Weather website AccuWeather has warned of the potential for a 1-in-1,000-year flood across northeastern Arkansas to western Kentucky, with the worst-hit areas to receive the equivalent of four months' worth of rain in just five days. In some cases, this will fall on areas that could be vulnerable to flooding, having already received a great deal of rainfall in recent months.

"We're concerned about the risk of life-threatening and historic flash flooding, which could evolve into a major river flooding event," Jonathan Porter, chief meteorologist at AccuWeather, said in a statement. "Dangerous situations can escalate to life-threatening emergencies in a matter of seconds with a flash flooding threat as serious as this."

Heavy rain is expected to fall from Wednesday night (April 2) through Sunday (April 6), leading to widespread flash flooding, particularly in the Lower Ohio Valley, Mid-South, and Arkansas, according to the National Weather Service.

Related: Giant, near-perfect cloud ring appears in the middle of the Pacific Ocean — Earth from space

The rain is flowing into the central U.S. from the tropics on an atmospheric river — a long, thin region of the atmosphere that transports heat and water vapor. The movement of water is expected to slow down and effectively stall between now and the weekend, resulting in a massive deluge of rain in the same few areas.

"A big area of high pressure off the coast of the Southeast U.S. will funnel moisture from the Caribbean and Gulf into parts of the central U.S.," Porter said. "The weather pattern will look like a traffic jam in the atmosphere, with repeating thunderstorms and downpours over the same areas. This is a recipe for big flooding problems."

Parts of Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky are all expected to receive up to 1.5 feet (0.5 meter) of rain between Wednesday and Saturday (April 5), AccuWeather reported. Some of these same regions have already battled deadly flooding this year, particularly Kentucky, where flooding led to the deaths of at least 24 people in February.

Forecasters anticipate that the rains will ease off over the weekend, but rivers may continue to rise into next week. Porter noted that people in the affected areas should be prepared to make for higher ground.

"Relentless rainfall will cause problems along creeks, streams, and low-lying flood-prone areas first before evolving into a river flooding problem as all of the water tries to flow downstream," Porter said. "Be ready to move quickly to higher ground."

The slab's pull has created giant "drips" that hang from the underside of the continent down to about 400 miles (640 kilometers) deep inside the mantle, according to a new study. These drips are located beneath an area spanning from Michigan to Nebraska and Alabama, but their presence appears to be impacting the entire continent.

The dripping area looks like a large funnel, with rocks from across North America being pulled toward it horizontally before getting sucked down. As a result, large parts of North America are losing material from the underside of their crust, the researchers said.

"A very broad range is experiencing some thinning," study lead author Junlin Hua, a geoscientist who conducted the research during a postdoctoral fellowship at The University of Texas (UT) at Austin, said in a statement. "Luckily, we also got the new idea about what drives this thinning," said Hua, now a professor at the University of Science and Technology of China.

Related: Earth's crust is peeling away under California

The researchers found that the drips result from the downward dragging force of a chunk of oceanic crust that broke off from an ancient tectonic plate called the Farallon plate.

The Farallon plate and the North American plate once formed a subduction zone along the continent's west coast, with the former sliding beneath the latter and recycling its material into the mantle. The Farallon plate splintered due to the advance of the Pacific plate roughly 20 million years ago, and remnant slabs subducted beneath the North American plate slowly drifted off.

One of these slabs currently straddles the boundary between the mantle transition zone and the lower mantle roughly 410 miles (660 km) beneath the Midwest. Dubbed the "Farallon slab" and first imaged in the 1990s, this piece of oceanic crust is responsible for a process known as "cratonic thinning," according to the new study, which was published March 28 in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Cratonic thinning refers to the wearing away of cratons, which are regions of Earth's continental crust and upper mantle that have mostly remained intact for billions of years. Despite their stability, cratons can undergo changes, but this has never been observed in action due to the huge geologic time scales involved, according to the study.

Now, for the first time, researchers have documented cratonic thinning as it occurs. The discovery was possible thanks to a wider project led by Hua to map what lies beneath North America using a high-resolution seismic imaging technique called "full-waveform inversion." This technique uses different types of seismic waves to extract all the available information about physical parameters underground.

"This sort of thing is important if we want to understand how a planet has evolved over a long time," study co-author Thorsten Becker, a distinguished chair in geophysics at UT Austin, said in the statement. "Because of the use of this full-waveform method, we have a better representation of that important zone between the deep mantle and the shallower lithosphere [crust and upper mantle]."

To test their results, the researchers simulated the impact of the Farallon slab on the craton above using a computer model. A dripping area formed when the slab was present, but it disappeared when the slab was absent, confirming that — theoretically, at least — a sunken slab can drag rocks across a large area down into Earth's interior.

Dripping beneath the Midwest won't lead to changes at the surface anytime soon, the researchers said, adding that it may even stop as the Farallon slab sinks deeper into the lower mantle and its influence over the craton wanes.

The findings could help researchers piece together the enormous puzzle of how Earth came to look the way it does today. "It helps us understand how do you make continents, how do you break them, and how do you recycle them," Becker said.

Researchers took a sediment core from the Great Blue Hole sinkhole, situated about 50 miles (80 kilometers) off the coast of Belize, which revealed that tropical cyclones have increased in frequency over the past 5,700 years. The scientists described their findings in a study published March 14 in the journal Geology.

"A key finding of our study is that the regional storm frequency has increased continuously since 5,700 years B.P. (before present)," study lead author Dominik Schmitt, a researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt's Biosedimentology Research Group, told Live Science. "Remarkably, the frequency of storm landfalls in the study area has been much higher in the last two decades than in the last six millennia — a clear indication of the influence of Modern Global Warming."

The bottom of the Great Blue Hole

Tropical cyclones are intense, rotating, low-pressure systems that form over warm ocean waters. They transfer heat from the ocean into the upper atmosphere. Tropical cyclones can be extremely destructive, producing strong winds, heavy rainfall and storm surges.

To learn more about these storms over a long period of time, the researchers extracted the sediment core from the bottom of the 410-foot-deep (125 meters) Great Blue Hole — a massive underwater sinkhole that formed as sea levels rose during the last ice age, around 10,000 years ago. This sediment core, measuring 98 feet (30 m) long, is the longest continuous record of tropical storms in the area.

By analyzing the layers of sediment in the core, the scientists could determine the number of tropical cyclones that had occurred over the past 5,700 years. Two layers of fair-weather sediment are usually laid down every year, enabling the researchers to count back the years like the rings of a tree and compare when storm-event sediment layers were deposited.

The researchers found that tropical cyclones have been getting more frequent over the past 5,700 years, with a particular increase in frequency since we started burning fossil fuels during the Industrial Revolution.

"Over the past six millennia, between four and sixteen tropical storms and hurricanes have passed over the Great Blue Hole every century," Schmitt said. In the past 20 years alone, however, the researchers found evidence of nine tropical storms passing over the same region.

There appear to be two factors driving the rise in tropical cyclones, the researchers noted. Much of the frequency increases over the past few thousand years may be due to a southward migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ).

The ITCZ is a region near the equator where the trade winds of the Northern and Southern hemispheres come together, resulting in low atmospheric pressure, high humidity and frequent thunderstorms. Along the northern edge of the ITCZ is the Hurricane Main Development Region (MDR), where most tropical cyclones in the Atlantic form.

The ITCZ usually moves northward in the summer and southward in the winter as a result of changing sea surface temperatures, but it has also been steadily moving southward over the past few thousand years.

This southward migration of the ITCZ "has probably led to a southward displacement of the major Atlantic storm genesis region, and a shift of the main storm trajectories from formerly higher to now lower latitudes," Schmitt explained.

A surge in storms

Increases in global sea surface temperatures as a result of human-caused climate change are likely responsible for the recent spike in tropical storms, and will likely result in even more frequent tropical cyclones in the coming decades, according to the study.

"The nine modern storm layers from the last 20 years indicate that extreme weather events in this region will become much more frequent in the 21st century," Schmitt said.

The researchers predict that as many as 45 tropical storms and hurricanes could hit the Caribbean before the end of 2100.

"This high number is far in excess of what has been the case in the past 5,700 years," Schmitt said. "An explanation for this high storm frequency is not the natural variations in climate or solar radiation, but the progressive global warming during the Industrial Age, accompanied by fast rising sea-surface temperatures and stronger global La Niña events, which create optimal conditions for the development and rapid intensification of storms."

The volcanic eruption started along the Sundhnúkur crater row following a swarm of earthquakes at 6:30 a.m. local time (2:30 a.m. ET) this morning (April 1), according to the IMO.

A nearly 4,000-foot-long (1,200 meters) fissure opened up at 9:45 a.m. local time north of the town of Grindavík, and it continues to extend southward toward the town.

IMO officials raised the hazard assessment alert level for both the Sundhnúkur crater row and Grindavík, which has a population of around 3,000 people, to the highest risk level. Southwesterly winds are expected to carry volcanic gas northeastwards and could reach the capital, Reykjavík, 25 miles (40 kilometers) away.

At 11:00 a.m., IMO representatives said that a new eruptive fissure had opened up inside the protective barriers around Grindavík.

Related: Huge steam plume rises from Alaska's Mount Spurr as volcano edges closer to eruption

Both Grindavík and the nearby Blue Lagoon spa — a popular tourist attraction — have been evacuated in anticipation of the eruption, and roads heading in and out of the town have been closed. However, according to local media outlet Visir, several Grindavík residents have refused to leave the town.

This incident marks the 11th eruption on the Reykjanes Peninsula since 2021 and the eighth along the Sundhnúkur crater row since 2023.

Based on current wind direction forecasts, the southwesterly winds are expected to die down towards the end of the day, concentrating the gas pollution in the area around the eruptive fissure. However, the IMO predicts that tomorrow morning, the winds will shift to northwesterly, and later westerly, sending gas and ash towards the southwest and east of the peninsula.

This striking satellite image reveals a giant, near-perfect cloud circle that formed in the heart of the Pacific Ocean more than a decade ago. While this type of cloud is not uncommon, it is extremely rare to find one isolated and in the middle of nowhere, experts say.

The strange structure, which is approximately 280 miles (450 kilometers) wide, was spotted "a few thousand kilometers southwest of the Hawaiian Islands" by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

The fluffy ring is made up of cumulus clouds that have been sculpted into a Rayleigh-Benard convection cell — a meteorological phenomenon powered by the rising and falling of air that's been warmed or cooled to different temperatures, known as convection.

There are two types of cloud cells: closed cells, which occur when cold air sinks around the cells' border, causing clouds to form at their centers; and open cells, which occur when cold air sinks at the cells' center, triggering clouds to form around their borders, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The cloud ring in the satellite photo was formed by a closed cell.

Cloud cells are normally hexagonal and usually appear alongside other cells of the same type, creating noticeable patterns in the sky. Open-cell clouds often form wispy honeycomb-like lattices, but for some reason, this cell appears to be all on its own.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

The lone cloud ring was likely triggered by a parcel of warm air over a small island or patch of water that was superheated by the sun, according to the Earth Observatory.

"As the warm air became buoyant and rose, cumulus clouds and eventually patches of light rain probably developed. The rain would have cooled the air beneath the clouds, causing a downdraft that sent rain-cooled air outward from the original location of the clouds," Earth Observatory representatives wrote. "When the rain-cooled air encountered warmer air at the edge of the cell, it likely pushed the warm air up, which caused the ring of cumulus clouds to form."

The cloud cell was located just south of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ICZ) — a low-pressure belt near the equator where the trade winds trigger frequent thunderstorms and heavy rainfall. This may have also played a role in the cloud's creation, according to the Earth Observatory.

The ocean surface to the east (right) of the cloud ring appears to have a metallic shine. This is the result of a sunglint, where sunlight bounces off the sea and directly back to an observing instrument in space. This can transform large patches of the ocean into swirling silver mirrors.

Cloud cells were only discovered in 1961, thanks to images from NASA's Television Infrared Observation Satellite 1 (TIROS-1) satellite — the first full-scale weather satellite ever launched into space. Before then, the intricate patterns of the cells had gone largely unnoticed by meteorologists, according to the Earth Observatory.

The iceberg A-84, which is roughly the size of Chicago, calved from Antarctica's George VI Ice Shelf on Jan. 13, 2025.

After receiving news of the iceberg’s movement from satellite imagery, scientists aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute's research vessel Falkor quickly hurried to the site. Just 12 days later, they arrived to find a never-before-seen ecosystem filled with giant sponges, fish, enormous sea spiders and octopuses exposed to the open air for the first time.

"We seized upon the moment, changed our expedition plan, and went for it so we could look at what was happening in the depths below," expedition co-chief scientist Patricia Esquete, a marine biologist at the University of Aveiro in Portugal, said in a statement. "We didn't expect to find such a beautiful, thriving ecosystem. Based on the size of the animals, the communities we observed have been there for decades, maybe even hundreds of years."

What lies beneath Antarctica's roughly 500 feet (150 meters) of ice is scarcely known, but scientists have suspected that it is filled with a gigantic network of rivers, lakes and estuaries. Yet it wasn't until very recently that scientists discovered that this hidden underworld harbored life.

Related: Scientists create new map showing ice-free Antarctica in more detail than ever before

Without sunlight or nutrients raining down from above, this life is likely sustained by deep-sea ocean currents that slip beneath the surface of the shelf, although scientists are unsure if this is the only mechanism at play.

To investigate the once-hidden biome, the scientists deployed a remotely operated submarine (named SuBastian), which — due to the thick ice blocking off GPS signals — navigated using sound waves to arrive at the ocean floor.

Once there, the submarine collected biological and geological samples from among the region's coral and sea sponges. Some of these creatures' enormous sizes suggested they'd been growing for centuries. The researchers also deployed other autonomous vehicles to study how meltwater is affecting the region.

"The science team was originally in this remote region to study the seafloor and ecosystem at the interface between ice and sea," Jyotika Virmani, executive director of the Schmidt Ocean Institute, said in the statement. "Being right there when this iceberg calved from the ice shelf presented a rare scientific opportunity. Serendipitous moments are part of the excitement of research at sea — they offer the chance to be the first to witness the untouched beauty of our world."

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

The shallow earthquake struck at 12:50 p.m. local time (2:20 a.m. EDT) at a depth of about 6.2 miles (10 kilometers), the USGS reported. Just 12 minutes later, a magnitude 6.7 earthquake at the same depth shook south of the first one, and later that day, nine smaller earthquakes, ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 4.9, also hit the region.

At least 144 people were killed in the earthquakes, and 732 were injured, Myanmar's military junta said, according to The Washington Post. A monastery and multiple buildings also collapsed in Myanmar. In Bangkok, at least 10 people died when a 33-story high-rise under construction fell down; Thai authorities also said 16 people were injured and 101 were missing, the Associated Press reported.

Although Bangkok was "well removed from where the faulting was" in Myanmar, "it's a very big earthquake and it's not really surprising it would have been felt for that amount of distance," Gregory Beroza, a professor of geophysics at Stanford University, told Live Science.

The earthquakes struck at the Sagaing Fault, which runs north-south and spans nearly 1,000 miles (1,600 km) through Myanmar toward the Andaman Sea. Earthquakes that occur on this fault are known strike-slip quakes, in which one block of land moves horizontally past a block of land on the other side of the fault, according to the USGS. This is a similar setup as the San Andreas Fault in California, which is also a strike-slip fault.

Related: Scientists find hidden mechanism that could explain how earthquakes 'ignite'

Myanmar, which is just south of the Himalayas, is a seismically active region and known for its big earthquakes, Ben van der Pluijm, a professor emeritus of geology at the University of Michigan, told Live Science.

"The reason for that is that the continent of India sits on the Indian Plate. And the Indian Plate has been moving northward for around 100 million years," van der Pluijm said. "But around 40 million years ago or so, India connected with the Eurasian Plate and kept on traveling northwards into the Eurasian Plate." Over millions of years, that collision helped create the Himalayas.

Even today, the Indian Plate is still moving northward, into the Eurasian plate. That motion "is what accumulated the energy that gets released in earthquakes like today's earthquakes in Southeastern Asia," van der Pluijm said.

Today's magnitude 7.7 earthquake was so big that it wouldn't be surprising if the ground were displaced several meters horizontally, van der Pluijm added.

"This is a very big earthquake," he said. "We don't have many of these."

Because these earthquakes were so shallow, they could be compared to the magnitude 7.8 and 7.5 earthquakes that struck Turkey in 2023 and caused widespread death and damage, said Jeffrey Park, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences who specializes in earthquakes and Earth structure at Yale University.

"We should expect the same kind of damage report and also loss of life from this earthquake because it's a shallow earthquake that's in a heavily populated area of Burma," Park told Live Science.

Since 1900, the region has had six other magnitude 7 or greater big strike-slip earthquakes within about 155 miles (250 km) of today's earthquake, according to the USGS. The most recent one, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake in January 1990, caused 32 buildings to collapse. An even bigger one — a magnitude 7.9 — shook south of today's earthquake epicenter in February 1912.

