20 millimeters) of rain a year. Two of the largest canyons — which are 2,000 feet (600 m) and 700 feet (250 m) deep, respectively — contain permanent waterways that flow east and west of the volcano, according to the Earth Observatory.

Emi Koussi's slopes are covered with dry "stream channels," which were carved out by millennia of rain flowing down its flanks. Current rainfall patterns would struggle to create such structures. However, thousands of years ago, during the mid-Holocene, the average rainfall was at least 10 times greater, according to a 2025 study that compared the ancient lakes of Era Kohor and Trou au Natron. (The Holocene is the current geological epoch, which began about 11,700 years ago, at the end of the last ice age.)

This is not the first time that astronauts have gazed down upon Emi Koussi. In fact, the volcano was one of the first geological formations photographed from space, when the crew of NASA's Apollo 7 mission snapped the imposing peak in October 1968.

See more Earth from space

The massive Nepal-Tibet flood on Aug. 26 showed just how devastating glacier-related disasters can be. As of Sept. 16, the event killed at least 1,400 people, with more than 6,000 people still missing.

The Himalayas, with their steep slopes studded with rapidly melting glaciers, are high risk, but areas across much of the world carry the risk of glacier-related disasters, including one tropical region that is at particular risk, experts told Live Science.

"Slope failure from glacier shrinkage is occurring everywhere," Mark Carey, a professor of environmental studies and geography and director of The Glacier Lab at the University of Oregon, told Live Science in an email.

Nepal-Tibet flood

The recent Nepal-Tibet disaster unfolded when a large mass of bedrock and glacial ice detached from the mountainside. The ice and rock accelerated rapidly, reaching speeds of 500 feet per second (150 meters per second) as it dropped 6,500 feet (2,000 meters) directly into the Lhende River in Tibet, according to the Stimson Center think tank in Washington, D.C.

The rock, ice and water that then raced rapidly downstream eroded the riverbanks and collected debris and water along the way.

Carey noted that this disaster was exacerbated by a combination of factors.

"This particular event in Nepal-China was so profound because of the scale of the landslide, the quantity of water in the flood, the speed of the flood, and the number of people, communities, public works/infrastructure in the flood path," he said. "There was also little warning."

Risks in the High Mountains Asia

The Himalayas and the wider High Mountains Asia — an area that includes parts of China, Afghanistan, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Bhutan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan — are among the major epicenters for future glacier-related disasters, experts said. More than 9 million people in this region are at risk from glacial outbursts — when a lake bursts through or overtops its dam and drains rapidly — a 2023 Nature study found.

The region is nicknamed the "third pole" because it has the third-highest amount of ice in the world, after the Arctic and Antarctica.

Compounding this, any water, ice or debris can be channeled down the steep slopes into narrow valleys, meaning water and material can move quickly and travel huge distances, potentially inundating the downstream valleys where many people live.

For instance, in the recent Nepal glacial collapse, the resulting flood caused damage more than 60 miles (100 kilometers) away. The 2025 collapse of Birch glacier in Switzerland, by comparison ‪—‬ in which rock and ice also detached from a slope and destroyed the village of Blatten —‬ traveled just 2.6 miles (4.2 km).

The Himalayas are also among the most seismically active places on Earth, and glaciers are frequently weakened by tremors, which can trigger avalanches, glacial lake outburst floods or glacial collapse.

The Himalayas are also warming twice as fast as the global average, reducing ice cover and increasing meltwater. "Permafrost and glacier cover help stabilize mountain slopes," Carey said. "They hold the rock in place." So as glaciers melt, the mountain slopes become more prone to avalanches.

Glacial meltwater can also act as a lubricant as it seeps into the bed of the glacier, which, in turn, can facilitate sliding, Bethan Davies, a professor of glaciology at Newcastle University in the U.K., told Live Science in an email.

The region's large population makes the geographic hazards there riskier, she added.

And with some of the biggest dams in the world going up in seismically active regions of the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau, new hazards are being introduced, Live Science previously reported.

A planet-wide risk

But another region on the other side of the world is also at very high risk of glacier-related disasters. Peru has 68% of the planet's tropical glaciers and has experienced disasters for decades, experts told Live Science.

"In Peru in 1970, 6,000 people died when an earthquake shook loose part of the glacier and rock on Mount Huascarán," Carey said. "The same slope had failed in 1962, causing a massive rock-ice landslide that buried the community of Ranrahirca, killing about 2,000 people in an event similar to the one recently in Nepal-China."

The Cordillera Blanca portion of the Andes in Peru is considered a particular hazard as a result of glacial lakes that are rapidly expanding due to glacial melt, fueled by increased temperatures driven by climate change. One such lake, called Lake Palococha, sits above the town of Huaraz, which is home to about 130,000 people. All told, experts have identified 528 lakes in Peru that are at risk of overflowing, with 58 considered "very high risk" due to their proximity to populations.

This threat spans the Andes. A 2023 study in the journal Nature noted that the number of glacial lakes in the Andes has risen by 93% in the past two decades — much more than the 37% increase in the High Mountains Asia.

In Europe, the Alps and cold regions like Scandinavia are potential hotspots for glacier-related disasters. Europe is warming faster than the global average.

In North America, meanwhile, Alaska is at risk for landslides and lake outbursts as glaciers collapse and retreat. Although many of the at-risk glaciers aren't in highly populated areas, there's a risk that glacial lakes could burst their banks and inundate the state's Suicide Basin, which frequently drains into and floods Juneau, Carey noted.

Glaciers or glacier-related landslides can also crash into the sea. "All areas with glaciers and all coastal areas where tsunami-like waves from a glacier collapse could inundate them," are at risk, Carey said.

How to reduce the risks

Better monitoring of glaciers and their lakes in at-risk regions can help mitigate the risks in the short and medium term, experts told Live Science.

The impact of good monitoring was evident last year in Blatten.

"The Birch Glacier was well monitored, and when it started to show signs of movement, the village below was evacuated," Davies said. Just one person — a 64-year-old shepherd who was outside the evacuation zone — died.

However, the Himalayas are a vast region with many potential hazards, and local authorities do not have the resources to establish and run giant monitoring networks, experts said. Nor do local authorities typically have access to expensive rescue equipment, like helicopters that can quickly evacuate people who would otherwise be trapped, Carey said.

Carey noted that when a potential hazard is identified, authorities can take other steps, such as draining a swollen lake to try reducing the risk.

In Peru, over 70 years, for example, authorities "drained 34 glacial lakes over those decades, no doubt saving tens of thousands of lives," he said.

But disasters can still occur even with monitoring, draining and scientific assessment.

"Everyone, including me, had thought that engineering works to stabilize and contain Lake 513 [in Peru] back in the 1990s had secured it," Carey said."We were all wrong."

Despite all that work, in 2010, a giant avalanche generated a 82-foot-tall (25 m) tsunami that overtopped the lake's dam and flooded homes and nearby farmland.

In the long term, slowing global warming is the most sweeping way to reduce the risk of glacial collapse.

"Stronger climate action may prevent a worsening and increasing destabilisation of these high mountain environments," Davies said.

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In the summer of 2008, New York City lowered the threshold for activating its emergency heat plan.

The city had historically relied on the National Weather Service threshold of a heat index of 105 F (40.6 C), but they noticed that people were getting heat stroke at lower temperatures.

As part of a wider effort, they changed the alert threshold: it would trigger if the temperature reached 100 F (37.8 C) for a day, or 95 F (35 C) for two days in a row. When the threshold was reached, city officials conducted targeted outreach, including to vulnerable groups, like homeless people; alerted residents on their phones; launched measures to protect the power and water supply; and opened cooling centers.

Lowering this threshold correlated with a more than 50% reduction in hospitalizations for heat stroke and related illnesses on hot days.

New York's case study offers one of the clearest examples of an intervention that worked to protect people from deadly heat.

As the planet warms, we will need to find more of these solutions. The consensus among scientists is that the most effective way to avoid the worst health outcomes of climate change is to slow warming by reducing carbon emissions. Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit), for instance, would mean 11,600 fewer deaths due to wildfire smoke exposure in the U.S. annually, compared with warming of 5.4 F (3 C).

But even if we rapidly reduce emissions, climate change will have wide-ranging effects on our health

So what measures actually work to protect people's health? Live Science reviewed dozens of studies and talked with 19 climate and health experts at universities and health and climate associations, to identify the most promising solutions to two of the biggest climate-related threats: extreme heat and wildfire smoke.

Some interventions have demonstrated a reduction in deaths or disease at the population level, while others have used modeling to predict health impacts or rely on proxy measures.

"The strongest evidence is where these approaches reduce illness, hospital visits or death," said Charles Leonard, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania, told Live Science, "not just heat exposure, pollution levels or other intermediate markers."

Most solutions do not offer the level of clarity of the New York example, however. Many reduce temperatures or alter human physiology in ways that are likely to decrease the number of heat-related deaths or cases of illness. But a deeper examination reveals limited evidence that many seemingly intuitive interventions, such as cooling centers, are effective on a societal level.

For both heat and wildfire smoke exposure, we analyzed the evidence to see which interventions have actually worked.

Extreme heat

Air conditioning and heat pumps

Evidence grade: Strong

One of the most common interventions for managing indoor temperatures is the use of mechanical systems with refrigerants, such as air conditioning or heat pumps.

Air conditioning has been tied to reduced hospital admissions in California and reduced heat-related deaths at Texas prisons. During a heat wave in Portugal, patients admitted to an AC-supported hospital had a 40% lower risk of dying than those in wards without AC. It is a clear way to impact health outcomes.

But AC can't be the whole solution.

"One of the most important lessons emerging from heat adaptation research is that no single intervention is sufficient on its own," said Shweta Arya, senior project manager for smart surfaces at the American Public Health Association's Center for Climate, Health and Equity, which leads the association's work on health and climate action.

While 90% of U.S. households used AC in 2020, the latest year for which energy survey data is available, it's not a cure-all. It is vulnerable to power outages, and it contributes to outdoor warming via added electricity demand and heat expelled from vents.

Additionally, just because people have AC doesn't mean they can afford to use it. This is known as the "heat or eat" dilemma: analysis of US household data have consistently shown families limit food purchases and take on debt to pay AC-linked energy bills.

"In many cases, the primary barrier to stay[ing] cool indoors is not access to cooling equipment but the ability to pay monthly energy bills," Pilar Botana Martinez, a research scientist at Boston University's Department of Environmental Health, told Live Science.

Shade, rest and hydration outdoors

Evidence grade: Strong

Staying indoors to avoid the heat is one way to reduce the health impacts of climate change, "but this is not a practical solution for everyone, especially those doing demanding jobs in very hot warehouses, on construction sites, in agricultural fields," Barrak Alahmad, director of the Occupational Health and Climate Change Program at Harvard University, told Live Science.

Nearly one-third of U.S. employees — mostly men — have regular outdoor exposure as part of their job.

Some of the strongest evidence for strategies for keeping them safe on the job comes from studies of sugarcane workers in Central America, Alahmad said. A nongovernmental organization called La Isla Network has rolled out a strategy in which workplaces incorporate mandated rest, shade, hydration and sanitation breaks.

In data collected over six years, La Isla Network has shown that this strategy improves health by reducing negative outcomes such as heat-related kidney failure. Similar reductions in heat-related illnesses have been seen in California; Texas; and Guangzhou, China, when such measures have been implemented. And although these interventions have some training and supply costs, they increase productivity, the data shows, which makes them an easier sell for companies.

"The aim is to build systems that reduce risk and harm, increase productivity and provide a return on investment so that these efforts just become business as usual," Jason Glaser, CEO of La Isla Network, told Live Science.

Passive cooling

Evidence grade: Intermediate

Passive cooling reduces indoor temperatures without mechanical devices like AC. These strategies include modern technologies, such as reflective surfaces and roofs that reflect more sunlight and thus keep buildings cooler; shade structures and urban greenery; and traditional techniques, like courtyards, shades and ventilation.

"These are often low-cost material choices that can make a big difference in the safety and comfort inside a building and have a proven track record of performance [in lowering temperature]," said Kurt Shickman, senior fellow at the WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities.

These passive technologies also make AC more efficient, thus reducing costs and lowering demand for electricity on peak power days, Shickman said.

The evidence suggests cool roofs work at scale. A 2019 California modeling study predicted that state-wide adoption of this technology would halve the number of people exposed to heat wave conditions by 2050, while a 2024 study in London that modeled cool-roof deployment predicted that the technology could reduce heat-related deaths by up to 32% during heat waves.

Green spaces can also reduce heat exposure. In dense cities in Southeast Asia, the introduction of green infrastructure, such as trees lining streets and additional bodies of water, has been shown to reduce air temperatures by up to 4.7 F (2.6 C) and surface temperatures by 19.8 F (11 C).

Those interventions won't work everywhere, though, in part because strategies that reduce deaths from heat could worsen those from cold, and cold-related deaths are four times more common globally, a 2025 study found. So places that have both cold snaps and heat waves will need to think about those trade-offs before implementing such strategies.

City-wide heat warning systems

Evidence grade: Strong

Heat warning systems have been proposed to reduce heat exposure. There is evidence that some existing systems, such as New York City's, work to reduce death or hospitalization. But whether these systems are effective depends on how they're implemented.

"Effective systems do far more than issue a temperature alert" based on forecast high-heat events, Arya told Live Science ‪—‬ an idea other experts echoed. Instead, they trigger coordinated actions, such as reaching out to vulnerable populations, extending utility protections, and coordinating with healthcare systems for surges in the number of patients.

It's difficult to test such plans in controlled experiments, but researchers try by comparing a city before and after an intervention, or by finding comparable cities or regions that did or didn't implement a heat plan and assessing the plan's effectiveness. These "natural experiments" offer a comparison without having an alternative universe as a control group. Academics using such methods concluded in 2025 that heat exposure prevention plans led to a 25% reduction in deaths attributable to extreme heat across Europe.

Personalized alerts

Evidence grade: Strong

While most warning systems trigger when temperatures cross a threshold that's considered dangerous for an average person, Shickman said, "[i]n reality, people experiencing the same air temperature will have very different responses to it."

One solution could be to individualize attention. Shickman pointed to a pilot program by insurance company Emblem Health in New York, in which a trained artificial intelligence (AI) agent supported 17,000 people with personalized advice targeted to those with complex health or social issues. The intervention halved hospital admissions compared with a control group that didn't take part.

"We can go a step further and use technology to shift from generic, passive warnings to proactive ones that address individuals' needs," he explained.

Cooling centers

Evidence grade: Weak

A common strategy implemented during heat waves is the use of cooling centers — dedicated public spaces like libraries, schools, religious buildings or commercial locations where cooler air (often via air conditioning) offers respite.

Despite extensive adoption across the U.S. and internationally, there is very limited evidence that cooling centers reduce deaths or hospitalizations from heat exposure — likely because they're not visited much.

