The science fiction film trope of the passionate astronomer monitoring radio telescopes in search of transmissions from an extraterrestrial intelligence, then actually hearing one, seems cliché today after decades of overuse. Surprisingly, its origins actually aren’t that old. It can be traced to 1996’s "The Arrival," which happens to be marking its 30th anniversary today.

"The Arrival" was quietly released by Orion Pictures on May 31, 1996, one month before the comic book-like alien invasion spectacle of "Independence Day" landed, and a year before Robert Zemeckis's "Contact" hit the screens with its adaptation of Carl Sagan's first contact novel.

Directed by veteran Hollywood screenwriter David Twohy, "The Arrival" ranks as one of the most overlooked and underappreciated sci-fi movies of all time. The film's taut, intelligent script by Twohy and standout performances from Charlie Sheen, Ron Silver, and Lindsay Crouse elevate it to a bona fide classic that remains topical today with society’s fascination with UFO culture, Congress spilling UAP images, and Spielberg's "Disclosure Day" on the horizon.

Twohy loves the sci-fi genre and notoriously co-wrote Kevin Costner's epic flop, "Waterworld," but would redeem himself admirably with "The Arrival" before writing and directing "The Riddick Trilogy," which consists of "Pitch Black" (2000), "The Chronicles of Riddick" (2004), and "Riddick" (2013).

"The Arrival" begins as pretty standard sci-fi fare with a devout radio astronomer for SETI named Zane Zaminsky (Charlie Sheen) intercepting what might be an extraterrestrial radio signal from Wolf 336, some 14 light-years off. After recording the transmission, Zaminsky takes the evidence to Phil Gordian (Ron Silver), his smarmy boss at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, where his remarkable findings are rejected as a misinterpretation and the smoking gun tape is eventually destroyed.

When he’s dismissed from his SETI job, a huge cover-up ensues. Hit men are dispatched, homicide takes hold, and a smear campaign is hatched to discredit Zaminsky as faking signals to keep his SETI gig. Realizing he’s stumbled onto a global conspiracy, Zaminsky goes on the run after linking neighborhood satellite dishes to create an array relocating the alien signal.

This leads him to a radio station in Central Mexico, where the cosmic transmission is being masked by its own signal. Here, he connects with a climatologist named Ilana Green (Lindsay Crouse). She's traced one potential source of Earth’s rising temperature to a newly built power plant in the same area that turns out to be the secret base of shape-shifting E.T.s attempting to heat things up to a steamy climate more to their toasty taste.

Cinematography on "The Arrival" was done by Hiro Narita, who five years earlier had been the Director of Photography on 1991's "The Rocketeer" and "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country."

Narita brings a no-nonsense visual style to "The Arrival" that keeps it well grounded, even when we first see the otherworldly beings in their true form. He uses tight paranoid close-ups and vivid splashes of local color that take full advantage of the location shoot and its jungle landscapes once the plot switches from Southern California to South of the Border.

Those weird reptilian alien creatures were digitally created by Pacific Data Images PDI, an early visual effects and digital animation studio bought by DreamWorks SKG in 2000 and merged into DreamWorks Animation. Along with Pixar, they were pioneers of computer animation and contributed visual effects to more than 70 feature films, including "Antz" and "Shrek."

Sadly, "The Arrival" didn’t exactly catch box office fire and only collected a total of $14 million upon its domestic release, off a $25 million production budget. With bigger tentpole releases like "Independence Day" looming and its bombastic marketing flooding the airwaves, "The Arrival" never attracted mass audiences, but it is being rediscovered for its many merits.

Sheen pulls off a fantastic, convincing performance, displaying an unhinged intensity while rockin’ a sweet goatee and close-cropped hair. Fans have noted the likeness of "Half-Life's" hero, Dr. Gordon Freeman, being similar to Zaminsky, with the sci-fi horror protagonist sporting identical horn-rimmed eyeglasses and black ‘90s-style facial hair!

With its "The X-Files"-like mystery, captivating alien creature effects, invasion conspiracy theories, climate crisis warnings, and sincere pitch-perfect performances, David Twohy's ambitious film is a must-watch for both sci-fi diehards and pulse-pounding thriller enthusiasts that won’t disappoint.

Steven Spielberg's "Disclosure Day" is nearly upon us, but this is a vintage gem also reminding us we're not alone.

Prepare yourself by checking out "The Arrival" on its 30th anniversary with our highest recommendation! You can catch it on Amazon Prime Video if you're subscribed, but you can also buy or rent it on Amazon.

Europe is experiencing a serious heat wave at the moment, and we have the satellite data to prove it.

In new data from Europe's Sentinel-3 mission, we can see the scorching temperatures spreading across the continent.

What is it?

Severe weather alerts are in effect across Western Europe as millions cope with extreme temperatures. This new image uses data from the Sentinel-3 mission to show in vibrant color just how extreme and far-reaching this heat has been.

The Northern Hemisphere hasn't yet made it to summer, but temperatures in Southern Europe are already reaching up to 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius), and temperatures as far north as London are soaring above 95 degrees F (35 degrees C). Scorching heat has been recorded across the continent, in Hungary, Spain, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and a range of other countries.

To clarify just how unusual these temperatures are, temperatures in London for the month of May typically average between 50 and 66 degrees F (10 to 19 degrees C). And these middling temperatures are often coupled with rain.

Sentinel-3, which launched in 2018, is a European satellite that was developed as part of the Copernicus Earth-observation program, a project run by the European Commission with support from the European Space Agency. It's part of a series of Earth-observing satellites that look down at our planet to study changes across the seas and land.

Why is it incredible?

This latest heat wave is yet another reminder that climate change is having impacts around the planet.

“We know beyond a shadow of a doubt that heat wave events such as this have been made more likely and more severe due to climate change,” Peter Thorne, director of the ICARUS Climate Research Centre at Maynooth University in Ireland, told CNN. “But nevertheless many of the records being set, particularly in the U.K. and France, are mind-bogglingly crazy."

And while the term "space mission" usually conjures up images of astronauts on the moon or telescopes looking at far-off worlds, it also applies to a variety of projects like Sentinel-3, which look back at us here on Earth. Space is an incredible vantage point from which we can better understand how our planet is changing, and how it will continue to change.

When you think of air pollution from wildfires, you probably picture the thick plumes of smoke and ash that waft into the atmosphere during a blaze. And if you've lived in an area that’s been enveloped by these emissions, you know to stay inside or wear a mask when the light tints red and gets hazy.

But this thick cloud isn't the only component of wildfire smoke that carries a health risk. Now, new research based on satellite data helps quantify the impact of an "invisible" wildfire pollutant: ground-level ozone. It would appear the yearly human cost of this hidden consequence lies in the thousands.

Over the past few decades, climate change — primarily driven by human activities like burning coal — has turned wildfire smoke from an occasional, regional-specific concern to a major source of air pollution in the U.S. Since the 1990s, the area burned by wildfires in the country each year has roughly doubled. This means the amount of pollution released by these fires is on the rise, too.

Researchers have therefore been scrambling to quantify what risk all that smoke poses for human health. So far, however, most of these efforts have focused on fine particulate matter, or PM2.5. This is made up of tiny bits of ash, dust, carbon or other material less than 2.5 microns across that get released into the air from fires or other sources, like industrial emissions. Scientists know that high PM2.5 exposure is hazardous to human health — it can exacerbate conditions like heart disease and asthma, and even damage lung tissue directly.

But PM2.5 is not the only type of pollutant that fills the air during wildfires. The blazes generate a complex cocktail of compounds, including ground-level ozone, one of the main ingredients in smog. Like PM2.5, ozone can mess with people's lungs and cardiovascular systems. But the two pollutants have very different pathways to formation. While fine particulate matter is made of charred bits flung directly into the atmosphere by wildfires, ozone forms after the fact, when nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds interact with light.

"It's what we call a secondary pollutant," Minghao Qiu, an atmospheric scientist at Stony Brook University and co-author of the new study, told Space.com.

While the health impacts of PM2.5 from wildfire smoke are pretty well-documented, fire-generated ozone has been overlooked. That’s a problem, Qiu says, because "high ozone days don't necessarily coincide with high PM2.5 days."

To help determine the effects of smoke ozone on health, Qiu and his colleagues looked at nearly 20 years of satellite data, meteorological records and ozone measurements. Unlike fine particulate matter, ozone pollution is not visible to the naked eye, but scientists can detect it in the ultraviolet spectrum.

The researchers found that certain regions of the U.S. were more likely to accumulate ozone from wildfires than others; states like Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi and Florida were at particular risk. They also estimated that wildfire-derived ozone was responsible for 2,045 excess deaths, on average, per year across the U.S. — nearly 16% of all deaths attributed to wildfire smoke.

That number is also increasing. The estimated deaths from smoke ozone in 2006 alone was around 100; by 2023 it was close to 10,000.

This outcome appears to be undermining gains made from regulations around ozone emissions under the Clean Air Act. While overall ozone-related deaths in the U.S. have been trending downward for the last two decades, smoke ozone is starting to push those numbers back up.

This study is a good start for establishing risk analysis for ozone, says Qiu, but there's still a long way to go before researchers fully grasp the health impacts of wildfire smoke. For example, wildfires often release heavy metals like lead into the atmosphere, along with aromatic hydrocarbons and other pollutants. More research is needed to determine how these compounds affect mortality — and how they might compound with each other. "We don't fully understand the impacts on health when you are exposed to all those chemicals together," Qiu says. He and his colleagues are already working on follow-up studies.

But future work may be hamstrung by federal funding cuts. Much of the data used in the new study was originally collected by satellites and monitoring stations operated by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Under the current Trump administration, NASA faces a proposed 47% cut to its science budget in 2027. NOAA faces a 26% reduction, focused largely on eliminating climate monitoring programs. Without these crucial projects, it will be much harder to disentangle the health costs of wildfire pollution, let alone predict future fire risk.

The study was published on April 29 in the journal Science Advances.

