Atlantic Ocean currents that regulate the global climate can adapt to rising temperatures, but the sheer pace of warming may cause the catastrophic collapse of these currents in the next few decades, a new study suggests.

Climate models show that when global temperatures rise slowly due to small year-over-year increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂), evaporation and sea ice feedbacks maintain Atlantic currents' strength at temperatures exceeding 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) of warming above preindustrial levels. By contrast, a rapid rise in global temperatures driven by yearly greenhouse gas emissions equal to or higher than today's may trigger a tipping point at just 3.6 F (2 C) of warming, researchers found.

"Under slow warming, the entire ocean, from the surface down to its deepest layers, has time to gradually reorganise and adapt to the changing conditions," study co-author Henk Dijkstra, a professor of dynamical oceanography at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, said in a statement. "Under faster warming, the ocean simply can't keep up."

The study investigated how different rates of climate change could affect the stability of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a giant network of ocean currents that includes the Gulf Stream and carries heat to the Northern Hemisphere. An unstable AMOC could make the climate in some regions unrecognizable in the long term. Specifically, slower currents could unleash freezing weather in parts of Europe, exacerbate sea level rise along the U.S. East Coast, and trigger droughts around the equator, previous research has shown.

Previous research suggests that the AMOC is at its weakest in more than 1,000 years and might grind to a halt if global warming reaches a certain threshold, which scientists calculate could be around 7.2 F (4 C) above preindustrial levels. However, the new study hints that there is more to the story than a single number.

The AMOC is vulnerable to global warming because the circulation relies on surface waters in the North Atlantic sinking to form bottom currents that propel the system. Surface waters sink if they are denser — typically, colder and saltier — than the layers underneath. But rising heat in the North Atlantic is warming surface waters, and Arctic meltwater is reducing their salt concentration, so these essential bottom currents are forming less reliably than they were before.

Dijkstra and his colleagues conducted model experiments known as CO₂ ramp simulations, in which it is possible to simulate increases in atmospheric CO₂ levels over time. The researchers worked with state-of-the-art climate models to perform one slow CO₂ ramp, where CO₂ levels increased by 0.5 particles per million (ppm) per year, and two fast CO₂ ramps, where levels rose by 2.5 ppm and 5 ppm per year, respectively.

The slow CO₂ ramp simulated a much slower increase than the current rise in atmospheric CO₂, which is between 2.4 and 2.5 ppm per year.

"We deliberately looked at a scenario that is much slower than what we're experiencing today," study co-author Reyk Bӧrner, a physical oceanographer at Utrecht University, said in the statement. "That allowed us to isolate the effect of the warming rate alone, independent of how warm it eventually gets."

The results were published Aug. 13 in the journal Nature Climate Change. They suggest that the pace of warming, rather than the extra heat on its own, will determine whether the AMOC persists under climate change. In the slow CO₂ ramp experiment, the AMOC remained strong until up to 9.9 F (5.5 C) of warming before the system collapsed. In the faster CO₂ ramps, the AMOC collapsed when warming reached 3.6 F.

Slow warming allows the AMOC to adapt to changing conditions through two mechanisms, the researchers found. First, gradually rising temperatures may cause more evaporation in the North Atlantic Ocean, removing fresh water and concentrating salt in the surface layers, which makes it easier for them to sink. Second, the North Atlantic would take up less Arctic meltwater in a warmer world, because most of the ice would have already melted. Smaller freshwater inputs would allow the system to regulate itself, but the key is that these changes must happen slowly, according to the study.

The research has implications for climate policy, as current targets and risk assessments are based on temperature thresholds. Policy agendas should also consider the rate of warming, the researchers argued in the statement.

Additionally, it's important to note that climate strategies involving a temporary overshoot — meaning we temporarily exceed a warming target before dialing temperatures down again with technologies such as carbon capture — can trigger irreversible tipping points in the AMOC and other Earth systems, study first author René van Westen, a physical oceanographer at Utrecht University, said in the statement.

"A tipping point inducing an AMOC collapse could already be triggered during such a temporary overshoot," van Westen said. "Once that happens, it can't simply be undone."

The new study shows that an AMOC collapse can be avoided if we slow the pace of global warming, but the exact limit is still unclear, Jenny Mecking, a research scientist at the National Oceanography Centre in the U.K. who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

"While this study alone is not enough to establish bounds on the rate of CO₂ change to prevent AMOC collapse, it highlights the importance of considering the rate of CO₂ increase alongside the level of global warming when investigating earth system responses to climate change," Mecking said.

This picturesque satellite snap shows a "street" of swirling clouds alongside a giant, multicolor plume in the waters between three countries in Asia.

The swirling clouds, known as a Kármán vortex street or von Kármán vortices, were carved out by winds that whipped around a 6,400-foot-tall (1,950 meters) shield volcano, known as Hallasan, on South Korea's oval-shaped Jeju Island. The lofty peak sits in the East China Sea around 60 miles (100 kilometers) south of the Korean Peninsula (top right of the photo) and between China's Jiangsu province (on the left) and Japan's Kyushu island (on the right).

When the winds are just right — between 11 and 34 mph (18 and 55 km/h) — air streams around the elevated peak, creating counterrotating vortices on the leeward side that can sculpt nearby clouds into the swirling patterns we see in this image, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. The three largest swirls collectively stretch roughly 230 miles (370 km) from end to end.

The photo also reveals a thick curtain of brownish sediment stretching beneath the waves along China's eastern coastline, including off Shanghai (located around halfway along the landmass in the image). Most of this sediment was discharged by the Yangtze River, the third-longest waterway on Earth, and similar scenes are visible from space for most of the year.

However, a more distinct plume of yellow and green sediment extends up to 270 miles (430 km) from the coast, appearing to almost touch the von Kármán vortices.

The elongated, pale plume is likely the result of increased turbulence in the Yangtze ‪—‬ caused by high rainfall ‪—‬ coupled with stronger seasonal currents and vertical ocean mixing in the winter, according to the Earth Observatory.

It is not unusual to see von Kármán vortices swirling in the cloudy skies near islands with large peaks, such as Mexico's Guadalupe Island or Spain's Canary Islands. Similarly, large sediment plumes are often photographed by satellites. However, it is much rarer to see such oceanographic and atmospheric phenomena occur side by side.

Jeju Island was created by a submarine volcanic eruption around 2 million years ago and has been inhabited by the Indigenous Jeju people for at least 8,000 years. A 2025 study found that people on the island today have unique genetic mutations leftover from this group, which may help the local Jeju Haenyeo ("women of the sea") free dive for food in deep and cold waters without specialized equipment.

Hallasan (also known as Mount Halla) is the tallest mountain in Korea. It is technically an active volcano, although it has not erupted since A.D. 1007, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program. It is renowned for its extensive system of subsurface lava tubes, which are among the "finest" in the world, according to UNESCO.

See more Earth from space

Despite being one of the remotest places on Earth, more than 100,000 people journey to Antarctica every year. And within the next few years, the number of tourists flocking to the continent each summer could reach 450,000. That's far fewer people than visit the Great Barrier Reef or Grand Canyon National Park, but Antarctic tourism comes with a colossal carbon footprint — and the frozen continent is a particularly vulnerable place.

A study published online July 8 in the journal Annals of Tourism Research reveals the impacts of Antarctic tourism from the perspectives of 25 former guides who, year after year, took visitors on cruise ships to some of the most remote locations on Earth. What these guides witnessed eventually made them quit, the study and an accompanying article in The Conversation show.

To find out exactly what drove the tour guides to leave their roles and whether such individual choices make a difference to Antarctica's overall condition, Live Science spoke with two of the study's authors: social anthropologist Zdenka Sokolickova and polar tourism researcher Liz Cooper, who both work at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Sokolickova and Cooper divided the interviews between them, speaking with 14 male guides and 11 female guides about their experiences. Together, those conversations shone a light on the reality of Antarctic cruises and the huge emotional toll of quitting a dream job.

Sascha Pare: How did you get the idea to interview former Antarctic tour guides?

Zdenka Sokolickova: We both started to work as postdocs on this project. We started with interviewing current Antarctic tour guides, because we wanted to know more about the industry, and about how they felt about the tourism development. The industry is booming; it's growing rapidly. And with more vessels, more tour operators and more people wanting to go and visit on a guided tour, there is also a bigger need for guides. So more people are accepted into the industry, and that comes with consequences; for example, the industry might need to lower the standards for qualifications, or there are safety risks coming with people who have less experience.

But we also heard that, at the same time, some tour guides are leaving the industry. We felt that it could be interesting to get to talk to these quitters, because they are likely critical and without vested interests in the industry, since they have deliberately left. We posted ads or calls for participants on closed Facebook groups, because we also know that the polar-guiding identity is quite strong and people tend to stay connected to the community, at least digitally or virtually. Within six days, we had 30 sign-ups. It went really fast, which kind of confirmed that there is a need within the community to voice some concerns.

Liz Cooper: We were also motivated to do this study because, generally speaking, tourism research usually incorporates the voices of people who are connected to the industry. It's not so common to see the voices of people who have removed themselves from the industry or refuse to engage with the tourism industry.

Antarctic tourism is, on a global level, a small industry. Around 120,000 people per year go to Antarctica [as of 2025/2026]. But the really interesting thing about Antarctic tourism is, of course, that this is the most remote place on Earth that you can visit as a tourist. This means also that it's the most carbon-intensive form of tourism that you can engage in on Earth. And, of course, it's an extremely fragile place, as well. So you have enormous global environmental impacts from the emissions from long-haul flights and from cruise ships, and then you have wildlife populations and a very fragile ecosystem there that is easily pitched out of balance. We also don't know very much about how tourism impacts the ecosystem in Antarctica either. We do know that it's bad, but we don't really know how bad. It's, in those terms, a risky practice, I would say.

SP: Did the former guides mention specific events that contributed to, or propelled, their decision to leave the industry?

ZS: In the "Mind the gaps" paper [the Annals of Tourism Research study published July 8], we speak about these tipping points that can be external or internal. External means that something in the outer world happens that makes you realize that you cannot continue like this any longer. We had quite strong accounts of that happening, like the cruise ship breaking the sea ice for the sake of the guests' experience so that they could land on the ice, for example, and observe wildlife or get to a place.

Many of these former Antarctic tour guides were polar tour guides, meaning that they also worked in the Arctic. For some of them, this decision happened through experiencing both Arctic and Antarctic tourism, so some of these tipping points happened in the Arctic. But we still felt it's relevant for our analysis, because polar tourism is connected, even though geographically, these are separated regions. We had a very strong account of something that happened in the Arctic, where the cruise ship hit a whale, even though the tour guide saw it and he was trying to communicate that. But there is a hierarchy in the chain of command that he couldn't break. He ran to the bridge and told off the captain, and then, after that incident, he quit.

There was a story about someone finding a little penguin chick in a boot hole. Normally, when you're trampling over snow in Antarctica, you're wearing these snowshoes — boots — and you're supposed to cover up the holes when you're leaving the place. But, obviously, not everyone does that. And so this person found a little chick that was struggling and couldn't climb up the boot hole. That also was a tipping point; it was the moment when that person realized, "I don't want to participate in this any longer, because if I weren't here, this little creature would have died."

LC: The most striking story that I remember was a participant who was talking about how the ship that they were working on sometimes would try and find a place on the sea ice to land, so that they can get the guests out walking on the sea ice. Not all companies do this, but some do. And then, they have to put the gangway down onto the ice so that people can walk directly out onto it. This piece of ice that they had chosen was apparently too thin, or too unstable or something. Where the gangway was connected to the ice, the ice kept breaking, so the ship kept having to move farther into this ice floe to get a secure holding.

On this piece of ice, the participant remembers that there were penguins with their chicks. And penguin chicks, when they're born, have fluffy down feathers, which are not waterproof, so they can't swim until these feathers have molted and they grow waterproof feathers. What this participant recalled was that, as the ship was moving in to get a hold on the ice, it broke this ice floe into many parts. Penguin chicks became isolated on smaller ice floes. Our participant remembered thinking, "That chick is not going to shed its down feather before this small ice floe melts." Essentially, our participant came to the conclusion that these chicks wouldn't make it.

SP: Emotionally, how easy was it for these guides to quit their jobs?

ZS: For some people, it was more difficult internally, emotionally, to make that decision, and for others, it was easier. We think that for those who were more environmentally concerned, it was, maybe a bit counterintuitively, more difficult to take that decision. Now we could speculate [about why]: Was that bond with the place stronger? Also, the emotions that were felt upon quitting were very mixed, I would say. It was a mixture of both feeling angry and feeling sad with feeling relieved — a "weight lifted," as someone put it.

But it definitely was, for many people, a struggle that took a long time in terms of years — from when you realize that your values actually cannot reconcile with what you engage in; through you realizing that there is a radical solution to that, and that you cannot muddle through or find alternative justifications; to deciding to quit; and still from there, to actually quitting. There is a path to walk. You can have decided, but you still can be doing the job, not feeling good about that.

SP: Has it been easy for these people to find new jobs that are more aligned with their values?

LC: We found that many of those who had quit primarily for environmental reasons and had gone through this particularly difficult decision-making process then made it their life objective, or aim, to do something good for the environment. We have a group of participants who actually moved into environmentally focused jobs. We have somebody who went on to set up an environmental NGO [nongovernmental organization]; we have somebody who went on to fight wildfires; various sustainability positions. It was, for some of the participants, not just a difficult and life-changing decision in the sense that it was hard to do but also because it changed the trajectory of their lives into becoming somebody who's more actively pro-environmental in the world.

SP: Did any of them regret their decision to quit?

ZS: Many of them did, until this day. Since it was a difficult decision to make and to act upon, it still triggers emotions, and people still think back. Yes, some of them do resent and regret and wish it was less environmentally harmful and wish they still could be having that dream job.

SP: Did any of the former guides reflect on the effectiveness of their decision, given that someone else could have potentially replaced them in their job the very next day?

LC: Yes. As I recall, many of our participants actually didn't really believe that their decision would make an impact in the overall environmental state of Antarctica. I don't agree with that. But there was a general feeling that, "OK, my individual choice isn't going to make a difference in the grand scheme of things" — also because, like you say, they expect that they will just be replaced, and probably replaced by somebody who's less environmentally concerned than them and might engage with Antarctic tourism practices in a less environmentally responsible way, which actually might make things worse. But in those cases, the decision to leave was basically mainly based on this internal conflict — this uneasiness that got so monumental that they couldn't live anymore doing this job.

What we do in the paper, now on a bit more of an academic level, is we argue that even though, yes, a single choice of an individual really makes an incremental change to the enormous problem of the climate crisis, these decisions [can be framed as] high-impact, pro-environmental behaviors. Because when you look at other individual behaviors that people are encouraged to do in their lives to reduce their carbon footprint, reduction of long-haul flying is one of the most impactful things you can do. And these guides were traveling several times per year — long-haul, back and forth — to South America, and then on cruise ships a lot, which are also carbon-intensive. Their reduction in their carbon footprint by making that choice has been massive. Even though they were feeling personally like maybe they weren't making that much of a difference, I do think that their choices have made a big difference.

SP: Was there anything in the interviews that surprised you?

ZS: Several of them said that they felt alone when they were going through this process of deciding and after [they quit]. They said that the fact that we asked for their opinions and their stories made them feel that they're actually part of a bigger community of people. It made me feel like we're actually responding to a need that exists in the field and that these people actually want to be heard. They want their concerns to be public, but they maybe had feared repercussions, or had even faced some repercussions, when they were being critical while still working in the industry.

SP: Did your interviews touch on other popular destinations where tourism may be doing more harm than good? I'm thinking, for example, of the Galápagos Islands and "last-chance" tourism in the Arctic.

ZS: They actually did. Some of the participants who quit in Antarctica still guide in the Arctic. So what we often heard was this juxtaposition, or comparing what it's like to be guiding in Antarctica and in the Arctic. The often-repeated argument, which I resonate with, is that in the Arctic, there are human communities. If it's their desire to choose this tourism path, tourism can be benefiting the human communities. In Antarctica, there are no permanent human settlements, and the nonhuman Indigenous inhabitants of Antarctica have no voice. Who asks the penguins, or the krill, or the orcas whether they want tourism there? If we could ask them, they would probably say no. Also, many of the guides live either in Northern Europe or North America, so the travel is shorter to the Arctic. It just makes more sense for them to stay in the business up there and quit in the South.

I actually did have one guide who also had experience from Bali, for example, and other regions in Southeast Asia. There, the reflections were actually around how destructive tourism can be in Indigenous regions, where people have no say and they don't benefit from tourism; they're just being "consumed" as a resource, as a sightseeing item, basically. That person quit cruise guiding overall, because they felt it was destructive.

LC: We also had a few people who, in their life after the decision, still worked in tourism but deliberately only in very local tourism. They, for example, set up a kayaking company in the local area where they lived, because they're still passionate about showing people beautiful places and connecting people with nature, but they simply couldn't reconcile taking people so far to create that connection with nature.

SP: Having done this work, what do you think people should consider when booking their next vacation?

LC: I would like people to properly research the impacts and consider, if the impact is significant, whether they really need to go or whether they can go in a low-impact way. For example, can you take the train instead of a plane? And if you have to take a plane, do you really have to go?

ZS: Several of the tour guides actually said they wished people asked themselves, "Why am I going to this place?" If it's just to tick off the seventh continent or the 75th country, or if it's just to show off on social media that you have a selfie from the Antarctic continent, then it's not worth this enormous carbon footprint.

If it's to feel a connection with nature and be away from the urban, hectic life, you definitely do not need to go to a place that is this remote. Perhaps you have a place where you can feel that connection with nature just a couple of kilometers away.

If it's this lifelong dream, I don't feel entitled to say, "You shouldn't go," because for those people, it really plays a big role in their lives. But the "bucket listers," as the guides often called them — the guides felt like these people actually don't belong, and maybe even they don't deserve this beauty and this breathtaking fragility, to be consumed and to be forgotten the next month, when another intercontinental holiday is happening.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

Brazil is home to some of the world's largest aquifers, yet many of those groundwater stores — which provide 55% of the country's water — have shrunk so much over the past 25 years that they face irreversible damage. This groundwater depletion has been caused by drought, increased water evaporation due to climate change, and pumping for human consumption, new research suggests.

Most of the world's soybeans, sugarcane, oranges and coffee — as well as a big proportion of the world's cotton and corn — are grown in the areas with the most depleted aquifers, so the dwindling groundwater supply could have ripple effects for food markets around the world, including in the U.S.

The depleted aquifers may also collapse river systems that produce hydroelectric power for Brazil, forcing the country to turn to coal or biomass for electricity, experts told Live Science.

Groundwater declines probably won't lessen total agricultural production in the next 10 to 20 years. "The concern is what happens if these trends persist for several decades," study first author Augusto Getirana, a researcher in the Hydrological Sciences Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told Live Science in an email. "Brazil is one of the world's major breadbaskets, so its water security has consequences well beyond the country itself."

A clear geographical contrast

Brazil holds the world's largest renewable freshwater reserves by country, mostly thanks to the Amazon Basin and its rainforest ecosystem. However, compared with countries like the U.S. and India, which have thousands of groundwater measuring sites, Brazil's network of monitoring wells is extremely sparse. Therefore, for the study, Getirana and his colleagues trained artificial intelligence (AI) models to fill in the gaps in the data.

The researchers fed the models measurements from 398 monitoring wells, satellite data showing tiny shifts in gravity resulting from groundwater changes, and information about the geology and land cover in different areas, among other datasets. AI reconstructed monthly groundwater level changes between 2002 and 2023 across different aquifers in Brazil at a resolution of about 6 miles (10 kilometers), Getirana said.

"We then reconstructed groundwater levels to estimate aquifer recharge — how much water reaches and replenishes the groundwater system — throughout the country," he explained.

The results, which were published June 3 in the journal Science Advances, showed severe, persistent groundwater losses in parts of central, northeastern and southeastern Brazil — including portions of the São Francisco, Paraná, Southeast Atlantic and East Atlantic basins, which together cover 760,000 square miles (1.97 million square kilometers), or about 23%, of Brazil's land area.

