June global sea surface temperatures have climbed to record highs, prompting concerns over extreme weather, flooding, sea level rise and stress to global ocean ecosystems.

The record, announced by the European Union's Copernicus Earth observation program on July 1, surpassed the previous record set in June 2024, with experts warning that more temperature records will likely be set over the coming months.

"Current conditions could indicate the beginning of a new phase, leading, once more, to uncharted territory," Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), said in a statement. "With ocean temperatures at these levels and El Niño on the horizon, we are likely to see more temperature records fall in the coming months.”

The record temperature was set on June 21, when the Copernicus Climate Change Service recorded global ocean surface temperatures of 20.86 degrees Celsius (69.55 degrees Fahrenheit), beating the record temperature of 20.83 C (69.49 F) set in 2023 and 2024. This measurement was corroborated by the Copernicus Marine Service, an independent dataset that reported temperatures of 21.0 C (69.8 F).

The recent sea surface heating did not occur evenly across the globe. In some areas, such as the Mediterranean, temperatures in June were up to 8 C (14.4 F) higher than average for the period from 1990 to 2020, as per data recorded on June 29, according to the European Space Agency.

The most significant rises in temperature were set in the Mediterranean, the Baltic Sea, bands across the Pacific and off the coasts of Northern Canada.

Warmer ocean temperatures have wide-ranging impacts. "Higher ocean temperatures keep the atmosphere warm for longer, provide extra energy to storms and increase evaporation, thus enhancing the potential for extreme precipitation and flooding," Copernicus Climate Change Service representatives said in the statement. "Ocean warming also contributes to sea level rise and ice melt, and stresses marine ecosystems."

According to data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the newly declared El Niño in the Pacific Ocean — the warm phase of a natural climate cycle. This El Niño is likely to reach levels that have not been seen in decades, with more temperature records expected to be set over the coming months as this Pacific heat is injected into an already warming world.

The service added that it remains to be seen whether these temperature spikes are temporary or indicative of longer term trends.

Life on Earth could continue for another 1.8 billion years, according to new research. This figure, which is based on complex climate models, is far longer than many previous studies indicated.

As the sun evolves, it is getting brighter. Our star is currently producing about a third more energy than it did at the dawn of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. And it will continue to get hotter until it eventually dies in about 5 billion years.

Scientists have wondered for decades how long life on Earth will manage to cling to existence as the sun brightens. In 1982, James Lovelock and colleagues estimated that Earth's photosynthetic biosphere — which includes all plants and forms the basis for most of the planet’s biology — would end about 100 million years from now. Successive studies have pushed back the deadline for the death of all life on Earth.

In the new study, published May 28 in the journal JGR Atmospheres, researchers suggest that plant life could continue about 1.8 billion years into the future. That nears the time when Earth would lose its oceans to space, either through radiation splitting water atoms or runaway evaporation, in about 2 billion years.

"We were trying to show that life on Earth — complex vegetation — could survive longer into the future than previous studies had shown," study co-author Jacob Haqq-Misra, an astrobiologist at space exploration charity Blue Marble Space, told Live Science.

The boundaries of life

Life on Earth relies on photosynthesis, the process used by plants, algae and some bacteria to turn sunlight into energy. The mechanism chemically converts carbon dioxide and water into sugars and oxygen. It requires both CO₂ and sunlight.

But at certain temperatures, plants' photosynthetic machinery shuts down. Eventually, the sun will warm Earth to the point that plants are no longer able to photosynthesize, which would in turn cause entire food webs to collapse and all life to perish.

Another issue is that as the sun dies and it gets brighter, there will be less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, effectively starving plants.

"The Earth has stayed pretty hospitable in terms of surface temperature for most of the last 4 billion years because it has a built-in thermostat" by storing CO₂ in rocks and releasing it during volcanic eruptions, Robert Graham, a planetary science researcher at the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the research, told Live science.

When it is hotter, the planet pulls more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and stores it in rocks underground, Graham said. This offsets the warming to keep the temperature stable but means that the carbon dioxide isn't accessible to plants.

Climate models and extreme plants

In the new study, Haqq-Misra and colleague Eric Wolf, a research scientist at Blue Marble Space, used 29 climate models to estimate what would happen to Earth's vegetative biosphere under different scenarios. They used the two extreme cases as limits — when Earth is too hot for life but the CO₂ was stable; and when there is not enough CO_2, but the temperature was stable. They then looked at the range of CO₂ and sunlight conditions in between those extremes. This enabled them to include situations in which Earth was very efficient at pulling carbon from the atmosphere when temperatures started rising.

They also included information about a variety of plants. Some plants can survive on a much lower ratio of atmospheric CO₂ than others. The study included plants that have a special photosynthetic process (known as crassulacean acid metabolism), such as succulents and orchids. These plants can sustain themselves on relatively tiny amounts of CO₂. The same is true of some marine plants, which can dissolve and access carbon in the ocean system.

Other experts were impressed by the findings.

"Haqq-Misra and Wolf have used a sophisticated 3D climate model to show that Earth's climate may remain hospitable to plant life significantly longer into the future than predicted" by simpler models, said Graham, who authored one of those earlier studies. "It's an advance over previous work and suggests that complex biospheres like that of Earth are more resilient to environmental change from stellar brightening than previously suggested."

Looking to the future

Andrew Rushby, an astrobiologist at Birkbeck University of London who was not involved in the research, told Live Science that the paper updated the concept of the lifetime of the biosphere. However, he cautioned that the results remained "broad estimates."

"It is not possible for us to predict or know the possible evolutionary adaptations that the photosynthetic biosphere may undergo in response to increasing solar output and lower [atmospheric CO₂], especially over billions of years," he said.

In their paper, the authors wrote that "limits posed by thermal stress or starvation may only reflect our observations of the biosphere today rather than hard limits on how the biosphere may evolve." There is also no way of knowing how life might adapt to new circumstances.

Haqq-Misra said that he found the results comforting. "Earth's system is resilient, and we are part of something that could have a much, much longer future," he said.

The results could also help scientists figure out what the thresholds could be on other planets. "Part of the challenge is starting with these Earth-based models, and then generalizing the physics as much as possible to be able to simulate a wider range of atmospheres," he said.

How much do you know about our blue planet? Test your terran knowledge with our Earth quiz!

Trees in China that were planted as part of huge reforestation projects appear to grow faster than those in natural forests, a new study finds. This is possibly because the reforestation trees are responding more strongly to the rising atmospheric carbon dioxide, scientists say.

China is quickly turning green. The country has planted 66 billion trees since 1978, with plans for 34 billion more by the middle of this century, as part of its "Great Green Wall" to slow the spread of the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts.

These new forests absorb large amounts of CO₂, but it is unclear exactly how they differ from natural ones, study first author Yuhang Luo, a landscape ecologist at Peking University in Shenzhen, China, told Live Science.

Luo and his colleagues set out to study how differences between natural and planted forests, including species diversity, tree density and age, might affect how the forests respond to rising CO₂ and climate change.

"Planted forests are widely used in climate mitigation strategies, but most global ecosystem models do not distinguish between forest types or represent age-related dynamics adequately," Luo said. "So we felt it was important to clarify how these factors interact — not just for scientific understanding, but also for improving the models and assumptions that underpin real-world forest policy and carbon accounting."

Planted forests are those purposefully created by humans, such as those in the Great Green Wall. Natural forests, on the other hand, grow without human intervention.

The researchers used satellite data to track leaf area index, a measure of canopy density and a key driver of carbon uptake, to determine how fast the different forest types grew, and found a striking difference: Planted forests increased their leaf area 66% faster than natural ones.

Most of that difference was due to planted forests being, on average, much younger than the natural ones — and young trees grow faster than old ones. But even when comparing forests of similar age and growing conditions, the planted ones still grew 4.6% faster, and the difference was even more pronounced in mixed and evergreen forests.

This is largely due to how planted forests are managed. They tend to feature fast-growing species like eucalyptus and poplar and are often actively managed, with people removing competing vegetation and even fertilizing them. These interventions reduce competition for light, water, and nutrients, amplifying the fertilization effect of rising atmospheric CO₂.

This discrepancy peaks in planted forests when trees are around 30 to 40 years old and then declines noticeably after age 40. In contrast, natural forests grow more slowly but steadily, so have an advantage over the long term.

"Planted forests can be a powerful short-term tool for carbon uptake, but this advantage is temporary," Luo said. "For long-term carbon storage and resilience, natural forests remain irreplaceable."

Kevin Dsouza, who worked on reforestation models during his postdoctoral research at the University of Waterloo and was not involved in the new study, said the results make intuitive sense, as the sprawling leaves of young, fast-growing trees could lead to increased carbon take-up. But he is not sure that leaf area is the best measurement for tracking growth and carbon sequestration.

"It's not a bad proxy, but it doesn't give you the full picture," he said. "The canopy is just the top of the tree and the carbon is stored in all sorts of different places like wood, bark, roots and soil."

Another study of Chinese forests found that natural forests actually accumulate more carbon above ground than planted ones in their early years, Dsouza pointed out, so these results should be considered carefully alongside other factors.

Luo said the findings show that most global climate models are missing something when it comes to understanding how various forest types play a role in carbon sequestration and climate change.

"Land use management works in more subtle and specific ways than we had assumed," he said. "It is not just about planting more trees. It is also about when you plant them, what species you choose, and how you manage them over time."

Luo hopes these findings will help guide reforestation efforts, to ensure we get the most benefit from planting new forests to help mitigate the effects of climate change.

"Our work offers a more practical guide for forest-based climate action: when to plant, what to plant, how long the benefits last, and what current models are getting wrong. We hope that helps people make better decisions," he said.

Editor's note: A picture caption in this article was corrected at 5:16 ET on July 1 to say 66 billion trees had been planted.

This eye-catching satellite snap shows off a sprawling mass of petrified lava surrounding the jet-black slopes of a potentially dangerous volcano in the heart of the Sahara. A smaller volcanic "skull" lurks near the shadowy peak's base.

Toussidé (also known as Tarso Toussidé) is a "potentially active" stratovolcano located within the Tibesti Mountains, which cover around 40,000 square miles (100,000 square kilometers) of northern Chad and southern Libya. The dark peak stands 10,712 feet (3,265 meters) above sea level, making it the second-tallest mountain in the Tibesti region.

The name Toussidé roughly translates to "which killed the local people with fire" in the language of the nearby Indigenous people, hinting at a destructive and deadly history. However, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program, there is no evidence that the volcano has erupted during the Holocene — the current geological epoch, which began around 12,000 years ago. It is unclear if it has actually killed anyone.

The dark blob surrounding the volcano is known as a massif. It is made up of layers of overlapping magmatic rock left by multiple ancient lava flows that effusively erupted, or slowly poured from, the volcano's summit.

The shadowy structure, which is up to 20 miles (32 kilometers) across at its widest point, stands out against the surrounding sand-covered plateau, which has been carved into a network of crisscrossing canyons by eons of wind blasting, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

Just southeast of the massif (in the upper right of the photo), there is a small, white circle containing several dark patches. This is Trou au Natron — a roughly 3,300-foot-deep (1,000 m) volcanic crater, or caldera, which looks eerily like a giant skull when viewed directly from above.

The cranium-like caldera likely formed during an explosive eruption more than 120,000 years ago. It was once filled with a giant salt lake that was home to ancient algae and other microorganisms. When the lake dried out, around the start of the Holocene, the receding water left behind a thick layer of white salt surrounding a pair of eyelike volcanic cones.

Toussidé is one of the youngest mountains in the Tibesti range, which formed by similar effusive eruptions long before the stratovolcano was born. The entire region likely once matched the massif's dark hue before being relentlessly bombarded by sand and wind. In another 100,000 years or so, the massif may blend in with the surrounding plateau, according to the Earth Observatory.

While the shadowy volcano has remained dormant for several millennia, it occasionally puffs out steam from small vents, or fumaroles, near its summit, suggesting that it is still technically active, according to the European Space Agency. However, geologists have not properly assessed its eruptive potential.

It takes a dozen or so hours for the mushroom to kick in. Then, the hallucinations are unlike any others known to science.

On this trip, there are none of the heightened colors, breathing or pulsing objects, nor geometrical patterns typically reported by users of psychedelic substances. In fact, the hundreds of people who enter clinics in China's Yunnan province during each year's summer mushroom season tend to say their vision is clear and largely unaltered.

Well, aside from one major exception: nearly all users see visions of hundreds to thousands of highly-rendered miniature people, dressed in bright colors like elves, gnomes, clowns or other fairy-like figures. The hallucinated sprites wriggle under doors, dive off spoons into soup bowls and make lewd and mischievous gestures, among other strange behaviors.

These visions are reported by 90% of those who come down sick after consuming a single species of bolete mushroom, called Lanmaoa asiatica, in its raw or undercooked form. Yet despite decades of anecdotal reports, the fantastical claims were dismissed by western scientists as a form of "mushroom madness" — until Colin Domnauer, an undergraduate student taking an optional university module on funguses, caught wind of the rumors.

Domnauer, now a doctoral student at the University of Utah, made finding and analyzing the mushroom the purpose of his PhD, a goal that took him to China and the northern Philippines on the trail of a hallucinogenic compound that is likely completely unknown to science.

Live Science sat down with Domnauer to discuss L. asiatica, the bizarre revelations it could hold for how we perceive reality, and the barely-discovered fungal universe that surrounds us. Here's what he had to say.

Ben Turner: Let's start by introducing this mushroom. What is Lanmaoa asiatica?

Colin Domnauer: Lanmaoa asiatica is a species of mushroom from Yunnan, China. It was described to science only 10 years ago in 2015, so it's a relatively newly discovered species, but it was actually being sold in the markets in Yunnan for decades before scientists realized it was its own species.

Through the work I've been doing, we've come to the conclusion that this species is responsible for really strange reports of hallucinations that people are getting after eating wild mushrooms in China, and elsewhere in the world as well.

It's a species that grows with pine trees. It has a symbiotic relationship called a mycorrhizal relationship and so, for that reason, it's something that can't be cultivated artificially. And it's still only found in its wild habitats, so it's difficult to distribute in that sense. But it's still relatively common and popular in the places that it is found.

BT: The mushroom is growing in notoriety because of the uniquely bizarre hallucinations it's reported to cause. Let’s say I ingest a significant dose of raw or undercooked L. asiatica right now, what's my next week gonna look like?

CD: Alright, so we don't know exactly the amount of mushroom that's required to get this effect, because in all these cultures they're eating it accidentally, or they're eating it just as food, but they're not intentionally pursuing the psychoactive effects. These effects are seen as an accidental side effect of eating too much, or if they're not cooked enough.

But if you do have a substantial amount, what we do know is that after about 12 to 24 hours you're going to start getting Lilliputian hallucinations, which is a clinically defined syndrome that's characterized by seeing little people or animals all around your environment.

And these aren't like some vague hallucinations, these are like three-dimensionally-rendered, highly-detailed figures inhabiting your exterior world. And they're also interacting with objects in the real world — like crawling up chairs and tables or under doorways, people say. So there's a very strange and specific type of reality-grounded, projected hallucination.

Even to this day science doesn't understand what's going on in the brain to cause this, or how to treat it, and this mushroom is the only thing that we currently know of to reliably produce this effect.

BT: Okay, so immediately there's a lot I want to ask you. Firstly, these tiny people are pretty reliably reported, right?

CD: At first scientists dismissed it as a folk tale or something, because it sounds so impossible, but this is actually something that affects hundreds of people every year in Yunnan, China, and there's many hospital reports of people getting affected in this way. In fact, one study looked at about 400 cases in a year of people who were affected by this mushroom, and 90% of them said that they had these Lilliputian hallucinations. It's a hallmark symptom of this mushroom.

BT: From the case reports we have hundreds to thousands of clearly-rendered, often brightly-colored, gnome or fairy-like teeny people clambering about and crawling under things. What else are they doing? Are they talking to the people having the hallucinations, is there much interaction going on?

CD: That's something that's not as commonly reported, but it has been mentioned in a handful of cases, both in China and in other cultures where this phenomenon has been noted.

The little people are said to typically like teasing, playing with or harassing the person seeing them, so there is some level of interaction there.

They're typically viewed to be amusing, mischievous, that sort of attitude. They're not usually seen as threatening, although in a few cases people felt that way.

BT: Are there any other clinically-reported effects on the mind and body?

CD: Yeah, there are. The Lilliputian hallucinations are the most striking symptom, but there's other things as well. About 50% of people reported having some gastrointestinal upset after eating this mushroom. It's not clear exactly the severity of that, because this was just a statistic that was noted in these papers, and it's also not clear if it was caused by this mushroom specifically or other things they were eating in the meal. So these aren't really robust studies in that sense, they're just collecting data of people who happen to get these effects.

And then another key thing that a lot of people note is that they seem to be typically weakened, more tired and delirious, so this could give us a hint as to the mechanisms that this unknown compound is working through. So it sounds quite different from the known psychedelic compounds.

And it's not only because of that. This is actually something I forgot to mention, but these hallucinations can last several days long. So it's not something that is experienced over a few hours like other compounds.

BT: If people are hallucinating thousands of miniature people taunting them for several days, are there any injuries or fatalities linked to cases? Or is it just unpleasant and irritating, but harmless?

CD: Yeah, that's something I really was curious about, because it sounded like it must be quite harmful if it's something that's sticking around in the body for several days and having these strong effects.

But interestingly, all those hundreds of hospital reports reported zero deaths or fatalities. They also reported no abnormalities in vital organ function, so it seems to be physiologically safe. But then, at the same time, we don't know if that's because those people were admitted to the hospital and they were getting proper treatment, or if we only have the records of people that were committed to the hospital. So it might be a skewed sample.

BT: You mentioned that this mushroom is found in China's Yunnan province. And you personally also identified it in the northern Philippines too. I was wondering how widespread and integrated into the cultures of these regions it is. How widely known is it? Is it treated as a mischief of little significance, or has it been integrated into any religious practices?

CD: In all these places, the mushroom is viewed as a very prized edible. It tastes very good and has a great flavor, but it's never been integrated into any spiritual or religious practices for the psychoactive effects. The psychoactive effects are like an accidental side effect of the food, and they're viewed as sort of an amusing side effect of that. They're not something that they intentionally pursue, but it's also not something that they feel fearful of and avoid.

Everyone knows that this mushroom has this property and can make you see little people, but they'll continue to eat it anyway, because they're just not afraid of that effect. But they're also not pursuing it, if that makes sense. It's sort of a middle ground viewpoint they have.

BT: And that's so strange. I mean you're a scientist, I'm a science journalist, to me this thing is so fundamentally bizarre that I struggle to understand how it has flown under the radar for so long. It was only scientifically described 10 years ago, and even then without much mention of the psychoactive properties. Why are we only just talking about this now?

CD: The first reports of psychoactive boletes actually go back to the 1930s to 1960s in Papua New Guinea. That's actually a time before we even knew about psilocybin mushrooms, and yet psilocybin mushrooms have exploded in the last century to become globally popular.

But this mushroom went the opposite way and faded into obscurity. And I think the reason for that is twofold. One, the scientists who were initially studying this mushroom in Papua New Guinea were unable to isolate any psychoactive compounds and couldn't determine the species responsible for the effects. And secondly, because these symptoms sounded so bizarre and fantasy-like — seeing little people — I think this biased them toward believing that it wasn't possible.

In fact, they concluded that this whole phenomenon of "mushroom madness" was all just a social act, a myth, or a way for the people to behave in ways they ordinarily wouldn't. But they concluded the mushrooms were just like a scapegoat, they weren't actually physiologically active, it was just an excuse to do these things. It sounded so impossible, and we just couldn't figure out the chemistry of these mushrooms.

But since that time, we've had more reports coming from other cultures — from China, and now over the last two years from the Philippines. That's multiple independent cultures reporting the same specific type of hallucination.

And what I was able to show was that they were due to the same mushroom, verified by DNA sequencing. It wasn't just random attribution, it was the same species. That, to me, confirms that there's an underlying physical cause of this.

BT: How did you first hear about L. asiatica?

CD: I first heard about this when I was an undergraduate student taking an elective course about mushrooms, and the teacher briefly mentioned one paper writing about these mushrooms in China that have this effect.

It was written sort of as an anecdotal story. The mycologist was traveling in Yunnan, and the local people told him: "Oh, these mushrooms will make you see little people if you don't cook them." But in that paper he was unable to identify the mushrooms, and he shared his story and said this is something that needs more attention. I tried to look more into it after hearing about that, and I found that, amazingly, no-one was studying it. It had gone just unnoticed or dismissed for decades.

This sounded so weird and groundbreaking to me that, even if it had a small chance of being true, it was something worth pursuing and I needed to know everything I could about it. So that's when I decided to do a whole PhD research project to try to answer that question.

BT: So what did you do next?

CD: My first task was to go to China, because that's where it was most popular and most well known. And, upon getting there, it was immediately obvious that the local people knew much more about it than we scientists did. It was actually a very well-known and common phenomenon. Everyone there was very open and welcoming and happy to talk about everything they knew about this mushroom with me. So I learned a lot just speaking with the local people who were selling this mushroom.

I just asked them: "Which ones will make you see little people?" they pointed to them, and I collected them. After getting back to my lab here in Utah, I was able to sequence the mushrooms to determine their identity, and it turns out they were all this one species, so that was a first big hint.

BT: There must have been a moment when you went from hearing about this as a tall tale to realizing it was the real deal. What was that like?

CD: Going into my whole PhD was sort've a wild goose chase — a long shot. We didn't even know if this was real, and even when I made this trip to China, as I was traveling there I asked myself: "Am I even going to find anything? Is this going to be a whole waste of time?"

But it was immediately obvious that it was incredibly well known. As soon as I started talking with the locals and mentioning this mushroom, their faces lit up, and they started sharing amazing stories. It wasn't some obscure, lesser-known myth. It was a big part of their mushroom knowledge and practices, and that just built up over the days as I was in China, and talked to more people, and just confirmed how integral and well known this psychoactive mushroom is to them. It felt like it was too popular to be dismissed as a folk tale.

The real smoking gun then came a few years later when I heard some remarkably similar reports of mushrooms causing Lilliputian hallucinations in a completely different part of the world in the northern Philippines.

That really got my attention. I wanted to know if this is the same species as the one in China, or something completely different? But no-one had ever sequenced or studied the mushrooms in those regions, we just didn't know what it was. So I traveled there, went into the forest and on the last day was able to finally find the mushroom that the local people said was the one that made you see little people. At first when I collected it I couldn't tell if it was the same as the one in China.

When I got the DNA sequencing back it was one of the most exciting moments of my whole research. It was actually the same species as the one in China, which was completely unexpected, because that species, L. asiatica, was thought to only be found in China. Now we have a whole new record in a country that has independently discovered the same specific psychoactive properties belonging to it.

BT: Skipping forward to the more recent research that you've published this month, what have you found out about the pharmacology behind the mushroom's psychoactive properties?

CD: Just this month I was finally able to publish research that sequenced the whole genomes of not just L. asiatica, but actually all of the species in this group. I did that because I wanted to understand what psychoactive chemicals might be causing this effect and if it’s something that's found more widely in the mushroom kingdom, or only in this one species; so I needed to understand the whole evolutionary relationships and history of the group.

By sequencing the whole genome, we could look for genes within it that we know are responsible for synthesizing psychoactive compounds. For example, we know the genes that are needed to make psilocybin, and we looked for those genes and they were notably absent. We then confirmed this by looking at a chemical extract of the mushroom and screening all the compounds within it, finding again that there was no psilocybin.

There weren't even any known psychoactive compounds, so it seemed like this must be some new hallucinogenic compound waiting to be discovered, because there's nothing that matches anything in our database.

BT: What work are you doing now to isolate the psychoactive compound?

CD: It can be a long and painstaking process to go from a complicated organism that has hundreds of molecules in it to one causing a single effect. We've been screening the chemical extracts in mice, for example. We give them an extract of this mushroom, and we also give them an extract of a placebo or a blank control and we watch how their behavior changes. With L. asiatica, they behave strikingly differently than in the control, so that shows that there is a bioactive effect going on.

We then take an extract and split it into like 20 fractions, with each fraction containing a different subset of the mushroom’s chemicals. Then we test each of those 20 in the mice, and we see, okay, 19 of these have no effect, and then one of them does have an effect. That way we can narrow down the chemical responsible.

There's also other more complicated methods that we're pursuing. But still to this day we haven't definitively found the actual chemical responsible.

BT: Do you at least have a few candidates?

CD: I'll say this: We’ve narrowed down whatever is causing the activity in mice to a few candidates, but we don't know if the thing that's causing activity in mice is the same thing causing hallucinations in humans.

Mushrooms can have a variety of different bioactive effects, and there's going to be more testing needed to confirm that it actually has the specific hallucinogenic property. It could all just be a red herring that we're chasing, and so that's one of the reasons why it takes a long time to definitively determine an active biochemical.

BT: I know you’re approaching this from the mycology side, but the same visions being consistently reported between cases implies one or more regions of the brain responsible for seeing little people. What work has been done on the neuroscience behind Lilliputian hallucinations? Has anyone identified the regions of the brain it's hitting?

CD: I mean, that's a great question. As far as I know there's really nothing known about the parts of the brain that are being activated. Lilliputian hallucinations have been documented for over 100 years from causes outside of mushrooms — people get them sometimes during alcohol withdrawals or certain neurological conditions associated with old age, like dementia or Charles Bonnet syndrome.

But in all those cases, psychiatrists and neurologists don't really have a treatment for those people because they don't know how it works in the brain. If you don't understand the mechanisms involved, you can't treat it, so it remains a mystery to this day. Hopefully more neuroscientists can use this mushroom to study it, because that's one of the reasons it's remained mysterious. We didn't have a tool that could produce these effects reliably. It was all random, inconsistent occurrences.

But now, hopefully, this mushroom can provide a tool that can reliably produce these effects and give us insights into the brain and body mechanisms causing these Lilliputian hallucinations.

BT: DMT, LSD, magic mushrooms — most psychedelics usually hit serotonin receptors, yet weirdly there's no sign of that here. Is there any possibility it's doing something upstream with the same effect?

CD: I would say we're not sure, but I'll say that there are very unique effects of these symptoms — that they take 12 to 24 hours to kick in, and then can last several days — that are unlike any known receptor interaction classical psychedelics work through. So it might be something more complicated going on in the body than just a single receptor being activated.

BT: Have you spoken to anyone who has suspicions of what parts of the brain might be involved?

CD: I haven't. However, I'll say that the very striking visual hallucinations of something being completely integrated with the real world environment around you can be a great tool to understand the mechanisms of perception, and how we perceive reality in the absence of this drug.

I mean, this is... I don't know of anything else like this that can produce these very realistic hallucinations integrated with the real world. So, hopefully, it can give us insight into how we perceive reality normally.

BT: With other psychedelics, people report seeing real objects altered or patterns appearing that aren't there. But the source of all that is a warped version of stuff you're already seeing. Here, your visual field is unaltered, except, of course, that there are hundreds of mischievous tiny people fooling about in it.