A sweeping new satellite analysis shows that Antarctica has lost nearly 5,000 square miles (12,950 square kilometers) of grounded ice over the past three decades — an area roughly twice as big as Delaware — as warming ocean waters erode the continent's most vulnerable edges.

Led by scientists at the University of California, Irvine, the study traces how Antarctica's "grounding line" — the boundary where ice anchored to bedrock begins to float on the ocean — shifted between 1992 and 2025. Because that boundary marks where land-based ice begins contributing directly to sea level rise, its retreat signals ice-sheet instability and future ice mass loss.

"We've known it's critically important for 30 years, but this is the first time we've mapped it comprehensively across all of Antarctica over such a long time span," study lead author Eric Rignot of UC Irvine said in a statement.

Rignot and his colleagues analyzed data from a wide range of satellite missions operated by European, Canadian, Japanese, Italian, German and Argentine space agencies. Using radar instruments, the researchers tracked the vertical movements of floating ice shelves caused by ocean tides. Grounded ice remained fixed on bedrock, allowing them to pinpoint shifts in the grounding line over three decades with unprecedented precision.

The results show that about 77% of Antarctica's coastline experienced no detectable grounding-line migration since 1996, suggesting broad stability across much of the continent. But in vulnerable regions, particularly parts of West Antarctica, the Antarctic Peninsula and sections of East Antarctica, the study found "significant retreat."

The largest changes were detected along the Amundsen Sea coast of West Antarctica and in the Getz sector, where the grounding line in some places pulled back by as much as 26 miles (42 km) during the study period.

Retreat was most pronounced where deep underwater pathways funnel warm ocean water toward the base of glaciers, Rignot said. That warmer water melts ice from below, thinning floating shelves and weakening their ability to buttress the glaciers behind them.

"It's like the balloon that's not punctured everywhere, but where it is punctured, it's punctured deep," said Rignot.

The study also highlights a puzzling pattern along the northeast Antarctic Peninsula. In that area, several ice shelves collapsed before the study period and multiple glaciers have since retreated significantly, but researchers lack clear evidence that warm ocean water is driving the change.

"Something else is acting — it's still a question mark," Rignot said in the statement.

Beyond documenting what has already happened, the researchers say the new record provides a crucial real-world test for computer models used to project future sea level rise.

"Models have to demonstrate they can match this 30-year record to claim credibility for their projections," Rignot said in the statement. "That's the real value of this observational record: knowing that this grounding line migration has happened."

While much of Antarctica remains stable, Rignot cautioned that the current balance may not hold indefinitely.

"The flip side is that we should perhaps feel fortunate that all of Antarctica isn't reacting right now, because we would be in far more trouble," he said. "But that could be the next step."

This research is described in a paper published March 2 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

One of Europe's most valuable wetlands is shrinking — and satellite views suggest it could disappear completely within a single human lifetime.

Doñana National Park is a vast wetland system in southwestern Spain that supports one of the continent's richest ecosystems and plays a critical role in European and African bird migration and breeding. Using high-resolution data from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Sentinel-2 satellites, researchers found that the park's marshland is steadily losing surface water — a trend that, if left unchecked, could leave the marsh effectively dry in about 60 years, according to calculations from a recent water-resource monitoring study.

In the Sentinel-2 satellites' orbital view, Doñana's wetlands appear as shifting patches of dark blue and violet, signatures of shallow water spread across the park's floodplain. But when scientists examined how those patterns have changed over time, a clear decline emerged. Since 2005, the marsh has experienced a marked reduction in wet surface area, water volume and average depth, with losses accelerating after 2010 as regional temperatures rose and rainfall declined.

The new study, led by scientists at the University of Seville, combined satellite observations with machine-learning techniques to distinguish water from vegetation and dry soil. That approach allowed researchers not only to reconstruct how Doñana's marsh has evolved over time but also to project its future under different climate scenarios.

In the most likely outcome, continued warming and drying would push the marsh past a tipping point within a few decades. The researchers estimate this could happen in as few as 45 years or as much as 175 years, depending on future temperature and precipitation trends and whether or not humans intervene, according to a statement describing the study.

That said, climate change is only part of the story. Doñana also depends heavily on groundwater, which has been increasingly depleted by intensive agriculture, ineffective wastewater treatment and reuse, and illegal wells in surrounding areas. As aquifer levels drop, less water reaches the marsh, compounding the effects of drought and heat. Even wetter years that temporarily flood the landscape no longer appear sufficient to reverse the long-term downward trend seen from space, according to the scientists.

The implications extend far beyond southern Spain. Wetlands like Doñana act as natural buffers against climate extremes, storing water during wet periods and releasing it slowly during dry ones. They also serve as biological hubs, supporting species that migrate across continents. Losing such a system would ripple through ecosystems far beyond the park's boundaries.

"This technology not only identifies areas affected by drought or falling groundwater levels but also supports decision-making for ecosystem conservation," according to the statement. "As a scalable and automated approach, the algorithm can be applied to other natural environments facing similar challenges, thus contributing to more efficient and sustainable water management."

Researchers stress that Doñana's fate is not sealed. Stronger groundwater regulation, the closure of illegal wells and managing water more sustainably could slow or even partially reverse the marsh's decline. However, the satellite data offers an unambiguous warning: Even Europe's most iconic wetlands are fragile, and their disappearance is already underway.

The new findings were published Dec. 2 in the journal Geographies.

This article was originally published at Eos. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Americans set few everyday expectations for science, but they are fundamental: We expect the weather forecast to be right, we expect science and technology that allow weather hazards to be anticipated within reason, and we expect public services to protect our lives and livelihoods from such hazards—floods, fires, tornadoes, and hurricanes.

Well, the fulfillment of those expectations is in real doubt now that the Trump administration plans to dismantle the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a federally funded institution that underpins critical science that Americans rely on. Administration officials have argued that NCAR's work can simply be redistributed to other institutions without loss. But NCAR is not just another research center. It is purpose-built critical infrastructure designed to integrate observations, modeling, supercomputing, and applied research in ways that no single university, agency, or contractor can replicate on its own.

Although Congress rejected the administration's proposed funding cuts to NSF, the most recent spending bill did not include explicit language protecting NCAR as a unified entity.

As a result, the center remains vulnerable—not through outright defunding, but through fragmentation. The administration could try to cut interagency contracts that NCAR relies on to fund its staff, lay off staff, and relocate critical capabilities. NSF has already outlined plans to restructure NCAR, including moving its supercomputer to another site and transferring or divesting research aircraft it operates. These risks would hollow out the institution itself, breaking apart integrated teams, disrupting continuity in projects, and weakening the unique collaborative model at NCAR that accelerates scientific progress in weather, water, climate, and space weather.

This distinction matters. NCAR's value does not lie solely in the science it produces, but in how that science is organized, sustained, and shared across the nation.

The following are five of the many ways Americans will lose the benefits of scientific research if plans to dismantle NCAR unfold, and two ways we can work to prevent it.

1. Air travelers will lose protection

Every day, millions of Americans board airplanes expecting to arrive safely at their destinations. What most passengers never see is the science working behind the scenes to keep flights safe through better understanding of atmospheric conditions such as turbulence and microburst winds.

Turbulence alone is the leading cause of injuries on U.S. commercial flights and cargo operations, and NCAR research has played a central role in reducing that risk by improving how turbulence is detected, predicted, and avoided. NCAR scientists helped develop advanced forecasting techniques that allow pilots and dispatchers to reroute aircraft away from dangerous air currents before passengers are ever put at risk.

In addition to safety, NCAR research has reduced the $100 million financial strain severe turbulence costs the U.S. aviation system every year through aircraft damage, inspections, medical costs, and delays.

NCAR's contributions to aviation safety extend well beyond turbulence. In the 1970s and 1980s, NCAR scientists led research that identified and explained microbursts, a poorly understood weather phenomenon consisting of powerful downdraft winds produced by thunderstorms. Microbursts had caused multiple fatal airline crashes during takeoff and landing, and NCAR findings convinced the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and international aviation authorities to develop radar warning systems to detect these threats. Since these tools have been deployed, fatal U.S. airline crashes caused by microbursts have effectively been eliminated.

Dismantling NCAR and moving this work elsewhere would break the integrated system that makes aviation safety research effective in the first place. NCAR uniquely brings together long-term observational data, advanced modeling, specialized instrumentation, and direct operational partnerships with agencies like the FAA under one roof. Fragmenting that capacity across multiple institutions would disrupt decades of trusted, public service relationships with the aviation community, making it harder and slower to translate research into real-world protections for pilots and passengers. With millions of people in the sky every day, this is not a risk we should take.

2. Food security and the U.S. agricultural economy will be put at risk

Agriculture contributes hundreds of billions of dollars annually to the U.S. economy, and food security remains a national priority, making NCAR's research crucial to this weather-sensitive sector. Drought, heat waves, and floods are recurring stresses that affect what crops farmers can grow, as well as food prices for consumers.

NCAR research is directly relevant to food security. For example, NCAR scientists are working in conjunction with universities in Kansas and Nebraska and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop CropSmart, a next-generation system that aggregates weather forecasts, crop data, soil conditions, and other inputs into actionable, decision-ready information for farmers, agribusinesses, and agricultural officials. Early projections from CropSmart suggest that if advanced decision support systems like this were adopted on even half of irrigated farms in a state like Nebraska, farmers could save up to 1 billion cubic meters of water and $100 million in irrigation energy costs annually while also cutting about a million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year.

If NCAR is broken up, we lose this economic opportunity and the myriad ways it supports U.S. agriculture. NCAR's long-standing collaborations, integrated modeling and computing capacity, and role as a trusted public service institution are what allow farmers to rely on consistent, decision-ready information year after year.

All the agricultural tools housed, supported, or innovated by NCAR would be put at risk, leaving farmers with fewer early warnings, less reliable guidance, and greater exposure to weather extremes. These losses would translate to the food on our tables having a higher price tag, which inevitably increases food insecurity, already a significant problem in the United States.