In an update on March 28, the Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO) shared an image of the restless volcano taken on March 26, revealing steam and gas pouring from both the summit and a vent on the northern flank.

"Robust steaming was observed from the summit yesterday due to favorable atmospheric and viewing conditions," AVO representatives wrote in the update. "No detectable change in earthquake activity or gas emissions accompanied the steam emissions."

The volcano has been showing signs of unrest over the last year, with earthquakes ramping up significantly in recent months. Scientists monitoring it now think an explosive eruption is likely.

"The increase in gas emissions confirms that new magma has intruded into the Earth’s crust beneath the volcano and indicates that an eruption is likely, but not certain, to occur within the next few weeks or months," AVO representatives wrote in a statement on March 11.

Related: Earthquakes at massive Alaska volcano Mount Spurr ramp up again — and there's now a 50-50 chance of an eruption

Mount Spurr, located around 80 miles (128 kilometers) west of Anchorage, is the highest volcano in the Aleutian Range, standing at 11,070 feet (3,374 meters) tall. The volcano consists of a central summit and a prominent side vent known as Crater Peak, located 2 miles (3.5 km) south of the summit, which has been the site of most of its historical eruptions, notably in 1953 and 1992.

AVO representatives said that the alert level for the volcano may be raised to an orange/watch or even a red/warning in the coming weeks if further signs of an eruption appear. "This would include a change in the rate and character of earthquakes, onset of sustained seismic tremor, further increased gas emissions, changes in surface deformation, and melting of snow and ice," representatives wrote in a statement following a flight over the volcano on March 11.

In the event of an eruption, the biggest hazards would be ash clouds that may affect aviation, ashfall, pyroclastic flows, and lahars, which are fast-moving, destructive mudflows that occur on the slopes of volcanoes.

In a Facebook post on March 19, the AVO advised Alaskan residents on how to stay safe in the event of an eruption. "The major hazards to Alaska residents from Spurr would be from ash risk to aviation and possible ashfall. The location, duration, and timing of the impacts would depend on the size and duration of the eruption as well as weather conditions during and afterwards," representatives wrote.

Those concerned about breathing in the airborne ash are advised to stay indoors, or wear a mask when venturing outside.

"The other hazards from a Mount Spurr eruption would only affect the areas immediately surrounding the volcano. While there are no residents in the identified hazard areas for pyroclastic flows and lahars, people do visit the area for recreational or subsistence purposes," representatives wrote.

Mount Spurr explosively erupted three times in 1992, the first of which occurred on June 27, and resulted in an ash cloud rising 9 miles (14.5 km) into the air, affecting air travel and covering parts of Anchorage in ash. The volcano erupted again on Aug. 18, and then again on Sept. 16 and 17, both of which also caused ash to rain down across the region.

This is the first time in nearly 50 years that a new plant genus has been described in a U.S. national park, since the discovery of the July gold shrub (Dedeckera eurekensis) in Death Valley National Park in 1976, according to a statement from the California Academy of Sciences.

The new discovery suggests that researchers are far from documenting all of the plant diversity of the Chihuahuan Desert, which covers parts of Mexico and the southwestern U.S.

"While many assume that the plants and animals within our country's national parks have probably been documented by now, scientists still make surprising new discoveries in these iconic protected landscapes," Isaac Lichter Marck, a botanist at the California Academy of Sciences and co-author of research describing the new species, said in the statement.

Discovering the woolly devil

In March 2024, the park volunteer, Deb Manley, shared photos of the flowers — which measured 1 to 3 inches (2.5 to 7.6 centimeters) across and were poking out from between desert rocks — to the citizen science platform iNaturalist, where an international community of botanists tried to identify the plant.

Manley and a team of botanists and biologists studied the flower's characteristics and conducted genetic analyses, comparing its DNA with those of species from herbaria at Sul Ross State University in Texas and the California Academy of Sciences. They confirmed the plant as both a new species and a new genus, and identified it as a member of the sunflower family, according to the research, which was published Feb. 18 in the journal PhytoKeys.

Related: Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life

The researchers chose the scientific name Ovicula biradiata. In Latin "ovis" comes from "sheep" and honors the desert bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis nelsoni), an iconic and threatened desert animal. The plant has white and woolly leaves, with small, curved, red and white flowers that resemble horns. The flowers were found near a part of the park called Devil's Den, leading the team to name the species the "woolly devil."

The Chihuahuan Desert is North America's largest and most biologically diverse warm desert, and Big Bend National Park contains a huge amount of this biodiversity. Many species found in the park have limited distributions, found only within the park or just outside it.

So far, woolly devils are known to exist only in a small area of Big Bend National Park, and the researchers think that, based on its limited range, this plant might be particularly sensitive to changing weather patterns.

This part of the Chihuahuan Desert has faced recent severe drought conditions, and the problem is expected to worsen due to climate change. That means woolly devils could qualify as vulnerable and face a high threat of extinction.

"As climate change pushes deserts to become hotter and drier, highly specialized plants like the wooly devil face extinction," Lichter Marck said in the statement. "It's possible that we've documented a species that is already on its way out."

Lake Salda is a body of water in Turkey that bears a strong resemblance to Mars' Jezero crater. The stunning lake is the only place on Earth with geology and mineralogy comparable to those of the ancient impact structure on the Red Planet. This striking similarity meant scientists flocked to study its shores before the Perseverance rover landed on Mars in 2021.

Lake Salda is one of Turkey's deepest lakes, with a maximum depth of 643 feet (196 meters). Its shores are covered in powdered hydromagnesite, a carbonate mineral that's rich in magnesium and is found in caves and on the shores of certain lakes. Notably, this mineral holds clues about ancient microbial life.

"Carbonates are important because they are really good at trapping anything that existed within that environment, such as microbes, organics, or certain textures that provide evidence of past microbial life," Brad Garczynski, a researcher in planetary geology at Western Washington University, told NASA's Earth Observatory.

Related: NASA Mars rover finds 'first compelling detection' of potential fossilized life on the Red Planet

The hydromagnesite on Lake Salda's shores likely eroded from microbialites, which are rock-like mounds that look similar to coral reefs but are made of microbes. The lake still hosts intact microbialites, but these will eventually be reworked and end up as sand on the shoreline, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

Using data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, scientists detected similar minerals along Jezero's western edge in 2019, suggesting the crater once held a lake. These observations have since been confirmed by the Perseverance rover, which found mineral evidence of a lake that existed inside Jezero crater billions of years ago.

Lake Salda and Jezero crater have something else in common: depositional features known as deltas. Deltas are layers of sediment that accumulate in places where rivers flow into lakes and other bodies of water. The features offer tantalizing clues about how water came to fill Jezero, and studying them in Lake Salda has helped scientists narrow down their search to specific locations in the Martian crater.

"One of the great things about visiting Lake Salda is it really gives you a sense of what it would have been like to stand on the shores of ancient Lake Jezero," Horgan said.

The area around Lake Salda is home to more than 300 plant species and 30 waterfowl species, making it a popular destination for nature enthusiasts and hikers, according to CNN. The lake is only a short drive from the Pamukkale travertines — stunning limestone formations with thermal pools.

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

The volcanoes were found during an expedition to map the seafloor near the Cook Islands in the Central Pacific, about 2,900 miles (4,700 kilometers) south of Hawaii. If these structures are volcanically active, the heat that they generate may have spawned a unique and exciting marine habitat nearby, the researchers said.

"So far, we have not seen any clear signs of volcanic activity, but then again, no one has yet had the chance to look carefully at the seabed and sample it," representatives from the Seabed Minerals Authority (SBMA), which co-led the research, said in a statement. "Once fully processed and interpreted, our new seabed map should help any future scientists quickly go directly to the best points for this sampling."

The Cook Islands are a group of 15 islands in the South Pacific Ocean, located between French Polynesia and American Samoa. This archipelago was created millions of years ago as the Pacific plate moved over a magma hotspot in the Earth's mantle — similar to the way the Hawaiian Islands were formed. A magma hotspot is a localized area in Earth's mantle where unusually hot rock rises toward the surface, causing volcanic activity. Unlike volcanoes at tectonic plate boundaries, hotspots occur in the middle of tectonic plates and remain stationary, while the plate above moves over time.

A hot mantle plume from the hotspot brings heat and magma toward Earth's crust, which can cause magma from the mantle to erupt onto the seafloor and then cool rapidly in the water. Over time, repeated eruptions build up a volcanic structure, forming an underwater volcano. If the eruptions continue, the volcano grows large enough to break the ocean surface, forming a volcanic island.

Related: Undersea volcano off Oregon coast could erupt this year, geologists predict

Most of the volcanoes in the Cook Islands are ancient, with their rocks dating back tens or even hundreds of millions of years. However, the islands of Rarotonga and Aitutaki are made of a combination of older and younger rocks, because they are among the most recent islands to form over the hotspot — the youngest rock on Rarotonga dates back only around 1.2 million years.

These newly mapped underwater volcanoes were first theorized in 2024 after researchers discovered that the rocks of one submerged volcano were only 670,000 years old. The rocks were discovered roughly 37 miles (60 km) southeast of Rarotonga, on a volcano called Tama, and they mark the youngest volcanic rocks discovered in the Cook Islands to date.

The team also theorized that, going southeast from Rarotonga through Tama, there may be several other underwater volcanoes lurking on the seafloor, which may also be much younger than the other Cook Islands.

To investigate these structures further, the ARTEX 2025 expedition was launched to map the ocean floor in the area surrounding Rarotonga. The team discovered that there was indeed a series of smaller structures dotted along the seafloor to the southeast of Rarotonga, including a 0.6-mile-high (1 km) volcano named "Pepe". The team's data is yet to be fully processed, however, and the structures have not yet been confirmed as volcanically active.

The researchers hope to return to the area to learn more about the seamounts, or underwater volcanoes, and to collect samples of the rocks to figure out exactly how old they are.

US volcano quiz: How many can you name in 10 minutes?

This stunning aerial shot highlights the "looming threat" of a volcanic island in Tonga, which could violently explode in the future. The island also has a colorful origin story in Tongan mythology, which involves quarreling gods, a stolen mountain and a brightly shining anus.

The island, named Tofua, consists mainly of a massive ring-like caldera left by an explosive eruption millions of years ago. The caldera's steep walls stand up to 1,690 feet (515 meters) above sea level and harbor a deep crater lake that is around 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) across. The island is part of the Ha'apai island group, a chain of volcanic islands and reefs located along a fault line between the Pacific and Indo-Australian tectonic plates.

One of the Ha'apai region's most famous inhabitants is the underwater Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai volcano, which violently erupted in January 2022, unleashing a gigantic plume of ash and steam above the ocean's surface. The explosive outburst, which occurred around 50 miles (80 km) south of Tofua, released as much energy as hundreds of atomic bombs, unleashed giant atmospheric shockwaves that reverberated across the globe, triggered a localized tsunami and wiped out a small nearby island. It also added record amounts of water vapor to Earth's atmosphere.

Tofua is docile compared to Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha'apai. However, the smoke in the image, which was pumping out of a volcanic cone north of the crater lake, known as Lofia, is a reminder that the island is still very much active and could blow its top once again in the future, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

"There's the looming threat that Lofia could erupt explosively, much like Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai did in 2022," though nothing suggests an eruption is imminent, NASA representatives wrote in October 2024.

Tofua has erupted at least 12 times since 1774, according to the Smithsonian Institute's Global Volcanism Program. The most recent and eruptive phase began in 2015 and is technically ongoing. However, the activity has mostly diminished as of May 2024.

An unusual origin story

In Tongan mythology, there is a colorful tale to explain Tofua's giant caldera and the creation of Kao — a tall cone-shaped island around 2.5 miles (4 km) northeast of Tofua, which is just out of shot in the satellite image.

In "Tongan myths and tales," (Kraus, 1924) which was compiled from oral tradition told by local people at the time, American anthropologist Edward Winslow Gifford wrote the story:

"Three deities from Samoa, Tuvuvata, Sisi, and Faingaa, conspired to steal Tofua. So they came and tore up the high mountain by its very roots and its place was taken by a large lake. This enraged the Tongan gods very much and one of them, Tafakula, essayed to stop the thieves. He stood on the island of Luahako and bent over so as to show his anus. It shone so brilliantly that the Samoan deities were struck with fear, thinking that the sun was rising and that their dastardly works was about to be revealed. Hence, they dropped the mountain close to Tofua and fled to Samoa. The mountain became the island of Kao."

It is unclear from the account why Tafakula's anus shone like the sun.

Melting ice caps in North America, Antarctica and Europe caused sea levels to rise quickly as temperatures warmed after the last ice age. But researchers have lacked robust geological data from this period, so how much sea levels climbed was unknown.

Now, new geological data show that sea levels rose about 125 feet (38 meters) between 11,000 and 3,000 years ago, according to a study published March 19 in the journal Nature. The findings could help scientists and policymakers understand what to expect as today's ice sheets respond to a warming climate.

In pursuit of these records, an international team of scientists turned to a relatively shallow area of the North Sea covering "Doggerland," the land bridge that connected the U.K. to mainland Europe until about 7000 years ago. The researchers drilled samples of peat, or partially decomposed plant matter, from beneath the sea.

Doggerland was home to coastal marshlands during the ice age, but rising waters and marine sediments submerged and compressed the marshes as sea levels rose. The team analyzed the different elements and types of microalgae in the peat to work out how sea levels changed.

All told, sea levels rose about 125 feet over the course of 8,000 years following the end of the last ice age. Most of this increase took place in two phases. The first occurred around 10,300 years ago and was due purely to an increase in meltwater. The second phase hit around 8,300 years ago and was driven by both ice melt and an influx of water from lakes atop melting glaciers.

Rates of sea level rise peaked at more than 0.4 inch (10 millimeters) per year, or about 40 inches (1 meter) per century. For context, sea levels are currently rising by 0.1 to 0.2 inch (3 to 4 mm) per year and will likely increase to between 0.2 and 0.4 inch (4 to 9 mm) per year by the end of the century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

"Of course, the consequences of sea level rise are now far greater due to the growth in population and the current presence of infrastructure, cities and economic activity in areas that will be vulnerable to the effects of climate change in the future," study co-author Sarah Bradley, a researcher in the School of Geography and Planning at the University of Sheffield in the U.K., said in a statement.

Understanding how sea levels changed during past periods of rapid warming could help scientists improve existing models of sea level rise, the researchers wrote. Paleorecords like the ones described in the new study complement more recent data from modern instruments on how Earth responds to various changes.

"By drawing on detailed data for the North Sea region, we can now better unravel the complex interaction between ice sheets, climate, and sea level," Marc Hijma, a geologist at Deltares, a technical institute in the Netherlands, said in the same statement. "This provides insights for both scientists and policymakers, so that we can better prepare for the impacts of current climate change, for example by focusing on climate adaptation."

The Drake Passage is an ocean channel between the southern tip of South America and the West Antarctic Peninsula. Named after the 16th-century explorer Sir Francis Drake, it is notorious for whipping up wild storms and monster waves up to 80 feet (25 meters) tall.

The passage is "the most dreaded bit of ocean on the globe," Alfred Lansing wrote in his 1959 book "Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage to the Antarctic." At around 600 miles (965 kilometers) wide, the channel is relatively narrow compared with the ocean around it, meaning currents speed up as they are forced through the passage. The same goes for southern winds, which blow unimpeded from west to east around Antarctica before they reach the Drake Passage.

As winds funnel through the passage, they whisk up huge waves, some of which can be dangerous — and even deadly — for passengers on boats making the 48-hour-long crossing. In the best case, the waves make for a bumpy ride, known as the "Drake shake."

"It's always interesting when you go to dinner and they put sticky mats on all the tables to make sure your plates and things don't slide around," Karen Heywood, a professor of physical oceanography at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. who sailed through the Drake Passage in 2024, told National Geographic.

Related: Mount Washington: Home to 'the world's worst weather' with record wind speeds of 231 mph

The Drake Passage is a "melting pot" of currents from the Atlantic, Pacific and Southern oceans, Heywood said. The waters are so turbulent that the layers which normally make up the seas mix together, meaning the passage draws a lot more carbon down into its depths than other parts of the ocean do.

The world's oceans lock away more than 30% of the carbon humans emit into the atmosphere every year, and the Drake Passage could be one of a handful of places where this activity is particularly pronounced, National Geographic reported.

@theworldpursuit

A super relaxed journey to Antarctica #antarctica #drakepassage

♬ My Heart Will Go On (Titanic) - Maliheh Saeedi & Faraz Taali

The passage also keeps Antarctica cold, because it cuts off warm air that would otherwise blow south from South America. Research suggests that when the Drake Passage opened between 49 million and 17 million years ago, it triggered significant cooling in Antarctica and contributed to the growth of giant ice sheets on the continent.