CD: It's really different, yeah. Like you said, either the objects that are normally there are changed in some way, or people go to a different world in their minds, behind closed eyelids.

But to see, with your eyes open, the world as it normally appears with the addition of very realistically-rendered people, that others don't perceive, is really striking.

BT: So there have been scant reports of similar hallucinations occurring elsewhere. Papua New Guinea is a strong lead, right? Does that mean that L. asiatica is also there, or could there be another mushroom that's kind of having effects?

CD: That's one of the most exciting questions that I'm interested in. It still remains a big question mark. What mushroom in Papua New Guinea is causing these effects? There's no records of L. asiatica even occurring in Papua New Guinea, but it could be that mycologists just haven't documented it there. Mycology is still a very young discipline, and there's a lot of parts of the world where we still don't even know the mushrooms that exist there.

Or it could be a completely different mushroom, which would be exciting for its own reason — it would show that whatever compound is causing this is perhaps more widespread, and it's not just found in one species. More research needs to be done, for sure.

The cultural use and consumption of these wild mushrooms in Papua New Guinea has faded since the 1960s, when they were prevalent and reported. There's been no cases of this "mushroom madness" for decades. The reasons could be twofold, either the local people have lost that tradition and practice, or the forests have also been deforested. It's still a big question mark as to what's going on in Papua New Guinea.

BT: On mycology being a young field, the estimates for the world's fungal species that have been described float between 3% and 10%. It makes one wonder what else could be out there. Have you heard any other intriguing mushroom rumours?

CD: Who knows what else is out there waiting to be discovered. That’s what got me into this field. I was actually initially in astronomy, because I was so captivated by exploring the unknown. And then I realized there's a whole universe of life here on Earth that is still unexplored, the fungi, and so that's when I started studying them.

So I'm sure there are other crazy, promising, interesting fungi out there just like this. But I can't think of specific cases to cite. I mean, if it's unknown, it's unknown.

BT: I was wondering if you were close to performing the same trick twice.

CD: Yeah, hopefully others can.

BT: Do you think the window for them will exist for much longer? You mentioned these things grow symbiotically with trees through mycorrhizal networks. It's not just in Papua New Guinea where humans are chopping a lot of those forests down.

CD: Yeah, absolutely. Not only are the forests being lost, but also the cultures that have this traditional knowledge are also being decimated, so we're losing a lot of knowledge about the natural world that has taken thousands of years of experimentation to accumulate, and it's a tragedy.

It's like burning down a library, but the library contains millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of cultural knowledge. I'm sure there's mushrooms every day that are going extinct, and those might be holding promising new medicines or strange new drugs that can change our understanding of ourselves and the world, or have solutions to environmental problems.

It is definitely a race against time, and certainly the reason why I think fungal conservation and cultural conservation and respect is needed.

BT: Finally, I can’t get to the end of this interview and not ask you. Have you eaten raw or undercooked L. asiatica? Have you seen the tiny people?

CD: Of course I’ve been tempted to. But I haven't actually eaten it raw intentionally for two reasons. One, the effects last several days, and also apparently cause a delirium that might not be so pleasant. So, it's a pretty serious undertaking, I'd say.

Then secondly, we also just don't know anything about the dose of the mushroom that causes the effects, because people are just eating this in a meal, and then in some cases they get these psychoactive effects. We don't know how much is required, so there'd be a lot of careful experimentation of consuming raw mushrooms and then increasing the amount. That would take, I think, a lot of time and mushrooms to go through.

I'm certainly super curious, and that’s why I'm studying this in the first place. But there's already hundreds of reports out there, I don't feel like I need to prove anything. Personally, at this point, I just don't feel like it's not worth the commitment to be having these hallucinations for several days.

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

The Socotra Archipelago is a cluster of four islands and two rocky islets belonging to Yemen. It is nicknamed the "Galápagos of the Indian Ocean" due to its staggering biodiversity, which includes hundreds of species that aren't found anywhere else in the world.

Located about 250 miles (400 kilometers) south of the Arabian Peninsula and 140 miles (220 km) east of the Horn of Africa, the Socotra Archipelago is home to around 60,000 people. As of 2023, visitors could reach it only via a weekly flight from Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, that had to be booked through WhatsApp and was often canceled without reason.

The archipelago has one main island, Socotra, which makes up 95% of the landmass, along with three smaller islands and two islets. The main island hosts snow-white sand dunes, a central mountain range, and limestone plateaus peppered with drought-resistant cucumber trees (Dendrosicyos socotranus) and umbrella-shaped dragon's blood trees (Dracaena cinnabari) that do not exist elsewhere on Earth. The dragon's blood tree gets its name from its crimson resin, which is used for natural medicine and as a pigment.

Socotra was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008, thanks to its unique plants and animals, which have evolved in isolation for at least 15 million years. Socotra is a leftover fragment from when Arabia and Africa pulled apart around 30 million years ago. The split opened the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, which connects the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea.

More than one-third of Socotra's plants, 90% of its reptiles and 95% of its land snail species are found exclusively in the archipelago, according to UNESCO. The marine life in Socotra is also incredibly diverse; it includes sea turtles, whale sharks (Rhincodon typus) and more than 250 species of reef-building corals.

The archipelago is tricky to get to, and pirates sometimes hijack vessels in the surrounding seas. Due to Yemen's ongoing civil war, many governments, including the U.S., advise against all travel to the country, including Socotra, citing threats of terrorism, unrest, crime, health risks, kidnapping and landmines.

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

Growing water scarcity could hamper the expansion of lithium mining in the U.S., deepening its reliance on foreign imports over the coming decades, a new study finds.

Lithium is used in electric-vehicle and energy-storage batteries due to its high energy density and low weight compared with other minerals, but mining it requires a huge amount of water. Currently, the U.S. has only one active lithium mine, in Nevada, and with demand for the metal projected to explode over the next few years, the government and private companies are planning to open at least 115 new mines across the country, according to the study.

However, most of the proposed mines that are in advanced stages of development overlap with water-stressed areas, specifically in the western U.S. In the new study, published May 28 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, scientists found that if lithium mines start operating in these regions, they will compete for water not only with households, agriculture and industry, but also with one another and with other proposed mineral mines.

"Future water availability under climate change may constrain whether new lithium mines will have sufficient water to operate," study senior author Jennifer Dunn, a professor of chemical and biological engineering and the director of the Center for Engineering Sustainability and Resilience at Northwestern University in Illinois, told Live Science in an email.

The U.S. imports more than 50% of its lithium, mostly from Chile and Argentina. Policymakers and corporations want to reduce this dependence, but even with the existing Nevada mine and the 22 proposed mines that are the closest to coming online, the U.S. won't have enough lithium to meet domestic demand, Dunn said.

"Every mine produces a different amount of lithium — depending on its deposit type, lithium grade, and final product — so we are unable to determine how many mines exactly would be needed," she said. "Our analysis estimated that if all 22 advanced [stage] proposed mines and the sole operating mine continued operation into 2050, 0.14 [to] 0.25 million metric tons [0.15 to 0.28 million tons] of lithium content in products could be produced per year."

This range falls short of the 0.83 million to 1.9 million tons (0.75 million to 1.7 million metric tons) of lithium per year that other researchers previously estimated the U.S. would need to cover its own demand.

However, the water demand to produce more lithium would be astronomical. That's because lithium is typically extracted from brines and rocks known as pegmatites, which require large-scale evaporation and aggressive processing with fresh water, respectively.

To find out if the U.S. would have enough water to support additional lithium mines under intensifying climate change, the researchers calculated the future water use of the 23 lithium mines most likely to be active in 2050, using data from mining companies. Then, they layered this projected water use on top of projected water uses from other sectors, such as agriculture and manufacturing, under four modeled socioeconomic-climate scenarios between 2040 and 2060.

The researchers found that the available water supply will, in most cases, be insufficient to support new lithium mines. The starkest example was Southern California's Salton Sea, which contains roughly 4.5 million tons (4.1 million metric tons) of lithium. The Salton Sea is fed by the Colorado River and showed the least water available to support lithium mining and other water demands, owing to the river's dwindling flow.

Lithium deposits in the U.S. are clustered in Nevada, Arizona and California. These are also some of the most arid and water-stressed states. Although the study found an increase in rainfall under a high emissions, "business as usual" climate scenario, these regions likely won't have enough water to support other activities, let alone additional lithium mining, Dunn said.

There were four exceptions in the study, including lithium-rich sites in North Carolina and Arkansas, which may have enough water to support future mines. However, there are other concerns related to lithium mining.

"Many of the lithium deposits in the United States reside near federally-recognized Indigenous and Tribal reservations, and the mines could violate Indigenous rights," Dunn said. "Lithium mining could also disturb sensitive ecosystems and biodiversity. And, like many other mineral mines, pollution, soil erosion, and water contamination are concerns."

Together, the findings highlight a catch-22 in the quest to source lithium: Lithium is essential to support a green energy transition and curb climate change, but shrinking water availability due to global warming is making it harder to extract lithium.

The study did not explore potential improvements to water-use efficiency that could reduce the pressure on some water resources and increase the availability for activities such as lithium mining. Nor did the researchers include water exchanges known as interbasin transfers (IBTs) in their analysis, due to the lack of studies about these transfers under climate change.

"IBTs could help supply water to arid or water-stressed regions," Dunn said.

Still, there is likely an upper limit on how much water can be allocated to lithium mining in a warming world, according to the study. This means the U.S. will probably continue to partially rely on foreign supply chains for lithium and other critical minerals.

Thousands of previously undetected tiny earthquakes have revealed the edge of a miniature tectonic plate slamming into Alaska near the Denali Fault.

The microplate could be focusing seismic energy in a straight line in a region under the Alaska Range of mountains, potentially contributing to large earthquakes and the development of small volcanoes in the area.

The Yakutat microplate is an ocean plateau that is thicker than the Pacific oceanic crust surrounding it. Formed by volcanoes tens of millions of years ago, this block of crust is now being pushed under the North American Plate in Alaska in a process called subduction. But because it is thicker and more buoyant than the surrounding oceanic crust, the microplate pushes up the Alaska Range, which includes North America's highest mountain, Mount McKinley (also known as Denali).

"Being able to identify where the Yakutat microplate is in the subsurface has helped us understand the tectonics," said Meghan Miller, the study's first author and a seismologist at the Australian National University.

Part of the plate is still off the coast of Alaska, sticking out like a slipper under a rug. But the precise location of the edge of the plate that has already subducted under the continent has been hard to pinpoint. Miller and her colleagues installed seven new seismometers south of the Denali Fault, which runs through the Alaska Range. This is a tectonically active region, most famous for a 2002 magnitude 7.9 earthquake that was felt as far away as Seattle.

But it wasn't a giant temblor like 2002's that revealed the hidden edge of the Yakutat. Instead, it was unmasked by about 3,000 newly discovered minuscule earthquakes clustered in a clean line running from northwest to southeast for 155 miles (250 kilometers) under the Denali Fault. The "very sharp, linear pattern" also aligns with a series of small volcanic cones and rock-type changes in the deep subsurface, Miller and her colleagues reported in the new study, published June 4 in the journal The Seismic Record.

The researchers suspect that the leading edge of the plate is focusing seismic energy toward the surface. The plate's location also aligns with the initiation point of the 2002 Denali quake, which started on a nearby fault, Miller told Live Science, but exploring that idea further will require computational modeling.

"What we were postulating is that the edge of the Yakutat plate is influencing all these different types of processes," Miller said.

For half a century, scientists have known that Earth's Northern and Southern hemispheres have almost the exact same albedo ‪— the amount of sunlight they reflect back to space. This is true even though the two hemispheres look very different, with the Northern Hemisphere having more land and the Southern Hemisphere having more ocean.

Now, researchers have uncovered another surprising symmetry hiding in the data: Earth's Eastern and Western halves appear to reflect the same amount of sunlight as well, they reported in a study published June 3 in the journal Nature. They found that the dividing line lies along a great circle that wraps around the whole planet. It's made up of two longitude lines: the 27 degrees east and 153 degrees west meridians, which stretch from the North to South Pole through Eastern Europe, Turkey, Central Africa, Norway and Alaska.

"Given that the Earth is approximately spherical, it is unsurprising that one can divide it into two non-overlapping hemispheres that reflect equal amounts of sunlight," the authors write in the paper. But what is surprising, they write, is how closely matched they are. The probability of the hemispheres naturally reflecting sunlight within 0.01 watts per square meter of each other is less than 3%.

If the symmetry is a fundamental part of Earth’s climate, this finding could help scientists test and possibly improve global climate models to predict future warming.

Secret symmetry

While the exact mechanism for the northern and southern symmetry has evaded scientists for decades, the study authors said they may have identified a reason behind their discovery.

Since the dawn of the space race in the late 1950s, scientists have wanted to figure out Earth's albedo. "That was a really burning question back then," Norman Loeb, an atmospheric scientist who leads NASA's Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) project who wasn't involved in the new study, told Live Science. And around a half century ago, they figured it out with satellite imagery.

Earth's planetary albedo is about 29%, according to the study. This means that about 0.29 of the solar radiation that hits Earth is reflected back into space. In contrast, a perfect mirror would have an albedo of 1, as it would reflect back 100% of the light that hit it.

Other analyses showed that the Northern Hemisphere's albedo was the same as the Southern Hemisphere's, although recent research co-authored by Loeb suggests that the Northern Hemisphere is now absorbing more light than the Southern, likely because of melting snow and ice, declining air pollution, and rising water vapor.

This newfound imbalance aside, Zhang, a researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, and colleagues wondered if other symmetry pairs had been overlooked or if they were considered too trivial to investigate, Zhang wrote in a blog.

To identify the symmetry, Zhang and his colleagues analyzed 25 years of satellite observations from 2001 to 2025 collected by the CERES program, which uses satellites to measure Earth’s energy budget. Instruments on these satellites measure how much reflected sunlight bounces back into space, as well as how much heat is emitted from Earth

Earth's albedo is shaped by many factors; clouds, oceans, snow, ice and land each reflect a different amount of sunlight. This reflection influences Earth's climate, so understanding it is key to an accurate understanding of climate in the future.

After running the first analysis, Zhang wrote he was both "absolutely amazed" and skeptical at what he saw, but three features stood out.

First the symmetry is unique to the meridian at 27 east longitude. If you shift the line to any other longitude, the symmetry disappears. Second, it's consistent across a 25-year dataset. Lastly, there is "triple symmetry": The two hemispheres contain similar proportions of ice-free ocean, experience similar cloud effects, and reflect similar amounts of sunlight under clear skies.

El Niño connection

Zhang and his authors hypothesize the East-West symmetry is tied to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a recurring climate pattern that shifts ocean temperatures and weather around the globe. When they examined the slight changes in the exact longitude of this symmetry, they found correlation with the ENSO record.

In the tropics, a giant loop of air called the Walker circulation acts like a big conveyor belt. Warm, moist air rises in the West, travels eastward high in the atmosphere, and then cools and sinks, before blowing back westward at the surface. This circulation acts as the albedo adjustment mechanism, according to the study.

The Walker circulation helps drive the difference between El Niño and La Niña, recurring climate patterns, based on weaker or stronger Pacific trade winds, respectively.

During La Niña years, the circulation is stronger, causing warmer water and so the Eastern Hemisphere has more clouds, and thus reflects slightly more sunlight. During El Niño, the circulation weakens, warm water spreads across the Pacific and so the Western Hemisphere reflects more. Over many years, the swings average out, helping to keep the long-term east-west symmetry centered near 27 degrees east.

"Nature throws surprises at us, so this is a curious surprise that this one longitude seems to divide the globe up very symmetrically," Loeb said. "It's really interesting that there's this single point longitude at 27 degrees."

Since the models are designed to simulate Earth's interactions among the atmosphere, oceans, lands, crust and other parts, the new symmetry offers another way to test if current climate models are accurate. "I think the short-term benefit of this type of discovery is that it's a further test of climate models," Loeb noted.

But when the scientists tested how the current models predicted new symmetry, "the models didn't do very well," Loeb said. "They didn't produce this East-West symmetry." This problem may be "contributing to the persistent uncertainty in climate projections," according to the study.

How much do you know about our blue planet? Test your terran knowledge with our Earth quiz!

Earth's oldest known impact crater formed when a meteorite slammed into what is now Australia about 3 billion years ago ‪—‬ 470 million years later than scientists previously claimed, a new study suggests.

The impact crater, known as the North Pole Dome crater, is located in Western Australia's Pilbara region, which is home to some of the planet's oldest rocks. It remains a record-breaking structure, beating the world's next-oldest known meteorite impact crater — the Yarrabubba impact structure, also in Western Australia — by roughly 800 million years.

"While the site had previously been identified as an ancient impact structure, its exact age remained uncertain," study first author Chris Kirkland, a professor in the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Curtin University in Australia, said in a statement. "The impact left a 'mineral clock' behind. By dating minerals that were remade or newly grown in the damaged rocks, we can now pin down when this extraordinary event happened."

In a study published last year, Kirkland and his colleagues said they had "unequivocal evidence" that the North Pole Dome crater was 3.47 billion years old, based on an analysis of cone-shaped chunks of rock known as "shatter cones" that form when the shock waves from a meteorite impact propagate downward.

However, a study published four months later in the journal Science Advances called the other team's results "inaccurate," arguing that the impact occurred no earlier than 2.7 billion years ago.

For the new study, Kirkland and his colleagues used advanced mineral dating techniques to estimate the ages of zircon, apatite, calcite and muscovite in shatter cones from the North Pole Dome crater. The researchers analyzed two samples of shatter-cone-bearing rocks, as well as a shocked quartz vein — a sheet-like deposit that typically forms when superhot, mineral-rich water circulates in the cracks between shocked rocks.

"The key evidence comes from zircon, a tiny but extraordinarily resilient mineral that can keep geological time for billions of years," Kirkland said. "Some zircons at North Pole Dome have unusual branching, skeletal shapes. We interpret these as impact-modified crystals, formed when older zircon was disrupted, partly recrystallised, and in places regrown during the intense heating caused by the impact."

The age recorded in zircon was the same as that locked inside apatite minerals, giving the researchers confidence that the impact occurred a little more than 3 billion years ago. The younger shatter cones in the Science Advances study may have formed subsequently due to tectonic and thermal activity, the team wrote in the new paper, which was published Tuesday (June 23) in the journal Geology.

"Ancient impact craters are incredibly difficult to date because over billions of years, rocks are altered by heat, pressure and fluids, which can obscure or reset the original impact signals," Kirkland said. "The new age places the North Pole Dome structure as Earth's oldest known impact crater and the only recognised example from the Archean eon [4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago], a time when the planet's earliest continents were forming."

Planet Earth quiz: What do you know about our planet's most amazing features?

A massive wave of warm water is making its way across the Pacific Ocean as the newly declared El Niño gets into full swing, satellite images show.

The band, called a Kelvin wave, marks a swell of higher-than-average sea levels that stretches hundreds of miles along the equator. The anomaly is caused by warmer waters linked to El Niño — the warm phase of a natural climate pattern whose current iteration could become one of the strongest ever recorded.

The Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite captured the deviations from average sea surface height on June 8. Red areas indicate higher sea surfaces than usual, while blue areas mark areas with lower surface heights.

Developed and launched in 2020 by NASA and the European Space Agency and operated by the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich measures changes in sea surface height down to fractions of an inch every 10 days.

The data complements measurements of sea surface temperature that have shown Pacific waters warming at unpreceded rates over the past several months, leading scientists to declare the start of a new El Niño on June 11. When ocean water warms, it expands and takes up more space. That translates to an increase in the height of the water relative to the satellite and the center of Earth, which is then picked up by the satellite's sensitive equipment. At some points along the equator, sea surfaces are now more than 6 inches (15 centimeters) higher than usual.

Kelvin waves like this one form when winds in the western Pacific near the equator weaken and temporarily reverse, blowing from west to east instead of east to west. That lets warm water gradually build up in the east, deepening the layer of warm surface waters and preventing colder waters from rising from below. The wave has now reached the western coast of South America.

NASA had already observed a few other Kelvin waves this year, suggesting an El Niño event was soon to follow. In January, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich detected one near Micronesia that dissipated around mid-February. Another emerged in March and elevated sea levels near Peru by mid-May.

Changes in sea surface temperature or height can alter atmospheric circulation patterns and affect the weather. El Niño often increases rainfall in the southwestern U.S., Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, while rainfall in the western Pacific tends to decrease. The most recent El Niño, which lasted from June 2023 to April 2024, boosted global mean temperatures that made 2024 the hottest year on record and the first to breach the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming limit — a guardrail set by the Paris Agreement beyond which the effects of climate change become more and more catastrophic.

The June 8 conditions in the western Pacific were similar to those that occurred 1997 during a particularly strong El Niño, according to a statement from NASA. 2026 has seen fewer Kelvin waves so far than 1997, but this year’s El Niño is still ramping up.

"For now, it looks like it's going to be a big one — more so than I would have said last week — but we still need more observations to know what's going to happen," Severine Fournier, a sea level researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, said in the statement.

How much do you know about our blue planet? Test your terran knowledge with our Earth quiz!

China controls some of the largest rivers in Asia, experiences heavy rain and has vast stores of water locked in glaciers in the west. But despite these abundant resources, China has a water problem. While central and southern regions are quenched by massive rivers like the Yangtze, the northeastern megacities like Beijing and Tianjin have endured serious water scarcity as agriculture, industry and population size rapidly increased.

To address the imbalance, China has undertaken one of the biggest engineering projects in the world: rerouting the flow of one of the world's mightiest rivers and its tributary, and ferrying the water thousands of miles from the center and south of the country to the thirsty north.

Called the South-to-North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP), the vast system of canals, pipes, dams, reservoirs and pumps moves staggering amounts of water via two routes through central and eastern China.

"It binds into a single network four major river basins, six provinces, three megacities, myriad bureaucracies, and more than 700 million people," Michael Webber, a professor emeritus in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Melbourne who specializes in regional economic development in China, wrote in a 2023 journal article.

But even this is not enough to satisfy the water needs in the North: China is currently expanding these routes and is planning a third, western route for the project, which would snake through the Tibetan Plateau before feeding the water-parched north and east. The route is attractive to Chinese officials because the river-and-glacier-threaded plateau, dubbed the Water Tower of Asia, has abundant water resources and is the source of numerous major rivers.

However, experts say the routes could worsen conditions in parts farther south that provide the water. What's more, the Tibetan portion of the project has stoked fears and suspicion in neighbors, as unofficial plans swirl suggesting major transboundary rivers could be diverted away from other countries and further into China.

The huge plan is "unbelievable," Mark Wang, a professor of human geography at the University of Melbourne, told Live Science. "The proposals [have] underestimated the negative impacts — environmental, earthquakes, evaporation and economic cost," as well as the international impacts, Wang added.

Water imbalance

Construction of the SNWTP began in 2002. The eastern route has operated since 2013 and transports water from the mighty Yangtze from Yangzhou, near Shanghai, to the megacity Tianjin, which has a population of 15 million people. The central route, which goes from Danjiangkou to Beijing and Tianjin, began flowing the following year, carrying water from the Han River, or Hanjiang. Together, they have moved 21 cubic miles (88 cubic kilometers) of water more than 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) since they began operating, according to the Chinese government — more than double the maximum amount of water held in Lake Mead.

The motivation for this project is obvious: China must support nearly 20% of the world's population with just 6% of its freshwater reserves. And this water is not distributed evenly across the country. Northern China has nearly half of the country's population and more than half of its agriculture but just one-fifth of the country's freshwater reserves.

In some places, the imbalance is even more dramatic. Tibet, in the west, has 4.8 million cubic feet (136,800 cubic meters) of water per person, while Tianjin, in the Northeast, has just 3,990 cubic feet (113 cubic m) per person. The United Nations considers less than 1,000 cubic m (35,000 cubic feet) of fresh water available per person water scarcity and less than 500 cubic meters (18,000 cubic feet) per person as "absolute water scarcity." The average in the U.S. is 314,300 cubic feet (8,900 cubic m).

Water transfer

China has a long history of rerouting water to serve its needs. Parts of the eastern route, for instance, use the Grand Canal, which was first built in the fifth century B.C.

And the broad concept of transferring water from the south to the north was first laid out by Mao Zedong, China's first communist leader, in 1952.

"Control of water has been a key theme in Chinese history and mythology," Tom Harper, a lecturer at the University of East London specializing in Chinese foreign policy and international relations, told Live Science.

Currently, the eastern route, which stretches 715 miles (1,150 km) from the Yangtze River to eventually reach Tianjin, transfers around 4 cubic miles (15 cubic km) of water per year.

This water needs to travel 213 feet (65 m) uphill, meaning pumping stations have to raise the water along the route.

The central route, meanwhile, relies on gravity to channel around 3 cubic miles (13 cubic km) of water 790 miles (1,270 km) from Danjiangkou Reservoir, on the Han River in Hubei province, to eventually reach Tianjin.

The Danjiangkou Reservoir already existed before the commencement of the project, but it was significantly expanded to raise the water level — and required 350,000 people to be relocated as a result.

The routes are now key to providing water to Beijing and Tianjin. For example, around 70% of Beijing's water comes from the route, experts told Live Science.

Fixing the fixes

The Chinese government and many Chinese scientists have boasted that the project has increased the water supply to people in northern China, raised the groundwater table in northern regions, and increased economic activity and agriculture in the region.

A major part of the project also focused on improving water quality: Freshwater supplies in China are heavily polluted, which reduces the amount of drinkable water.

"These were reservoirs, these were rivers, these were groundwater resources that had severe pollution impacts," Darrin Magee, a dam expert at Western Washington University, told Live Science. "So in the south where we had abundant water resources, the quality tended to be very bad in some areas."

To rectify this, the SNWTP installed water-cleaning stations along the route and the government implemented measures to reduce water pollution, including shutting down or relocating hundreds of manufacturing businesses that dumped their waste into waterways along the routes.

Along the eastern route, "pollution was terrible," Wang noted. "The central government put in a lot of effort… and they have control of the pollution again in a short period of time," he noted, adding that the water quality has significantly improved along the routes.

However, experts have said that the massive project has damaged ecosystems, displaced hundreds of thousands of people and fueled saltwater intrusion into underground reserves in water-providing areas, as the Yangtze River's freshwater flow is reduced.

"When the South-North Water Transfer was being proposed, many, many Chinese scientists were also against it because you just create lots and lots of new problems, whatever you fix," Emily Yeh, a professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder who specializes in Tibet, told Live Science. "Why not conserve water instead?"

Other experts agreed. "The water problem in China, it's not just physical water scarcity, it's the structural problem," Wang said. The biggest driver of water consumption is farming irrigation, which is water-intensive and leads to significant water loss. Conserving that water would go a long way to alleviating water scarcity, Wang added.

If China's "first priority is conservation, you won't need a large-scale, world's largest mega project," Wang said. Chinese authorities seem to be realizing this. They're also attempting large-scale water conservation policies, Wang said.

But the country is forging ahead with engineering projects.