Some of Brazil's most critical aquifers went years with no recharge. By contrast, the Amazon Basin and parts of southern Brazil showed either no change or localized groundwater gains attributable to shifts in rainfall and natural climate variations, Getirana said.

"There is no single trend for the entire country," he said. "We found a clear geographical contrast."

Climate change is the culprit

The study didn't attribute groundwater changes to specific pressures, but it is clear from the data that climate shifts played a major role in the observed patterns, Getirana said. Several of the sharpest declines in aquifers came after prolonged droughts and major climate events, such as an El Niño cycle between 2015 and 2016.

Due to patchy monitoring, it is difficult to untangle and quantify the impacts of agriculture, industry and households on groundwater levels. However, the results revealed a substantial overlap between groundwater losses and areas with intense irrigation, urban and industrial demands, mining, land conversion and high well density, Getirana said.

"The most scientifically defensible interpretation is therefore that climate creates the underlying water deficit, while extraction and land-use changes are probably amplifying its magnitude and duration in heavily used regions," he said.

Javier Tomasella, an environmental scientist and hydrologist at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research who was not involved in the study, agreed that the main cause of aquifer depletion in Brazil is climate change.

"Droughts are lasting longer and becoming more intense in Brazil, and this is affecting most of the country, particularly the central area and the Northeast of the country," Tomasella told Live Science. Harsher droughts reduce groundwater recharge and create a higher demand for water, meaning people extract more from aquifers during dry spells. "This is why the impact in irrigated areas is much higher," he said.

The findings suggest that if droughts intensify over the next few decades, major agricultural regions in Brazil could run out of water to grow certain crops. Groundwater provides a buffer when rainfall and surface water resources become unreliable, especially for agriculture and municipal water supply, Getirana said.

The worry isn't so much that aquifers will dry up completely but rather that water levels will drop so low that it will become too expensive to pump water compared with the returns from producing crops.

"This is the same type of progression already observed in intensively exploited aquifers such as the High Plains and [Central] Valley systems in the United States and aquifers in northern India and Bangladesh," Getirana said. "The water does not necessarily disappear overnight; it progressively becomes harder, less reliable and more expensive to access."

Supply-chain risks

Farmers will likely adapt to smaller water supplies by switching water-intensive crops, such as soybeans, to less-thirsty ones, such as corn and wheat, Tomasella said. Some may do this during the dry season to save water, as is already common in regions such as northern Paraná that have a "double-crop" system. But if current market conditions hold, farmers' decisions about what to grow will ultimately depend on how much money they can make from crops while covering extra irrigation costs, he said.

The total production of mostly rain-fed crops like soybeans and corn likely won't be affected any time soon, but the balance of these crops may change, Tomasella said. Conversely, the total production of irrigated crops such as coffee, sugarcane and oranges may decline, "but that depends on how droughts will evolve in the next two decades," he said.

Countries that rely on food imports from Brazil might experience supply disruptions, but the scale of these is hard to predict. The most-exposed country is probably China, because it imports roughly 80% of its soybeans from Brazil, Getirana said. The U.S. and Europe may see declines in imports of coffee, sugar and oranges, while Asia and the Middle East could be affected through cotton and corn, he added.

"The United States alone relies heavily on Brazil for coffee and orange-juice imports," Getirana said.

Assuming market conditions don't change, it's unlikely there will be a decrease in Brazilian beef production, because demand for beef is so high, Tomasella said. If anything, he said, beef production will increase, because Brazilian farmers haven't yet maximized the number of cattle per acre of pasture. However, cattle do emit huge amounts of methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas, he added.

Ripple effects

The study has implications beyond agricultural impacts, because aquifers are connected to river systems. Groundwater declines could cause rivers to dry up, and this would hit Brazil's hydropower network, which supplies 60% of the country's electricity, Tomasella said.

The alternative to hydropower is burning fossil fuels and biomass to produce electricity, he said. This comes with huge carbon dioxide emissions, which would worsen climate change and further amplify Brazil's water issues.

In the short term, groundwater losses are more likely to affect drinking-water supplies in big Brazilian cities like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo than they are to impact agriculture, Tomasella noted.

"If droughts intensify, it might reach a point where you have to make very tough decisions," he said. "The real question is, 'Is this the new normal?' If this is the new normal, then we are in very deep trouble."

This dramatic astronaut photo shows a highly active stratovolcano in Tanzania that was recently adorned with a striking white "crown" of ash. The explosive volcano produces a rare type of lava that is unusually cool, uniquely colored and the fastest-flowing on Earth.

The volcano is officially named Ol Doinyo Lengai and stands up to 9,718 feet (2,692 meters) above the grassy plains of the Arusha region of northern Tanzania. The local Maasai people call the towering peak the "Mountain of God," because they believe it is the residence of the supreme creator god Ngai (also known as Engai or Enkai), according to the book "Sacred Mountains of the World" (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Ol Doinyo Lengai is one of Africa's most active volcanoes; it has been erupting on and off for the past 15,000 years. It alternates between effusive eruptions, where lava seeps out of its vents, and sporadic explosive outbursts, which can drastically alter its appearance. Its most recent eruption, which is effusive, has been going on since April 2017, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program.

The sacred mountain produces a rare type of lava that consists of natrocarbonatite rock, which is rich in sodium, potassium and calcium carbonate but low in silica. As a result, it is much cooler than most other lava, dipping to temperatures below 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit (600 degrees Celsius). It also has an unusually low viscosity, which makes it "some of the fastest-flowing lava in the world," according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

When it solidifies, this unusually runny lava turns surprisingly pale, due to chemical reactions with rainwater and moisture in the air. In this image, you can see several lightly colored rivers of rock snaking down the volcano's flank. The youngest of these lava flows was created during an eruption in 1998.

For most of the past century, Ol Doinyo Lengai's summit consisted of a bowl-like depression that gradually filled with lava. But between 2007 and 2008, a series of major explosive eruptions birthed a 330-foot-tall (100 m) ash cone that now looms over the summit's center.

This explosive event has transformed the volcano's appearance when viewed from space, additional photos from the Earth Observatory show. In the featured image, a dark spot of fresh lava can be seen in the center of the cone, making it look like a crown.

Ol Doinyo Lengai is located in the East African Rift System, a roughly 2,000-mile long (3,500 kilometers) area surrounding a divergent fault line where the African Plate is splitting into the Somali and Nubian plates.

This region has been tectonically active for more than 25 million years and has created some of the continent's most interesting topographic features, including Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya, which are located on each side of Ol Doinyo Lengai, according to the Earth Observatory.

The godly mountain is around 10 miles (16 km) south of Lake Natron, a red salt lake that's famed for its large flamingo populations. The geographical features are often photographed alongside one another.

See more Earth from space

This article was originally published by Yale Environment 360.

Near-extinct oryx are returning. Farms are prospering as irrigation water reaches fields for the first time in decades. Farmers are even nurturing new trees on their land. Once a byword for drought and famine, the African Sahel region on the southern flank of the Sahara Desert now has more water than it has for decades. Wells are filling as water tables have risen by 13 feet or more in places. Lake Chad, which was one of Africa's largest expanses of water before shriveling during the droughts, is recovering.

Over years of drought in the late 20th century, the sun hard baked the soils of the Sahel. Now, erratic but extreme rains are returning to this semi-arid region, causing lethal floods but also replenishing rivers, filling desert depressions, restoring water to dried riverbeds known as wadis, and sluicing rainwater off impermeable soils directly into aquifers. The process began in the 1990s but has accelerated in the past five years.

"Across the Sahel, from Ethiopia to Senegal, we have evidence of increased terrestrial water storage," says Richard Taylor, a hydrogeologist at University College London who has led ground teams investigating the relationships between climate, land use, and groundwater recharge in the region.

But increased rainfall since the drought years of the 1970s and 1980s explains only some of the rewetting of the Sahel. It cannot fully account for the transformation, say researchers. Also driving the rewetting, they posit, are changes to the land surface, ranging from the internationally funded Great Green Wall project to the revival of traditional water harvesting methods and the chaos caused by jihadist militants, which has led to the abandonment of irrigation projects that once emptied rivers of their flows.

Much remains unclear in these remote lands on the edge of the Sahara Desert, but the trend seems set to be long-term, with climate scientists saying more — and more extreme — rainfall is on the way in the 21st century. As underground water reserves revive, some are forecasting an agricultural renaissance.

The Sahel is a band of semi-arid land around 500 miles wide that stretches across North Africa, from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east, with a fast-growing population above 150 million. It is a transition zone between the Sahara Desert in the north and savanna grasslands and coastal forests to the south. Water is everything in the Sahel. Its rains are critical to human survival, but they have been sporadic and unpredictable since the close of a humid era around 5,000 years ago.

How much rain the Sahel gets depends on the West African monsoon, a wet wind that sweeps north from the Gulf of Guinea between June and September, and on how far the monsoon penetrates into the interior. Whether it reaches the 15th parallel north of the equator or stalls at the 10th parallel make the difference between a good year and a failed harvest, say hydrologists.

During the droughts of the late 20th century, as the monsoon repeatedly fell short, up to a million people died of hunger and disease. But now, with a strengthening monsoon, there is talk among scientists of the Sahel being on the verge of a new humid era.

That is good news for wildlife. With wadi systems reviving in Chad's Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim nature reserve, conservationists are documenting resurgent numbers of aardvarks, porcupines, badgers, and foxes, and the successful reintroduction of the scimitar-horned oryx, which was once declared extinct in the wild but now numbers more than 600 individuals. Elsewhere, West African giraffes are browsing on verdant vegetation in areas from which they had disappeared.

As the rains return, farmers have boosted crop yields by nurturing the natural regrowth of some 200 million trees on formerly treeless fields in southern Niger, according to former World Resources Institute geographer Chris Reij. And, supported by new aid programs such as the World Bank's regional recovery program PROLAC, they are re-establishing small-scale irrigation systems by tapping groundwater around resurgent oases in Chad, Niger, and Cameroon.

"In the past … there was not enough water to irrigate crops, and our harvests were meager. Now our lives have changed," Achta, a farmer in Chad, said last year. She now has water to plant on four times as much land and has doubled her onion crop. The Bank says her story "reflects a broader transformation across the Lake Chad basin."

Most places in the Sahel are seeing more rainfall. And that rain has become concentrated in extreme downpours from clusters of violent thunderstorms, known to meteorologists as Mesoscale Convective Systems, that occasionally bubble up during the monsoon season. Sahelian storm clusters are now rated as some of the most powerful on the planet, and they deliver most of the region's rainfall. There has been a threefold increase in the frequency of extreme storms since the 1980s, according to a recent analysis.

Why the revival of the rains? An assessment published in 2021 by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found "high confidence" among climate scientists that it is a result of strong warming in the North Atlantic, caused by a combination of global heating and a reduction, in Europe and North America, of sulphate aerosols from coal burning, which once created a thin haze that cooled the ocean. That cooling prevented the northward migration of the West African monsoon into the Sahel, resulting in drought. But the clean-up has warmed the ocean and pulled the monsoon back into the Sahel, strengthening its ability to produce deluges.

The effects of these mega-storms are especially challenging in a region more used to disasters caused by the absence of rain. Niger, one of the world’s 10 poorest countries, saw tens of thousands die from famine during the late 20th century droughts. Now, it sees more deaths from floods than droughts. Fierce storms during the 2024 monsoon season inundated the capital, Niamey, and in rural areas washed away more than 150,000 mud-brick homes.

Sudden downpours are initially destructive, but they are a boon to underground water reserves. Falling onto compacted ground, the water does not initially infiltrate the soil but rushes into rivers and dry wadis, which speed the water's flow into aquifers.

Hydrologists say that this indirect infiltration is most intense after heavy storms. "In some locations, rainfall intensity is more important than the annual rainfall amount in determining the magnitude of groundwater recharge," says Taylor. This intensity, he says, is a major cause of the rapid rising of water tables — especially since, in the Sahel, most water drains not to the ocean but inland to depressions and lakes.

Not only are new ponds forming across the formerly arid lands; ancient networks of wadis are being restored. And Taylor's network of researchers has found wells across the region refilling. Mean water tables in much of Niger have risen by some 13 feet, indicating a 15 percent increase in aquifer reserves.

This local data is now being corroborated by analysis from satellites that measure changes in land mass by tracking subtle changes in gravitational force from the land below. NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment mission has found a sharp increase in gravitational force across the Sahel in the past two decades that hydrologists attribute to growing terrestrial water storage.

But rainfall and its intensity are only part of the story. Events on land also play a part.

Environmentalists have long held that the encroachment of agriculture into the Sahel during the 20th century caused "desertification" by removing natural vegetation, destroying soils, and allowing the advance of desert sands. But hydrologically, the effect may be the opposite because some crops can actually help the land retain water.

All vegetation absorbs moisture from the soil before transpiring it into the air. But shallow-rooted African grain crops such as millet and sorghum transpire less moisture than the deeper-rooted grasses they replace, leaving more moisture in the soil.

An amplifying factor is the drought-driven crusting of soils, which has increased runoff by around 50 percent in the central Sahel in recent decades. Analysis by Christophe Peugeot, a hydrologist at the HydroSciences laboratory at the University of Montpellier in France, found that the droughts "have permanently transformed the region's soils… fueling today's floods."

Much of this runoff ends up in Lake Chad, on the border between Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger, which drains an area almost six times the size of California. The lake's dramatic demise became a totemic image of the late 20th century hydrological decline of the Sahel. But less well known is that the lake is now recovering, as water inflows increase. Hydrogeologists at the University of N'Djamena in Chad report that in 2024 it swelled to a peak of more than 9,000 square miles, almost as big as in the 1960s and 10 times its size in the mid-1980s.

This growth is partly masked by large areas of saturated vegetation in the lake that do not show up in satellite images, say hydrologists. But as the lake grows, the aquifer beneath is also refilling.

Some researchers argue that deliberate efforts to capture rain in soils can also help explain the rising groundwaters across the region. One such effort is the Great Green Wall. Originally planned as a barrier of planted trees to prevent the advance of the Sahara, it has morphed into more grassroots efforts to control soil erosion by capturing rainfall and improving soil moisture, all of which can improve infiltration underground.

Many such projects revive traditional water-harvesting techniques, including the placement of stones along hill contours, digging small holes known as "zai pits" amid crops, and forming crescent-shaped mounds around trees.

Alpha Lo of the Climate Water Project, who highlighted the restored Sahelian groundwaters in a recent online analysis, argues that such techniques are "the primary reason." But most researchers believe that, while locally effective in nurturing trees or crops, they are not happening at sufficient scale to explain the region-wide resurgence.

A final suggestion is that humans are extracting less water from rivers, leaving more to eventually infiltrate into aquifers. One driver of this trend is the decline of big irrigation projects that were constructed during the drought years to boost food production. For instance, Cameroon once largely emptied the River Logone, historically the biggest single source of water flowing into Lake Chad, to grow rice. But the SEMRY irrigation project reportedly diverts much less water now, due to poor management, aging infrastructure, and the outmigration of farmers.

In areas around Lake Chad, farmers have also abandoned their irrigated fields because of Boko Haram, a militant jihadist group that continues to terrorize communities. Timmo Gaasbeek, food security policy officer at the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, says the chaos in northern Nigeria "means that the water in the rivers is not caught upstream, and continues to flow into Lake Chad, where it contributes to higher water levels and more groundwater recharge."

Most climate models predict a further increase in annual rainfall in the coming decades, due to global heating and the banishing of cooling aerosols from the North Atlantic. Taylor predicts that "the Sahel will experience particularly marked increases in extreme rain" that will "serve to increase groundwater recharge."

Peugeot says that "the increased availability of water in valley bottoms could promote the development of irrigation, offering new prospects in several Sahelian regions." Buoyed by such predictions, Nigeria is looking to restore the 165,000-acre South Chad Irrigation Project on the former shores of Lake Chad, which has long been abandoned for want of water.

But the road ahead will not be straightforward. Sahel rains will continue to be erratic on all timescales. Most immediately, climatologists are predicting that this year's strong El Niño event could deliver drought in the eastern Sahel, but bumper rains and more floods further west.

Yams and sweet potatoes are often confused, and the names are sometimes used interchangeably in the U.S. However, they're two different crops. So what sets them apart?

The differences lie mainly in these vegetables' classifications, plant growth, and nutritional profiles, experts told Live Science.

Despite both growing underground and appearing somewhat similar, "Botanically, sweet potatoes and yams are not closely related, as they belong to different plant families," said Phillip Wadl, a research geneticist at the U.S. Vegetable Laboratory in Charleston, South Carolina. Sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) are in the morning glory family (Convolvulaceae). Yams (Dioscorea), by contrast, belong to the Dioscoreaceae family, and there are 11 yam species cultivated for food and income, Wadl told Live Science in an email.

Yams and sweet potatoes also belong to different plant groups, or "cotyledon types," said Jeffrey Cole Denis Gregorie, a sweet potato specialist at the Sweet Potato Research Station in Chase, Louisiana. Yams are monocots, plants whose embryo has only one cotyledon, or seed leaf, like grasses and lilies. Sweet potatoes are dicots, plants with two embryonic seed leaves, which include many fruits and vegetables, such as grapes, squash, strawberries and tomatoes.

In addition, yams and sweet potatoes store food in different parts of the plant. "Sweet potatoes form storage roots which are enlarged parts of the root system," Wadl explained, "whereas yams form tubers, which are enlarged underground stems for nutrient storage."

A single sweet potato plant typically produces about four to 10 sweet potatoes, while a yam plant yields about one to five yams. Sweet potatoes generally take about three to five months to mature, compared with about six months to a full year for yams, according to Craig Yencho, a professor of horticultural science and a sweet potato and potato researcher with North Carolina State University.

How do you tell sweet potatoes and yams apart?

Visually, sweet potatoes and yams are easy to tell apart when you know what to look for. Sweet potatoes tend to be shorter and blockier, with tapered ends. Yams are usually long and cylindrical, sometimes with "toes," or branching shapes.

Sweet potatoes come in various flesh colors, including orange ‪—‬ the most common color in the U.S. ‪—‬ as well as yellow, purple and white. Their skin is typically thin and smooth, whereas "yams often have a rough, bark-like skin and their flesh can be white, purple or reddish," Wadl said. One well-known purple yam, known as ube (Dioscorea alata), is a popular ingredient in treats such as ice cream, cookies and pound cake.

Sweet potatoes and yams also have noticeable differences in their culinary and nutritional profiles, Wadl said. "Sweet potatoes are generally sweeter and have a moist, creamy texture when cooked, although dry types are available," he explained. "Yams, on the other hand, tend to be starchier, drier, and have a more earthy, sometimes less sweet, flavor compared to sweet potatoes. Their texture can be more like a regular potato."

Nutritionally, the two crops are quite different, too. Sweet potatoes, particularly the orange-fleshed varieties, are an excellent source of beta-carotene (a precursor to vitamin A), vitamin C, dietary fiber, potassium and some B vitamins. "While nutritious, [yams] typically contain less beta-carotene than orange sweet potatoes," Wadl noted. Instead, yams are a good source of potassium, vitamin C, manganese and dietary fiber.

Sweet potatoes are generally considered safe to eat both raw and cooked, Wadl said. By contrast, many wild varieties of true yams, especially those not cultivated for commercial consumption, contain compounds like dioscorine that could make them toxic to humans if eaten raw. "These must be thoroughly cooked to remove the toxins and make them safe for consumption," Wadl said.

Thanksgiving confusion around yams and sweet potatoes

If yams and sweet potatoes are so different, why do so many Americans call sweet potatoes "yams"?

Part of the answer lies in history. The yam was a key provision on voyages of enslaved people from West Africa to the Americas, "used to feed captives a familiar food," said Judith Carney, a professor of geography at UCLA. "In mainland plantation societies of North America where the African yam could not be grown, the sweet potato served as a substitute dietary staple." Because the two crops shared some characteristics, "the word 'yam' came to refer vernacularly to both tubers in mainland America, as we see in the U.S. today," Carney told Live Science in an email.

The U.S. sweet potato industry also leaned into the confusion, adopting the term "yam" for marketing reasons, Gregorie told Live Science in an email. "In the United States, many orange-fleshed, moist varieties of sweet potatoes are often mislabeled as "yams" to distinguish them from the drier, white-fleshed sweet potato varieties," Wadl explained.