For example, a 2024 study into Virginia's cooling centers questioned the state's existing strategy because communities that had cooling centers also had higher numbers of heat-related illnesses. Surveying the field, a 2025 review from the National Bureau of Economic Research questioned "whether those who can most benefit from reduced heat exposure can or are willing to access cooling centers, and whether travel to centers can actually increase heat exposure relative to staying at home."

Wildfire smoke

Wildfire smoke is full of fine particulate matter known as PM_2.5. These particles are 30 times smaller than the diameter of an average human hair and can penetrate deep into the lungs and the bloodstream, thereby increasing the risk of ailments such as heart attacks, asthma attacks and adverse pregnancy outcomes.

PM_2.5 pollution contributes to tens of thousands of excess deaths every year in the U.S. And research suggests that wildfire smoke emissions could increase by 262% to 482% by 2055, depending on the level of carbon emissions.

Here's what has been shown to work against this threat.

Commercial air filtration

Evidence grade: Intermediate

Data repeatedly shows that air filtration — whether through commercial HVAC systems or even a fan with a filter taped to it — reduces indoor PM_2.5 exposure.

"For wildfire smoke, an important adaptation is cleaner indoor air, as simple as that may sound," Leonard said.

Staying indoors protects individuals from the worst PM_2.5 exposure. But a 2021 California study that used 1,400 air quality sensors showed that on days with nearby wildfires, smoke found its way into households, tripling PM_2.5 compared with days without fires.

Putting newer-grade filters (MERV 16 or higher) on commercial systems, however, can reduce PM_2.5 indoors by 81%, studies found. Similarly, portable air filters have been shown to reduce PM2.5 exposure in Montana offices, Seattle homes and Singapore apartments.

However, what's still unclear is the extent to which air filtration will reduce deaths or hospitalizations related to wildfire smoke. This is because we don't know whether interventions that make air cleaner in perfect conditions scale up; people may not replace their air filters, or they may use the portable ones only some of the time, for example.

Modeling of some air filtration measures, however, suggests that they could prevent 11% to 63% of the hospital admissions and 7% to 39% of wildfire-linked deaths.

Masks for outdoor smoke exposure

Evidence grade: Intermediate

Many people, including those who work in construction and other outdoor jobs, must venture outside during smoky days, and they need information and tools to protect themselves, said Gillian Capper, program manager at the American Public Health Association's Center for Climate, Health and Equity.

For example, these measures include "distributing N95 respirators and requiring smoke protection plans for outdoor workers," she said.

Modeling studies show that N95 respirators can reduce exposure to wildfire smoke by 90%, and a modeling exercise that used data from 2012 wildfires in Washington state showed that these masks decrease smoke-linked hospitalizations by up to 30%, compared with a group that did not use masks.

Land management

Evidence grade: Intermediate

The evidence to support a reduction in wildfires through land management is mixed. The idea is that by thinning forests, harvesting trees, clearing underbrush and doing prescribed burns to prevent unplanned conflagrations, we can reduce the risk of massive, uncontrolled wildfires.

"Reducing fuels today may help avoid larger, more severe fires and associated smoke impacts in the future," Micah Hahn, an associate professor of environmental health at the University of Alaska Anchorage, told Live Science. "But relatively little research has directly measured those downstream health benefits."

A 2022 modeling exercise led by U.S. Forest Service scientists compared four forest management scenarios ‪—‬ including actions such as forest thinning and prescribed burning — in the Lake Tahoe basin over the next century. It found that these measures reduced PM_2.5 particle levels as well as smoke-related illness and death, compared with fire suppression on its own. It also modeled the health impacts for one year (2039) and found reduced health costs tied to such management.

But the benefits plateaued with more land burns. Research from the southeastern U.S. shows that management can become a large source of PM_2.5.

Still, prescribed burns have an advantage over a spontaneously erupting wildfire, experts said. "With prescribed burning, one distinct difference is the ability to plan for smoke," Heidi Huber-Stearns, director of the Center for Wildfire Smoke Research and Practice at the University of Oregon, told Live Science, and to "know when and where it will likely affect communities as compared to the unpredictability of wildfires."

Smoke alerts

In theory, fire alerts, which use high-resolution air-quality data, could reduce smoke exposure, Laura Kate Bender, vice president of nationwide advocacy and public policy at the American Lung Association, told Live Science. Alerts would be paired with tailored guidance to notify people of dangerous smoke levels and to tell them when to take action.

Because these alerts are a fairly new idea, however, there's little data showing that such programs would reduce smoke exposure or related hospitalizations and deaths. That said, there’s evidence from other fields: a 2012 World Bank modeling exercise calculated that weather data and early warnings saved nearly 800 lives per year in Europe, and could save a further 23,000 in the Global South if systems were upgraded.

"The hurricane warnings are good examples to follow, as people do act on these early warnings", Kai Chen, faculty director at the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health, told Live Science.

Ultimately, the researchers we spoke with agreed that we need more data, which requires funding for further studies into which interventions are effective and can be scaled.

"We've put a lot of effort into understanding the impacts of climate change and related exposures," Alahmad said. "But there comes a point where we need to move from studying the impacts to looking at interventions and solutions and see what actually works out there."

How we evaluated studies

We categorized evidence as strong, intermediate, or weak. Here's the criteria we used to assess them.

Strong: Data shows a reduction in disease, hospitalization or death at a population level. Data comes from either randomized trials or quasi-experimental protocols. Sample sizes are robust enough to show a clinically meaningful effect.

Intermediate: Data shows an improvement in an intermediate proxy measure, such as temperature or particulate matter concentrations, which has been tied to negative health outcomes, and/or data relies on modeling to show improved health outcomes at the population-level.

Weak: Limited data exists, or the data that does exist does not show a strong protective effect.

Burning up — How can we adapt to a warming world?

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The Amazon, Earth's largest tropical rainforest, could be on the brink of an irreversible change as the ongoing El Niño strengthens its grip on our climate.

El Niño is the warm phase of a multiyear natural climate cycle that is often marked by rising global temperatures and disruptive weather. This time, scientists monitoring the event are warning that climate change has helped supercharge it to likely the strongest ever recorded.

As temperature records are breached and the risk of a humanitarian crisis looms, already stressed natural systems are coming under unprecedented strain. The Amazon is one such system. Having suffered severe degradation in recent decades, some fear that a historic El Niño could launch a devastating drought that may help force the Amazon beyond a tipping point — transforming the verdant rainforest and vital store of the planet's carbon into savannah.

To get to grips with this looming catastrophe, Live Science spoke to Bernardo Flores, a Brazilian ecologist who studies the Amazon and has been sounding the alarm about its fate.

Patrick Pester: How could a strengthening El Niño impact the Amazon?

Bernardo Flores: We have a very high confidence that it is already a strong El Niño and that it will be very strong, possibly the strongest one on record. This is very concerning because during past decades we saw a few very strong El Niños — not as strong as this one, probably — and the consequences were very dramatic, and they became increasingly dramatic.

The Amazon becomes drier during El Niño, and then you have conditions for forest fires. You can have different types of fires, but forest fires are those that penetrate and spread through the moist forest, which is rarely flammable. And during these years, you can have thousands of kilometers of burnt forest that were not disturbed before.

We expect that these burnt areas will increase, possibly exponentially. There will be an acceleration, and that's a sign of a tipping point.

PP: Could a historic El Niño push the Amazon beyond a tipping point this year or next year?

BR: One of the things that makes the Amazon resilient is the existence of Indigenous people and local communities protecting the forest and managing the forest. But there is an increasing territorial expansion of organized crime syndicates involved in illegal activities that destroy the ecosystem. They're spreading ignition sources through these remote forests and competing for these territories with the local and Indigenous peoples. They bring violence, and then through violence, people die, people lose livelihoods, and become increasingly less capable of living in that area.

If you add to that these droughts, fires and water and food insecurity caused by these El Niños, then you increase the risk that these regions will be abandoned and become easier for organized crime groups to occupy through methods that involve destruction and fires. So, the tipping point of the Amazon has these mechanisms. You have climate change and El Niño that are disturbances in the climate, but you also have shifts from local and Indigenous management and governance to low governance and destructive organized crime activities, and the spread of wildfires that become increasingly large and recurrent.

Through a model, we pinpointed that with 1.5 degrees [Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit] of global warming, which is what we have now basically, and 22% of deforestation accumulated across the Amazon, there could be a tipping point. Then you have lost so much forest that you lose so much rain that the system becomes trapped in the self-degrading drought-fire loop. But this is not considering all the forest degradation that has occurred over the past decades, which is accumulating. At least 40% of the Amazon has been estimated to be degraded.

I have been saying that we could cross a tipping point. So, the message is we have to be very careful and take precautions to avoid wildfires. This is a very concerning and critical moment to focus on wildfires.

PP: In your recent paper, you and your colleagues wrote that the Amazon could undergo a "near systemwide transition" with global warming of 1.5 C to 1.9 C and deforestation of 22% to 28%. Most people now think the Paris Agreement's goal of keeping warming below 1.5 C is dead, so if the degradation is now at 40%, do you think this transition can be avoided, realistically?

BR: Yes. The tipping point is not a collapse. It is just a point beyond which the feedbacks change. The feedbacks that were previously keeping the Amazon resilient, they weaken, and other feedbacks that make the system self degrade gain strength. So, it means that when you cross the tipping point, it becomes more difficult to avoid, but it's not impossible.

The Amazon is a huge system. Forests, trees, they have long lives, so the dynamics are relatively slow. The collapse of the Amazon, if we did nothing, could take 100 years, centuries; we don't know. But this means that we have a few decades to act. In the next 10 years, we [need to] invest heavily in large-scale reforestation where rainforests have been cleared and degraded; restore the capacity of these forests to pump moisture into the atmosphere; and also shift the economic activities in the region to legal ones and strengthen the local people's capacity to persist and govern the landscape. Also, shift the economies of the region into more sustainable ones — not based on clearing for cattle and soy; but based on forest products, agroforestry, medicine, lots of industries that can be developed through forest products.

There are several issues being debated, but there is huge potential to shift. Even within a capitalist economic system, we could do that. Forest restoration will take 20, 30 years, but the time for that is now. And also to control organized crime. That's probably the most difficult thing; more difficult than shifting the whole economy.

PP: What's the difference between how the organized crime groups are approaching the landscape and how the local people are managing it?

BR: The local people and Indigenous peoples have been there for thousands of years. They know the forest in so much detail. They have empirical experience of hundreds of El Niños. Of course, the climate is changing, so they are dealing with conditions that are new to everyone, including them, but they have more capacity to adapt because they identify the changes. They have huge potential to help us deal with climate change. They manage the ecosystem in ways that the forest becomes more abundant in food; the forest becomes more resilient.

Organized crime comes from outside with the intention just to extract and destroy, and the methods are based on violence. They involve people working in illegal mining, for instance, and illegal logging and land grabbing. And then there's laundering of ecological assets. So, there's timber laundering. They do this with minerals also. When they occupy a region, a territory, the lives of people in the rural areas and Indigenous territory become much more violent and much more degrading. These regions are remote, so it's difficult. We can have control of these territories, but it depends on lots of international cooperation because they involve politicians. There are very powerful people who are involved with the organized crime system, and they also have a lot of economic power because they have this very diverse economic approach through different activities, legal and illegal, in the urban and rural areas. They accumulate all this wealth and capacity to invest in machines, for instance, in guns.

Ten years ago, we would work in remote parts of the Amazon, and it was fine. These weren't dangerous places. Now I have a colleague who goes to work, and they are in a river in a canoe with local people, and suddenly a fast boat approaches with very powerful engines, and there are five or six men with machine guns wanting to know what they are doing there. This is something that is increasingly more common, and it didn't exist before. To me, that's the most challenging problem to address.

PP: I mean, it sounds challenging. What gives you hope this can be overturned?

BR: I tend to be optimistic, and I have hope because I know how it can be done. It depends on results from elections; it depends on people becoming more aware, but because I work with tipping points, I know how tipping points occur in social systems and behavior. Suddenly, people can understand the importance of something, and then they support ideas. I believe that we are moving towards such tipping points. I don't know how late [we'll be], or what will be lost, but at some point we're going to have to react.

Editor's note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Climate change is often discussed in terms of rising temperatures, extreme weather and environmental loss. But there's another consequence that can be harder to see: The impact on our mental health.

In this exclusive video, we explore how heat exposure influences mental state, drawing on research by Kim Meidenbauer, a neuroscientist at Washington State University who studies the effect of heat on emotion and behavior.

Editor's Note: This text was updated at 12:30 p.m. EDT to correct the spelling of Kim Meidenbauer's name.

Burning up: How can we adapt to a warming world?

As the planet warms, our environment will be transformed, but so will our bodies. This video is part of a series where we investigate the health impacts of climate change, focusing on heat, air quality, food and infection risk. We also evaluate the promising solutions that could help us adapt to our warmer future.

This eye-catching astronaut photo shows the point where an ancient Patagonian lake has been split by a peculiar land bridge, creating two contrastingly colored bodies of water.

Lake Pueyrredón (on the left in the photo) is the Argentine half of a roughly 40-mile-long (65 kilometers) glacial lake, which stretches across the country's border with Chile in Patagonia — a region in South America that is well known for its diverse range of geographic features, including mountains, fjords, deserts and rainforests. The Chilean half of the lake is known as Lake Cochrane (not shown in this image). Both halves hold crystal-clear water that is up to 1,600 feet (500 meters) deep, giving Pueyrredón a deep blue hue when viewed from above.

Thousands of years ago, a thick sediment barrier formed across the southern section of Lake Pueyrredón, creating a new body of water known as Lake Posadas. This smaller body, which is roughly 5 miles (8 km) long, has a lighter, teal color due to its shallow water and a large influx of sediment from a nearby river, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

Other rivers from nearby hills have previously dumped large quantities of sediment along the western shore of Lake Pueyrredón (bottom of the photo), creating a trio of fan-shaped landforms, known as deltas, that increase in size from north to south (left to right in the photo).

Wind-driven currents and waves have pushed some of this sediment from the outer edges of the two smaller deltas, creating long, thin strips of land, known as sandspits, pointing down-current.

The strip of land separating Pueyrredón and Posadas looks similar to the sandspits. However, it is most likely a moraine — a barrier of sediment and larger rocks that formed along the edge of a hefty iceberg or long-lost glacier, according to the Earth Observatory.

Eagle-eyed viewers may be able to spot a narrow airstrip on the smallest delta (running almost parallel with its sandspit). While the area is largely uninhabited, it is popular with tourists, who travel to the lakes to camp, hike, fish and kayak, according to a local travel site.

Lake Posadas is also home to a unique island with a massive rocky arch (see below) that is also popular with tourists.

The two lakes in the astronaut photo sit within a large valley, which was carved by a massive ice sheet that once covered the area. The last remnants of this ice sheet are located in northern Patagonia, around 20 miles (30 km) west of Lake Cochrane, and have also been snapped from space by astronauts.