The SNWTP's sources, particularly along the Han River, have less water per capita than the world's average, so siphoning off large amounts of the river's water could severely strain local areas. This has become such a problem that Chinese authorities are now undertaking even more engineering projects to alleviate the problem caused by the SNWTP. For instance, a new, smaller diversion is being added near the Danjiangkou reservoir, because people downstream are not getting sufficient water, Wang said.

The central route is further being extended to improve Danjiangkou's water levels. The central route relies on gravity, so a high water level is required for the route and the reservoir's dam to function. If water levels dip too low, as happened in 2011 during droughts, the dam stops working. So, engineers are connecting the Danjiangkou reservoir to the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest dam, on the Yangtze, to increase the water supply.

The project is "a fix to fix the fix to fix the fix," environmental researcher Stevan Harrell wrote in the Made in China Journal — emphasizing the ever-growing number of engineering projects to deal with poor water governance.

Western route

Even though the two existing routes provide vast amounts of water to the North, and other water-conservation measures are being rolled out, Chinese authorities say the supply to the North is still not enough to meet demand, and that more water diversion is necessary.

The SNWTP's planned western route through the Tibetan Plateau won't start operations until at least 2050, but since its earliest planning stages, it has been mired in controversy.

The western route's official path would take 4 cubic miles (17 cubic km) of water per year from the Tongtian, Yalong and Dadu rivers — all tributaries that eventually feed into the Yangtze. The route would cross about 190 miles (300 km) of the Tibetan Plateau to the Yellow River, which then flows to the water-scarce north and east. The government has commissioned more feasibility studies for this route as part of the country's newly announced five-year plan.

The construction of such a massive project is fraught with difficulty. The Tibetan Plateau rises 10,000 to 15,000 feet (3,000 to 4,500 m) above sea level. These high altitudes present several problems, such as challenges in construction and maintenance, and difficulties in preventing water from freezing.

To transfer water across the plateau, the route would require pumping stations, along with a series of 300- to 1,000-foot-tall (100 to 300 m) dams, which would rank among the tallest dams in the world. The project would also require cutting 200 miles (300 km) of tunnels through the mountains, including the Bayan Har Mountains, which separate the upper Yangtze and Yellow River drainage basins.

The Tibetan Plateau is very seismically active, meaning earthquakes could lead to collapses or landslides, potentially damaging the vast infrastructure.

In 2018, Chinese scientists attempted to overcome the difficult terrain by transferring water through the air. But the "Sky River," or Tianhe project, ultimately proved unfeasible and has been effectively cancelled.

But China has not been deterred by these obstacles. The ongoing construction of the Dianzhong Water Diversion Project, in Yunnan province in southwest China, provides a test case for transferring water across mountainous, earthquake-prone landscapes. The damless design relies on a 380-mile-long (610 km) series of 58 tunnels, as well as pumps, to carry water through the mountainous and seismically active terrain. It is the "the world's longest water tunnel that could fit two high speed trains" and is "seen as a pilot demonstration project that will inspire and inform the design for the Western Routes," according to the Hong Kong-based think tank CWR. The first stage of the Dianzhong project is due for completion later this year, with a second phase recently announced.

Red flag

While the official western route has yet to break ground, alternative proposals have caused serious concern in neighboring countries. One unofficial plan developed in the 1990s, which politicians and academics subsequently considered completely unworkable, suggested funneling 48 cubic miles (200 cubic km) of water (four times the flow of the Yellow River) away from the Brahmaputra River, which flows into India and Bangladesh, and diverting the water toward the Yellow River basin, which serves the North and East of China.

A second controversial proposal, known as the Red Flag River project, suggests diverting 14 cubic miles (60 cubic km) of water 3,700 miles (6,000 km) from the Lancang, Nu and Yarlung Tsangpo rivers (called the Mekong, Salween and Brahmaputra rivers when they leave China) across the Tibetan Plateau to the northern Xinjiang region, which has high water stress and is facing desertification. Officials suggested the plan could turn Xinjiang into China's "California." The diverted water could also potentially be rerouted toward Beijing, experts told Live Science.

Some experts have called these "semi-official" proposals, as they have no official government backing but have been discussed openly by researchers with heavy government backing and support in China, which the government wouldn't allow if these people were truly speaking out of turn, Wang said.

Despite no official government backing, the plans have worried neighboring countries, particularly India, due to fears that any water diversions on international rivers could significantly reduce vital downstream supplies. Massive water engineering projects are already being built in Tibet, such as the upcoming Motuo megadam on the Yarlung Tsangpo — close to the proposed starting point for the Red Flag River project.

"There's a lot of concern that there might be water diversion, because China has been talking about this for many, many years," Tenzin Norgay, a researcher at the nonprofit organization International Campaign for Tibet, told Live Science. "If it happens, it's going to be a huge risk to downstream countries."

Researchers have calculated that the Red Flag project would likely siphon around 20% of the rivers' upstream flows, though the overall water loss for the whole of each river is less than that. Regardless of the actual amount of diversion, the lack of international consultations and transparency is exacerbating suspicions, experts told Live Science.

A changing climate

While China is forging ahead with attempts to redistribute China's water and reduce water scarcity via the SNWTP, climate change could scramble those plans. An increased risk of droughts over the coming decades could compromise the SNWTP's ability to move water.

The Tibetan Plateau, which is a source of water for almost 2 billion people, is particularly at risk. The world's "Third Pole" is rapidly warming, leading its numerous glaciers to melt. This could lead to sudden flooding, followed decades later by reduced river flow as the glaciers disappear. Desertification, meanwhile, is also impacting the Tibetan Plateau.

"Short to medium term, [we'll] see an increase in runoff as melting begins earlier each year," Magee said. "But over the long term, decreased snowpack means less secure water resources for most of China."

Taming nature

China's water management approaches include vast dam-building projects, cloud seeding, monumental tree-planting schemes and water-transfer projects, all of which rely on technological and engineering solutions to control the natural world, experts told Live Science.

When it comes to megaprojects, "If there's any country that will do it, it's China," Magee said. "The People's Republic of Engineers."

Other experts agreed. "It is part of this idea that you can engineer your way out of these problems, even if it's with trees rather than with machines," Yeh said. "A large-scale engineering approach to the natural world has been a characteristic of Chinese approaches to perceived or real environmental problems."

This is particularly true for the Tibetan Plateau. "The government is really imagining Tibet as a source of ecological service for the rest of the country," Yeh said.

Other experts agreed that Chinese authorities typically take an engineering approach to attempt to manage nature.

But Wang noted that China faces big pressures, which is why its government is looking for big solutions.

"If you understand China's energy issues, you understand why China is doing this. If you understand the water and food security issues, you understand so many things China has done," Wang said.

This eye-catching satellite snap shows off a "bull's-eye-like" set of concentric cloud rings that formed above an erupting volcano on La Palma in Spain's Canary Islands.

The eruption, the first on La Palma in 50 years, began Sept. 19, 2021, when a fissure opened up on the western flank of Cumbre Vieja — a volcanic ridge that runs through the southern half of the island — and spewed massive lava fountains into the air. The violent outburst created a 660-foot-tall (200 meters) vent, dubbed Tajogaite, which continued to slowly pump out lava until Dec. 13, 2021.

The molten rock flowed into the Atlantic Ocean in a giant "river of fire" that destroyed a town and unleashed deadly gases that are still causing issues for locals today, Live Science previously reported.

The concentric cloud rings in this image are made up of steam, smoke and ash ‪—‬ known as an eruption plume ‪—‬ that rose above Tajogaite for weeks.

Normally, such a plume would continue to climb into the cold air of the stratosphere — the second layer of the atmosphere, which extends from around 6 to 31 miles (10 to 50 kilometers) above Earth's surface. However, when this image was captured, a rare "temperature inversion" created a layer of elevated warm air that acted as a lid, preventing the plume from rising and forcing it to spread outward, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

The trapped plume created concentric rings that formed from the natural ebb and flow in the intensity of volcanic activity. This pulse in the emissions given off by the volcano is visible in time-lapse footage captured by the Izaña Atmospheric Research Center on Tenerife, another Canary Island.

The official name for this type of concentric cloud formation is a "gravity wave," according to the National Weather Service. However, the formation has nothing to do with gravity, and it's completely separate from the ripples in space-time called gravitational waves.

"River of fire"

During the 85-day eruption, around 7.1 billion cubic feet (200 million cubic meters) of lava — reaching temperatures of up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 degrees Celsius) — seeped from the ground.

This molten rock traveled around 4 miles (6.4 kilometers), destroying around 3,000 buildings in the town of Todoque, before falling into the Atlantic Ocean in a fiery waterfall. The estimated damage exceeded 700 million euros ($780 million), according to the Spanish newspaper El País.

Where lava fell into the sea, around 4.6 million square feet (430,000 square meters) of new land was created. The reaction between the molten rock and the water also released high levels of volcanic gases, such as sulfur dioxide and hydrogen cyanide.

At least one person, a 72-year-old man who returned to his home prematurely, is believed to have died from inhaling these toxic fumes, according to AFP. Thousands of wild and agricultural animals are also thought to have been killed by the gases.

The damage was "truly terrible," Marie Edmonds, a volcanologist at the University of Cambridge, told Live Science at an event on La Palma in April 2025. "Most shocking to me is the closeness of the vent to the communities," she added when describing what it was like to visit the area. "It must have been absolutely terrifying to see the eruption so close."

The Amazon is the largest rainforest in the world, spanning more than 2 million square miles (5.2 million square kilometers) — an area 12 times the size of California. It influences global water cycles, stores years of global carbon emissions, supports 47 million people, and is home to the greatest concentration of biodiversity on Earth.

But the Amazon rainforest is also disappearing, with 17% of it already cut down or destroyed and largely replaced with agriculture. Other grave threats, such as oil drilling and illegal mining, continue to whittle it down. The next century may have outsize importance, as the forest could reach a "tipping point."

So what will the Amazon rainforest look like in 100 years?

The answer depends on a number of compounding threats, Bernardo Flores, a researcher with the EqualSea Lab at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, told Live Science.

Encroaching farmland and organized crime are a couple of the problems chipping away at the Amazon. But those work in tandem with what he considers the three main threats: climate change, which can lead to extreme weather events, "like wetter wet seasons and drier dry seasons," deforestation and fire.

As the Amazon loses more of its forest, it triggers a feedback loop. "You have less rainfall; then you have less forest, [then] less rainfall, less forest," Flores explained. "That ultimately leads to "a global scale feedback involving the Amazon: More forest loss [leads to] more global warming. More global warming, more forest loss."

As forests get drier, it becomes easier for wildfires to burn more areas. Roads also degrade the forest, and "wherever you have roads, you have people doing illegal activities, illegal logging … then this leads to [more] forest fires," Flores said.

The "arc of deforestation" — a roughly 310,000-square-mile (800,000 square km) border along the Amazon considered the largest deforestation frontier in the world — offers a preview of what much of the Amazon could ultimately look like, according to Flores. The forests that remain there have higher tree mortality and more canopy gaps, and they are often "covered with lianas," or woody vines, that become an ecological problem, he said. Lianas compete with trees for light and nutrients in the soil, and significantly reduce not only a tree's chance of survival but also the overall diversity of trees in a forest. "When the whole forest is covered in lianas, you don't see the forest anymore," he added.

Invasive grasses introduced by cattle farmers will likely proliferate in the decades ahead, but "only a few parts" of the Amazon could become "a savanna, because a savanna is a native, biodiverse ecosystem," he said. Invasive grasses "exclude native species, reduce biodiversity" and would not allow native savanna grasses to replace the forest, Flores said. Instead, one possibility is a "degraded open-canopy ecosystem," where native, naturally fire-tolerant trees, combined with invasive grasses, vines and ferns, proliferate, Flores told Live Science.

Wildlife would quickly be affected as well. Aquatic species are especially vulnerable, Flores said. "When you start having these droughts that will simply last for one, two, three years," wetlands will dry out and become flammable, he explained. That could lead to "very quick extinctions in those areas."

The destruction of the Amazon rainforest would be disastrous for the Indigenous people living there, Christian Poirier, program director of Amazon Watch, an environmental and Indigenous rights advocacy group, told Live Science. "Imagine having your backyard bulldozed and your water source poisoned," he said. "You probably need to move from where you live, and that's exactly what's happening in the Amazon."

A devastated Amazon would also lead to "a more chaotic global climate system," Flores said. There could be less rainfall across parts of South America, and global warming will worsen. Earth could eventually reach a tipping point where ice sheets melt, ocean currents malfunction and the collapse of the Amazon accelerate warming all at once, pushing the planet to "cross the tipping point and transition to a much warmer climate," he said, leading to potentially irreversible consequences.

Unlike other major climate risks, such as the potential of the Greenland Ice Sheet melting and contributing to sea level rise, deforestation can in theory be reversed more easily by reforestation, said Arie Staal, an assistant professor of ecosystem resilience at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

"That gives us a knob to turn that we don't have for other possible tipping points on Earth," he told Live Science. "It is clear that we really need to stop deforestation in the Amazon. And there's hope."

Editor's note: This article was updated at 6:23 p.m. EDT on June 22 to fix the conversion of roughly 310,000 square miles to 800,000 square kilometers.

Rainforest quiz: Can you sort the largest rainforests on Earth?

Energy used to power artificial intelligence (AI) could jump to 3% of global electricity demand by 2030, guzzling as much water as the 1.3 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa consume in one year to meet their domestic water needs.

Those are the conclusions of a recent United Nations report that estimated the land use, water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions associated with AI's breakneck expansion. If the data centers that underpin AI formed a country, they would rank 11th in the world for energy use due to their high infrastructure and electricity needs to train ever more complicated models and satisfy users, the report found.

By 2030, data centers could rise to sixth in the world for energy consumption, which would have a land footprint the size of Connecticut and release emissions comparable to those of the U.K. in 2025, depending on how much renewable energy is in the mix.

The findings highlight how much additional pressure AI and the infrastructure that supports it could put on the environment and the climate within the next few years. But why does AI have such a huge footprint, who is benefiting or being left out from the opportunities linked to AI's growth, and what can be done to limit the damage?

To find out more, we spoke with Kaveh Madani, lead investigator for the U.N. report; director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health; and the recipient of this year's Stockholm Water Prize.

Sascha Pare: What would you say is the main takeaway from the report?

Kaveh Madani: The main takeaway of this report is that although in the general discourse AI is perceived as something virtual, or digital, or up in the clouds, there is [a] massive physicality to AI and the supply chains and infrastructure that back it up. And that's one thing that this report has tried to do: to remind people that behind every prompt, every use, every interaction, there is some level of impact on the environment. This is because from the top of the supply chain, where the extraction of critical minerals happens, to the point of manufacturing the hardware, the construction of the data centers, then the operation of data centers, and then dealing with the e-waste, there are major environmental impacts. If we take all of those into account, then we realize that what's digital is not necessarily free of impact. There is always some footprint associated with it, and we have to remember that.

SP: Why does AI have such massive land and water footprints, specifically?

KM: The report outlines the carbon, water and land footprints of AI's energy use. All along the supply chain, from the extraction of critical minerals to the point of disposing and dealing with the electronic waste, we have actions and interventions that require water, require land, and are associated with carbon emissions. So, if you think about, for example, the extraction of critical minerals, we know that during the process, a lot of water is being used and a lot of water is being polluted and poisoned. We published a report in April about the water injustice implications of the critical minerals, showing exactly what is happening where we have the extraction of critical minerals.

But let's not forget that the [new] report is focused on AI's energy use, and then tries to argue that the energy production process itself requires also a lot of water and land. If you are using hydropower to provide energy to your data center, you're using a lot of land and a lot of water. This applies to all sorts of energy sources, regardless of being clean or not, or if you consider them renewable or not — they all require water and land. On top of this, of course, you need to build data centers on land, but also you need water for cooling. That's why, throughout the supply chain, throughout the life cycle of AI, we have a lot of water and land use, in addition to carbon emissions.

SP: The report is packed with jaw-dropping statistics about how big AI's environmental footprint could get by 2030. But how significant are the impacts?

KM: First of all, it is very hard to estimate exactly how much energy AI is currently using, but we know that roughly 20% of the current load of data centers can be attributed to AI. We are expecting that to be 40% within a few years. And by then, the data centers that back AI's operations are expected to have an energy demand that is about 3% of the total energy demand of the world. This is equivalent to being the sixth-most-energy-intensive country in the world. The water demand of that is also huge; the water footprint associated with that is enough to satisfy the domestic water needs of 1.3 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa.

SP: Can the environment and communities cope with the projected levels of energy and water consumption needed for AI?

KM: There would be places in the world where big decisions must be made, meaning that you have to decide if you want to continue using your water for agriculture or if you want to put it into data centers. Those would be decisions for the communities — and if the communities are not involved, then the most vulnerable, the poor, will be dealing with the consequences.

At the same time, we know that the world's electricity consumption keeps increasing. That's a major problem, because although we are trying to add more and more renewables to the energy supply systems, the renewables cannot keep up with the increasing electricity demand. This means that not only can we not retire the old systems, but we might also need to use more fossil energy to satisfy this growing demand. And of course, that means more pressure on the fragile environment.

We know some of the data centers are being placed in locations that are already dry or suffering from what we refer to as "water bankruptcy," based on the report we published in January. These are major issues. More pressure on the environment [puts] more pressure on humans, and this recipe means [we could have] a kind of reinforcing degradation loop that would jeopardize both nature and human society.

SP: Who is benefiting the most from AI's expansion, and who is being excluded?

KM: AI expansion is benefiting humanity as a whole. It has changed our lifestyle; it has provided a lot of opportunities and improvements. But at the same time, it has some consequences. The issue that we see right now is that the richer communities and countries of the world are the ones that are benefiting from it the most, and within those communities and countries, it's the rich who are also profiting more from the expansion. If you look at the investment landscape of AI, you can see that there is a lot of push from a number of strong players and private investors. And they don't bear the costs when it comes to pollution, water bankruptcy, land degradation and so on.

If you think about the emissions, they are contributing to global warming, and everybody would suffer from it. Even the countries that don't have AI infrastructure are affected: If you think about where the critical minerals come from, you see a lot of poor communities, poor countries and poor regions in Africa, South America, parts of Asia, where people don't have basic infrastructure — they don't even have clean drinking water and energy infrastructure. They don't benefit from this expansion and the profits and utilities it provides. It's the most vulnerable communities and the poor economies that are going to suffer the consequences, while the other ones will benefit more.

SP: How did you estimate AI's growth by 2030, and how likely is it that your numbers will come true, given the fears that AI is a bubble that's about to catastrophically burst?

KM: We were looking at the data centers, and we still think that our projections are conservative. There is a lot of push from the private sector to further growth. Countries are also seeing investment in AI and data centers as an investment in security, sovereignty and other matters, so there's also a competition there. Some of the investments — some of the decisions about expanding AI — are not necessarily based on comprehensive assessments. Investments remain a bid to stay in the race, and that means more and more push. So we think that what we have projected is probably very conservative.

SP: China is scaling up its energy capacity together with data center buildout, and it is putting data centers in the ocean to try to solve the hardware cooling issue. What do you make of this strategy, and should other countries learn from it?

KM: China's more centralized decision-making system provides advantages, but I think we need to be careful about generalizing the information of one or two projects highlighted by the media to the overall strategy.

We know that China has been expanding its renewable energy production capacity, and that's definitely a good thing. We have to make sure that the additional load of AI would not mean more fossil energy and would not compromise the decarbonization process. But at the same time, we should note that just scaling up renewables is not sufficient if you're thinking about decarbonization. We need a massive addition of renewables if we're going to reverse climate change, and we are not seeing strong enough signs of that around the world. So that's something that we have to be worried about.

That has been the challenge created for the world because of the expansion of AI. When it comes to putting things under the ocean, I think we do not yet have enough information and enough experience to judge if those things come with less environmental impact. What we hide would not be impact-free; there are also other impacts to worry about.

SP: What are some other solutions to the pressures AI is putting on the environment and people? How should we approach the rapid expansion to ensure it is fair?

KM: We offer a framework based on a number of principles about making the AI governance system more fair and transparent and sustainable. So, those are the principles suggested, and they bring responsibility to all stakeholders, including the developers and service providers — those who provide the technology and have responsibilities of ensuring that their systems are more transparent and efficient.

Then, we have the governments that have the responsibility of ensuring that information becomes available, that footprints are properly monitored and disclosed and regulated. They can use a range of incentives, mechanisms or penalties to ensure that footprints are reduced across the supply chain — and I insist on that — from the mines to the landfill. So, that can be done; pollution taxes can be charged and so on. [Governments should ensure] that those who have to deal with the consequences also benefit from the profits and the opportunities that data centers bring to their communities. Decisions must be made based on resource availability and the environmental consequences taken into account.

Users also can do a better job of making smarter choices by using AI more responsibly and only when it's absolutely necessary. When using AI, choose the right models, and be mindful of what is happening behind the scenes. Is it really necessary to generate another image? Is it really necessary to generate a video? Is it necessary to use the model in the "thinking mode"? Together, all the stakeholders can make a difference, and users can also call for more transparency and force governments to take action to force the service providers to provide more information and be more transparent.

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

Rainforests are some of the most important and diverse ecosystems on Earth. Found across several continents, these vast forests are home to millions of plants and animal species, many of which can't be found anywhere else. Many rainforests, both tropical and temperate, also play a crucial role in regulating the planet's climate by absorbing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen.

Rainforests vary immensely in size. Some stretch across multiple countries and cover millions of square miles, while others are much smaller but still support incredible biodiversity. Understanding the relative size of these rainforests helps us appreciate their role on our planet and the challenges involved in preserving them.

In this quiz, you'll test your knowledge by sorting the top 10 biggest rainforests from largest to smallest. Click on and drag the blue rectangles to place them in the right order. Remember to log in to put your name on the leaderboard; hints are available if you click the yellow button.

Related quizzes:

Earth quiz: What do you know about our planet's most amazing features?

Yellowstone quiz: How much do you know about the first national park?

Equator quiz: Can you name the 13 countries that sit on Earth's central line?

A giant blob of abnormally cold water in the North Atlantic Ocean is shifting the Indian summer monsoon, threatening the livelihoods of more than 1 billion people, new research suggests.

The link between these two systems highlights a previously unrecognized connection that could inform weather forecasts in South Asia and shed light on climatic events elsewhere, scientists say.

The Indian summer monsoon is a rainfall pattern that lasts from June to September and is driven by temperature differences between the warm northern Indian Ocean and cooler seawater below the equator. Historically, the monsoon triggered heavy rainfall along the west coast of India and a huge region of northern India called the Indo-Gangetic Plain. But since 1999, this pattern has changed dramatically, the researchers reported in a new study.

Northwest India now receives about 25% more rain during the monsoon season than it did before 1999, while the Indo-Gangetic Plain gets roughly 4% less, the team found. This is disastrous for farmers, in particular, because their soils and crops are adapted to the old rainfall pattern, said study first author Mahendra Nimmakanti, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Science's Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.

"India is largely dependent on agriculture," Nimmakanti told Live Science in a joint interview with study co-author Matthew Huber, a professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at Purdue University in Indiana. Higher-than-normal precipitation in northwest India is causing flash floods and crop losses, because agriculture in this region is adapted to dry conditions. Meanwhile, the Indo-Gangetic Plain has seen periods of drought that also caused crop declines and impacted farmers' livelihoods, Nimmakanti said.

Previous studies have linked shifts in the Indian summer monsoon to changes in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a giant web of ocean currents in the Atlantic that regulates the global climate and carries heat to the Northern Hemisphere. Data suggests the AMOC is slowing due to climate change and releasing less heat in the North Atlantic Ocean than it did before. This may be causing a southward shift of the Intertropical Convergence Zone, a band of low-pressure atmospheric conditions around the equator that drives tropical monsoons, including the Indian summer monsoon.

But these studies didn't specify how the Indian monsoon might shift or explain the underlying mechanism in detail, Nimmakanti said. "They generally explain that if there is a weakening of AMOC, that suppresses the Indian summer monsoon," he said.

One part of the problem is that current climate models do not show the changes in the Indian monsoon that have happened in real life, possibly because they also don't fully capture shifts in North Atlantic sea surface temperatures. This is especially true for a region southeast of Greenland known as the "cold blob," where the water was colder between 1901 and 2021 than it was in the late 1800s, even as the ocean around it heated up.

The cold blob suggests the AMOC is weakening because it points to a reduction in the amount of heat reaching the North Atlantic.

To pinpoint how and why the Indian monsoon has changed, the researchers fed precipitation data, sea surface temperature records and other real-life observations into dozens of climate models. This reproduced the shifts observed over the past 27 years. However, the results only implied a correlation between shifts in the North Atlantic and changes in the monsoon, not that the former directly caused the latter.

To figure out if North Atlantic sea surface temperatures caused the Indian monsoon to behave strangely, the team added and removed the cold blob in a simulation. The results showed that the cold blob has shifted the Indian monsoon by creating a strong temperature gradient over the North Atlantic, which, in turn, affects jet stream winds and pressure systems in the atmosphere above Eurasia.

Specifically, the jet stream above the North Atlantic has intensified, and a "blocking" system over the Ural Mountains in western Russia has strengthened, Huber said. As a result, weather systems in India have changed, sucking moist air toward the country's northwest and away from other regions.

"It's a shifting of the high- and low-pressure systems," Huber said. "Realizing that these two systems were directly linked through this wave train coming off the North Atlantic, that was novel."

More than 1 billion people in India and other parts of South Asia depend on the monsoon for food security and economic stability. The new results, published April 27 in the journal AGU Advances, could help forecasters predict extreme rainfall and drought events in India and neighboring countries like Pakistan during the monsoon season.

Some researchers think the Indian monsoon is a key tipping point within the global climate, and the findings suggest the system crossed a threshold in 1999. Since then, the cold blob has caused a "persistent jet stream reorganization," leading to abrupt shifts in the monsoon, according to the study.

It's unclear how the Indian monsoon will evolve under intensifying climate change, because climate models produce different predictions of what will happen in the North Atlantic, and other drivers may come into play as the world changes, Huber said.

"What we do now know is that this is one of the key building blocks of formulating a theory for what will happen in the future," he said.

In southwest China, Chinese soldiers load and fire rockets toward the sky as aircraft and drones circle overhead, dropping their toxic cargo into the air. The weapons are not trained on an enemy, and the planes aren't dropping bombs. Instead, they are targeting the clouds hovering in the sky.

This footage is just a tiny snapshot of the massive, countrywide effort to seed the clouds with rain at an unprecedented scale.

More than 50 countries around the world use cloud seeding to modify the weather at small scales, including the United States.

But China is the world leader, employing around 50,000 people; using thousands of rocket launchers and dozens of planes; and investing the equivalent of billions of dollars in these initiatives, experts told Live Science.

In 2018, China embarked on its most ambitious cloud seeding plan. The Tianhe ("Sky River") project aimed to create a permanent airborne water "corridor" from one river basin to another on the Tibetan Plateau. The project was intended to be part of the country's much bigger South-North Water Transfer project — a massive effort to transfer water to China's highly populated and water-scarce North and East.