As a result, the "yams" at most U.S. supermarkets are probably sweet potatoes. "Garnet yams" and "jewel yams" aren't actually yams, despite those labels; instead, they're softer, sweeter varieties of sweet potatoes, according to the University of California, Davis.

Although genuine yams are sold in many international markets in the U.S, "if you're buying a "yam" in a typical U.S. supermarket, you're almost certainly purchasing a sweet potato," Wadl said.

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

Nestled within Brazil's Cerrado tropical savanna — the second-largest biome in South America, after the Amazon rainforest — Uberaba Geopark is a time capsule from the Late Cretaceous period (100.5 million to 66 million years ago).

The geopark boasts abundant, well-preserved fossils from the last chapters of the nonavian-dinosaur era, according to UNESCO, earning it the nickname the "Land of the Giants," or "Terra dos Gigantes" in Portuguese. Paleontologists have discovered more than 10,000 fossils belonging to dinosaurs, prehistoric crocodyliforms (a group encompassing living crocodiles, alligators, caimans and gharials, as well as their extinct relatives), turtles and other ancient creatures within the park's boundaries.

One of the best-known discoveries is the fossil of Uberabatitan ribeiroi, a titanosaur measuring 89 feet (27 meters) long and 33 feet (10 m) tall, according to UNESCO.

The finds were clustered in impressive geological features, including the Serra da Galga formation and Serra Geral mountain range. These structures formed from ancient basalt flows, which came from giant volcanic eruptions that predate the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent 180 million years ago.

The park has the ideal conditions to preserve fossils because it alternated between shallow lagoons and river systems when the dinosaurs roamed the region, meaning the animals' remains were conserved in mud when they died.

Serra da Galga and Serra Geral also overlie one of the world's largest freshwater reservoirs, the Guarani aquifer, which supplies drinking water for more than 100 cities in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.

The Cerrado savanna, which houses the entire park, is a critical-yet-underprotected carbon sink that hosts more than 12,000 plant species and diverse animal life.

The "Land of the Giants" was added to UNESCO's list of geoparks in 2024 in recognition of the region's geological and natural heritage.

What is now the Uberaba Geopark was the birthplace of Brazil's modern livestock market, which is one of the biggest in the world. Farmers in the 19th century introduced zebu (Bos indicus) cattle from India because they are better suited to the climate in Brazil and require less food than common domesticated cattle (Bos taurus). Zebu cattle also produce lower greenhouse gas emissions than common domesticated cattle do, according to UNESCO.

Uberaba Geopark is open to visitors. There are several museums and trails to explore, including one that leads to the Vale Encantado, or "Enchanted Valley," which contains forests, waterfalls and prehistoric rock formations, according to the BBC.

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

The Caspian Sea, the world's largest inland body of water, is in major trouble. Since the mid-1990s, this saline lake, located between Europe and Asia, has lost an area nearly the size of Sicily. But until now, it wasn't clear why.

Researchers finally provided answers in a study published June 5 in the journal Earth's Future. Using ground- and satellite-based observations, they connected falling water levels to a drastic drop in river inputs from Iran, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia, all of which border the Caspian Sea.

The team particularly highlighted losses from Russia's Volga River, the longest river in Europe, which supplies roughly 80% of the Caspian's inflow.

To find out why the Volga is discharging less water into the Caspian Sea now than it did 30 years ago, we spoke with Amir AghaKouchak, a co-author of the study and professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine.

AghaKouchak, who directs UC Irvine's Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing, explained why river inputs have dropped and how decades of water withdrawals have put the Caspian Sea on a path to collapse. He also touched on a solution to this crisis — and revealed why Russia's hunger for ammunition to attack Ukraine is making it harder to save the Caspian Sea.

Sascha Pare: Falling water levels in the Caspian Sea have been attributed to natural variability, and more recently, there's been a focus on climate change and increased evaporation due to rising temperatures. But what did the results of your study show?

Amir AghaKouchak: People quickly jump to conclusions about climate change. Of course, that is important, but it cannot explain the change that we have observed. Over the last 30 years, water levels in the Caspian Sea have shrunk by around 2 meters [6.5 feet] or so. Just to put things in perspective, this translates to about 24,000 square kilometers [9,300 square miles] of sea area loss — about 5%. When we look at drivers, we notice that rainfall hasn't changed significantly over the lake and upstream, so the decline cannot be explained simply by changes in rain.

Evaporation has increased, so it explains maybe about one-third of the change. There is less water in the lake, and that indicates there's probably some water lost along the way. We don't have a lot of human-related data ‪—‬ for example, water withdrawal for irrigation or groundwater wells. That area is very difficult; the countries are not open to sharing data. A lot of our results are based on looking at proxies. Our interpretation is that temperature caused about 30% of the change and the rest is probably because of human activities.

SP: Which human activities does your research suggest are responsible for the Caspian Sea's decline?

AA: Several of the countries on the Caspian Sea have built large dams — Russia, for example. They are all desperate for hydropower. All of the countries around the lake [have also built infrastructure to supply agriculture], and one reason is that they want to create jobs and improve the local economy. Water demand is increasing in all those countries around the Caspian Sea. It's not surprising to see lakes drying or groundwater levels falling.

It's hard to find data about how much water countries are using; they keep data very private, especially places like Russia. We don't have detailed information, but the Volga-Don Canal in Russia is one of the projects that is contributing to this crisis. [Editor's note: The Volga-Don Canal is a ship canal that connects the Volga and Don rivers at their closest points.]

But we cannot blame this whole thing on that. We have to be careful with our language; we can't say one project is responsible. Most likely, this is the collective impact of many different small withdrawals from here and there, overall contributing to a significant decline in the Volga River outflow into the lake. In the paper, we have different rivers, but the Volga dominates because it's the largest river. The Volga has a higher impact than all the other rivers combined. There are lots of demands along that river basin.

SP: Did you expect human activities to play such a big role, or were you surprised?

AA: We did not have any expectations at the beginning. In fact, when we started this project, I reached out to a lot of colleagues from neighboring countries around the Caspian Sea. We didn't want to do it on our own, sitting in California, looking at another area of the world, without having local people involved. If you look at the co-authors, you see people from Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan — so, we have local experts. We thought this was really important to have those perspectives. I didn't want to reflect the opinions of only one research group. What we have here is the collective opinion of people who have not met in person; we only exchanged emails to look at the results, and then we came up with those conclusions.

We do have a Russian involved, but not from an official Russian institution. I thought this was really important, because there's more back-and-forth [with a large group of people]. If two people have to convince themselves of an idea, it's much easier than with 20. Also, we brought in people from other countries who had projects in the area; for example, there is one group from Finland and another group from Germany. We tried to come up with something that this large group of people could agree on. It was not easy, but it worked out.

SP: What is the worst-case future scenario for the Caspian Sea if shoreline countries fail to decrease their water demands?

AA: My concern is that, in the same general area, we have the Aral Sea, which is now about 5% to 10% of what it used to be, and Lake Urmia, in northwest Iran, that has also shrunk really fast and is now very small, with low levels of ecological activity. So we have two smaller lakes in a very similar climate that, from an ecological perspective, are dead. Because we have seen those degrade, we have to consider that this is the worst-case scenario for the Caspian Sea, too.

The Caspian Sea is much, much bigger. I hope it doesn't happen, but it's on the same path. Again, it's much larger, so it would probably take 100 years [to shrink as much as the Aral Sea and Lake Urmia], even with the current trend. But because we have seen those lakes shrink really fast, it deserves attention. Due to the size of this lake, the potential impacts will be huge. Even if 20% of the Caspian Sea dries out, the consequences will be very significant. It would be a disaster.

SP: You mentioned that drying lakes can become ecologically "dead." What other impacts could the Caspian Sea's falling water levels have on the surrounding landscape and people?

AA: The lake's retreat will expose the lake bed, and because it's saline, you have all kinds of minerals that will be exposed. With the next strong wind, they will go into the air. The health impacts include respiratory diseases, and even eye diseases, that are linked to salt minerals in the atmosphere. Those are the immediate consequences. Additionally, those minerals can travel long distances. In general, salt deposition on agricultural land reduces productivity. It takes a while, but if those lands are exposed for a long time, this will have an impact on the agricultural sector in those areas, which means potential food security issues. We don't exactly know what those materials are on the lake bed, so it's hard to know precisely what the consequences will be.

There is also serious shipping happening in this region. Right now, most of the shrinking is happening in the Caspian Sea's northern part, which is shallower [than the rest of the lake]. The drop in water levels is about 2 meters, and you can imagine that if you have a port and water levels drop more, you won't be able to operate. You'll need to extend your shipping routes southward; you'll need to invest and spend a lot of money to use other ports and docking sites. We have evidence of that around the Aral Sea and also Lake Urmia. There used to be these docking sites and ports, but those are now far away from the water.

SP: What must bordering countries do to save the Caspian Sea and prevent these negative effects?

AA: Demand management is absolutely critical. Demand management doesn't get a lot of attention, because unlike big projects that make the news, management means you have to cut things and do things that people don't notice. Some people argue that politicians don't show a lot of interest in demand management, but it's something that we have control over. The technological opportunities are there.

But when you look at that area, there is a big war ‪—‬ so probably it's not the priority to invest in management. There are a lot of things that we don't talk about in the paper that are relevant. I recently learned through discussions with people from the region — this is something that came to us from co-authors and collaborators — that many countries in that area grow cotton, which uses a lot of water. It has a lot of applications, but apparently, one of them is military. Cotton is used to produce ammunition. Russia needs a lot of ammunition, so not only are they growing it themselves, but they also bought neighboring reserves from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. So now, even those countries have an incentive to grow more cotton. This is driving more irrigation, more groundwater extraction, more surface water depletion, and probably more impacts on the Caspian Sea.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

Each year, tons of soil, silt and rocks flow into reservoirs in the U.S. and get stuck there, creating a "ticking time bomb" that threatens lives and livelihoods. According to a new study, around a fifth of the world's reservoirs are currently at high risk of filling with sediment, and by 2060, half could be inoperable as a result.

The sediment takes up space meant for water, putting additional pressure on structures that were not built to contain large quantities of sand and sludge. As the reservoir fills with the material instead of water, sediment-filled reservoirs pose a serious threat to water security and the safety of people living near or downstream of them — and as the climate changes, scientists expect the problem to worsen.

"We are losing storage space in our reservoirs faster from sediment accumulation than we gain space from new dam construction," Amy East, a geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, told Live Science.

What is dam sedimentation?

Dam sedimentation is not a uniquely U.S. problem. Rain pulls sediment down slopes into waterways. Normally, this sediment would travel through the river system, shaping the water flow, creating habitats, and fortifying coastal wetlands and estuaries against erosion. In many parts of the world, this sediment is also a vital natural fertilizer for crops. But after a river is dammed, this sediment can collect in the reservoir.

A 2023 study published in the journal Science found that sediment buildup was the greatest threat to global water storage in existing reservoirs — even more than drought.

New research, which includes smaller reservoirs, has offered a more nuanced and concerning picture. In the study, published June 5 in the journal Nature Sustainability, researchers assessed the state of reservoir sedimentation globally. They looked at more than 550,000 reservoirs, most of which spanned less than 0.4 square miles (1 square kilometre). They found that almost 1 in 5 of reservoirs globally are at high risk of filling up with sediment.

The researchers found that sedimentation is eating into global reservoir storage capacity at about 7.3% every decade. There are 16 global hotspots that are at high risk of reservoir sedimentation, threatening water supplies to more than 2 billion people and impacting more than a quarter of global irrigated land. One of these hotspots includes the western U.S.

The authors found that sedimentation risk was especially pronounced in regions with dense small-reservoir networks supporting key crop systems.

"Without intervention, we project that, by 2060, more than half of all reservoirs could become functionally inoperable," the authors wrote. This includes more than half of all small reservoirs and more than a third of large reservoirs globally.

Where is it a problem in the U.S.?

North America has the second largest number of reservoirs, after Asia, according to the global survey. And at 7.8%, its sedimentation rate is higher than the global average, ranking it third after Oceania (9.9%) and South America (8.1%),

The U.S. is home to many small dams, said Matthias Kondolf, a geomorphologist at the University of California, Berkeley who wasn't involved in the study. "All the focus tends to be on the big dams, and these many, many small ones have been neglected," he told Live Science.

From the 1940s to 1970s, there was a big push by the U.S. government to build "farm ponds," he said. In western Oklahoma, for example, "all these dams are now filling up with sediment, and there's nothing in place to assess the safety of these features, which have now become threats."

Some of these dams have already failed, following large storms as the ageing dams were not able to cope with the volume of water. A 2018 study found that since 1980, there have been on average 24 dam failures a year in the U.S.

Reservoirs in some regions are more at risk than others. The western U.S. is a natural hotspot because it has a steeper topography, meaning more sediment naturally ends up in watersheds, East, who wasn't involved in the new research, said.

And in areas where human activities like farming or logging disrupt the landscape, rainfall is likely to drag even more sediment into reservoirs, East said. "Those types of land use can create sediment-producing hotspots almost anywhere."

In California, for example, more than half of small reservoirs in maize-growing areas are filling up with sediment at a rate of more than 10% a year, which threatens local maize production.

The threat to water security will be particularly acute in places struggling with wildfires, such as the western U.S. After fires, rain washes the debris and sediment into watersheds. A 2024 study in California found that most of this post-fire sediment erosion occurred upstream of reservoirs, rather than in places where sediment would move downstream directly to the ocean.

The dam-sedimentation situation is likely to get worse as the climate changes, researchers said. As the climate changes, there will be more extreme weather events, such as droughts and wildfires, adding more sediment to watersheds. Dams are designed to cope with the pressure of water, not sediment which exerts more force on dam walls. Moreover, in seismically active areas, the sediment vibrates at a different frequency than the concrete of the dam, which creates further impact against the structure. Additionally, the dams are just getting older.

"What do we do 50 or 100 years from now when we have all these reservoirs across the landscape filled with sediment, sitting there as ticking time bombs?" Kondolf said.

What can be done about it?

For a reservoir to be sustainable long-term, the amount of sediment entering it and leaving it should be the same.

"A big part of preventing reservoir sedimentation problems is upstream soil conservation in the watershed," East said. Interventions include ensuring that land use, such as agriculture or timber harvesting, follow best practice to reduce the amount of sediment washing off the landscapes.

If sediment is already in the dam, it can be difficult to manage and expensive to remediate, Kondolf said. Some dams, such as Fall Creek Dam in Oregon, have mechanisms that enable engineers to release sediment. But in the past, reservoirs were not designed to manage sediment and little thought was given to how to decommission them.

"This is one of those issues that falls in the cracks between different agencies and responsibilities," Kondolf said. Some larger facilities fall under the remit of the federal government. Other dams fall under state governments. California, for example, recently launched a state-sponsored program to future-proof the state's dams.

But smaller dams often get overlooked, Kondolf said.

One option is to remove the dams entirely. For example, sediment-related concerns contributed to the decision to remove the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams in Washington. The Elwha River later carried most of the sediment to its river mouth.

For smaller dams with a relatively small amount of sediment, "you just blow up the dam and let the sediment work its way downstream", Kondolf said.

There are other technological solutions, but they are expensive, such as retrofitting dams to enable them to pass sediment; creating a bypass to route sediment-heavy water around the dam; and mechanical dredging.

Another option is to empty the reservoir of water and let the river cut a channel through the sediment, Kondolf said.

However, released dam sediment brings its own risks. If not managed carefully, sediment can flood the river system and disrupt downstream ecosystems.

"The economics of managing reservoir sediment long-term were not generally incorporated into dam design and planning in the last century when many western-U.S. water projects began," East said. This has "pushed the cost burden on future generations."

But the reality is that reservoirs around the country are filling with sediment. It is reducing their ability to store water and potentially endangering the communities living downstream of them — and unless addressed, the problem will only get worse.

Scientists have confirmed that a flowering plant native to the mountains in southwest China is carnivorous, supporting a prediction made by Charles Darwin more than 150 years ago.

The species, Saxifraga candelabrum, grows at elevations above 8,200 feet (2,500 meters) in the Hengduan Mountains, which connect the southeast portions of the Tibetan Plateau to the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau.

The plant has stems and branches covered in sticky hairs that can trap small insects, predominantly nonbiting midges. However, scientists were unsure if these insects were being ingested by the plant. In a new study, researchers showed that S. candelabrum can digest and absorb nutrients from insects after capturing them, proving that the plant is carnivorous. The scientists published their findings Tuesday (Aug. 4) in the journal Nature Communications.

This is the first demonstrated case of carnivory in the saxifrage plant group, said study co-author Douglas Soltis, a distinguished professor of biology at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Other carnivorous plants typically grow in moist, boggy soils, but S. candelabrum is found in dry alpine areas, Soltis told Live Science in an email. "These are all nitrate poor soils — that's why this carnivorous habit has evolved a number of times" to supplement the plants in vital nutrients, he said.

In 1875, Darwin theorized that two species closely related to S. candelabrum that also have sticky hairs — S. rotundifolia and S. umbrosa — may be carnivorous, based on their ability to catch insects. But the 19th-century naturalist couldn't show that the plants digested their prey or reused the nutrients in insect tissues — two conditions that are key to confirming carnivory in plants. Without these conditions, a species is considered simply "protocarnivorous," meaning it catches and kills insects or other small animals but doesn't digest or absorb them, according to the study.

"Although untested at the time, Darwin’s hypothesis provided an important inspiration for our study," study co-author Hang Sun, a researcher in the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Kunming Institute of Botany, told Live Science in an email.

The researchers conducted field observations and herbarium surveys of S. candelabrum, which revealed that mature plants with more numerous and longer branches had an average of 71 trapped insects on them. In the herbarium surveys, the team found that 43 out of 45 specimens had caught insects, suggesting that insect-trapping is a widespread phenomenon in this species.

Next, the study's authors showed that S. candelabrum possesses phosphatase, a digestive enzyme commonly found in carnivorous plants. They did this by labeling the phosphatase enzymes with fluorescent molecules to visualize them under a specialized microscope, a technique known as fluorescence tagging.

To determine if S. candelabrum digests and absorbs nutrients from insects, the researchers labeled fruit flies with a stable form of nitrogen before feeding them to the plants. This led to a marked rise in stable nitrogen in S. candelabrum and in a different, known carnivorous species, which the team used as a control group. By contrast, a non-carnivorous plant that formed a second control group did not show an increase in stable nitrogen, indicating that S. candelabrum is carnivorous.

Finally, the researchers performed a genetic analysis, which revealed that S. candelabrum has genes in common with known carnivorous plants that are linked to prey attraction, digestion and nutrient absorption. Together, the results showed that S. candelabrum evolved carnivorous traits to cope with its nutrient-poor environment, adapting its hairs — which were initially used for herbivore defense — into insect traps, according to the study.

Larger insects, which S. candelabrum requires for pollination, rarely get stuck to the hairs, the researchers noted in the study, suggesting that the species has perfectly balanced its needs through evolution.

Other Saxifraga species and plants belonging to the same lineage could turn out to be carnivorous, too.

"Many members of the Saxifragaceae, which includes genera other than Saxifraga, have sticky glandular hairs and are often covered with insects," Soltis said. "I would not be surprised if other members of the family are also carnivorous — as Darwin predicted."

The study broadens the scope of carnivorous plant research, Sun said. "Carnivory may therefore be far more widespread among flowering plants than previously recognized," he said.

Charles Darwin quiz: Test your knowledge on the 'father of evolution'

Forecasters are warning that the ongoing El Niño is likely to become supercharged in the coming months and inject potentially unprecedented heat into our already warming world.

El Niño is the warm phase of a multiyear natural climate pattern, but models suggest this year's cycle will be exceptionally intense. Super El Niño conditions could contribute to temperature extremes until next year, but scientists are warning that it may also pose longer-term threats.

Jong-Seong Kug, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Seoul National University in South Korea, uses observational data and artificial intelligence to model El Niño events.

Kug has found that super El Niño events can drive sudden, dramatic and even irreversible climate regime shifts. Live Science spoke with Kug to learn more about climate regime shifts and the long-term threats posed by this year's ongoing El Niño.