The temperature drop as you traverse the passage is noticeable even for people on ships, Alberto Naveira Garabato, a professor of physical oceanography at the University of Southampton in the U.K., told National Geographic. "Suddenly you are in this icy world," Naveira Garabato said.

So, while extreme winds and currents inside the passage create terrifying conditions for passengers, they also help to maintain Antarctica's frigid climate — although climate change is slowing the system.

Were it not for the Drake Passage and its wild weather, the frozen continent would likely hold much less ice than it currently does.

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

These numbers are considerable, given how densely populated China is, an expert told Live Science. Still, the total figure may be an underestimate due to the limitations of the technology used to count the trees, the authors of the new study said.

"The actual number could be higher," said Qinghua Guo, a professor in the Institute of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System at Peking University and the lead author of the study. China's Ninth National Forest Resources Inventory counted an average of 426 trees per acre (1,052 trees/hectare) across the country in 2019, which is much higher than the new study's estimate of 279 trees per acre (689 trees/hectare), Guo told Live Science in an email.

The true number of trees could be somewhere in the middle, but more research is needed to figure out what it is, he said.

An accurate estimate of China's tree population is crucial to evaluating forest ecosystem conditions and the amount of carbon that is being locked away in trees, Guo said. He and his colleagues also created a detailed map showing the distribution of China's trees, which they say will help the country hit its ecological and climate targets.

Related: Massive sinkholes in China hold 'heavenly' forests with plants adapted for harsh life underground

"The study represents the first high-resolution mapping of tree density across China," Guo said. "Ultimately, this research contributes to China's approach to global sustainable ecosystem management and restoration."

To produce the estimate, the researchers used a laser-based mapping technique called lidar (light detection and ranging). The team has been collecting lidar data from drones since 2015, amounting to an area covering 540 square miles (1,400 square kilometers).

For the new study, the scientists counted the number of trees in this area using software called Lidar360 that incorporates artificial intelligence (AI). They then extrapolated the resulting tree density estimate to obtain a national figure, with the results published Feb. 6 in the journal Science Bulletin.

The technology is cutting-edge, but some features need ironing out, Guo said. For example, Lidar360 cannot detect trees growing below thick canopies. "In densely forested areas, overlapping canopies obstruct the accurate detection of mid-story and understory trees, leading to lower-than-actual tree counts," Guo said. Incorporating terrestrial lidar data and improving the software could provide more accurate tree counts, he added.

Despite certain limitations, the results broadly align with researchers' previous understanding of China's tree population, said Tom Crowther, an assistant professor in the department of environmental systems science at the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. "Globally, there are closer to 400 trees per person, but in such a densely populated region, it makes sense that this number is lower," Crowther, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

China's tree population may soon increase, however, because the country is planting seedlings at a dizzying rate. Tree counts could skyrocket this spring as drones are deployed to seed the "Great Green Wall" — a huge belt of trees in the north of China that is being planted to prevent the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts from expanding. The Great Green Wall project — also known as the Three-North Shelterbelt Forest Program — started in 1978 and is due to be completed in 2050, by which point it could hold 100 billion trees. The wall is already the world's largest seeded forest with more than 66 million trees, but its success in staving off desertification is debated.

The technology used for the study not only helps to count and map trees, but it could also optimize where China chooses to focus its tree-planting efforts.

"The fusion of high-precision data and intelligent models ensures that every tree can be planted in the most suitable location," Guo said.

The griffon vulture (Gyps fulvus), which was initially uncovered in the Colli Albani volcanic complex southeast of Rome, Italy, in 1889, was found in incredibly good condition — it even had traces of its delicate wing feathers and eyelids.

Since the discovery, researchers have puzzled over how exactly the bird was so well-preserved. Now, in a new study published Tuesday (March 18) in the journal Geology, researchers suggest this rare preservation of such intricate details may be due to tiny silicon-rich crystals called zeolites that formed as the bird's remains were buried in ash from an erupting volcano.

This would mark the first time that fossilized soft tissues, like feathers, have ever been found preserved in volcanic ash, the scientists said.

"Fossil feathers are usually preserved in ancient mudrocks laid down in lakes or lagoons. The fossil vulture is preserved in ash deposits, which is extremely unusual," study lead author Valentina Rossi, a paleobiologist at University College Cork in Ireland, said in a statement.

"When analysing the fossil vulture plumage, we found ourselves in uncharted territory. These feathers are nothing like what we usually see in other fossils," she added.

Rare preservation

This fossil was first found in the foothills of Italy's Mount Tuscolo in 1889 by a local landowner. Paleontologists at the time noted the rare preservation of feathers in volcanic rock. However, over the years, much of the fossil was lost, with only the feathers of one wing and the bird's head and neck remaining. In recent years, scientists have reanalyzed the fossil, revealing the intricate details of the vulture's eyelids and skin.

In the new study, the researchers used electron microscopes and chemical tests to study the fossilized feathers, which revealed that the fossils were preserved in three dimensions. This is very unusual for feathers, which usually only leave two-dimensional fossilized carbon imprints in rocks. Three-dimensional feathers have only ever previously been found in amber.

The researchers could see details of the feathers' structures as small as one micron (0.001 millimeters), and discovered that the feather fossils were made of zeolite, a mineral that is often associated with volcanic environments.

"Zeolites are minerals rich in silicon and aluminium and are common in volcanic and hydrothermal geological settings," Rossi said. "Zeolites can form as primary minerals (with pretty crystals) or can form secondarily, during the natural alteration of volcanic glass and ash."

This discovery is the first time that feathers have been found preserved in such a way, and with such high levels of detail. Additionally, no other fossils have ever been discovered preserved in zeolite.

The fact that these feathers were preserved in zeolite indicates that the ancient vulture was likely buried in a huge cloud of volcanic ash, which was much cooler than the pyroclastic flows that scorched Pompeii during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

"The fine preservation of the feather structures indicates that the vulture carcass was entombed in a low temperature pyroclastic deposit," Rossi said.

This ash likely crystallized into zeolite after reacting with water over the course of a few days, with tiny crystals of the mineral gradually replacing every cell and detail of the bird's remains.

"Volcanic deposits are associated with hot, fast-moving pyroclastic currents that will destroy soft tissues," study co-author Dawid Iurino, an associate professor in vertebrate paleontology at the University of Milan, said in the statement. "However, these geological settings are complex and can include low temperature deposits that can preserve soft tissues at the cellular level."

The researchers hope that this unique discovery could pave the way to finding other fossils hidden in volcanic rocks.

"The fossil record is continually surprising us, be it new fossil species, strange new body shapes, or in this case, new styles of fossil preservation. We never expected to find delicate tissues such as feathers preserved in a volcanic rock," study co-author Maria McNamara, a professor of paleontology at University College Cork said in the statement.

"Discoveries such as these broaden the range of potential rock types where we can find fossils, even those preserving fragile soft tissues."

We live in places that will be flooded by rising sea levels. We have food production systems dependent on specific climates. And we have built economic structures, trade relationships and social dynamics contingent on certain temperatures.

What's more, we are not alone in this world, and the rapidly changing climate is a threat to the flora and fauna with whom we share this planet. Some of us think this is a problem — although admittedly not all of us.

The key questions then are: How fragile are systems to a changing climate? What are the costs of the impacts or shocks to the system (such as relocating people from places underwater, or victims of extreme weather events that are made more likely by climate change)? What are the costs of adapting to these impacts? How do we negotiate the equity and distributional impacts of these effects? And crucially, what are the costs of preventing these impacts to begin with?

That is the climate discourse in a nutshell. Except for heat. Heat is a different story because we cannot live above a certain heat level.

Of course, the heat story is driven by climate change, so at first glance it may seem I am making an artificial distinction here. Global warming is heat and heat is global warming. But the reason is that it creates an almost unmanageable risk, one incapable of being mitigated by adaptation, at least within the current technological paradigm.

This is different to almost any other effect from climate change. We can maintain habitats below sea level, the Netherlands being a perfect example, through dams and adaptation. Perhaps we would not be able to do this everywhere, and perhaps we would decide that we couldn't be bothered — economically speaking — to do this, but we at least have the means.

We can change food production patterns, our economic activity cycles, we can irrigate, we can create water, we can do all these things. Some have prohibitive price tags and come with dramatic non-financial costs to health, cultural capital and societal welfare. But they can be done.

Related: 200,000 Americans could die of temperature-related causes each year if global warming hits 3C

Heat is the final boss. Heat is a different beast. Heat deaths in and of themselves may not appear as a particularly new or novel phenomenon. They happen everywhere, as the frail, the ill and the old are unable to regulate their body temperatures during hot summers.

And heat deaths can also happen to the young. One of the first "proven" victims of climate change is a 6-year-old boy from Toyota, Japan, who collapsed in a park on a morning field trip, and was dead by the afternoon.

When I think of the heartbreak of our indifference, I think of him. These kinds of deaths will increase in frequency through climate change but, of course, as any self-respecting climate sceptic or denialist will tell you, we can also expect fewer deaths from cold temperatures.

Indeed, there is some reason to believe that from a pure temperature perspective, temperature-related mortality has in fact decreased in the past decades, not just because of improved adaptation, but also because of warmer winters.

Over time, that pendulum — as we near 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) global warming above pre-industrial levels — will swing in the other direction, with up to 10 million annual climate deaths by the end of the century, according to some estimates (not counting the indirect deaths from climate poverty, conflict and so on).

What will be new about heat deaths is the extent to which the lived environment will become physically uninhabitable for everyone, old and young, middle-aged, healthy and ill.

Extracted from "The Pocket Guide to Planetary Peril" by Jakob Thomä (WH Allen, £16.99)

The high-resolution map reveals what the frozen continent looks like beneath its miles-thick blanket of ice and snow, and will help researchers predict how Antarctica might evolve in a fast-warming climate.

"Imagine pouring syrup over a rock cake [or a chocolate chip cookie, if that's more familiar to you] — all the lumps, all the bumps, will determine where the syrup goes and how fast," Hamish Pritchard, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the lead author of a new study outlining the research, said in a statement.

The same process will occur in Antarctica if a significant amount of the ice sheet melts, Pritchard said. "Some ridges will hold up the flowing ice; the hollows and smooth bits are where that ice could accelerate," he said.

Related: When was the last time Antarctica was ice-free?

Bedmap3 builds on two previous studies that digitally stripped Antarctica of its ice. The new map incorporates all of the data used for Bedmap1 and Bedmap2 — including measurements gathered by planes, satellites, ships and even dog-drawn sleds. But the team also sourced an extra 52 million data points to refine these previous results, according to the study, published March 10 in the journal Scientific Data.

In total, more than six decades' worth of data was compiled to construct Bedmap3, the researchers said in the statement. "This is the fundamental information that underpins the computer models we use to investigate how the ice will flow across the continent as temperatures rise," Pritchard said.

The new map is color coded to show the height of Antarctica's bedrock above sea level, highlighting the continent's tallest mountains and deepest valleys. The topography is revealed in the finest detail yet, providing new insight into understudied areas, including around the South Pole, according to the statement.

The researchers used radar, seismic and gravity measurements to map the bedrock and estimate the thickness of the ice sheet above it. Against their expectations, they found that the place with the thickest ice in Antarctica is an unnamed canyon in Wilkes Land, a district in the east of the continent.

Previous surveys placed Antarctica's thickest ice in the Astrolabe Basin in Adélie Land. The difference in ice thickness between the two areas is small: The Astrolabe Basin has a thickness of around 2.9 miles (4.7 kilometers), while Wilkes Land is almost 3 miles (4.8 km) thick, according to the study.

The new research also reveals, in unprecedented detail, the shape of the ice sheet and ice shelves that float around the fringes of the continent.

"In general, it's become clear the Antarctic Ice Sheet is thicker than we originally realized and has a larger volume of ice that is grounded on a rock bed sitting below sea level," study co-author Peter Fretwell, a mapping specialist and geographic information officer at the BAS, said in the statement.

Although thickness in itself is not a problem, the fact that much of the ice sits below sea level is concerning, because relatively warm seawater can flood into the ice sheet, Fretwell said. "This puts the ice at greater risk of melting," he added.

"What Bedmap3 is showing us is that we have got a slightly more vulnerable Antarctica than we previously thought," Fretwell added.

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

Mount Spurr, which sits 81 miles (130 kilometers) west of Anchorage, is now releasing unusual levels of volcanic gases near its summit and from a flank vent that last erupted in 1992.

The 11,000-foot (3,370-meter) volcano has been undergoing an uptick in earthquakes and snow and ice melt on its slopes in the past year, indicating magma movement under the surface. Now, according to scientists at the Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO), it's most likely that this unrest will end in an eruption.

That's an increase in risk from the observatory's last assessment in February, which gauged that Mount Spurr was equally likely to simmer down as it was to erupt. Now, observations of increased carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide emissions from the volcano have tipped the balance toward an eruption, said Matt Haney, the scientist-in-charge of the AVO at the U.S. Geological Survey.

"This time period of unrest will eventually most likely end in an explosive eruption like the ones that happened in 1953 and 1992," Haney told Live Science.

Related: Scientists find giant magma reservoirs hidden beneath dormant volcanoes in the Cascades

Those eruptions both took place at Crater Peak, a flank vent about 2 miles (3.2 km) from the stratovolcano's summit. The last time the mountain's peak erupted was likely more than 5,000 years ago, Haney said, so scientists don't expect an eruption there — most likely, the rock between the eruptible magma and the summit crater is well-solidified and would be hard for any magma to burst through.

Any eruption will probably occur at Crater Peak, which has been more recently active and which probably has easier pathways to the surface for magma to move.

Crater Peak exploded three times over several months in 1992 and once in 1953. In both cases, ash erupted at least 50,000 feet (15,240 meters) in the atmosphere, Haney said. One of the explosions in 1992 sent the cloud drifting over Anchorage, blanketing the city in an eighth an inch (3.1 millimeters) of dust. In 1953, Anchorage experienced a quarter-inch (6.4 mm) ashfall.

If the magma movement beneath the volcano doesn't settle down, the next sign of an eruption will likely be volcanic tremor, Haney said.

Unlike the brief, small earthquakes that have been shuddering the volcano over the last year, volcanic tremor is a long, ongoing shaking that can last for minutes, hours, or days. It indicates that magma is rising and that an eruption is likely imminent.

In 1992, volcanic tremor started about three weeks before Mount Spurr erupted. Another nearby volcano that erupted in 2009, Mount Readout, showed volcanic tremor for two months before it blew its top.

"If we see [tremor]," Haney said, "that will be the next sign that Spurr is further progressing toward an eruption."

US volcano quiz: How many can you name in 10 minutes?

But what we tend to forget is that carbon is the main ingredient for life. And we are the only species on Earth that disrupts the natural flow of carbon, says environmentalist and author Paul Hawken.

Hawken's new book, "Carbon: The Book of Life" (Viking, 2025), shines a spotlight on the countless flows of carbon that power life, from individual cells to vast underground fungal networks and entire human societies. Through the lens of carbon, the author takes the reader on a journey through corporate retreats, the pharmaceutical sector, the food industry and the realms of plants, insects and fungi.

Related: Bear hair and fish weirs: Meet the Indigenous people combining modern science with ancestral principles to protect the land

Live Science sat down with Hawken before the book's publication on March 18 to discuss the language we use to talk about the climate and the paradigm shift needed to start valuing, restoring and protecting the natural flow of carbon on Earth.

Q: "Carbon" is about showing that carbon is not just a problem we need to neutralize, but also a vital force that flows through every living being and Earth system. How does this encourage us to think differently about climate change?

Hawken: The narrative [around global warming] is really screwed up, frankly, because it has objectified carbon, the atmosphere, climate change, etcetera. It's the same mindset that caused the problem: We objectify the living world and see ourselves as distinct and separate from a world that we can exploit, extract from and use to our own ends.

When people say we're going to "fix" the climate, or "tackle" or "combat" climate change, to me it's just so emblematic of this profound disconnection between self and other. We don't have a climate crisis; the climate cannot have a crisis. We are the crisis. That's what I want to explore. [I want] to go to a place that's not just insular and about self, but actually [gives rise to] a sense of being in the world that can create a sensibility that forms community. Because all of life as we know it exists in a community.

Q: I found the book very uplifting and hopeful. How do you find the drive to write about the climate when everything we hear from scientists is so bleak?

Hawken: What I'm trying to do in my own life, certainly, but also in communication, is to create the context in which people can see the world. Because what you see and receive really determines your mindset, your consciousness, your awareness and your sense of stress, anxiety and equanimity in the face of events that are troubling. Rather than going to the trouble and staying with that, I'm looking for a conversation that makes sense. That's where change needs to happen.

Q: Could you give an example of where the current conversation does not make sense to you?

Hawken: People talk about "net zero." I'm not a physicist, but I can tell you that "net zero" does not exist in terms of carbon. "Carbon neutrality" does not exist.