From the start, the Sky River faced scathing criticism from scientists who said the project was unworkable. Yet China forged ahead.

China's pursuit of such a scientifically questionable geoengineering technology shows just how far Chinese authorities are prepared to go to achieve the country's water and climate goals. It also reveals how the Chinese government views the natural world, experts have said.

"There is an impetus to control and to view the environment as a machine or an infrastructure that can be controlled," Emily Yeh, a professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Live Science.

The science of cloud seeding

China uses cloud seeding to produce precipitation to build up snowpack, help alleviate droughts, reduce the impact of hailstorms, and create skies clear of clouds and pollution for official events — as it did most famously during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, experts told Live science.

But cloud seeding can't create rain from an empty sky. Instead, it causes existing clouds to generate precipitation more efficiently by injecting particles into a cloud. Water droplets then coalesce around these particles, and the water eventually falls as rain or snow.

"Every single drop in any cloud you have ever seen — there's a particle in it," Rob Rauber, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told Live Science. Cloud seeding speeds up the raindrop-forming process by introducing more particles, he explained.

There are two main ways to do this, depending on whether the temperature of the clouds is above or below 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius). Warm-cloud seeding is known as hygroscopic seeding, while cold-cloud seeding is called glaciogenic seeding.

"They have the same general goals or approach," Jeff French, head of atmospheric science at the University of Wyoming, told Live Science. "And that is to introduce something into the cloud that would increase the efficiency in which cloud droplets or ice crystals are able to grow to precipitation-size particles and fall out of cloud either as rain or as snow."

A salt such as sodium chloride is typically used for hygroscopic seeding to attract water droplets, French said. Glaciogenic seeding, by contrast, takes advantage of cold clouds' supercooled water — water that is liquid even when temperatures are below freezing — by introducing silver iodide. This substance has a similar structure to ice and collides with supercooled water in a cloud, causing it to freeze and eventually fall from the cloud, French said.

Scientists insert seeding particles into clouds in a number of ways, including by dropping them from planes and drones, firing shells or rockets into the clouds from the ground, or burning materials in chambers that release the combustion byproducts into the air.

Scientists are still learning exactly when and how to use these techniques most effectively. Rauber and French both noted that it's difficult to quantify cloud seeding's impact.

"It becomes kind of a quagmire when you ask that question: 'Does cloud seeding work?'," French said. For his research, he used airplanes, ground sensors and radar across the U.S. Mountain West to measure the effects of seeding from aircraft on the initiation and growth of crystals and eventual snowfall. "From a physical standpoint, I can say very confidently that cloud seeding works," French said.

However, that experiment was in cold, mountainous conditions, and the impact of cloud seeding depends on many conditions, so tracking whether cloud seeding increases precipitation over a longer period and in different conditions can be challenging.

"Not all clouds are created equal," French said. Some are colder or warmer, and the seeding material won't work as well; in others, the size or distribution of droplets makes precipitation less likely. Even within a small region, the snowfall varies tremendously from one point to another. And beyond a small region, all bets are off.

"If you have a very successful cloud seeding program, that is producing, maybe 7% or 9% or even 10% more precipitation over a mountain range, downstream of that mountain range, the impact may be 1%," French said. "But it is a really difficult number to get our arms around."

French added that scientists should be careful to not overpromise what cloud seeding can accomplish.

"If the promise is that cloud seeding is going to eliminate droughts even on a local level, the answer is no, it can't live up to that. There's no scientific evidence," French said. But if targeted properly, it can moderately increase natural precipitation, he said.

Cloud seeding on the Tibetan Plateau

Despite cloud seeding's limitations, China has established weather modification bureaus across the country.

"They have a whole campus of people who are working in the weather modification field," Rauber said. "They have a fleet of aircraft — they're on a whole different scale than anything that goes on anywhere else in the world."

Chinese researchers claim that the country has made huge strides in its weather modification. Reports from state-owned media suggested that weather modification efforts increased precipitation by 168 billion tons between 2020 and 2025, and that in experiments, just one cup of cloud seeding material generated 30 Olympic-size pools' worth of precipitation over an area the size of Yellowstone National Park in the arid Xinjiang region.

These weather modifications have also been conducted on the Tibetan Plateau. The vitally important region, nicknamed Asia's Water Tower, is the source of multiple major rivers that supply water to nearly 2 billion people across Asia. But the plateau is facing increasing desertification and glacier loss due to human-caused climate change and other human activities such as overgrazing animals.

China's cloud-seeding ambitions for the plateau reached a whole new level in 2018, when authorities announced the Sky River project. The controversial project aimed to use cloud seeding to create precipitation across a 620,000-square-mile (1.6 million square kilometers) area in the Tibetan Plateau — about the size of Alaska — to divert Indian monsoon rains above the Yangtze River basin and channel the water to the Yellow River basin. From the Tibetan Plateau, the Yellow River flows north and east into the parched northern regions of China, while the Yangtze flows south and east into less-water-scarce areas. The initial plan claimed the project would transfer up to 7% of the country's total annual water consumption, reports noted.

The atmospheric channel was intended to be part of the country's colossal South-North Water Transfer Project, circumventing the region's challenging terrain by moving the water in the sky instead.

The plan, due to be completed in 2025, called for seeding this atmospheric river using tens of thousands of silver iodide-burning chambers on the ground, linked to a series of meteorological satellites that would analyze the weather conditions. Information from these satellites would automatically trigger the burners when the conditions were suitable for cloud seeding.

However, the plan was immediately met with a barrage of criticism from scientists in China. In a translated statement, Hancheng Lu, a professor at the National University of Defense Technology's School of Meteorology and Oceanography, called the project "an absurd and fantastical project with neither scientific basis nor technological feasibility."

The project was unworkable because it is not possible to convert all atmospheric moisture to rain, or to channel moisture in this way, Yeh said.

As of 2022, researchers were working on a significantly scaled-back version of the project. However, China's official channels have gone dark on the topic.

China's newly announced five-year plan, which sets out the policy direction of the country from 2026 to 2030, references weather modification enhancements but doesn't mention this specific project, according to reports from Chinese media.

This has led experts to speculate that the project was quietly canceled.

"When one goes to China and asks atmospheric scientists not involved in it about it, they just sort of laugh, and it's like this embarrassing incident," Yeh said. "It was never possible."

To see whether the project was still going forward, Live Science reached out to several researchers involved in the project, but they did not reply by the time of publication.

The fears of cloud seeding

The pursuit of the Sky River project — despite the low likelihood that it would ever work —— has caused significant alarm in neighboring countries. India relies on the monsoon rains and rivers such as the Brahmaputra, which starts in the Tibetan Plateau before flowing through India and Bangladesh on a 1,800-mile-long (2,900 km) route to the sea. There are also suspicions about cloud seeding being used to cause flooding across borders.

Many of these fears are overblown, experts told Live Science. Rauber noted that cloud seeding can't influence weather enough to reduce water in a wider weather system.

"This is always a question of, 'Are you robbing Peter to pay Paul?'" Rauber said. But the amount of water in storm clouds "is way greater than anything cloud seeding is going to extract."

Climate geoengineering

China's all-in pursuit of technologies like cloud seeding — even on the internationally important and politically sensitive Tibetan Plateau — has raised concerns that China is prepared to go to extreme lengths to engineer its way out of its problems — even when it involves scientifically dubious geoengineering projects with massive risks.

China's determination to address climate change and investment in megaprojects that attempt to engineer the natural world, such as the upcoming Motuo megadam in Tibet and colossal tree-planting projects in northern China, are also signs that China is moving toward larger climate geoengineering, experts have suggested.

This may even involve attempts to change how much sunlight reaches the planet's surface, experts have speculated.

"Given similarities, weather modification could serve as a means to incrementally build legitimacy for solar radiation management, in China and beyond, which may ultimately make it possible to deploy it," researchers argued in a 2019 study.

However, there's no evidence that China is currently pursuing such climate modifications, and it's unlikely they'd do so without some cooperation or buy-in from other countries, researchers wrote in 2023.

"It is currently unlikely that China would deploy SRM unilaterally. But its weather modification programme does demonstrate the country's willingness and capability to undertake large-scale atmospheric intervention projects," the study authors wrote.

Solar radiation modification aims to release particles such as sulfur high into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into space in an effort to limit global heating. It is being increasingly investigated by researchers and governments. The controversial concept has never been demonstrated on a large scale, and studies suggest it has many potential risks, such as the potential to shut down monsoon rains.

Scientists have already seen some of the negative impacts of natural solar radiation modification, for instance in the aftermath of large volcanic eruptions, such as Tambora in 1815. "It led to the suppression of the monsoon, because the monsoon is driven by heating from the sun, Rauber said. "And that cuts back on rain in tropical areas, and that causes droughts, which causes all sorts of diseases and can lead to mass starvation," he added.

"The evidence from nature is don't mess with Mother Nature," he said.

A colossal chunk of sea ice roughly the size of Texas is missing from the west coast of Antarctica, and scientists fear it might never form again.

Antarctica is currently in winter, which runs from March to October on the southernmost continent. During the winter months, floating sea ice surrounding the continent typically grows, driving currents that regulate Earth's climate. But this year, there's a notable ice gap over the Bellingshausen Sea, on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Satellite observations have revealed that around 250,000 square miles (650,000 square kilometers) of sea ice hasn't formed yet, compared with the average amount of sea ice between 1991 and 2020, The Guardian reported last week. For comparison, the ice gap covers an area slightly larger than France or nearly the size of Texas.

Will Hobbs, a sea ice-ocean interaction scientist at the University of Tasmania, told The Guardian that he was "concerned" by the lack of sea ice and that it was "depressing." Hobbs noted that this year represents the third time in four years that the region's sea has been very low.

"I don't think we will see sea ice there any more," he said. "It's done."

Researchers still have a lot to learn about sea ice changes in Antarctica. Hobbs said that the sea ice loss was likely linked to changes in the ocean and that scientists are trying to determine whether global warming was a factor.

Sea ice has declined much more slowly in Antarctica than in the Arctic. But in recent years, scientists have been witnessing an astonishing change in the sea ice extent. One record low in 2016 was followed by another in 2022 and then a third in 2023.

Edward Doddridge, a physical oceanographer at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies in Australia, told ABC News (Australia) that he was no longer surprised by sea ice loss.

"It's not good news, but it has become a pattern that we're expecting now," Doddridge said. "A warming world is going to have less sea ice."

The diminished winter sea ice is likely to have a variety of knock-on effects. For example, this area of sea ice normally provides important habitat for animals like krill and penguins. Sea ice also plays an important role in regulating the climate, including by driving key ocean currents, insulating the ocean from the sun, and protecting ice shelves at the mouths of glaciers.

Down the coast from the missing sea ice, researchers have warned that a key ice shelf is about to disintegrate from Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier — nicknamed the "Doomsday Glacier" because its collapse could raise sea levels by 2.1 feet (65 centimeters) in the coming centuries, flooding coastal communities worldwide. The ice shelf helps protect the mouth of the glacier by acting as a buttress, thereby restraining the flow of ice from the glacier into the sea.

Thwaites Glacier has been melting rapidly since the 1980s, which is part of a wider concern for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that it helps to support. The collapse of such an ice sheet is considered one of the major environmental tipping points, or "points of no return," that humanity must avoid in the fight to rein in climate change.

The San Andreas and San Jacinto fault systems are at their highest levels of tectonic stress in 1,000 years, raising the threat of a major, imminent earthquake that could devastate Southern California, a new study finds.

The faults could rupture separately or together, thanks to an "earthquake gate" between them at Cajon Pass, where the San Jacinto fault splits from the main trace of the San Andreas fault. Researchers discovered that Cajon Pass can prevent or facilitate earthquakes moving between the faults, depending on how similar their stress levels are at the time of rupture.

And right now, the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults appear to have comparable, extremely elevated stress levels, potentially spelling trouble for Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside and the Coachella Valley, the team warned.

"Our results show that stress levels on multiple fault segments are now at or above the highest values seen in the past millennium and that the region may be capable of a large through-going rupture involving both fault systems," study first author Liliane Burkhard, a planetary geologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland and at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, said in a statement.

The San Andreas and San Jacinto faults have caused 36 earthquakes with magnitudes of 6.4 or above in the past 1,000 years. Southern California's last "big one" was a magnitude 7.9 event in 1857, when a 205-mile (330 kilometers) segment of the San Andreas fault slipped horizontally between Parkfield and Cajon Pass. That rupture did not propagate through Cajon Pass, but a similar megaquake in 1812 did, suggesting this could happen again in what is now a much more built-up and densely populated environment, according to the study.

Almost 170 years have passed since the 1857 megaquake, raising fears that another huge earthquake could be due to hit soon.

To estimate this risk, Burkhard and her colleagues built a model replicating the last 1,000 years of major earthquake activity along the southern San Andreas and San Jacinto fault systems.

The researchers used observations such as tree-ring records and age data from sediments that have been displaced to reconstruct Southern California's earthquake history. They fed this information into the model, which simulated the accumulation, release and propagation of tectonic stress in the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults.

The results, published June 3 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, suggest the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults are primed for an Earth-shattering rupture, which may involve the earthquake gate at Cajon Pass opening to unleash more destruction than a single-fault event would on its own.

If a rupture were to occur along the two branches of the San Andreas fault that connect at Cajon Pass, it would be a joint rupture, according to the study. If both branches of the San Andreas fault and the San Jacinto fault were involved, this would constitute a tripartite rupture.

The chance of each event happening and the timing of a potential rupture are unknown, but understanding how much stress is building up inside the system could help planners and policymakers prepare for whatever comes next, Burkhard said.

"What we can say is that the system is critically stressed, and that physics-based models like this one give us a clearer picture of the range of scenarios we should be prepared for," she said. "That information matters for hazard assessment, infrastructure planning, and emergency preparedness."

The researchers say their model could apply to other fault junctions and be used as a tool for hazard assessment globally. "We are using rigorous, quantitative science to better understand the risk facing millions of people," Burkhard said.

This awesome astronaut photo shows the striking symmetry of "twin" stratovolcanoes at the heart of Java, Indonesia. The parallel peaks are an eye-catching reminder of the region's extreme tectonic activity.

Mount Sundoro (also known as Sindoro or Sindara) on the left of the image, reaches a maximum height of 10,331 feet (3,149 meters). Its partner, Mount Sumbing, sits to the southeast (on the right of the image) and is slightly taller, at 11,056 feet (3,370 m) above sea level.

Both are considered active. Although Sumbing has not erupted since 1730, Sundoro has blown its top more recently, in 1971, and has experienced seismic activity as recently as 2012, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program.

The volcanoes' peaks are just 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) apart. A raised ridge with a major highway runs perpendicularly between them.

Each volcano also has a smaller, secondary cone on its flank left over from previous eruptions (to the upper left of Sundoro and the upper right of Sumbing in the image), and their orientations make the volcanoes look like mirror images of each other.

The slopes of both cones are covered with rings of dark-green forest that sharply terminate at their bases. The volcanic soils surrounding the mountains are excellent for growing crops such as rice, corn, coffee and sugarcane, which has led to the deforestation of their surroundings, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

This matching coloration accentuates the similarities between the pair, especially when viewed from above.

One of the few differences between Sundoro and Sumbing is that the latter volcano has a sizable crater at its summit, which was carved out by the 1730 eruption. As a result, the larger volcano appears to have a darker point at its top.

The volcanoes are commonly referred to as "twins," due to their near-identical profiles. However, local people often call them "husband and wife," according to a local travel site. In this narrative, Sumbing is considered the husband due to its slight height advantage and "more masculine" profile.

Sundoro and Sumbing are part of the wider Dieng Volcanic Complex, which consists of around 20 volcanic cones stretching across central Java. Indonesia is also positioned along the "Ring of Fire," a roughly horseshoe-shaped arc of volcanoes that runs along a series of tectonic plate boundaries encircling the Pacific Ocean.

Over the past few years, there have been a number of significant eruptions in Indonesia, including a pair of violent blasts at Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki, on Flores Island, in 2024 and 2025. As of June 2026, there are seven ongoing eruptions in Indonesia — the most of any nation.

The Atacama Desert started forming about 20 million years earlier than scientists previously thought, long before the nearby Andes Mountains took shape, new research reveals.

Previously, the desert's hyperarid core was thought to have developed between 15 million and 20 million years ago, around the time the Andes were forming and cold ocean currents were establishing off the Chilean coast. But the new study suggests those ultradry conditions were present more than 40 million years ago, indicating that one of the world's oldest deserts is even more ancient than we thought.

"Our results indicate that the hyperarid core of the Atacama Desert was established in the Mid- to Late-Eocene [47.8 million to 33.9 million years ago], indicated by extremely low surface activity," study co-author Benedikt Ritter-Prinz, a geologist at the University of Cologne in Germany, said in a statement. "This makes it the longest continuously dry region on Earth and forces us to reconsider how and when such extreme environments develop."

The findings, published May 20 in the journal Nature Communications, could help scientists understand the global factors that contribute to desert formation and the evolution of life in dry regions.

Dating the Atacama's arid core

Covering up to 50,000 square miles (130,000 square kilometers) in northern Chile, the Atacama Desert is one of the driest regions in the world. The Andes to the east block precipitation from the Atlantic, and a cliff to the west blocks moisture from fog from the Pacific. The central, hyperarid region of the desert typically receives less than 0.2 inches (5 millimeters) of rainfall per year.

This lack of rainfall limits erosion and allows fluffy, flour-like gypsum soil to build up over time, according to the study. Once the soil reaches a critical thickness, it absorbs rain while leaving the desert surface virtually unchanged over long periods.

In the new study, Ritter-Prinz and his colleagues measured how long the surface of the desert's center had remained unchanged — a clue to when the hyperarid conditions set in.

The team collected quartz pebbles, which resist weathering and wind erosion, from different locations. That required an off-road venture deep into the desert.

"If you drive there, you can sink in up to 2 meters [6.5 feet] of this gypsum dust," Ritter-Prinz told Live Science. "So getting the samples is quite difficult."

Then, they measured the amount of rare isotopes, or versions, of the elements neon and beryllium in those samples. Called cosmogenic nuclides, those isotopes form when cosmic rays from outer space collide with objects on the planet's surface.

About 24% of the samples contained higher-than-expected levels of cosmogenic nuclides, suggesting they had remained on Earth's surface for longer than previously thought. While previous research estimated that the hyperarid core started drying out during the Early to Mid-Miocene epoch, about 20 million to 15 million years ago, the new findings suggest dry conditions may have been in place since at least the Late Eocene, about 40 million years ago.

"The idea just to have pebbles there, which are exposed for up to 45 million years … it's quite amazing," Ritter-Prinz told Live Science.

Instead of forming when the Andes rose and began blocking moisture from the ocean, the desert's core may have started to form when temperatures cooled following the Early Eocene Climate Optimum (54 million to 49 million years ago), a period characterized by extremely high atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperatures 18 to 29 degrees Fahrenheit (10 to 16 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels. This suggests the formation of the Andes merely intensified the drying in the desert, rather than initiating it. Future work using climate models could help discern exactly how that happened, Ritter-Prinz said.

Learning how and when the desert formed could also help to explain the history of plant and animal life in the region.

"With this data, we can better understand how life adapts to specific events," and why certain species diverge, Ritter-Prinz said. For example, a shift to hyperarid conditions could cause certain migration pathways to close, eventually forming new species in isolated groups, he added.

Towering 14,800 feet (4,500 meters) above sea level, the Tibetan Plateau, with its frigid temperatures and glacier-covered mountains, is the source of most of Asia's major rivers — the Yellow, Yangtze, Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) and Lancang (Mekong) — which supply almost 2 billion people downstream, including the two most populous countries on Earth: China and India.

For that reason, the Tibetan Plateau is often called the roof of the world, the third pole and Asia's water tower.

But in recent years, the region has also earned a new moniker: Asia's power tower, thanks to its huge, untapped potential for generating hydropower.

Faced with water scarcity in densely populated, industrialized and irrigated regions of China; an insatiable need for energy; and a drive to eliminate fossil fuel use, Chinese authorities are pursuing a number of hydropower projects in the region. Together, they will not only tap the region's vast power potential but also attain unprecedented levels of control over vital water sources its neighbors rely on.

The government's flagship project is the Motuo (also called Medog) megadam project on the Yarlung Tsangpo River. The project officially started construction in July 2025, and its costs are staggering — estimated at up to $168 billion.

The megadam is slated to be completed in less than a decade and will dwarf all other hydroelectric projects in the world with its estimated 300 terawatts of annual power output — three times the output of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze, the world's current largest dam, and more than the entire U.S. produced in net hydropower in 2024.

The dam is just part of a bigger Chinese initiative to transform its environment.

"You have a modern, powerful China who is in a way very, very confident of taming nature," said Tenzin Norgay, a researcher at the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), a nongovernmental organization that works to promote human rights and democratic freedoms for the people of Tibet. The ICT is closely monitoring dam building in the region. "That's literally what they are trying to do, right?" Norgay told Live Science. "They are trying to tame nature."

But the massive project comes with huge risks for both people in Tibet and the hundreds of millions of people in countries downstream, including those in India and Bangladesh, experts told Live Science.

"Controlling [the] nature of the water or the river itself is a danger for the entire Himalayan belt particularly for countries like India, Bangladesh and to some extent also Nepal," said Jagannath Panda, head of the Stockholm Center for South Asian and Indo-Pacific Affairs at the Institute for Security and Development Policy, told Live Science.

Project of the century

China is the world leader in dam building. The government has constructed around 98,000 dams and reservoirs across China, including 40% of the world's largest dams, and numerous dams outside the country as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. But this new project is different.

"There's nothing on this scale, and nothing close to it," Brian Eyler, director of the Southeast Asia and energy, water and sustainability programs at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington, D.C., told Live Science.

The project will utilize Tibet's unique geography to full effect. In the project area, the Yarlung Tsangpo River (known as the Brahmaputra in India and Jamuna in Bangladesh) flows through the world's deepest canyon, called the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon, and rapidly drops around the horseshoe-shaped "Great Bend," before continuing to flow down and into India and, eventually, Bangladesh.

The project will dam the upper section of the river and divert the water through a series of tunnels that will be cut through the 25,500-foot-tall (7,800 m) Mount Namcha Barwa, before returning the water to a lower section of the river, circumventing the Great Bend. The project will likely have five dams in total, with hydropower stations inside the tunnels. The water will drop 6,500 feet (2,000 m) within 30 miles (50 kilometers) of tunnels, thereby generating a huge amount of hydroelectric power.

"It's really incredible that this type of project can be built," Eyler added.

The cascading dam system will require huge amounts of water to run effectively, meaning there will likely be a reservoir at the beginning, and so during the dry season the Great Bend will effectively run dry, Eyler said.

Mega project, mega challenges

Building such a large project in this region is fraught with risk, experts noted.

The Tibetan Plateau is one of the most seismically active regions in the world, driven by the ongoing collision between the Indian and Eurasian plates. The region has recently been rocked by several major earthquakes, including the 7.1 magnitude Dingri quake in January 2025, which damaged five dams in the region, and the 7.8 magnitude Nepal earthquake in 2015 that damaged a fifth of the country's hydropower capacity.

Parts of the Himalayas are unsuitable for dam construction due to the high risk of seismicity and its effects, researchers have warned, noting that dams are particularly vulnerable to earthquake-induced landslides.

In addition to naturally caused earthquakes, large-scale projects involving land excavation, tunneling and water redirection have the potential to trigger seismic activity, while the creation of reservoirs has been strongly linked with earthquakes in China.

Other natural disasters could endanger people beyond Tibet.

Glacial lakes — bodies of water created by melting glaciers and permafrost — can pose a problem to people downstream if they suddenly release their water and overwhelm dams. This scenario happened in northeastern India in 2023, causing a large, newly built dam to catastrophically fail, killing at least 46 people and impacting 88,000 more.

Climate change is accelerating glacial melt, meaning the threat will only increase as the region's glaciers are further destabilized, experts have warned.

Climate change could also render the dam obsolete sooner than anticipated. Dams typically function for around 70 to 100 years, experts told Live Science. Water levels in the Yarlung Tsangpo are expected to peak in 2060, so when water levels start to fall after that, the whole dam could become useless during dry periods because the water level will be too low to produce hydropower — a status known as minimum pool elevation. Water levels could even drop so low that they can't pass through a dam. This situation, known as "dead pool," is already an issue for some dams on the Colorado River.

The project will also affect Tibetans. "From our viewpoint, displacement of people around that and submergence of cultural sites" are the biggest issues, Norgay told Live Science.

However, the area is sparsely populated, and the reservoirs needed will almost certainly not be as big or as deep as reservoirs of other megadams. So although there will be an impact, it won't be on the scale of the 1.3 million people displaced by the Three Gorges Dam, Eyler noted.

Downstream impacts

Even without a climate-driven reduction in water, the river's flow will be transformed. To ensure a continuous, controlled flow of water through the dam, authorities typically fill reservoirs during the wet season and release water during the dry season. While this ensures that the hydroelectric dam can function, it inevitably impacts the river's natural flow and has knock-on effects for communities downstream. The filling-and-releasing process also raises the possibility of the upstream country — namely, China — "turning off the taps" to benefit the dam at the expense of other downstream water users.

"If a dam operator has an opportunity to take water during a time of drought, they're going to take at the expense of downstream users," Eyler said. "We've seen this happen in the Mekong, where the downstream was suffering drought, but China still filled its reservoirs," worsening drought in 2019 in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

In the case of the Motuo megadam, any change in water flow will affect India and Bangladesh. The Brahmaputra flows for about 1,800 miles (2,900 km), eventually joining with the massive Ganges River, and is a vital source of water and natural fertilizer for more than 130 million people. It provides India with 30% of its freshwater reserves, while Bangladesh is heavily dependent on the river to support its irrigated agriculture.

"The greatest ecological and environmental impact will be related to sediment flow. The Great Bend itself is a rich provider of sediment to the downstream [countries]," Eyler said. "Sediment is important for agricultural production. It's a very inexpensive natural fertilizer."

Sediment from the Brahmaputra is integral to building up the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta, helping the low-lying region stay above rapidly rising sea levels. The delta is home to nearly 200 million people — including in the megacity of Kolkata — and is considered one of the places most at risk from sea level rise. The Yarlung Tsangpo in Chinese-controlled territory provides up to 50% of the river's downstream sediment flow.

"River deltas are built by sediment flows pushing land out into the ocean year after year," Eyler said. "And either the dams themselves or the lack of flow within the Great Bend will cause a great reduction in the amount of sediment coming down."

The potential reduction in sediment could threaten food security in the downstream countries.

"Millions of people's lives are dependent on this river," Norgay noted.

India also plans to build major dams on the waterway, Norgay added, which could itself have negative impacts downstream.

Not true "green power"

The Motuo megaproject is just one of several new dams planned or under construction in Tibet; the ICT counts at least 193 dams in the region that have been planned or built since 2000, when China embarked on a policy of expanding infrastructure projects in the region.

The surge in hydropower projects is intended to help China move away from fossil fuels, experts told Live Science.