Patagonia is home to dozens of similar valleys and fjords that were carved out by the same massive ice slab. Around 210 miles (340 km) southwest of Pueyrredón and Posadas, a trio of ravines converge to create a rare configuration where a lake, river and glacier "touch" each other at a single point.

See more Earth from space

A volcanic eruption 22 million years ago froze a snapshot of the Andes in their youth, revealing a slow-and-steady formation of this formidable mountain range.

The eruption, which originated from the Lauca Caldera in what is now northern Chile, blanketed the landscape in a formation known as ignimbrite. This rock is left over after a pyroclastic flow ‪—‬ a mix of rock, volcanic gas and ash that sweeps over the landscape like a broiling tsunami. Pyroclastic flow is what buried the Roman town of Pompeii after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, preserving buildings and people where they fell.

Now, a new study published Sept. 11 in the journal Science Advances extrapolates the landscape under this Andean ignimbrite, revealing that it must have buried rolling foothills rather than craggy peaks.

"Pompeii shows how volcanic eruptions can freeze a moment in human history," Byron Adams, a geomorphologist at University College London, said in a statement. "This study shows that much larger eruptions can also freeze moments in Earth history, burying whole landscapes beneath volcanic deposits and preserving clues to how mountains were being built before the eruption. We cannot dig down to see the buried landscape, but we can use the shape of the volcanic blanket and what we know about how rivers shape mountains to infer what is hidden beneath it."

The original slope of the volcanic flow from Lauca Caldera was about 1.5 degrees, Adams and his colleagues wrote in the new paper. The researchers also calculated the erosion of the landscape to figure out how fast the rocks in the area were rising as the oceanic Nazca Plate pushed under the continental crust of South America, which is how the Andes were built.

They found that prior to the eruption, the uplift of the crust was no more than 0.16 mile (0.26 kilometer) per million years — quite a sluggish process. This finding corresponds to earlier work that used the formation of certain minerals within rocks to determine when a particular rock rose through the crust and approached the surface.

"There is debate over whether the Andes grew slowly and steadily over 40 or 50 million years or whether they rose extremely slowly and then popped up more recently, in the last six to 10 million years," Adams said. "Our findings, which cover a large part of the middle of that history, support the slow but steady hypothesis."

The same method could be applied to other mountain ranges worldwide, the researchers added.

Scientists have a new view of the ground under Los Angeles, and it's a bit shaky.

The 3D model of the Los Angeles basin shows that downtown LA is underpinned by up to 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) of sediment, which will likely amplify shaking from any earthquake that hits the region. That's not entirely new information, but the underground map is more precise than ever before, and it should help earthquake scientists better understand which areas of the city are most vulnerable.

"With this improved model of the basin, we now know the shape of the edges of the basin in a lot more detail," Elizabeth Cochran, a U.S. Geological Survey seismologist who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.

That's important, Cochran said, because irregular edges can focus or direct earthquake waves. In the magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake in 1994, Santa Monica experienced more shaking damage than expected because of the way the seismic waves traveled along the basin edge, she added.

Los Angeles sits in a sedimentary basin, a low spot where layers of sediment have accumulated for at least 15 million years. At first, the basin was underwater, so the lowest layers of these sediments were oceanic sediments. Later, when tectonic forces brought the basin onto dry land, additional sediment accumulated from the mountains nearby.

Researchers knew the general shape of the basin, but not in great detail. "Previous surveys were just linear arrays that went through just one cross section on the LA Basin, but this was the first full three-dimensional map," said Valeria Villa, a doctoral student at Caltech and co-author of the new paper describing the map, published Aug. 4 in the journal JGR Solid Earth.

The data from the new map came from 273 temporary seismic stations deployed around LA. These stations detected faint earthquake waves from distant quakes that couldn't be felt by humans. The paths and timing of these waves as they traveled helped researchers build a 3D map of the rock layers below the surface.

The central part of the basin, under downtown LA, holds the deepest sediments, which could amplify shaking. The edges of the basin are thinner, with 0.6 to 2.5 miles (1 to 4 km) of sediment before the hard crystalline rock that serves as the basin's bottom.

On its own, the map doesn't tell geophysicists exactly where shaking might be the worst in the case of a big LA earthquake, but researchers can now update their models and simulations to test different scenarios, Villa told Live Science. The damage will ultimately depend on a lot of factors, such as which fault causes the quake. Los Angeles is surrounded by many faults, including the famous San Andreas, which could give off a magnitude 7.8 quake that would jolt Southern California.

One important factor in the amount of damage to buildings during such a quake is "resonance" ‪—‬ whether buildings shake in time with the sediments below them, Cochran said. When buildings and sediments are in resonance, the damage is worse. A better understanding of the sediment layers beneath downtown LA will help researchers ensure buildings are designed to avoid resonating with the shaking basin, she said.

"You can, for example, change the stiffness of your building and do other things to offset this effect," Cochran said. "What is important is that you know what the ground is like, and what the larger geologic structure is like, underneath the region where you are building the building to know that this could be an issue."

Weakening Atlantic Ocean currents could cripple agriculture in some of the world's major breadbaskets, threatening global food security and raising the price of basic commodities, new research finds.

The study, which hasn't been peer-reviewed yet, investigated how a roughly 60% decline in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) would impact global food production. The AMOC is a system of ocean currents that regulates the global climate and brings heat from the tropics to the Northern Hemisphere.

However, the system is currently the weakest it's been in more than 1,000 years, having lost 10% to 20% of its strength due to climate change, estimates show.

In the new study, researchers used a computer model to simulate the AMOC's future decline. They modeled 100 years of change, assuming 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) of warming above preindustrial levels. The team forced an AMOC slowdown over the first 50 years in one simulation but didn't modify the circulation in a second experiment, which enabled them to compare the world with and without an AMOC failure.

The model's outcomes mirrored the results of previous studies, showing broad cooling in the Northern Hemisphere and a southward shift of the belt of clouds and rain that encircles the globe near the equator. As in past studies, these effects were irreversible on human timescales, said study co-author Michael Hinge, a senior economist at the nonprofit Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED).

"Once the damage is inflicted, it stays there," Hinge told Live Science, adding that in the 50 years after the peak rate of AMOC slowdown in the model, the circulation weakened by an extra 20%. The study was posted on ALLFED's website July 7.

An agricultural "shock"

Hinge and his colleagues ran three models to look at the most common varieties of wheat, maize and rice, layering these models on top of the AMOC simulations. They found that global yields for these crops decreased by 5.3% by the 50-year mark, once the AMOC had weakened substantially.

"Lots of these effects manifest earlier, so it's a moving target," Hinge said.

He added that the results were based on a single warming scenario that was run once and used monthly rather than daily data, so they should be interpreted as a proof of concept. "We've set up a pipeline that is ready to take pretty much any AMOC scenario that can generate high-resolution climate data and see what it implies for crops," Hinge said.

While there was a 5.3% decrease overall, that global metric concealed huge differences between regions. For example, countries like Germany and Ukraine lost up to 19% of their cereal yields due to sudden, sharp cooling, while Canada showed a 12% decline in production for the same reason.

"Scandinavia, the United Kingdom and Canada are particularly exposed," Hinge said, "but there are many other [vulnerable] locations, some of which may be surprising even to the people who are living there."

For instance, the model produced a "very nasty brown splodge" of reduced precipitation over India, Pakistan and big parts of China, he said. Iran, Sudan and Eritrea, which are already water-stressed countries, also exhibited severe declines in rainfall, indicating that a portion of the agriculture there may not survive an AMOC collapse.

The 5.3% result also hides variability among years, Hinge said, because it's an average. So there may be years when global cereal losses reach 10% or more, which would bump up food prices, in part because countries might stockpile crops instead of trading them.

Global response

The regional effects of an AMOC slowdown would interact with climate change, triggering unpredictable outcomes. In particular, maladaptation — taking actions that end up backfiring — is a worry, Hinge said.

"You're preparing and setting up for much hotter temperatures or trying to develop areas for these temperatures and the trends you're seeing, and suddenly you see something different," he said. "That may cause an even larger compounding effect [on agriculture]."

The findings build on prior research led by Paul Ritchie, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter in the U.K., whose team explored the effects of an AMOC collapse on agriculture in Great Britain. That study, published in 2020, had similar limitations as the new one, so it's best to interpret both papers as a suggestion of what might happen rather than a precise forecast, Ritchie told Live Science in an email.

"I think the new study is valuable in showing the potential scale and geographic distribution of the initial agricultural shock," said Ritchie, who was not involved in the latest work. "What that would ultimately mean for food production and food security is more uncertain, because there are many possible responses by farmers, markets and governments." For that reason, the regional predictions may be more informative than the 5.3% global average, he said.

Average food prices worldwide could rise by 17% to 40% if the AMOC weakens to the extent it did in the model, the study predicts. The level of increase depends on how countries respond to the shock and their degree of preparedness, as well as on whether agriculture can be sustainably expanded in places like the African Sahel (the semi-arid zone directly south of the Sahara Desert) and Brazil, the analysis suggests.

The U.S. would not be spared from this price jump, and the model indicated that the country could see crop losses of about 3% for domestic wheat and corn. This loss would likely impact other foods that rely on cereal inputs, like meat, Hinge said. "The variety of foods available in the stores may well diminish for periods," he added.

An AMOC collapse would fundamentally deepen the need for countries to trade with each other, because some regions — such as the Indian subcontinent, China, Iran, Russia, Ukraine and Canada — could endure this giant shift only if they imported more food, Hinge said.

"Should countries turn inwards and start to restrict exports in an effort to ensure access for their own citizens first, or deal with the uncertainty, or offset concerns, then this will massively magnify the effects of AMOC," he said.

If governments behave as they have during past shocks, such as the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, they may restrict trade and start stockpiling food if and when the effects of AMOC weakening begin to show, Hinge predicted. The researchers hope their work and future modeling can help people understand the need to take swift, effective action if a collapse were to occur, he said.

Currently, "if that warning light starts flashing, we're not sure what to do with it," Hinge said. "There are no easy answers here; an AMOC [collapse] would be deeply catastrophic."

To the untrained eye, Xiaoyu Shan's lab bench looked like a home gardening experiment gone bad: dishes filled with dirt — some that looked like mud pies and others that were bone-dry — and not a plant to be seen.

But those dishes held a warning. The dirt that Shan, a postdoctoral research associate in biology and biological engineering at Caltech, was studying contained soil microbes. And those soil microbes were exhibiting a concerning propensity: In dried-out soil, they were evolving to become more antibiotic resistant.

The study describing those findings, published in March, systematically showed that drought conditions could fuel the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Most of this resistance is driven by humans' misuse of antibiotics, which spurs bacteria to evolve genes that help them ward off the drugs. But the Caltech study raised a new worry: As many places face increased drought conditions, climate change itself could act as a selective pressure that could supercharge the evolution of these drug-resistant superbugs.

"We can expect to have more resistant bacteria being selected for in certain places around the globe," said Dianne Newman, a Caltech microbiologist and co-author of the study.

Increased antibiotic resistance is just one way that climate change is likely to put new populations at risk of multiple types of infections.

And this increased disease burden will coincide with climate change scrambling supply chains, eroding nutrition and stressing our health in other ways.

"No individual metric really does justice to the overall risk and health and well-being of these multiple stressors being exacerbated all at once and compounding each other," said Marina Romanello, a principal research fellow at the Institute of Global Health at University College London.

Warm-weather disease

In the small mountain town of Bailey, Colorado, which lies at an elevation of 7,740 feet (2,360 meters), May often brings snowstorms that can blanket the ground in white even as the sun starts to bake the plains at lower elevations. But on Memorial Day 2026, the forest floor was dry and ticks quested their way along blades of grass, seeking a blood meal.

A mild winter in most of the country means ticks — and the diseases they carry — are a rising concern. In April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that emergency department visits for tick bites were at their highest for that month since 2017. That trend isn't a one-off, according to the CDC; as temperatures rise, insects and arthropods can survive longer in the year and farther north.

As a result, vector-borne illnesses such as Lyme disease (spread by black-legged ticks in the Ixodes genus) and West Nile virus (spread by mosquitoes) will become more common in increasingly northerly locations. Already, alpha-gal syndrome, which is not an infection but is transmitted by the Lone Star tick (Amblyomma americanum) and causes an incurable allergy to red meat, is also seeing a dramatic rise as the species expands its range across the Northeast. Positive tests for antibodies to the alpha-gal molecule have increased by 100 times between 2013 and 2024.

Right now, almost half a million people are treated for Lyme disease each year, and the CDC records more than 8,000 cases of other tick-borne diseases annually across the country. It's not clear how this will change as the climate warms. One 2022 study found major increases in Lyme disease only at levels of warming of 6.3 to 9.9 degrees Fahrenheit (3.5 to 5.5 degrees Celsius) by 2100, but that much warming that fast is now considered an implausible scenario. However, the researchers saw a huge amount of uncertainty in the numbers, given the number of variables that affect whether a spreading tick population will transmit more disease, such as how often people go outside or what steps they take to avoid tick bites. Tick-borne illnesses are likely also underreported, so even the true number of illnesses transmitted each year right now is unknown.

But ticks are responsible for spreading 90% of all vector-borne diseases in the U.S., so any trends in the suite of illnesses spread by ticks are likely to affect thousands to tens of thousands of people.

An even more ubiquitous bloodsucker, the mosquito, currently spreads only a few diseases in the U.S. The most common and most serious is West Nile virus, which mosquitoes catch from feeding on infected birds. As of Sept. 8, 504 cases of West Nile virus had been reported in the U.S. in 2026, with 363 of them affecting the central nervous system. And because fewer than 1% of West Nile cases progress to the central nervous system, those numbers likely represent a dramatic underreporting of milder cases, which can cause months of fatigue in some people, in addition to acute flu-like symptoms, such as fever, headache and body aches.

Mosquito-borne illnesses like West Nile are expected to spread more quickly in warming temperatures. Heat helps mosquitoes stick around longer during the year, much like it does for ticks. It also speeds up the transmission and replication of the virus inside the mosquito, since the insects are cold-blooded and thus their metabolism is ruled by the weather.

"Except for places that are already really, really warm, we should expect that the replication rate of the virus inside the mosquito will speed up," said John Drake, director of the Center for the Ecology of Infectious Diseases at the University of Georgia. "That shortens the generation time, and that means we expect there to be more transmission."

Even though mosquitos love water, climate-related drought could ironically nearly triple the number of human West Nile cases in the U.S. over the next 30 years from around 2,000 reported cases (according to CDC data) to between 5,000 and 6,000. That's likely because in drier conditions, more mosquitoes are infected, possibly because birds, the intermediate host of the virus, either congregate more closely with mosquitoes around water sources or breed less readily in drought, meaning the fraction of birds that carry the virus is higher than in more water-abundant times.