If you look at the proposals to really shift away from fossil fuels, what we're talking about is renewable energies to energize an economy that's skyrocketing in consumption, which is destruction. Renewable energy doesn't really take a step back to ask: "Energizing yes, but what?" And if we don't look at that, then we're just in a gerbil wheel. We may have the illusion that the faster we go, the faster we're getting somewhere, but actually we're not — it's almost the opposite.

Q: A few chapters of the book focus on health and the food industry. How do those topics relate to carbon and why was it important to include them?

Hawken: The book is about life and about carbon as an element. The flow of carbon is, in a sense, the flow of life. I began to look at the food system and what was being sold, what was being promoted. One thing led to another in terms of looking at health and self and food and agriculture as a system that is inseparable from the rest. That goes back to carbon, because if you look at a healthy agricultural system, it's full of carbon. That whole systemic understanding of food and health and farming and soil and agricultural practices and chemistry is also a way of looking at the other systems we have and that we take for granted.

Q: This leads nicely into the "spaceship Earth" you mention in the book. Spaceship Earth is a concept that encourages us to think of the planet as a closed system with limited resources. Humanity is the crew, and every passenger should work toward the greater good of this crew. Why do you like this metaphor?

Hawken: Earth is so big, we don't even understand our own cities. It leads to ways of thinking where [we don't consider where] our trash and sewage go. The spaceship is an imaginative exercise, where you imagine that a group of you is going on a spaceship for 10, 50, 100 years and you ask yourselves what is allowed on board and what is not. There's no spatial limit — it's more about the system, its inputs and outputs. It's just to bring it down to a scale where people can understand what happens on Earth without being a scientist.

Q: The central message in "Carbon" is that we need to reconnect with the world around us to shape a better future than what we're currently headed for. One of your previous books is called "Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation" (Penguin, 2021) — and I was wondering what regeneration means to you. How do we end the climate crisis?

Hawken: Regeneration for me is pretty simple. It means that your life, your being, your presence here is about creating more life — not in the sense of making children, but in every sense of life. That means you start thinking about consumption, about what to buy and what you take, and the implications of that.

The purpose of "Carbon" is to suggest there is this beautiful flow of wonder and majesty that is inseparable from us. The purpose is to ask: What if we truly believed that Earth is our home? And what if we acted that way? Because we don't.

"Carbon: The Book of Life" encourages readers to examine the world around us more closely, and to see and appreciate its beauty. For an example of what this appreciation looks like, read this excerpt from Chapter 11 of the book.

Two satellite photos taken 33 years apart show the disappearance of a glacier in Iceland that was the first ice mass to be declared dead as a result of human-caused climate change.

Okjökull was a dome-shaped glacier situated around the summit crater on Ok (pronounced Auk), a 3,940-foot-tall (1,200 meters) shield volcano located 44 miles (71 kilometers) northwest of Reykjavík. (The name Okjökull translates to "Ok glacier" in Icelandic.)

In 1901, Okjökull's ice covered an area of around 15 square miles (39 square kilometers), but when the first of the two satellite photos was taken in 1986, there was less than 1 square mile (2.6 square km) of ice left. By the time the second image was captured in 2019, the ice covered less than 0.4 square miles (1 square km), according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

The glacier was declared dead in 2014, when Icelandic glaciologists revealed that the ice had become so thin that it was no longer being slowly pulled down the mountain by gravity, meaning it had stopped moving for the first time in tens of thousands of years, according to a 2024 paper summarizing Okjökull's demise.

The glacier's death was showcased and explored in a 2018 short film titled "Not Ok," which was made by researchers from Rice University in Texas.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

In August 2019, around 100 people, including researchers and politicians, attended a funeral for Okjökull near the summit of Ok, according to The Guardian. During this ceremony, a commemorative plaque, inscribed with a message titled "A letter to the future," was placed near the summit.

It reads as follows: "Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it."

The plaque also listed the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which was 415 parts per million at the time. As of March 2025, the concentration is over 428 ppm, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In 2023, Iceland also created the world's first iceberg graveyard, where ice-like headstones were constructed for the 15 major glaciers listed on the Global Glacier Casualty List, all of which are either dead or critically endangered, according to the United Nations. This list includes the Anderson Glacier in Washington state, which, in 2015, became the first U.S. glacier to be declared dead.

Because of inconsistent monitoring and debates about the true sizes of glaciers, it is unclear exactly how many glaciers have been lost due to climate change, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. However, some researchers estimate that up to 10,000 glaciers of various sizes may have already been lost to climate change, The Washington Post reported in 2024.

Many of the deaths have occurred outside Tornado Alley, with at least six fatalities reported in Mississippi and three reported in both Arkansas and Alabama. This follows a pattern previously predicted by long-range forecasters at AccuWeather, which warned of an eastward-shift in tornado risk this year.

"Families and businesses across the Mississippi and Tennessee valleys need to prepare for a stormy spring. This forecast is concerning because more people are in harm's way, compared to Tornado Alley," AccuWeather lead long-range expert Paul Pastelok said in a statement. "More people live in the Mississippi and Tennessee valleys, and more of those families are in vulnerable buildings without basements like mobile homes."

What is Tornado Alley?

Tornado Alley is a nickname given to a region stretching across several South Central states where destructive tornadoes are most likely to occur, according to AccuWeather.

"This area encompasses much of northern Texas northward through Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and parts of Louisiana, Iowa, Nebraska and eastern Colorado," AccuWeather senior meteorologist Dan Kottlowski said in a statement.

Related: 'Winter is far from over': Polar vortex reversal could bring springtime snow to US

However, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) this nickname can be misleading as tornadoes can occur anywhere in the U.S. — and tornado threat shifts at different times of the year and under different weather patterns.

Tornadoes are violently rotating columns of air that stretch between the ground and the base of storm clouds. Their strength is measured using the Enhanced Fujita Scale, which estimates the tornado's strength based on the damage it causes. The highest ranking on the scale is EF5, indicating "incredible" damage.

Why is tornado risk shifting eastward?

In the U.S., tornado season usually begins in early March when cold air from Canada clashes with warm, moist air from the Gulf.

Pastelok said that this year's eastward shift in tornado risk is due to a large and persistent area of high pressure that is expected to hover over the Southwest this spring, limiting the severity of thunderstorms, and thus tornado risk, in the Western Plains. Exceptionally warm sea water in the Gulf is also expected to significantly influence severe weather in Southeastern states.

Cooler weather across much of the Great Lakes and Northeast is expected to limit the severity of thunderstorms and tornados in the Northern states through early spring.

On Friday (March 14) and Saturday, a particularly powerful storm system tore through many Central and Southern states, with 52 confirmed tornadoes whipping up expansive dust storms and wildfires. Nearly 1,100 flights were canceled during the two day period and 150 million people were affected by the extreme weather, AccuWeather reports.

According to the National Weather Service (NWS), two EF4-strength tornadoes — indicative of "devastating" damage — ripped through Arkansas on Friday. This was the first time in over 25 years that two EF4-strength tornadoes hit the state in a single day. One of these tornadoes, which devastated the town of Diaz, reached estimated wind speeds of 190 mph (306 kilometers per hour), NWS reports.

Meanwhile, winds topping 80 mph (129 km/h) were reported across the Southern Plains on Friday, with three people killed in car crashes attributed to dust storms in Texas.

Wind-driven wildfires have also caused extensive damage across Texas and Oklahoma, with the latter reporting more than 130 fires, according to state Governor Kevin Stitt.

The storm system is expected to move offshore by the end of the day on Monday (March 17), according to CNN. However, extremely critical fire-weather conditions are likely to persist into Tuesday afternoon (March 18), according to the NWS Storm Prediction Center.

Between 1,300 and 1,450 tornadoes are predicted to occur across the U.S. in total in 2025, according to AccuWeather. This is above the historical average of 1,225. Between 75 and 150 tornadoes have been forecast for March, 200 to 300 in April and 250 to 350 in May.

As well as increasing the frequency of tornadoes, our warming atmosphere may also contribute to more impactful and dangerous thunderstorms, AccuWeather senior meteorologist and climate expert Brett Anderson said in the statement.

"Our warming atmosphere can hold more moisture, unleashing intense rainfall rates that can trigger dangerous flash flooding," he said. "As water temperatures continue to increase in the Gulf, warmer air with more moisture can be forced northward into the Southern states ahead of a cold front, providing an extra boost of energy for severe thunderstorms that can produce tornadoes."

Earth's oldest lake has a clear winner: Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia. Scientists estimate that this enormous freshwater body is 25 million years old, according to Ted Ozersky, an associate professor of biological limnology (the study of inland bodies of water) at the University of Minnesota. By contrast, the Great Lakes formed less than 20,000 years ago. The second oldest lake on Earth is Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan, which formed about 20 million years ago.

Lake Baikal measures 12,239 square miles (31,700 square kilometers), making it Earth's seventh-largest lake. It is not only the world's oldest lake but also the deepest one, at about 1 mile (1.6 kilometers). But that's just the water depth. "The actual basin is much more than a mile deep," Ozersky told Live Science, including between 3.1 and 4.3 miles (5 to 7 km) of sediment at the bottom. In the case of Lake Baikal, where there are miles of sediment, researchers use seismic surveys to estimate the average rate of sediment formation, Ozersky said.

This sediment is key to dating the lake. Researchers measure a lake's age through isotopic dating. This technique involves measuring the ratios of radioactive isotopes. In this case, limnologists analyze lake sediments for radioactive versions of cesium, lead and carbon. This analysis tells them how old the different layers of sediment are and how fast that sediment accumulates, Ozersky explained

Related: How much water is in Earth's crust?

By understanding lake formation — and Lake Baikal's formation, in particular — researchers can get a better idea of how it has persisted for millions of years. Many lakes form as glacial features, Mark Edlund, a senior scientist and the director of aquatic research and collections at the Science Museum of Minnesota, told Live Science. Glaciers score a pocket in the landscape and deposit chunks of ice that eventually melt and fill the depression. "But in the grand scheme, they're very short-lived systems," Edlund said.

On the other hand, Lake Baikal is a rift lake. Rift lakes form when two continental plates start moving away from each other, creating a chasm. This chasm is called a graben. As these plates continue to drift apart, the graben continues to deepen. "As a result, that site never fills in," Edlund said, which is why rift lakes can last so long.

In fact, Ozersky said Lake Baikal gets an inch (2.5 centimeters) wider every year. Some of the world's other oldest lakes, like Lake Malawi (up to 5 million years old) and Lake Tanganyika (up to 12 million years old) — both in Southeast Africa — also come from rifts.

Lake Baikal also claims the title of Earth's most biologically diverse lake, according to Ozersky.

"Evolution has had so much time to work in that system without being interrupted," he said. It also has the highest rate of flora and fauna endemic to its ecosystem, meaning those plants and animals aren't found anywhere else on Earth. Perhaps the best and most beloved example is the Baikal seal (Pusa sibirica), the only freshwater seal species. (Although other seal species may inhabit lakes, those seals have "invaded" them through streams, Ozersky noted.)

This ancient lake also hosts hundreds of species of freshwater shrimp, which gives researchers the opportunity to study speciation and diversification. "Trying to understand how evolution works is one thing that is really interesting about Baikal," Ozersky said.

Edlund also studies diatoms, which are a unicellular type of algae. These organisms pull dissolved silica from the water and turn it into biologically produced glass, which encases them. Diatoms are typically between 10 and 50 microns (about half the width of a human hair) in diameter, but Baikal's diatoms are unusually large at about 50 to 150 microns. "When we look at the diatoms in Lake Baikal, they just blow your mind," Edlund said.

The lake is also open to human visitors. But because it's covered with ice five months out of the year, it's not a great swimming destination. Its average surface temperature is 39 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius). "It's a bitterly cold lake," Edlund said. "If you want to swim in it, you've got to gird your loins."

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

The influx of cold meltwater could slow the Antarctic Circumpolar Current by up to 20% by 2050, researchers reported March 3 in the journal Environmental Research Letters. The slowdown could affect ocean temperatures, sea level rise and Antarctica's ecosystem, the team said.

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which swirls clockwise around Antarctica, transports around a billion liters (264 million gallons) of water per second. It keeps warmer water away from the Antarctic Ice Sheet and connects the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Southern oceans, providing a pathway for heat exchange between these bodies of water.

Climate change has caused Antarctic ice to melt rapidly in recent years, adding an influx of fresh, cold water to the Southern Ocean. To explore how this influx will affect the Antarctic Circumpolar Current's strength and circulation, Bishakhdatta Gayen, a fluid mechanist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and his colleagues used Australia's fastest supercomputer and climate simulator to model interactions between the ocean and the ice sheet.

Related: Are Atlantic Ocean currents weakening? A new study finds no, but other experts aren't so sure.

Fresh, cold meltwater likely weakens the current, the team found. The meltwater dilutes the surrounding seawater and slows convection between surface water and deep water near the ice sheet. Over time, the deep Southern Ocean will warm as convection brings less cold water from the surface. Meltwater also makes its way farther north before sinking. Together, these changes affect the density profile of the world's oceans, which drives the slowdown.

Such a slowdown could allow more warm water to reach the Antarctic Ice Sheet, thereby exacerbating the melting that's already been observed. In addition to contributing to sea level rise, this could add even more meltwater to the Southern Ocean and weaken the Antarctic Circumpolar Current further.

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current also acts as a barrier against invasive species by directing non-native plants — and any animals hitching a ride on them — away from the continent. If the current slows or weakens, this barrier could become less effective.

"It's like a merry-go-round. It keeps on moving around and around, so it takes a longer time to come back to Antarctica," Gayen said. "If it slows down, what will happen is, things can migrate very quickly to the Antarctic coastline."

It's difficult to say when we'll start to feel the effects — if we haven't started feeling them already. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current hasn't been monitored very long because it's in such a remote location, Gayen told Live Science. To better differentiate warming-induced changes from baseline conditions, "we need a long-term record," he said.

The effects of the slowdown will be felt even in other oceans. "This is where the ocean heart sits," Gayen said. "If something stops there, or something different is happening, it's going to impact each and every ocean circulation."

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

The end-Permian mass extinction, also known as the "Great Dying," took place 251.9 million years ago. At that time, the supercontinent Pangea was in the process of breaking up, but all land on Earth was still largely clustered together, with the newly formed continents separated by shallow seas. An enormous eruption from a volcanic system called the Siberian Traps seem to have pushed carbon dioxide levels to extremes: A 2021 study estimated that atmospheric CO2 got as high as 2,500 parts per million (ppm) in this period, compared with current levels of 425 ppm. This caused global warming and ocean acidification, leading to a massive collapse of the ocean ecosystem.

The situation on land is far hazier. Only a handful of places around the world have rock layers containing fossils from land ecosystems at the end of the Permian and beginning of the Triassic.

A new study of one of these spots — located in what is now northeastern China —revealed a refuge where the ecosystem remained relatively healthy despite the Great Dying. In this place, seed-producing gymnosperm forests continued to grow, complemented by spore-producing ferns.

"At least in this place, we don't see mass extinction of plants," study co-author Wan Yang, a professor of geology and geophysics at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, told Live Science.

The finding, published Wednesday (March 12) in the journal Science Advances, adds weight to the idea that the Great Dying was more complicated on land than in the seas, Yang said.

The great changover?

Yang and his colleagues looked at rock layers in Xinjiang that span the mass extinction event.

A major advantage of this now-desert site is that the rocks include layers of ash that hold tiny crystals called zircons. The zircons include radioactive elements — lead and uranium — that gradually decay, which enables researchers to determine how long it has been since the crystals formed. This means the researchers can more accurately date the rock layers here than they can at other sites.

Some of these layers also hold fossil spores and pollen. These fossils reveal that there wasn't a massive die-off and repopulation but a slow changeover of species, Yang said.

This is consistent with other evidence from Africa and Argentina, where plant populations seemed to have shifted gradually rather than dying off dramatically and then repopulating, said Josefina Bodnar, a paleobotanist at the National University of La Plata in Argentina who was not involved in the research.

Land plants "have a lot of adaptations that allow them to survive this extinction," Bodnar told Live Science. "For example, [they have] subterranean structures, roots or stems, that can survive perhaps hundreds of years." Seeds can also persist a long time, she added.

This survival may have been particularly possible at humid, high-latitude regions. The site in Xinjiang was once dotted with lakes and rivers, a few hundred miles from the coast. Other places where plant refuges have been found, such as Argentina, were also high-latitude in the Permian, far from the equator where temperatures were the hottest.

Yang and his colleagues found that during the late Permian and early Triassic, the climate became a bit drier in what is now Xinjiang — but not enough to cause deforestation.

This may have been a consequence of location, said Devin Hoffman, a researcher in paleontology at University College London who was not involved in the new study. Marine animals had no escape from global ocean acidification. But climate change on land wasn't uniform. The impact would have been most pronounced in the center of Pangea, which was a vast desert.

This means that in more temperate regions on land, survival could have been possible, Hoffman told Live Science. "You essentially have everything being pushed toward the poles and towards the coast, but on land you're able to escape some of the effects," he said.