"It is part of a more widespread strategic vision where China is trying to become more sustainable," said Tom Harper, a lecturer in international relations at the University of East London who specializes in China.

One key to China's strategic vision is phasing out coal.

"This dam has been described as the coal killer. There are numerous coal plants that can be taken offline as a result of this and retired permanently," Eyler said. "When you bring in China's carbon emissions reduction goals, through 2050, the dam makes a lot of sense."

However, hydropower is not as sustainable as it's often portrayed, and it has environmental impacts. Large dams can cause severe environmental damage to river ecosystems. The creation of reservoirs can also release greenhouse gases as trees and plants are covered with water and subsequently rot, though this is less of an issue in cold places like the Tibetan Plateau, Darrin Magee, a hydropower expert at Western Washington University, told Live Science.

Though the authorities claim there will be no significant environmental impact from the dam, that's hard to believe, Eyler said. "Typically, the larger the project, the greater the impacts, and this is the largest dam system ever created."

Scientists also question the necessity of using hydropower to meet sustainability goals, when the Tibetan Plateau has huge, untapped wind and solar power potential.

Experts had different theories of what China would do with such a vast amount of energy generated in such a remote and sparsely populated area.

"There's certainly no need for it, right now or in the foreseeable future in the area where Motuo Dam is sited," Magee said. "But China solves that problem by building ultra-high voltage DC transmission lines at, at a rate that no one in the world is matching." These high-voltage lines transport energy from the west to east, bypassing local grid networks, he added.

Norgay and Panda both think Tibetans are unlikely to benefit.

The power will likely be moved east to power Chinese industry, they said, and it could also align with the political goal of further integrating Tibet into China, Panda added.

Eyler, meanwhile, thinks it will be used to power data centers in Tibet, "which can be built around the super dam, in a naturally cool and cold environment."

Better cooperation needed

There is little official information about the megadam for Chinese authorities, Eyler noted, and the lack of transparency is fueling fears. For example, Indian politicians have expressed concern that the megadam will give China full control of the river, and that China could potentially weaponize ‬the river by deliberately reducing the flow of water or by releasing large amounts of water in one go, thereby devastating downstream communities. Some researchers have called this possibility a "water bomb."

Eyler, however, said that this risk is low, and that the dam system's design means it cannot hold back enough water to cut off supplies downstream.

"I don't think that there's some type of nefarious plot out there from Beijing to bring these countries to heel by controlling the upstream of the rivers," he said. "China's top priority is to develop its economy, bring stability to the country, and building large dams on rivers is one way to do that."

The expansion of hydropower is a key aim for China in the next few years, as the country embarks on the 15th five-year plan from 2026. With shared water resources in short supply, better cooperation among neighboring countries is vital, experts said. Yet China and India share only limited data, Panda noted.

Some of the concerns from neighbors could be mitigated by better communication between stakeholders, Magee said. "Be more transparent with the data, bring more voices into the conversation, have some realistic assessment of both need for the project and the impacts."

But even with better communication, the megadam and other upcoming dams means China will still largely control the region's water resources due to its upstream position.

"This is a dam project which actually gives China the upper hand," Panda said.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has revealed hundreds of previously unknown earthquakes beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, including some in an unexpected place: in the middle of a tectonic plate, far from a plate boundary.

The findings, published May 28 in the journal Science, reveal that Antarctica is more seismically active than previously thought and that new technologies can help to uncover hidden earthquakes in surprising locations.

In the new study, scientists used machine learning, a type of AI, to reanalyze seismic data taken from 49 seismic stations over the past two decades: one dataset from 2001 to 2004, and another from 2012 to 2015. The data revealed over 500 previously unrecognized earthquakes about 60 to 90 miles (100 to 150 kilometers) beneath David Glacier, which stretches nearly 700 miles (1,100 kilometers), bridging East and West Antarctica. This major outlet glacier drains about 4% of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet into the ocean, and its ice has thinned over the past several thousand years.

Earthquakes over 50 miles (80 km) deep are called intermediate-depth earthquakes. This type of earthquake is typically seen only at tectonic plate boundaries ‪—‬ specifically subduction zones, where one tectonic plate dives beneath another.

Yet the study showed that these earthquakes are happening in the middle of the tectonic plate, far from active plate boundaries.

"The earthquakes occur where the cold, rigid crust and upper mantle beneath East Antarctica meets warmer, softer rock beneath West Antarctica, and this contrast creates an abrupt change in tectonic strength," Long Ho, a University of Alabama geologist and first author of the new paper, told Live Science in an email. The detected earthquakes have magnitudes ranging from 1.6 to 3.5. The warm, buoyant material of the upper mantle extends beyond the edges of David Glacier from below, uplifting the edges of the nearby crust and bending them, and this concentrated stress causes the ground to shake, Ho explained.

It was surprising to find so many earthquakes at these depths, far from plate boundaries, Ho said, but similar earthquakes may be occurring in other geographic regions and going unnoticed given their small magnitudes. AI could help to identify those hidden quakes by reanalyzing past seismic data.

"As machine-learning tools continue to improve, they could reveal that deep, continental-interior earthquakes are more common than currently recognized," Ho said. "If so, the role of such events within the plate tectonics framework may need to be re-evaluated."

The results also show that Antarctica is more dynamic than previously thought. "Antarctica was [long] considered to largely lack earthquakes," Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State who was not involved in the new paper, told Live Science in an email. "Now, we know that the apparent lack of earthquakes was really a lack of [tools] to listen to earthquakes." The data from this paper were collected between 2001 and 2004 and are now yielding new results as modern techniques have been developed to analyze the data, Alley said.

The detected earthquakes are not strong enough to threaten the overlying ice sheets or the Antarctic ecosystem, Ho said, so the research team is not concerned about that.

Next, Ho hopes to explore how the enormous weight of the Antarctic Ice Sheet might contribute to the location of earthquakes, and how changes in the ice sheet could affect underlying seismic activity.

It's still puzzling that seismic activity is concentrated at David Glacier rather than spread along the mountains in this region, Alley said, adding that the answer could be linked to the recent history of the ice sheet growing and shrinking, or to a longer history of the ice sheet eroding.

"I worry a lot about the ice sheet," Alley said, "and I hope work like this is continued and expanded, to help us understand the history and improve our understanding of possible futures."

How much do you know about Earth's frozen continent? Test your smarts with our Antarctica quiz!

This week's science news was awash with alarming updates from the world's oceans, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declaring the official onset of El Niño.

El Niño is the warm phase of a multiyear natural climate pattern in the Pacific Ocean that supercharges temperatures across the globe, and this one is looking to be particularly strong, earning it the unofficial moniker of a "super" El Niño. Just how intense is it? It will likely become the strongest in history, most climate models predict, and it may have profound effects on rainfall, wildfires and agricultural yields across the planet.

Jumping from the Pacific to the Atlantic, we also reported on a growing "cold blob" south of Greenland that could signal the slowing of ocean currents that are vital to the Northern Hemisphere, just as the Trump administration decided to remove the deep-sea instruments that monitor it. And farther into the Arctic, we also covered news that the region had crossed a critical biological tipping point.

If all that seems a little grim, one story also reminded us that a marine death isn't always the end; sometimes, it's the beginning of a sea change, as evidenced by the discovery of a 5 million-year-old whale graveyard that stretches for hundreds of miles, making it a "megasite" for other life-forms in the Indian Ocean.

Artemis III crew revealed

Artemis III crew revealed: NASA announces astronauts for 'one of history's most complex missions'

Less than two months after the triumphant splashdown of the Artemis II astronauts, NASA announced the crew for its next step toward the moon, which the agency is touting as one of its most complex yet.

NASA's Randy Bresnik will serve as commander, the European Space Agency's Luca Parmitano will be the pilot, and NASA's Andre Douglas and Dr. Frank Rubio will be the crew's mission specialists. They will launch into low Earth orbit in 2027 as part of a mission to test commercial lunar landers before 2028's scheduled return to the moon.

Yet most of the drama of this mission is taking place before it has even launched, with the two private companies commissioned by NASA to develop a lander — SpaceX and Blue Origin — suffering some explosive setbacks in recent weeks. What that means for the mission remains up in the air.

Discover more space news

—2 long-vanished 'super Earths' once orbited near Neptune in our outer solar system, new study hints

—'Crystals' of space-time could be the origins of certain rare black holes, theoretical study hints

—This 'crawling' robot rolled around the moon and took a historic photo

Life's Little Mysteries

Has all the water on Earth been peed before?

How much pee have you drunk in your lifetime? Your answer is almost certainly little to none, at least on purpose. But what if all the water you drink is the product of urination? It turns out this disturbing question is controversial even among scientists, Live Science's deep dive reveals.

—If you enjoyed this, sign up for our Life's Little Mysteries newsletter

Ancient corpse's arms turned into tools

2,000 years ago in Scotland, people removed a corpse's brain and fashioned the arm bones into tools

A new analysis this week revealed that a woman buried in the far North of Scotland had her brain scooped out and her arms whittled into tools.

Exactly what explains the unusual burial ritual remains unclear, according to the archaeologists who studied the remains. "However, the care with which she was reassembled and deposited in the cairn possibly suggests she commanded a level of reverence and respect by her community," said Laura Castells Navarro, an archaeologist at the University of York in the U.K. and part of the team.

Beyond the baffling and grisly finding, the team conducted a DNA analysis that found connections with individuals buried at sites across ancient Scotland, suggesting the people maintained complex social relationships across vast distances.

Discover more archaeology news

—Complete skin of an adult horse found with 10th-century woman and newborn in rare Siberian burial

—Ditch full of 7,000-year-old headless human skeletons discovered in Slovakia, baffling archaeologists

—Thanks to natural selection, Indigenous Andeans may digest potatoes better than anyone else in the world, study finds

Also in science news this week

—Scientists discover giant, fan-shaped structure deep beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet

—In a first, scientists translated an entire viral genome so a quantum computer could read and analyze it

—Genetically modified worms can now produce and deliver drugs inside a living body, scientists say

—Diagnostic dilemma: Man who donated his body after death had rare 'triple penis'

—China unveils first-of-its-kind 'dual-core' quantum computer — its makers say it improves stability and efficiency

—Physicist Richard Feynman's forgotten notes on 'the restaurant problem' finally deciphered after 50 years

—World's rarest great ape decimated by 4 days of extreme rain, with 7% of population lost to cyclone

Something for the weekend

If you're looking for things to keep you busy over the weekend, here are some of the best news analyses, crosswords, interviews, opinion pieces and skywatching guides published this week.

—Scientists were excited about a blood test for many cancers — but it failed a big trial. Here's what to know. [News analysis]

—Artificial turf contains 400 chemicals tied to cancer and hormone disruption. But is it unsafe? [News analysis]

—Live Science crossword puzzle #47: The 'unicorn of the sea' — 9 across [Crossword]

—'A disease anywhere can be a disease everywhere tomorrow morning': Public health expert on Ebola and the threat of future outbreaks [Interview]

—Doctors need to understand patients' lived experiences to treat them well — but medical schools may stop requiring that training [Opinion]

—The Milky Way returns: How to take breathtaking photos of our galaxy this summer [Skywatching]

Science news in pictures

'Geminid Symphony' and 'Galactic Gandalf': See the breathtaking views of our home galaxy from the 2026 Milky Way Photographer of the Year contest

This stunning shot is one of the winners of the 2026 Milky Way Photographer of the Year contest, whose honorees captured the mixtures of gases and stars forming our home galaxy from vantages around the world.

This particular image is a long exposure captured by photographer Daniel Viñé Garcia over a salt flat in Argentina's arid Catamarca province. The brightest stars can be seen reflected in the turquoise, briny pools at the bottom.

Follow Live Science on social media

Want more science news? Follow our Live Science WhatsApp Channel for the latest discoveries as they happen. It's the best way to get our expert reporting on the go, but if you don't use WhatsApp we're also on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Flipboard, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky and LinkedIn.

As water molecules move around the planet through the water cycle, they take on many forms, moving from solid to liquid to gas and back again. They can make up snowpacks melting in the spring, a river rushing to the ocean, clouds carried on sea breezes, and even pee flushed down the toilet.

But with this complex cycle of evaporation, condensation and precipitation continuing over and over, has the water coming out of your faucet been inside a dinosaur or a mammoth at some point? And does that mean all the water on Earth has been peed before?

The answer depends on how you approach the question.

For Neil Donahue, director of the Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research and a professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, the answer is likely yes, based on a back-of-the-envelope calculation. But this math is based on a few assumptions, Donahue told Live Science over email.

The first is that the average person weighs about 110 pounds (50 kilograms) and pees about 0.26 gallons (1 liter) per day, which is roughly equivalent to 2.2 pounds (1 kg). Then, Donahue made a "WILD assumption" that all animals pee roughly the same proportion — 1% of their body weight — which he said is "probably wrong" but helpful for a ballpark estimate.

Next, if the total mass of all chordates (the taxonomic group that includes mammals, birds, fish,) is approximately 2.2 billion tons of water and carbon (2 billion metric tons), this equates to around 0.02 gigatonnes — or 8,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools — of pee every day, Donahue said. For the sake of the calculation, he assumed that the weight of chordates has remained constant over time.

On the water side of the equation, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that Earth has about 1.4 billion gigatons of water, including that in oceans, ice caps, glaciers, lakes, rivers, groundwater and vapor.

If you divide the weight of the world's water by 0.02 gigatonnes of pee each day, it would take around 70 billion days, or about 191 million years, "to pee out the whole ocean," Donahue said. Given that chordates emerged at least 500 million years ago, this is "plenty of time" for all water to become pee at one time or another, he said.

David Kreamer, a professor of hydrology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, agreed that when "you go back in history to the dinosaurs and things like that, that's a lot of pee." But he also said calculations that depend on assumptions and generalizations have a large margin of error.

Instead, when it comes to whether every last drop of water on Earth has been peed at one time or another, Kreamer said the answer is no.

For one, water does not move through the water cycle at a constant speed, he noted; water can be trapped as glacial ice for hundreds of thousands of years, and "there is some deep groundwater that's been underground for tens of thousands of years."

What's more, some water hasn't ever been in the water cycle, he said. This water, known as juvenile water, is trapped deep below the planet's surface and "hasn't really emerged from the depths of the Earth ever in Earth's history," Kreamer told Live Science.

Over time, juvenile water can be brought to the surface through volcanic activity in the form of steam or lava. Trapped deep in Earth's crust, "it's released when magma dissolves it, and when a volcano blows up into the atmosphere," Kreamer explained, noting that during eruptions, "there's a certain amount of water or moisture that's released" alongside ash and rock. This water would then enter the water cycle and could eventually find its way into and out of an animal.

Ultimately, at any given time, at sites of volcanic activity around the world, there are streams of new water reaching the surface for the first time. That water "hasn't been peed," Kreamer said ‪—‬ at least, not yet.

Editor's note: This article was updated at 1:41 p.m. EDT on June 15 to fix a math error: 1% of 2.2 billion tons is around 0.02 gigatonnes (8,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools) of pee, not 0.2 gigatonnes (80,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools) as was previously stated. This means it would take approximately 191 million years to "pee out the whole ocean," not 19 million as was previously stated.

As a result, researcher Neil Donahue changed his answer from "emphatically yes" to "likely yes." Despite this error, Donahue says that would still have been enough time if you go back to when chordates first emerged. Previously, he had gone back only to the end of the dinosaur age and said that mammals alone could have done it.

Earth's underground fungal network is so vast that, if it were in outer space, it would span roughly 10% of the Milky Way if placed in a straight line, a new study finds.

These subterranean structures, called arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks, work in partnership with most of the world's land plants, feeding plants nitrogen and phosphorus in return for their carbon. Now, the first global map of this fungal network has revealed where their intricate branching structures are most densely packed.

In grasslands that are high-altitude or flooded grasslands, such as the Everglades in Florida, the top 6 inches (15 centimeters) of soil are especially dense, containing around 40% of the global fungal biomass. This highlights that undisturbed grasslands are an essential, reliable carbon sink, according to the research, which was published Thursday (June 11) in the journal Science.

"This is the most dense fungal forest on Earth, and they're under wild grasslands," study first author Justin Stewart, an evolutionary biologist at the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, a scientific research organization specializing in fungi which form symbiotic relationships with plants, told Live Science. "It's changing the way that we're discussing how life is distributed on Earth."

"I hope this builds into the conversation for their protection because wild grasslands are going away quite quickly," Stewart added. "These are areas that people are really ripping up because it's much easier to rip up a grass than it is to rip up a tree."

For instance, the map revealed that some agricultural practices are decimating this underground network, with the topsoil in croplands containing roughly 50% lower densities, on average.

The hidden fungal forest

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are made up of tiny branching threads called hyphae. These hyphal networks form two-way pipes to channel nutrients and carbon to and from plants, respectively. As a result, the fungi gobble up vast amounts of carbon. One estimate found they take in around 4.3 billion tons (3.9 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide equivalent each year, representing roughly 11% of global fossil fuel emissions in 2021.

Even though these fungi are essential to Earth's health, it wasn't known how they were distributed around the world. "That's like saying we know every day 100 million cars move across Earth but we have no idea what road network facilitates that," Stewart said.

To establish the first global map showcasing the distribution and density of hyphal networks, Stewart and their colleagues compiled data from 16,669 soil cores collected in 322 previous studies. These cores provided data on hyphal density from both field studies and experiments in pots, with the field samples spanning every continent and nine biomes.

The team then used artificial intelligence to predict the distribution of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi for every 0.4 square miles (1 square kilometer) of topsoil worldwide, using information on the climate, soil chemistry, vegetation and hyphal density.

The researchers found that there is an average hyphal density of 237 feet per cubic inch (4.4 meters per cubic cm) in land topsoil. If all hyphae were laid out in a straight line, the researchers estimated they would span approximately 68 quadrillion miles (110 quadrillion km). That's nearly a billion times the distance of Earth to the sun, or around 10% the width of the Milky Way galaxy.

Wild grasslands had the highest density, at 355 feet per cubic inch (6.6 meters per cubic cm), while cultivated trees had the lowest, at 204 feet per cubic inch (3.8 meters per cubic cm). Although the team could not specify which agricultural practices had the greatest impact on hyphal density, fungicides and phosphorus and nitrogen fertilizers could explain the relative sparsity in cropland topsoil, the authors wrote in the study.

Some regions of the world, such as those in tropical rainforests and deserts, need more sampling to reduce the uncertainty on the map. Stewart said researchers are actively working on filling in these gaps. "Within the next five years, this map will be updated and we're going to have a better picture of the distribution of these fungi," they said.

A global map of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal network density and biomass was "urgently needed" and "can inform more efficient strategies for biodiversity conservation and restoration, agricultural management, and climate change mitigation," Andrea Genre, an expert in arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi at the University of Turin in Italy who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email.

This "seminal" research "makes part of the invisible visible," Edouard Evangelisti, a plant scientist at Côte d'Azur University in France who was not involved in the research, told Live Science.

The map is a "major milestone," Evangelisti said, and opens the door to investigating the functional importance of these gigantic underground networks, such as for drought tolerance and disease resistance. The dynamic nature of these fungi also needs to be investigated.

"The abundance of living hyphae is important, but for the carbon cycle, we also need to know how quickly these hyphae grow, die, and contribute to stable soil carbon," he told Live Science in an email.

It's official: El Niño is here, and it's shaping up to be among the strongest ever recorded.

The natural climate cycle, which supercharges temperatures and shifts weather patterns across the planet, officially took hold over the past month, according to a June 11 update by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center.

What's more, an accompanying average of various forecasting models gives a "63% chance of a very strong El Niño during November-January that would rank among the largest El Niño events in the historical record going back to 1950," NOAA officials wrote in the update.

This is no longer much of a surprise. Last week, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, considered the "gold standard" of global weather models, suggested that this year's brewing El Niño would likely become the strongest ever recorded.

That prediction is increasingly shared by the world's best climate models, with about 75% of them now forecasting a record-breaking surge of at least 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.5 degrees Celsius) above average sea surface temperatures across key parts of the Pacific Ocean, according to Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Service, with other model scenarios climbing as high as 7.2 F (4 C).

For reference, the past two strongest recorded El Niño events (2015-2016 and 1997-1998) sent ocean temperatures to 4.1 F (2.3 C) above average in the Niño 3.4 index, which measures sea surface temperatures across a key region of the Pacific Ocean.

What is El Niño?

El Niño events occur every two to seven years as part of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) natural climate cycle in the Pacific Ocean. 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. That year was also the first to breach the 1.5 C (2.7 F) warming limit — a key guardrail set by the Paris Agreement, beyond which the effects of climate change are predicted to become increasingly disastrous.

The current El Niño will also raise global temperatures this year and next, making it likely that Earth will reach, or even surpass, those previous records.

Now that El Niño's onset is official, scientists can advise people around the world on how to prepare. The impacts of this extra burst of heat stand to be profound, with studies linking previous El Niño periods to famine in Europe; civil wars in tropical regions; and droughts, floods and forest fires around the world. This year's El Niño will arrive during a period of already-increased global food insecurity driven by the Iran war.

And while El Niño would have occurred regardless, scientists are seeing signs that this El Niño's quicker-than-expected onset was driven by humanity's warming of the planet.

"It might be one of the most rapid transitions that I've seen in the record ‪—‬ maybe the most rapid," Nathaniel Johnson, a research meteorologist and member of the ENSO seasonal forecast team at NOAA, told Live Science in a May 1 interview. "Because, to go from a weak-to-moderate La Niña to a strong-to-very-strong El Niño within one calendar year is just not something we see very often."

"Over the past century, we have seen an increase in these more rapid swings from one state to the other," he added. "So there's some suggestion that potentially climate change could play a role in making these swings more rapid between El Niño and La Niña. It's something that will take more investigation."

A mysterious "cold blob" in the Atlantic Ocean is a sign that key ocean currents are weakening, a new study has found, with potentially devastating long-term impacts on our climate and weather.

The cold blob, or North Atlantic Warming Hole, is an area south of Greenland and Iceland where average sea surface temperatures have actually been going down. Researchers have been working to understand the blob for years, given that it bucks the global trend of Earth getting warmer.

The new research, published May 28 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, supports previous interpretations that the blob's existence points to a weakening of ocean currents known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

The AMOC maintains Europe's relatively mild temperatures, particularly in winter, and helps regulate climate across Europe, Africa and America. Researchers have warned that a weakening AMOC has serious environmental consequences, with its collapse considered a major potential tipping point, or key threshold within Earth's systems, beyond which substantial and irreversible environmental change will occur.

Scientists are uncertain about the rate at which the AMOC is weakening, with one recent study projecting that it will slow down by around 50% by 2100. If the AMOC were to collapse completely, temperatures in parts of the Northern Hemisphere could plummet by some 18 to 27 degrees Fahrenheit (10 to 15 degrees Celsius), extreme droughts would be unleashed in southern Europe, and the sea level would rise along the northeastern coastline of North America.

"Given the well-established existence of a tipping point of the AMOC, as well as recent studies finding a range of different "early warning signals" of the ocean circulation approaching such a tipping point, the strong evidence for a weakening AMOC is a serious concern for society and policy," the authors of the new study wrote in the study.

The AMOC acts like a conveyor belt, carrying water, nutrients, and absorbed carbon dioxide from the tropics northward. This warm water heats up the atmosphere, with westerly winds then carrying the resulting warm air towards land, keeping Europe relatively mild.

Many researchers have posited that cooling in the blob is due to reduced ocean heat transport. In other words, slowing ocean currents are delivering less heat to that region, leading to a patch of cooling. However, some researchers have also suggested that the blob could be the result of increased heat loss at the ocean surface, according to the study.

The authors of the study analyzed measurements of ocean heat content and surface flux changes in the blob region, based on data collected by Copernicus satellites and other sources. They concluded that the blob was a deep-reaching loss of ocean heat content and thus couldn't be explained by heat changes at the surface. Rather, their findings support the theory that the blob is caused by changes in ocean heat transport and the AMOC, a conclusion backed by a previous study published in 2025 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

"Our analysis supports the interpretation of the observed "cold blob" as a sign of a weakening AMOC," the authors wrote.

There are still uncertainties surrounding the cold blob and the weakening AMOC, with work ongoing to better understand these phenomena. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is set to remove 900 deep-sea monitoring instruments from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which include sensors that would have kept tabs on the AMOC.

Scientists have discovered a giant, fan-shaped structure that connects several well-known basins deep beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet — and it may have formed in the breakup of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana.

The feature is the product of a tectonic process known as distributed rotational extension, in which Earth's crust deforms outward from a fixed, central point, like fingers spreading out on a human hand. The gaps between the "fingers" in East Antarctica are triangular basins that were previously described but not recorded as belonging to a single system, researchers reported in a new study.

"Rotational extension is known from other tectonic settings, but recognizing a feature of this scale, hidden beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, is quite remarkable," first author Egidio Armadillo, an associate professor and researcher in the Applied Geophysics Laboratory at the University of Genoa in Italy, told Live Science in an email. "If our interpretation is correct, this may be one of the largest and clearest examples of distributed rotational extension yet recognized in continental crust."

The discovery began with the simple observation that many buried basins in East Antarctica seem to radiate from the same place. From there, Armadillo and his colleagues examined the region's subglacial landscape and geology, as well as gravitational, magnetic and seismic data. They also used models to simulate the formation of the structure, which they named the East Antarctic Fan-Shaped Basin Province.

The results, published June 3 in the journal Nature Geoscience, support the idea that some of East Antarctica's best-known features — including the Wilkes and Aurora basins and the basin that hosts Lake Vostok, the largest known subglacial lake on Earth — were formed by distributed rotational extension. But it's unclear exactly when this happened, Armadillo said.

"The structure may have developed in more than one phase," he said. "However, we think it is likely connected to the long tectonic evolution that preceded and accompanied the breakup of Gondwana, especially the separation between Antarctica and Australia."

Gondwana splintered around 180 million years ago, creating the landmasses and continents we know today. The split between Antarctica and Australia occurred roughly 70 million years ago, toward the end of the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago). The East Antarctic Fan-Shaped Basin Province may have facilitated this late separation by weakening a zone to the north of the province that eventually tore apart, but the province may have continued to fan out after Antarctica and Australia broke apart, Armadillo said.

The precise mechanism that drove East Antarctica's distributed rotational extension remains unknown. "In my view, this is one of the most exciting aspects of the study: it does not close the problem, but opens a new research direction," Armadillo said.

Overall, the results suggest East Antarctica has a much more dynamic tectonic history than scientists previously thought. "East Antarctica is often regarded as an old, cold and relatively stable cratonic [ancient and deeply rooted] region," Armadillo said. "In our model, the formation of the fan-shaped basin province strongly influences the surrounding landscape."

The structure opened several enormous basins that are now concealed under more than 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) of ice. To the west, the structure's formation may have contributed to the uplift of the Gamburtsev Mountains, which are similar to the European Alps in scale and shape but completely buried in ice. And to the east, the spreading of the "fingers" likely helped rotate and break up the Transantarctic Mountains, which divide East and West Antarctica, Armadillo said.