Mosquito-borne diseases long ago eradicated from the U.S. could also resurge with warming temperatures. The southeastern United States will become more prone to malaria and dengue fever transmission under all levels of warming; summer 2026 saw more than 40 locally-acquired cases of dengue fever in Florida. Public health surveillance and disease-control measures have largely stopped those transmission chains, but the likelihood is that society will have to pour more money into beating these diseases back again in future decades. For example, there are malaria vaccines approved for children, but currently, they are recommended only in areas where the illnesses are endemic. If malaria were commonly found in the southern U.S., millions of Americans might need vaccines, including susceptible adults.

"If we were to get endemic diseases like those in the U.S. again, it could become a huge burden and it could be quite costly," Drake said.

Disaster and disease

Flooding is another factor that's exacerbating vector-borne disease under climate change. As climate change worsens, extreme weather events will, too. Because warm air can hold more moisture, many areas will see increased episodes of heavy rainfall and hurricanes will become more intense.

"Flooding creates habitat for these mosquitoes," Drake said.

Disasters also spur the spread of other diseases that are usually quite rare in the U.S., such as leptospirosis, a bacterial infection that spreads from animals to humans via animal urine. Floodwaters may be contaminated by the bodies of drowned animals; in 2022, after Hurricane Fiora hit Puerto Rico, leptospirosis cases leapt by a factor of 3.6 to over 10 cases a week.

After Hurricanes Matthew and Florence in 2016 and 2018, respectively, North Carolina saw an 11% increase in emergency department visits for gastrointestinal illnesses. Black and American Indian residents were the most affected, likely because discrimination over generations has disproportionately pushed Black Americans and Native Americans to less desirable, more flood-prone land, the researchers found.

Cycles of precipitation, drought and subsequent dust storms can spur the spread of Valley fever, a fungal respiratory disease that causes an estimated 700 to 1,100 deaths per year, mostly in the U.S. Southwest. Valley fever is already on the rise, with cases in Arizona, one of the hotspots for the disease, doubling from about 64 cases per 100,000 people in 2005 to 145 cases per 100,000 people in 2022. As the West warms and dries, Valley fever is likely to spread from its stronghold in the Southwest and become endemic in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota, putting millions more people at risk.

The infectious disease risk from natural disasters tends to stack on top of other health problems stemming from these catastrophes. Flooded buildings can harbor mold that can worsen allergies, asthma and other respiratory illnesses. When major storms cause power loss, people turn to generators for electricity, which release pollutants linked to asthma. Though it's often hard to track the effects of these disasters, one study found that flooded regions after Tropical Storm Imelda in Texas in 2019 saw 10% more emergency department visits for asthma than nonflooded regions did.

Moreover, the threat to life and livelihood from these disasters can cause mental health conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, Romanello said. The problems compound on each other, she said; already, she has heard reports from Africa about malaria outbreaks, fed by warming, and health workers struggling to reach the affected regions because flooding, also exacerbated by warming, has washed out roads.

"What is the most concerning aspect is that all of that is happening together, so we're seeing all of this risk being exacerbated at once," she said.

Antibiotic resistance on the rise

As Newman and Shan's work shows, as spots around the U.S. face new infection risks, existing treatments may become less effective. Their work showed that drought concentrated the natural antibiotics that bacteria make in the soil, making it harder for bacteria susceptible to the compounds to survive. As a result, the microbes with genes for antibiotic resistance did better. The problem for human health is that bacteria are very good at gene swapping, so these soil microbes can easily pass their antibiotic resistance superpowers to bacteria that infect people, their research showed.

"Gardening, breathing dust ‪—‬ that's how it happens," Newman said of human and soil bacteria coming into contact. "We are constantly encountering bacteria in our environment."

The researchers found an association between drought and antibiotic resistance reported by hospitals.

They aren't the only ones. A recent study on Salmonella, a bacterium that causes about 1.35 million cases of food poisoning each year in the U.S. alone, found that temperature and rainfall promote antibiotic resistance in this microbe. "Globally, climate change was linked to about a 10% increase in Salmonella resistance gene abundance," said study first author Zhen-Chao Zhou, an ecology researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Other microbes show similar effects.

Meanwhile, warmer conditions help bacteria grow faster, adapt to stress and swap resistance genes, Zhou said, while drought concentrates them in limited water sources where they mingle freely. Climate-change-induced flooding can then, in theory, spread the resistant genes far and wide.

Combating the compounding risks requires both public health and climate mitigation approaches, experts say. Not only does the world need to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but people also need to use antibiotics more carefully, Zhou said; improve sanitation practices, such as sewage management, around the world so that antibiotic-resistant strains don't spread as easily; strengthen food safety; and expand disease surveillance. The public also needs to understand that climate change is a health issue, Romanello said.

"When we talk about tackling greenhouse gas emissions," she said, "what we're talking about is a sustainable livable future with healthy economies."

Burning up — How can we adapt to a warming world?

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Abnormally high temperatures on the Tibetan Plateau triggered two catastrophic rainfall events halfway around the world in California and nearby states in early 2017 and 2023, a new study reports.

This is the first time that researchers have identified this link, known as a climate teleconnection. The results could improve forecasts of extreme weather in the western U.S., which, in turn, could improve warnings for coastal communities and potentially save lives as well as billions of dollars in property damage, the study's authors say.

In December 2016 and February 2023, the Tibetan Plateau was warmer than usual for these times of the year. Roughly one month after each of these hotspots appeared, parts of California, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Arizona received record-breaking precipitation, causing a total of around $6.6 billion in damage, according to the study, and killing at least nine people.

State-of-the-art forecast systems, which rely heavily on ocean conditions like El Niño, failed to predict this extreme rainfall, said study first author Yongkang Xue, a distinguished professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UCLA. The record precipitation occurred during La Niña years, which are typically associated with dry conditions in California and neighboring regions, further complicating the picture.

"This study provides the first evidence from observational data analysis and model simulations that abnormally high early-winter temperatures on the Tibetan Plateau led to stronger atmospheric rivers along the U.S. Pacific Coast, driving heavy regional precipitation," Xue told Live Science in an email.

Atmospheric rivers are narrow, elongated corridors of intense water vapor transport. They are key drivers of precipitation and floods in the western U.S., and in this case, they interacted with giant waves in Earth's atmosphere, called Rossby waves, to produce devastating rainfall in the winters of 2017 and 2023.

As temperatures increased over the Tibetan Plateau in late 2016 and early 2023, a strong gradient formed with the regions north and south of the plateau. This generated an atmospheric disturbance that propagated eastward along the jet stream via Rossby waves, triggering what is known as a Rossby wave train between the Tibetan Plateau and the Rocky Mountains, Xue said.

A Rossby wave train is a series of waves traveling in the same direction and at regular intervals around alternating high- and low-pressure systems. As the wave trains initiated over the Tibetan Plateau reached the northeastern Pacific Ocean, they suddenly broke, and this supercharged the weather above California and adjacent states, Xue explained.

"Over the eastern Pacific, the wave breaks — much like a towering ocean wave crashing near the shore," he said. "This wave-breaking mechanism reduces static stability and significantly intensifies atmospheric rivers, ultimately driving extraordinary, heavy precipitation along the West Coast."

The findings, published Wednesday (Sept. 9) in the journal Science Advances, are based on complex modeling and analyses of precipitation and surface temperature data, among other observations. The results are part of a new body of research examining the influence of land temperatures on weather patterns, and this is the first study of a winter season, Xue said.

The analysis is a "very specific and impactful case study," said Matthew Huber, a professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at Purdue University in Indiana, who was not involved in the research. The results build on the well-established idea that extra heat on a mountaintop affects Rossby waves almost as if the mountain had suddenly grown, Huber told Live Science in an email.

Large mountains and plateaus generate waves in the jet stream that are thousands of miles long — "so long that we also call them planetary waves," Huber said. An increase or drop in temperature so high up above sea level adds or subtracts from the atmospheric disturbance that already exists due to the elevation.

"You can imagine the waves in the jet are kind of like a motorcycle rider going off a jump," Huber said. "How far and how high they jump depends on how fast they are going and how big a ramp they are going over."

The models replicated the extreme weather with surprising accuracy, raising hopes that the Tibetan Plateau could be integrated into early warning systems for the western U.S., Xue said. "As similar, though less severe, events become more [frequent] and extreme weather escalates globally, understanding this teleconnection allows forecasting agencies to better warn coastal communities of impending extreme conditions," he said.

Huber agreed that the results could help to better prepare for weather hazards. "This study shows that accurate predictions of weather events in the U.S. West are very sensitive to tiny changes very far 'upstream' and these upstream features are identifiable and traceable," he said.

In this excerpt from "The Carbon Wave" (MIT Press, 2026), author Leah Stokes, an associate professor of environmental politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, looks at a hopeful moment in U.S. politics when climate change took center stage: when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey ramped up calls for a "Green New Deal."

In September 2017, a still­-unknown Alexandria Ocasio-­Cortez watched as Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. Electricity went down for months. Like thousands of Puerto Ricans, her grandfather died in the storm's aftermath. She could see how climate change was hitting her community harder than others.

And it wasn't just Ocasio-­Cortez's community: the year before, she'd traveled to Standing Rock, North Dakota, to see firsthand how the fossil fuel industry was harming Indigenous people. It was mere weeks after the 2016 election, and the resistance to Trump had found its center in a makeshift camp along the Missouri River. People had united to oppose an oil pipeline.

Serendipitously, the day after Ocasio-­Cortez left the protest, a progressive organization reached out to ask her to run for Congress. Moved by the activists at Standing Rock, she said yes. In 2018, she ran a long-­shot primary campaign in a Bronx district occupied by a ten-­term congressman in House leadership. Her platform included an idea that some had bandied about before, but no one had developed in earnest: a Green New Deal. As she told journalists that summer, "The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan. We must again invest in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy, but this time green energy." In June, she won the primary. Her election signaled the beginning of a broader shift: climate change was back on the political agenda.

That fall, the world's leading climate science organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change —­ often called the IPCC —­ released a short report concluding that limiting warming to 1.5°C would require emissions to fall by almost half by 2030. The news ricocheted around the world, with headlines like "We Have 12 Years to Limit Climate Catastrophe." In my own neighborhood, someone printed a copy and stuck it in the free lending library, labeling it "important reading." The report changed how many people thought about the problem: it wasn't something we could deal with in 50 years; it was something we had to deal with today.

In the November 2018 midterm elections, two years into the first Trump administration, Democrats won big, paving the way for Nancy Pelosi to return as Speaker of the House after eight years as the minority leader. Days later, a group of young activists from the Sunrise Movement staged a sit-in at her office. Their bright yellow and­ black signs read "We have 12 years. What’s your plan?" referencing that scientific report.

Newly elected Representative Ocasio-­Cortez joined the action that day. She told the organizers they needed a clear ask and encouraged them to call for a Green New Deal. The idea broke through, sparking widespread coverage across the country. It was a new, hopeful vision for climate policy. These young people were not just talking about the climate disasters we needed to avoid —­ they were explaining how investments in clean energy could create good jobs. They were showing us the better world we could build together. If we only tried.

I watched these developments unfold in DC from my office by the Pacific Ocean and wanted to be a part of it. I wouldn't have to wait long. The Green New Deal held a force like gravity, pulling people into its orbit. By chance, I met some of the people tied to Ocasio-­Cortez at a conference and was invited to an early gathering to develop the idea into more detailed policy. By then, she'd released a framework for the plan with Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts.

The meeting was held in March 2019, at a hip hotel in DC's Adams Morgan neighborhood, miles away from the Capitol. A wide swath of people were invited: youth activists, environmental justice leaders, political organizers, think tank wonks, and a few academics like me. It was a contentious meeting that opened with a protest, revealing fissures in the movement that would eventually grow into large cracks. Some people believed that frontline communities facing the greatest pollution burdens were not being adequately consulted or invited to participate in the event. At the time, I didn't understand these dynamics between the climate and environmental justice movements. I was just a political science professor trying to understand how I could make my work more practical and help get a climate law passed if we got the chance.

It was at that event that I met Varshini Prakash, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement. I’d seen her photo many times, standing in the middle of Pelosi's office with her dark red jacket over a black­ and yellow T-­shirt, surrounded by young people sitting on the floor. Four months had passed since the sit-­in, and Varshini had ricocheted to the center of the climate movement. But she was also a recent college grad in her mid-­twenties, feeling a heavy burden from the climate crisis and the work involved in fighting it. At one point during the meeting, she spoke frankly about the stress that was on her and other young activists and cried. I found her vulnerability moving.

The fact was, Varshini had already changed history. She'd given me, and millions of others, a sense of hope and possibility. It was her actions, alongside all the other organizers in the Sunrise Movement, that brought us together in that first DC convening, and in countless other meetings to come. She inspired me to believe that I could do something bigger if I tried.

Too often, the way we think about cause and effect is simplistic. We're fed a linear model that favors the immediate. One person is responsible for their own carbon footprint. One person only has one vote. One person can only do so much. From this perspective, standing against more than a century of fossil fuels running through the heart of our society, it can feel like there's nothing we could do to shake the system loose. We're too small. Mere drops. But drops in the ocean can make waves.

Excerpted from The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet by Leah C. Stokes. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright 2026.

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In the event of a global catastrophe, such as a nuclear war, an enormous volcanic eruption or large asteroid strike, the best place to be is Australia, according to a new study.

Researchers looked at the places that were most resilient to global catastrophic risks, which are events that would kill more than 10% of the global population over several months or years.

"These kinds of catastrophes are under-researched" because they are not very likely, study first author Florian Ulrich Jehn, a researcher at FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany, told Live Science. "That makes them easy to ignore."

But they are still possible — and no country would be unaffected if they occurred, he said. And some places are more vulnerable than others.

In the new study, published Aug. 23 in the journal Global Challenges, researchers analyzed studies across a variety of disciplines such as food security, biological weapons, and volcanism, to identify potential global catastrophic risks and the factors that helped communities to endure them in the past or on a smaller scale. They also brought in subject experts to add discipline-specific papers to their database.

The team identified three broad types of risk: events that would block out sunlight, such as nuclear war or a huge volcano explosion); events that destroy global infrastructure, such as a geomagnetic storm or massive cyber attack; and biological hazards, such as natural or human-caused infectious diseases that would kill much of the population.

These events, the authors wrote, would have significant and long-lasting global consequences. Many would result in global famine from crops failing and trade networks falling apart. "The food system is often the thing that gets you," Jehn said.

A trade-off of risks

The team identified characteristics that made countries more resilient to catastrophe and better able to feed their inhabitants. And while "no single place on Earth" would be resilient against all catastrophic risks, the authors wrote, some would fare better than others.

The team found that wealthier countries and regions with a strong industrial base that are not highly reliant on global trade are better able to weather global disasters.

With a strong industrial base, countries are able to manufacture goods that they cannot import, making them more resilient.

Geography also plays a role. Large islands have an advantage over continents because they can easily isolate, but they also need to have an economy that can at least partially support itself, the researchers said. If an island is highly reliant on international trade, like Japan, it will struggle if global trade networks are disrupted, the study found.