3. U.S. national security and military readiness will be weakened

The U.S. military depends on weather and climate intelligence to operate safely, effectively, and strategically. From flight operations and naval deployments to training exercises and base infrastructure, weather conditions shape nearly every aspect of defense readiness. When forecasts are wrong or incomplete, missions can be delayed, equipment can be damaged, and personnel and our national defense are put at risk.

NCAR's research and operational tools provide the environmental intelligence that defense planners, operators, and test authorities rely on to keep us safe. Accurate, NCAR-enhanced forecasts have saved the U.S. Army millions of dollars by reducing weather-related test cancellations and avoiding needless mobilization costs. NCAR weather forecasting tools have been used for defense-related purposes, including anti-terrorism support at the Olympic games, protection of the Pentagon, support for firefighters, and analysis of exposure of our military personnel to toxins.

The strategic value of this work is reflected in the breadth of defense agencies that rely on NCAR today. NCAR maintains active partnerships and contracts with the Air Force, the Army Corps of Engineers, the National Ground Intelligence Center, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and the Army Test and Evaluation Command. These relationships exist for a simple reason: Accurate environmental intelligence reduces risk, lowers costs, and strengthens national security.

Dismantling NCAR is a national security threat. Defense agencies rely on specialized, mission-critical environmental products and expertise that are developed, maintained, and refined through streamlined, long-standing relationships with NCAR scientists. These capabilities cannot be replaced quickly without disruption, and even short gaps in trusted weather and environmental intelligence would increase operational risk for current and future missions. Protecting NCAR is an investment in military readiness, operational efficiency, and the safety of those who serve.

4. Americans in disaster-prone areas will have less time to prepare for, and evacuate from, extreme weather

Since 1980, weather hazards have cost the United States thousands of lives and more than $3.1 trillion. In 2025 alone, disasters cost nearly 300 lives and $115 billion in damages to homes and businesses. And these weather hazards are expected to worsen because of our changing climate.

A 2010 study from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that public weather forecasts and warnings deliver roughly $31.5 billion in annual economic benefits in the United States. These gains in preparedness and economic benefit would not have been possible without sustained scientific research from NCAR.

Hurricane forecasting provides a clear example of how NCAR research has secured the safety and mitigated the economic losses of residents and businesses. Since 1980, hurricanes have caused nearly $3 trillion in damages in the United States.

For decades, NCAR scientists have worked to develop and refine instruments and methods to collect real-time hurricane observations and improve our understanding of storm behavior. By the 1980s, data and modeling advances emerging from NCAR research were being used operationally by NOAA, contributing to a roughly 20%–30% improvement in the accuracy of hurricane track forecasts compared to earlier decades.

NCAR continues to enhance forecasting capabilities for hurricanes, as well as their associated flood risks, through the center's sophisticated flood risk model. Today, the model is used operationally by the National Weather Service in more than 3,800 locations serving 3 million people.

If NCAR's role in advancing forecast science is weakened by dismantling it, these gains in disaster preparedness will be put in jeopardy. Forecast improvements do not happen automatically; they require sustained research, coordination, and testing. If NCAR’s research capabilities to develop and improve weather forecasting disappear, the United States will face a major public safety risk.

5. Americans lose a unique source of national pride

NCAR was never designed to serve a select few. It was built with public investment to serve the nation as a whole. From its founding, NCAR embraced the idea that understanding the Earth system—its atmosphere, oceans, land, and ice—requires collaboration across institutions, disciplines, and generations, not isolated efforts working in parallel.

That collaborative model is embedded in how NCAR operates. It is stewarded by a consortium of more than 120 colleges and universities across the United States, representing a wide range of regions, institutional types, and scientific strengths. This structure allows knowledge, tools, and expertise to flow across the country, connecting large research universities with smaller institutions, federal agencies with academic scientists, and fundamental research with real-world applications for the public and private sectors. The result is a shared national capability that no single institution could sustain on its own.

There is something deeply American in that collaborative vision, a belief that publicly funded science should be openly shared, collectively advanced, and used to strengthen the common good. NCAR represents what is possible when a nation chooses to invest in science as a public good.

For more than 6 decades, NCAR has shown that open, collaborative science can save lives, support economic resilience and national defense, and expand opportunity across generations. Preserving and celebrating NCAR are choosing a future where shared knowledge, innovation, and public-serving science continue to thrive.

What we must do now

This moment demands more than concern—it requires action.

First, NSF is requesting feedback regarding its intent to restructure NCAR. Feedback "will be used to inform NSF's future actions with respect to the components of NCAR and to ensure the products, services, and tools provided in the future align with the needs and expectations of stakeholders to the extent practicable."

Respond, and inform NSF about the value and benefits of all of NCAR, not only its constituent parts. Readers can submit comments through 13 March.

Second, Congress ultimately holds the authority to fund and protect NCAR, and lawmakers need to hear clearly that dismantling it would put the health, safety, and financial stability of Americans at risk. By October 2026, Congress will address the funding of NSF for next year; we must actively and consistently reach out to our congressional representatives now and throughout the year.

Readers can contact their members of Congress through easy-to-use resources provided by AGU and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Our planet has experienced dramatic climate shifts throughout its history, oscillating between freezing "icehouse" periods and warm "greenhouse" states.

Scientists have long linked these climate changes to fluctuations in atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, new research reveals the source of this carbon – and the driving forces behind it – are far more complex than previously thought.

In fact, the way tectonic plates move about Earth's surface plays a major, previously underappreciated role in climate. Carbon doesn't just emerge where tectonic plates meet. The places where tectonic plates pull away from each other are significant too.

Our new study, published in the journal Communications, Earth and Environment sheds light on how exactly Earth's plate tectonics have helped to shape global climate over the past 540 million years.

Peering deep within the carbon cycle

At the boundaries where Earth's tectonic plates converge, we get chains of volcanoes known as volcanic arcs. Melting associated with these volcanoes unlocks carbon that’s been trapped inside rocks for thousands of years, bringing it to Earth's surface.

Historically, it's been thought these volcanic arcs were the primary culprits of injecting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Our findings challenge that view. Instead, we suggest that mid-ocean ridges and continental rifts – locations where the tectonic plates spread apart – have played a much more significant role in driving Earth's carbon cycles throughout geological time.

This is because the world's oceans sequester vast quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They store most of it within carbon-rich rocks on the seafloor. Over thousands of years, this process can produce hundreds of meters of carbon-rich sediment at the bottom of the ocean.

As these rocks then move about the Earth driven by tectonic plates, they may eventually intersect subduction zones – places where tectonic plates converge. This releases their carbon dioxide cargo back into the atmosphere.

This is known as the "deep carbon cycle". To track the flow of carbon between Earth's molten interior, oceanic plates and the atmosphere, we can use computer models of how the tectonic plates have migrated through geological time.

What we discovered

Using computer models to reconstruct how Earth moves carbon stored on tectonic plates, we were able to predict major greenhouse and icehouse climates over the last 540 million years.

During greenhouse periods – when Earth was warmer – more carbon was released than trapped within carbon-carrying rocks. In contrast, during icehouse climates, the carbon sequestration into Earth's oceans dominated, lowering atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and triggering cooling.

One of the key takeaways from our study is the critical role of the deep-sea sediments in regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide. As Earth's tectonic plates slowly move, they carry carbon-rich sediments, which are eventually returned into Earth’s interior through a process known as subduction.

We show that this process is a major factor in determining whether Earth is in a greenhouse or icehouse state.

A shift in understanding the role of volcanic arcs

Historically, the carbon emitted from volcanic arcs has been considered one of the largest sources of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

However, this process only became dominant in the last 120 million years thanks to planktic calcifiers. These little ocean critters belong to a family of phytoplankton whose main talent lies in converting dissolved carbon into calcite. They are responsible for sequestering vast amounts of atmospheric carbon into carbon-rich sediment deposited on the seafloor.

Planktic calcifiers only evolved about 200 million years ago, and spread through the world’s oceans about 150 million years ago. So, the high proportion of carbon spewed into the atmosphere along volcanic arcs in the past 120 million years is mostly due to the carbon-rich sediments these creatures created.

Before this, we found that carbon emissions from mid-ocean ridges and continental rifts – regions where tectonic plates diverge – actually contributed more significantly to atmospheric carbon dioxide.

A new perspective for the future

Our findings offer a new perspective on how Earth's tectonic processes have shaped, and will continue to shape, our climate.

These results suggest Earth's climate is not just driven by atmospheric carbon. Instead, the climate is influenced by the intricate balance between carbon emissions from Earth's surface and how they get trapped in sediments on the seafloor.

This study also provides crucial insights for future climate models, especially in the context of current concerns over rising carbon dioxide levels.

We now know that Earth's natural carbon cycle, influenced by the shifting tectonic plates beneath our feet, plays a vital role in regulating the planet’s climate.

Understanding this deep time perspective can help us better predict future climate scenarios and the ongoing effects of human activity.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

A severe winter storm that brought crippling freezing rain, sleet and snow to a large part of the U.S. in late January 2026 left a mess in states from New Mexico to New England. Hundreds of thousands of people lost power across the South as ice pulled down tree branches and power lines, more than a foot of snow fell in parts of the Midwest and Northeast, and many states faced bitter cold that was expected to linger for days.

The sudden blast may have come as a shock to many Americans after a mostly mild start to winter, but that warmth may have partly contributed to the ferocity of the storm.

As atmospheric and climate scientists, we conduct research that aims to improve understanding of extreme weather, including what makes it more or less likely to occur and how climate change might or might not play a role.

To understand what Americans are experiencing with this winter blast, we need to look more than 20 miles above the surface of Earth, to the stratospheric polar vortex.

What creates a severe winter storm like this?

Multiple weather factors have to come together to produce such a large and severe storm.

Winter storms typically develop where there are sharp temperature contrasts near the surface and a southward dip in the jet stream, the narrow band of fast-moving air that steers weather systems. If there is a substantial source of moisture, the storms can produce heavy rain or snow.