The planet's memory

These findings have led to some debate over whether the greatest mass extinction ever deserves the moniker on land. "I will call it a crisis on land. I will not call it an extinction," said Robert Gastaldo, an emeritus professor of Geology at Colby College who was not involved in the new study, but who has collaborated with Yang in the past.

The end-Permian extinction is particularly interesting to scientists because it was driven by greenhouse gases, much like climate change today. The situation was far more extreme then: The polar ice caps melted completely — a situation that would cause sea levels to rise a staggering 230 feet (70 meters) today.

But humans may be nearly as deadly as giant volcanoes. A 2020 study, for example, found that a smaller extinction event at the end of the Triassic (201 million years ago) was driven by greenhouse gas pulses from volcanoes that were on a similar scale to what humans are expected to emit by the end of this century. Studying these ancient catastrophes can give us a sense of what to expect under atmospheric carbon dioxide levels people have never experienced, Gastaldo said.

"The planet has experienced it," he said. "The planet's memory is in the rock record. And we can learn from the rock record what happens to our planet under these extreme conditions."

Mount Washington is the tallest peak in the Northeast. The mountain is famous for attracting extreme weather, with winds that exceed the force of a hurricane more than 100 days per year.

The mountain is home to "the world's worst weather" for three main reasons. Firstly, at 6,288 feet (1,917 meters) tall, it is the highest mountain in New England. Winds pick up speed when they can blow unobstructed, and the mountain is directly exposed to winds from the west that travel for hundreds of miles without obstruction. The closest mountains of a similar height to Mount Washington along this westerly windpath are the Black Hills of South Dakota about 1,600 miles (2,500 kilometers) away, according to the Mount Washington Observatory.

Not only do these winds hit Mount Washington at full speed but they are also siphoned toward the peak by the surrounding landscape. The mountains to the west of Mount Washington form a 75-mile-wide (120 km) funnel that channels westerly winds toward the mountain, accelerating already-fast winds until they reach breakneck speeds, according to the observatory.

Finally, Mount Washington sits on the confluence of three major storm tracks. Storms hit the summit every three days on average in the winter, bringing high winds and huge amounts of precipitation, according to the observatory. Record levels of precipitation for Mount Washington were measured in 1969, when 4.1 feet (1.3 m) of snow fell within 24 hours.

Related: Record spike in earthquakes at Washington's 'high threat' volcano sends researchers scrambling for answers

As a result of its unique position, Mount Washington is a contender for the world's fastest recorded wind speed. On "calm" summer days, instruments on Mount Washington's summit record wind speeds of 40 mph (65 km/h). But when storms roll in, these winds can whip up gusts exceeding 100 mph (160 km/h).

On April 12, 1934, instruments at the summit measured a record wind speed of 231 mph (372 km/h), which is equivalent to wind speeds inside a level-5 tornado on the Enhanced Fujita Scale. Such winds have the power to level well-constructed buildings, blow away structures with weak foundations and throw cars over large distances. The record still stands today as the second-fastest natural wind gust ever recorded, with the fastest occurring on Barrow Island in Australia on April 10, 1996 and reaching speeds of 253 mph (407 km/h).

Even wind speeds of 100 mph can rip huge chunks of ice off the mountain and the Mount Washington Observatory building at the summit, which poses a severe risk for hikers and climbers in the winter. The observatory has bulletproof windows to mitigate the risk of one of these chunks smashing into the building, according to its website.

As well as flying ice, people climbing Mount Washington in the winter are faced with the risk of avalanches, hypothermia and frostbite. Temperatures on the mountain average 27.1 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 2.7 degrees Celsius), which can create extreme wind chill conditions, according to New Hampshire State Parks.

Several rescue teams monitor Mount Washington, and volunteers regularly save the lives of hikers who get lost or caught out by changing weather conditions.

These strange regions in Earth's mantle, known as "large low velocity provinces" (LLVPs), are actually chunks of Earth's crust that have sunk into the mantle over the past billion years, new research suggests.

Scientists have long known that there are LLVPs — one below the Pacific Ocean and the other below Africa. In these regions, seismic waves from earthquakes travel 1% to 3% more slowly than they do in the rest of the mantle. Scientists believe they may affect the planet's magnetic field because of the way they influence heat flow from Earth's core.

There's a lot of debate about what LLVPs are. Some studies have suggested that they're material from the ancient Earth — either a layer of primordial unmixed rock from the planet's formation or a leftover hunk of the giant space rock that hit Earth 4.5 billion years ago, forming the moon.

Related: Scientists discover Earth's inner core isn't just slowing down — it's also changing shape

Others have suggested that the blobs are huge chunks of oceanic crust that were pushed into the mantle when one tectonic plate slipped under another — a process known as subduction.

The crust hypothesis had not been subject to as many studies as the ancient-material idea, said James Panton, a geodynamicist at Cardiff University in the U.K. In a new study, published Feb. 6 in the journal Scientific Reports, he and his colleagues used computer modeling to determine where subducted crust entered the mantle over the past billion years and to find out whether that subducted crust could form features similar to the LLVPs.

"We found that the recycling of the oceanic crust can indeed generate these LLVP-like regions beneath the Pacific and Africa without the need for a primordial dense layer at the base of the mantle," Panton told Live Science. "They are evolving by themselves, simply through the process of subduction of oceanic crust."

That doesn't mean there isn't dense material from Earth's youth at the bottom of the mantle, Panton said; there may be a thin layer of ancient material that contributes to the LLVPs as well. But if subduction alone can explain the LLVPs, that could hint at their age.

"That potentially means that shortly after we started having subduction on Earth, then maybe that's when we started to have LLVPs," Panton said. (The advent of subduction is itself a complicated question. Some scientists think it began more than 4 billion years ago, while others think it started around a billion years ago.)

The subduction process has resulted in two different types of blobs, the authors said in the study. The LLVP under Africa doesn't get as much crustal material currently as the LLVP under the Pacific, which is fed by the subduction zones of the Pacific Ring of Fire, which is a horseshoe-shaped line of subduction that circles the Pacific Ocean.

The African LLVP is thus older and better mixed with the rest of the crust, the team said. It also has less of a volcanic rock called basalt, which means it is less dense than the Pacific LLVP. This may explain why the African LLVP extends 342 miles (550 kilometers) higher in the mantle than the Pacific LLVP.

One question for the future, Panton said, is how hot regions of the mantle called mantle plumes may help drive the subduction process in the Pacific and influence the LLVPs. These plumes stretch from the very bottom of the mantle to volcanic hotspots at the surface, such as the Hawaiian islands.

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

The twister hit Seminole County in the Orlando metropolitan region on Monday (March 10) with peak wind speeds of up to 115 mph (185 km/h), weather website AccuWeather reported.

The tornado raced over a distance of around 4 miles (6 kilometers) in 15 minutes, destroying two homes, uprooting trees and damaging vehicles. There weren't any serious injuries reported as a result of the tornado, according to FOX 35 Orlando.

FOX 35 Orlando staff confirmed the tornado's location live on air when it hit their studio. Brooks Garner, a meteorologist at the TV station, was tracking the storm when a camera showed a gray mass of wind and rain approaching the FOX building.

"Take shelter!" Garner said as the tornado hit. "Everybody in the FOX 35 building, get to your safe space, under your desk if you're not in a designated area. We're catching debris right now on the roof."

FOX 35 Orlando staff said they felt the building shake and heard debris hit the roof as the tornado passed over them, FOX Weather reported. Nobody in the building was hurt, according to the report.

Related: 'Winter is far from over': Polar vortex reversal could bring springtime snow to US

Tornadoes are narrow, rapidly rotating columns of air that stretch from clouds down to the ground during a thunderstorm. They are among the most violent storms on Earth, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Severe Storms Laboratory.

Scientists categorize a tornado's strength using the Enhanced Fujita Scale (EF Scale), which ranges from EF0 to EF5. The Florida tornado was EF2, meaning winds of 111 to 135 mph (179 to 217 km/h). For context, the most powerful EF5 tornadoes have winds of more than 200 mph (322 km/h). The last twister to reach EF5 was the 2013 Moore tornado, which killed 24 people and devastated the city of Moore in Oklahoma.

More tornadoes could hit the central and southeastern U.S. later this week. A powerful storm is expected to sweep across the country from west to east, with a risk of severe thunderstorms that could spawn tornadoes in 12 states, including Florida, on Friday and Saturday (March 14 to 15), according to a statement released by AccuWeather.

"All of the ingredients are coming together for a significant severe weather outbreak," Bernie Rayno, chief on-air meteorologist at AccuWeather, said in the statement. "We could end up with two dozen tornadoes or more by the end of the weekend."

This unusual image shows a large plume of discolored water rising toward the Pacific Ocean's surface from the Kavachi volcano, also known as "sharkcano," during an undersea eruption.

Kavachi is a submarine volcano that is part of the Solomon Islands, around 15 miles (24 kilometers) south of Vangunu Island. Its peak stands roughly 3,600 feet (1,100 meters) above the seafloor and lies just 65 feet (20 m) below the waves. The volcano is named after the sea god of the Vangunu people and is also referred to as "Rejo te Kvachi," or "Kavachi’s Oven," according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

In 2015, a research expedition discovered multiple scalloped hammerhead sharks (Sphyrna lewini) and silky sharks (Carcharhinus falciformis) living within the volcano's central crater. The surprising presence of the oceanic predators at the volcano raised "new questions about the ecology of active submarine volcanoes and the extreme environments in which large marine animals exist," the researchers wrote.

It is unclear whether any of the sharks at Kavachi were hurt by the outburst that triggered the plume in the image or if they were able to sense the incoming eruption and evacuate the crater.

The image was first released in May 2022 by NASA Goddard on the social media platform X along with the caption: "You’ve heard of sharknado, now get ready for sharkcano."

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

The plume in the photo is part of an eruption that began in October 2021 and lasted for just a few weeks after the aerial image was taken. Similar plumes occurred during subsequent eruptions in August 2023 and April 2024, according to the Global Volcanism Program at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Before then, the volcano's most recent major eruptions were in 2016, 2014, 2007 and 2003. In the past, researchers also sighted ephemeral islands up to half a mile (1 km) wide being birthed by the eruptions and then sinking. A similar ghostly landmass recently emerged after an undersea volcano in Japan blew its top in 2023.

Explosive plumes

Kavachi experiences "phreatomagmatic eruptions," which occur when magma meets water and ejects steam, ash, volcanic rock fragments and chunks of magma known as "incandescent bombs," according to the Earth Observatory.

A study conducted in the wake of the 2007 eruption found that the volcanic plumes are made of warm, acidic water that also contains particulate matter and sulfur, which "attracts microbial communities that thrive on [the chemicals]," the researchers wrote.

The volcano can also launch jets of heated water without any visible plumes or other signs of erupting.

Residents of neighboring islands have frequently reported that they regularly see steam and ash on the water's surface between eruptions, further confirming that the so-called sharkcano is percolating beneath the surface.

The polar vortex usually keeps cold Arctic air confined above the North Pole, but experts believe it is starting to shift and stretch. That disruption could create the conditions for springtime snow and storms in the central and eastern U.S., according to a statement released by weather website AccuWeather.

"Don't put your winter jacket and gloves away just yet," Paul Pastelok, the lead long-range forecaster at AccuWeather, said in the statement. "Winter is far from over. Many parts of the central and eastern U.S. will see a surge of springlike warmth next week, but the polar vortex could contribute to a sharp drop in temperatures across parts of the U.S. during the week of March 17."

The polar vortex disruption will cause Arctic air to flow south into North America. However, it's not yet clear how severe its impact will be. With the warmer temperatures of spring approaching, any Arctic air flowing into the U.S. won't be as cold compared to if this happened in January, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Polar Vortex Blog.

Related: Spectacular photo taken from ISS shows 'gigantic jet' of upward-shooting lightning towering 50 miles over New Orleans

The polar vortex is an area of low pressure and cold air circulating around the poles in the stratosphere — a layer in the atmosphere hovering between 7.5 and 31 miles (12 and 50 kilometers) above the surface. The Northern Hemisphere's polar vortex regularly expands over winter, sending a blast of cold air south with the jet stream, according to the National Weather Service.

There are a variety of different factors that contribute to cold weather, so not all cold snaps are related to the polar vortex. This winter, the vortex has actually been strong and stable for the most part, with rapid west-to-east winds keeping Arctic air confined to the Arctic. However, a sudden warming will buck that trend.

The temperature difference between the North Pole and the equator maintains the polar vortex's strong west-to-east winds over winter. However, sudden warming in the stratosphere can bring this whirling to a halt and cause the winds to reverse direction. Such a warming event can displace the polar vortex or split it in two, according to the Polar Vortex Blog.

The polar vortex might not recover its strong west-to-east winds after the warming, which would make this the final stratospheric warming event of the season. The polar vortex reversal happens every spring (usually later in mid-April) as sunlight returns to the north pole and the temperature difference between the North Pole and the equator decreases, according to the Polar Vortex Blog.

The findings offer a new insight into the extreme forces unleashed by the tsunami that followed the Chicxulub asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago.

In the new study, published online Jan. 19 in the journal Marine Geology, researchers analyzed an extensive set of petroleum industry 3D seismic data and found that these tsunami-driven ripples extend across a far larger area than previously documented.

In a 2021 study, University of Louisiana at Lafayette geoscientist Gary Kinsland and colleagues first identified a 77-square-mile (200 square kilometers) region of seismically imaged megaripples on the shelf of what is now central Louisiana. This relatively shallow part of the landmass was once submerged and extended from the coastline before dropping off into deeper ocean waters.

Related: What happened when the dinosaur-killing asteroid slammed into Earth?

In that 2021 study, the research team suggested that the megaripples, which have an average height of 52 feet (16 meters) and an average wavelength (from one crest of a wave to the next) of 1,970 feet (600 m), were sculpted by tsunami waves as they surged across the sediment-laden seafloor following the asteroid's impact.

To build on that research, the team analyzed 900 square miles (2,400 square km) of 3D seismic data encompassing regions farther up the shelf and down into deeper waters. The results show that megaripples are present across the entire study area, revealing the widespread impact of the tsunami.

However, the researchers also found significant variations in the ripples' shapes and orientations depending on their location.

"The megaripples are different on the slope, at the shelf break and further up the shelf," Kinsland, who is the lead author of the new study, told Live Science in an email. "This is important information in modeling of tsunami, in prediction of future tsunami interactions with shelves and in the understanding of the Chicxulub tsunami."

Near the shelf break — the point where the continental shelf suddenly drops off — for example, the megaripples are strongly asymmetric, likely due to the tsunami's surge onto the shelf. This asymmetry is what allowed Kinsland and the authors of the 2021 study to determine the direction the water was flowing when the ripples were made. The long, asymmetrical sides of the ripples slope south-southeast, pointing back to their source in the Chicxulub impact crater at the tip of Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.

About 30 miles (45 km) further inland, the megaripples are more weakly asymmetric, suggesting differences in the behavior of the tsunami as it moved into shallower waters. Meanwhile, in the deeper slope sections the team analyzed, the ripples have a much more varied shape — likely a result of the tsunami's interaction with features such as faults and collapses.

The researchers propose that the megaripples were not formed in the same way as ordinary sand ripples on a beach, which develop from the movement of individual grains. Instead, they suggest that the massive earthquake following the impact fluidized a layer of sediment, which the high-speed tsunami waves then shaped into standing waveforms.

"The ripples must be formed by deformation of the mass of the material," Kinsland said. "An analogy is the ripples formed in the process of making whipped cream, which produces ripples which stand after having been pushed into ripple shapes." The exact mechanism for the megaripples' formation, however, remains an open question, the authors wrote in the paper.

Understanding these ancient tsunami dynamics is not just about reconstructing the past. With modern asteroid-tracking programs in place, scientists are keenly aware of the potential for future impacts.

"We track asteroids now and should be able to predict future impacts," Kinsland said. "Understanding the worldwide impact effects will help us prepare if we see one coming which we cannot deflect."

With more studies underway to examine the global impact of the Chicxulub tsunami, researchers will continue to uncover new details about one of the most devastating events in Earth's history — one that reshaped both the planet's surface and the course of life itself.

Hidden away in the country's outback, the crater is a whopping 3.47 billion years old, according to a study published Thursday (March 6) in the journal Nature Communications.

"Before our discovery, the oldest impact crater was 2.2 billion years old, so this is by far the oldest known crater ever found on Earth," study co-author Tim Johnson, a professor in the school of Earth and planetary sciences at Curtin University in Australia, said in a statement.

The crater is located in Western Australia's Pilbara region, which is home to some of Earth's oldest rocks. Johnson and his colleagues identified the crater thanks to cone-shaped chunks of rock known as "shatter cones," which form when the shock waves from a meteorite impact propagate downward.