"The main message is that a large part of East Antarctica may not simply be a collection of separate subglacial basins, but a coherent tectonic province produced by a continent-scale deformation process," he said. "At the same time, our model is a hypothesis that can and should be tested further. In particular, better constraints on the timing of deformation will be essential."

The discovery could shed light on how the East Antarctic Ice Sheet will respond to climate change, because tectonic processes influence the paths followed by glaciers and ice streams when they melt. However, the broader significance of the findings is that Antarctica still conceals many geological secrets, Armadillo said.

"More than 99% of the bedrock is hidden beneath the ice, so integrating subglacial topography, gravity, magnetics, crustal structure and ice-sheet observations is essential," he noted.

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

This dramatic astronaut photo shows a trio of colorful lakes straddling the border between Nevada and California. The three lakes ‪—‬ which vary in shape, size and salinity ‪—‬ also occupy very different biomes.

The most famous lake in the trio, Lake Tahoe (on the left), is the largest alpine lake in the U.S.. It covers an area of around 192 square miles (497 square kilometers) and sits at about 6,223 feet (1,897 meters) above sea level in the Sierra Nevada, which stretches across the bottom of the image and is covered in snow.

The other two bodies, Walker Lake (upper right) and Mono Lake (lower right), are positioned southeast of Lake Tahoe and each have have a maximum width of around 13 miles (21kilometers). (Another major body of water, Pyramid Lake, is located out of the shot to the northeast of Lake Tahoe, while two much smaller lakes sit between the three larger lakes.)

The border between California and Nevada runs directly through the middle of Lake Tahoe and continues to bisect the space between Walker Lake, which is in Nevada, and Mono Lake, which is in California.

While Tahoe is located in the lofty climbs of the Sierra Nevada and is subsequently exposed to very wet and cold conditions, Walker and Mono are situated within the Great Basin desert. This flatter region — which also covers parts of Utah, Idaho and Oregon — has a drastically different environment because it sits within the mountain range's "rain shadow" and, therefore, receives very little precipitation, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

The other stark difference between the lakes is their respective colors, which become even more apparent when viewed from above.

Lake Tahoe is the second-deepest lake in the U.S., with a maximum depth of 1,645 feet (501 m). As a result, it has a rich, bright-blue hue. It has constant subsurface currents that prevent it from freezing over in the winter, so it looks the same year-round.

Walker Lake is endorheic, which means it does not have a proper inlet or outlet and instead rises and falls via rainfall and evaporation. Over the past few centuries, the rate of evaporation has outpaced precipitation, which has made the lake extremely salty, or hypersaline. This altered chemistry, combined with the lake's shallower waters and the presence of various microbes, gives the lake a greener hue when viewed from above.

Mono Lake is also endorheic. It has seen an even sharper drop-off in recent years, as evidenced by a series of "bathtub rings" left over from when the lake had much higher water levels. It's home to salt-tolerant photosynthetic algae, which are preyed upon by brine shrimp (Artemia). Drops in the shrimp population in the colder winter months allow the algae to bloom, causing Mono Lake to turn bright green. If you look closely at the image of the lake, you can see a large swirl that represents the blooming algae getting trapped within wind-driven surface currents.

Due to the sharp rises in their salinity, Walker and Mono lakes have almost no remaining fish populations. This has allowed algae to take a greater hold in both lakes, according to the Mono Lake Committee.

Mono Lake also made headlines in 2010 when NASA scientists found a species of bacteria living there that could feed on the high levels of arsenic in its waters — a first in microbe biology, which could "impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life," researchers claimed. However, this paper was eventually retracted in 2025 after experts noticed flaws in its data.

Although it is rare to see many visually contrasting lakes in close proximity, similar scenes have been snapped from space. For example, in Africa's Great Rift Valley, there is a striking trio of blue, green and yellow lakes. Colorful collections of lakes can also be found in Crimea's "putrid sea" and around the Etosha Pan in Namibia.

See more Earth from space

The Arctic Ocean has crossed a tipping point that is wreaking havoc on the region's food chain, with potentially dire consequences for commercial fishing and the ocean's capacity to soak up carbon, a new study reports.

Scientists found that vast areas of melting sea ice in the Arctic are leading to a significant reduction in nitrate, a key nutrient that forms the base of the marine food web and thus underpins important regional fisheries. As the ice disappears, more light hits the water's surface, promoting the growth of microscopic, plant-like organisms called phytoplankton. When phytoplankton die, their cells sink to the seafloor and are decomposed by nitrate- and oxygen-consuming bacteria.

The new study, published May 28 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, found that the bacteria are consuming more nitrate than the Arctic ecosystem can withstand.

This effect, known as "denitrification," is irreversible under current climate conditions because we have passed a threshold where so much sunlight reaches the ocean that it's supercharging phytoplankton's productivity, said Marta Santos-García, a doctoral student of Arctic marine biogeochemistry at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and the first author of the study.

"Even if sea ice were to increase temporarily, the Arctic nutrient system responds over much longer timescales," Santos-García told Live Science in an email. "Short-term increases in sea ice would be unlikely to rapidly reverse the decline in nitrate inventories, which may take much longer to recover."

Dropping nitrate levels may eventually come back to bite phytoplankton, because these tiny organisms need nitrate to carry out photosynthesis. As a result, the transition to a low-nitrate regime could accelerate climate change, as nitrate plays an essential role in the ocean's biological pump, which takes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere via photosynthesis and locks it away at depth when phytoplankton and the animals that eat it die.

"With nutrients such as nitrate in limited supply this mechanism cannot work effectively," Santos-García said.

To understand ecosystem changes in the Arctic, the researchers analyzed two decades of data from the Fram Strait, a passage between Greenland and Svalbard, Norway, that is the main gateway through which Arctic waters flow into the Atlantic Ocean. They found a sharp decline in nitrate levels in this region after 2009, which coincided with a dramatic reduction in Arctic sea ice and a gradual shift in phytoplankton communities toward smaller species that can cope with low nutrient levels.

"Shifts towards smaller phytoplankton have already been observed in parts of the Arctic, although these changes have not previously been linked to nitrate losses," Santos-García said. "This matters because smaller phytoplankton are generally less efficient at transferring energy up the food web. More of the energy is recycled within microbial communities rather than being passed on to larger zooplankton, fish, seabirds, and marine mammals."

Phytoplankton sit at the very bottom of the marine food chain, so the impacts of nitrate depletion will ripple through the Arctic ecosystem, impacting species at the highest levels. This could also affect fisheries in regions that depend on Arctic nutrient exports, such as the North Atlantic. But pinpointing what will happen in ecosystems downstream of the Arctic Ocean requires more research, Santos-García said.

For years, researchers thought the long-term impact of sea ice loss in the Arctic would be an increase in phytoplankton, because more organisms can bathe in sunlight and multiply when the sea ice extent is small. However, the increase in phytoplankton since 2009 has depleted nitrate levels enough to limit future phytoplankton growth.

Whereas phytoplankton proliferation used to be limited by how much sunlight reached surface waters, it is now controlled by nitrate levels. Therefore, nitrate must be considered as a key driver of future changes in the Arctic, Santos-García said.

"As nitrate is the nutrient that limits Arctic productivity, understanding these changes is therefore important not only for Arctic communities and ecosystems, but also for improving projections of future climate change," she said.

Caves pockmark the world, extending deep into the bowels of Earth. Many caves are record holders, including one in Kentucky that's the longest known cave system, another in Vietnam that's the largest cave, and one in Mexico that holds the title for the longest underwater cave. But caves are known for being dark abysses, so which is the deepest cave on Earth? And which strange animals live at their deepest depths?

There's no clear winner, Live Science found. Instead, there are two caves that alternate as the record holders for the deepest cave on our planet: Veryovkina and Krubera-Voronya (also spelled Voronja), limestone caves in Abkhazia, an autonomous republic in the Republic of Georgia.

Both of these caves are more than 6,560 feet (2,000 meters, or 1.2 miles) deep, and they sit on the same remote mountain range, known as the Gagra Range. Explorers and scientists frequently update each cave's measurements.

According to a list of the world's deepest caves maintained by geologist Paul Burger, a regional hydrologist in Alaska for the National Park Service, Veryovkina is currently in the lead, with a depth of 7,257 feet (2,212 m, or 1.37 miles). Krubera is close behind, at 7,215 feet (2,199 m, or 1.37 miles).

"Both caves are frequently reported with vertical errors of plus/minus tens of feet so first and second place can vary depending on how those data are interpreted," Burger, who is also the author of the book "Cave Exploring: The Definitive Guide to Caving Technique, Safety, Gear, and Trip Leadership" (Myotis Publishing, 2022), told Live Science in an email.

The two caves are located in the Arabika Massif, a glacially eroded karst in the Caucasus. Karst is a type of landscape formed by soluble rocks like marble, gypsum and, in this case, limestone from the Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous periods, or from about 163.5 million to 100.5 million years ago. Over time, the limestone lays down in layers, and then it gets compressed by tectonic forces and turns into vertical walls of rock, Hazel Barton, a microbiologist and geologist at the University of Alabama, told Live Science.

"If you can imagine all those layers, you've got a BLT sandwich," she said. If you turn that BLT vertically, "when the water goes in, it's always going to look for the easiest way down." The water travels through cracks, eventually hitting the water table. "It's basically a massive bathtub down there," Barton said. Once the water hits the water table, it becomes groundwater and circulates in subterranean streams and rivers.

The reason this region has so many deep caves has to do with mountain building, Barton said "The limestone beds have been tilted near vertically, so the easiest route for the water is just straight down. You also have a large plateau that can collect the water, which helps push it one way or another."

Life in the caves

These caves aren't cozy. They're extremely dark, wet and cold environments. Temperatures inside caves in this region average 35 to 37 degrees Fahrenheit (2 to 3 degrees Celsius) throughout the year, said Ana Sofia Reboleira, a subterranean ecologist at the University of Lisbon in Portugal.

These conditions are harsh, and any organisms living there must adapt in order to survive. The deeper you go into caves, the more limited the nutrients become there. Animals need to slow their metabolism so they can go long stretches without eating, which allows them to live longer, Reboleira said. Their features are also adapted to life underground; most animals living at such depths lack pigment and eyes. They also have long appendages, hair and antennae to help them move in the darkness and sense air vibrations inside the cave.

One of these deep-dwelling species is a type of wingless insect known as a springtail, which Reboleira and her colleagues discovered on a 2010 expedition to Krubera at about 6,500 feet (1,980 m, or 1.2 miles) below the surface. The hexapod, named Plutomurus ortobalaganensis, feeds on fungi and decomposing organic matter. Sixteen years later, it still holds the record for the deepest known land animal.

Subterranean microbes have also evolved mechanisms to survive deep underground. At extreme depths, these microbes rely on chemolithoautotrophy, a metabolic process that enables them to gain energy by oxidizing the bedrock and turning it into food, Barton explained.

By understanding these subterranean environments, scientists can learn more about what's happening underneath our feet. "Caves are windows to the vast dimension of the underworld," Reboleira said.

Caves are ultimately part of a system that is fundamental for all ecosystems on our planet. They provide water purification by filtering water their their many layers, play an important role in nutrient cycling, and sustain the carbon cycle by storing carbon in stone and hosting organisms that turn carbon dioxide into organic matter.

"Subterranean ecosystems are absolutely vital and strategic for ensuring life on Earth," Reboleira said.

How much do you know about our blue planet? Test your terran knowledge with our Earth quiz!

The Trump administration is targeting one of the world's most trusted sources of climate and oceanic data — the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). According to the New York Times, ships will be dispatched this month to remove the more than 900 deep-sea instruments that comprise the network, which, for the past decade, has collected crucial data on physical, chemical, geological and biological conditions from all layers of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans on a continuous basis.

In a statement dated May 21, the OOI confirmed that the National Science Foundation (NSF) had begun a "descoping" process, including removing all in-water infrastructure from four of the OOI's five deployed arrays. "This plan includes the removal of all in-water infrastructure from the Irminger Sea, Station Papa, Endurance and Pioneer Arrays, subject to ship scheduling and other operational constraints," the OOI said in the statement. This covers instruments stationed in the Pacific, as well as others in the waters off the U.S. Atlantic coast and Greenland and Iceland. The initiative was originally meant to run for 25 years.

In a statement, an NSF spokesperson said the intention was not to cancel the OOI but to transition to a "nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio."

"NSF remains committed to ocean science and will continue working with the scientific community on high-priority research objectives," he added.

Among the arrays that are set to be taken apart is the Coastal Endurance Array, which lies off the coasts of Oregon and Washington State. Its data is vital to scientists studying a region of ocean that accounts for about a quarter of the annual global fish catch. And the station in the Atlantic's Irminger Sea has gathered crucial data on the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), which some scientists suspect is weakening — if it collapses, the weather effects could be devastating.

"Sustained ocean observations are how we detect emerging risks in real time, from shifts in circulation to changes in chemistry and ecosystem health. Without them, we are effectively choosing to navigate an increasingly volatile ocean with diminishing visibility," said Helen Findlay, a biological oceanographer at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in England, in a statement. "We already know the AMOC plays a critical role in regulating climate and sustaining marine ecosystems, and there is growing evidence that it may be weakening. Growing uncertainty around its future is precisely why long-term, consistent monitoring is more vital than ever."

Removing the sensors is a loss that will be keenly felt by scientists studying ocean wildlife. Rebecca Helm, a marine biologist at Georgetown University, points out that expeditions are both costly and limited in the time they can remain at sea, while the sensors provide a continuous influx of data.

"Ocean observing systems are important because they are like our eyes and ears in the water," says Helm. "They're providing invaluable information on the state of the ocean that is hard to get any other way."

The loss won't just be felt in the scientific community, but also by human industries that depend on marine systems, she adds.

According to the OOI's May 21 statement, one network of seafloor sensors — the Regional Cabled Array, which extends from the Oregon coast to the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate in the Pacific Ocean — will remain in service "for the foreseeable future." The NSF's Fiscal Year 2026 budget request had proposed to cut funding for the OOI by 80 percent.

Conditions in the world's ocean can have enormous effects on the climate, and vice versa. Deep water stores an enormous amount of carbon, which, if released into the atmosphere, could tremendously speed up climate change. Ocean currents also play a vital role in maintaining weather patterns that, if affected by warming waters, could lead to wide-scale chaos.

Still, dismantling the ocean monitoring system is the Trump administration's latest effort to scale down the U.S. government's support for climate research. Separately, last December the administration announced it would shutter the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a key research facility for the study of climate and weather. A court ruling has since temporarily blocked that effort.

This article was first published at Scientific American. © ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved. Follow on TikTok and Instagram, X and Facebook.

This year's brewing El Niño will likely become the strongest ever recorded, a new forecast warns.

New predictions by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) suggest sea surface temperatures in a key region of the central equatorial Pacific Ocean will climb 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) above average by December of this year, with some scenarios showing they could go above 7.2 F (4 C).

If the forecast bears out, it means that this year's El Niño — the warm phase of a multi-year natural climate pattern that supercharges temperatures across the globe — will be significantly stronger than the previous joint record holders of 2015 to 2016 and 1997 to 1998.

Those past two El Niño events sent temperatures in the Niño 3.4 index (which measures sea surface temperature anomalies between 5 degrees north and 5 degrees south latitude, and 120 degrees west and 170 degrees west longitude) to 4.1 F (2.3 C) above average.

"Almost every scenario now reaches past +3˚C, with a cluster of high-end scenarios in excess of +4˚C," Ben Noll, a meteorologist and global weather writer at the Washington Post, wrote on the social platform X. "This outlook now depicts the strongest El Niño on record."

El Niño events occur every two to seven years as part of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) natural climate cycle in the Pacific Ocean. 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 and the first to breach the 1.5 C (2.7 F) warming limit — a key guardrail set by the Paris Agreement, after which the effects of climate change become increasingly disastrous.

The impacts of previous El Niño periods on global agriculture have been profound, with studies linking the events to famine in Europe; triggers for civil wars in tropical regions; and droughts, floods and forest fires around the world. This year's El Niño will arrive during a period of increased global food insecurity driven by the Iran war.

In an update on Tuesday (June 2), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warned that the climate pattern has an 80% chance of forming before September and a 90% chance before November, and that the world should prepare for a potentially strong event.

"The science is clear: El Niño is arriving on our doorstep in the coming months with 90% certainty. The world must treat it as the urgent climate warning it is," UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a video statement.

And while El Niño would have arrived regardless of anthropogenic climate change, Guterres was careful to stress that it will add more heat to an already dangerously warming planet.

"El Niño conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world. Impacts will hit even harder, travel even farther, and cross borders with devastating speed," he added.

"The only effective response is climate action equal to the crisis — ending the addiction to fossil fuels, accelerating the shift to renewables, protecting the most vulnerable, and delivering early warning systems for all."

A volcano that slept for more than 100,000 years before erupting is blowing up our understanding of when volcanoes should be defined as active or extinct.

Volcanologists officially classify sleeping volcanoes as extinct if they haven't erupted in the past 10,000 years or so, or in the past 11,700 years since the start of the current geological epoch, the Holocene.

And yet, an analysis of the active volcano Methana, near Athens, Greece, recently found that it once slept for nearly 110,000 years before bursting back to life. The finding could be the final straw for volcanologists, many of whom were already questioning the current definition of what makes a volcano extinct.

"The take-home message," said study co-author Răzvan-Gabriel Popa, a volcanologist at ETH Zürich in Switzerland, "is that extinct volcanoes around us might not really be extinct."

Changing the way we define whether volcanoes are extinct or active is important because the misclassification of volcanoes leaves people exposed to the risk of an unexpected eruption. And many of these sleeping giants should be monitored more closely, experts told Live Science.

A sleeping giant wakes up angry

In a study published April 22 in the journal Science Advances, Popa and his colleagues reconstructed the history of Methana by dating and analyzing the chemistry of zircon crystals in the rocks around the volcano, which had been ejected in various eruptions.

This revealed 31 eruptions over roughly 700,000 years of volcanic activity and a long period in which it lay quiet. During this time, the volcano was building up its magma reservoir, and afterward, it erupted energetically about 168,000 years ago. "We discovered that it was surprisingly able to restart after 110,000 years of inactivity and erupted quite intensely afterwards," Popa told Live Science. "What's important from my point of view is to start looking at other volcanoes that we currently consider extinct, because they might be going through growth periods. Maybe they're going to wake up in this catastrophic stage."

Methana isn't the only "extinct" volcano that has roused after a long period, Popa said.

Last year, Pablo González, a volcanologist at the Spanish National Research Council's Institute of Natural Products and Agrobiology, and his colleagues published a study showing that Taftan volcano in Iran had woken up and that its summit was rising, probably due to a buildup of gas pressure below the volcano's surface. It's not clear when it erupted last, but researchers estimate it was around 700,000 years ago.

Another volcano, Ciomadul in Romania, was thought to be extinct because it last erupted 30,000 years ago, but a 2019 study found magma still lurking beneath the volcano.

"It has a magma chamber which is brewing; it's very active," Popa said. "It just hasn't erupted. Ciomadul is definitely going through a growth stage, and maybe there are more such volcanoes."

Hayli Gubbi volcano, in the Afar region of Ethiopia, also erupted unexpectedly in 2025, after having lain dormant for an estimated 12,000 years. However, due in part to the volcano's remote setting, geologists are unsure of precisely how long ago it last erupted.

What is clear is that 10,000 years of silence is no guarantee a volcano is dead. "We have to look at a much longer time scale to be more certain about the level of activity of a volcanic area," González told Live Science.

Expanded monitoring

Fortunately, volcanoes don't usually erupt without warning —as long as scientists are monitoring them.

For example, González said, thousands of small eruptions heralded the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which had been quiet for about 500 years, and thorough seismic monitoring helps scientists anticipate eruptions at Mount Etna in Italy, one of the world's most active volcanoes.

But obvious seismic activity ramps up mainly in advance of imminent threats.

Other geophysical signs help reveal which volcanoes are quietly building up their magma stores — and those need to be monitored too, experts told Live Science. For example, satellites can detect a growing magma chamber if they pick up bulging in the ground of just an inch a year, Popa said. Scientists can also use magnetotellurics, a method that leverages Earth's magnetic and electric fields to give CT-scan-like images that reveal how much rock is being melted to create more magma.

Such assessments should be extended to many volcanoes assumed to have a lower risk level, the experts said. "I think it's important that as much as possible we are monitoring all potentially active volcanoes for signs of subsurface unrest," Jenni Barclay, a volcanologist at the University of Bristol in the U.K., told Live Science. This could reveal magma that is actively melting and building up to potentially fuel future eruptions.

The monitoring of quiet volcanoes should first focus on volcanoes in relatively populous regions, including Eifel in western Germany and La Garrotxa in northeastern Spain, the experts said.

Some such volcanoes are already monitored. Yellowstone, which is considered dormant even though it last erupted 70,000 years ago, is watched closely because it sits on a hotspot of magma production and the high flux of heat means the rocks in the crust behave in a plastic way, deforming to create space for even more magma. This means Yellowstone is likely to erupt one day, Popa said, and it is unlikely to be a complete surprise.

"When a giant like Yellowstone wakes up, there will be lots of signs," he said

New classification system needed

The studies on reawakening volcanoes are leading ever more volcanologists to question the time-linked definition of an extinct volcano. "The definition is more or less an arbitrary date," Popa said. "It just means that we can find evidence of eruptions easily in the geological record and we have experienced them."

Inspired by the issue, volcanologists Luca Caricchi at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and Ben Kennedy at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand surveyed attendees at an international meeting of volcanologists in Geneva last year. Caricchi told Live Science that about 70 to 80 people there agreed that the 10,000-year definition was flawed, but consensus hasn't coalesced around a new definition.

"The big challenge that we have as volcanologists is that thinking about the state of the volcano really depends on the time scale that you're thinking of," Barclay said. "These gaps of 100,000 years are all very well, but most people are wanting to know if it is going to erupt during their lifetime, and given unrest, is it going to erupt over the next few days or weeks?"

All of the experts Live Science spoke to suggested that a new classification system should rely on measures of volcanic or magmatic activity, rather than on time passed. Some also don't like the term "dormant," which implies a volcano that has magma beneath it but isn’t active, because even if a volcano isn't erupting, an active magma chamber is never sleeping.

Classification should probably be done on a case-by-case basis by looking at the system to see whether the magma chamber is alive, Popa said, "because that's telling us if the volcano is really dead."

González agreed. As long as the conditions for magma to erupt exist below the surface, "that's a good indication that a volcanic area can have a future eruption," he said.

What do you know about volcanos? Test your knowledge with our volcano quiz!

One of the world's rarest trees, a cliffside plant with just one known individual left in the wild, may have a new chance at survival after scientists collected hundreds of seeds from the lone survivor's precarious home on Chile's Robinson Crusoe Island.

The tree, Dendroseris neriifolia, is native to the Juan Fernández Islands, a remote chain of volcanic islands about 420 miles (673 kilometers), from mainland Chile. Once found in lowland areas of Robinson Crusoe island, D. neriifolia has been pushed to the brink by habitat loss, erosion, invasive species, grazing animals, fires and historic forest clearing.

The genus Dendroseris has 11 species, with all populations, not just D. neriifolia in decline, Paulina Hechenleitner V., a plant taxonomist at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in Scotland, told Live Science via email. She added that no seeds from this genus had been stored in any seed back, until now.

Seeds from the last remaining wild tree were recently sent to the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew Wakehurst, a botanic garden in West Sussex, England, where scientists are conducting germination trials and storing material for long term conservation. X-ray analysis found 25 of the 29 seeds sent to Kew were potentially viable, and seven seedlings are now putting down roots inside the gardens, according to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

"Through this project, we hope to be able to produce more seed from the plants which we have growing now once they reach flowering age," Alice Hudson, the Millennium Seed Bank partnerships officer at Kew Wakehurst, told Live Science in an email.

The vanishing of an island tree

Hechenleitner said D. neriifolia's population has been declining for more than a century. The species was first described from material collected in the 1830s by Italian botanist Carlo Bertero, one of the early botanic explorers of the Juan Fernández Islands.

"Historical accounts indicate that the species was still relatively common in parts of its range in the late 19th century, although local extinctions were already being reported," Hechenleitner said.

While a field expedition in 1980 found seven trees, each up to16 feet (5 meters) tall, only one tree remains today, monitored by Chilean park rangers with CONAF, Chile's national forest agency.

Climbing the cliffside

Collecting seeds from the tree is dangerous, highly specialized work. Simply getting to the tree is a challenge.

"It is a rocky volcanic island with no car [accessible] road," Hechenleitner said. "The only access is by taking a 4 hour journey and afterwards, a 2 hour climb."

The last known wild D. nerifolia clings to a steep cliff and is supported by ropes to keep it from falling. Each March, when the seeds mature, park rangers climb along the trunk to reach the flowering branches to catch mature seeds in nets. However, this is the first time the seeds have gone to a bank."There are lots of different ways you can collect seeds from a tree, the best method depends on many factors including the height of the tree," Hudson said. "Seeds should be collected at the point at which they naturally release from the tree, this means you can often use methods like getting a throw line over a branch and gently shaking the tree to release the seeds for collection."

Climbing remains the main option for very tall or inaccessible trees, though new tools like drones may help with seed collecting in the future.

Overcoming biological barriers

Even with seeds looking viable, conservationists are worried about genetic bottlenecks, low fertility and inbreeding in the wild. Although D. neriifolia can self-fertilize, seed production may remain limited if flowering branches are sparse.

"Seed conservation offers a back-up — if anything happens to the plant in the wild, there are seeds stored in the bank which we know how to germinate, so the species is not lost," Hudson explained. "It spreads some of the risk."

Seed banks also allow scientists to study the germination process up close and in a controlled environment.

"Many species can have complex dormancy or germination requirements so it means that we can research the best ways to germinate seeds, sharing our knowledge to help others to reintroduce plants back into the wild or use them for scientific research finding future foods or medicines," Hudson said.

Now, scientists hope the young D. neriifolia plants at Kew Wakehurst will eventually flower and produce even more seeds to store. The knowledge gained from growing them could help Chilean conservationists develop protocols for future restoration.

"These will be able to be used in Chile with future seed produced from the remaining tree to hopefully produce plants for restoration efforts or other ex-situ living collections in Chile," Hudson said.

Do you know where pumpkins and blueberries come from? Find out with our fruits and vegetables quiz!

Mangrove forests, long considered among the world's most threatened ecosystems, are now showing signs of global rebound, a new study reports. These findings mean experts are cautiously optimistic about gains in coastal protection.

The results are based on 40 years' worth of satellite data, which shows that mangrove forests are more resilient than expected. Gains over the past 16 years have outpaced losses, leaving the world with about a 1% net decline in mangrove area since the 1980s, far less than previous estimates suggested. The findings were published Thursday (June 4) in the journal Science.

Historically, mangrove populations have been declining mainly because coastal development, aquaculture and agriculture have cleared large areas of mangrove forests. Pollution and rising sea levels have also weakened these ecosystems, shifting the balance of saltwater and freshwater that these trees need to survive.