In late January, a strong Arctic air mass from the north was creating the temperature contrast with warmer air from the south. Multiple disturbances within the jet stream were acting together to create favorable conditions for precipitation, and the storm system was able to pull moisture from the very warm Gulf of Mexico.

Where does the polar vortex come in?

The fastest winds of the jet stream occur just below the top of the troposphere, which is the lowest level of the atmosphere and ends about seven miles above Earth's surface. Weather systems are capped at the top of the troposphere, because the atmosphere above it becomes very stable.

The stratosphere is the next layer up, from about seven miles to about 30 miles. While the stratosphere extends high above weather systems, it can still interact with them through atmospheric waves that move up and down in the atmosphere. These waves are similar to the waves in the jet stream that cause it to dip southward, but they move vertically instead of horizontally.

You've probably heard the term "polar vortex" used when an area of cold Arctic air moves far enough southward to influence the United States. That term describes air circulating around the pole, but it can refer to two different circulations, one in the troposphere and one in the stratosphere.

The Northern Hemisphere stratospheric polar vortex is a belt of fast-moving air circulating around the North Pole. It is like a second jet stream, high above the one you may be familiar with from weather graphics, and usually less wavy and closer to the pole.

Sometimes the stratospheric polar vortex can stretch southward over the United States. When that happens, it creates ideal conditions for the up-and-down movement of waves that connect the stratosphere with severe winter weather at the surface.

The forecast for the January storm showed a close overlap between the southward stretch of the stratospheric polar vortex and the jet stream over the U.S., indicating perfect conditions for cold and snow.

The biggest swings in the jet stream are associated with the most energy. Under the right conditions, that energy can bounce off the polar vortex back down into the troposphere, exaggerating the north-south swings of the jet stream across North America and making severe winter weather more likely.

This is what was happening in late January 2026 in the central and eastern U.S.

If the climate is warming, why are we still getting severe winter storms?

Earth is unequivocally warming as human activities release greenhouse gas emissions that trap heat in the atmosphere, and snow amounts are decreasing overall. But that does not mean severe winter weather will never happen again.

Some research suggests that even in a warming environment, cold events, while occurring less frequently, may still remain relatively severe in some locations.

One factor may be increasing disruptions to the stratospheric polar vortex, which appear to be linked to the rapid warming of the Arctic with climate change.

Additionally, a warmer ocean leads to more evaporation, and because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, that means more moisture is available for storms. The process of moisture condensing into rain or snow produces energy for storms as well. However, warming can also reduce the strength of storms by reducing temperature contrasts.

The opposing effects make it complicated to assess the potential change to average storm strength. However, intense events do not necessarily change in the same way as average events. On balance, it appears that the most intense winter storms may be becoming more intense.

A warmer environment also increases the likelihood that precipitation that would have fallen as snow in previous winters may now be more likely to fall as sleet and freezing rain.

There are still many questions

Scientists are constantly improving the ability to predict and respond to these severe weather events, but there are many questions still to answer.

Much of the data and research in the field relies on a foundation of work by federal employees, including government labs like the National Center for Atmospheric Research, known as NCAR, which has been targeted by the Trump administration for funding cuts. These scientists help develop the crucial models, measuring instruments and data that scientists and forecasters everywhere depend on.

One of the least-mapped planetary surfaces in our solar system is closer to home than you might expect: the continent of Antarctica.

While Antarctica's icy surface is fairly well-studied, its subglacial bedrock landscape — located up to 3 miles (4.8 km) beneath the ice — is more difficult to discern. Current methods of mapping require expensive ground-based and airborne surveys, and such activities are few and far between.

To create the most detailed map of Antarctica's subglacial topography yet, a team of researchers led by Helen Ockenden, of the University of Edinburgh and the Institut des Geosciences de l'Environnement in France, applied a modeling technique known as Ice Flow Perturbation Analysis (IFPA). IFPA uses detailed satellite observations of the ice surface and the physics of ice flow to infer the topography that exists below the ice.

"Our IFPA map of Antarctica’s subglacial landscape reveals that an enormous level of detail about the subglacial topography of Antarctica can be inverted from satellite observations of the ice surface, especially when combined with ice thickness observations from geophysical surveys," wrote the team in a new paper on their research.

In creating the map, the researchers discovered previously unknown or poorly resolved geologic features, from steep-sided channels possibly linked to mountain drainage systems to deep valleys reminiscent of U-shaped glacial valleys elsewhere on Earth. These features might provide insight to an ancient, pre-glacial Antarctica.

Maps like these are key to understanding the movement of the ice above across the continent, which ultimately allows researchers to predict how Antarctic ice might contribute to global sea-level rise.

But while this new IFPA map reveals unprecedented details about Antarctica's hidden topography, there is still room for greater precision. The reconstruction resolves features at the mesoscale — about 1.2 to 18.6 miles (2 to 30 km) — meaning that smaller landforms remain beyond its reach.

"Our landscape classification and topographic map therefore serve as important guides toward more focused studies of Antarctica's subglacial landscape, informing where future detailed geophysical surveys should be targeted, as well as the extents and resolutions (e.g., flight-track spacing) required to capture the fine details required for ice flow modeling," the team wrote.

And there's no better time than the present to prepare those future surveys. "The upcoming International Polar Year 2031-2033 presents a timely opportunity for international efforts to integrate expansive observation and modeling approaches to better understand ice sheet and bedrock properties, guided by methods similar to that of Ockenden et al," Duncan Young, of the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, wrote in a "Perspective" piece accompanying the new study.

The team's research was published in the journal Science on Jan. 15.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

The summer of 2025 brought unprecedented flash flooding across the U.S., with the central and eastern regions hit particularly hard. These storms claimed hundreds of lives across Texas, Kentucky and several other states and caused widespread destruction.

At the same time, every hurricane that formed, including the three powerful Category 5 storms, steered clear of the U.S. mainland.

Both scenarios were unusual – and they were largely directed by the polar jet stream.

What is a jet stream?

Jet streams are narrow bands of high-speed winds in the upper troposphere, around four to eight miles (seven to 13 kilometers) above the surface of the Earth, flowing west to east around the entire planet. They form where strong temperature contrasts exist.

Each hemisphere hosts two primary jet streams:

The polar jet stream is typically found near 50 to 60 degrees latitude, across Canada in the Northern Hemisphere, where cold polar air meets warmer midlatitude air. It plays a major role in modulating weather systems in the midlatitudes, including the continental U.S. With winds up to 200 mph, it's also the usual steering force that brings those bitter cold storms down from Canada.

The subtropical jet stream is typically closer to 30 degrees latitude, which in the Northern Hemisphere crosses Florida. It follows the boundary between tropical air masses and subtropical air masses. It’s generally the weaker and steadier of the two jet streams.

These jet streams act like atmospheric conveyor belts, steering storm systems across continents.

Stronger (faster) jet streams can intensify storm systems, whereas weaker (slower) jet streams can stall storm systems, leading to prolonged rainfall and flooding.

2025's intense summer of flooding

Most summers, the polar jet stream retreats northward into Canada and weakens considerably, leaving the continental U.S. with calmer weather. When rainstorms pop up, they’re typically caused by localized convection due to uneven heating of the land – picture afternoon pop-up thunderstorms.

During the summer of 2025, however, the polar jet stream shifted unusually far south and steered larger storm systems into the midlatitudes of the U.S. At the same time, the jet stream weakened, with two critical consequences.

First, instead of moving storms quickly eastward, the sluggish jet stream stalled storm systems in place, causing prolonged downpours and flash flooding.

Second, a weak jet stream tends to meander more dramatically. Its broad north-south swings in summer 2025 funneled humid air from the Gulf of Mexico deep into the interior, supplying storm systems with abundant moisture and intensifying rainfall.

This moisture surge was amplified by unusually warm conditions over the Atlantic and Gulf regions. A warmer ocean evaporates more water, and warmer air holds a greater amount of moisture. As a result, extraordinary levels of atmospheric moisture were directed into storm systems, fueling stronger convection and heavier precipitation.

Finally, the wavy jet stream became locked in place by persistent high-pressure systems, anchoring storm tracks over the same regions. This led to repeated episodes of heavy rainfall and catastrophic flooding across much of the continental U.S. The same behavior can leave other regions facing days of unrelenting heat waves.

The jet stream buffered US in hurricane season

The jet stream also played a role in the 2025 hurricane season.

Given its west-to-east wind direction, the southward dip of the jet stream – along with a weak high pressure system over the Atlantic – helped steer all five hurricanes away from the U.S. mainland.

Most of the year's 13 tropical storms and hurricanes veered off into the Atlantic before even reaching the Caribbean.

Climate change plays a role in these shifts

So, how does climate change influence the jet stream?

The strength of jet streams is controlled by the temperature contrast between the equatorial and polar regions.

A higher temperature contrast leads to stronger jet streams. As the planet warms, the Arctic is heating up at more than twice the global average rate, and that is reducing the equator-to-pole temperature difference. As that temperature gradient weakens, jet streams lose their strength and become more prone to stalling.

This increases the risk of persistent extreme rainfall events.

Weaker jet streams also meander more, producing larger waves and more erratic behavior. This increases the likelihood of unusual shifts, such as the southward swing of the jet stream in the summer of 2025.

A recent study found that amplified planetary waves in the jet streams, which can cause weather systems to stay in place for days or weeks, are occurring three times more frequently than in the 1950s.

What's ahead?

As the global climate continues to warm, extreme weather events driven by erratic behavior of jet streams are expected to become more common. Combined with additional moisture that warmer oceans and air masses supply, these events will intensify, producing storms that are more frequent and more destructive to societies and ecosystems.

In the short term, the polar jet stream will be shaping the winter ahead. It is most powerful in winter, when it dips southward into the central and even southern U.S., driving frequent storm systems, blizzards and cold air outbreaks.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

The Arctic is transforming faster and with more far-reaching consequences than scientists expected just 20 years ago, when the first Arctic Report Card assessed the state of Earth's far northern environment.