The extreme pressure caused by a meteorite collision fractures the rock below in a branching pattern, leaving chunks that are shaped like cones, with the tapered end pointing toward the center of the impact.

Related: What are the largest impact craters on Earth?

The shatter cones were buried in a rock formation called the East Pilbara Terrane, which scientists already knew dates back to more than 3 billion years ago. The cones were "exceptionally preserved," according to the new study, providing "unequivocal evidence" of an epic meteorite crash around the dawn of life on Earth.

The impact likely rippled across the planet, opening a crater that may have measured up to 62 miles (100 kilometers) across — although more work is needed to confirm the size, the researchers wrote in the study. The shatter cones revealed that the meteorite was traveling roughly 22,400 miles per hour (36,000 km/h) when it hit the ground, according to the statement.

As well as being a destructive force, the impact may have helped to spark life by creating the physical and chemical conditions required.

"Uncovering this impact and finding more from the same time period could explain a lot about how life may have got started, as impact craters created environments friendly to microbial life such as hot water pools," study lead author Chris Kirkland, also a professor at Curtin University's school of Earth and planetary sciences, said in the statement.

Evidence of ancient meteorite strikes on Earth is hard to come by, because the planet continuously recycles rocks from the crust into the mantle, erasing most crash sites. Erosion and weathering also degrade rocks sitting at the surface, meaning Earth's early impact record is largely lost, according to the study.

Nevertheless, researchers suspect that Earth was regularly pummelled by meteorites in its first billion years of existence due to scars on the moon, which does not have plate tectonics. The moon counts millions of impact craters and 40 that are more than 62 miles across, suggesting planets in the early solar system also underwent heavy bombardment, the researchers wrote.

The new discovery hints that some information about Earth's early history has survived. Not only does this offer new avenues to explore how life began on Earth, but it could also shift geologists' perspectives on the formation of Earth's crust.

"The tremendous amount of energy from this impact could have played a role in shaping early Earth's crust by pushing one part of the Earth's crust under another, or by forcing magma to rise from deep within the Earth's mantle toward the surface," Kirkland said.

The new crater alone doesn't paint a clear picture of Earth's first billion years, but there may be many more similar craters awaiting discovery, the researchers concluded in the study.

Mount Roraima is a plateau with near-vertical sides that sits on the triple border point between Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana. The plateau is often encircled by a ring of clouds, which makes the summit look like an island floating in the sky.

The mountain towers 9,219 feet (2,810 meters) above the surrounding savanna, jutting out like a giant tabletop. Geologists call this kind of formation a "tepui," which means "house of the gods" in the language of the Pemon, the local Indigenous people. The Pemon believe tepuis to be sacred, and that Mount Roraima is the stump of a supernatural tree that held all the fruit and vegetables of the world until a mythical figure named Makunaima felled it, according to the International Business Times.

But scientists have another explanation for how Mount Roraima came to be. Tepuis are exclusively found in South America, and specifically in Venezuela and western Guyana, where they number more than 100. According to the Geological Society of London, tepuis are the remnants of a huge block of sandstone that formed in this region around 1.8 billion years ago as large sand dunes slowly solidified into rock.

Over the next 1.5 billion years, other types of rock accumulated on top of the sandstone, but these layers were eroded away roughly 180 million years ago, according to the Geological Society. Wind and water then went to work on the sandstone, carving out the giant, steep-sided plateaus we see today, according to Geology Science. Finally, geologic uplift raised the plateaus to their current height, according to Geology Science.

Related: Snake Island: The isle writhing with vipers where only Brazilian military and scientists are allowed

Like other tepuis, Mount Roraima's summit harbors a "lost world" ecosystem that has been sheltered from the surrounding region for about 70 million to 90 million years, according to a 2012 study.

Much remains unknown about the way that tepui ecosystems have assembled and evolved, but researchers estimate that a high proportion of the flora and fauna on the summits are endemic, meaning that they aren't found elsewhere. For example, about one-third of the vegetation found at the top of all tepuis, including carnivorous plants and orchids, is endemic, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

However, the 2012 study found that these ecosystems aren't completely isolated. The researchers analyzed the DNA of four tree frog species living on separate tepuis to determine whether these species have had any contact with each other in the past 70 million years. The scientists discovered that the frogs shared a common ancestor as recently as 5.3 million years ago, suggesting that tree frogs — and perhaps other creatures as well — can migrate up and down the cliffs of tepui formations.

Rare nectar-sucking birds and other unusual creatures, such as the Roraima black frog (Oreophrynella quelchii), thrive at the top of Mount Roraima thanks to pools of crystal-clear water and streams that feed waterfalls down the tepui's sides. These cascades are fed by rainwater and include the Crystal Valley Falls and Triple Point Falls.

Mount Roraima's summit and its incredible views are accessible to tourists, but ascending to the top requires a multi-day trek through challenging terrain, according to Geology Science.

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

Sea ice is the frozen seawater that floats on the ocean's surface. As the planet warms, the amount of sea ice declines. In February 2025, sea ice around the poles reached an "all-time minimum" when compared with previous Februaries (records began in 1979), according to a statement from the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service.

"One of the consequences of a warmer world is melting sea ice, and the record or near-record low sea ice cover at both poles has pushed global sea ice cover to an all-time minimum," Samantha Burgess, the strategic lead for climate at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which implements the Copernicus program, said in the statement.

Sea ice loss has the potential to trigger a cascade of adverse environmental impacts, including for the human and wildlife communities living on it. The melting also accelerates global warming even further as the newly exposed ocean beneath reflects less sunlight than bright ice does.

Related: Scientists identify tipping point for Greenland's ice sheet — and it's not far off

Copernicus publishes monthly updates on sea ice cover and global temperatures, so its assessments are based on billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations worldwide, according to the statement.

Last month, Copernicus scientists announced that January 2025 was the warmest January on record, even though Earth had entered La Niña, the cold phase of the El Niño climate pattern. The latest report revealed that February 2025 was the third warmest February on record. So it wasn't a record-breaker in that respect, but it did continue a worrying warming trend.

February 2025 was, on average, 2.86 degrees Fahrenheit (1.59 Celsius) warmer than preindustrial levels — the estimated average temperature between 1850 and 1900. World leaders previously promised to limit warming to preferably below 2.7 F (1.5 C) and well below 3.6 F (2 C) in the 2015 Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty. However, Earth is now consistently above the 2.7 F target, with February 2025 the 19th month out of the past 20 to breach 2.7 F.

Temperatures fluctuate from year to year, so climate change doesn't mean that every new month is guaranteed to break records. However, there is a clear overall trend of the planet getting warmer and warmer. Last year was the first complete year to breach 2.7 F and ended up as the hottest year on record since preindustrial levels.

Not all parts of the planet get warmer at the same rate. Last month, severe winter storms blasted the U.S. with record-breaking cold, and Copernicus' data revealed that a good chunk of North America was cooler than average for February. However, temperatures were mostly above average around the rest of the world.

Temperatures in the high Arctic were particularly high, with scientists recording "extreme" warming of 36 F (20 C) at the North Pole on Feb. 2, Live Science previously reported. The Arctic is warming around four times faster than the rest of the world — an effect linked to the melting sea ice.

Climate change threatens billions of people worldwide. The effects of global warming include the fueling of wildfires and other extreme weather events that destroy homes; rising sea levels that threaten the survival of coastal communities; and drying agricultural lands that undermine our ability to produce food.

The megaberg, which is roughly the size of Rhode Island, struck shallow waters 50 miles (80 kilometers) from the South Atlantic wildlife haven, the BBC reports, and researchers are keenly observing what it will do next.

"In the last few decades, the many icebergs that end up taking this route through the Southern Ocean soon break up, disperse and melt," Andrew Meijers, an oceanographer at the BAS, said in a statement. "It will be interesting to see what will happen now."

A23a, nicknamed the "queen of icebergs," first broke off from Antarctica's Filchner Ice Shelf in 1986. However, it remained tethered to the seabed for more than three decades before it finally began to break free in 2020, according to the BAS.

In 2024, the icy colossus then got stuck again, spinning in one spot for several months just north of the South Orkney Island. But in December 2024 it broke free once more and continued its journey northwards.

When A23a's trajectory towards South Georgia first became apparent in January, experts feared a collision could be catastrophic for the large colonies of penguins, seals and other marine wildlife that live there.

Related: 45-mile-long iceberg slams into penguin refuge in Antarctica, almost causing ecological disaster

If the megaberg stays grounded, Meijers said it is unlikely to pose a significant threat to the local wildlife. But if it moves closer to the island or breaks apart, "it could interrupt their pathway to feeding sites and force the adults to expend more energy to travel around it," he said. "This could reduce the amount of food coming back to pups and chicks on the island, and so increase mortality."

Similar fears were raised in 2020, when the previous world's largest iceberg, A68a, came perilously close to grounding right next to South Georgia before it was eventually ripped apart into many smaller pieces by ocean currents.

However, there could also be an upside to the recent iceberg grounding: "If the berg is stimulating ocean productivity, this could actually boost populations of local predators like seals and penguins," Meijers said.

As well as stirring up nutrients from the ocean floor, megabergs also contain a vast amount of nutrients locked away in their ice. "It's like dropping a nutrient bomb into the middle of an empty desert," Nadine Johnston, a marine ecologist at the British Antarctic Survey, told BBC.

However, Meijers added that, as the berg disintegrates, it might pose a threat to local sailors and fishermen. "Commercial fisheries have been disrupted in the past however, and as the berg breaks into smaller pieces, this might make fishing operations in the area both more difficult and potentially hazardous."

BAS will continue to monitor the effects of this iceberg on the surrounding ecosystem.

Over the past decade, the rate at which buildings have collapsed along the ancient city's seafront has increased from around one per year to as many as 40 per year, according to a study published Feb. 12 in the journal Earth's Future.

In the past 20 years, 280 buildings in this 2,300-year-old port city — known for being the birthplace of Cleopatra and the ancient home of the famed Library of Alexandria — have collapsed due to coastal erosion, and 7,000 more are at risk of collapsing in the future, according to the paper. Between 2014 and 2020 alone, 86 buildings completely crumbled, and 201 partially collapsed across the city, resulting in 85 deaths.

"The true cost of this loss extends far beyond bricks and mortar," study co-author Essam Heggy, a water scientist at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering, said in a statement. "We are witnessing the gradual disappearance of historic coastal cities, with Alexandria sounding the alarm. What once seemed like distant climate risks are now a present reality."

The crumbling of coastal buildings results from sea level rise and the subsequent intrusion of seawater into the ground under the city. As saltwater creeps farther inland due to rising sea levels, it increases groundwater levels beneath buildings and other infrastructure and erodes the soil. This can lead the ground to sink, which makes buildings unstable and at risk of collapse. Additionally, saltwater corrodes the steel reinforcements of building foundations, further weakening the structures.

Average global sea levels have risen by between 8 and 9 inches (20 to 23 centimeters) since 1880, with a 4-inch (10 cm) rise since 1993 alone, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). If nothing is done to curb climate change, U.S. sea levels could rise by as much as 7.2 feet (2.2 meters) by 2100 compared with the levels seen in 2000.

Low-lying cites face the highest risk of erosion and flooding due to sea level rise, especially those along the U.S. East Coast, West Coast and Gulf Coast, according to NASA.

"Our study challenges the common misconception that we'll only need to worry when sea levels rise by a meter," Heggy said. "However, what we're showing here is that coastlines globally, especially Mediterranean coastlines similar to California's, are already changing and causing building collapses at an unprecedented rate."

In the study, the researchers mapped collapsed buildings around Alexandria between 2001 and 2021, and compared satellite images from between 1974 and 2021 with maps of the city from 1887, 1959 and 2001 to determine sea level rise. Using this data, they determined that Alexandria has seen its coastline move inland by tens of meters over the past few decades, with some regions experiencing up to 79 to 118 feet (24 to 36 m) of soil erosion per year.

The researchers also analyzed chemical isotopes in the soils to determine the degree of soil erosion.

"Our isotope analysis revealed that buildings are collapsing from the bottom up, as seawater intrusion erodes foundations and weakens the soil," study co-author Ibrahim Saleh, a soil radiation scientist at Alexandria University, said in the statement. "It isn't the buildings themselves, but the ground underneath them that's being affected."

The researchers suggest several ways that Alexandria could prepare for the oncoming onslaught of seawater. These steps include building sand dunes and other barriers along the coast, elevating buildings, and relocating people who live in the highest-risk areas.

"Historic cities like Alexandria, which represent the cradle of cultural exchange, innovation and history, are crucial for safeguarding our shared human heritage," Heggy said. "As climate change accelerates sea level rise and coastal erosion, protecting them isn't just about saving buildings; it's about preserving who we are."

The striking image was taken by an unnamed ISS crewmember on Nov. 19, 2024, but it was not initially shared by NASA or any other space organization. However, photographer Frankie Lucena, who specializes in capturing giant lightning sprites, stumbled across photos of the event on the Gateway to Astronaut photography of Earth website and shared them with Spaceweather.com, which reshared the shots Feb. 26.

"I checked the ISS database for pictures before and after the event, and found that there were 4 photos [of lightning] in all," Lucena told Spaceweather.com. The images can be viewed in a time-lapse video posted on YouTube, but only one has an associated jet.

The exact location of the jet is unclear because thunderclouds are covering Earth's surface in the images. However, based on the position of the ISS at the time, the jet likely occurred just off the coast of New Orleans, according to Spaceweather.com.

Related: Electrifying time-lapse image captures 100 lightning bolts torching the sky over Turkey

Gigantic jets are massive lightning bolts that shoot upward from thunderstorms when the charged layers of the clouds get temporarily inverted. They mainly give off a blue light due to the high levels of nitrogen in the upper atmosphere and usually last less than a second.

Most observed gigantic jets reach the ionosphere — the part of the atmosphere that begins around 50 miles above Earth's surface and contains charged particles captured from the sun. This has earned the phenomenon the nickname "Earth's tallest lightning," according to Spaceweather.com. However, the exact height of the newly photographed bolt is unclear.

Gigantic jets are also extremely energetic. The most powerful recorded example of this phenomenon, which occurred during a thunderstorm over Oklahoma in May 2018, contained roughly 60 times more energy than a standard lightning bolt and reached up to 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit (4,400 degrees Celsius).

These jets often terminate with tendrils of branching red lightning, which can be faintly seen in the new image. These additional discharges are very similar to "sprites," which often look like giant electric jellyfish. However, gigantic jets are a separate phenomenon from traditional sprites, which occur without jets, according to EarthSky.com.

Gigantic jets were first discovered relatively recently, in 2001 — so only a few dozen photographs of these massive bolts have ever been captured, according to Spaceweather.com. However, scientists think there could be up to 1,000 unseen jets every year.

Most of these images have been taken from space, but some others, including a breathtaking image from September 2018, have also been snapped by airplane passengers flying over thunderstorms.

This intriguing astronaut photo shows around a dozen giant "star dunes" as they slowly dance across a sandy field near the edge of the Sahara desert. The rare dunes, which are often confused with human-made pyramids, are likely several centuries old, recent research has revealed.

The unusual structures are located in Erg Chebbi. This field of open, windswept sand — or erg — covers around 65 square miles (170 square kilometers) in southwest Morocco along the northwestern edge of the Sahara. The erg is surrounded by flat lowlands but contains some of the tallest dunes in the Sahara, making it stand out like a mountain range when viewed from afar.

The town of Merzouga is also visible in the bottom right of the image. This settlement is built on top of a large aquifer, or underground reservoir, which allows palm groves to flourish alongside the desolate landscape and draws in tourists who are looking to explore the erg's sandy peaks.

A star dune is a type of sand dune that has at least three ridges coming from a central peak, which gives it a star-like shape when viewed from above, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. But when they're viewed from the side, their multiple smooth slopes, known as "slip faces," can make the star dunes look very similar to pyramids from ground level.

These dunes, which can grow to be over 300 feet (90 meters) tall, form only in locations where wind directions change constantly, which allows their different slopes to form, according to the National Park Service. As a result, they move by just a couple of inches every year in the direction of the strongest prevailing wind. That's a lot slower than some other wandering dunes, which can travel up to 1,000 feet (300 m) annually when blown in a single direction.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

The largest star dune in Erg Chebbi, Lala Lallia, is 330 feet (100 m) tall and is located slightly to the north (left) of the dunes in the satellite image. In March 2024, researchers revealed that this dune is around 900 years old, which is much younger than previous estimates had suggested.

The same study also revealed that some of the sand buried at the base of this dune is up to 13,000 years old. These grains predate an 8,000-year period of climatic change that occurred after the end of the last ice age. During this time, the Sahara was temporarily transformed into a swampy environment covered in vegetation — a shift that ended only around 4,000 years ago, researchers wrote at the time.

On Earth, star dunes are also found in China, Namibia, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and several U.S. states, including California and Colorado. But very similar structures can be found on Mars, according to NASA.