"After decades of loss, we're finally seeing a global turning point for mangroves," study first author Zhen Zhang, a postdoctoral scholar in the School of Science and Engineering at Tulane University in Louisiana who specializes in mangrove forest coverage, said in a statement. "This highlights their strong resilience and their potential as a powerful nature-based solution for climate mitigation and coastal protection."

Eyes in the skies

Mangroves make up salt-tolerant forests full of shrubs and trees that grow along tropical and subtropical coastlines. They protect coastal communities by acting as a natural barrier against storms, strong winds and flooding. Their dense root system helps slow down storm surge and reduces erosion by holding shoreline soil in place. Mangrove forests also help support ecosystems because their tangled roots provide safe habitats where fish, crabs, shrimp and other marine animals can grow before moving into open waters.

These forests are also important in the fight against climate change, as they store large amounts of carbon in their trees, roots and deep muddy soils, helping to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

To track the changes in mangrove populations, researchers at Tulane's Mangrove Lab used long-term observations from the Landsat program, a joint mission between NASA and the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The researchers combined Landsat's digital eyes with high-resolution satellite imagery from the European Space Agency's PlanetScope to validate the mangrove maps.

"Ground fieldwork is extremely valuable, but it is often costly, and doesn't allow this large-scale perspective," Daniel Friess, a professor of Earth and environmental sciences at Tulane and the director of the Mangrove Lab, told Live Science in an email. "Satellite observations allow us to fill these gaps and detect long-term changes in places where field measurements are sparse or unavailable."

The team used machine-learning techniques to create baseline mangrove maps for the 1980s, 2010 and 2021, then applied change-detection methods to generate annual records from 1984 to 2023. Those maps allowed the researchers to calculate yearly mangrove losses and gains across the globe and identify a shift from a global decline before 2010 to a net gain after 2010.

The rebound was driven by both restoration and natural expansion, according to the researchers. In some places, mangroves have recolonized abandoned aquaculture ponds. In others, the forests have spread onto newly formed coastal mudflats, particularly in river deltas where sediment creates favorable conditions.

Along the U.S. Gulf Coast, warming temperatures have also encouraged mangroves to expand into higher-latitude areas. Louisiana has seen an overall increase in mangrove area over the past 40 years, while mangroves in the Mississippi River Delta began increasing more sharply after 2012, the researchers said.

But the findings, while encouraging, do not mean mangroves are safe. Friess said continuing losses must be halted so that mangrove forests can continue to rebound.

"We may have underestimated the state of the world's mangroves, " Friess said, as there is evidence that the forests are naturally regenerating and expanding. "It means that if we can halt continuing loss through conservation, then we may see an even bigger gain in the world's mangroves."

Recovery remains fragile

A separate study published Wednesday (June 3) in the journal Earth's Future warned that rising seas could reduce the amount of carbon dioxide mangrove forests store and, in some cases, turn them from carbon sinks, storing more carbon than they emit, into carbon sources, in which they would emit more carbon than they could store.

The researchers used a model that combined water flow, sediment movement, carbon storage, and mangrove growth and dieback — when a large number of mangrove trees rapidly die off — to get a bigger picture of mangrove ecosystems. They found that sea level rise may increase carbon storage in some localized areas at first, but whole-forest carbon storage is likely to decline over the next century, meaning more carbon will be kept in the atmosphere, adding to the effects of climate change. Mangroves need a certain amount of tidal flooding to survive, but too much flooding could cause them to disappear.

The findings underscore the ongoing need to protect existing mangroves so they can continue protecting ecosystems and sequestering carbon. Friess said he hopes global gains continue, but the effects of climate change could lead to losses instead.

"While we hope that net gains in mangrove area will continue, it may be challenging to maintain this trajectory in many places under climate change," he said. "So we need to focus on conserving and restoring mangroves now in order to give them the best chance in the future."

In this striking satellite photo, rusty-orange water appears to bleed across the salty white floor of a high-altitude lagoon in Bolivia.

Laguna Colorada ("Red Lagoon" in Spanish) is a hypersaline, or extremely salty, lake in Bolivia's Altiplano — the world's second-highest plateau, which stretches across the Andes. It sits around 14,100 feet (4,300 meters) above sea level.

The lagoon was once much larger, which is evident thanks to the striations of an ancient shoreline visible along its right edge. As it eventually dried out, an uneven layer of borax salt (sodium tetraborate) was left behind. These salty crystals often rise above the water level, creating bright-white islands and causing the "bleeding" effect when viewed from above.

The water's reddish hues come from algae, predominantly Dunaliella salina. This salt-loving species is rich in red pigments known as carotenoids, and is responsible for creating similarly reddish waters across the globe.

The lake is often much redder. However, the water's hue changes based on its temperature and salinity, which determine the growth of various alga species, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. At some points in the year, the color is greenish.

Laguna Colorada has been listed as a "wetland of international importance" since 1990 under the Ramsar Convention. Its surroundings are home to a number of animals, including mountain cats, foxes and llamas. However, its most famous residents are flamingos.

At least three species of the bright-pink birds — the Andean flamingo (Phoenicoparrus andinus), the Chilean flamingo (Phoenicopterus chilensis) and the James's flamingo (Phoenicoparrus jamesi) — frequent the lagoon and get their vibrant coloration from eating the carotenoid-rich algae. (Flamingos are born gray; their iconic hue comes from their diet.)

The lagoon sometimes draws comparisons to Tanzania's Lake Natron, which often has blood-red water and is home to 2.5 million of the pink birds — the largest flamingo colony on Earth.

Laguna Colorada is sandwiched between two volcanoes, just out of view at the top and bottom of this photo.

Several other colorful salt lakes are nearby, including Laguna Verde ("Green Lagoon) and Laguna Blanca ("White Lagoon"), which sit side by side around 40 miles (65 kilometers) south of Laguna Colorada.

See more Earth from space

Around 5.4 million years ago, two rivers flowed across present-day Turkey and Syria and into the Mediterranean Sea — and eventually, they would merge to form the Euphrates River, new research suggests. The merged river would play a pivotal role in the development of early human civilizations in the Fertile Crescent.

Scientists revealed that the Paleo-Karasu and Paleo-Murat rivers discharged into the Mediterranean Sea until 5.33 million years ago, and tectonic shifts altered their paths around 3.6 million years ago, after a period when both rivers emptied onshore. The Paleo-Murat River changed course first, and the Paleo-Karasu River was rerouted 800,000 years later. Both waterways combined to flow southeast into the Persian Gulf by roughly 1.6 million years ago, according to the new study.

"The modern landscape onshore, along with buried sediments offshore, still preserves clear signs of the ancient Euphrates River," said study first author Andrew Madof, a senior geologist at the oil and gas corporation Chevron. "If the Palaeo-Murat and Palaeo-Karasu rivers had not switched course and merged when they did, it is unclear whether the Fertile Crescent would have formed in the way it did," he told Live Science in an email.

Often referred to as the "cradle of civilization," the Fertile Crescent is a boomerang-shaped region in Western Asia that stretches from present-day Egypt to southeastern Iraq. Its eastern branch, known as Mesopotamia, contains the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. These two rivers created an oasis of fertile soil in an otherwise arid region, which helped ancient civilizations such as the Sumerians and Assyrians flourish some 6,000 years ago.

Despite the Euphrates playing a central role in the success of these early civilizations, the origins of the 1,900-mile-long (3,000 kilometers) river have until now remained enigmatic. Some researchers previously proposed that the Euphrates evolved from a single river that flowed into the Mediterranean Sea or into ancient lakes in what is now Turkey, while others suggested it evolved from a river ending somewhere on the Arabian Peninsula.

But in the new study, published Monday (June 1) in the journal Nature Geoscience, Madof and his colleagues showed that the Euphrates was born from the marriage of two rivers, rather than from a single waterway.

The researchers used seismic data, maps of the land surface, and satellite data to reconstruct the Euphrates' geological history. They identified 5 million to 6 million-year-old river deposits buried off the coast of Lebanon and compared them to previously documented river deposits of a similar age off the coast of Turkey. These deposits revealed two ancient waterways: the Paleo-Karasu and Paleo-Murat.

These rivers flowed into the Mediterranean Sea during the Messinian salinity crisis, a period of about 700,000 years when tectonic processes caused most of the sea to dry up. The Mediterranean refilled 5.33 million years ago, submerging the grooves and sediments that the two rivers left on the seabed. It was those remnants that the new study uncovered.

"A useful way to think about this is that we were tracing the buried 'footprints' of the ancient Euphrates offshore and connecting them to where those footprints reappear on land," Madof said.

Tectonic shifts involving mountain-building episodes, faulting processes and earthquakes moved the Paleo-Karasu and the Paleo-Murat around 3.6 million years ago, so the researchers had to piece together the clues on land.

"Where these ancient river channels crossed faults, the landscape behaved like a conveyor belt that had shifted sideways," Madof said. "By measuring how much the river was offset and how fast the fault moves, we could estimate when this motion occurred."

The team also modeled sediment transport in the Paleo-Karasu and Paleo-Murat rivers to estimate the rivers' size and the extent of their drainage areas. The team found that the Paleo-Karasu was larger than the modern Nile River before it merged with the Paleo-Murat to form the modern Euphrates 1.6 million years ago.

Some stretches of the Paleo-Karasu and Paleo-Murat rivers changed very little, while others were completely rerouted. The position of these rivers likely influenced the routes mammals took when they migrated out of Africa and through the Levant by determining water availability, Madof said.

Understanding how the Euphrates formed helps us to better understand "how large-scale changes in water distribution can reshape landscapes and influence the conditions needed to support life," he noted.

Editor's Note: This story was updated on June 3 at 11:53 a.m. ET to update Andrew Madof's title, correct the date when the Paleo-Karasu and Paleo-Murat rivers stopped flowing into the Mediterranean Sea, and clarify that only the Paleo-Karasu River was bigger than the modern Nile River.

On March 10, the U.S. and Israel bombed Iran's capital of Tehran so heavily, one resident described the city as "the last stop before hell."

Buildings shook and windows shattered as missiles struck oil and weapons development facilities in Tehran, which is home to nearly 10 million people. The World Health Organization urged Iranians to stay indoors as acidic rain blackened with soot and toxic compounds showered residential areas.

Since the start of the war on Feb. 28, U.S.-Israeli forces have launched thousands of attacks around Iran, destroying homes, schools, hospitals and other key civilian infrastructure. Almost 3,500 Iranians have died, and more than 26,500 have been injured.

But as bombardments continue, another emergency is spiraling in the background. The war has overshadowed a dire water crisis in Iran that, among other things, caused Tehran to nearly run out of water late last year.

In November 2025, four of Tehran's five water reservoirs were 88% empty, and the fifth, Amir Kabir, was 92% empty. The city faced its worst water crisis in six decades, with taps going dry in some districts and desperation paving the way for deadly protests in December 2025 and January 2026.

Iran has been in a drought for more than five years, and water shortages caused by decades of overreliance on agriculture, broken water policies and hostility toward the rest of the world have gripped the country. Lakes, rivers and wetlands are drying up across most provinces. And in the northeastern city of Mashhad, which is home to about 3.5 million people, water levels in November fell to below 3% of storage capacity.

To make up for surface water losses, Iranians are pumping groundwater, but those reserves are also running dry.

"Iran, for the foreseeable future, will have many, many other issues that need to be sorted out, and I'm afraid the environment will not be at the top of priorities," Nima Shokri, executive co-director of the United Nations University Hub on Engineering to Face Climate Change and head of the Institute of Geo-Hydroinformatics at the Hamburg University of Technology in Germany, told Live Science.

But the water crisis hasn't gone away, and the war will likely worsen the problem, experts told us. Iran can't afford to neglect its water issues any longer, Shokri said.

"If the priority shifts in a meaningful way, if there is structural change, if the environment becomes a top priority, there are things that can be done," Shokri said. "Iran has no choice. Things will collapse unless there is meaningful structural change."

A water-bankrupt country

Tehran's water shortages last year persisted for months. Already in July 2025, officials warned that the city was weeks away from "day zero," when water supplies drop so low that taps run dry, forcing residents to queue for rations or buy bottled water. In August, faced with temperatures of up to 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius) that increased the demand for energy and water, authorities closed government offices, banks, schools and universities for several days.

By November, Iran's president, Masoud Pezeshkian, had revived a long-debated plan to move Tehran to the country's wetter south due to water shortages. This time, he claimed that relocating the city was "no longer optional." His government said the Makran region, which stretches across Iran's south from the Strait of Hormuz to Pakistan, could host a new city. But the government didn't release a detailed plan or address the relocation's cost, which analysts say could be more than $100 billion.

Pezeshkian's comments highlight the lack of a national strategy to deal with water scarcity, said Eric Lob, an associate professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University and a scholar in the Carnegie Middle East Program. Instead of implementing durable solutions, the Iranian regime has relied on water cutoffs, fines and temporary fixes to save water, which is like "putting a Band-Aid on gaping wounds," Lob told Live Science.

Government officials and experts dismissed Pezeshkian's claims as unserious, and they weren't wrong, Lob said. "Even if you were to do that, you still don't have a national plan in place, and you still only have these reactive, stopgap measures that are not going to bring forth any type of sustainable, serious plan."

But the fact that Iran's government would consider displacing 10 million people also shows the gravity of the country's water crisis, which has reached "water bankruptcy" levels — where the damage to some water systems is irreversible on human timescales. Nationwide shortages last year sparked protests in the central Isfahan province in March and contributed to country-wide unrest that the regime brutally suppressed in January 2026 by killing up to 30,000 people.

Last year worsened a historic drought, with Iran receiving about 40% less rainfall than the long-term average, and climate change is predicted to exacerbate the region's aridity. However, water bankruptcy in the country is not driven solely by climate change or short-term droughts. Rather, it stems from decades of broken water governance and aggressive policies that the regime has pursued at the expense of the environment and the Iranian people, Shokri told Live Science.

"It is not 'mismanagement,' because mismanagement is a shallow representation of the issue," Shokri said. "It's a high-level strategic error."

Self-sufficiency at any cost

Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the country's ruling elites have placed a great emphasis on independence and self-sufficiency, particularly in food production. In a commentary published March 13 in the journal Nature Sustainability, Shokri and his colleagues argue that this stance and Iran's post-revolution geopolitical aims caused its water crisis.

Agriculture in Iran has mushroomed over the past four decades, despite the country's arid climate and limited water availability. The regime promoted uncapped groundwater extraction to grow crops such as wheat, rice, barley and sugar cane for domestic consumption, while thirstier crops, such as dates and pistachios, simultaneously ballooned to feed exports. Officials invested only minimally in water reuse, leak reduction and monitoring infrastructure, and they heavily subsidized energy, which farmers used to drill more wells and pump more groundwater.

Additionally, the government funded hundreds of dams to store water, but some of the rivers on which they were built are too small to sustain reservoirs. "Oftentimes, the dams don't have enough water, and then also are causing some sort of evaporation, because there's just water sitting in there," Liz Saccoccia, a water security associate at the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C., told Live Science.

Today, agriculture makes up roughly 90% of Iran's water use. As of 2024, 32 of the world's 50 most overpumped aquifers were in Iran. The number of wells to pump groundwater almost doubled from around 450,000 in 2000 to 800,000 in 2013, but the amount of water that was extracted from those wells in that period declined by 18% due to aquifers running dry. To get to the last drops, farmers have adopted submersible electric pumps that can reach below 160 feet (50 meters), but this has lowered groundwater tables so much that salt water has infiltrated aquifers. Farmers who use this water for irrigation now have saline soils, which limits their productivity.

Iran's food self-sufficiency policy has wavered over the past few decades, Lob said, and the country has imported wheat and other agricultural commodities, mostly from places like Russia and Brazil. But the pressure to operate water pumps has remained high, mainly because water use in Iran is extremely inefficient.

Inefficient water use is due to weak input from the Iranian government, which has spent resources on supporting militant and rebel groups around the Middle East, like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, rather than on developing sustainable water systems, Shokri said.

A lack of foreign investment and limited access to advanced water technologies from countries like the U.S. and Israel due to international sanctions have amplified the problem. Technologies such as big data analytics, artificial-intelligence-based irrigation scheduling and satellite-based water accounting could slash water use; instead, "the way they do the irrigation is completely outdated," Shokri said. For example, flood irrigation is used to grow rice in regions with high evaporation rates, such as Khuzestan province in southwest Iran, he said.

Other experts agreed that the Iranian regime is responsible for the country's water emergency and that global warming and economic sanctions are simply exacerbating an existing problem. "It's a crisis that's been years in the making, and I think that could be equally — if not more — attributed to government mismanagement, alongside these structural issues and externalities," Lob said.

The main flaw in Iran's water policy is that decisions are made on the national scale, rather than at a basin level, where authorities could plan economic activities based on the amount of water available, Saccoccia said. "In Iran, they have these political goals that do clash with the reality of the water resources that they have," she said.

From bad to worse

Freshwater depletion in Iran has helped trigger three other crises that threaten people's livelihoods, health and safety.

First, water shortages have impacted energy production, because water generates hydropower and cools power plants. In 2019, 10.6% of Iran's electricity came from dams, but in 2025, that percentage decreased to 3.3% due, at least in part, to record-low water levels in some reservoirs.

Power outages have become daily occurrences in cities like Tehran, where reservoirs have dropped well below capacity. Last summer, offices and shops were forced to close for hours each day due to electricity cuts that blocked internet access and appliances such as air conditioners and refrigerators. In the sweltering heat, water and electricity shortages made staying at home exceptionally difficult and left residents with few options but to buy bottled water to cool down.

The water crisis has also created dangerous air pollution through dust that blows off dry lake beds and riverbeds, Shokri said. Satellite images show that bodies of water across Iran have shrunk dramatically over the past 40 years, exposing sediments that are easily picked up by wind and can travel hundreds of miles. For example, northwest Iran's Lake Urmia — once the largest saltwater lake in the Middle East — has almost completely dried up and, in turn, increased harmful particle pollution in the region.

The third crisis born out of Iran's water emergency is widespread subsidence, or sinking of the land surface over time. This is due to groundwater extraction, which compresses sediments by removing water volume from the ground, Jess Payne, a doctoral student at the University of Leeds Institute for Geophysics and Tectonics in the U.K., told Live Science.

In a 2025 study, Payne and her colleagues used radar data from satellites to show that more than 12,120 square miles (31,400 square kilometers) of Iran — an area roughly the size of Maryland — is subsiding faster than 0.39 inches (10 millimeters) per year. Some places are sinking much faster than that; for example, Rafsanjan, a city in central Iran, dropped by over a foot (34 centimeters) every year between 2014 and 2022.

About 77% of subsidence in Iran occurs in valleys dominated by agriculture, and it is especially acute in desert regions, where rainfall doesn't replenish aquifers, Payne said. "Only 3% of the subsidence we observe happens under urban areas," she noted. "That tells you that the drivers are going to be probably linked to agriculture, and that probably tells you it's groundwater extraction."

But agriculture-driven subsidence affects urban areas, too. In cities like Shiraz, Isfahan and Yazd, uneven subsidence has caused huge cracks to form in buildings and roads. In September 2025, the threat was so severe that officials evacuated 40 schools in Isfahan, which has a population of about 2.2 million.

Subsidence may also increase the risk of earthquakes in Iran, which is a hotspot for seismic activity. Many faults are likely hidden beneath aquifers, and groundwater extraction could reduce the load on these faults, Payne said. "It won't cause an earthquake, but if that fault is close to failure, it might contribute to it happening sooner," she said.

In the longer term, subsidence is ominous because sediments can become so compact that they forever lose their ability to hold water. "Some subsidence is irreversible," Payne said. "You're permanently losing freshwater stores in the ground, and that's really problematic, particularly for arid regions like Iran."

Air strikes on critical infrastructure

The recent war has caused massive-scale destruction around the Persian Gulf and thousands of deaths. The conflict has eclipsed Iran's water concerns, but it will likely exacerbate shortages in the country over the coming months and years, experts said.

A major, imminent threat to Iran's water security is U.S.-Israeli forces' targeting of energy infrastructure, including fuel depots and oil refineries. Most water infrastructure cannot function without power, Auroop Ganguly, a distinguished professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern University in Massachusetts, told Live Science in an email.

"Water and energy are inextricably linked," Ganguly said. "If energy infrastructure in Iran is targeted, water, wastewater and sewage treatment would be impacted, while electric wells, pumping stations, and water distribution networks would become inefficient or crippled."

Iran has also sustained heavy damage to a desalination plant on Qeshm Island, which officials said cut off water supplies to 30 villages. However, Iran relies on desalination for less than 3% of its water use, meaning strikes on desalination plants have a smaller impact on water security in Iran than they do in Gulf states like Bahrain and Kuwait, which depend on desalination for 90% of their drinking water, Ganguly said.

Desalination serves a handful of coastal cities and islands in Iran, including Bandar Abbas and Kharg Island. "Targeting desalination plants in the critical coastal or island regions would have severe local effects, but targeting larger dams or power supplies could result in broader nation-wide impacts," Ganguly said.

The air strikes have also caused other environmental problems.

The war has unleashed deadly air pollution from burning oil and gas facilities that will worsen existing air quality issues in Iran and fuel both immediate and long-term health crises, Frederick Otu-Larbi, a lecturer and environmental scientist at Ghana's University of Energy and Natural Resources and Lancaster University in the U.K., told Live Science.

"For several days or weeks at the beginning of the war, you could literally see black smoke covering most of Tehran, and Iran, and the region, from burning oil and infrastructure," said Otu-Larbi, who recently published an analysis of greenhouse gas emissions created in the first few weeks of the war. "We're looking at a whole country's total annual emissions being pumped out into the atmosphere in a space of 30, 40 days. All of that air pollution from burning oil [and] burning infrastructure is likely to cause some immediate problems, but also long-term health complications for the population."

"Chaos" ahead

The war will likely worsen Iran's water crisis by diverting its resources to reconstruction rather than the environment and by further isolating the country from neighbors and others that have more advanced water technologies.

Solving Iran's water emergency requires creating alternative economic opportunities for farmers and boosting water use efficiency across the country, yet the war will likely strengthen the regime's goal of self-sufficiency and entrench its geopolitical stance, Lob said. "If anything, this war has hardened the regime," he said, adding that this makes it extremely unlikely that Iran could obtain advanced water and desalination tech from countries like the U.S. and Israel in time to stave off a water catastrophe. These technologies would not make up for decades of water depletion, but they could alleviate pressure on Iran's natural systems and help the country save water.

Many farmers cannot move into other sectors, because economic sanctions and Iran's isolation from international trade and investment restrict what jobs are available. Reconstruction after the war could cost tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars, further limiting economic growth and job opportunities, which would bake in more water depletion through continued reliance on agriculture, Lob said.

Iran wants to increase its desalination capacity to mitigate water shortages, Ganguly said, and it is building pipelines to carry desalinated water inland to cities like Isfahan. But desalination plants are expensive to operate, and they take up to six years to erect, Naser Alsayed, an environmental policy expert for the Gulf region at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, told Live Science. Iran is a mountainous country, meaning transporting desalinated water inland will be difficult, Alsayed added.

The longer the war drags on and the more Iran delays rethinking its water management and national priorities, the worse the water situation will get. Nature takes 20 to 30 years, on average, to recover from warfare, a 2025 study found. Water supplies could be contaminated with heavy metals, oil and other toxic pollutants for decades to come. This potential contamination, together with estimates that population growth will drive up Iran's water demand by 30% by 2050, suggests the country will face more severe water shortages in the future.

"If there is no structural change in the governance, things will only get worse," Shokri said. "The environmental system will collapse."

Water-shortage protests that have been building over the past few years indicate that Iran's society could break down if the regime doesn't act soon to preserve water, Alsayed said. "If people don't even have access to essential resources, then it's going to be chaotic — very chaotic," he said.

More revolts over basic access to water and electricity could lead to more violent crackdown by the regime and avoidable deaths, as well as emigration from the country. "The regime will find it hard to contain this; that's for sure," Alsayed said.

The solutions are numerous and obvious, Shokri said. "How about you heavily invest in wastewater treatment? How about you modernize your irrigation system? How about you start normal interactions with the world? How about stabilizing your currency? How about you use money to strengthen infrastructure? How about fixing your water transportation system?"

At the very least, Iran should integrate water use efficiency measures into its postwar reconstruction, Lob said. "We're looking at a country that's been devastated by war, so the situation is pretty bleak, and they're dealing with an economy that's in shambles," he said. Nevertheless, there could be an opportunity to build back better when it comes to water infrastructure. "One can hope."

Fingal's Cave is a sea cave in Scotland whose walls are made of hexagonally joined basalt columns. These structures may have formed within the same lava flow that shaped the Giant's Causeway, a geological formation in Northern Ireland composed of more than 40,000 interlocking basalt pillars.

Fingal's Cave extends 230 feet (70 meters) deep and 60 feet (18 m) high inside the small, uninhabited island of Staffa, located in Scotland's Inner Hebrides. It was carved by a volcanic eruption sometime during the Paleocene epoch (66 million to 56 million years ago).

As giant lava flows from this eruption began to cool and solidify, their top and bottom parts contracted and fractured into hexagonal shapes similar to those formed by desiccation cracks in muddy sediments. Eventually, these fractures extended and combined in the center of the flow, forming hexagonal pillars whose sides were later revealed by waves eroding the margins of the flow, according to the National Trust for Scotland.

The cave gets its name from an Irish myth about a warrior called Fionn Mac Cumhaill. According to the legend, Fionn — whose full name was shortened to Fingal, meaning "white stranger" — built the Giant's Causeway across the sea to Scotland to fight a rival called Benandonner, and Fingal's Cave is what remains of Fionn's path over the ocean on the Scottish side.

The 18th-century Scottish writer James Macpherson popularized the name Fingal's Cave with a book titled "Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books" that was published in 1762. Then, after visiting the cave in 1829, the Romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn wrote an overture — a musical introduction to a ballet or opera — known as the "Hebrides Overture" or "Fingal's Cave Overture."

Mendelssohn was inspired by the natural acoustics and eerie echoes inside Fingal's Cave, according to the National Trust for Scotland. A nod to these unique sounds is also found in the cave's Gaelic name, "Uamh-Binn," meaning "cave of melody" or "musical cave." Mendelssohn's overture established Fingal's Cave as a tourist destination, and other famous visitors include the authors Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson, the poets John Keats and Lord Alfred Tennyson, and Queen Victoria.

The cave can still be visited today through organized sightseeing cruises that take tourists inside the cathedral-like cavern when ocean conditions are calm enough.

The National Trust for Scotland owns Fingal's Cave as part of a nature reserve that was established in 2001. The cave and its surroundings host several types of birds and marine animals, including puffins, fulmars, basking sharks, dolphins, gray seals, minke whales and pilot whales.

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

A single day of attacks on four Iranian oil refineries produced as much sulfur dioxide (SO₂) as a volcanic eruption, a new analysis finds.