The snow season is dramatically shorter today, sea ice is thinning and melting earlier, and wildfire seasons are getting worse. Increasing ocean heat is reshaping ecosystems as non-Arctic marine species move northward. Thawing permafrost is releasing iron and other minerals into rivers, which degrades drinking water. And extreme storms fueled by warming seas are putting communities at risk.

The past water year, October 2024 through September 2025, brought the highest Arctic air temperatures since records began 125 years ago, including the warmest autumn ever measured and a winter and a summer that were among the warmest on record. Overall, the Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the Earth as a whole.

For the 20th Arctic Report Card, we worked with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an international team of scientists and Indigenous partners from across the Arctic to track environmental changes in the North – from air and ocean temperatures to sea ice, snow, glaciers and ecosystems – and the impacts on communities.

Together, these vital signs reveal a striking and interconnected transformation underway that’s amplifying risks for people who live there.

A wetter Arctic with more extreme precipitation

Arctic warming is intensifying the region's water cycle.

A warmer atmosphere increases evaporation, precipitation and meltwater from snow and ice, adding and moving more water through the climate system. That leads to more extreme rainstorms and snowstorms, changing river flows and altering ecosystems.

The Arctic region saw record-high precipitation for the entire 2025 water year and for spring, with the other seasons each among the top-five wettest since at least 1950. Extreme weather – particularly atmospheric rivers, which are long narrow "rivers in the sky" that transport large amounts of water vapor – played an outsized role.

These wetter conditions are reshaping snow cover across the region.

Snow and ice losses accelerate warming, hazards

Snow blankets the Arctic throughout much of the year, but that snow cover isn’t lasting as long. In 2025, snowpack was above average in the cold winter months, yet rapid spring melting left the area covered by snow far smaller than normal by June, continuing a six-decade decline. June snow cover in recent years has been half of what it was in the 1960s.

Losing late spring snow cover means losing a bright, reflective surface that helps keep the Arctic cool, allowing the land instead to be directly warmed by the sun, which raises the temperature.

Sea ice tells a similar story. The year's maximum sea ice coverage, reached in March, was the lowest in the 47-year satellite record. The minimum sea ice coverage, in September, was the 10th lowest.

Since the 1980s, the summer sea ice extent has shrunk by about 50%, while the area covered by the oldest, thickest sea ice – ice that has existed for longer than four years – has declined by more than 95%.

The thinner sea ice cover is more influenced by winds and currents, and less resilient against warming waters. This means greater variability in sea ice conditions, causing new risks for people living and working in the Arctic.

The Greenland Ice Sheet continued to lose mass in 2025, as it has every year since the late 1990s. As the ice sheet melts and calves more icebergs into the surrounding seas, it adds to global sea-level rise.

Mountain glaciers are also losing ice at an extraordinary rate – the annual rate of glacier ice loss across the Arctic has tripled since the 1990s.

This poses immediate local hazards. Glacial lake outburst floods – when water that is dammed up by a glacier is suddenly released – are becoming more frequent. In Juneau, Alaska, recent outburst floods from Mendenhall Glacier have inundated homes and displaced residents with record-setting levels of floodwater.

Glacier retreat can also contribute to catastrophic landslide impacts. Following the retreat of South Sawyer Glacier, a landslide in southeast Alaska's Tracy Arm in August 2025 generated a tsunami that swept across the narrow fjord and ran nearly 1,600 feet (nearly 490 meters) up the other side. Fortunately, the fjord was empty of the cruise ships that regularly visit.

Record-warm oceans drive storms, ecosystem shifts

Arctic Ocean surface waters are steadily warming, with August 2025 temperatures among the highest ever measured. In some Atlantic-sector regions, sea surface temperatures were as much as 13 degrees Fahrenheit (7.2 Celsius) above the 1991-2020 average. Some parts of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas were cooler than normal.

Warm water in the Bering Sea set the stage for one of the year's most devastating events: Ex-Typhoon Halong, which fed on unusually warm ocean temperatures before slamming into western Alaska with hurricane-force winds and catastrophic flooding. Some villages, including Kipnuk and Kwigillingok, were heavily damaged.

As seas warm, powerful Pacific cyclones, which draw energy from warm water, are reaching higher latitudes and maintaining strength longer. Alaska's Arctic has seen four ex-typhoons since 1970, and three of them arrived in the past four years.

The Arctic is also seeing warmer, saltier Atlantic Ocean water intrude northward into the Arctic Ocean. This process, known as Atlantification, weakens the natural layering of water that once shielded sea ice from deeper ocean heat. It is already increasing sea ice loss and reshaping habitat for marine life, such as by changing the timing of phytoplankton production, which provides the base of the ocean food web, and increasing the likelihood of harmful algal blooms.

From ocean "borealization" to tundra greening

Warming seas and declining sea ice are enabling southern, or boreal, marine species to move northward. In the northern Bering and Chukchi seas, Arctic species have declined sharply – by two-thirds and one-half, respectively – while the populations of boreal species expand.

On land, a similar "borealization" is underway. Satellite data shows that tundra vegetation productivity – known as tundra greenness – hit its third-highest level in the 26-year record in 2025, part of a trend driven by longer growing seasons and warmer temperatures. Yet greening is not universal – browning events caused by wildfires and extreme weather are also increasing.

Summer 2025 marked the fourth consecutive year with above-median wildfire area across northern North America. Nearly 1,600 square miles (over 4,000 square kilometers) burned in Alaska and over 5,000 square miles (over 13,600 square kilometers) burned in Canada's Northwest Territories.

Permafrost thaw is turning rivers orange

As permafrost – the frozen ground that underlies much of the Arctic – continues its long-term warming and thaw, one emerging consequence is the spread of rusting rivers.

As thawing soils release iron and other minerals, more than 200 watersheds across Arctic Alaska now show orange discoloration. These waters exhibit higher acidity and elevated levels of toxic metals, which can contaminate fish habitat and drinking water and impact subsistence livelihoods.

In Kobuk Valley National Park in Alaska, a tributary to the Akillik River lost all its juvenile Dolly Varden and slimy sculpin fish after an abrupt increase in stream acidity when the stream turned orange.

Arctic communities lead new monitoring efforts

The rapid pace of change underscores the need for strong Arctic monitoring systems. Yet many government-funded observing networks face funding shortfalls and other vulnerabilities.

At the same time, Indigenous communities are leading new efforts.

The Arctic Report Card details how the people of St. Paul Island, in the Bering Sea, have spent over 20 years building and operating their own observation system, drawing on research partnerships with outside scientists while retaining control over monitoring, data and sharing of results. The Indigenous Sentinels Network tracks environmental conditions ranging from mercury in traditional foods to coastal erosion and fish habitat and is building local climate resilience in one of the most rapidly changing environments on the planet.

The Arctic is facing threats from more than the changing climate; it's also a region where concerns of ecosystem health and pollutants come sharply into view. In this sense, the Arctic provides a vantage point for addressing the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.

The next 20 years will continue to reshape the Arctic, with changes felt by communities and economies across the planet.

When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, carbon dioxide gets the lion's share of global attention.

But methane is the second-largest contributor to human-caused global warming. A high proportion of methane emissions comes from the energy sector, often from concentrated "point sources" such as flare stacks, coal vents and open-pit mines. To help reduce those emissions, we must first identify the major culprits — and new satellite data is helping us do just that.

Using high-resolution observations from the GHGSat satellite constellation, researchers have produced a global, facility-level view of methane emissions, identifying thousands of individual oil, gas and coal sites that are releasing the greenhouse gas into Earth's atmosphere.

"This is the first global gridded estimate of annual methane emissions from facility-scale measurements, an advancement in measurement-based accounting that is due to the comprehensive scale of GHGSat's satellite constellation to measure methane worldwide," said Dylan Jervis of GHGSat Inc., lead author of a new study on the findings published Dec. 11 in the journal Science.

"This information will be useful to improve understanding and predictions of methane emissions, and, therefore, provide information that is useful to direct mitigation efforts," Jervis told Space.com.

Traditionally, scientists have measured methane emissions with a mix of bottom-up inventories, which estimate emissions based on industry activity but can miss short-term fluctuations like leaks, and top-down atmospheric measurements, which detect methane concentrations directly but lack the resolution to pinpoint specific sources. Neither can paint a very precise picture of global methane emissions from the energy sector. But the GHGSat constellation, run by the Canadian company GHGSat, bridges that gap by combining meter-scale spatial resolution with global coverage.

Analyzing GHGSat observations of methane plumes collected in 2023, the team estimated annual methane emissions from 3,114 oil, gas and coal facilities worldwide that totaled about 9 million tons (8.3 million metric tons) per year.

Geographically, the biggest emitters stood out clearly in the satellite data. "The countries where we measure the largest oil and gas methane emissions are Turkmenistan, the U.S., Russia, Mexico and Kazakhstan," said Jervis. "The countries where we measure the large coal emissions are China and Russia."

While bottom-up inventories are fairly good at estimating methane emissions on such large scales as countries, they aren't nearly as precise when you zoom in. "We found moderate agreement between GHGSat-measured emission estimates and bottom-up inventory predictions at the country level, but very little agreement at 0.2 degree x 0.2 degree [about 20 by 20 kilometers] spatial resolution," Jervis said. Thus, effective change may need to happen at the facility level, not at the country level.

The researchers tracked how often individual facilities emitted detectable methane plumes, a metric they call persistence.

"Persistence of emissions depends more on sector than region," said Jervis. For coal facilities, methane plumes were detected about half the time on average. Oil and gas sites, by contrast, were far more intermittent, emitting detectable methane in only about 16% of satellite observations on average. That variability makes oil and gas emissions especially difficult to capture with infrequent monitoring.

For the most accurate and actionable methane estimates, detailed surveys like the ones provided by GHGSat are crucial — which is why GHGSat is growing its constellation. Two new satellites were launched in June, and two more in November, bringing the company's total to 14 satellites. "This will enable better coverage, both spatially and temporally, allowing us to detect more emissions and monitor them more frequently," said Jervis.