Patrick Pester: Last year, you published a study that found super El Niño events significantly increase the likelihood of potentially irreversible climate regime shifts. With a super El Niño now looking very likely, how concerned should we be?

Jong-Seong Kug: We should be concerned but not alarmist, because our study does not suggest that every super El Niño inevitably causes a climate regime shift. Rather, a super El Niño can push an already-stressed climate ecosystem across a critical threshold. If a system is near a critical threshold, then strong forcing can induce irreversible change.

Current forecasts indicate a very strong El Niño is increasingly likely later this year. We need to watch vulnerable regions closely, particularly those that are already experiencing severe warming, drying, ecosystem degradation or ocean stress.

PP: What kind of climate regime shift do you fear most?

J-S K: I am particularly concerned about the persistent shift in major ecosystems, such as the Amazon rainforest moving toward a much drier and degraded state. You know, a long time ago the Amazon was a savannah area, so we are now approaching this kind of tipping point. Also, in the Amazon, this drying can weaken [or] even reverse the forest's role as a carbon sink.

The Amazon is a carbon sink, but imagine it becomes drier and drier, and there's some die-back of the forest. Now, [carbon] sink becomes source. This could amplify global warming long after an El Niño event.

PP: Is there anything we can do to mitigate the threat of extreme climate and weather events in the coming months?

J-S K: We cannot stop El Niño. But we can greatly reduce its human impact or ecosystem impact. Governments should use precision forecasts to strengthen our heat health plan, water and food management and flood and wildfire preparedness. In the long term, a rapid reduction in greenhouse gas emissions remains essential because every additional degree of warming increases this possibility that an extreme natural event will trigger lasting damage.

PP: Do you think a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is likely, given where we are now?

J-S K: I don't think so. It's very difficult.

PP: So, where does that leave us?

J-S K: I don't know. There are some additional techniques we may use at a critical point. Have you heard about climate engineering? Like stratospheric aerosol injection [reflecting solar radiation back into space]. If we cannot do anything, then we have to choose that kind of technology. I don't want this kind of situation, but maybe in the near future we have to decide.

There are two kinds of climate engineering. One is carbon mitigation, just direct air capture [taking carbon out of the atmosphere]. That is a safe way. The other is solar energy management. We can deflect more solar energy from the surface.

So, the easiest way is just to inject an aerosol into the stratosphere; then this aerosol reflects solar radiation, and then global temperatures will decrease. It's like a volcano: After a big eruption of a volcano, the global mean temperature drops by about 0.6 degrees [Celsius, or 1 degree Fahrenheit] because there is volcano aerosol [in the atmosphere]. Instead of volcano aerosol, artificially we can inject aerosol into the stratosphere. Then global temperature can easily decrease.

But there are many side effects. Some we already know, but some we don't know. Like climate inequality. If we artificially decrease temperatures, then some countries will have a drought or a flood. And then how will we compensate?

Obviously, if you want some kind of climate mitigation, we need a kind of consensus across the countries.

PP: Is there anything else you'd like to add that we haven't covered?

J-S K: This year, super El Niño is developing in an already exceptionally warm climate. We are already seeing widespread heat waves this year, so we cannot attribute every individual event to this El Niño. But El Niño will intensify toward the end of this year, so it is likely to further increase the risk of extreme events in many regions, so we need to prepare.

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

This eye-catching astronaut photo shows the fractured surface of the world's highest frozen lake lurking in the lofty climbs of the Tibetan Plateau. The smooth, white line where the ice meets the water closely follows a disputed border between China and India.

The elevated lake, known as Pangong Lake or Pangong Tso, sits at an altitude of 13,862 feet (4,225 meters), according to NASA's Earth Observatory. It is long and thin, stretching 83 miles (134 kilometers) across Ladakh, part of the Kashmir region administered by India; and Tibet, an autonomous region of China.

This photo shows a roughly 9.5-mile-long (15 km) section of the river, located around a third of the way along its length from west to east. This is also where the most widely accepted border between Ladakh (on the left of the photo) and Tibet (right side of the photo) lies. However, the exact position of the divide, commonly known as the Line of Actual Control, is poorly defined and has shifted in recent decades, according to The New York Times.

Pangong Lake is endorheic, meaning it has no outflow, and the only way water can escape is via evaporation. As a result, the lake's waters have built up an unusually high concentration of salt over thousands of years. This would usually prevent it from freezing. However, the temperature in the region can drop to minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 25 degrees Celsius), according to a local travel site, which is cold enough for the salty water to freeze over.

It is unclear why the lake's ice is fracturing in the photo. Normally, the entire body of water is completely frozen in January, when this photo was taken in 2024.

Although Pangong Lake has no major outflow, it is connected to several inflowing rivers, including one on the bottom left of this image. The river's delta has largely frozen over (visible as the large, white patch on land), but you can still see a small plume of water entering the river.

On the opposite bank of the delta, there is a beach littered with several striations parallel to the water. These are ancient shorelines left over from when the lake had a higher water level, according to the Earth Observatory.

Pangong Lake was likely once part of the Indus River, which stretches nearly 2,000 miles (3,200 km) across South and Central Asia. However, it was likely cut off from the waterway millions of years ago as the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates collided and the Tibetan Plateau and Himalayas formed.

Disputed border

The Line of Actual Control was first established in 1959 but was largely set in its current position in 1962 after the Sino-Indian War. Although the countries have technically been at peace ever since, frequent and occasionally deadly skirmishes have broken out along the border, including on the shores of Pangong Lake, according to the BBC.

Nonetheless, the lake frequently draws tourists from both China and India, particularly bird-watchers, who travel there to see the large groups of bar-headed geese (Anser indicus) and Brahminy ducks (Tadorna ferruginea, also called ruddy shelducks) that breed there, according to the Earth Observatory.

On the Ladakh side of Pangong Lake, extreme-sports enthusiasts run long distances across the lake's ice. In February 2023, dozens of runners gathered there to participate in the highest-altitude frozen lake half-marathon ever recorded, according to Guinness World Records.

See more Earth from space

At the end of a glacier deep in East Antarctica's Taylor Valley, there is a haunting waterfall that oozes red brine like a bleeding wound in the ice. Scientists explained the brine's gory hue several years ago, finding that it is exceptionally rich in iron. And now, they may have identified the salty water's origin.

Microbes in the crimson waterfall, called Blood Falls, suggest the brine is composed of ancient seawater that was trapped in a pool beneath the glacier when ocean levels fell and the glacier advanced. However, it's unclear exactly when that happened, researchers noted. Previous studies had already proposed a seawater origin for the brine, based on various chemical signatures and bacteria detected in the liquid, but the new results add molecular and genetic evidence to the mix of clues.

"Findings in this study reveal a dominance of marine eukaryotic lineages in the Blood Falls area" compared with the broader region, known as the McMurdo Dry Valleys, the authors wrote in the study, published Monday (Aug. 3) in the journal Nature Geoscience. "This marine signal is less prominent but still detectable in the prokaryotic structure," the researchers added.

Eukaryotes' cells contain a membrane-bound nucleus and other closed internal compartments. Prokaryotes, by contrast, are single-celled organisms whose DNA floats around freely in the cell, unbounded by a membrane.

To characterize the types of microorganisms present within Blood Falls, the researchers used a suite of genetic techniques to analyze 167 samples of water, sediment and air from around the falls and the broader McMurdo Dry Valleys.

Some researchers argue that Blood Falls' water does not originate from seawater, and suggest the marine bacteria and chemical signatures that point to seawater may have instead reached the falls from the ocean via intense winds, which are common in the McMurdo Dry Valleys. By analyzing samples from various sites in the Dry Valleys, the team behind the new study compared microorganisms from the wider region with those at Blood Falls to determine if Blood Falls has a distinct microbial assemblage potentially left over from ancient conditions.

The researchers found that the crimson brine and associated red-tinted sediments at Blood Falls shared a higher proportion of eukaryotes with nearby oceanic samples than other sites in the Dry Valleys did. Whereas Blood Falls had a little over 9% of its eukaryotes in common with the ocean, the Dry Valleys showed only about 1% similarity, according to the study. The remaining eukaryotes and most of the prokaryotes identified in the paper had freshwater and terrestrial origins.

The results also showed that the air near Blood Falls contained only a tiny proportion of marine microorganisms, suggesting that present-day winds can't fully explain the microbial composition of Blood Falls, the researchers wrote.

Therefore, an ancient seawater origin is the most likely explanation for the microorganisms found at Blood Falls today, the team concluded. Winds may have played a role in shaping the community in the past, but now, their influence is probably insignificant, the team added.

The brine that feeds Blood Falls may have become entrapped more than 1 million years ago, during a warm period with higher sea levels and less ice cover than there is now, previous estimates suggested. However, further work, including more comprehensive genetic profiling and mapping of microorganisms, is needed to pinpoint when Taylor Valley's glacier grew to cover the brine, the researchers wrote.

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

Aspen trees could provide a natural buffer against wildfires, as new research shows that areas of forest where these trees dominate burn less intensely than those made of conifers.

The findings suggest that planting more of the right kinds of trees, such as trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides, also known as quaking aspen), could be an effective strategy for protecting communities as devastating wildfires become more common and intense in a warming world, researchers reported June 15 in the journal Forest Ecology and Management.

Individual aspen trees burn easily because of their thin bark, but large "stands" ‪—‬ contiguous communities of trees that are uniform in species, age and structure ‪—‬ of them are more resistant to fire than stands of conifers and can act like a firebreak.

The reasons for aspen stands' resilience are not certain. However, researchers think it likely stems from a combination of factors, including the high moisture content in the aspens' leaves and the undergrowth, the trees' lack of highly flammable resin, and the leaves' height, which makes it harder for fire to spread to the canopy and leap from tree to tree.

Flavie Pelletier, who conducted the research as part of her doctorate at McGill University in Montreal, wanted to see whether aspen stands have been able to maintain their fire-resistant properties as climate change makes fire seasons more intense and destructive.

She combined new maps of dominant tree species in forests across Canada with satellite maps of wildfires from three recent years, including 2023, which was the country's most destructive wildfire season ever recorded. She noted which tree species tended to be inside the fire zone and which were more common at the edges. She found that aspen trees were more than twice as common at the perimeters of fires than inside them, while conifers like spruce and pine were equally present in both locations.

Having more aspen trees in a particular area also decreased the amount of forest that burned each day during a fire, so it also appears to help slow the spread of the fire. Notably, the trees still resisted fire spread even in the spring, before their leaves had fully sprouted.

"This is proof that aspen has an impact on fire perimeter formation and can slow fire progression," she told Live Science.

Anthony Taylor, a forest management specialist at the University of New Brunswick, said the study, with its use of large datasets on real fires, does a good job of analyzing and quantifying a phenomenon that Indigenous peoples and foresters have understood for a long time.

"The idea that deciduous trees burn less has been known for millennia, but knowing something through experience is different than testing it," he told Live Science.

Changing practices

The research supports the idea that planting aspen or other deciduous trees around vulnerable communities can help protect them from fires. Taylor said this buffer strategy is being considered or implemented in many areas.

A single line of trees will not do the trick. The stands must be deep enough to stop the flames from blowing over the top — probably 300 to 1,000 feet (100 to 300 meters), Taylor said.

Aspens can also play a role in fire control at larger scales. Pelletier first became interested in this topic when she learned that forestry companies often spray the forests they manage with the herbicide glyphosate to kill deciduous trees like aspen so they can grow monocultures of more economically valuable conifers, leaving those forests at much higher risk of fires. She hopes her work will help convince the companies and regulators to change their practices.

"There needs to be less of a war on aspen in commercial forests," she said. In the long term, it would actually benefit the companies, because it would reduce the risk of losing large numbers of trees to fire, even if it slightly reduces the value of the forest in the short term.

Taylor agrees that in places like New Brunswick, a province with a large forestry sector, officials should be promoting more mixed and hardwood forests, and less of the softwood monocultures that the forestry industry relies on.

"That would go a long way to making our landscape more resilient to wildfire," he said. "And that's what would have been here anyway, before we started converting the forests to a more industrial forest."

Climate change's impacts are being felt everywhere, from health and food security to extreme weather, sea level rise and collapsing ecosystems. World leaders have been slow to adapt to the warnings, despite an ever-growing body of evidence showing the compounding risks of greenhouse gas emissions.

But despite fossil fuels remaining the world's primary source of energy and emissions continuing to rise, there are changes afoot.

In his book "Despite it All" (Granta, 2026), author and journalist Fred Pearce looks at the shifts that have taken place over the last 40 years, highlighting how far humanity has come in the green transition. He believes this progress gives us reason to hope that we can eventually overcome the challenges we face today.

Pearce spoke with Live Science about his book, which has been shortlisted for the 2026 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

Hannah Osborne: There are a lot of positive environmental stories throughout the book, including those that aren't necessarily being told. Do you think that there is a growing appetite for positive climate news now? And will it help us?

Fred Pearce: I detect a kind of desire to be told something other than it's all hopeless and there's nothing we can do. Some people are therefore saying, "Well, what can I do?" And they're very sort of personal stories about how they can contribute. But also people who think more, if you like, strategically: What can the world do, what can governments do, what, how can we influence that?

I try not to write what I think people want to read. I try to write what I want to say. And it seems to me that we do so many things so badly, whether it's managing our resources or water or handling forests or the climate, or pollution or whatever. We do things so badly that there is a great deal of scope for doing things a lot better. So, we need optimists and we need pessimists. We need pessimists to point out the problems. We need optimists to come up with some solutions or suggest where [there are] half open doors that we can push open.

I wrote this book in that kind of spirit to say "Look, yes, things are bad, yes, I'm not denying that they're bad, but there's an awful lot that we can do about it and in some cases are doing about it." That then divides into whether we're talking about human activity, our technical solutions to climate change. Tech fixes are good, not bad, which is something that can be a hard sell in the environment community sometimes, so I want to stress that.

I went to the Earth Summit 30 years ago where they agreed [upon] the original climate change convention. Back then they said we [need to] prevent dangerous climate change, but they really didn't know much about how to do it. Wind turbines were just, you know, a few masts on a hill in California. Nobody was dealing much in solar power because it was just so expensive. It had been developed for powering satellites and electric cars. Nobody was talking about [it].

We have made quite a lot of progress and it's not fast enough and CO₂ emissions are stable, they're not going down. We need to do a hell of a lot more and we may have passed climate tipping points. I'm not denying any of that, but rather than throwing up our hands or saying it's hopeless, let's get on with the tech, let's also recognize that nature is very good at recovering. You destroy a forest, a rainforest, it doesn't mean that it's destroyed forever. It will, given the chance, come back if we give it room. So let's give forests room to recover.

In large parts of the world it's already happening — in Europe, even in North America. Agricultural land is being abandoned, and when it's abandoned nature comes back and not necessarily in the sort of ways that we might think. But nature does come back, stuff regrows. We can see how evolution is being kickstarted, if you like, by the chaos that we're creating. That's not to say we shouldn't stop creating the chaos, but we can see how nature recovers.

These are things that we can recognize and respond to; giving nature room to recover, rewilding projects, therefore I'm all in favor of [them]. We're not rewilding where we're trying to garden nature to get back to some sort of perfected past, a pristine system where we thought that everything was great — pre-industrial revolution or before Europeans arrived in North America or whatever it might be. But, we can give nature room to evolve and adapt and change. We can see that nature's doing that all the time, with or without climate change and with or without humans. Nature is constantly, if you like, remaking itself.

I'm not saying nature always comes back in ways that we approve of. Let's recognize the distinction between our sort of slightly romanticized idea of what nature should be and what nature actually is.

HO: You talk about rewilding and letting nature take its course, but how do humans fit in with this? Can we adapt our own perceptions of what nature is allowed and what's not?

FP: I think we can probably forget about what's allowed and what's not. Nature will do what it wants to do. We pride ourselves on our ability to garden nature in a way, or manage ecosystems. We're not really very good at it. Nature will very often take over and do what it wants to do.

Some of the world's biggest rewilding projects have gone quite badly wrong because we haven't quite thought it through. The one I'm thinking of really is the large project in the Netherlands where they're trying to sort of recreate ancient European ecosystems and they ended up with mass deaths of animals because their conception of the ecosystem didn't quite figure out. They then largely abandoned the project because they didn't like to see large numbers of animals dying.

A hardline rewilder would say let nature take its course. I see the case for that, and often I would support that, but we have our own sensibilities and our own concerns and we are living in a world where we are very much in charge of what's going on. So while I'm in favor of standing back and letting nature take its course, we have our own sensibilities, and it's not wrong for us to want to intervene sometimes.

HO: There's a chapter on human population and fertility rates, and how this is very much a climate change story as well. We're now seeing a lot of the rhetoric around this, and rights being stripped back and taken away. What's it like for you, having seen the changes from the UN International Conference on Population in Mexico in the 80s, to Cairo in the 90s to now?

FP: It's an extraordinary story. I've been working on these issues for 40 years now so I've seen a number of changes. Some of the changes I've seen are how technical fixes somehow became a reality when they seemed very distant a while ago.

But our perceptions change too on many things. We are, in many ways, more attuned to environmental issues now than we were 30 or 40 years ago. One of the big changes that I've seen is the notion of the population bomb, which for much of the 20th century was seen as the number one issue. People would say, "Well, there's no point in fixing the climate, there's no point in reducing our pollution because there are more and more people on the planet, and we're kind of doomed for that reason."

Well, it hasn't [happened]. When I went to my first international conference, which was the UN Population Conference in Mexico City in 1984, that was all the rage. They gave the UN Population prize to the mastermind of China's one child policy, which — in terms of human rights and what I would regard as acceptable human behavior — was dreadful. But such was the concern about population issues that they wanted to give a prize to the operator of that program.

A lot has changed. A feminist agenda, if I could put it that way, and I would say that approvingly, has taken over in reproductive politics. I saw it at a UN population conference in Cairo in 1994, 10 years after the Mexico event, that we need to assert reproductive rights. Many environmentalists said that's a cop out. It was all "it's feminist perspective, but it's dooming us."

Well, it didn't, because what we found was that by and large, women wanted to have smaller families because their children got to grow up. Medical improvements meant that you didn't have to have four or five children to secure the next generation. Two would usually do, sometimes you just wanted one. Women wanted to have lives outside the home. The population people seemed to be a bit surprised by that.

The environmental agenda was a very male-dominated one for a long time. So that came as a bit of a surprise, but the net result is that we've halved our fertility rates. They're more or less down to replacement levels [of reproduction] now globally.

I'm not just talking about Europe or North America. I'm talking about almost everywhere except Africa, and African levels have come down. Sometimes they're coming down to super low levels, so that people are now talking about not having enough babies and how we can encourage people to have babies. There are parts of the world where we're down to one child per woman and even a bit less.

My argument is that we need to carry on. Not take a sort of Elon Musk approach [or] send the women back to the home and [do] reproduction and that's what their job is. We need to complete the feminist revolution so that women have more rights, can make better choices, and indeed couples can make more and better choices about the family size that they want. We can arrange things so that it is possible to have children and a career, or make it easier to do that, and at that point probably reproduction levels will come back up.

What I'm really saying is that the agenda is now vastly different from what it was as recently as the 1980s and, and into the 1990s. The population bomb is being defused, to put it simply, there's a residual momentum effect which means that our numbers will carry on going up a bit. Sure, that creates strains on the planet, but we're not now talking about double the world population every 30 years, which is what was being talked about back in the mid 20th century. It's tailing off.

We now have, if you like, a consumption bomb more than a population bomb. The global issue is consumption in the rich world, and that's what's stressing the planet now — not too many babies in poor parts of the world.

HO: Inequality between the super rich and people in developing countries is becoming more and more stark. How do we bridge the gap to make sure there's a reasonable living standard for regular people without a huge cost to the environment?

FP: The truth is, and the numbers have been done by a number of different people, a reasonable standard of living for everybody on the planet is perfectly feasible without destroying the planet.

We need to do some things better, we need to have better technology, but for me, right up there with climate change is an issue of global inequality. When I was young, it was taken [that] inequalities were diminishing and it was taken almost as read that they would carry on diminishing, and a lot of aid policies were directed towards that. That's kind of disappeared since the sort of Reaganomics of the 1980s, all the changes in the finance system and perhaps the fall of the Berlin Wall, which meant that the sort of socialist or, or equality-based agendas collapsed politically.