Certain countries and regions are less resilient in the face of some types of catastrophes, even if they are wealthy. For example, countries with nuclear capabilities, such as the U.S., the U.K., France, Israel, Russia, Pakistan, and India, are more at risk of being involved in nuclear war. This makes the Northern Hemisphere, where NATO countries are situated, more vulnerable to nuclear attack than places in the Southern Hemisphere.

There are also fewer volcanoes in the southern half of the globe, while the Southern Hemisphere has more ocean to act as a climate buffer, making countries there more resilient to a huge volcanic eruption, the study found.

Global resilience

There are some factors that make all countries better able to endure disasters in general, such as democratic processes and equality, Jehn said.

"When these catastrophes happen, you have to make the right decisions, and this depends on whether your country has functional governance," Jehn said. "Inequality makes governance worse, because it leads to things like elite rivalries, or less state capacity."

Australia came out as the best location to weather a catastrophic event that decimated global populations. It is in the Southern Hemisphere, so far away from the most likely location of a nuclear conflict (although the authors warn that it is allied with the U.S., which might increase its risk exposure). It is a major food producer, with diverse climatic zones, and has significant energy infrastructure.

Next best spots are Argentina, Brazil and New Zealand. New Zealand ranks lower than Australia because it has active volcanoes, a small industrial base, and is surrounded by water and vulnerable to tsunamis. Meanwhile, Brazil and Argentina have high levels of inequality and historical political instability, the authors wrote.

They also note that Iceland was a contender for a safe refuge, but its location in the far north makes it vulnerable to temperature shocks if a major incident were to block out sunshine.

The U.S. is not particularly well-placed to weather a global catastrophe, the study found. The country is exposed to the threat of geomagnetic storms because of its location and to nuclear war. The authors also pointed to the country’s poor COVID-19 outcomes, which appeared to be due to "a lack of political will and poor social cohesion."

David Denkenberger, director at Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED) and a researcher at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, told Live Science that the new study aids our understanding of future risks by considering a wider range of catastrophes.

"No country is resilient to every catastrophe, and this is an important central finding," he said. "A useful next step would be to quantify the relative likelihood and severity of different catastrophes, and the importance of different resilience factors, because these factors can involve significant trade-offs," said Denkenberger, who has previously collaborated with Jehn but is not an author on the paper.

How to be more resilient

Even though these global catastrophes are unlikely, it is important to include them on national risk registers and have international trade agreements in place in case they come to pass, Jehn said. "When global catastrophes happen, then you would likely have to restructure the food system — where it is produced, where it is traded," he said. "The chance to find a good compromise after the catastrophe has happened seems slim."

Denkenberger echoed his comments. The study, he said, "makes it clear that regional resilience to global catastrophic risk requires investment in practical preparedness, including food-system resilience, critical infrastructure, coordinated trade and governance."

Two distinct climate regimes that could trigger runaway methane emissions are emerging in Siberia due to Arctic warming, new research suggests.

While western Siberia is becoming wetter in response to rising heat and moisture transported from the North Atlantic Ocean, eastern Siberia is getting drier and more prone to wildfires, a study published Aug. 6 in the journal Science finds. The Yenisei River (also spelled Yenisey) in central Russia delineates the separate environmental states — referred to as regimes because they describe specific types of climates — on each side of the basin, the study authors said.

Between 2010 and 2023, methane emissions from Siberia rose by 5% per year, with western Siberia releasing methane mainly via microbial activity in thawing soils and eastern Siberia discharging the powerful greenhouse gas through biomass burning, the results showed.

"Given the observed increases in permafrost thaw, wetland activity, and wildfire occurrence, an increase in methane emissions was expected," study co-author Paul Palmer, a professor in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh, told Live Science in an email. "What is surprising is how large and sustained the increase appears to be."

Annual methane emissions grew by about 13.2 million tons (12 million metric tons) over the study period, almost mirroring the rate of increase in methane emissions from wetlands worldwide. Although Siberia currently makes up only about 5% of global methane emissions, the region is becoming one of the fastest-growing natural methane sources on the planet, Palmer said.

In their study, Palmer and his colleagues integrated satellite observations with near-surface measurements to map methane emissions from Siberia over time. Instead of adding up individual methane sources on the ground, the researchers used a modeling method known as a methane flux inversion system, which helped them limit the uncertainty in their estimates to roughly 10%.

Siberia is vast, remote, sparsely instrumented and currently inaccessible for many scientists due to the Russia-Ukraine war, making it hard to monitor methane consistently by any means other than satellites. Although satellites rely on sunlight, of which Siberia gets very little in the winter, most methane emissions are thought to occur in the spring and summer, when Siberia gets more sunlight, Palmer said.

The results of the study show that Arctic warming amplifies methane emissions via distinct pathways in western and eastern Siberia because the regions are influenced by different climate patterns. The researchers also used climate models to predict future methane emissions from Siberia and found that additional warming could unleash millions of tons of greenhouse gases stored in forests and permafrost, which would further accelerate the warming trend.

In western Siberia, methane is released mainly from permafrost, or ground that has stayed frozen for at least two consecutive years. Siberia holds 46% of the Northern Hemisphere's permafrost, and this icy sediment traps vast amounts of carbon that have accumulated for thousands of years, Palmer said.

Western Siberia is influenced by the Scandinavian pattern of atmospheric circulation, a climate connection that consists of a main circulation center over Scandinavia and opposing weaker centers over Western Europe and eastern Russia. Global warming makes the Scandinavian pattern transport more warmth and moisture to western Siberia from the North Atlantic. Together with soaring temperatures in western Siberia itself, this triggers extensive permafrost thaw and unlocks carbon that microbes can convert into methane.

Conversely, eastern Siberia is influenced by a climate pattern known as the Arctic Oscillation, which causes atmospheric air pressure to "seesaw" between the Arctic and the Northern Hemisphere's middle latitudes. Climate change affects the Arctic Oscillation, leading to persistent high-pressure systems that intensify heat waves, reduce cloud cover and promote wildfires in eastern Siberia, Palmer said.

The climate models showed that methane emissions will increase with temperature rise and that the increase could become steeper the hotter the world gets, triggering a feedback loop.

"Eastern Siberia appears to be the main driver of the projected increase because it is warming faster than western Siberia and has seen a sharp rise in extreme wildfires," Palmer said. "Whether that trend continues will depend on how much vegetation remains available to burn, but there is also evidence that fires may be accelerating permafrost thaw and the release of methane from previously frozen ground."

However, the rise in methane emissions reported in the study is small relative to global and projected future emissions, especially if wildfires are already destabilizing eastern Siberia's permafrost, Palmer said.

"Siberia's vast permafrost carbon store is a sleeping giant," he said. "Continued warming risks waking up a much larger source of greenhouse gases."

This iconic photo, captured by an American astronaut on board the International Space Station (ISS), shows a lengthy trail of thick smoke pouring across New York City in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. A quarter of a century later, the image is as haunting as ever.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, members of the terrorist group al-Qaeda hijacked four passenger airliners and crashed two of them into the twin towers — a pair of 110-story skyscrapers at the heart of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. The impact of these collisions, which occurred roughly 17 minutes apart, eventually caused both buildings to collapse.

Shortly after the second tower was hit, the third hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Department of Defense in Arlington, Virginia. Another attack — likely intended for Washington, D.C. — was thwarted when the passengers of a fourth plane fought back against their hijackers, causing the aircraft to crash near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. In total, 2,977 people were killed across the different attacks, according to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.

NASA astronaut and ISS commander Frank Culbertson — the only American not on Earth at the time of the attacks — passed over New York City shortly after being told about what was happening back home. He photographed the thick plume of smoke blowing away from Manhattan, at an altitude of roughly 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth's surface.

If you look closely, you may be able to see what Culbertson described as an "odd bloom" around the base of the column of smoke rising from the towers. This is likely a sign that the image was captured "around the time of, or shortly after, the collapse of the second tower," Culbertson said.

Culbertson wrote several letters in the days following the attacks, sharing his unique perspective of the events. "It's horrible to see smoke pouring from wounds in your own country from such a fantastic vantage point," Culbertson wrote on Sept. 13. "The dichotomy of being on a spacecraft dedicated to improving life on the earth and watching life being destroyed by such willful, terrible acts is jolting to the psyche."

While in space, Culbertson learned that the pilot of the plane that was later hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon was his former flight school classmate Charles "Chic" Burlingame. When the ISS later passed over the Pentagon, the astronauts could see the large gash in the side of the building where the third plane had crashed. "Tears don't flow the same in space," Culbertson wrote while discussing his friend.

In 2017, Culbertson revealed that there was another striking thing he and the rest of his crew noticed in the wake of the attacks, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. "One of the most startling effects was that within about two orbits, all of the contrails that are normally crisscrossing the United States had disappeared because they had grounded all the airplanes," he said.

However, there was one exception. The astronauts noticed a single contrail moving eastward across the Midwest. "That was Air Force One headed back to D.C. with President Bush," Culbertson said. It was a "very sobering" sight, he added.

See more Earth from space

"Protect our water," "Water for people not AI," "Don't mess with our water," declare protest signs from Texas to New Mexico to Arizona. Angered by water use, energy consumption and pollution, locals are increasingly protesting the rapid expansion of data centers in the United States as tech companies work to rapidly expand capacity for AI.

Many data centers rely at least partly on water to absorb heat from air or surfaces, and then cause cooling as it evaporates, just like sweating keeps our bodies cool. The processors inside data centers can reach internal temperatures of up to 176 degrees Fahrenheit, for the same reasons that an overtaxed laptop heats up.

But while there's little doubt that data centers are consuming significant amounts of energy, water consumption is more complicated. Claims circulating online bring scant clarity, ranging from articles claiming that chatbots can consume 500 ml of water per query to some online commentators declaring AI's water issue to be nonexistent. And the consumption data from large tech companies themselves are often incomplete and inconsistent.

Experts stress that, overall, data center water consumption pales in comparison to the usage by industries like agriculture and some kinds of manufacturing. Researchers have estimated that data center cooling systems consumed 66 billion liters of water in 2023, less than 1 percent of the nation’s total consumption.

That figure could considerably rise with the rapid buildout of AI data centers, however — which may not be a big problem for water-rich regions but could significantly add to local water stress in drought-strapped places like New Mexico and Arizona.

Fortunately, engineers say there's a host of things that can be done — and are being done — to reduce the strain on local water resources. "There are many good ideas out there," says energy systems expert Fengqi You of Cornell University. When you add in efforts to replenish and restore natural water resources, "there's a good chance that, eventually, it could be net-zero water for the on-site cooling."

More renewable energy and better siting

Recent advances in AI technology have already reduced water demand for many data centers. Electrical and computer engineer Shaolei Ren of the University of California, Riverside, says that an estimate he made based on GPT-4, an earlier version of the model powering ChatGPT, as recently as 2024 — that drafting a short email would consume 500 milliliters of water — is already outdated because AI models have become more efficient. (This study was the origin of the half-liter-per-query claim.) In 2025, Google estimated that five drops of water are spent on processing a median-length query with its chatbot Gemini.

But even tiny amounts add up, given the rise in AI use. You's group recently predicted that by 2030, US data centers could consume 731 billion to 1,125 billion liters annually — the latter roughly equivalent to New York City's annual drinking water supply.

Still, these numbers factor in not just cooling, but also a greater amount of water used to generate the electricity that powers data centers. Much of that comes from burning coal or gas, with water being used to cool steam back into liquid after it's been used to spin the electricity-generating turbines. In other words, AI's water consumption can be significantly reduced by shifting to solar and wind, which require little to no water to operate, You says.

You adds that companies should site data centers in areas less prone to drought and with ample renewable energy sources, like regions in Montana, Nebraska, parts of Texas and South Dakota, instead of constructing new data centers in water-stressed places, such as in Arizona, New Mexico and Southern California. Strategic siting along with other measures could reduce AI's future water footprint by up to 86 percent, he says.

New cooling technologies

Advances in cooling technologies are also helping. The newest data centers that specialize in AI are already more water-efficient than their predecessors.

Pre-AI data centers use fans to carry away the heat from processor-filled racks, then use chilling systems funneling cool water through the building to cool the warm air down again. The heated water is then fed into a cooling tower that removes the heat but also loses some of the water to the atmosphere. This evaporative cooling uses a lot of water, says Eric Masanet of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who researches data center sustainability.

But the energy-hungry processors inside AI data centers generate so much heat that it's hard to remove it with air alone. That’s why many tech companies — including Amazon, Microsoft and Google — use a more efficient technique called liquid cooling.

In this method, a system of pipes filled with water, sometimes mixed with temperature-regulating chemicals, runs on top of the hardware, cooling the processors directly rather than cooling the entire data center. And because this is a closed-loop system, no water is lost: The heated fluid can be cooled down by exposing the pipes to the outside air, if conditions are cool enough, or an air-conditioner-like system, which uses energy.

But when it's extremely hot or humid, the centers need to bring online extra, more effective methods that involve water; one of these is to mist the air around the pipes. Mechanical engineer Vaibhav Bahadur at the University of Texas at Austin says that most AI data centers in Texas only use this kind of water-based cooling for the hottest parts of the summer.

Still, he and his colleagues recently estimated that the state's growing number of data centers — which currently consume less than a percent of the state's water demand — could be using 3 to 9 percent of that water by 2040. He expects that figure to reduce considerably, though. "Data centers are becoming much more efficient in their water usage," he says.

Indeed, recent technological developments have made it easier to avoid water-based cooling, even in hot climates, says Josh Parker, head of sustainability for NVIDIA, the company that designs many of the processors that populate AI-specialized data centers. Their latest generation of processors run at such high temperatures that they can be cooled with water at around 113 degrees Fahrenheit which, Parker says, is significantly warmer than traditional approaches. That reduces the need to bring on water-based cooling. Unless local temperatures regularly exceed 113 Fahrenheit, a threshold generally crossed only during severe heat waves, "typically we can just get away with large efficient fans cooling the infrastructure and the ambient air is sufficient to pull the heat away," Parker says.

Ren cautions that some companies may not want to run their processors that hot because it can interfere with computational performance, while some also house non-AI servers in the same space that cannot take the heat. But other cooling technologies are in development.

Some of these rely on elaborately designed pipe systems that draw heat even more effectively from processors. A number of US companies are exploring immersion cooling, where data center hardware sits in a tank filled with cooling liquid. In China, some companies have taken a similar approach by installing data centers in the ocean, although this makes them hard to access should hardware need replacing or upgrading, Bahadur says.

Advances in cooling technology will be necessary for tech companies to meet sustainability goals they have set for their operations. According to a statement from Amazon, its Web Services "set a goal to be water positive by 2030 — returning more water to communities than our direct operations use — and as of 2024, we're more than halfway there."

A spokesperson for OpenAI points to a web page outlining the company's plans to minimize water use, while Google aims to replenish 120 percent of the freshwater its data centers consume by 2030 through a variety of water stewardship projects.