We've all had the thought — wouldn't it be nice if summer were just a little longer? Well, it might become a reality in the not-too-distant future. And, unfortunately, that's not a good sign for our planet.

According to a new study, climate change — primarily driven by human activities like burning coal for cheap power — could lengthen summers in Europe by 42 days by the year 2100. That's because the "latitudinal temperature gradient" (LTG), or the temperature difference between the North Pole and the equator, is currently decreasing. A higher LTG drives wind patterns across the Atlantic Ocean, bringing about seasonal temperature changes in Europe. With a lower LTG, summer weather patterns and heat waves will last longer across the continent.

"Our findings show this isn't just a modern phenomenon; it's a recurring feature of Earth’s climate system. But what's different now is the speed, cause and intensity of change," Dr. Laura Boyall, an author of the study, said in a statement."

To peer back into Earth's climate history in Europe, researchers analyzed layers of mud at the bottom of lakes. Deposited seasonally, these sediments paint a clear timeline of winters and summers as far back as 10,000 years ago.

Around 6,000 years ago, European summers were about eight months long due to natural fluctuations in the LTG. But now, the Arctic is warming up to four times faster than the global average, in part due to greenhouse gas emissions. For every degree Celsius the LTG decreases, European summers will grow by about six days. Thus, according to current climate projections, Europe will have 42 extra days of summer by 2100.

"Our research has uncovered that European seasons have been driven by the temperature gradient over thousands of years, which provides useful insight that can be used to help predict future changes more accurately," says Dr. Celia Martin-Puertas, lead researcher from Royal Holloway at the University of London. "The findings underscore how deeply connected Europe’s weather is to global climate dynamics and how understanding the past can help us navigate the challenges of a rapidly changing planet."

A study on the research was published on Nov. 19 in the journal Nature Communications.

Antarctic sea ice reached its seasonal winter maximum on Sept. 17, 2025, but even at its greatest extent of the year, coverage remained strikingly low by historical standards. Satellite imagery and data highlighted by the NASA Earth Observatory show the difference between the 2025 extent and the long-term average, revealing substantial reductions around much of the Antarctic coastline.

What is it?

Antarctic sea ice plays a critical role in Earth’s climate and ecosystems, and understanding its variability is essential for interpreting broader environmental changes. Unlike the Arctic, which is an ocean surrounded by land, Antarctica is a continent surrounded by open ocean.

This geographic contrast allows Antarctic sea ice to expand freely during winter and retreat dramatically in summer, creating one of the most dynamic seasonal ice cycles on the planet. Sea ice in this region regulates climate by reflecting sunlight back into space, influences ocean circulation through the freezing and melting of saltwater, and helps shape weather patterns across the Southern Hemisphere. It also supports a rich ecosystem in which species such as penguins, seals, seabirds, and krill depend on predictable ice conditions for feeding and breeding.

Where is it?

This image was created using satellite data captured from low Earth orbit.

Why is it amazing?

For many years, Antarctic sea ice did not exhibit the long-term decline seen in the Arctic and instead fluctuated around or above average levels. However, that pattern shifted abruptly after 2016, when successive years began to show historically low extents in both winter and summer.

Now, satellite measurements show that the ice expanded to just 6.88 million square miles (17.81 million square kilometers) this southern winter, making it the third-lowest winter maximum in the 47-year satellite record, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. This year’s peak fell nearly 348,000 square miles (900,000 square km) below the 1981–2010 average, continuing a post-2016 pattern of unusually low sea ice.

Despite these clear departures from previous decades, researchers caution that the Antarctic climate system is highly complex, making it difficult to draw definitive conclusions about long-term change. Ocean temperatures, atmospheric circulation, wind patterns and natural climate variability all interact in ways that can influence seasonal ice formation.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about climate change and Earth-observing satellites.

SpaceX launched a powerful ocean-mapping satellite from California early Monday morning (Nov. 17) on a landmark flight — the company's 500th orbital mission with a used rocket.

The Sentinel-6B spacecraft lifted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base on Monday at 12:21 a.m. EDT (0521 GMT; 9:21 p.m. on Nov. 16 local California time).

"Sentinel-6B rising, extending nearly four decades of the precise sea-level record from space," NASA spokesman Derrol Nail said during the agency's launch webcast.

SpaceX highlighted the reuse milestone in a post on X, as did company president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell.

"Congratulations to the SpaceX team on completing 500 (!!!!) missions with flight-proven rocket boosters. You’ve made the impossible possible with reusable rockets, paving the way to land huge amounts of cargo and lots of people to establish permanent human presence on the moon and beyond with Starship!" Shotwell wrote.

The fully reusable Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. SpaceX is developing it to help get humanity to the moon and Mars, among other feats. Starship has launched 11 times to date, but those don't contribute to the 500 count; all of Starship's liftoffs so far have been suborbital test flights.

Sentinel-6B is part of the European Union's Copernicus Earth-observing program. The new satellite will measure sea surface heights around the globe with great accuracy, continuing the work of its predecessor, Sentinel 6 Michael Frelich, which launched atop a Falcon 9 in November 2020.

"Monitoring sea-level rise is high on the global agenda," European Space Agency (ESA) officials wrote in a Sentinel-6B mission description.

"In the past 25 years, the average height of the world's oceans has risen by almost 10 cm [4 inches], according to data from Copernicus," they added. "The Copernicus Sentinel-6 mission has become the gold standard reference mission to monitor and record this key consequence of climate change."

Sentinel-6B will do this work using a radar altimeter instrument developed by ESA. The satellite also carries a NASA-provided microwave radiometer, which will determine atmospheric water content, allowing for more accurate interpretation of the altimeter's results.

During its first year of observations, Sentinel-6B will work with Sentinel 6 Michael Frelich, "enabling greater accuracy with precise cross-calibration between the two instruments," ESA officials wrote about the mission, which is a collaboration among the European Commission, ESA, NASA, Eumetsat, and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with support from the French space agency CNES.

The Falcon 9's upper stage deployed Sentinel-6B on schedule about 57 minutes after liftoff, at an altitude of 1,322 kilometers (821 miles). The 3,175-pound (1,440 kilograms) satellite will now go through a series of checkouts, then begin its science mission.

The Falcon 9's first stage, meanwhile, came back to Vandenberg for a landing about nine minutes after liftoff as planned It was the third flight for this particular booster; its previous two missions lofted batches of SpaceX's Starlink broadband satellites, according to the company.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 12:33 a.m. ET on Nov. 17 with news of successful launch and rocket landing, and again at 1:25 a.m. ET with news of satellite deploy.

Interplanetary dust laced with helium-3 that has settled on the sea floor has provided climate scientists with an urgently needed historical record of sea ice. That urgency stems from climatologists battling with understanding how the Arctic will respond to the worsening climate crisis.

The amount of ice on the Arctic Ocean has depleted by more than 42% in response to rising temperatures since regular satellite monitoring began in 1979 — and the Arctic continues to warm faster than anywhere else on Earth, particularly due to human-driven global warming caused by things like burning coal for cheap power. In a few decades time we could see the Arctic Ocean free of ice all summer long. Besides the resultant rising sea levels as the ice melts, scientists want to learn more about how this change in sea ice affects the habitability of the Arctic and the wider world.

"If we can project the timing and spatial patterns of ice coverage decline in the future, it will help us understand warming, predict changes to food webs and fishing, and prepare for geopolitical shifts," said Frankie Pavia of the University of Washington in a statement.

Until now, it has been difficult to make accurate predictions about the Arctic sea ice in part because there have been no historical records to base predictions on. If we don't know how the sea ice responded to changes in climate in the past, we can't say for certain how it will respond in the future.

Which is where the cosmic dust comes in.

We are being gently doused in dust from space every day. If you place a bowl outside for a week, some of the dirt that gathers in it will be from space.

When the Arctic Ocean is covered in ice, the dust is prevented from reaching the sea floor. So when the ocean is largely absent of ice, more of the cosmic dust is able to settle as sediment.

Pavia led a team who went searching for this dust in sedimentary cores taken from three locations in the Arctic Ocean: one near the North Pole where there is ice present all year, one near the edge of the ice in September when ice coverage is at its annual lowest, and another at a site that was covered in ice in 1980, but no longer is.

In particular, Pavia's team was looking for sedimentary layers of the isotopes helium-3 and thorium-230. Each has a different origin. Helium-3 is present in cosmic dust, having been captured by dust grains from the sun's solar wind, whereas thorium is a decay product of naturally occurring uranium that has become dissolved in the ocean. At times of high ice abundance on the ocean, the ratio of thorium-230 to helium-3 should be higher than at times when there is less ice and more cosmic dust can reach the seabed.

"It's like looking for a needle in a haystack," said Pavia. "You've got this small amount of cosmic dust raining down everywhere, but you've also got Earth sediments accumulating pretty fast."

The cores provided a historical record chronicling periods when greater and smaller amounts of cosmic dust have reached the bottom of the ocean, corresponding to differing amounts of sea ice. The ice has waxed and waned over millennia, and the cores indicate that the dawn of the most recent ice age, beginning about 20,000 years ago, saw a decrease in the amount of cosmic dust on the seabed as ice covered the entirety of the Arctic all year round.

"During the last ice age there was almost no cosmic dust in the Arctic sediments," said Pavia.

When the ice began to melt and retreat as the ice age started to come to an end 15,000 years ago, the cores show that the amount of cosmic dust in the sediment on the sea floor began to increase.

What's most intriguing is what the cores tell us about what governs the amount of sea ice and how its presence, or lack thereof, can influence the balance of nutrients and hence the biosphere of the ocean.

The assumption had been that the loss of ice from the Arctic Ocean was governed by the temperature of the ocean, but the results from Pavia's group indicate that it has more to do with atmospheric temperatures instead. This is a crucial piece of information because the ocean takes longer to respond to climate change than the atmosphere. If true, then we may lose sea ice in the Arctic Ocean more quickly than we expected.