We're now finding increased inequality, and that, it seems to me, is a threat to the lives of millions and billions of humans, but also to global stability and our ability perhaps to manage.

Serious global issues like climate change and many others are all undermined by the political stresses and economic stresses created by rising inequality. I see them going together.

It's also clear that it's important to level up, but also level down from the obscene riches that we see among a small number of individuals, who seem to be accumulating a greater share of the world's wealth, whether we're talking about dollars or natural resources.

HO: You have a whole chapter on renewables and how they're outpacing fossil fuels. They're the cheaper alternative. How do you see the political opposition to clean energy panning out over the next five to 10 years?

FP: It's fizzling out. It's a weird political backlash and yes, any big social trend or economic trend, they all have backlashes and it feels to me like this is it. What we see in the real world is that the U.S. — not just the U.S., but principally the U.S. — are in a state of near denial about climate and they're wanting to go back to fossil fuels.

In the rest of the world, if you look at it in terms of geopolitics of [the] U.S. versus China, then the U.S. is pushing this rather old agenda of fossil fuels, and China is absolutely going to reap the benefits in many, many ways in its drive towards renewables. China has been a really bad story in the past with its coal burning — and it's still building a few coal-fired power stations. But the really big story is how China has been principally responsible for bringing down the costs of renewable energy, particularly solar power.

You can now go to the most remote corners of rural Africa and you find people putting up their solar panels to recharge car batteries so that they can run their lights in the evening or whatever it is. And then you've got megacities operating using increasing amounts of solar power. India is getting on the bandwagon as well. It's got the fastest growing solar energy economy in the world.

In the real world, renewable [energy] is mostly cheaper than fossil fuels. It is also quicker to install, you don't have to build a huge power station, you can do it in bits and pieces, bolt bits on.

Yes, there are grid issues and they need to be addressed, and there are limits on operating. There are challenges, but renewables are just growing so fast, and it is growing so fast because it is so cheap.

And it's become so cheap, to put it very simply, because the Chinese 20 or 30 years ago decided this is what's going to happen. While everybody else was sort of talking about it and fussing about it and doing it in research labs, the Chinese kind of got to grips with it. I remember back in the 1990s talking about people who were going into China and coming back and telling me stories about how the Chinese are really serious about renewable energy. To be honest, I didn't quite believe them, but they were right, and 30 years on, the world is living with the benefits. That's true whether you're talking about Europe or rural Africa or big cities in Asia or wherever. It's coming.

There will be different solutions in different places and there are undoubtedly things that are harder to do than, you know, running our national grids on renewable energy, which is becoming really quite easy and something that everybody wants to do. The cement industries, fertilizers perhaps, some of these industries will take some more technical innovation. But it's happening, these are technical fixes that are working in the real world. Will we do it in time? Well, we're a bit late on the case, but we are on the case.

HO: We're now seeing a massive rise in AI data centers as well. Is this bad tech, shall we say?

FP: It's a serious issue. Partly because they're growing so fast — they can't just plug into the grid because the grid really can't deliver, so these companies are developing their own energy systems. Even in the U.S. they are very often renewable systems because they're cheaper. If you've got a data center out in Texas, then you're going to use wind power or solar power because it's cheaper and you're in control of it.

I suppose we reach a point where [we have to decide], do we want to reduce our use of energy or have almost as much energy as we want, but just green it and green it very fast. It is true that if all the renewable investment is going into electricity for data centers, that leaves less investment for other sectors of the economy, so I'm sure there are trade-offs, and I'm not saying that we should embrace data centers. But they can be a driving force for adoption of different forms of energy, renewable energy, and for perhaps changes in the grid systems as well.

I think we can have both. I think we need to have both because we're probably not going to stop the data engines, so we've got to find ways of greening them. There are issues and there are challenges ahead, and I don't want to diminish any of those, but you know, let's, let's be hopeful.

The title of the book uses the word hopeful rather than optimist because I don't want to sound Panglossian, but I do want to inject some hope.

HO: When you started writing the book, what did you hope people would take from it, and did that change after you'd finished?

FP: Well it kind of evolved. It began as an idea to sort of [be a] retrospective of my reporting, and then the publisher said, "Well, the story changes rather a lot along the way, so rather than just showcasing your reporting over 40 years, why don't you showcase the change, and be hopeful in the context of how things have changed over the last 40 years?"

That was [the] kind of starting point, and we sharpened up on it, as we went along it did become "Despite It All" and you know, the title is important, and not diminishing the "All." There's a lot of bad stuff out there, but despite it all we can have hope and we can find, develop and demand solutions.

HO: Did you find anything during the process of writing the book that surprised you?

FP: As I say, it started as a sort of retrospective project and going through it, [there were places I went years ago] and it did look bad, then I checked up on what had happened over the intervening years and suddenly things looked a lot better.

I went to Alaska and saw how the conflicts over managing caribou herds and the huge migrations that go on and it felt like that was doomed. I was talking to people who were hunting the animals and they were trying to protect them because they wanted to hunt them, therefore they wanted them still to be there, which is kind of counterintuitive for many environmentalists, but you know, they were the best defenders of the caribou because they ate them.

But it felt doomed, and yet 20 years later I checked out the numbers and the population of that herd has doubled and tripled. So stuff does happen and I suppose my surprise was how much good change I found when I looked into it further. Maybe that's me being better at looking for good news stories. I've written quite a lot of "bad news" books over the years and done a lot of "bad news" journalism over the years, so I certainly don't discount that. But if you step back and you think, well did good stuff happen? Well, yeah, sometimes it did.

The bison herds are coming back on the plains of parts of North America, if you go to Montana. The ranches are disappearing and big areas are being set aside for bison, and I've been seeing how farmland in parts of southern and eastern Europe has been abandoned over the years. It's not necessarily good news that we're abandoning farmland, but again, the way that nature comes back and woodlands are growing, there are more forests in Europe than there have been for probably centuries.

There's a lot of bad stuff to say. But it does seem to me that we have to not just cling onto, but embrace good stuff and try [to] take it forward.

Something I really hadn't thought about till I went back was what were the big issues in the 1980s, 1970s when I started out. Well, all our industrial rivers in Britain were filthy. Now our industrial rivers are relatively clean. It's our agricultural rivers that are filthy, so, I mean, there's been a big change there.

Nobody has to talk much about the ozone layer now. That was the number one issue in the mid 1980s, and the absolutely terrifying prospect if we hadn't fixed that. But it's been fixed.

We banned the chemicals that were doing it.

Remember acid rain, lead in petrol. They were hot topics, headline news, part of the rise of the environmental agenda in the 1980s — and they're the ones that we don't have to talk about anymore.

Now we're talking about climate change. I think there are other things coming up. I think the issue of nitrogen pollution is a fast growing one, and we need technical solutions to that.

The green revolution of crops, the high-yielding crops, which got us out of a cycle of ever worsening hunger and famines in the mid 20 century. That was a solution which created new problems. Those crops grew very well, but they required large amounts of inputs, including water, and water is now a growing issue — finding enough irrigation water, but also fertilizer and other agrichemicals. We're now reaping some of the bad effects of that, and we need to solve that. Scientists I know are working on, if you like, high-yielding crops that don't require so much fertilizer and don't require so much water.

It's doable because as I think I said at the start, we do a lot of things really very badly, but that does give us a lot of scope to do things a lot better, so let's get on with it.

This interview has been condensed and edited lightly for clarity.

Biodiversity loss has been recognized as a threat to global stability for decades. The decline in overall diversity of species on our planet, either through extinction or a fall in abundance, can culminate in ecosystem collapse.

But in this excerpt from "Despite it All" (Granta, 2026), author and journalist Fred Pearce looks at the remarkable resilience of nature. If we can put aside our notions of what should and shouldn't be in a given environment and leave nature to adapt and thrive, we may begin to see the gains needed to support a healthy biosphere.

"Despite it All" has been shortlisted for the 2026 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.

If we are serious about rewilding, then we need to accept that it will take its own course.

Often invasive species are just the first stage of an ecological resurgence. They are the first movers, and their infestations are short-lived. In time, diversity usually returns — even if it's not always the same diversity as was there before. We should recognize that. We need to be as adaptable as nature itself, and jettison our more romantic notions about biodiversity and pristine environments.

So do many oldschool ecologists, says Chris Thomas, an ecologist at the University of York. They too often simply ignore any bits of nature that do not meet their expectations of what "should" be present. "The establishment of successful species in new locations is commonly interpreted as further evidence that the Earth's system is departing from a more desirable state," he told me.

So when biodiversity assessments are conducted, "alien" species lurking in the undergrowth are simply not counted. As outsiders, they are deemed not to belong to the ecosystem they inhabit. Thomas says that, in Britain, official records show biodiversity in decline, even though, if we add all losses and all gains together, "it is unequivocally true that the total number of species in Britain is increasing."

Most of the gains — the weeds, pests and alien species — are kept off the biodiversity books. This amounts to an ecological catch-22. Biodiversity can only ever decrease, as new species are seen as inimical to the local environment, and each year millions of pounds, dollars and euros are being spent to eliminate them.

Of course, it sometimes makes practical sense to eradicate invaders. I don't say we shouldn't try to keep out pests that cause short-term ecological mayhem and economic damage. But if we choose to get rid of new species, we can't then hold up our hands in horror at declining biodiversity. And besides, ecologically as much as socially, migrants can stir things up to good effect. They interact with other species — eating or being eaten, pollinating, and rotting after death to nurture new organisms.

We should embrace novel ecosystems that contain both what we regard as native species and the feral, opportunistic interlopers that find their new environment congenial. In his book about weeds, British naturalist Richard Mabey celebrated what he called these "outlaw plants" and showed how they have had a hand in shaping not only our landscape but our civilization, becoming crops, medicines and sources of beauty and creative inspiration.

It is easy to be nostalgic about past ecosystems as a golden age. But what we imagine to be the perfect ecological state — a supposedly natural order of things that often gets called "the balance of nature" — was mostly itself a passing phase. Nature is always moving on. And more often than we realize, humans have had a hand in what we now like to regard as natural.

Environmental scientist Erle Ellis, who runs the Anthroecology Lab of the University of Maryland, argues persuasively that most of the planet has been heavily influenced by human activity for thousands of years, including places such as the Amazon that we often think of as untouched. We have, in effect, long lived on a "used planet," and humans and nature have not historically been at odds. The most biodiverse places are often those where people have lived the longest. By constantly tending the land, past civilizations created ever-changing mosaics of habitats where more species thrived than in places with less human interference.

So, we should be careful not to let our reverence for the pristine blind us to the environmental potential of today's wastelands, backwoods, abandoned fields, scrublands and no-go areas. In a Good Anthropocene we are likely to need more of them.

There is a final reason for believing that nature is equipped for recovery from almost anything we can throw at it. The apparent chaos of the Anthropocene is turbocharging evolution itself. Every perturbation of our environment creates an opportunity for existing species to adapt or for new ones to evolve, says Chris Thomas.

I first met Thomas in 2004, when he had just published an influential paper warning that climate change could wipe out a quarter of the world's species this century. He called it "terrifying." It was headline news. Two decades later, he has not changed that forecast, but he has added an important rider. Despite the coming extinction holocaust, he told me, "the Anthropocene could raise biological diversity."

His research is showing that evolution in the twenty-first century is speeding up to fill the gaps left by the extinctions — delivering new and better-adapted species. "The seeds of recovery are already visible," he told me. "Genes are jumping around. New species are beginning to emerge." Rob Dunn, an ecologist at North Carolina State University, agrees. In his book "A Natural History of the Future," he says that this evolutionary spurt is happening fastest in urban landscapes, where species are adapting to city life with almost as much alacrity as newly arrived humans.

This urban ecological renaissance resembles the story of the finches on the Galápagos archipelago, which Charles Darwin observed to have evolved different beaks to match the food on the different islands. In modern cities, house mice have evolved to produce saliva with a chemical make-up better able to digest the carbohydrates available in urban food; cockroaches and bedbugs have developed resistance to pesticides and even learned to avoid sugar-impregnated bait; London's pigeons have learned to commute on the Underground. We have clothes moths and carpet beetles.

Such natural innovations may not always be cuddly, but they do show that nature is on the prowl in the Anthropocene. So where is biodiversity headed? It is undeniable that most species of plants and animals are currently in numerical decline in a human-centric world.

This global disturbance is favouring some generalists — so-called superspecies — that can occupy a wide range of habitats, displacing local, rare and specialist species. Locally, however, biodiversity has sometimes increased substantially, especially in the rich kaleidoscopes of gardens, parks, toxic brownfield sites, roadside verges and so on that humanity has helped create.

Such places may become crucibles for a biodiversity rebound. Understanding this reality should change how we do conservation. We should not abandon nature to its fate. Some of our favourite species will pass into history unless we act to save them, and I'd vote for action any day. But it does mean embracing rather than rejecting the processes of change. Change in the Anthropocene is good. We should be grateful that nature is finding a way.

This is an extract from Despite it All by Fred Pearce, published by Granta.

While millions around the world grappled with extreme heat this month, a research station in Antarctica recorded Earth's coldest temperature since 2012.

The high-altitude research station, named Concordia, logged a low of minus 119.4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 84.1 degrees Celsius) on July 18, according to data from the station.

Concordia is located in the interior of the Antarctic continent, which is currently in the dead of winter with no sunlight. Temperatures at the station regularly fall below minus 112 F (minus 80 C) this time of year ‪—‬ so the new reading isn't unprecedented, but it's still significant.

"Even here, where extreme cold is expected, temperatures below minus 84 C are remarkable and highlight how variable Antarctic weather can still be," Gabriele Carugati, the station leader at Concordia for Italy's National Antarctic Research Program (PNRA), told Live Science over a video call from the station.

The French Polar Institute Paul-Émile Victor, which runs Concordia with the PNRA, sent Live Science raw data from July 18, which showed the temperature dropping to minus 84.1 C twice, at 6:25 a.m. and 6:34 a.m. local time.

The extreme chill at Concordia stands in sharp contrast to the sweltering heat that many countries are currently experiencing. North America and Europe have been battling heat waves this summer, with Western Europe recording the hottest June on record. Meanwhile, wildfires are raging in Canada, the U.S., France, Spain and other countries.

Globally, average temperatures are going up as humans pump more heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. However, Earth's weather systems are complex, and climate change doesn't mean that everywhere gets hotter all of the time.

"Climate change describes the long-term global trends, while individual weather events can still [bring] exceptional cold," Carugati said. "Antarctica is influenced by complex atmospheric processes, so an extreme low temperature at one location does not contradict the broader picture of global warming."

"Astronauts of ice"

Concordia is considered the most remote and extreme research station in the world. Built on top of a 10,800-foot-thick (3,300 meters) ice cap, the station is used for a variety of purposes, including seismic observations, astronomy and the modeling of Earth's past climates, according to the French Polar Institute Paul-Émile Victor.

"Concordia is a special place because it sits at over 3,200 meters [10,500 feet] above sea level on the Antarctic Plateau, and more than 1,000 kilometers [600 miles] from the coast," Carugati said. "During winter, there is no sunlight for months, the atmosphere is extremely dry and stable, and under clear skies, heat continuously escapes to space because there are no clouds, allowing temperatures to fall to extraordinary levels."

Concordia's environment is so harsh and isolated that the station is also used to improve our understanding of the physical, mental and social challenges astronauts experience in space. Carugati noted that the only person at the station who is not researching the environment is a European Space Agency biomedical doctor, who is studying the researchers who work there, nicknamed "astronauts of ice."

Planes can't fly to Concordia once winter sets in, and it's around 370 miles (600 kilometers) from the nearest research station. That technically makes crews more isolated than astronauts on the International Space Station, which orbits about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth, according to the European Space Agency.

What is the coldest temperature ever recorded?

The coldest temperature ever recorded at Concordia was minus 120.5 F (minus 84.7 C), logged in the winter of 2010, according to the Italian Antarctic Meteo-Climatological Observatory. However, another high-altitude research station in East Antarctica has the all-time record for the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth. Russia's Vostok weather station, the nearest station to Concordia, recorded a temp of minus 128.6 F (minus 89.2 C) in July 1983, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

Satellite data suggests that temperatures can drop as low as minus 144 F (98 C) in East Antarctica, according to a 2018 study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. However, even though Antarctica is the coldest and driest continent, it's not immune to global warming.

Major glaciers and the ice sheet they support are at risk in West Antarctica, with the Antarctic Peninsula — which extends out of the western side of the continent — experiencing the most rapid warming. A study published in February in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science found that decisions made on greenhouse gas emissions today will determine how much the peninsula will change in the coming centuries, with sea ice, ice shelves and glaciers, along with the penguins that live on them, at risk of disappearing.

Concordia sits on the largest ice sheet on Earth. This sheet in East Antarctica is more stable than the smaller sheet of West Antarctica, but it is still vulnerable to rising temperatures. An unprecedented Antarctic winter heat wave in March 2024 saw temperatures near Concordia rise to a record high of 15.1 F (minus 9.4 C) ‪—‬ about 32 F (18 C) warmer than the previous March maximum. This East Antarctic heat wave was amplified by global warming, according to a study published in April in the journal npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.

Earth recently entered an El Niño, the warm phase of a multiyear natural climate pattern, which could bring unprecedented temperature extremes to an already-warming world. Carbon Brief, a U.K. based outlet that reports on climate news and policy, has predicted that 2026 is likely to be the second-warmest year on record, behind 2024, with the intensifying El Niño increasing the likelihood that 2027 will be the warmest year ever recorded.

For now, at Concordia, the researchers are continuing their work in the blistering cold of Antarctica's winter. Carugati noted that the latest extreme-temperature data will inform forecasts and long-term climate monitoring.

"Extreme observations like this help scientists better understand atmospheric processes and improve the climate models," he said.

An ecological "superspreader" event may be imminent as more than 1,500 ships continue to idle in the closed Strait of Hormuz, with the potential to cause serious impacts for human health and global marine ecosystems, scientists warn.

In a study published July 22 in the journal Biological Invasions, scientists explain how the hundreds of stranded commercial vessels sitting idle on both sides of the strait are being colonized by marine microbes, algae, seaweed, barnacles and other invertebrates. The problem is that once these ships start moving again, these organisms will be spread all around the world.

"The unprecedented scale and duration of this spring and summer mass lay-up of large commercial ships has created ideal conditions for a marine invasive species 'super-spreader' event," Mario Tamburri, a professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and first author of the study, said in a statement.

The Iran War is already having devastating impacts around the world. After the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on Feb. 28, Tehran retaliated by restricting shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz ‪—‬ a critical shipping route that connects the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman and facilitates the transport of 20% of the world's oil supply, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

But the economic impacts of the waterway's prolonged closure are only part of the story.

While it's common for cargo ships to linger for a day or two at most ports, the study authors say these organisms — which are arriving from all over the world and are now mixing and spreading among the other stationary vessels — really begin to flourish after about 10 days of inactivity.

When ships are idle for longer than 10 days, these organisms start to colonize "aggressively" as the special coatings that protect ships from contamination start to work less effectively, the researchers write. And once these organisms are brought into new environments, they can wreak havoc on local ecosystems.

"Marine invasions are hard to predict but it is possible for several species to establish themselves in new habitats and with some causing significant environmental and economic impacts," Tamburri told Live Science in an email.

Tamburri pointed to the example of zebra mussels (Dreissena polymorpha) in the Great Lakes. The mollusks, which are native to Europe and Asia, are thought to have been introduced to the U.S. in the 1980s via water discharged from large European cargo ships, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The impacts of these invasive animals are widespread: They filter out algae that native species need for food and attach to native mussels, preventing them from moving, feeding or reproducing, according to the National Park Service (NPS). They also clog pipes and water supply systems, which cost millions of dollars to fix.

Each female zebra mussel can produce thousands of eggs, so once populations are established, there is "very little" that can be done to remove them, the NPS notes.

In addition to outcompeting native species for space and resources, invasive species can spread disease.