Some companies, such as Google, are also finding smart ways to use waste heat from data centers to help address other sustainability challenges, such as making building heating less reliant on fossil fuels. Across Europe, some data centers are funneling heat from cooling circuits into district heating systems used to warm buildings.

The future of AI's water usage hinges on decisions that tech companies, engineers and policymakers will make in the coming years, Masanet says: where data centers are sited, their local energy infrastructure and climate, and how they're designed. "If you choose one set of choices, your number is going to be off the charts," he says. "You choose another set of choices, it's going to be way down here."

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.

Large patches of open water were visible just 37 miles (60 kilometers) from the North Pole on Aug. 29, a NASA satellite image shows. Although this doesn't necessarily mean that Arctic ice is worse off this year than the past few years, the image reveals how severely climate change is affecting the region, experts say.

The image is from the NASA Worldview satellite photo browsing tool and was shared last week on the blog Arctic News. The patches are "quite striking," but it's not the first time that water has encroached upon Arctic ice in this way, said Julienne Stroeve, a professor of polar observation and modeling at University College London.

"We can see open water at times at the North Pole but I don't think it's ever been this extensive," Stroeve told Live Science in an email. For instance, the central Arctic Ocean and regions north of 80 degrees north latitude, an imaginary line that crosses Canada's Ellesmere Island and Spitsbergen in Norway, were highly fragmented in early September 2016.

The time of year is one reason water is now visible in this region, said Zachary Labe, a climate scientist at Climate Central, a nonprofit news organization that analyzes and reports on the climate. "By the end of summer, the sea ice generally becomes more fragmented, with areas of open water appearing more widespread between pieces of sea ice," Labe told Live Science in an email.

This means that local weather conditions and ocean currents can create large gaps between ice floes, Labe said. For example, strong winds can push ice fragments together or pull them apart, leading areas of water to widen or close within hours or days.

"Individual satellite images from around the North Pole in just the last two weeks show dramatic changes in the amount and location of visible open water," he noted.

The current extent of Arctic sea ice isn't particularly low when compared with record-setting years, but that's now very changeable due to the diffuseness of the ice, Stroeve said. "Winds could change and compress the ice into a more compact ice cover leading to sudden drops in total extent," she said.

There is no specific distance from the North Pole at which open water should normally stop, because Arctic conditions can vary substantially from year to year, Labe said. However, the summer ice has become thinner and more fragile in recent years, so open water is consistently reaching closer to the North Pole than it did before.

"To me, this image doesn't necessarily show that conditions are dramatically worse this year compared to other recent years," Labe said. "Instead, it represents a worrying snapshot of a very different Arctic Ocean than only a few decades ago and one that is quickly changing over time."

The Arctic is warming nearly four times faster than the global average. Some of the northernmost regions that have historically boasted expansive, thick and persistent ice at the end of summer now have young, brittle ice floes instead, Labe said.

"The broader implications of more open water across the Arctic Ocean are wide-ranging, from changes in local weather and ocean conditions to impacts on marine ecosystems and greater coastal risks like erosion and flooding for Arctic communities," he said.

Scientists expect that sea ice will start to refreeze by mid- to late September, closing at least some of the gaps.

With only a couple of months to go before the harvest season for winter wheat in Colorado, the crop faced a whiplash: After a warm, dry winter, a cold snap plunged the plants into freezing weather for 12 hours, and temperatures soared to nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32.2 degrees Celsius) two days later. When the final harvest numbers were tallied in July, 73% of the crops were in poor or very poor condition. According to early estimates by Colorado Wheat, 2026's winter wheat crop was the smallest in the state since 1965.

Pick a crop, any crop, and you'll hear a similar story: Extreme weather and climate change are rocking the food supply. The warming climate makes food less nutritious, threatens crop survival, and triggers tipping points that would upend farming as we know it.

The impacts will be felt most intensely in less-developed regions of the world, where many people can't afford imported food and climate-related famines and nutritional scarcity are already happening.

But the U.S. is facing big changes to its food systems too, and no one is immune. Humans have overcome looming agricultural disasters before, but experts say the challenge should not be underestimated.

"There are real food security and nutrition concerns," said Andrew Hultgren, an environmental economist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, "especially under these high-warming futures."

Food is becoming less nutritious

As the planet warms, food crops are expected to become less nutritious. That's because, due to plant biology that's not yet fully understood, crops grown under higher levels of carbon dioxide are deficient in zinc, protein, magnesium, iron and other micronutrients. Crops are already less nutritious than they were in the 1950s, but this is partly due to breeding decisions that prioritize yield over nutrition. The carbon dioxide deficiencies will exacerbate this nutrition decline.

The global monthly average concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now over 420 parts per million (ppm), well over the preindustrial average of 280 ppm. By the end of the century, those levels will increase to at least 550 ppm in all but the most optimistic scenarios.

That will mean an additional 175 million people will be zinc deficient and an additional 122 million people will be protein deficient by 2050, a 2018 study found. Zinc deficiency has consequences for immune and skin health and may lead to poor growth in childhood; protein deficiency can also cause stunted growth as well as fatigue, muscle weakness and stress fractures. Those figures account only for the effects of carbon dioxide. A cascade of climate shifts and extreme weather may also affect the number of nutrients (and calories) available to the world.

The threats are myriad: Rising sea levels may inundate farmland and lead to saltier soil in coastal regions where, for example, rice farming is common. Soil salinity can make it impossible to grow crops in some regions. Droughts, heat waves, storms or temperature swings like those seen in Colorado this year might take out certain crops in particular places, leading to year-by-year price spikes or shortages. In the U.S., the results might look a lot like the recent egg shortages triggered by bird flu; temporarily empty shelves, price spikes, or even restrictions on the amount a customer can purchase in a visit for an affected food.

Climate shifts that harm pollinators and fuel the spread and introduction of plant pathogens such as harmful fungi will also likely reduce crop yields.

Areas that depend on the ocean for food are also facing steep challenges, due to both ocean acidification and the degradation of coral reef ecosystems, which are sources of food for many coastal communities and form much of the base of food chains for the larger fish people eat.

Hotter weather also affects food safety, said Christopher Golden, a professor of nutrition and public health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

"Increasing sea temperature and increasing sedimentation within seas could lead to harmful algal blooms or increasing food poisoning events from temperature-related food spoilage," Golden said. Algal blooms can contaminate shellfish like oysters or scallops with neurotoxins that can sicken and kill people who eat them. Food spoilage is a concern in regions such as Madagascar, where catches are brought ashore and readied for consumption in the open air.

Meanwhile, fish may move poleward to avoid the hottest sea temperatures, leaving the most vulnerable regions ‪—‬ such as Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Africa, Central America and the Pacific ‪—‬ with fewer fish in their waters. How bad this looks depends on the extent of the climate swings, with research suggesting that without any mitigation, fishers could see their catches decline by 58% to 92% off small islands in the Pacific and by 70% to 86% in Southeast Asia. This would drive food insecurity and malnutrition in those regions. The U.S. will likely face impacts too, as most of its seafood is imported from subtropical or tropical waters elsewhere.

There may be shifts in trade networks that lessen the blow for U.S. consumers, Golden said, but it's hard to predict. Some possibilities include "price shifts or trade shifts that lead to changing dietary patterns or more shelf-stable and heavily processed items that we know aren't good for your health," he said. In other words, less fresh-caught snapper and more potted meats.

Changing foods on the table

Individual producers are adapting, sometimes in ways that may not be immediately obvious to consumers. "Climate change is bad in that it's a slow-moving wave," said Elizabeth Wolkovich, a professor of forestry at the University of British Columbia. "You don't really notice that it's shifting underneath you and that the apple you eat isn't the apple your granddaughter will eat."

On that note, growers in the Pacific Northwest and U.S. Northeast will face challenges getting apples to lunch boxes around the world. Fewer cold days and more extreme-heat days will likely reduce apple yields by affecting how and when trees go dormant and bloom. Because it takes five or more years to establish fruiting trees in new regions, this could mean a reduced apple supply and higher prices.

Today's smooth arabica coffee (Coffea arabica) varieties may get harder to find and more expensive as climate change forces coffee growers out of many of the places they used to farm and droughts reduce supply. Earthier, more bitter robusta coffee beans (Coffea canephora) do better in warming temperatures, but even those beans could struggle with increasing seasonal variability caused by climate change.

Climate has already shifted wines in favor of less-acidic and higher-alcohol varieties, Wolkovich said, but it's happened slowly enough that, unless you're a connoisseur, you may not have noticed. Wine lovers can expect more changes: Wolkovich has found that the varieties of wine grapes that growers can produce will shift with climate change. Wildfires in grape-growing regions like California can also produce an unpleasant acrid and smoky flavor in wine.

And it's not just flavors that will be affected. U.S. dairy cattle breeds originated in cool and cloudy Northern Europe, and their milk output goes down as temperatures climb. Such heat stress reduced annual milk yield by an average of 1% a year between 2012 and 2016 alone, and heat-related losses are expected to balloon by 30% by 2050.

Americans have long been drinking less milk from the glass, but their demand for yogurt and cheese is rising, said Jared Hutchins, an assistant professor of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and first author of the study on milk yield. Those products depend heavily on the fat and protein content in milk, which is the first thing to drop when cattle are hot. "Fat and protein are what deliver the cultured dairy products that are in high demand," Hutchins told Live Science.

The story repeats itself across agricultural products, Hultgren said. "For each degree of that global temperature rise, caloric output [from crops] drops by 120 kilocalories or U.S. calories per person per day," he said, "which is about 4.5% of a person's daily recommended caloric intake."

That calculation, published by Hultgren and his colleagues in the journal Nature in 2025, already accounted for adaptations that farmers can make to reduce crop losses. Without those adaptations, the number would be over 30% higher, he said.

Reductions in available calories will translate to food shortages in vulnerable places, such as the Horn of Africa or India, said Marina Romanello, executive director of a multinational research project that tracks the impacts of climate on health at University College London. In North America, "it would feel like inflation," Hultgren said ‪—‬ yet another factor driving up grocery prices.

Worst-case scenarios

For farmers, the year-by-year uncertainty of climate change is a problem. Will this year bring drought? Will there be a sudden storm or flood that will wash away the spring crop? Should they take a risk on a new heat-resistant plant or agricultural technique?

Similar uncertainty haunts the long-term forecast. Climate tipping points can lead to sudden, irreversible changes in the system. For agriculture, one of the scariest tipping points is the potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). This pattern of ocean currents brings warm surface water north from the equator and circulates cold water south, warming Northern Europe and the northern parts of North America and cooling the Southern Hemisphere.

If this current were to collapse, northwestern Europe would cool dramatically, with studies suggesting that London could see temperature lows of minus 4 F (minus 20 C) ‪— ‬colder than the city's lowest temperatures on record. Precipitation would decline across Europe, leading to drought. Meanwhile, in the Amazon, the wet season could become the dry season and vice versa, said René van Westen, a climate researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands who has studied the impacts of an AMOC collapse.

On the other hand, if the AMOC doesn't collapse, London is expected to warm by 4.9 F (2.7 C) and see 15% to 18% more precipitation, depending on the season. The uncertainty in these predictions makes preparations difficult. There is still a lot of controversy over whether the AMOC will collapse and, if so, when. Should farmers plan for England to become increasingly toasty, or should they expect it to be plunged into a little ice age?

AMOC-related changes will take decades to centuries to unfold, even with a total collapse, van Westen told Live Science. But even so, they would require a total rewriting of agriculture in Europe and the northeastern U.S. "It will be very challenging to adapt to such a scenario," he said.

That doesn't mean a collapse of the world food system is inevitable. Farmers are already adapting to the early impacts of climate change by scaling back water-hungry crops in drought years and, in some places, testing new, heat-resistant varieties of crops in an attempt to stem the losses.

And humans have overcome looming disaster in agriculture before: In the 1950s and 1960s, new varieties of rice and wheat, along with the availability of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, spurred the "Green Revolution," tripling the world's yield of cereal crops while expanding farmland by only 30%. Similar innovations could limit hunger even as the world warms.

But the biggest way to mitigate these impacts is the most obvious one. While Hultgren and his colleagues found that adaptation could cut caloric losses under climate change by 30%, mitigating warming by reducing emissions today could slash them by half. Similarly, the AMOC is on a path toward weakening, van Westen said, but as long as humans slow the pace of climate change, the current can recover.

"If you are cutting your emissions," van Westen said, "you can lower your risk."

Burning up — How can we adapt to a warming world?

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Scientists have identified an ancient volcano on England's east coast that is so eroded, it took researchers three decades to piece together its enormous size and explosive past. What remains of the caldera system is located beneath the English counties of Norfolk and Lincolnshire.

However, while the volcano undoubtedly produced at least one huge-scale eruption, some experts don't think there is enough evidence for the structure to be called a supervolcano.

"It obviously must have been a very large eruption, but it would be very difficult to calculate the volume of the eruption given the poor preservation of the deposits," said Michael Poland, a research geophysicist with the Cascades Volcano Observatory and the scientist-in-charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. "This is part of the reason I really hate the term 'supervolcano,'" Poland, who was not involved in the discovery, told Live Science in an email.

In a recent analysis, published April 29 in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, scientists examined zircon crystals that were taken 80 years ago from boreholes 40 miles (65 kilometers) apart in Norfolk and Lincolnshire. Zircon crystals are smaller than the diameter of a human hair and form within molten magma underground before a volcano erupts. They contain uranium that decays into lead isotopes at a known rate, enabling researchers to precisely date eruptions.

The results showed an age match between the zircon crystals from Norfolk and Lincolnshire and counterparts taken from the Kinnekulle tephra, a thick layer of volcanic ash covering Scandinavia and the Baltic region. This suggests the ash plume from the volcano in what is now eastern England blew across the Tornquist Sea, a body of water that existed during the Ordovician period (488.3 million to 443.7 million years ago), and settled on what is now Scandinavia.

Researchers already knew that the Kinnekulle tephra was formed during a massive volcanic eruption. But the recent analysis shows for the first time how far the ash traveled and, therefore, how big the eruption really was.

The eruption would have also produced huge pyroclastic flows, or avalanches of rocky debris, ash and hot gas that race down the sides of some erupting volcanoes, said Peter Rowley, a volcanologist and senior lecturer at the University of Bristol in the U.K. who was not involved in the analysis. "The last eruption of this kind of scale was the Oranui event at Taupō in New Zealand, over 26,000 years ago," he told Live Science in an email.

However, while the explosion would have been impressive and equivalent to the force of thousands of atomic bombs, experts said the definition of a supervolcano is vague and there are better ways to describe what happened.

"The scientific definition of a supervolcano varies a little; it’s a term we tend not to use as volcanologists much," Rowley said. "In this case we would describe it as an ultraplinian eruption."