They also found that sea-ice coverage is correlated with how quickly nutrients in the ocean are consumed by biological processes. Tiny shells that were once worn by microbes called foraminifera were present in the cores, and a chemical analysis revealed how much of the total available nutrients they consumed when the microbes were alive at different points in the historical record. Pavia’s team found a correlation between increased consumption of nutrients and a lack of sea ice.

"As ice decreases in the future, we expect to see increased consumption of nutrients by phytoplankton in the Arctic, which has consequences for the food web," said Pavia. Long term, such productivity might not be maintained, causing delicate ecosystems both in the ocean and on the coast to collapse.

The results still leave some questions unanswered for now, such as why nutrient availability changes with the amount of sea ice present. One possible explanation is that with less ice, there is more room on the surface of the ocean for photosynthesizing algae that produce more nutrients. However, a competing effect would be the dilution of the nutrients by the melting sea ice, meaning there must be a delicate balance between the two processes.

The results were published on Nov. 6 in the journal Science.

Earth just endured one of its most extreme wildfire years on record — and scientists say human-driven climate change is the cause.

A sweeping new analysis, the State of Wildfires 2024–25 report, finds that human-driven global warming dramatically increased the intensity and scale of wildfires across the globe, in some regions making severe fire seasons 25 to 35 times more likely than they would have been in a cooler world.

The international study combines satellite data, weather reanalysis and land-surface models to show how heat, drought and vegetation changes converged into record-breaking fires from the Amazon to California.

"Land surface models simulate how climate, vegetation and fire interact across the Earth’s surface," Douglas Kelley, a land surface modeler at the U.K. Center for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) and a co-lead of the State of Wildfires annual report, told Space.com. Kelley and his collaborators used two approaches to study the impacts of global wildfires, first running thousands of simulations of past fire seasons with and without the effects of human-driven climate change. Then, they looked at models of the Earth's vegetation to see how the growth and death of plants can produce fuel for wildfires. "Together, these approaches show both how climate change has already influenced major fire events, and what the future might hold,” Kelley said.

The team calculated that, from March 2024 through February 2025, wildfires burned 1.4 million square miles (3.7 million square kilometers), an area larger than the size of India.

Certain regions saw truly staggering spikes. Fire emissions were higher than normal, with Bolivia seeing its highest carbon dioxide emissions total of this century (771 million tons), while Canada had its second year of reaching over a billion tons its CO2 emissions. Brazil's Pantanal region, considered the world's largest wetland, had six times the average carbon dioxide emissions for the area.

As carbon dioxide helps contribute to greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, these emission increases are helping to propel a positive feedback loop, driving up global warming conditions even further, which, in turn, can lead to more extreme wildfires.

The most powerful finding for the team was how clear climate change emerged as a variable in driving the intensity of the wildfire seasons worldwide.

"Wildfires are shaped by a tangled mix of weather, vegetation, land use and chance — factors that usually make event-scale attribution incredibly difficult. To fully reflect that complexity, we pushed our methods to explore thousands of different ways that climate, people, and ecosystems might interact to influence fire," Kelley said.

"Yet across all those possibilities, the conclusion barely wavered: human-driven climate change increased the likelihood of these extreme fires and amplified how much land burned...The science has now advanced to the point where the climate signal is unmistakable. But worryingly, climate change itself has advanced so far that this signal is visible in every extreme fire event we assessed,” Kelley said.

The human and ecological toll

Wildfires in 2024 and 2025 killed more than 200 people worldwide, including 100 people in Nepal, 34 people in South Africa and 30 people in Los Angeles. The Southern California blazes alone forced 150,000 evacuations and caused an estimated $140 billion in damages. Similarly, fires in Canada's Jasper National Park alone cost over US $1 billion in damages while Brazil's Pantanal’s agribusiness sector lost over $200 million due to wildfires.

Besides carbon emissions, air quality impacts were also significant. Fine particulate pollution from fires in Brazil reached up to 60 times higher than the World Health Organization’s safe limits, exposing hundreds of millions of people to toxic smoke.

Watching the Earth burn from space

For scientists, much of this evidence comes from low-Earth orbit. Satellites such as NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites have become indispensable for detecting active fires, mapping burn scars and monitoring atmospheric pollution from smoke plumes.

Those space-based observations fed directly into the State of Wildfires analysis, which used them to validate fire-weather models and quantify how much climate change has altered conditions on the ground.

The research team says future versions of the report will rely even more heavily on upcoming hyperspectral sensors and next-generation Earth observation satellites, which can track vegetation dryness, fuel loads and even early-stage ignition events in near real time.

For researchers like Kelley, the question then becomes: what can humanity do about it?

"We touch on this in our summary for policymakers, especially around climate finance and how wildfires affect nature-based climate solutions. However, we haven’t yet been in a position to explore in depth how local fire management decisions influenced each event: what worked, what didn’t, and what we can learn. Advances in scientific methods and ongoing study time will enable us to do this, and it's a key area for future work," said Kelley.

Antarctica is far more than just a bucket-list destination for travelers and a home for penguins. It's a veritable time machine, holding evidence from millions of years of Earth's climatic history deep within the ice.

Scientists working with the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (COLDEX) have collected the oldest directly dated ice cores ever drilled: 6 million years old. In studying the air and water from the samples, they glimpsed the climate of the ancient Earth, when the planet was warmer than it is today and sea levels were higher — and discovered evidence of a long-term cooling period.

Led by Sarah Shackleton of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and John Higgins of Princeton University, the team collected the sample from the Allan Hills of East Antarctica, where the topography of the landscape brings ancient ice nearer to the surface. While the researchers expected to find ice up to 3 million years old here, the sample greatly exceeded expectations.

"The team has built up a library of what we call 'climate snapshot'’ roughly six times older than any previously reported ice core data, complementing the more detailed younger data from cores in the interior of Antarctica," COLDEX Director Ed Brook, a paleoclimatologist from Oregon State University, said in a statement.

Tapping into the air bubbles frozen into the ice, scientists measured an argon isotope to date the sample. Then, looking into oxygen isotopes in the ice, the team discovered there was a long-term cooling period during the Pliocene era; it appeared that the Earth cooled about 22 degrees Fahrenheit (12 degrees Celsius) over this period.

The team will continue to study these samples through the lens of climate change, analyzing and reconstructing levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases and ocean heat. They'll also return to Allan Hill to drill more cores — and hopefully find even more ancient ice.

"Given the spectacularly old ice we have discovered at Allan Hills, we also have designed a comprehensive longer-term new study of this region to try to extend the records even further in time, which we hope to conduct between 2026 and 2031," said Brooks.

The team's research was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on October 28, 2025.

2024 may have been Earth's hottest year in at least 125,000 years, according to a grim climate report published Wednesday (Oct. 29) that describes our world as "on the brink" and warns its "vital signs are flashing red," with nearly two-thirds showing record highs.

Last year had already been declared the hottest on record (those records dating back to the late 1800s), following 2023 — which used to be considered the warmest year in human history. The year 2024 also capped a decade of record-breaking heat fueled by human-caused climate change, continuing a trend that began in 2015. Now, the new report, led by researchers at Oregon State University, suggests the year was also likely hotter than the peak of the last interglacial period, roughly 125,000 years ago, when natural shifts in Earth's orbit and tilt made the planet warmer and sea levels several meters higher. That result is based on previously published climate studies.

The study concludes that 22 of 34 measurable indicators of Earth's health, including greenhouse gas levels, ocean heat, sea ice and deforestation, have reached record extremes. The authors warn that these trends suggest humanity is in a "state of ecological overshoot," consuming the planet's resources faster than they can be replenished.

"The message is simple in that the climate crisis has entered an emergency phase and every tenth of a degree of avoided warming matters," William Ripple, a professor of ecology at Oregon State University who co-led the new report, told Space.com. "We need courage, cooperation and speed."

Published in the journal BioScience, the report shows that planet-warming gases such as carbon dioxide and methane reached record levels again in 2025, with carbon-dioxide concentrations at Hawaii's Mauna Loa Observatory surpassing 430 parts per million in May — a level likely unseen in millions of years.

According to the researchers, the ongoing warming stems from a combination of a few things.

For one, there are fewer sunlight-reflecting aerosols in the atmosphere, such as sulfates from industrial pollution, allowing heat to build up. These aerosols also influence how clouds form and reflect light; as temperatures rise, clouds are becoming thinner and less reflective, trapping more heat. Our planet is darkening too, as Earth's reflectivity, or albedo, is dropping to near-record lows due to melting ice and reduced snow cover that expose darker surfaces that absorb even more heat. Recent research has shown the Northern Hemisphere is darkening faster than the South, creating an imbalance that scientists say is rising faster than models predicted, and could intensify warming in the northern hemisphere and disrupt global weather patterns.

The effects of these trends are visible across the planet, including in all-time high ocean heat, which fueled the largest coral-bleaching event ever recorded, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Greenland and Antarctic ice masses are now at record lows, with loss rates quadrupling since the 1990s — evidence, the report notes, that both regions may have already crossed critical tipping points that could lock in several meters of future sea-level rise.

Forests, too, are under stress. Studying satellite data, Ripple's team found that global tree-cover loss reached 29.6 million hectares in 2024, the second-highest total on record and nearly 5% higher than what was seen in 2023. Fire-related losses surged 370% over the course of 2023, fueled by hotter, drier conditions driven by human-induced climate change and El Niño, the researchers found.

These trends illustrate that nature's built-in safety nets against climate change, such as forests, soils and other ecosystems that capture and store carbon, regulate nutrients, and buffer against environmental extremes are "starting to falter," Ripple said.

By August 2025, the European Union had endured its most extensive wildfire season on record — the fires burned more than 1 million hectares — and Canada faced its second-largest fire season. As fires burn, they release massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, heating the planet and increasing the risk of even more fires — a dangerous, self-reinforcing cycle of warming, the study warns.

"It's difficult to pinpoint thresholds where climate tipping points are crossed and changes may become irreversible," Ripple said, "but it's increasingly clear that even current levels of warming could destabilize the Earth system."