"One of the less perceptible concerns from biological invasions is the potential spread of infective stages of parasites and diseases that are either entrained within ship ballast tanks or associated with organisms attached to ship hulls," April Blakeslee, an associate professor of biology at East Carolina University, told Live Science in an email. Parasites and diseases introduced by ships could then spill over to native species, which could affect ecologically and/or commercially valuable species, or possibly pose concerns for human health, Blakeslee added.

In other words, these species could spread diseases with the potential to infect local wildlife and humans, as well as fisheries and aquaculture.

Tamburri said the areas most at risk are first ports of call with similar temperatures and salt levels to the Gulf region, particularly ports in India, Singapore, Greece, Spain, the Netherlands and several ports in the Middle East.

So what can be done to stop this "superspreading" event before it happens? According to the researchers, cleaning ships in the water before they leave the Gulf region could significantly reduce the spread of these organisms. Estimating the risks posed by specific ships before departure and setting up monitoring networks and early detection systems at high-risk ports may also limit the damage.

"While the human and economic consequences of events like the war in the Middle East will always remain the highest priority, ecological impacts cannot be overlooked," the researchers wrote.

A powerful earthquake struck southwestern Japan Tuesday afternoon local time, collapsing part of a shopping mall, toppling a stone wall at the centuries-old Kumamoto Castle, and sending more than 150,000 people to evacuation shelters, the BBC reported.

The quake, which the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) measured as a magnitude 6.8, hit at 4:27 p.m. local time near Kumamoto, a city of more than 700,000 people located on the island of Kyushu in southern Japan.

Thousands of homes lost power, and roads buckled across the region. The second floor of a shopping center collapsed, trapping shoppers inside, according to the BBC report; some of these people were evacuated and later hospitalized. A brief tsunami warning was issued and lifted within an hour.

The USGS measurement is different from the magnitude 7.1 reported by the Japan Meteorological Agency, "primarily because the agencies are reporting different magnitude types," the USGS reported. While Japan is looking at local magnitude, the USGS measured the moment magnitude, which is derived from the physical size of the fault rupture and gives the "most reliable estimate of earthquake size" for large earthquakes, since local-magnitude scales can lose accuracy once a rupture grows big enough, the USGS reported.

These measurements are helpful, as "different magnitude types capture different characteristics of earthquake source processes," the USGS noted. Local magnitude, for example, reflects how strongly the ground shook nearby, while moment magnitude reflects the total energy released across the fault.

Why this quake is scientifically interesting

Japan sits atop one of the most active plate boundaries on Earth, where the Philippine Sea Plate dives beneath the Eurasia Plate. That process, known as subduction, is responsible for the massive, tsunami-generating earthquakes that periodically strike offshore Japan, and it's been studied intensively for decades.

But Tuesday's earthquake didn't occur at the boundary itself. Instead, the rupture happened within the Eurasia Plate, more than 60 miles (100 kilometers) inland from where the plates meet, Jeffrey Park, a theoretical seismologist at Yale University, told Live Science. Roughly 90% of earthquakes happen at plate boundaries, where the constant grinding of two plates builds up stress until a fault gives way. Quakes that strike farther inside a plate — sometimes called intraplate earthquakes — are rarer and less understood, though scientists suspect that stress transmitted through the plate can reactivate old, dormant faults far from the boundary that produced it.

According to Park, the fault in Tuesday's earthquake moved in a way that suggests the plate tore horizontally as it was twisted by subduction occurring at an angle.

The USGS describes this event as shallow strike-slip faulting: the two sides of the fracture slid past each other horizontally, rather than one side thrusting up and over the other. This faulting style, combined with the shallow depth of just 6 miles (10 kilometers) down, points to the same type of rupture behind Kyushu’s deadly 2016 Kumamoto earthquake sequence.

That inland location is also why the quake didn't generate a damaging tsunami, despite the brief precautionary warning. Tsunamis are produced when a big event ‪—‬ such as an earthquake, volcanic eruption or landslide ‪—‬ displaces water; the force from that displacement then propagates as a wave.

Tuesday's rupture stayed entirely on land, so it never pushed the seafloor up the way offshore quakes do. That's why the tsunami risk stayed low, even with the brief precautionary warning. Still, an inland quake isn't automatically off the hook: if the shaking triggers a landslide that spills into the sea, that alone can generate a tsunami.

The depth mattered just as much as the location. The quake was shallow enough to concentrate its energy near the surface, which Park said explains the structural damage.

"Because it is shallow it will cause more structural damage than a similar-sized event that might occur deeper and offshore," he told Live Science in an email.

Earthquake country

Several earthquakes have already clustered in the area, and numerous aftershocks are expected over the coming days. Japan experiences roughly 1,500 earthquakes annually, making it one of the most seismically active countries on the planet — a byproduct of sitting at the junction of several tectonic plates.

To protect itself, Japan has spent decades — and learned from painful lessons from disasters like the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami — engineering a response system built for exactly this scenario.

Bullet trains are programmed to halt automatically the instant seismic sensors detect a major earthquake, a safeguard Park pointed to as a defining feature of the country's earthquake readiness. That automatic shutdown extends to other transit and utility systems, part of a broader early-warning network that alerts the public within seconds of a quake's detection, giving people crucial time to take cover before shaking arrives.

Japan's investment in its infrastructure may help to explain why, even after a magnitude 7 event near a city of 700,000, Japan's death toll and damage have historically been far lower than those from comparable quakes elsewhere in the world.

Search-and-rescue efforts are continuing in Kumamoto, with CNN reporting that between 20 and 30 employees remained unaccounted for at the Aeon Mall in Kashima Town, where the building’s second floor had collapsed. Firefighters were also working to reach the site and contain nearby fires.

This striking satellite photo shows a multicolor "fan" of folded rocks sculpted by a longtime collision between two of Earth's tectonic plates.

The geological feature, known as an imbricate fan, is located around 3 miles (5 kilometers) east of the town of Murgha Kibzai in Pakistan's Balochistan province. The photographed section of folded rocks measures around 9 miles (15 km) across, but the fan stretches up to 55 miles (89 km) from end to end, well beyond the area in this image.

The dramatic structure sits at an altitude of around 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) in the Sulaiman Range, a series of mountains that covers around 2,500 square miles (6,500 square kilometers) of Pakistan and Afghanistan. ("Sulaiman" means "of Solomon," in reference to the biblical figure King Solomon, and the range's largest peak is Takht-e-Sulaiman, which translates to "Throne of Solomon.")

This is one of several unique features that emerged along the boundary between the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates, which have been colliding for more than 60 million years. At one point during this tectonic tug-of-war, the two plates became somewhat intertwined, allowing the fan to take shape, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

"As India moved northward, it began to rotate in a counter-clockwise direction, wrenching the northwestern part of the Indian plate backwards into part of the Eurasian plate," Earth Observatory representatives wrote. "The countervailing forces put the rocks of the Sulaiman Range in a unique compressional vice, causing many of its faults to curve and stretch in convoluted ways."

The fan is made up of alternating layers of sandstone, which appear dark in the image, and limestone, which has a much lighter hue. These sedimentary rocks were formed by "thrust faults" that shot upward from the boundary between the Eurasian and Indian plates and became entangled as the boundary moved back and forth.

The satellite image is false-color, meaning it includes wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum that are not normally visible to humans. This helps to accentuate the differences between the two rock types, although they can also be easily distinguished with the naked eye. Pockets of vegetation appear in red throughout the image.

The photo is a small part of a larger, wide-field image (see above), which showcases several other intriguing geological features across the Sulaiman Range in false color.

Continental collision

The collision between the Eurasian and Indian plates became inevitable around 80 million years ago, when dinosaurs still ruled Earth, according to the Earth Observatory. At this point, the pair became locked on a collision course, with each plate moving more than 8 inches (20 centimeters) per year — around twice the speed of the fastest tectonic plates today.

Around 60 million years ago, the plates slowly slammed together. Normally, this would cause the smallest tectonic plate to sink below the other. However, the two plates' massive size meant neither receded. Instead, the continental crust along the boundary grew thicker, and the ground buckled, folded and pushed upward.

This process created not only the Sulaiman Range but also the Karakoram (a huge mountain range that spans the borders of China, India, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan) and the Himalayas — the two tallest mountain ranges on Earth, according to the Earth Observatory.

This collision continued at full speed for around 30 million years, before eventually slowing down. However, the two plates are still technically colliding today, making the region a major earthquake hotspot.

See more Earth from space

Science word of the day: Seamount

Pronunciation: SEE'-mount

What it means: A seamount is an undersea mountain that rises at least 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) above the seafloor but does not come close to breaking the surface. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, there are at least 100,000 seamounts in the oceans, and less than 0.1% of them have been explored. Seamounts typically form from volcanic activity, and many host dramatic communities of sea life ‪—‬ from coral, to sharks, to an assortment of weird jellyfish-looking things.

How to use it in a sentence: Every time marine biologists explore a seamount with their remotely operated vehicles, they seem to discover a new universe of strange and blobby deep-sea creatures.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

Science word of the day: Pando

Pronunciation: PAN'-doh

What it means: In Latin, "Pando" means "I spread." And boy, does it. Pando is a clonal stand of aspen trees in Utah that weighs about 13 million pounds (6 million kilograms), making it the world's heaviest living organism ever found. Its 40,000 trees cover 106 acres (43 hectares) in Fishlake National Forest, and they're all connected by a single, sprawling root system. Some DNA analysis suggests that this many-fingered megatree is tens of thousands of years old.

How to use it in a sentence: When you walk through Pando, what seems like a normal stroll through an aspen grove is actually a trip through a single, ancient living being.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

Science word of the day: Cenozoic

Pronunciation: See-noh-ZOH'-ihk

What it means: The ascendency of mammals, the birth of the Himalayas, the diversification of birds ‪—‬ Earth's in its Cenozoic era, baby!

The Cenozoic is the geological era happening right now. It started 66 million years ago with the abrupt mass extinction known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, when a massive asteroid hit Earth and wiped out the nonavian dinosaurs. It's been a busy few tens of millions of years, ushering in such hits as Earth's first cacti, whales and most (if not all) of the Grand Canyon.

How to use it in a sentence: The Cenozoic is called the Age of Mammals, but the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley would like you to know it could have been called the Age of Teleost Fish, if mammals weren't so dang self-centered.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

Science word of the day: Abiotic

Pronunciation: Ay-bye-AH'-tik

What it means: Abiotic means "without living organisms." Scientists typically use the term when referring to nonliving aspects of an ecosystem that affect organisms' growth or reproduction. Some abiotic factors might be light, water, fertilizer, nutrients or chemical elements, such as oxygen or sulfur. Others include the tides or rain. Sometimes, "abiotic" is used to describe the origin of a particular chemical. Abiotic methane, for example, comes from chemical reactions between rocks and water in Earth's crust, unlike biotic methane, which comes from decaying organic matter as well as microbes living in your gut.

How to use it in a sentence: A new "gold rush" of exploration is on for abiotic hydrogen, which forms when rocks react with water deep underground and could be a renewable, carbon-free fuel of the future.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

Science word of the day: Abiogenesis

Pronunciation: Ay-bye-oh-JEN'-ih-sis

What it means: Abiogenesis is the emergence of life from nonliving matter through chemical processes. Scientists still don't know exactly how abiogenesis happened on Earth. Theories range from lightning strikes that could have scrambled water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen into amino acids and sugars ‪—‬ the building blocks of life ‪—‬ to chemical reactions at deep-sea vents. Abiogenesis is not the same as spontaneous generation, which held that living organisms such as maggots formed directly from decaying matter. It was a compelling idea for anyone who had watched meat rot, but Louis Pasteur, inventor of pasteurization, disproved it in the 1860s by showing that microbes could only grow from preexisting microbes.

How to use it in a sentence: All life on Earth may owe itself to an incident of abiogenesis more than 3.7 billion years ago.

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Runoff from Greenland's rapidly melting ice sheet could severely disrupt currents in the Atlantic Ocean that regulate the global climate, researchers say. But the fresh water won't trigger the complete and irreversible collapse of the circulation that some research predicts, a new study suggests.

By 2100, Greenland meltwater could cause a reduction in the strength of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) equivalent to an additional 10% to 20% on top of the weakening that many scientists already expect for this huge system of currents, researchers found.

Previous research suggests the AMOC, which moves heat from the tropics to the Northern Hemisphere and cold water back south toward Antarctica, is at its weakest in more than 1,000 years due to Arctic ice melt and soaring ocean temperatures. Models indicate that the circulation will continue to weaken for decades to come, potentially unleashing freezing weather in Northwest Europe, additional sea-level rise along the U.S. East Coast and droughts around the equator.

The new study revealed that by 2300, Greenland's ice sheet could cause a whopping 40% of AMOC weakening on top of the declines projected by some climate models if we continue to cook the planet. The results highlight the effects on the AMOC of a growing freshwater pulse from Greenland that most climate models currently don't take into account, the authors said.

"By the year 2100, yes, we have something, but the greatest fraction is what we add later," study co-author Jost von Hardenberg, a professor in the Department of Environment, Land and Infrastructure Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Turin in Italy, told Live Science.

Meltwater from the Arctic and Greenland slows the AMOC by preventing the formation of deep currents in the North Atlantic that drive the circulation south toward Antarctica. Deep currents form when masses of cold, salty water sink to the seabed, but inputs of fresh water and rising water temperatures are blocking this step by diluting and warming surface waters.

While Arctic meltwater is commonly integrated into climate simulations, researchers have been slower to include runoff from the Greenland ice sheet in models, partly because this runoff may not be as disruptive as Arctic meltwater on shorter timescales, von Hardenberg said.

"In order to represent correctly the Greenland melt, you need a specific, dynamic model for the Greenland ice sheet. It's nice to have, but it requires a lot of resources to develop," von Hardenberg said

The Community Ice Sheet Model version 2 (CESM2) is one of the few available simulations of the Greenland ice sheet. For the study, von Hardenberg and his colleagues used a global climate model called EC-Earth3, which does not include the Greenland ice sheet. The team added the ice sheet from CESM2 to explore how it might affect the AMOC over the next few centuries. Adding the ice sheet separately enabled them to compare AMOC weakening with and without Greenland, clearly revealing the impact of the ice sheet on the AMOC's strength.

The results, published June 19 in the journal Science Advances, suggest the Greenland ice sheet will have a big influence on Atlantic ocean currents, especially after 2100.

"Greenland starts really melting strongly only after that date," von Hardenberg said. "If you go farther in our simulation — we go up to the year 2300 — that is also when this meltwater really becomes extremely strong."

Yet unlike other studies that show the AMOC collapsing irreversibly under climate change, in this model, the circulation recovered once the team switched off the meltwater or dialed down greenhouse gas emissions. Both the simulations that didn't include the Greenland ice sheet and those that did had similar results, recovering partially when the meltwater was turned off and fully when greenhouse gas emissions were stopped.

The recovery in the model suggests that the AMOC is more stable than previously thought and doesn't suddenly flip from an active state into a collapsed one, von Hardenberg said. "It's consistent with a strong weakening, but not a shutdown," he said.

Overall, the findings show that it is important to include the Greenland ice sheet in climate models — something von Hardenberg and his colleagues are planning to do in the next version of the EC-Earth3 model.

"It's really something which is worthwhile doing to better constrain the uncertainty of these future simulations," von Hardenberg said. "If we have a larger set of models which include this component, we will be in a better position to try to answer the question, 'How much do we expect AMOC to decrease in different scenarios?'"

Other experts agreed that integrating the Greenland ice sheet in climate models will increase the accuracy of AMOC predictions.

"What makes the study particularly interesting is that it directly tests a process that has often been highlighted as an important source of uncertainty in future AMOC projections," said Jonathan Baker, a senior climate scientist at the Met Office in the U.K. who was not involved in the study.

The results are consistent with previous research showing that Greenland meltwater causes additional AMOC weakening, but whether the system could collapse is still uncertain, given that the team used only one model, Baker told Live Science in an email. "Repeating these experiments across a wider range of models will be important to assess how robust the findings are," he said.

Nicholas Foukal, an assistant professor at the University of Georgia's Skidaway Institute of Oceanography who was not involved in the study, said he doesn't think the use of a single model limits the analysis.

"I think this result is robust and I am glad to see the authors come to this conclusion in such a high-resolution and realistic coupled climate model," Foukal told Live Science in an email. "This finding also agrees with other modeling results that require immense amounts of fresh water, much more fresh water than is available on Greenland, to cause irreversible change in the AMOC."

However, a third expert said the model used in the study is unrealistic, because its parameters make the AMOC more resilient than those of other models. Therefore, the study should be replicated in other models to draw unbiased conclusions.

"While the experiment reported is interesting, its outcomes are neither surprising nor should be interpreted as exemplary for the whole model ensemble," Sybren Drijfhout, a professor of physical oceanography at the University of Southampton in the U.K., told Live Science in an email.

Researchers should investigate the impact of the Greenland ice sheet on the AMOC further, von Hardenberg said. "It would be interesting in the future to check it [the AMOC's recovery with Greenland meltwater] with other models, but of course it's encouraging to see it in one case," he added.

This eye-catching astronaut photo shows a cloud of sediment swirling into a giant, milky-green vortex in one of Europe's largest lakes.

Lake Skadar (also known as Shkodër, Shkodra or Scutari) is the largest lake in Southern Europe, with a surface area between 140 and 200 square miles (360 to 520 square kilometers), depending on the time of year. It is situated on the border between Montenegro, which surrounds the western half of the lake (left in the photo), and Albania, which encircles the lake's eastern shore. The body of water is split 65% to 35% in Montenegro's favor.

The lake's main water source is the Morača River, to the northwest, and its biggest outlets are the Bojana and Drin rivers, which start at the lake's easternmost point and eventually drain into the Adriatic Sea, which is partially visible in the bottom left of the photo. Skadar's southern shore is also hugged by a lofty mountain range, known as the Dinaric Alps.

During late winter and early spring, the lake's water level rises, and it usually fills with a milky-green substance that often gets whipped into a vortex by a combination of wind-driven surface currents and the natural flow of water between the lake's major inlets and outlets.

The swirling material looks very similar to blooming algae, but it is actually made of sediments — predominantly limestone and dolomite — that wash into the lake from the Dinaric Alps and other nearby mountains as the snow melts.

Skadar is a karst lake, meaning it was once a cave system that flooded and eventually collapsed, likely because the caves were made from the same easily erodible rocks that now swirl on the lake's surface, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. The lake is a "cryptodepression" because most of the lake's floor is below sea level.

The lake originally formed during the Cenozoic Era (66 million years ago to the present), according to the International Lake Environment Committee Foundation's World Lake Database. It is home to several small islands, some of which can be seen in the photo along the lake's southern shore. These include Beška, which is home to a pair of 600-year-old churches, and Grmožur, where the remains of a 19th-century fortification loom above the lake's surface.

The shipwreck of a paddle steamboat, named Skanderbeg, lies along the lake's western shore. Local partisans sank the vessel in 1942 after Italian soldiers commandeered it during the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia in World War II. When the lake's water levels are at their lowest, part of the shipwreck rises above the surface.

Skadar Lake is a biodiversity hotspot and has protected wildlife status on both sides of the Montenegro-Albania border. It is a particularly important site for birds; more than 280 avian species call it home, including the Dalmatian pelican (Pelecanus crispus) and several endemic species, according to BirdLife International.

The lake also hosts around 50 freshwater snail species ‪—‬ more than any other lake on Earth, according to a 2013 study.

Science word of the day: Autotroph

Pronunciation: AW'-tuh-trohf

What it means: Autotrophs are organisms that can feed themselves with inorganic substances such as light (for plants) or methane (certain microbes). Autotrophs were the first single-celled life-forms to colonize the planet, thriving on chemicals bubbling up from the subsurface at deep-sea vents or figuring out how to harness the sun for energy. Heterotrophs (like you, me and all fungi), arrived on the scene later to feast on these DIY-ers.

How to use it in a sentence: Stromatolites, microbial mats built by cyanobacteria, are autotrophs that thrived in ancient shallow seas.

Can you crack our science word of the day puzzle, Chain Word?

This year's El Niño will almost certainly become the strongest ever recorded, an analysis by a prominent climate researcher has warned. Though other scientists have cautioned that it's still too early to say what it will unleash.