Ultraplinian eruptions are the most violent type of volcanic explosions, ejecting more than 240 cubic miles (1,000 cubic kilometers) of material. It's difficult to say exactly what the eruption that formed the Kinnekulle tephra would have looked like, but it likely lasted days to weeks and formed ash clouds taller than 25 miles (40 km) that reached into the stratosphere.

Geologists tend to reject the term supervolcano because it is imprecise, instead preferring to describe eruptions by the volume of material they eject.

Stephen Self, a physical volcanologist at the University of California, Berkeley, agreed that the term supervolcano can be too vague. "Supervolcano has become a kind-of buzz-word," he told Live Science in an email. "It's the deposits of the eruptions that are recognized, not the volcano."

Very little of the material ejected in England's ultraplinian eruption remains today, because most of it was eroded or buried. "The geological record is far from complete so it can be very difficult to say much about these eruption volumes with very old volcanoes," Rowley said.

Similarly, the Kinnekulle tephra has been degraded over time, Poland said.

The analysis also found evidence for an earlier eruption of the volcano that occurred 453.7 million years ago. However, there is no trace of these eruptions at the surface today; the boreholes are located in some of England's flattest landscapes, study first author Tim Pharaoh, a geophysicist with the British Geological Survey, said in a statement in August.

It's not surprising to find traces of big, ancient volcanoes in England. The recently identified volcano is part of a wider volcanic system that was active 450 million years ago and includes Eryri National Park in Wales and the Lake District in northwestern England, Rowley said.

"It's best not to imagine whole preserved volcanoes, but rather that we have deposits from their eruptions, or rocks which formed in the magma reservoirs beneath the original volcano," Rowley said. "These are often deformed and altered by tectonic events meaning that it takes some careful geological investigation to interpret the true picture."

China's solar power capacity has overtaken coal for the first time, marking a major milestone in the country's rapid expansion of renewable energy.

China had about 1,288 gigawatts (GW) of installed solar capacity at the end of July, compared with 1,285 GW of coal-fired capacity, according to figures from the country's energy administration reported by the South China Morning Post.

The milestone could have major implications for global efforts to tackle climate change: China is the world's largest annual greenhouse gas emitter, accounting for around 30% of global planet-warming emissions. If its rapid expansion of renewable energy begins to displace coal-fired power ‪—‬ one of the country's primary sources of greenhouse gas emissions ‪—‬ the impact could extend well beyond Chinese borders.

"China reaching around 1,288 GW of installed solar capacity, marginally overtaking coal, is a major milestone," Matthew Davies, UNESCO chair in sustainable energy technologies and a professor of chemical engineering at Swansea University in the U.K., told Live Science.

However, installed capacity doesn't necessarily equate to actual electricity generation. "Solar only generates when sunlight is available, whereas coal plants can run for much longer periods, so solar still supplies a much smaller share of China's electricity than coal," Davies said.

In other words, China has more solar capacity than coal capacity, but coal remains far more important when it comes to the amount of electricity actually delivered to the grid.

Between January and July this year, Chinese solar power output rose 15.5% compared to the same time period in 2025. Over those seven months, it reached 802.4 TWh, which is around 13% of the country's total electricity consumption.

"I would see this as a structural turning point, not the point at which solar has replaced coal," Davies said. "The key question is whether renewable generation can grow fast enough not only to meet rising electricity demand but to push coal generation down in absolute terms. Given the scale of China's power system, sustained reductions in coal use could have a major impact on global CO₂ emissions."

To do that, China will need to do more than build solar farms. One of the biggest challenges will be integrating all of the new renewable power into the electricity system.

"Installing solar is only part of the transition; grids, transmission, storage and demand flexibility all need to keep pace so that renewable electricity can actually be used," Davies said.

This transition toward solar panels will also make renewable energy more accessible around the world, as China's enormous manufacturing capacity will help drive down the global cost of solar panels. However, Davies said the next phase of the transition is to ensure the whole solar production process is sustainable. "We need to think about where technologies are made, where materials come from, how long they last, and how they are reused or recycled," he said.

Solar panel manufacturing involves raw material extraction, processing, manufacture, transport and installation, so it has an initial carbon footprint. High energy requirement for polysilicon production is a considerable factor as it uses coal-fired power plants. But, this is offset by the electricity they generate.

There is also a case for expanding local and regional manufacturing, Davies noted. Doing so could strengthen supply chains, create local skills and economic value, and make the global energy transition more resilient and equitable. That could be particularly important for expanding access to electricity in parts of the world where reliable power remains limited.

"The global energy transition is not only about replacing fossil fuels in existing electricity systems; it is also about enabling people who still lack reliable electricity to gain access to clean, affordable power," Davies said. "Ultimately, success is not simply about installing more solar panels. It is about building a clean-energy system that is affordable, sustainable, resilient and accessible globally."

A massive volcano erupts in Southeast Asia. Ash fall delays flights and destroys crops, while pyroclastic flows wipe out entire towns. Over the following weeks, the sulfur dioxide pumped out turns into a haze of fine acid droplets, eventually wrapping around the entire planet, scattering sunlight back to space. The sun turns pale, shadows go soft, the sky glows violet after sunset and the ground below cools. The next summer never appears. Harvests fail from the American Midwest to the monsoon belt in Asia. Countries close their borders, and people who have never heard of the volcano begin to starve.

This nightmare scenario has yet to happen, but it's not a matter of if but when a world-changing event like this will hit, and governments need to start preparing for global catastrophes that could disrupt the food system on an unprecedented scale.

There are three main steps we need to take soon: put events like nuclear war, a huge volcanic eruption and a continent-wide blackout into national risk assessments; agree to trade rules for such an emergency before it arrives; and fund pilot projects now for foods so we know what can be produced at scale without much sunlight or without fertilizer.

We've been faced with turbulent times the last few years with COVID, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Iran war. And the current outlook indicates there's more trouble ahead — the closure of the Strait of Hormuz alone could disrupt global food production, for example. A significant part of the world's traded fertilizer passes through it, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that the shortfall will cut yields into 2027.

This shows that in today’s interconnected world, regional crises will influence countries far away from it. With larger catastrophes, these ripple effects in the global system would be more widespread, quicker to take hold and on a higher magnitude.

Critics might question why we need to prepare for such Black Swan events. But global catastrophes are not as unlikely as they feel. Ice cores enable us to count large eruptions of the past. On that basis, volcanologists put the chance of a magnitude 7 eruption — the size of Tambora in 1815, which caused a "year without summer" — at roughly 1 in 6 this century. Estimates for a repeat of the 1859 Carrington solar storm, which could disrupt power grids on a continental scale, run from about 1% to 12% per decade. Nuclear-armed states are almost constantly engaged in conflicts, risking nuclear war.

Each of these events might seem unlikely. But in combination, they add up to a significant chance that at least one of them will happen this century.

What they all have in common is that they all would drastically impact the food system. A volcanic eruption, the firestorms of a nuclear war or a large asteroid impact all push particles into the upper atmosphere that block sunlight, which would lead to colder, drier growing seasons that could result in harvest losses up to total failure. In the most extreme nuclear war scenario, researchers estimate that global calorie production could drop by around 90%. A long blackout, caused by a powerful solar storm for example, works differently but has the same consequence: no fertilizer, no pesticides, no fuel, and the sharpest yield losses exactly where we produce most food today.

Hardly anyone is assessing these risks. Even the countries doing it best fall short. The U.K. and Switzerland are good examples. The U.K. National Risk Register lists 89 risks, including volcanic eruptions, severe space weather, pandemics and a nuclear miscalculation abroad. However, the catastrophic events it considers are all relatively small-scale — with a "reasonable" worst-case scenario of over 1,000 deaths and a cost of tens of billions of pounds — and the register does not even begin to consider events like a global famine or a nuclear war that could lead to tens of millions of deaths and cost trillions of pounds.

Switzerland's national risk analysis, meanwhile, covers 44 hazards including a solar storm, a foreign volcanic eruption and a meteor strike. Again, the scale is too small. The volcano is a moderate European eruption and the meteor is 66 feet (20 meters) across, comparable to the Chelyabinsk impact in 2013. Many other countries do not even consider risk on these limited scales.

No country can solve this alone. In a review, my colleagues and I highlighted the key factors that would make countries and communities more resilient to various global catastrophes. These include food self-sufficiency, decentralization, geographic isolation and governance quality — meaning working institutions, low corruption and low inequality. Australia scores best, but even Australia would struggle without imported fuel, medicine and fertilizer. Nowhere is a refuge on its own.

Countries will need international collaboration to make it through a crisis of this scale. Export bans have been a common reflex in food crises of the past. After a global catastrophe, they would only isolate countries from each other and lead to further damage, as export bans can easily lead to the situation where enough food is still around, but nobody is trading it and so people starve.

We need to work on rules to govern trade under those circumstances before a global emergency occurs.

You might say the probabilities are too small to justify the cost, and that money spent on hypothetical volcanoes is money not spent on floods, hospitals and defense. This criticism might land if you only look at a single catastrophe. However, there is a whole portfolio of events that could lead to global catastrophe. In combination, there is a good chance that one of them will hit, and if it does, we better be prepared. Also, many of the preparations needed are not even that expensive. Low-input farming, decentralized grids, a diverse food supply and more exhaustive risk assessment are within grasp of most countries.

This needs to happen now. Starting work on resilient foods or better international agreements when a global catastrophe has already occurred is too late. You cannot start an industry in the month the harvest fails. Clearly, prevention is better than resilience, but some of these events cannot be prevented at all. When one of them arrives, the difference between the societies that prepared and those that did not will be measured in lives.

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.

This striking satellite snap shows a series of ghostly green lakes that merged into a single murky entity after several years of unusual weather in the Australian outback.

The entwined lakes are located in Barkly Tableland, an area within Australia's Northern Territory, which lies between the states of Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia. The largest section of the conglomerate is Tarrabool Lake (on the left side of the photo), which stretches around 55 miles (90 kilometers) across at its widest point. It is dark green due to the dense vegetation and algae in the water.

The smaller half of the merged lakes (on the right side of the image) is made up of three lakes: Lake Sylvester, Lake Corella and Lake Deburgh. This section has a paler and chalkier hue due to high levels of suspended sediment. This is likely because the lakes have overflowed and mixed together, whipping up the dust and topsoil that once surrounded them. (Several other, smaller lakes of various sizes and shades of green can also be seen throughout the image.)

All of these lakes are ephemeral, meaning they have no constant inflow or outflow of water, much like most of Australia's other lakes. As a result, they almost completely dry out during prolonged periods of sunny weather, as high temperatures cause the water inside them to evaporate, and then reappear as heavy rainfall refills the basins.

However, across the two years prior to this image, there was so much rain that the lakes never dried out. Instead, they continued to grow year over year, as you can see from additional satellite imagery (see below), which shows the same area between 2022 and 2024.

The Northern Territory's rainy season lasts between October and April. Both the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 rainy seasons, which preceded the 2024 satellite photos, were ranked among the top 10 wettest since 1990, according to NASA's Earth Observatory, which released these images.

Although this is extreme, it is not that surprising, considering that annual rainfall in the Barkly Tableland rose by around 14% between 1989 and 2018, according to a report from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. This is likely due to the effects of human-caused climate change.

On top of the general increase in rainfall, Tropical Cyclone Megan dumped a massive amount of rain on the region in March 2024. The resulting flash flooding was so great that fish were seen swimming across a nearby road, Australia's ABC News previously reported.

In the winter, Tarrabool Lake and Lake Sylvester are important breeding sites for birds, including the straw-necked ibis (Threskiornis spinicollis) and the Australian pelican (Pelecanus conspicillatus), and BirdLife International lists both lakes as important bird areas. At its fullest, Tarrabool Lake also floods the surrounding Eva Downs Swamp system, creating Australia's largest wooded swamp.

See more Earth from space

In July, a government agency tasked with protecting our cultural heritage abdicated its responsibility, voting to further industry's pursuit of profit over protecting sites of cultural significance. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP), the only federal agency whose sole mission is promoting preservation of America’s historic places, voted to advance a proposed new rule that would make sweeping changes to how Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act is implemented. By doing so, the Council is opening the door for federal agencies to bulldoze sacred Indigenous sites and important archaeological sites.

Section 106 requires federal agencies to assess the effects of their actions — or the actions they license or permit — on historic, archaeological, and cultural properties listed in or eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. Additionally, agencies must attempt, to the extent possible, to minimize harmful effects on these significant places. The rules governing Section 106 have been in place since 1974. As part of that framework, the government is legally required to consult with Tribal Nations about projects that may destroy or damage their sacred places or culturally significant resources.

The proposed new regulations destroy the idea behind consultation. For instance, they would give federal agencies the discretion to decide whether public participation will be useful. Essentially, the agencies get to decide whether to notify the public or provide opportunity for public comment before they approve projects that might damage or destroy historic properties.

It would also give federal agencies the right to approve projects that may damage or destroy Tribal sacred places and other culturally significant resources without consulting with Tribal Nations or seeking their expertise about them. This violates federal law and jurisprudence, which recognizes Tribal Nations as "domestic, dependent nations," and requires consultation with them on a government-to-government basis; Tribal Nations are not merely “interested parties” like community organizations or local groups.

An agency official would prepare a "Section 106 report" that identifies historic properties, assesses impacts, and makes a determination on next steps; this Section 106 report would then be circulated to State Historic Preservation Officers, Tribal Historic Preservation Officers, and all relevant consulting parties — including project proponents — who would have an opportunity to comment on the findings. The agency official must only review those comments; officials have no obligation to respond to or incorporate any of those comments before issuing the final decision, shifting Section 106 from its previous consensus-seeking exercise to one where the agency official simply decides.

The new regulations also remove vast swaths of our history from protection. To be considered a historic property, the new regulations say it must include, or have included, tangible human improvements – built structures – AND the historic property must be geographically compact. This change in definition will exclude entire categories of historic places from meaningful consideration under Section 106 in the future, including battlefields like Gettysburg or the Little Bighorn, cultural landscapes like Devil’s Tower in Wyoming or the Black Hills in South Dakota, archaeological resources like petroglyphs in Chaco Canyon. It lessens protection on places like the Grand Canyon, simply because they are not “geographically compact” or centered on a building or other structure.

The new regulations specifically preclude "noncompact, unimproved natural features such as mountains, valleys, bodies of water, or landscapes, including ethnographic landscapes" — locations that carry great spiritual and historical meaning to American Indian groups. Many traditional cultural places and sacred sites of deep religious and cultural significance to Tribes, Native Hawaiian organizations, and local communities will automatically be excluded from consideration for protection by the new regulations.

The changed definition of "historic property" in the new regulations will remove protections for 99% of American Indian heritage and could result in the erasure of the heritage of an entire group of people in the United States – those who lived here before European colonization.

Mitigation, or trying to prevent, minimize or offset any damage to a historic site, becomes a “maybe,” as the federal agency undertaking the project decides whether the "value" of the property is worth the cost of mitigation. "Reasonable mitigation" is redefined so that federal agencies only have to consider measures to lessen the impact of a project on a historic property if they are "technically and economically feasible."