Remote sensing from Chinese and European meteorological satellites has revealed that fires caused by Israeli airstrikes launched on Iranian refineries and storage facilities on March 7 emitted a total of around 33,000 tons (29,800 metric tons) of SO₂ by March 8. The toxic gas cloud had traveled roughly 1,240 miles (2,000 kilometers) by March 9, reaching as far as East Asia, according to a study published Tuesday (May 26) in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.

Although the cloud had largely dissipated by the end of March 9, the impact of the "major emission event" should not be neglected because of its relatively short duration, the authors wrote in the study.

The pollutants mixed with precipitation to produce potentially corrosive "black rain" loaded with toxic particles such as hydrocarbons, and "some residents [in Tehran] experienced headaches, a bitter taste in the mouth, eye and skin irritation, and breathing difficulties," the authors wrote in the study.

The ongoing war between the U.S., Israel and Iran is already known to be releasing an extraordinary amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) alongside other greenhouse gases. A recent analysis found that, between Feb. 28 and March 14, the war contributed more CO₂ than Iceland emitted across the whole of 2024.

Now, researchers have mapped the size and trajectory of the SO₂ plume emitted following the March 7 attacks on the Fardis, Shahran, and Aghdasieh oil depots, and the Tehran Oil Refinery. To track the cloud, the scientists analyzed ultraviolet and infrared hyperspectral imaging data — which combines information about particular locations alongside spectral data — obtained by China's FengYun 3 satellites and the European Space Agency's Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite.

The scientists found that the amount of SO₂ in the atmosphere in Tehran rose sharply on March 8. The affected area spanned roughly 185,000 square miles (300,000 km²) with northeasterly winds sending the giant plume as far as East Asia.

By comparison, Iceland's 2010 Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption spewed roughly 22,000 tons (20,000 metric tons) of SO₂ in total over a three day period. The ash plume was so vast that it grounded flights in Europe for almost a month after a series of eruptions, and caused various health repercussions, with exposed individuals experiencing breathing difficulties in the following months.

SO₂ is a major precursor of acid rain, which has profound environmental impacts, such as removing nutrients from soil and polluting waterways. Pollution, including from sulfur dioxide, is also linked to depression, anxiety and other mental health problems. Research is needed to determine the specific public health impacts of the attacks on the Iranian oil refineries.

Antarctica's "Doomsday Glacier" is about to lose an ice shelf that protects it from warming ocean waters, which could have devastating long-term consequences for hundreds of millions of people affected by rising sea levels.

The already-melting Thwaites Glacier is nicknamed the "Doomsday Glacier" because if it totally collapses, global sea levels would rise by 26 inches (65 centimeters) and flood coastal communities. Rising sea levels are already threatening the residents of major cities in the U.S. and throughout the world, including New York, Boston, San Francisco and Miami.

Researchers don't expect the Florida-size glacier to collapse anytime soon, but Thwaites' eastern ice shelf is breaking away, which will likely accelerate the glacier's demise. The ice shelf has acted as a floating support structure, or buttress, slowing the flow of ice from the glacier, which is grounded on the Antarctic continent.

The shelf's breakup is "very likely to happen sometime this year," said Robert Larter, a marine geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), who announced that the BAS had already written the ice shelf's "obituary."

To discuss what the loss of the ice shelf spells for the glacier and coastal communities, Live Science spoke with Larter, who runs the U.K. arm of the science coordination office at the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), where U.S and U.K. research agencies have investigated the glacier's complex and rapidly changing environment. Here's what he had to say.

Patrick Pester: What is happening to Thwaites Glacier?

Robert Larter: The last bit of ice shelf in front of the glacier is poised to disintegrate. We don't know quite how this ice shelf is going to break up, but it's definitely going to go. It's tearing away from the glacier at the moment, and its internal structure is getting more and more fragile. You can see the fractures and rifts growing in sequences of satellite images.

PP: What happens when the shelf breaks free?

RL: That is the big question. What we have seen over the last few years, as the ice shelf's structure becomes weaker, is that an area of the grounded ice has started to flow faster — an area where glacier ice is flowing into the ice shelf. So this shows that it was doing something to restrain the flow of the ice.

PP: Are warming oceans to blame for the undermining of the shelf?

RL: Yes, we're pretty sure of that. It's clear that it is warm ocean water that has done the damage, and there was a change in the delivery of this water sometime in the middle of the 20th century that has set off the current phase of ice loss and grounding zone retreats.

It's more the circulation of the water than the warming. The source of the water is several hundred meters deep in the Southern Ocean. There is a huge body of relatively warm water at depth in the Southern Ocean, and it's when this gets onto the continental shelf and gets to the front of the glaciers that it starts to do the damage.

PP: And is it humans' fault?

RL: There is a lot of work going on to try to establish that. But yeah, indications are that it is caused by human-forced climate change.

So, the circulation in the Southern Ocean is mainly driven by surface winds, and what we know has happened is that there have been changes in the wind patterns that drive this Southern Ocean circulation. There is an active scientific debate about exactly how this works, but it seems pretty clear that in some way, the changes to the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds are what is driving warm water onto the continent. And those wind changes are part of the wider pattern of climate change that we're seeing.

PP: Do you think the "Doomsday Glacier" nickname is appropriate?

RL: I mean, it's got us a lot of media attention. Initially, we resisted it. We didn't want to adopt that name because it kind of prejudges the conclusions of what we were trying to establish. But the collaboration started in 2018 ‪—‬ so eight years ago ‪—‬ and in light of the eight years of research results that are now coming in, I increasingly think it is appropriate. I think, overall, our results point to that, eventually, the Thwaites Glacier will be lost.

The time frame is still the big open research question. Most of us who are working on it are convinced that the retreat is not going to stop, but there is still a lot to work on to predict more accurately how long that is going to take. There's a whole range of ice sheet computer models that give a range of predictions. So I don't think anybody can state with a very high confidence what the rate of ice loss will be over the next century or two.

PP: What's the human and environmental impact of this accelerated ice loss around the world?

RL: This is a difficult thing to communicate because we're still at the level of talking of sea level rise changes of a few millimeters a year. So the current overall rate is 4 or 4 and a half millimeters [0.16 to 0.18 inches] a year of global mean sea level rise, and if you add an extra millimeter, it's difficult to get people excited about that.

But really, the important thing that we need to get across is that a small rise in sea level has a really disproportionate effect when you look forward a decade or two to the risks of coastal flooding in many areas. You don't need a lot of sea level rise, just a meter or two, to turn your once-a-century coastal flooding event into a once-a-decade or even an annual event.

So, although we're talking millimeters a year, centimeters a decade, maybe a few tens of centimeters over a century — and that's if it doesn't accelerate — those sorts of rates of sea level rise within a few decades are going to present us with major problems. They're presenting coastal cities with major infrastructure decisions about how they manage their defense, which is why we need to do that research to get a better idea of how fast Antarctica, Greenland, etc., are going to contribute to global sea level.

PP: Is there anything else you'd like to add that we haven't covered?

RL: I think it's incredibly important to explain what an ice shelf is and to make clear that an ice shelf is not the glacier. And in fact, what we're talking about here in terms of some of the ice shelves around Antarctica, it's a relatively small ice shelf. The glacier is a couple of orders of magnitude larger in area than the ice shelf, but it is going to be a significant, very visible change that you can see in satellite images.

As this ice shelf does break up, which I think is very likely to happen sometime within this year, we're going to see this ice shelf really move away and maybe totally fragment. That's going to be quite a spectacular event when you look at the sequence of satellite images. And then it's going to be very interesting to see how the glacier responds to that.

It is increasingly looking like "Doomsday Glacier" is a good name. The glacier is doomed. And the rate at which we're losing it is going to increase, I think, but it's not going to happen in the next few decades.

PP: That's good. In the broader scheme of climate and environmental news, that's something, I suppose.

RL: Yeah, but if we're right that it's doomed, we're committed to that much sea level rise. Even if we get to net zero [emissions] at 2050, this glacier is going to go. It is going to add 65 centimeters [26 inches] to sea level rise, which is a large commitment and will be something that's difficult to deal with in many places around the world.

And probably, loss of this glacier destabilizes other marine-based parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, because the problem and the reason that this area is so unstable is that virtually the whole glacier is sitting on a bed that's a long way below sea level, and so are the neighboring glaciers.

So this instability is not going to stop when you've removed Thwaites Glacier. There's probably a total commitment in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet of more than 3 meters [9.8 feet] to sea level. It won't be our generation that has to deal with that.

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

A vital ice shelf is about to break away from Antarctica's "Doomsday Glacier," further destabilizing one of the world's largest and most vulnerable glaciers.

The Thwaites Glacier is nicknamed the "Doomsday Glacier" because its collapse would send so much ice into the Southern Ocean that global sea levels would rise by 2.1 feet (65 centimeters or 26 inches), flooding coastal communities worldwide. This collapse could take centuries, but there is an imminent threat to Thwaites' eastern ice shelf, which will likely accelerate the glacier's demise.

Researchers say that satellite images reveal that the Thwaites eastern ice shelf is about to detach from the glacier, New Scientist reported last week. While the glacier sits on land, the ice shelf is a floating body of ice that is attached to the glacier's mouth. Researchers still have a lot to learn about the glacier, but this shelf acts as a buttress, restraining the flow of ice from the glacier into the sea.

Robert Larter, a marine geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey, said that the ice shelf is very likely to break up in 2026. Larter runs the U.K. arm of the science coordination office at the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, where U.S and U.K. research agencies have investigated the glacier's complex and rapidly changing environment

"The last bit of ice shelf in front of the glacier is poised to disintegrate," Larter told Live Science in an interview. "We don't know quite how this ice shelf is going to break up, but it's definitely going to go."

Around the size of Florida, Thwaites Glacier is the largest glacier in West Antarctica. The gigantic river of ice is more than 6,500 feet (2,000 meters) thick in some parts and 75 miles (120 kilometers) across — making it Earth's widest glacier.

The glacier has been melting rapidly since the 1980s, losing hundreds of billions of tons of ice. That's due to relatively warm ocean water flowing underneath the ice shelf and melting the glacier at its base, where ice sits on ground that's below sea level. The glacier has retreated around 12.4 miles (20 km) since 1992.

Modeling the demise of massive glaciers is a complex task, making it hard to put an exact date on when Thwaites Glacier will finally collapse. However, a study published March 9 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters found that the glacier could be losing 180 billion to 200 billion tons of ice per year by 2067.

Thwaites Glacier's slow collapse is part of a wider concern among scientists for the future of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Thwaites is a key pillar of the ice sheet, protecting other ice from slipping into the ocean. If the whole ice sheet were to go, sea levels would rise by 10.8 feet (3.3 m), according to the British Antarctic Survey. The collapse of ice sheets like this one are considered tipping points, or "points of no return," in the fight against climate change — meaning that once they are crossed, they bring about permanent changes that cannot be reversed for many thousands of years.

The Thwaites eastern ice shelf is fracturing where the shelf is held in place by a ridge on the ocean floor, and at the mouth of the glacier. Larter said that movement on the western side of the shelf, where the ice is breaking away, has approximately doubled over the last eight months.

Much like other Antarctic sea ice — and the glacier itself — this shelf is undermined by warmer, saltier water being forced up from deep below the surface of the Southern Ocean. Larter noted that it's more about the circulation of water than warming, but indications are that human-driven climate change is ultimately to blame.

"There is an active scientific debate about exactly how this works, but it seems pretty clear that in some way, the changes to the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds are what is driving warm water onto the continent," Larter said. "And those wind changes are part of the wider pattern of climate change that we're seeing."

This shimmering satellite image shows tendrils of gold surrounding Ghana's sacred "lake of souls," which was carved out by a devastating asteroid strike around 1 million years ago.

Lake Bosumtwi (also spelled Bosomtwe) spans 19 square miles (19 square kilometers) ‪—‬ a little smaller than Manhattan ‪—‬ and is located just to the southeast of Ghana's second-largest city, Kumasi (partially visible in the top left of the photo). The roughly circular body of water, which is up to 240 feet (70 meters) deep, is the country's only natural lake.

To the Indigenous Asante people, the lake is a sacred site. According to their mythology, a hunter named Akora Bompe chased a wounded antelope into a small magical pond, causing the small body of water to rapidly swell into the lake we see today. It is also considered a "place where souls bid farewell to Earth before entering the afterlife," according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

In reality, the lake actually formed around 1 million years ago, when a roughly 3,300-foot-wide (1 km) meteor slammed into our planet, creating "arguably the best-preserved complex young impact structure known on Earth," according to the International Commission on Geoheritage.

The catastrophic collision likely triggered "a blinding flash of light and an immense fireball [that] would have incinerated life for dozens of kilometers," Marian Selorm Sapah, a senior lecturer in the University of Ghana's Department of Earth Science, told the Earth Observatory. If the same event occurred today, it would likely obliterate the city of Kumasi, she added.

Remote sensing analysis has revealed that the material blasted out of the impact settled in a raised, lobed pattern known as a "rampart" crater. This suggests the area was covered in a layer of groundwater when the collision occurred, according to the Earth Observatory.

Rampart craters are rare on Earth but are more common throughout the solar system, including on Mars, as well as on smaller bodies, such as Ganymede, Dione, Tethys and Charon. As a result, studying Lake Bosumtwi could provide insight into how these extraterrestrial craters formed, Sapah said.

The impact also fractured Earth's crust and allowed mineral-rich magma to rise to Earth's surface, forming shallow veins of gold and other valuable elements that have been mined for generations. This activity has resulted in the golden flecks and lines visible in this satellite image.

The rate of gold mining has accelerated in recent years due to advances in technology. Another satellite photo taken in 2024 (see below) shows much more visible gold, which has been exposed by this increased activity. (The lake also appears green in the newer photo due to higher concentrations of phytoplankton in its waters.)

"The stark visual evidence of anthropogenic [human-caused] change juxtaposed with a million-year-old geological landmark is striking," Sapah said.

See more Earth from space

When Earth first formed around 4.5 billion years ago, it was a ball of molten rock. Over time, heavier elements, like iron and nickel, sank to the planet's center, forming the Earth's early core.

Today, Earth's core remains an incredibly hot and dense sphere deep inside our planet. It consists of a liquid outer core, which starts at around 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) below Earth's surface and extends for 1,400 miles (2,200 kilometers). There is also a solid inner core, which begins at around 3,200 miles (5,150 km) below ground, with a radius of roughly 758 miles (1,220 km).

But just how hot is Earth's core? And how did scientists figure it out, if they can't go that deep underground?

Thanks to a combination of techniques, scientists have estimated that the temperature of the Earth's core is about as hot as the surface of the sun: It reaches around 9,000 to just over 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (roughly 5,000 to over 5,500 degrees Celsius). This temperature comes from the boundary between the inner and outer core, which is thought to be the hottest part of the core.

However, this temperature was not measured directly. Instead, it is inferred via experiments and theories that scientists have of the composition of the core.

Earth's center is composed primarily of iron, roughly 85%, alloyed with nickel and other lighter elements; this material is in liquid form in the outer core and solid in the inner core. Scientists deduced these properties from a mix of laboratory measurements of iron alloys at high pressures, analyzing the composition of meteorites, and understanding how seismic waves bend or disappear as they travel through the planet's interior.

Because Earth's outer core is made mostly of liquid iron, temperatures in this region must be higher than iron's melting temperature. At the planet's surface, the melting point of pure iron is 2,800 F (1,538 C). But this number doesn't take into account the "enormous pressures" of the deep interior, Quentin Williams, a mineral physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Live Science. Increasing pressures boost the melting point of iron and most other substances, which explains why the inner core is very hot, but remains solid due to its high pressure.

To determine the melting temperature of iron at astronomical pressures, scientists have conducted a number of experiments to simulate this environment. Some studies have squeezed a piece of iron between two sharpened diamonds (called diamond anvil cells) to generate high pressures while a laser heated the iron to high temperatures. Others have hit pieces of iron with high-velocity projectiles or shock-creating rays to simulate crushing pressures. The results from those experiments were then plotted and extrapolated to the pressures at the boundary of the inner and outer core, which led to the estimates ranging from around 9,000 to just over 10,000 F.

"To some extent, what we know about the Earth['s] core is all an educated guess," Shichun Huang, a geology professor at Sun Yat-sen University in China, told Live Science. Many mechanisms, such as how the solid inner core crystalizes into a solid, are still a mystery.

Hot from the beginning

All of this heat hints at our planet's unique history. When Earth formed, all sorts of material got pulled together, including the iron that makes up the core. That "gravitational potential was converted to heat," Huang said.

Further, scientists think that some time during that formation, a Mars-size object hit our protoplanet and that this force deposited a lot of heat into the interior. Some scientists think that radioactive elements, like potassium, uranium and thorium, also contribute to the planet’s internal heat, although whether these elements are actually present in the deep Earth is debated, Huang said.

A hot core also contributes to Earth's ability to host life. In contrast to other planets, Earth's interior has held onto much of its original, primordial heat.

"We're not really good at planet cooling," Williams said, meaning that Earth has held onto much heat from its original formation, unlike other rocky planets in our solar system. As a result, our planet has properties like plate tectonics, which moves pieces of the Earth's surface, bringing up nutrients and creating diverse habitats for life to evolve and thrive. The iron core that is part liquid also generates Earth's magnetic field, which protects the planet and life on it from dangerous solar winds.

"If you care about life, you should care about the inside of the Earth," Huang said. A blazing hot core in the center of our planet is what allows all of us to survive where we are today.

What is Earth made of? Find out with our inside Earth quiz!

A trove of fossils uncovered in northwestern Canada suggests that complex animals evolved in North America earlier than previously thought.

The site houses more than 100 fossils, including six taxa never found in North America before, with some dating back 567 million years. The findings push back the origins of animals that can move themselves in search of food by several million years, according to a study published May 20 in the journal Science Advances.

"For 3 billion years, life on Earth was dominated by microbes," study co-author Scott D. Evans, assistant curator of invertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, said in a statement. Then, all of a sudden, "we get these strange-looking marine animals big enough to see and capable of behaviors we would find familiar today. If we want to understand this transition, when life first became large, complex and unmistakenly animal, this new site has tremendous potential."

Complex, multicellular animals first evolved during the Ediacaran period (635 million to 541 million years ago). At this time, North America was part of the ancient continent Laurentia, which predated the supercontinent Pangaea.

Some of these early animals from the Ediacaran are linked to modern animals, like mollusks and jellyfish, while others look nothing like any species living today. Most, however, had soft bodies without shells or bones, so fossils from this period are rare.

Scientists split the fossils that did form into three groups, or assemblages, based on when the animals lived. The Avalon assemblage (575 million to 559 million years ago) consisted of stationary animals that lived deep underwater. The White Sea assemblage (559 million to 550 million years ago) contained a more diverse group of animals that lived in shallower water, and the Nama assemblage (550 million to 538 million years ago) included the earliest animals that formed shells and bones.

In the new study, the researchers discovered several fossils of species known to belong to the White Sea assemblage for the first time in North America. These fossils date back 5 million to 10 million years earlier than White Sea assemblage fossils previously found in Europe, Asia and Australia.

Among the fossils were Dickinsonia, a flat, oval-shaped organism that absorbed algae through its entire bottom surface; Funisia, a tube-shaped creature that represents the oldest evidence of sexual reproduction among animals; and Kimberella, an early mollusk that may now be the oldest fossil species to exhibit bilateral symmetry.

"Not only is this new site highly diverse, but also it is from a part of the rock succession where we have previously lacked fossil remains," study co-author Justin Strauss, an Earth scientist at Dartmouth College, said in the statement. "This is really exciting. Given our understanding of the regional geology in northwestern Canada, there is great potential here to revisit our understanding of Ediacaran Earth history."

That potential may apply to the creatures' evolutionary history. Based on the sediment patterns in the surrounding rock, the fossilized organisms found in Canada lived in deeper water than researchers previously thought creatures in the White Sea assemblage lived. That could suggest that the animals first evolved in deep water and gradually expanded their range into shallower water — the opposite of typical animal evolution.

"We think of the deep ocean as a dark, inhospitable place, but it is also relatively stable, with few fluctuations in things like temperature and oxygen essential to most animal life," Evans said in the statement. "This stability may have provided key opportunities to support early animal life."

The Appalachian Mountains hold massive untapped reserves of extractable lithium — enough to make 500 billion cellphones, 180 billion laptops or 130 million electric vehicles, new research from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) suggests.

The region holds 2.5 million tons (2.3 million metric tons) of the key element, which would replace U.S. lithium imports for 328 years if imports stayed at last year's level. Therefore, mining this mountain system could lessen the U.S.' dependence on countries like China, Argentina and Chile, but the environmental consequences of doing this are unclear.

The lithium resources, peppered across the eastern U.S. from Alabama to Maine, exist within extremely coarse-grained rocks called pegmatites, geologists reported in two new studies of the northern and southern Appalachians.

"This is the first USGS mineral resource assessment of the lithium resources in the region," said Christopher Holm-Denoma, a USGS research geologist and a co-author of the northern Appalachians analysis, which was published April 18 in the journal Natural Resources Research. "Assessing these deposits is part of a nationwide USGS assessment of lithium resources in pegmatites, in brines and dried lakebeds, and in ancient volcanoes."

Lithium is an essential component in electronics, military equipment and rechargeable electric vehicle batteries. It is also used in aerospace alloys, mood stabilizers and industrial lubricants. Demand for lithium to produce batteries, in particular, has risen sharply in the U.S. in recent years, highlighting a large gap between domestic supplies and needs, Holm-Denoma told Live Science in an email.

"The U.S. has some of the largest lithium reserves in the world," he said, yet "more than half the lithium we use in the U.S. is imported," because there is currently only one operational lithium mine in the country, in Clayton Valley, Nevada. Lots of products containing lithium are also made in countries like China, meaning the U.S. imports embedded lithium as well as the raw resource.

The northern Appalachians — which include parts of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware — hold around 990,000 tons (900,000 metric tons) of lithium, Holm-Denoma and his colleagues found. To get this estimate, the researchers analyzed geologic maps, geochemical and geophysical data, records of mineral occurrences, and the region's tectonic history. They also ran a model with a global dataset of lithium pegmatites to simulate the distribution and size of lithium deposits in the study area.

Lithium-rich pegmatites are relatively small deposits, measuring tens to hundreds of feet wide and hundreds of feet long. However, "when these resources are summed across the region, they represent a significant amount of lithium," Holm-Denoma said.

Lithium in the northern Appalachians is concentrated in Maine and New Hampshire. Several deposits there, such as the Plumbago North pegmatite in Maine, contain the mineral spodumene, which has a high lithium content by weight of 3.5% and well-established extraction steps, Holm-Denoma said.

The southern Appalachian study, published May 11 in Natural Resources Research, revealed that the lower half of the ancient mountain system — which encompasses parts of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama — holds approximately 1.57 million tons (1.43 million metric tons) of lithium. These resources are concentrated in South Carolina and North Carolina, which hosted the first large-scale mining of lithium pegmatite in the U.S. between 1942 and the 1990s.

Pegmatite hard-rock mining in places like the Carolinas used to produce most of the lithium used in the U.S., but no such mines are currently active, Holm-Denoma said. Lithium in Clayton Valley, Nevada, is extracted from dry lake beds, he noted.

Lithium-rich pegmatites crystallized from lithium-rich magma more than 250 million years ago during the formation of the Appalachian Mountains. Mining these deposits would involve opening giant pits and destroying wildlife habitats, affecting the landscape and regional biodiversity. It would also create harmful pollution due to waste products such as fluids and finely ground rock that can leach trace elements into the ground and waterways. Additionally, the heavy machinery that would be required for hard-rock mining in the Appalachians would pump huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and extracting lithium from those rocks would involve toxic chemicals and more greenhouse gas emissions.

Campi Flegrei, a volcanic caldera west of Naples, is speeding toward a transition within the next decade, a new study suggests, but researchers can't yet say whether that transition will be an eruption or some other change in the volcano's internal plumbing.

The caldera, also known as the Phlegraean Fields, is home to about 500,000 people who would be at risk in the event of an eruption. The caldera stretches about 9 miles (15 kilometers) in diameter and formed in a massive eruption 40,000 years ago. Other, smaller eruptions have happened since, including an explosive one in 1528 that built Monte Nuovo, a 433-foot (132 meters) cinder cone.

In the past 75 years, Campi Flegrei has been restless, with periods of particularly frequent earthquakes and ground uplift in the 1950s, 1970s and 1980s, which weakened the caldera's crust. Since 2005, the volcano has been increasingly active, and the floor of the caldera has risen about 4.6 feet (1.4 m), possibly indicating the movement of volcanic gases below the surface. The new research suggests that this increased activity has reached a point where even its acceleration is accelerating, indicating that something will change soon. What that "something" is remains a question, however.

"Our paper identifies when the system is likely to reach a breaking point, but it cannot determine what will happen at that breaking point with the current data," said study first author Davide Zaccagnino, a postdoctoral researcher who studies geological hazards at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Guangdong, China.

The paper is currently under review for publication in a peer-reviewed journal but has yet to be formally published; Zaccagnino and his colleagues posted it ahead of publication on the preprint database arXiv.

The researchers used a physics-based model to determine whether Campi Flegrei's accelerating activity falls into one of two categories. One is exponential acceleration, in which the speed of activity increases at a fixed rate. The other is called finite-time singularity, which means the acceleration itself is accelerating. Like a car with a stuck brake, the faster you go, the faster your rate of speed picks up.

This is important because it's not just an uptick in activity that determines whether a volcano will blow its top. The key, Zaccagnino told Live Science, is whether the crust has reached the point that it can no longer support the accumulating stress. It's like an athlete at the end of a marathon: A single step they could have taken with ease at the starting point might be the one that leads them to collapse at the finish line.

In other words, those previous periods of unrest in the 20th century matter, said Christopher Kilburn, a volcanologist at University College London who was not involved in the research.

"At each emergency, the crust is being stretched just that bit further, so the later emergencies are building on the previous ones," Kilburn told Live Science. .

What Zaccagnino and his colleagues found was that at Campi Flegrei, the pattern of seismicity fits a pattern of accelerating-accelerating change. That means the process feeding this change is self-feeding. Both ground uplift data and earthquake data indicate that this increasing rate of acceleration can self-sustain until around 2030 to 2034. At that point, something's got to give.

The movement of deep magmatic fluids are driving this process, fracturing and uplifting the brittle crust of the caldera, Zaccagnino said. What isn't clear is what happens when that process hits its end point. The nature of that transition could be an eruption, or it could be some other geological change that shifts the activity or settles it down. Nor does the research say what size or kind of eruption might occur, if one does, Kilburn noted.

Zaccagnino and his team are working to build a system that updates this activity prediction every few months based on the latest earthquakes and uplift from Campi Flegrei. The idea is to have a continuous, time-stamped record of forecasts for use by emergency management agencies, he said.

Kilburn warned that he would be leery of putting a potential date on an upcoming eruption, but he said the paper was an important additional piece of information pointing to fundamental shifts in how Campi Flegrei is behaving.

"Things are changing," he said, "and, therefore, past experience is not necessarily a good guide to the future."

What do you know about volcanos? Test your knowledge with our volcano quiz!