Dynamical models now assign a 90% chance of the 2026-2027 El Niño being an all-time record event, sending temperatures in the Pacific Ocean up to around 3.6 degrees Celsius (6.5 degrees Fahrenheit) above average, according to an analysis by Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth and an author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Seventh Assessment Report.

As the warm phase of a multiyear natural climate pattern, the El Niño could bring unprecedented temperature extremes to an already-warming world. The natural climate pattern is infamous for boosting global temperatures and fueling disruptive weather events such as floods and droughts.

A strong El Niño doesn't guarantee more severe weather impacts. The current El Niño models are also imperfect predictions of what's to come, and we won't know the true nature of this El Niño event until it peaks, likely later this year. However, forecasters have been warning of potentially supercharged El Niño conditions for months, and as more data emerges, there are more reasons to prepare.

According to projections by the World Meteorological Organization, the current El Niño — officially declared on June 11 — is on track to rapidly develop into a "strong" event between July and September. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center now predicts a more than 80% likelihood of very strong El Niño conditions taking hold by the end of the year, ranking this El Niño event among the largest in the historical record.

"These are striking forecasts," Emily Black, a professor of terrestrial processes and climate at the University of Reading and a senior scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science in the U.K., told Live Science in an email. "El Niño forecasts always come with uncertainty, but the level of agreement between models at this time of year, combined with the observed warming already underway in the tropical Pacific, means this should be taken very seriously."

"The important point is that a very strong El Niño would substantially shift the odds of damaging weather in many parts of the world, particularly in the Global South — with severe impact on livelihoods," Black added.

The International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian organization, has warned that the intense El Niño conditions threaten to unleash severe flooding and drought across East Africa and Asia, hitting some of the most vulnerable communities, Al Jazeera reported Tuesday (July 14).

During El Niño, warmer waters gather east of the equatorial Pacific, forcing the jet stream south. In the U.S., this typically brings warmer, drier conditions to the Northeast, while the Gulf Coast and Southeast experience an increased risk of flooding. Globally, the net result of the warmer waters is more heat in the atmosphere, on top of the temperature rise from human-driven global warming.

"El Niño is a natural climate phenomenon, but it is now happening against the backdrop of a much warmer planet," Black said. "That matters because a strong El Niño releases heat and energy into an already warmed world."

"This does not mean every impact can be attributed simply to El Niño or simply to climate change," Black added. "The two interact. El Niño can load the dice towards drought in some regions, flooding in others, marine heatwaves, disrupted monsoons and unusually high global temperatures. Climate change makes many heat extremes more severe and can intensify heavy rainfall because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture."

The last El Niño event occurred between 2023 and 2024. Both years broke temperature records, with 2024 becoming the hottest on record and the first to breach the 1.5-degree- Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming limit set by the 2016 Paris Agreement. The current El Niño is forecast to be more intense than the one in 2023 and 2024, with the projected "very strong" status putting it in a different class of severity.

The strongest El Niño in history?

Hausfather's analysis reports that there's around a 90% chance that the current El Niño will be the strongest ever recorded, with data from multimodel forecasts suggesting that it may obliterate the previous record.

"With the July runs now in from 667 ensemble members across 14 different seasonal forecast models, it looks like this year's El Niño is not only very likely to be the strongest event since reliable records began ‪—‬ it may end up the strongest by a truly mind-blowing margin," Hausfather wrote in The Climate Brink Substack post published Monday (July 13).

NOAA recognizes El Niño conditions when the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean is at least 0.5 C (0.9 F) warmer than the historical average, while wind, surface pressure and rainfall in the region are also consistent with El Niño conditions. The El Niño is then categorized as weak, moderate, strong or very strong. A very strong El Niño (above 2 C, or 3.6 F, warmer than the historical average) is often nicknamed a "super" El Niño, though it's not a scientific term.

The July models suggest that temperatures will likely sail past 2 C above average in the coming months and could potentially even exceed 3.5 C (6.3 F) above average by the end of the year. This is based on newly introduced sea surface temperature forecasts that account for rising background temperatures that can inflate El Niño warming figures. In the traditional and most widely used indices, the temperature-anomaly forecasts cluster closer to 4 C (7.2 F), with some even exceeding 4 C.

In The Climate Brink Substack, Hausfather noted that the multimodel median for the event's peak is currently forecast at 3.6 C (6.5 F), or around 0.8 C (1.4 F) hotter than the prior record holder (2.75 C, set in the 2015-2016 El Niño event). Hausfather wrote that around 91% of ensemble members (individual computer models) have this El Niño exceeding the 2015-2016 record at their peak — around 77% likelihood in the newly introduced indices.

However, Black stressed that the models are still estimates, and not guarantees.

"It is certainly plausible that this could become a record-breaking El Niño, and the latest forecasts make that a real possibility rather than a remote one," Black said. "However, I would still be cautious about treating any probability estimate as a certainty."

"There are two reasons for caution," she added. "First, this event has not peaked yet, and El Niño events usually reach their maximum strength later in the year. Second, 'strongest ever recorded' depends on the index, dataset and baseline used."

"Impacts are what matter"

The most severe El Niño events have left a trail of devastation in their wake. For example, the 2015-2016 El Niño saw a record-breaking hurricane season in the central North Pacific, severe drought in the Caribbean and Ethiopia, and, of course, abnormally hot global temperatures, according to NOAA's Climate.gov. If the forecasts pan out, the current El Niño will match or exceed the 2015-2016 event, as well as an even more infamous super El Niño that occurred between 1877 and 1878, long before modern recordkeeping of El Niño began in 1950.

The 1877-1878 event likely fueled an extreme drought that fed into the 1876-1878 global famine, which ultimately killed more than 50 million people — making it among the worst humanitarian crises in history. However, the disaster was far from just an environmental one, with extractive colonial agricultural policies helping to create conditions for a massive humanitarian crisis. Nonetheless, the famine highlights what can happen when environmental and socioeconomic factors converge.

Even though the world has changed a lot since the 19th century, experts have said a super El Niño could still cause severe shocks to our food systems. This is especially true at a time when researchers say food insecurity is not just confined to low-income countries and that climate change is already pushing agricultural systems to the brink.

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle triggers a warm El Niño and then a cold La Niña roughly every two to seven years, with each phase typically lasting around nine to 12 months. Carbon Brief has predicted that 2026 is likely to be the second-warmest year on record, with the intensifying El Niño increasing the likelihood that 2027 will be the warmest year ever recorded.

The strength of an El Niño event does not necessarily correspond to the size of its influence or impact, according to the Climate Prediction Center. More severe events typically, but not always, increase the certainty of expected impacts. Black believes the impact of an El Niño event is more important than where it ranks in the observational record.

"Records are compelling, but impacts are what matter," Black said. "Even if it falls just short of a record, a very strong El Niño can still have serious consequences. Finally, these forecasts are concerning, but they are also useful: they give societies time to anticipate possible impacts and act before the worst effects are felt."

Heaven Lake is a crater lake at the top of Mount Changbaishan (also called Changbai Mountain) — a colossal, dormant volcano on the border between China and North Korea that formed through successive eruptions over the past 2.6 million years.

Known in China as Tianchi, the lake is the highest and largest crater lake in Northeast Asia, according to UNESCO. It is also the deepest lake in China, according to a study published in March. The lake sits at an elevation of around 7,200 feet (2,200 meters), covers roughly 3.6 square miles (9.2 square kilometers), and has a maximum depth of 1,224 feet (373 m), according to the study.

Heaven Lake is surrounded by 16 peaks that belong to Mount Changbaishan. The lake fills a caldera created by past eruptions, the biggest of which was the "millennium eruption" that took place in A.D. 946 and remains one of the largest eruptions in modern history.

Water started to pool on Mount Changbaishan's summit after the prehistoric Tianwenfeng eruption, which scientists dated to between 70,000 and 40,000 years ago. Heaven Lake has periodically emptied and refilled since then due to precipitation, snowmelt, and an active geothermal system beneath the volcano that forces water up through fault lines.

Although hundreds of reports in the early 2000s claimed there was a creature with a head shaped like that of a horse living in the water, scientists have repeatedly said they are skeptical that any large creature could survive in Heaven Lake.

Mount Changbaishan is one of the best-preserved stratovolcanoes from the past several million years, according to UNESCO. Stratovolcanoes, also known as composite volcanoes, are volcanic mountains built from alternating layers of solidified lava, volcanic ash and rocky debris. Mount Changbaishan is an "open-air classroom for volcanism" because it recorded the different stages of multiple eruptions in astounding detail.

In North Korea, Mount Changbaishan is known as Mount Paektu or Paeku Mountain, meaning "white-topped mountain." The volcano's Chinese name means "forever white mountain."

China, North Korea and South Korea have clashed over the volcano in the past, as the mountain holds cultural and geopolitical significance for the three countries. Two border treaties between China and North Korea in 1962 and 1964 divided the volcano and Heaven Lake roughly down the middle, with North Korea securing 54.5% of the lake.

In the 2000s, China moved to develop the region around the volcano, opening the Mount Changbai Airport and the Mount Changbai Eastern Railroad to connect the region with the rest of the country.

A geological park surrounding the Chinese site of the volcano was officially designated a UNESCO Global Geopark in 2024.

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

A large pit discovered by an amateur astronomer on Google Maps in 2024 is actually a 390 million-year-old meteor impact crater, scientists have confirmed.

Joël Lapointe was planning a camping trail through Quebec's Côte-Nord region when he stumbled upon a large indentation in the terrain, CBC reported at the time. The pit, centered around Lake Marsal, was about 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) in diameter and a near-perfect ring — it didn't seem like a normal ditch. Lapointe eventually got in touch with French geophysicist Pierre Rochette, who said that the surrounding topography was "very suggestive" of an impact crater.

Initial testing of samples retrieved from the site contained a mineral called zircon often formed during meteor impacts. However, zircon's presence alone was not enough to prove the crater's extraterrestrial origin story. So a team of scientists had visited the pit in person.

"One of the key things we look for is evidence for shock metamorphism, which can only occur due to the immense pressures created by asteroid or cometary impacts — or nuclear explosions," Gordon Osinski, a professor of planetary geology at Western University, told Live Science in an email. "Most of these features are microscopic, so you can only confirm in the lab with samples."

But there is one feature Osinski said can be seen with the naked eye: grooves or lines in the rock's surface called shatter cones, which are caused by shockwaves passing through the ground.

In October 2025, Osinski and a team of geologists visited the site to investigate whether any of these features were present. "This was one of the most arduous expeditions I’ve ever done — and I’ve done 25 expeditions to the Arctic and 6 continents," he said. "The terrain was incredibly rough and rugged, plus [there were] lots of bugs."

But they eventually found what they were looking for — shatter cones. They also discovered big cliffs of impact melt rock, created by the intense temperatures and pressures produced by a meteor impact. "You can melt literally tens of cubic kilometres of the Earth's crust when you get a big enough asteroid hitting," Osinski told CBC.

Taking samples from the rocks, the team dated the crater at 390 million years old.

Osinski, who runs a website called Impact Earth dedicated to verifying meteor impact sites, is used to getting emails about strange looking satellite images. "I get lots of messages from the public thinking they have found a crater and 99/100 turn out not to be the case," he told Live Science. "This is one of those rare examples that shows this is possible."

So far, we know of roughly 200 impact craters on Earth, 31 of which have been found in Canada. "Typically about 1 or 2 craters are discovered per year, but these are typically less than 5-10 km [3 to 6 miles] in size," Osinski said. "[A crater of this size] is pretty rare."

The last meteor crater confirmed in Canada was in 2010.

After the new investigation confirmed the pit was punched out by a meteor impact, Osinski, Rochette and their team named it Uhaachatik Crater following discussions with the Ekuanitshit Innu council, a council representing the indigenous people in the area. The researchers will present their work at the Annual Meeting of the Meteorological Society in Germany next month.

Speaking to Radio-Canada, Lapointe said that he was very happy to hear his discovery had been confirmed as a genuine meteor crater. "It's not every day that an ordinary citizen finds a 390-million-year-old crater," he said. “I encourage everyone to not ignore intuition or an observation, even if it isn’t part of your field of expertise.”

Osinski and the team will continue their work on the collected samples to learn more about the impact site. "Any crater discovered offers us insight into how craters form and the effects that they can have on Earth’s geology, biology, and climate," he told Live Science.

Extreme coastal flooding events are occurring far more frequently in our warming world than ever before, threatening countless communities that will only become more vulnerable as climate change intensifies.

A recent study found that once-in-a-century flooding events now strike on our planet about once a decade. The study, published June 10 in the journal Nature Climate Change, also found that human-driven climate change has quadrupled the frequency of coastal sea level extremes since 1900.

The findings were released alongside another study by a separate team, published in the journal Science Advances, that found human-caused sea level rise was clearly measurable at 97% of sites sampled around the world, and was responsible for around 58% of the observed daily extreme water level exceedances between 2000 and 2018. In other words, human activities are the primary drivers behind sea level extremes — which include storm surges, high tides and rising sea level anomalies.

As the ocean's potential to devastate coastal communities surges, Live Science spoke with Sönke Dangendorf, lead author of the Nature Climate Change study, to learn more about what's to come. Here's what he had to say.

Patrick Pester: How do you separate human-driven sea level rise from natural forces?

Sönke Dangendorf: The absolute basis for doing these kinds of investigations is to work with observations, but observations are unfortunately sparse. We have a few more than 100 tide gauges [distributed worldwide] that offer long, century-scale records of sea level change since the early 20th century. We see that sea levels are changing at those locations, but we cannot tell a whole lot about what is happening elsewhere. So, what we can do is use the same climate models that we use to produce future projections of sea level change.

If you compare observations with the models, then the models need to be able to reproduce what the observations have shown. That was the first step we did, and indeed we proved in this study that the climate models are capable of reproducing observed climate. The nice thing with climate models then is that if you are able to reproduce what has been observed, you can start doing experiments. For instance, you can keep greenhouse gases constant in the modeling and then assess the influence of natural climate variability on the changes that we have observed. That's what we did in the study.

We found that we have seen already a 12-fold increase on average globally in what used to be a once-in-100-year event in 1900. And when we do these forcing experiments, we have also seen that anthropogenic forcing [human-driven change], in particular since the 1970s, has become the dominant force.

PP: What does this mean for coastal communities around the world?

SD: A couple of centimeters of sea level rise doesn't sound like a whole lot in theory, but if you live along the coast, it hits you much harder than you might think. Just an example: I used to live along the U.S. East Coast in Norfolk, Virginia. The community was built along the water, and they used to be fine in the 1950s and 1960s; they wouldn't see flooding at all, or maybe just once every five or six years. But due to sea level rise, what happens now is that high tide leads to flooding. You see flooded streets, and that affects your commute, so people increasingly cannot make it to work.

It affects your daily life suddenly. And then it makes it very hard for you and your coastal community because you have increasing insurance costs — the accumulated costs of these events can easily be as much as a major hurricane making landfall. So, this is a daily experience that many people already have, and it's a direct impact of sea level rise.

With respect to what we assessed in these more extreme events, people may absorb a once-in-a-100-year event once in their lifetime. They may experience something like a Storm Sandy, and they may be able to recover from that, but if you think about recovering from that basically every eight years — the frequency of these events nowadays compared to 1900 — that's of course way more difficult and not feasible for many people.

PP: What can we do?

SD: We can adapt. The silver lining here is that we have shown humans are the dominant forcing factor behind these changes. That's the silver lining because it means if we react, we can do something about it.

The reaction to changes in climate is often delayed, so we have sea level rise that we are already committed to. For instance, if you look into projections, they all agree with respect to what happens until around 2060, independently of how much greenhouse gases are emitted. There's no way around that. We could stop emitting greenhouse gases today, and we would still experience it. So, we need to adapt to that sea level rise, but if we mitigate climate change, if we stop emitting greenhouse gases, then we can avoid dangerous sea level rise, and that's very important.

PP: What will the world look like in 2060 with the committed sea level rise?

SD: According to the last IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report, what used to be a once-in-a-100-year event in the present day will occur annually at 19% to 31% of tide gauge locations by 2050. So, at about a quarter of the locations, you will experience these once-in-a-100-year events annually, and that is something that is just mind-blowing.

The changes are happening much quicker in low-latitude locations. The reason is that in the tropics you typically have a less variable climate. You don't have these massive swings all the time. For instance, in the North Sea, we have a storm season, and we have huge tide ranges. We are already adapted to pretty massive changes of multiple meters, so a couple of centimeters of sea level rise do not play out that hard, but in the tropics, where it's more calm, it makes a huge difference.

As an analogy, think about two hurdle runners. You have one hurdle runner that's compared to the tropics; he jumps very consistently but always below the hurdle, so he never makes it over. Then you have another hurdle runner that's the North Sea type of guy. His jumps are very variable. Sometimes he's very high and makes it over that hurdle, but very often he also jumps very low. Now think about lowering that hurdle, which is comparable to increasing sea levels. Suddenly, that hurdle runner who is very consistent makes it over all of the time, while the guy from the North Sea may jump over the hurdle a couple more times, but he also still has the very extreme lows. So, the constant jumper is way more sensitive to these changes.

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

This stunning astronaut photo shows the last time one of NASA's iconic space shuttles photobombed astronauts' view of Earth as the spacecraft docked with the ISS.

NASA's Space Shuttle Program included five plane-like spacecraft — Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour — which collectively completed 135 missions between 1981 and 2011, racking up more than 32,000 hours in space. During that time, they helped to construct the ISS and, later, ferry astronauts to and from the station. The space shuttles also helped to deploy and maintain several other important spacecraft, including the Hubble Space Telescope.

The last space shuttle to fly was Atlantis, which successfully completed 33 missions (the second-highest total, behind Discovery).

This photo shows Atlantis approaching the ISS for the last time as it passed over the distinctive turquoise waters of the Bahamas. The space shuttle's bay doors are open, exposing its cargo area. This was standard procedure for all space shuttles once they reached low Earth orbit because it prevented the spacecraft's radiators from overheating.

The open doors also enabled the shuttle's docking mechanism, located within its cargo bay, to attach to the ISS, thus creating a pressurized seal so that astronauts could move between the two spacecraft.

Atlantis' final flight began on July 8, 2011, when it launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida vertically strapped to a massive fuel tank and a pair of rocket boosters. It returned to Earth on July 21, gliding down to land onto a runway at the launch site. (The spacecraft is now on display at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.)

In addition to helping construct the ISS, NASA's space shuttles visited Russia's Mir space station, serviced Hubble, and deployed both the Magellan probe to Venus and the Galileo probe to Jupiter. In total, the space shuttle orbited Earth 4,848 times, traveling nearly 126 million miles (203 million kilometers) — more than 525 times the distance between Earth and the moon.

Astronaut photos of the space shuttles were popular because they offered "punctuated snapshots of distinct places on Earth" that were "framed by a human eye," NASA representatives wrote in 2011. "These images speak to people."

While the Space Shuttle Program achieved a lot during its 30-year history, it famously suffered two tragedies: the 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia disasters, which killed all crewmembers on board.

NASA eventually canceled the program in 2011, citing the high cost of maintaining the aging spacecraft and a reduced need for the vehicles after the completion of the ISS the same year. To this day, the space shuttles remain the only winged spacecraft to carry humans into space.

See more Earth from space

The two major earthquakes that struck Venezuela just 39 seconds apart on June 24 had slightly different epicenters in north-central Venezuela. The first (M7.2) struck near San Felipe, and the second (M7.5) near Yumare, leaving thousands dead and thousands more injured, according to government officials. But beyond the devastation, the sequence opened a rare scientific opportunity: Researchers think the unusual "earthquake doublet" could offer new insight into how large fault systems interact and how some of the most destructive earthquakes grow.

Large earthquakes are typically followed by smaller aftershocks. But particularly intense events can also alter stress on nearby faults ‪or along the same fault, ‪triggering another major earthquake.

These scenarios are infrequent but not unprecedented. The 2023 sequence in Kahramanmaraş, Turkey, and the 1997 earthquake doublet in Harnai, Pakistan, are two well-known examples.