This rare form of helium is called helium-3 because it has two protons and one neutron in its nucleus. Normal helium, which is 700,000 times more common than helium-3, is called helium-4 because it has two protons and two neutrons. Whereas helium-4 is a common product of the decay of radioactive elements, helium-3 comes almost entirely from the initial cloud of dust and gas that formed the solar system.

This primordial element was already known to exist inside Earth. Each year, about 4.4 pounds (2 kilograms) of helium-3 leaks out of mid-ocean ridges where the crust is pulling apart and out of volcanic hotspots that tap magma from the deep mantle. But exactly how it has remained inside the planet for billions of years is a persistent mystery.

Helium is a very light gas, and most volatile gases have long since escaped the mantle, having been blown away during the giant impact that formed the moon or churned to the surface by the inexorable movements of plate tectonics.

Scientists have theorized that perhaps this primordial helium is locked up in Earth's core, where it would remain safe from major disturbances and leak out to the surface only very slowly. But the core is mostly iron, and helium and iron typically don't mix.

Now, in a new study, researchers at the lab of Kei Hirose, a planetary scientist at the University of Tokyo, and their colleagues have found that at the temperatures and pressures expected in the core, the two elements actually do mix. In fact, solid iron at high temperature and pressure could contain up to 3.3% helium, the researchers reported Feb. 25 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The researchers discovered this compatibility by heating iron and helium to between 1,340 and 4,940 degrees Fahrenheit (727 to 2,727 degrees Celsius, or 1,000 to 3,000 kelvins) while compressing the elements with a diamond-tipped anvil to between 50,000 and 550,000 times the pressure at Earth's surface. Then, they depressurized the samples under cryogenic temperatures and measured their crystalline structures. This method likely prevented the escape of helium during the measurement phase, Hirose said in a statement.

The researchers used normal helium-4 in their experiments, but helium-3 would likely behave very similarly, said Peter Olson, a geophysicist at the University of New Mexico who was not involved in the study but studies Earth's core. The findings confirm that helium could stay locked in Earth's solid inner core for a long time, Olson told Live Science, but he cautioned that only 4% of the core is solid.

"This is significant, because it shows that helium is compatible with the solid phase of the core," Olson said. "But because the core almost certainly formed in a liquid state, there is more work to be done to show that the same interpretation can be applied to the liquid part."

Figuring out how helium-3 got incorporated into the core during Earth's formation is very important for understanding when the planet formed, Olson said. Light gases like helium hung around in the gas-and-dust nebula that formed the solar system for only a few million years.

"It's very much debated how long it took the Earth to form," Olson said. "There is other evidence that has been interpreted to say the Earth formed very slowly, requiring 100 million years. You wouldn't get much helium deep in the Earth if the Earth formed that slowly."

In other words, if scientists can show that Earth's core contains a lot of helium-3, it will strongly suggest that the planet formed quickly, settling a long-standing debate about the birth of the solar system.

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

Dalton et al. home in on a period from 15 million to 6 million years ago, over which, as prior research revealed, ocean crust production dropped by 35%. This reduction, mostly resulting from a global slowdown in seafloor spreading, caused ocean basins to deepen.

In the new work, the researchers considered various possible initial conditions for the area and ages of ocean crust, as well as crust destruction rates, calculating that the ancient seafloor spreading slowdown would have resulted in a sea level drop of 26–32 meters. This amount is comparable to the sea level change that would result today if the entire East Antarctic Ice Sheet (Earth's largest ice sheet) melted, but in reverse.

Related: When were sea levels highest?

In addition, the researchers calculated that heat flowing into the ocean from the hot mantle beneath would have decreased by about 8% overall from 15 million to 6 million years ago, with an even greater drop (35%) in hydrothermal flux near oceanic ridges. They suggest this drop may have caused significant changes in the ocean's chemistry.

In previous work, some of the same researchers proposed that the 35% slowdown in crust production could have led to decreased volcanic emissions of greenhouse gases, and thus to global cooling, during the same period. If this decrease occurred, sea level could have fallen by more than 60 additional meters, thanks to thermal contraction of seawater and more water being held in continental ice sheets.

Only limited evidence of sea level changes over the past 15 million years is available from coastal rock layers. Nonetheless, the new calculations are consistent with interpretations of existing sequence stratigraphy data gathered from coastal New Jersey and offshore Nova Scotia, the researchers say.

Though this is not the first study to estimate past sea level changes on the basis of shifting plate tectonic speeds, it covers a more recent period at a finer resolution and with greater statistical certainty than most prior studies, the researchers add.

This article was originally published on Eos.org. Read the original article.

A new study finds that the volcano — or one near it — laid down an enormous layer of ash and volcanic rock about 109,000 years ago. This outburst, dubbed the Maddaloni/X-6 eruption, was similar in size to the biggest known Campi Flegrei eruption, which happened 40,000 years ago and was so large that it created a caldera 9 miles (15 kilometers) in diameter.

"Despite the relatively large uncertainty, the Maddaloni/X-6 eruption may be, by a wide margin, at least the second-largest explosive event [to have] occurred in the Campi Flegrei area since 109,000 years ago," study lead author Giada Fernandez, a doctoral student in Earth science at Sapienza University of Rome, wrote in the new paper, published Jan. 15 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Campi Flegrei sits just east of Naples, at the southern end of the fertile Campanian Plain. The soil of the plain is rich and fertile, and it's made of broken-down volcanic ash from the eruption 40,000 years ago.

The confirmation of an older eruption that was nearly as large has subtle implications for the risk to the 400,000 or so people who live in the caldera.

The volcano has been experiencing about 75 years of unrest, which may or may not lead to an eruption. Should such an eruption occur, it is almost certain to be small, said Christopher Kilburn, a volcanologist at University College London who was not involved in the new research. But if Campi Flegrei has experienced multiple caldera-forming eruptions in the past, it could suggest that in the long term, the volcano has the capacity for more devastating explosions.

"It changes the perception of the risk of Campi Flegrei being active again," Kilburn told Live Science.

What the new paper can't say, however, is whether the Maddaloni/X-6 eruption came from Campi Flegrei itself or whether the magma erupted from fractures a few dozen miles north of the caldera. This wouldn't particularly matter to anyone standing in the eruption zone in the event of such a devastating event, Kilburn said. But it does matter to researchers monitoring the volcano, because it can help them focus on the signals that are most likely to presage a major eruption.

Researchers knew the volcano had laid down ash layers prior to the eruption 40,000 years ago. The difficulty in understanding these eruptions is that most of their traces were wiped away by that most recent major eruption. The rocks from the Maddaloni/X-6 eruption are now visible mostly in small outcrops in the Apennine, Kilburn said, or in boreholes drilled deep into the Earth.

Fernandez and her colleagues used these outcrops to make a model of what the 109,000-year-old eruption would have looked like. They found that it did come from the Campi Flegrei region and that it began with an explosive eruption of ash and rock that made the classic billowing volcanic cloud. Next came a period of enormous pyroclastic flows — avalanches of hot gas and rock that became a layer of rock called ignimbrite. This ignimbrite is 6.5 feet (2 meters) deep in places.

The eruption would have removed more than 36 cubic miles (150 cubic km) of magma from below the surface. That is not much smaller than the largest known eruption, which occurred 40,000 years ago, Fernandez and her colleagues reported.

In comparison, the last eruption at Campi Flegrei was in 1538 and spewed about 0.005 cubic miles (0.02 cubic km) of magma, Kilburn said.

The new study is "an exemplary piece of work," Kilburn said, and it points to the need to better understand the magma plumbing under the Campi Flegrei system. If the eruption 109,000 years ago came from Campi Flegrei itself, that suggests the caldera is capable of large, recurring eruptions, he said. If it came from nearby volcanic fractures, it suggests that those areas need to be better studied.

This doesn't mean a huge eruption is likely on human timescales, Kilburn stressed, but it could reveal more about the future of volcanic activity in the region over tens of thousands of years.

"We"ve got to start viewing the volcano as more than just Campi Flegrei," he said. "We"ve got to start thinking of the whole of the Campanian Plain as being a potential zone of eruption, even if very rarely."

Researchers identified the flying squirrel fossil among a cache of animal remains that were unearthed in Tennessee 25 years ago. The specimen belongs to an extinct genus called Miopetaurista, which are more commonly found in Asia, though there are two purported examples from Florida, according to a study published Feb. 21 in the Journal of Mammalian Evolution.

"It is amazing to imagine these giant flying squirrels gliding over rhinos and mastodons living in the forests of Tennessee 5 million years ago," study co-author Joshua Samuels, an associate professor of geosciences at East Tennessee State University, said in a statement.

The team believes that Miopetaurista moved into North America when the continent was connected to Asia via the Bering Land Bridge in the early Pliocene (5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago). Miopetaurista would have found warm forests in what is now Tennessee that were similar to those in Asia at the time, according to the study.

This Miopetaurista specimen was identified from a single tooth unearthed at the Gray Fossil Site in East Tennessee. Other fossils from this site reveal that the region was teaming with unusual wildlife when Miopetaurista was alive.

Related: Killer squirrels have developed taste for flesh — and voles are running for their lives

Researchers are still learning about the history of flying squirrels, which have a spotty fossil record. The earliest North American examples date back to around 36 million years ago. However, flying squirrels vanished from the fossil record around 9 million years ago, before seemingly reappearing with Miopetaurista in Florida around 4 million years ago, according to the study.

The Gray Fossil Site is up to a million years older than the two fossils found in Florida, so the latest discovery is potentially the oldest Miopetaurista fossil ever discovered in North America to date.

The Gray Fossil Site sinkhole formed and filled with water around 5 million years ago. Surrounded by a forest, the resulting pond provided a drinking source for many ancient species. Sediment and mud then slowly filled the pond, burying and preserving animals that died at the site, according to East Tennessee State University.

Miopetaurista weighed around 3.3 pounds (1.5 kilograms), much heavier than the flying squirrels inhabiting Tennessee today. For example, Tennessee's northern flying squirrel (Glaucomys sabrinus) weighs up to just 2.5 ounces (71 grams), according to the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency.

Miopetaurista thrived in what is now Tennessee until its warm ecosystems began cooling at the beginning of the Pleistocene around 2.6 million years ago. The Pleistocene brought ice ages, likely forcing Miopetaurista south to warmer regions such as Florida, according to the researchers.

"As the climate cooled over time, the Pleistocene Ice Ages led to the isolation of these giant flying squirrels in warmer refuges like Florida, and ultimately contributed to their extinction,” study co-author Montserrat Grau-Camats, a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Paleontology in Spain, said in the statement.

National parks are areas of land protected by the federal government and managed by the National Park Service (NPS). They are open to the general public, and figures show that in 2023, roughly 90 million people visited these parks.

The first national park in the U.S., which was also the first national park in the world, was established by an act of Congress in 1872. State parks and nature reserves existed before then, but the new national park was bigger and considered by the federal government to be one of America's crown jewels.

Over the next century, successive U.S. governments designated dozens of additional national parks. Many of these parks were created on confiscated Indigenous land, and there are calls today to hand it to the people who originally owned, lived and worked on it.

How many national parks can you name? You'll have 30 minutes to complete this quiz. Note that you don't need to write "national park" after each name.

Make sure you log in to add your name to the leaderboard — and if you need a hint, tap the yellow button.

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Walvis Bay is a port city on the Atlantic coast of Namibia that is home to an enormous sea salt production plant. The plant has been operating for more than 60 years thanks to the region's arid climate and coastal winds, which are ideal for evaporating seawater containing the salt.

The saltworks are located about 5 miles (8 kilometers) southwest of Walvis Bay city center. The plant covers an area of 12,350 acres (5,000 hectares), according to Walvis Bay Salt Holdings, making it roughly half as big as Disney World in Florida.

Salt production at Walvis Bay relies on Atlantic seawater that is pumped at a rate of 8,500 cubic feet (240 cubic meters) per minute into artificial ponds, according to the guided tour operator Desert, Dunes and Dust Tours. The plant is fed by the Benguela Current — a cold, northward flowing ocean current that forms the eastern limb of the South Atlantic subtropical gyre.

Evaporation via a combination of the sun's warmth and wind increases the salt content in the ponds from about 2.9% to 3.5%, which is still liveable for plankton, algae and small ocean critters. These creatures and microorganisms can turn the ponds so colorful, the plant looks like a tile mosaic from above.

Related: Before and after satellite images show lakes appearing across Sahara after deluge of rain soaks desert

Pumps transfer the brine resulting from this initial evaporation stage to concentration ponds, where the salt content rises to 25%. Another set of pumps then siphons this water into crystallization ponds that each span about 50 acres (20 hectares) in size, or about 38 football fields.

By the end of the crystallization stage, each pond contains a 4- to 6-inch-thick (10 to 15 centimeters) salt crust, which mechanical harvesters remove and dump into huge bins. A conveyor belt then takes these bins to a facility where the salt crystals are washed with a mixture of seawater and gypsum that dissolves impurities such as magnesium and potassium, while keeping the salt intact.

After washing, the salt is dried in huge piles outside. Around 240 tons (220 metric tons) of salt are washed and dried every hour at Walvis Bay, amounting to a total annual production of more than 1.1 million tons (1 million metric tons) of salt, according to Walvis Bay Salt Holdings.

The company exports chemical-grade salt used in industries like animal feed production, water treatment and pharmaceuticals to Nigeria, Cameroon, South Africa and Europe. It also exports table salt for human consumption to several countries in Africa, including South Africa, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Walvis Bay's saltworks are also a feeding ground for shrimp and larval fish, which in turn attracts birds. Together with the nearby Walvis Bay Lagoon and a bird sanctuary, the salt production plant provides coastal wetland habitat for birds like flamingos and pelicans, according to the website Birdingplaces.

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

The new study revealed an "amazing correlation" between Earth's tilt and ice sheet formation, said lead author Stephen Barker. Based on these findings, researchers estimated that the next ice age would be well underway in 11,000 years — were it not for human-driven global warming.

"The prediction is that the next ice age will begin within the next 10,000 years," Barker, a professor of Earth science at Cardiff University in the U.K., told Live Science. However, this result does not take into account our ballooning greenhouse gas emissions, which are heating the planet to the point of preventing ice ages, he said.

Ice ages, or glacial periods, are extremely cold stretches of time that occur roughly every 100,000 years, covering much of the planet with enormous ice sheets for thousands of years at a time. Glacial periods are separated by warmer interglacial periods, when ice sheets retreat toward the poles. Earth is currently in an interglacial period, with the last glacial period having peaked around 20,000 years ago.

Tilt and wobble

Scientists have previously suggested that Earth's position and angle relative to the sun affect ice sheet formation. In the early 1920s, Serbian scientist Milutin Milankovitch proposed that slight changes in Earth's axial tilt and the shape of Earth's orbit could trigger massive glacial events.

Researchers have been testing Milankovitch's theory for the past 100 years. Notably, a 1976 study found geological evidence showing that two of Earth's parameters — obliquity and precession, or changes in Earth's axial tilt and how the axis wobbles around itself, respectively — play a part in the waxing and waning of ice sheets. But the precise role of either parameter has remained unclear.

Related: Giant ice age landforms discovered deep beneath North Sea revealed in amazing detail

Now, Barker and his colleagues say they've finally untangled these parameters' effects.

Earth's axis is currently tilted at a 23.5-degree angle away from vertical as it rotates around the sun, affecting how much solar energy hits each of the poles, in particular. But the tilt of Earth's axis naturally gets bigger and smaller in a cycle that lasts about 41,000 years. The axis also wobbles around itself like an off-center spinning top, affecting how much solar energy reaches equatorial regions during the summer within time periods of about 21,000 years.

For the study, the researchers plotted known changes in obliquity and precession over the past 800,000 years. They also plotted the expansion and retreat of ice sheets during this period using existing data from microscopic shells, called forams, in ocean sediment cores. The relative abundance of certain types of oxygen in forams reveals how far ice sheets extended when the organisms were alive, Barker explained.

The results from combining these plots were a "fall off the chair moment," Barker said. "We found this amazing correlation [...] that says there's a direct relationship between the phasing of obliquity and precession, and then the resulting duration of how long it takes the ice sheets to decay," he said.

Put simply, ice sheet expansion from the poles toward the equator appears to be directly governed by obliquity. The retreat of ice sheets from the equator back to the poles, on the other hand, is more dependent on precession. The researchers revealed their findings in a study published Thursday (Feb. 27) in the journal Science.

The results are perhaps unsurprising, given that obliquity and precession affect how much sunlight reaches polar and equatorial regions, respectively, Barker said. "Depending on where you are on Earth, you'll find more influence from precession or obliquity," he said.

The plots were so neat that the scientists extrapolated the data and estimated when the next glacial period would occur if the climate was changing only according to natural cycles, Barker said. More research is needed to pin the timings down, but ice sheets would likely start expanding in around 10,000 to 11,000 years and reach their maximum extent within the following 80,000 to 90,000 years. They would then take another 10,000 years to retreat to the poles.