The new regulations water down the definition of what is considered to be an "Adverse Effect" on historic properties so that they are close to meaningless. By removing indirect and cumulative effects on historic properties and eliminating the visual, atmospheric or audible elements that diminish the experience at a property, the new regulations could say that building and operating a casino or amusement park on Mount Vernon would not be considered an Adverse Effect.

Additionally, agencies will not be required to avoid or minimize adverse effects. They can simply document that “other considerations outweigh” historic preservation and proceed as they wish.

Advocates of the new regulations argue that the existing regulations for protecting historic places slow down projects and make economic development more expensive than necessary. They say these new regulations create a system that allows industry to plan better with more precise information, and the processes and procedures are better explained. They argue that the narrower definitions and expanded exemptions could mean faster, more predictable reviews. In reality, however, the rules that are already in place seek to balance the need for economic development with the need to protect the fabric of America’s heritage.

I remember urban renewal and its impact on Oklahoma City in the early 1960s, as large, beautiful buildings in the downtown area were bulldozed to rubble and hauled away so that new, shiny structures could replace them. I remember entire neighborhoods of working-class people being leveled so that an Interstate highway could be constructed through the center of town to let millions of people speed through without having to see the “urban blight” that was erased. I remember, too, the historic properties that disappeared under the developer’s bulldozers and graders.

Those memories are fading fast, I must admit, and the historic properties are long gone. The National Historic Preservation Act was established to help prevent the destruction of the property of economically weaker groups of people at the behest of the economically strong without some level of consideration of the heritage under threat by construction; the Section 106 regulations grew out as a result of that time and has been seen to be a good compromise between economic development and economic justice.

The new regulations serve to weaken everything that has worked about Section 106 for the last 50 years so the federal government has the power to quickly green-light industry's ground-disturbing projects without considering the impact of its actions on America’s heritage. Agencies may proceed as they wish, since the new regulations mute the voices of states, tribes, and local communities who are at the forefront of identifying and protecting American heritage.

The new regulations are currently under review with the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the White House Office of Management and Budget.

There is a chance that the administration will use a rushed rulemaking process that bypasses public comment, meaning the regulations will take effect when published.

But bringing visibility to the proposed changes could potentially forestall that, and so people who are concerned should contact their local congressional representatives to tell them the changes are a threat to all American's heritage.

If these changes are not stopped, our children will hold us accountable for letting our shared heritage be erased merely for the convenience and benefit of a few.

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.

Earth's temperatures are steadily rising, with the past decade experiencing all 10 of the warmest years on record. As heat waves become more frequent and intense, concerns are growing about how this heat could impact people's health.

Higher temperatures can have serious effects on the human body, including dehydration, heat exhaustion and heatstroke. But extreme heat can also drive up the rates of heart attack and strokes due to ill health.

In a Live Science poll, we asked our readers how concerned they are about rising temperatures affecting their health and fitness, daily activities and the safety of their community. Over 170 people responded to the poll, which was published Aug. 26, with 67% of readers voting "Yes, I'm very worried about how extreme heat is affecting everyone around the world."

The comments from readers also reflected their concerns. One commenter wrote, "Too much of humanity is unaware that the Earth is a single organism. Everything is connected. El niño may begin off South America but its effects are eventually felt everywhere. There is only one ocean."

Another reader mentioned the daily challenges caused by the rising temperatures, saying, "I've been trying to make walking around the block of my neighborhood a regular thing, but when it gets too hot (and more precisely too humid) I prefer staying inside my house where I can be comforted by the AC."

So what do you think? After reading these responses, are you also worried about extreme heat? Let us know in the comments.

Climate change is making El Niño stronger and more dangerous than ever before, scientists warn.

In a new study, researchers have revealed that El Niño events have become nearly 40% stronger over the past four decades than they were in the preindustrial era.

The finding comes as the world is in the grips of a historic "super" El Niño. While daily average sea surface temperatures soar to unprecedented highs, forecasters have become almost certain that the 2026 to 2027 El Niño will be an all-time record event.

"We don't see a time in the past where El Niños have been as strong as today, and we show that the strength of El Niño changes in parallel with the warming of global temperature," study first author Julia Cole, a professor and chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Michigan, said in a statement. "Our findings tell us that the big El Niño events of the last 40 years are not normal in the context of the last thousand years."

El Niño events occur every two to seven years as part of the Pacific Ocean's El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) natural climate cycle. The ENSO cycle flips between the warmer El Niño phase and the cooler La Niña phase, with neutral periods in between.

El Niño periods bring elevated sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific, thereby weakening or reversing trade winds and strongly disrupting global temperatures and rainfall patterns. Earth's last El Niño ran from June 2023 to April 2024, delivering an injection of heat to our already warming world that made 2024 the hottest year on record.

The impacts of El Niño periods can be profound, with studies linking the events to famine in Europe, civil wars in tropical regions, and droughts, floods and forest fires around the world.

Climate scientists have long suspected a link between the growing intensity of recent El Niño events and global warming. But sparse instrumental records and significant variability in the natural climate pattern has made it difficult to say so for certain.

So in the new study published Aug. 27 in the journal Science, researchers investigated whether climate change has been boosting the severity of recent El Niño events. The team analyzed 13 ancient and modern corals taken from close to the events' epicenter — the Pacific Ocean's Galápagos Islands.

By analyzing the temperature-sensitive chemistry of the coral samples, the scientists discovered a millennium-spanning pattern of lower intensity El Niño events being gradually superseded by ones of increased strength after humanity's widespread adoption of fossil fuels in the 19th century. Using climate simulations, the researchers ruled out the possibility that natural causes, such as volcanic eruptions or solar variability, could have caused this shift.

"We kept adding records thinking well, this is going to get more complicated, but it really didn't," Cole said. "This is such a clear story."

The prospect of El Niño and climate change feeding back into each other is troubling, the researchers said, especially as the climate pattern has the potential to drive persistent shifts in major ecosystems such as the Amazon rainforest.

"El Niño is a really big source of climate extremes, and so if it's getting stronger, the impacts are getting stronger. Impacts like droughts, floods, wildfire and food insecurity," Cole said.

In the short term, the combination of climate change and El Niño could bring significant strain to our warming planet.

"The question is not whether the current El Niño is going to happen, but how bad is it going to be, and how bad will the impacts be?" Cole said. "This event is superimposed on global warming, and it's likely to supercharge the temperature increase that we would normally see from greenhouse gases."

The findings further underscore the urgent need to mitigate further global warming, Cole noted.

"No country has the resources to be fully protected from these impacts. This is one more reason we need to move away from fossil fuels, the root cause of the problem," Cole said.

As wildfires raged through Ontario, Canada in mid-July, millions of people in the Midwest and on the East Coast found themselves under a shroud of yellow skies, darkened by smoke from the infernos. The air quality index in Grand Rapids, Michigan hit 616 on July 16, breaking the previous record for the city of 350; any number over 301 indicates hazardous, emergency conditions.

Smoke events like this are only likely to worsen in the coming decades: Wildfires are one of the most imminent impacts of climate change.

Not only do the flames themselves directly threaten lives, but the smoke can trigger heart attacks, asthma attacks and premature births, as well as worsen heart disease or lung ailments such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). And those effects can spread as insidiously as smoke travels.

A 2025 study found that the record-breaking 2023 Canadian wildfire season may have shortened the lives of 87,000 people exposed to the smoke plumes worldwide. Another 2025 study found that wildfire smoke contributed to 41,380 excess deaths per year in the U.S. between 2011 and 2020 and that the number will rise to 71,420 excess deaths by 2050 if global temperatures rise 5 to 8.3 degrees Fahrenheit (2.8 to 4.6 degrees Celsius) by the end of the century.

In North America, the health impacts of this extra fire are likely to be significant. Wildfire season is getting longer and more intense in the West and Southwest, while regions not historically prone to wildfires will need to deal with the impacts of smoke plumes that can travel thousands of miles.

"Wildfire smoke is the fastest-growing environmental threat [to health] in the U.S.," said Marshall Burke, a professor of global environmental policy at Stanford University who was the senior author of the study predicting the grim rise in excess deaths. "It's just changing so rapidly."

Longer fire season, bigger blazes

Even a rapid drop in greenhouse gas emissions wouldn't fully mitigate the growing risk of wildfires. Because these gases persist in the atmosphere for decades, a more fire-friendly future is already locked in.

"No one foresees changes in the near future, at least, that are going to result in decreases in wildfire," said Mary M. Johnson, a principal research scientist in environmental health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Wildfires are "predicted to increase in size, intensity and frequency."

Global data suggests that without climate change mitigation, fires will increase in all vegetation types by the end of the 21st century. Even if warming is held to 2.2 F (1.5 C) over pre-industrial temperatures ‪—‬ an increasingly challenging goal to meet ‪—‬ fires outside of tropical latitudes will become more frequent.

In the U.S., the picture is bleak. Between 1984 and 2015, the number of large wildfires in the U.S. West doubled, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The seasonality of fire is also shifting. A February 2026 study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters found that climate change is nudging fire season in the boreal forests of Alaska and Canada forward as winter snow vanishes earlier, leaving spring vegetation dry and ripe to burn. In the U.S. West, on the other hand, fire season is stretching later because of summer drought.

"It's about dryness," GRL study senior author Hongliang Zhang, an air quality researcher at China's Fudan University, told Live Science.

Climate change warms the atmosphere, and a warmer atmosphere can hold more water. But changes in precipitation patterns can still lead to increased dryness and drought, Zhang said. With climate change weighing the scales toward more intense bouts of rainfall, a particular location could see more precipitation but still experience a simultaneous increase in dry or drought periods, he added.

Zhang and his colleagues found that under a scenario in which temperatures rise by about 7.9 F (4.4 C) by 2100 — a high-emission scenario in which we do little to curb carbon output — fire season would move forward by about a week in Canadian and Alaskan forests, with some of the northernmost regions of Canada and Alaska seeing shifts of up to 23 days. California, with its Mediterranean-like climate, would experience a peak burning shift later in the season. In the Southwest, fire season under this scenario would start a week later but end more than a month later than it does now.

How wildfire smoke is poisoning the air

All of this spells bad news for human health in the U.S. More frequent and intense fires will fuel dramatic increases in air pollution. For instance, a 2020 study suggests that particulate smoke pollution levels will double or triple in the Pacific Northwest and Northern California under unmitigated warming by the end of the century. And even though the West is the U.S. region most prone to fire, wildfire smoke pollution won't stay there. Instead, it will travel across the country, worsening air quality on the East Coast and in the Midwest, Burke and his colleagues found. Depending on the level of warming, smoke emissions will increase 262% to 482% between 2046 and 2055 compared to 2011 to 2020, the researchers found.

Climate change also brings an uptick in severe weather, including winds, Johnson told Live Science. More wind means smoke can travel many thousands of miles. For example, the smoke from the 2023 Canadian wildfires reached Europe and Asia, and that trend is likely to worsen.

"There really isn't any place in the world now where you can say, 'I'm not going to be exposed to smoke,'" she said.

When wildlands burn, they produce PM2.5, a fine particulate matter that is small enough to slip into the bloodstream. Epidemiological studies have linked exposure to PM2.5 to a range of health issues, including dementia, kidney disease and lung cancer. The particles increase oxidative stress on cells in lab dishes, induce cell death, and cause DNA damage that can lead to cancerous mutations, among other impacts.

The damage is evident during big fires. For instance, exposure to wildfire smoke raises the risk of heart attack, stroke and other cardiovascular emergencies, according to a study of California emergency department visits during the 2015 wildfire season. Cumulative exposure over time, however, is how wildfire smoke causes the most deaths. Between 2006 and 2020, PM2.5 from wildfire smoke exposure was responsible for an average of 24,100 deaths per year in the United States, a study published in the journal Science Advances in February found. Smoke exposure worsened the death rate for every health condition studied, with neurological disease deaths rising most significantly.

Wildfire smoke may also fuel premature births. Just a week of wildfire smoke exposure raised the risk of preterm birth by 3.4%, a 2022 study found — and in a world where smoke exposure could span weeks, that could translate to a significant uptick in the rate of premature birth. Other studies tell a similar story: a 2024 study found risk of premature birth rises with every incremental increase in exposure to PM2.5 from wildfires during pregnancy. And a 2025 study found that preterm birth risk increased in the U.S. West with smoke exposure, regardless of whether that exposure was measured by high-smoke days, exposure to 4-day waves of smoke, or by the concentration of particulate matter in the air.

Wildfire smoke may also affect cognition: A 2022 study found that cumulative exposure to wildfire smoke over the school year was linked to slightly lower test scores for elementary and middle schoolers. And research using data from cognitive brain-training apps has also shown that performance on a cognitive task declines on high smoke days in adults. Over the long term, PM2.5 exposure from wildfires is linked to dementia risk.

Toxic cocktail

Researchers are still working to understand why wildfire smoke is so dangerous to the body. Smoke can contain a toxic stew of ingredients, especially when homes and buildings burn. Air testing after the 2025 Palisades fire in Los Angeles found high levels of silver and chromium-6 nanoparticles, the latter of which are carcinogenic.

Johnson and her team have found that smoke exposure leads to epigenetic changes associated with the immune system.‪‬ In other words, the person's DNA doesn't change, but the way it's translated into building proteins and cells in the immune system shifts. And epigenetic shifts can be passed along to the next generation. One shift is a decline in regulatory T cells, immune cells that help the body tolerate itself and harmless allergens. The immune changes probably play a role in why wildfire smoke exacerbates chronic diseases, Johnson said.

More smoke days can also affect health indirectly, by keeping people from going outdoors. In California, the heaviest smoke days actually have fewer emergency department visits overall, Burke said. On the smokiest days, when the air is noticeably hazy and may even smell like a campfire, emergency department visits for asthma-related reasons rise, but visits related to injuries or car accidents decline even more, probably because everyone is staying home. That may sound like a net benefit, but if forced quarantines happen repeatedly, they can worsen physical and mental health over time, making people more sedentary or less able to socialize.

"It's keeping people from doing things they would otherwise love to do," Burke said.

On the flip side, emergency department visits rise on days when the Air Quality Index indicates a moderate risk or a risk to sensitive groups.On these days, the air may not seem noticeably bad, and people may go out without realizing the amount of pollution they are inhaling until they start to feel ill.

"That's really consistent with this broader air pollution literature that, especially recently, has shown there is no safe exposure level to air pollution," Burke said.

With an increasingly wildfire-friendly climate in its future, Americans will be less healthy. There are ways to reduce the impact, however. Burke and his team have found that controlled burns put off less pollution than wildfires, while reducing the fuel load that turns wildland fires into smoke-churning infernos. An investment in managing fuels could ultimately be an investment in improving the country's health.

"It is within our power to correct that problem," Burke said.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

Burning up — How can we adapt to a warming world?