The Venezuelan sequence also reinforces an emerging consensus among seismologists: that treating faults as isolated structures may underestimate the destructive power of quakes in regions where multiple tectonic faults meet, as they do both in Venezuela and around California's San Andreas Fault system. That's a problem, because many of the seismic hazard models in California do not account for those multi-fault interactions.

A natural laboratory for understanding major earthquakes

The fault system involved in the Venezuelan earthquake ‪—‬ which includes the Boconó, Morón, San Sebastián and El Pilar faults ‪—‬ shares several key characteristics with the San Andreas Fault. Both are right-lateral strike-slip fault systems ‪—‬ in which the crustal blocks slide horizontally past each other ‪—‬ located along the boundary between two tectonic plates: the South American and Caribbean plates in Venezuela, and the Pacific and North American plates in California.

Despite these similarities, researchers caution that the two systems differ in important ways.

"The main difference is that the Venezuelan plate boundary has a much more complex fault architecture," Julián García Mayordomo, a senior scientist in the Geological Hazards and Climate Change Department at the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain, told Live Science.

The difference stems largely from the Maracaibo block, whose interaction with surrounding faults creates a much more intricate plate boundary than California's.

"The other difference is the speed at which the plates move," García Mayordomo pointed out.

In Venezuela, the tectonic plates move past each other at about 0.8 inches (20 millimeters) per year, compared with roughly 1.2 inches (30 millimeters) along the San Andreas Fault. Faster plate motion allows tectonic stress to accumulate more quickly, which influences how often large earthquakes occur over long timescales, but not when the next one will strike.

Along the San Andreas Fault, magnitude 7 or larger earthquakes occur, on average every 100 to 200 years, although the frequency of recurrence varies along the fault. The last major rupture in Southern California was the magnitude 7.9 Fort Tejon earthquake in 1857. In Venezuela, estimated slip rates suggest recurrence intervals of one to two centuries. The region experienced two devastating earthquakes in 1812, part of a multiple-rupture sequence that included events of magnitude 7.5, 7.2 and 6.5, and a 2018 study concluded that the Boconó Fault had already accumulated enough strain to generate another major earthquake.

However, these are statistical averages. The recurrence of large earthquakes is highly irregular and depends on a multitude of factors, many of which we still don't fully understand. So a major event could occur in 100 years ‪—‬ or even tomorrow.

Looking beyond individual faults

This uncertainty is precisely one of the reasons the Venezuelan seismic doublet is generating so much interest among seismologists.

"It is the kind of natural event that can sharpen and test the rupture-interaction concepts that paleoseismic models like ours can only infer indirectly," said Liliane Burkhard, a geologist and geophysicist at the University of Bern and first author of a recent study suggesting that the junction between the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults in Southern California is experiencing some of its highest tectonic stress levels in the past 1,000 years, told Live Science.

"Our Cajon Pass work relied on centuries of paleoseismic reconstructions to infer how stress evolves and whether ruptures can cross between fault systems," Burkhard told Live Science. But that doesn't give geologists real-time data, captured by seismic instruments, showing how different faults interact during quakes, she added.

The Venezuela doublet offers exactly that opportunity. The main lesson for California, Burkhard said, is that interactions between neighboring faults can play an important role in the evolution of large earthquakes.

"Whether it is Cajon Pass where the San Andreas and San Jacinto systems meet or the Boconó-San Sebastián in Venezuela, these are precisely the locations where single-fault hazard models break down because the real behavior depends on how stress is shared and transferred between adjacent structures," she said.

Still, the two systems are quite different. The Venezuelan sequence represents a different type of cascading rupture than the one described in Burkhard's research. At Cajon Pass, the "earthquake gate" concept explores whether a single rupture can jump from one fault system to another during the same earthquake, over tens of seconds of rupture propagation along a continuous fault trace. The Venezuelan doublet, by contrast, "looks like two distinct ruptures on what may be two separate fault structures, triggered in close succession," Burkhard said.

For Burkhard, the Venezuelan earthquake reinforces the need for seismic hazard models to move beyond treating faults as isolated structures and instead represent them as interconnected networks. The challenge is particularly relevant in California, where roughly 300 active faults may interact in ways that traditional hazard models do not capture.

New Zealand has already incorporated this lesson. After the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake ruptured at least 12 faults in a single event, New Zealand revised its National Seismic Hazard Model to include complex multifault ruptures.

García Mayordomo argues that both Venezuela and the United States should incorporate these complex rupture scenarios into seismic hazard assessments and building codes. Earthquakes involving multiple faults can produce longer-lasting shaking that increases structural fatigue and, ultimately, the risk of collapse.

"It's like a boxing match," García Mayordomo said. "Many times the winner isn't the boxer who lands the hardest punch but the one who keeps punching for longer."

Even so, researchers cautioned against drawing sweeping conclusions from a single earthquake.

"Each earthquake gives us one possible scenario," Judith Hubbard, an earthquake scientist and structural geologist at Cornell University told Live Science. "The range of earthquake behaviors is wide."

Tropical forests draw down and store large quantities of CO₂ from the atmosphere. The Amazon rainforest in South America, for example, stores approximately 123 billion tonnes of carbon — more than is stored in any other terrestrial ecosystem in the world. But these forests are facing a critical challenge.

Research from 2023, which was carried out by me and more than 100 colleagues, found that tropical forests in South America are vulnerable to climate extremes. We determined that during an El Niño event, the warm phase of a natural fluctuation in the Earth's climate system, South American tropical forests may fail to act as a carbon sink.

This finding becomes even more alarming when we consider the increasing frequency and intensity of El Niño events. There have been twice as many "very strong" El Niños in the last 60 years as there were in the 60 years before that. And the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has recently confirmed that such an El Niño is currently underway.

Tropical forests absorb CO₂ through the process of photosynthesis and convert it into biomass. However, the balance between photosynthesis and respiration is delicate and depends on two factors: temperature and water availability.

In hotter and drier conditions, plants close the pores of their leaves to avoid water loss. But closing them effectively cuts off a plant's fuel supply because it is through these pores they absorb CO₂. This starves plants of the carbon needed for photosynthesis and to grow.

During El Niño years, which are characterized by high temperature anomalies, prolonged climate stress leads to reduced forest growth and increased tree mortality. The effects of this are felt for decades as carbon is released back into the atmosphere when the dead trees decompose.

Our findings revealed that during the 2015-2016 El Niño, when temperatures on land were at least a degree higher on average than usual conditions, some of South America's tropical forests effectively stopped absorbing carbon. This raises concerns about the possible impact of the current El Niño on the Amazon and global climate.

In our research, we measured over half a million trees across six South American countries over a period of more than 30 years, using tape measures to track their growth. These trees belonged to over 4,000 different species. We used this data to calculate precise estimates of the amount of carbon stored as a forest's aboveground biomass.

We found that the vulnerability of these forests to El Niño conditions was closely linked to their baseline climate. While we tend to assume that rainforests are all hot, wet and biodiverse ecosystems, seasonal drought is a reality for many tropical forests. Conditions in regions at the edge of the Amazon rainforest, for example, tend to be particularly hot and dry.

Our findings revealed that drier forests at the edge of the Amazon, where trees regularly endure periods of limited water availability, were especially susceptible to extreme El Niño conditions. On average, a 0.5°C increase in temperature caused these forests to lose 0.5% of their aboveground carbon.

Larger trees suffered the most. While tree mortality rates increased from 1.8% to 3% per year during the El Niño in South American tropical forests as a whole, mortality rates effectively doubled for medium (classified as over 20cm in diameter) and large trees.

The fact that larger trees with less dense wood died at much higher rates compared to small trees and those with high wood density points strongly to hydraulic failure, when intense atmospheric moisture demand snaps the tension in the tree's internal water column rather than slow carbon starvation.

These results suggest that adaption to seasonal drought may not be sufficient to protect tropical forests from extreme events. Climate extremes are possibly already pushing forests at the edges of the Amazon beyond their capacity to adapt, causing catastrophic carbon losses.

A looming threat

Scientists have warned that 2026 may again be the warmest year on record. Heightening the alarm further is the severity of the current El Niño. Never before has an an El Niño begun when oceans are already so warm and air temperatures so high.

On top of this is the fact that, over the past three decades, the edges of the Amazon have experienced some of the highest temperatures and most rapid warming the tropics have ever seen. The structural integrity of a forest is compromised when a major climate anomaly occurs before it has recovered from recent, multi-year stress.

These compounding factors mean that we risk witnessing tree and carbon losses on scales not yet seen.

Tropical forests are invaluable assets in the fight against climate change. But South American tropical forests, a once-reliable carbon sink, are vulnerable to intensifying heat and drought. There is a risk these essential ecological allies stop acting as a carbon sink as extreme climate conditions become the norm.

Preserving tropical forests is thus essential. Their ability to continue acting as carbon sinks hinges on efforts to protect them and a collective commitment to limit global temperature rise. The Amazon's future depends on this, and so does ours.

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

Rainforest quiz: Can you sort Earth's largest rainforests from biggest to smallest?

For decades, cities have been designed around "gray infrastructure." Roads move people. Bridges connect communities. Water systems protect public health. These systems are governed by engineering standards because society recognizes that safety cannot depend on good intentions alone.

Urban nature deserves the same recognition.

In June, a heat wave gripped Europe, breaking temperature records across the continent. In France, officials reported over 2,000 excess deaths. In the U.K., hospitals declared critical incidents and machinery and IT systems failed. In the U.S., a heat dome over the Midwest and East Coast disrupted Fourth of July celebrations, with at least 25 heat-related deaths over Independence Day weekend.

Cities are being tested by a warming climate. Yet one of our most effective forms of climate infrastructure is being lost — not because it does not work but because we still do not treat it as infrastructure.

My view is simple: Urban nature ‪—‬ including street trees, parks, wetlands and other urban green spaces ‪—‬ should be categorized and managed as essential infrastructure, with minimum standards for its protection, quality and long-term maintenance. Just as we regulate roads, bridges and drinking water, we need standards that ensure all urban residents benefit from healthy and thriving urban nature. Without such standards, cities will become hotter, less resilient and increasingly unequal as climate change accelerates.

Scientific research shows that urban trees and green spaces cool cities during heat waves, reduce flooding by absorbing stormwater, improve air quality, store carbon, support biodiversity, and improve both physical and mental health. During extreme heat, neighborhoods with mature tree canopies can be several degrees cooler than nearby streets dominated by concrete and asphalt. Those few degrees can mean the difference between manageable discomfort and dangerous heat exposure, particularly for older adults, children and people with existing health conditions.

But while the science is strong, our governance is not.

Cities enthusiastically announce ambitious tree-planting campaigns, biodiversity strategies and new greening targets. These initiatives are valuable, but they often focus on what is easy to count rather than what truly matters. Planting a tree is not the same as growing a healthy urban forest. Creating a park does not guarantee biodiversity. A green roof delivers little value if it fails during drought.

The real measure of success is whether urban nature continues providing benefits decades after trees are planted and established.

This is where cities are still falling short.

Unlike buildings or transport systems, urban nature rarely operates under consistent minimum standards. Many cities have no requirements for minimum tree canopy cover, adequate rooting space, soil quality, biodiversity targets, long-term maintenance or even whether newly planted trees survive. As a result, access to nature depends heavily on where people live. Wealthier neighborhoods often enjoy mature tree canopy and high-quality parks, while disadvantaged communities experience hotter streets, fewer green spaces and greater exposure to climate risks.

That is not simply an environmental issue. It is a public health issue, a climate adaptation issue, and an issue of social equity.

The solution is not simply to plant more trees. It is to establish urban nature standards that recognize nature as essential infrastructure.

These standards would not prescribe the same solution for every city. Instead, they would establish minimum expectations based on scientific evidence. They could include targets for accessible green space, minimum tree canopy cover, sufficient soil volume for healthy tree growth, biodiversity outcomes, long-term maintenance funding and routine monitoring to ensure that urban nature continues delivering benefits to communities.

Importantly, these standards should focus on outcomes rather than simple planting targets. Counting how many trees are planted tells us little about whether cities are becoming more resilient. Measuring survival, canopy development, ecosystem health and equitable access provides a much better picture of whether investments in urban nature are actually returning dividends.

Some critics argue that cities cannot afford stronger standards for urban nature. Municipal budgets are already stretched by housing, transport and aging infrastructure. But this argument overlooks a fundamental reality: We already spend enormous sums responding to the consequences of extreme heat, flooding, poor air quality and declining public health. Healthy urban ecosystems help reduce these costs while delivering multiple benefits simultaneously.

As climate change accelerates, the distinction between gray and green infrastructure becomes increasingly blurred. Trees cool buildings and reduce energy demand. Wetlands decrease flood damage. Parks improve public health and strengthen communities. These are not optional amenities. They are functioning components of urban infrastructure that deserve the same level of planning, investment and accountability as any engineered system.

Building codes transformed the safety of our cities because they established minimum standards that every development had to meet. Climate resilience now demands a similar transformation for urban nature.

The next generation of resilient cities will not be defined simply by how many trees they plant but by the standards they adopt to protect, restore and sustain the living infrastructure urban life depends on.

The real question is not whether cities can afford to invest in urban nature; it is whether they can afford not to.

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

This ethereal satellite snap shows beautiful, "painting-like" folds within an ancient underwater structure in the Bahamas.

The Great Bahama Bank (GBB) is a massive submerged platform stretching around 330 miles (530 kilometers) across a shallow ocean channel between Andros Island and the Exuma islands, according to Britannica. The crescent-shaped bank surrounds a darkly colored ocean drop-off known as "The Tongue of the Ocean," which plunges to depths of 6,500 feet (2,000 meters), according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

The photographed section of the GBB is around 23 miles (37 km) across and features a series of submerged sandbanks — most of which are covered with dense seagrass beds — that lie between 7 and 40 feet (2 to 12 m) below the ocean's surface.

The varying water depth and seagrass concentration cause multiple hues of green and blue to shine across the sandbanks, which have been carved into smooth, folding ribbons by ocean currents over thousands of years.

"The varying colors and curves remind us of graceful strokes on a painting," Earth Observatory representatives wrote.

This section of the GBB was first photographed in 2001 by the Landsat 7 satellite and has often appeared on lists of the most iconic aerial images of our planet.

"There are many nice seagrass and sand patterns worldwide, but none like this anywhere on Earth," Serge Andréfouet, an oceanographer at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development who first shared the 2001 image, told the Earth Observatory. "I am not surprised it is still a favorite, especially for people who see it for the first time."

The sandbanks are like giant underwater dunes carved out by ocean currents.

"Tides and ocean currents in the Bahamas sculpted the sand and seaweed beds into these multicolored, fluted patterns in much the same way that winds sculpted the vast sand dunes in the Sahara Desert," Earth Observatory representatives wrote in 2001.

The GBB lies atop a roughly 3-mile-thick (5 km) bed of limestone dating to the age of the dinosaurs, more than 65 million years ago. This hefty mass, made up of the remains of long-dead coral reefs, is so large that Earth's crust directly below the GBB has "sagged under the weight," according to the University of Texas at Austin's Marine Science Institute.

Before the end of the last ice age, around 12,000 years ago, this limestone slab had risen to more than 400 feet (120 m) above sea level and only resubmerged as global sea levels rose due to the melting of glaciers, according to the Marine Science Institute.

The Bahamas has more than 3,000 islands and smaller cays and is home to several other intriguing oceanographic features, including deep tidal channels off the coast of Great Exuma Island (which once harbored famous pirate ships) and a series of aurora-like sandbanks that appear to shine along the nation's northernmost islands.

See more Earth from space

A simple method to thicken Arctic sea ice has shown promising results in its very first field experiment, performed in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, Canada.

Researchers are considering several controversial geoengineering techniques to slow the catastrophic melt of Arctic sea ice, including stratospheric aerosol injection, which involves shooting tiny sulfur particles into the sky to blot out the sun. But in a new study, scientists evaluated the merits of a much safer and more straightforward approach: pumping seawater onto existing sea ice in winter and letting it freeze into a reinforcing layer.

Known as sea ice thickening, this method has been used by Nordic and Arctic communities for decades, and ice hockey rinks employ a similar technique to keep their ice sturdy, two of the study's authors told Live Science in an email.

"Practical applications [that already exist] include building ice roads and creating platforms for offshore oil exploration," said Edward Blanchard-Wrigglesworth, a research associate professor in the University of Washington's Department of Atmospheric Sciences, and Andrea Ceccolini, an honorary professor at University College London and the CEO of the startup Real Ice, which studies artificial sea ice thickening methods and receives funding from the U.K. government.

Modeling work hints that sea ice thickening could become a climate adaptation tool for Arctic communities by limiting coastal erosion near towns, facilitating travel and supporting animal migrations and hunting.

Now, researchers have assessed the method's efficacy in the field for the first time. Their results, published May 22 in the journal Earth's Future, indicate that both the thickness and brightness of sea ice can be enhanced significantly on small scales — making the ice more reflective, and therefore more resilient to melting.

In the experiment, the team set up eight test areas and three control sites in Cambridge Bay during the winter of 2024 to 2025. Using submersible pumps that each consume less power than a toaster, they flooded the test areas either once or twice with up to 8 inches (20 centimeters) of seawater, while the control sites were never flooded. In spring, one control site was used for a melt pond drainage experiment, which involved drilling small holes in the ice to remove meltwater and expose the brighter ice underneath.

Overall, the test areas grew up to 12.6 inches (32 cm) thicker than the control sites by the end of winter, which is roughly equivalent to the ice thinning that has happened in the Arctic over the past 50 years, according to the study. Test areas that were flooded twice showed greater thickening than those flooded once. And in the melt period from late May to September, sea ice in the test areas appeared brighter and had slower melt rates, remaining thicker than the ice in the control sites. The melt pond drainage experiment also resulted in brighter sea ice than the other control sites.

When water is pumped onto sea ice, it saturates the snow that sits on top of the ice. "The snow-water mixture freezes into a new layer of ice, while the reduction in snow insulation allows colder atmospheric temperatures to accelerate natural ice growth from below," Blanchard-Wrigglesworth and Ceccolini explained.

Thicker sea ice is usually brighter than thin sea ice, which boosts the amount of sunlight that is reflected back into space. "The broader implication is that these effects could enhance the Arctic's reflectivity through both increased surface brightness and longer-lasting sea ice," the researchers said. "If similar results could eventually be achieved at larger scales, increased Arctic albedo could contribute to regional cooling, with potential knock-on benefits such as slowing permafrost thaw and reducing ice loss from Greenland."

However, there is still a big question mark over how scalable and economically viable sea ice thickening is, given that it requires people and machines working in the field. According to a 2016 study, 10 million wind-powered pumps would be needed to cover just 10% of the Arctic Ocean, and 100 million to cover the entire Arctic. "It is reasonable to ask whether such an endeavor is financially feasible or even logistically possible," the authors of that study wrote.

Yearly sea ice extent in the Arctic has shrunk by 20% since 1979, and this loss is accelerating with global warming. Therefore, if we want Arctic sea ice thickening to work at a large scale, "the pumps must be deployed almost immediately, while there is still a sufficient area of sea ice over which to flood," researchers wrote in a 2021 study.

The ecological and social impacts of Arctic sea ice thickening are not well understood, and further research will delay deployment, meaning it might be too late to roll out sea ice thickening by the time scientists have the data they need to ensure its safety and feasibility.

For these reasons and others, including governance issues and high maintenance needs, "sea-ice thickening is simply not feasible for use at a scale and at a rate that would be meaningful for sea ice protection," researchers wrote in a review published last year.

Deployment on anything but local scales would be challenging, Blanchard-Wrigglesworth and Ceccolini agreed. Nevertheless, the researchers said their most recent winter trials, which have yet to be published, showed encouraging results. In those trials, the sea ice in test areas grew 20 inches (50 cm) thicker than in control sites, The Guardian reported.

"We expect to have a clearer picture once the current melt season is complete," the researchers told Live Science. "In parallel, we are developing underwater robotic technology that could support autonomous deployments. Earlier this year, we conducted the first Arctic field tests of a prototype re-icing drone in Finland."

The drone is currently being refined in collaboration with the BioRobotics Institute in Pisa, Italy, according to The Guardian.

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.