There is much debate around the timing of the next glaciation, but most experts agree that humans are disrupting these cycles through global warming. "If CO2 stays high, you won't get a new glaciation," Barker said.

That's not to say that cooking the planet is a good idea, Barker cautioned. "What we don't want is for people who want to emit more CO2 into the atmosphere to jump on this," he said.

Rather, the point of this study and future research is to build a picture of what the climate would do over the next 10,000 to 20,000 years without the impact of human activity, Barker said. The goal is then to provide a long-term estimate of humanity’s impact on the planet, he said.

Nuclear power plants generate 18% of electricity in the United States, according to the World Nuclear Association. While this energy source produces no carbon emissions, it does generate radioactive waste that can be environmentally hazardous and remains active for thousands of years.

Seeking to repurpose this waste, a research team from Ohio State University used high-density materials that emit light when absorbing radiation called scintillator crystals combined with solar cells to convert gamma radiation into electricity.

“Nuclear waste emits powerful gamma radiation, a high-energy form that can penetrate most materials,” Raymond Cao, lead author of the study published in the journal Optical Materials: X and a professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State, told Live Science in an email. “Our device employs a scintillator, a specialized material that absorbs these gamma rays and converts their energy into visible light — similar to how glow-in-the-dark objects function, but driven by radiation rather than sunlight. This light is then captured by a solar cell, like those found in solar panels, which transforms it into electrical power.”

The prototype battery, measuring just 4 cubic centimeters — about the size of a teaspoon of sugar — was tested at Ohio State’s Nuclear Reactor Laboratory using two radioactive sources: cesium-137 and cobalt-60. The battery produced 288 nanowatts of power when powered by cesium-137 and 1,500 nanowatts when using the more radioactive cobalt-60 isotope — enough to operate microelectronic systems such as microchips or emergency equipment.

Related: Why radioactive waste is being melted into glass

While this output is far below the kilowatts needed to power your kettle, the researchers believe this technology could be scaled up for applications at or beyond the watts level with the right power source.

Regardless, the new technology wouldn’t be used in homes — the system relies on high levels of ambient radiation to operate, so would need to be in situ at waste sites. For example, the researchers envision the battery being deployed in nuclear systems for space and deep-sea exploration, where extreme radiation levels render conventional power sources impractical.

“We do not produce or carry a radiation source; instead, this device is designed for locations where intense gamma radiation is already present,” Cao said. “The beauty of this approach is that shielding materials can be replaced with a scintillator, and the glowing light it produces can be harvested and converted into electricity.”

Before it’s rolled out, however, a few hurdles remain. According to Cao, the high levels of radiation gradually damage both the scintillator and the solar cell. “Further development is needed for more durable, radiation-resistant materials to ensure the system’s longevity,” he said.

If overcome, these long-lasting batteries could be deployed in high-radiation areas that are difficult to access, with little to no maintenance required, making them an attractive energy solution.

“The nuclear battery concept is very promising,” co-author Ibrahim Oksuz said in a statement. “There's still lots of room for improvement, but I believe in the future, this approach will carve an important space for itself in both the energy production and sensors industry.”

That's apparent as the second Trump administration "floods the zone" with efforts to dismantle science agencies and the data and websites they use to communicate with the public. The targets range from public health and demographics to climate science.

We are a research librarian and policy scholar who belong to a network called the Public Environmental Data Partners, a coalition of nonprofits, archivists and researchers who rely on federal data in our analysis, advocacy and litigation and are working to ensure that data remains available to the public.

In just the first three weeks of Trump's term, we saw agencies remove access to at least a dozen climate and environmental justice analysis tools. The new administration also scrubbed the phrase "climate change" from government websites, as well as terms like "resilience."

Here's why and how Public Environmental Data Partners and others are making sure that the climate science the public depends on is available forever.

Related: Facts don't convince people in political arguments. Here's what does.

Why government websites and data matter

The internet and the availability of data are necessary for innovation, research and daily life.

Climate scientists analyze NASA satellite observations and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather records to understand changes underway in the Earth system, what's causing them and how to protect the climates that economies were built on. Other researchers use these sources alongside Census Bureau data to understand who is most affected by climate change. And every day, people around the world log onto the Environmental Protection Agency's website to learn how to protect themselves from hazards — and to find out what the government is or isn't doing to help.

If the data and tools used to understand complex data are abruptly taken off the internet, the work of scientists, civil society organizations and government officials themselves can grind to a halt. The generation of scientific data and analysis by government scientists is also crucial. Many state governments run environmental protection and public health programs that depend on science and data collected by federal agencies.

Removing information from government websites also makes it harder for the public to effectively participate in key processes of democracy, including changes to regulations. When an agency proposes to repeal a rule, for example, it is required to solicit comments from the public, who often depend on government websites to find information relevant to the rule.

And when web resources are altered or taken offline, it breeds mistrust in both government and science. Government agencies have collected climate data, conducted complex analyses, provided funding and hosted data in a publicly accessible manner for years. People around the word understand climate change in large part because of U.S. federal data. Removing it deprives everyone of important information about their world.

Bye-bye data?

The first Trump administration removed discussions of climate change and climate policies widely across government websites. However, in our research with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative over those first four years, we didn't find evidence that datasets had been permanently deleted.

The second Trump administration seems different, with more rapid and pervasive removal of information.

In response, groups involved in Public Environmental Data Partners have been archiving climate datasets our community has prioritized, uploading copies to public repositories and cataloging where and how to find them if they go missing from government websites.

As of Feb. 13, 2025, we hadn't seen the destruction of climate science records. Many of these data collection programs, such as those at NOAA or EPA's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, are required by Congress. However, the administration had limited or eliminated access to a lot of data.

Maintaining tools for understanding climate change

We've seen a targeted effort to systematically remove tools like dashboards that summarize and visualize the social dimensions of climate change. For instance, the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool mapped low-income and other marginalized communities that are expected to experience severe climate changes, such as crop losses and wildfires. The mapping tool was taken offline shortly after Trump's first set of executive orders.

Most of the original data behind the mapping tool, like the wildfire risk predictions, is still available, but is now harder to find and access. But because the mapping tool was developed as an open-source project, we were able to recreate it.

Preserving websites for the future

In some cases, entire webpages are offline. For instance, the page for the 25-year-old Climate Change Center at the Department of Transportation doesn't exist anymore. The link just sends visitors back to the department's homepage.

Other pages have limited access. For instance, EPA hasn't yet removed its climate change pages, but it has removed "climate change" from its navigation menu, making it harder to find those pages.

Fortunately, our partners at the End of Term Web Archive have captured snapshots of millions of government webpages and made them accessible through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The group has done this after each administration since 2008.

If you're looking at a webpage and you think it should include a discussion of climate change, use the "changes" tool" in the Wayback Machine to check if the language has been altered over time, or navigate to the site's snapshots of the page before Trump's inauguration.

What you can do

You can also find archived climate and environmental justice datasets and tools on the Public Environmental Data Partners website. Other groups are archiving datasets linked in the Data.gov data portal and making them findable in other locations.

Individual researchers are also uploading datasets in searchable repositories like OSF, run by the Center for Open Science.

If you are worried that certain data currently still available might disappear, consult this checklist from MIT Libraries. It provides steps for how you can help safeguard federal data.

Narrowing the knowledge sphere

What's unclear is how far the administration will push its attempts to remove, block or hide climate data and science, and how successful it will be.

Already, a federal district court judge has ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's removal of access to public health resources that doctors rely on was harmful and arbitrary. These were put back online thanks to that ruling.

We worry that more data and information removals will narrow public understanding of climate change, leaving people, communities and economies unprepared and at greater risk. While data archiving efforts can stem the tide of removals to some extent, there is no replacement for the government research infrastructures that produce and share climate data.

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

In this stunning astronaut photo, a rare "sunglint" transforms the Mediterranean Sea’s surface into a swirling, silver mirror surrounding a pair of Greek islands — Milos (center) and Antimilos (left).

A sunglint occurs when sunlight reflects off a flat body of water directly toward an observer orbiting Earth, such as a satellite or astronaut. It is similar to how light reflects off the sea during sunrise or sunset. But instead of a bright-orange streak reflected off the waves, it looks like a massive, silvery patch that can cover several hundred square miles. From space, sunglints appear to move across the ocean as Earth rotates.

Wind-driven surface currents, deeper ocean currents, spinning gyres and other oceanographic phenomena cause the wavy lines and swirls that cut across the sea's silver surface in the image, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

Most of these features would normally be invisible from space. But because they scatter some of the sun's light, they become visible during a sunglint.

Related: See all the best images of Earth from space

One of the most striking oceanographic features in the photo is a gyre spinning like a giant whirlpool to the east (right) of Milos. Another noteworthy feature is the long, straight line in the bottom left of the picture, which is most likely the wake from a ship, according to the Earth Observatory.

However, the rarest phenomenon in the image is a set of parallel lines located just off the northwest coast (top left) of Antimilos. These lines, which are partly obscured by clouds, are "internal waves" — massive vertical waves that pass through the water beneath the surface, according to the Earth Observatory.

Unlike surface waves, which are mainly driven by ocean currents or strong winds, internal waves are the result of gravity waves (not to be confused with gravitational waves in space-time), which pass across the interface of two fluid mediums when gravity disrupts the equilibrium between them. In this case, the waves are rippling along the submerged border between two layers of water that have been stratified by temperature and salinity and disrupted by Earth's changing tides, according to a 2021 article in The Conversation.

While sunglints are visually stunning, they can pose problems for marine scientists who rely on color in satellite imagery to monitor the health of the ocean. As a result, researchers often have to digitally remove them from images, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

On the other hand, scientists can use sunglints to more accurately measure oil spills on the ocean's surface, because petroleum absorbs sunlight rather than reflecting it into space, according to NOAA.

Just 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) of further warming could be enough to trigger a collapse of the world's second-largest ice sheet, causing sea levels to rise by 23 feet (7 meters) and sowing havoc across global ecosystems.

Scientists have long observed the accelerating decline of Greenland's ice cover — with the sheet losing an estimated 33 million tons (30 million metric tons) of ice every hour. But researchers weren't sure exactly when the ice sheet could enter a terminal death spiral. Now, a new study published Jan. 9 in the journal The Cryosphere has revealed that, if the worst warming estimates come true, this irreversible tipping point could come by the turn of the century.

Freshwater reserves under threat

Greenland's ice sheet is one of only two permanent ice sheets on Earth, the other being the Antarctic ice sheet. It is nearly three times the size of Texas, covering roughly 656,000 square miles (1.7 million square kilometers), according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Colorado.

Related: Fossils from Greenland's icy heart reveal it was a green tundra covered in flowers less than 1 million years ago

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets make up more than 70% of Earth's freshwater reserves, according to the NSIDC. Both have been losing mass at an accelerated rate due to human-caused climate change, and the sheets have lost a combined 6.9 trillion tons (6.3 trillion metric tons) of ice since 1994, according to a 2021 study.

Yet despite these significant losses, the entirety of the sheet has yet to enter a state where irreversible collapse is inevitable, according to scientists, especially if drastic cuts to carbon emissions are made in time.

To estimate when a tipping point for Greenland's ice sheet could arrive, the researchers designed a climate model that simulated the future of the ice sheet's surface mass balance — meaning the difference between snow buildup and loss due to melting — in different warming conditions.

The model's results were chilling, finding that a tipping point for the sheet will be reached when roughly 230 gigatons (253.5 billion tons) of ice is lost in a single year — a 60% decrease from the ice sheet's pre-industrial equilibrium.

This scenario is tied to a global temperature increase of 6.12 F (3.4 C) above pre-industrial levels. The planet is currently hovering around 2.65 F (1.47 C) hotter in 2024 than in the late 19th century, but the most pessimistic projections suggest it could hit 3.4 C of warming by 2100 under current plans.

If the sheet were to melt completely, the accompanying sea level rises would cause devastation for the billions who live along the world's coasts, and and this rise along with warming temperatures would have serious implications for globally vital Atlantic ocean currents.

Greenland's trend of accelerated melting is also occurring in icy regions all over the world. Between 2000 and 2019, Earth's glaciers lost an average of 294 billion tons (266 billion metric tons) of mass per year, accounting for 21% of observed sea-level rise across that time period.

Another study published in 2021 estimated that Earth is losing enough ice every year to cover a frozen area the size of Lake Superior.

The potentially hazardous asteroid measures an estimated 180 feet (55 meters) across — about as wide as the leaning tower of Pisa is tall. At this size, 2024 YR4 is too small to end human civilization, but it could still wipe out a major city and unleash 500 times more energy than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

On Feb. 18, the odds of this so-called "city-killer" colliding with Earth in 2032 peaked at 1 in 32, or 3.1% — the highest impact probability NASA had ever recorded for a space object of this size. However, as of Friday (Feb. 21), the odds have plummeted to a mere 1 in 360, or 0.28%, based on new observations.

The latest shift in odds is arguably the most significant so far because it lowers YR4's official threat level, meaning there is now "no unusual level of danger" posed by the space rock, according to NASA.

Ancient Egyptian tomb discovery

Tomb of ancient Egyptian pharaoh is 1st to be discovered in 100 years

Archaeologists have uncovered the tomb of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh marking the first such finding since the discovery of King Tutankhamun in 1922. The tomb belonged to Thutmose II, who ruled Egypt roughly 3,500 years ago. However, unlike the burial of King Tut, the newfound tomb is mostly empty thanks to a flood that occurred shortly after the pharaoh's burial. It is possible that there is an as-yet-undiscovered second tomb where the majority of the chamber's contents was moved due to the flood.

Mummy quiz: Can you unwrap these ancient Egyptian mysteries?

Discover more archaeology news

—Lasers reveal 1,000-year-old Indigenous road near Chaco Canyon that aligns with the winter solstice

—Ancient Egyptian 'granary with scribes' diorama: A miniature workplace found buried in a tomb from the Middle Kingdom

—1,300-year-old royal flush toilet used by crown prince discovered at palace in Korea

Life's Little Mysteries

Can animals learn another species' 'language?'

We've all seen pictures of different animals appearing to have conversations — whether it's pet cats and dogs or different species of wild birds. But while research shows that animals can communicate within their own species, is it possible for them to learn another species' "language"?

It turns out that some animals have not only learned but can also use vocalizations from other species, which begs the question: What is going on inside their heads?

AI decoder reads human thoughts

AI 'brain decoder' can read a person's thoughts with just a quick brain scan and almost no training

Scientists have developed a new "brain decoder" algorithm that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to convert thoughts into text. Past iterations of the decoder have required participants to spend hours in an MRI machine while the algorithm was trained on their brains' responses. But now, the latest model can translate thoughts after just 70 minutes of training.

The researchers hope to use the technology to support people with aphasia, a brain disorder that affects a person's ability to communicate through speech.

Discover more technology news

—Quantum simulation breakthrough will lead to 'discoveries impossible in today's fastest supercomputers,' Google scientists claim

—AI-designed chips so weird that 'humans cannot really understand them' — but they perform better than anything we've created

—Breakthrough quantum chip that harnesses new state of matter could set us on the path to quantum supremacy

Also in science news this week

—NASA rover discovers liquid water 'ripples' carved into Mars rock — and it could rewrite the Red Planet's history

—Divers discover 500,000-year-old treasure trove of fossils in Florida sinkhole

—14-year-old known as 'the human calculator' breaks 6 math world records in 1 day

—Man nearly guaranteed to get early Alzheimer's is still disease-free in his 70s — how?

Science Spotlight

Invisible DNA lurks everywhere in the environment — and we're on the verge of decoding its secrets

Nature is littered with DNA. Now, thanks to state-of-the-art genetic sequencing technology and AI, we might be able to use it to learn more about the world around us.

Every living organism, from humans to sea moss, leaves a genetic fingerprint behind them everywhere they go. This is known as environmental DNA, or eDNA. The genetic data can reveal the locations of endangered species and characterize new food webs, among other things.

The problem is, scooping DNA out of the environment yields so much data that it can be difficult to figure out what is actually going on. That's where AI steps in.

Eventually, this information could provide a real-time view of how the planet operates and enable us to adapt to ecological changes more quickly.

Something for the weekend

If you're looking for something a little longer to read over the weekend, here are some of the best long reads, book excerpts and interviews published this week.

—US suffers record-breaking cold: What's going on with the polar vortex?

—1 million 'interstellar objects' — each larger than the Statue of Liberty — may lurk in the outer solar system

—Creepy 'ghost lanterns' in South Carolina are not what they seem, study suggests

Science in pictures

'Like a family photo of our solar system': The James Webb telescope is watching 2 alien planets being born before our eyes

How are planets born? This was one of the major questions the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) set out to explore. Now, the telescope has captured this exact process in unprecedented detail.

The photo shows a nearby star system called PDS 70. Two young planets can be seen inside a large disk of gas, dust, asteroids and other ingredients needed to build a planet.

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