Brazil's Amazon — which holds about 60% of the world's largest tropical forest — is one of the few bright spots in the report. Deforestation there fell by about 30% in 2024, reaching its lowest level in nine years, thanks to "strengthened environmental enforcement under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's administration, which has prioritized conservation efforts," , the authors note.

The team's findings align with another major climate assessment released earlier this month. That report, authored by 160 scientists from 87 institutions in 23 countries, warns that warm-water coral reefs that support nearly a billion people and a quarter of all marine life are crossing their tipping point, as evidenced by mass die-offs already under way. The report also flags looming tipping points for the Amazon rainforest, polar ice sheets, and key ocean currents that help regulate Earth's climate.

"The findings of this report are incredibly alarming," Mike Barrett, a chief scientific advisor at the World Wildlife Fund in the U.K. who co-authored the report, said in a statement. "That warm-water coral reefs are passing their thermal tipping point is a tragedy for nature and the people that rely on them for food and income."

The twin reports arrive just weeks before the United Nations climate summit in Brazil, where scientists hope their findings will push world leaders to take stronger action against these cascading threats.

"As we head into the COP30 climate negotiations it's vital that all parties grasp the gravity of the situation and the extent of what we all stand to lose if the climate and nature crises are not addressed," Barrett said in the statement. "The solutions are within our reach — countries must show the political bravery and leadership to work together and achieve them."

Both reports stress that solutions exist, and there is still time to act. Rapidly scaling renewable energy, especially solar and wind, "is likely the single most powerful lever," Ripple said.

When asked what gives him hope that humanity can still avoid the worst outcomes described in the report, "hope comes from nature's resilience and human ingenuity," he said. "Earth systems can recover if given the chance."

Update 10/28: Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica on Tuesday (Oct. 28) afternoon.

Satellites around Earth watched as a powerful Hurricane Melissa traveled toward Jamaica.

On Oct. 21, scientists began monitoring Hurricane Melissa — the 13th named storm of the Atlantic Hurricane season this year — develop. Just four days after its formation, the storm quickly became a large and dangerous major hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, churning into a monster storm early on Monday (Oct. 27) as sustained winds reached 175 miles per hour (280 kilometers per hour).

Currently classified as a Category 5 storm, Melissa is moving at a snail's pace, making the storm even more destructive. It made landfall in Jamaica as the strongest hurricane in the nation's recorded history. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), there have been only three hurricanes since 1950 to make landfall on the island with two as Category 3 hurricanes: Hurricane Charlie in 1951 followed by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988.

Thanks to satellites in space, scientists and forecasters are able to follow the storm along its path, watching it grow in size and strength throughout its lifespan. NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) satellites have kept a close watch over Hurricane Melissa since it formed, painting a high-definition picture of the storm.

Using a combination of instruments on GOES-19, experts can learn a variety of things about the storm, such as the location of lightning within the eye, the moment the storm began to rapidly grow and strengthen, and the location of the hurricane's outer bands and where they extend to.

The satellites also reveal how the storm became more symmetric over time as it grew more powerful in the open waters of the Caribbean, as well as where it hit the brakes and began its slow trek toward Jamaica.

It is expected to bring life-threatening flash flooding, landslides and the potential for devastating winds to the island through Tuesday (Oct. 28) and through the middle of the week as it moves through the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

To stay up-to-date with the latest on Melissa, you can find more details from NOAA's National Hurricane Center.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Hurricanes are America's most destructive natural hazards, causing more deaths and property damage than any other type of disaster. Since 1980, these powerful tropical storms have done more than US$1.5 trillion in damage and killed more than 7,000 people.

The No. 1 cause of the damages and deaths from hurricanes is storm surge.

Storm surge is the rise in the ocean's water level, caused by a combination of powerful winds pushing water toward the coastline and reduced air pressure within the hurricane compared to the pressure outside of it. In addition to these factors, waves breaking close to the coast causes sea level to increase near the coastline, a phenomenon we call wave setup, which can be an important component of storm surge.

Accurate storm surge predictions are critical for giving coastal residents time to evacuate and giving emergency responders time to prepare. But storm surge forecasts at high resolution can be slow.

As a coastal engineer, I study how storm surge and waves interact with natural and human-made features on the ocean floor and coast and ways to mitigate their impact. I have used physics-based models for coastal flooding and have recently been exploring ways that artificial intelligence can improve the speed of storm surge forecasting.

How storm surge is forecast today

Today, operational storm surge forecasts rely on hydrodynamic models, which are based on the physics of water flow.

These models use current environmental conditions – such as how fast the storm is moving toward shore, its wind speed and direction, the timing of the tide, and the shape of the seafloor and the landscape – to compute the projected surge height and determine which locations are most at risk.

Hydrodynamic models have substantially improved in recent decades, and computers have become significantly more powerful, such that rapid low-resolution simulations are possible over very large areas. However, high-resolution simulation that provide neighborhood-level detail can take several hours to run.

Those hours can be critical for communities at risk to evacuate safely and for emergency responders to prepare adequately.

To forecast storm surge across a wide area, modelers break up the target area into many small pieces that together form a computational grid or mesh. Picture pixels in an image. The smaller the grid pieces, or cells, the higher the resolution and the more accurate the forecast. However, creating many small cells across a large area requires greater computing power, so forecasting storm surge takes longer as a result.

Forecasters can use low-resolution computer grids to speed up the process, but that reduces accuracy, leaving communities with more uncertainty about their flood risk.

AI can help speed that up.

How AI can create better forecasts

There are two main sources of uncertainty in storm surge predictions.

One involves the data fed into the computer model. A hurricane's storm track and wind field, which determine where it will make landfall and how intense the surge will be, are still hard to forecast accurately more than a few days in advance. Changes to the coast and sea floor, such as from channel dredging or loss of salt marshes, mangroves or sand dunes, can affect the resistance that storm surge will face.

The second uncertainty involves the resolution of the computational grid, over which the mathematical equations of the surge and wave motion are solved. The resolution determines how well the model sees changes in landscape elevation and land cover and accounts for them, and at how much granularity the physics of hurricane surge and waves is solved.

AI models can produce detailed predictions faster. For example, engineers and scientists have developed AI models based on deep neural networks that can predict water levels along the coastline quickly and accurately by using data about the wind field. In some cases, these models have been more accurate than traditional hydrodynamic models.

AI can also develop forecasts for areas with little historic data, or be used to understand extreme conditions that may not have occurred there before.

For these forecasts, physics-based models can be used to generate synthetic data to train the AI on scenarios that might be possible but haven't actually happened. Once an AI model is trained on both the historic and synthetic data, it can quickly generate surge forecasts using details about the wind and atmospheric pressure.

Training the AI on data from hydrodynamic models can also improve its ability to quickly generate inundation risk maps showing which streets or houses are likely to flood in extreme events that may not have a historical precedent but could happen in the future.

The future of AI for hurricane forecasting

AI is already being used in operational storm surge forecasts in a limited way, mainly to augment the commonly used physics-based models.

In addition to improving those methods, my team and other researchers have been developing ways to use AI for storm surge prediction using observed data, assessing the damage after hurricanes and processing camera images to deduce flood intensity. That can fill a critical gap in the data needed for validating storm surge models at granular levels.

As artificial intelligence models rapidly spread through every aspect of our lives and more data becomes available for training them, the technology offers potential to improve hurricane and storm surge forecasting in the future, giving coastal communities faster and more detailed warnings about the risks on the way.

Some think it's a no brainer: Scattering microscopic particles of sulfur into Earth's atmosphere would reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches the ground, thereby cooling the planet. Indeed, this cooling might temporarily offset the progressing climate change — but a new study claims this type of intervention is likely to have several more unwanted side effects than previously thought.

The concept of geoengineering, or human-induced alteration of the planet's climate, by stratospheric sulfur injections (SAI) is backed by nature's own phenomena. The 1991 eruption of the Philippine stratovolcano Mount Pinatubo injected nearly 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere, the layer of Earth's atmosphere between altitudes of 7.6 and 31 miles (12 and 50 kilometers). The presence of the sulfur particles in the atmosphere led to a global mean temperature drop of about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.5 degree Celsius), according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

But that cooling, measurable for two years after the eruption, also disrupted the Indian monsoon system, causing a drought across South Asia, according to the new research paper. Plus, although the sulfur aerosol cooled Earth's surface, it warmed the stratosphere, speeding up ozone destruction.

"There are a range of things that might happen if you try to do this — and we're arguing that the range of possible outcomes is a lot wider than anybody has appreciated until now," Faye McNeill, an atmospheric chemist and aerosol scientist at Columbia’s Climate School and Columbia Engineering and one of the authors of the paper said in a statement.

Researchers are using sophisticated computer models to understand the effects of geoengineering interventions. But McNeill and her colleagues warn that no simulation is perfect and that, in the real world, surprises would be inevitable.

"Even when simulations of SAI in climate models are sophisticated, they're necessarily going to be idealized," McNeill said. "Researchers model the perfect particles that are the perfect size. And in the simulation, they put exactly how much of them they want, where they want them. But when you start to consider where we actually are, compared to that idealized situation, it reveals a lot of the uncertainty in those predictions."

For example, if the geoengineering particles accumulate around the equator, they risk disrupting global atmospheric circulation patterns and alter how heat is distributed around the planet. On the other hand, an accumulation of those particles around the poles could throw out of whack the tropical monsoon system, the researchers explain.

"It isn't just a matter of getting five teragrams of sulfur into the atmosphere. It matters where and when you do it," McNeill said.

On top of that, as the sulfur particles descend toward Earth by the pull of the planet's gravity, they are likely to react with rainwater, forming acidic rain, which in turn harms the soil.

The researchers also looked at alternatives to sulfur but found problems with each of the studied chemical compounds.

"Scientists have discussed the use of aerosol candidates with little consideration of how practical limitations might limit your ability to actually inject massive amounts of them yearly," Miranda Hack, an aerosol scientist at Columbia University and the study’s lead author said in the statement. "A lot of the materials that have been proposed are not particularly abundant."

For example, diamond, cubic zirconia and rutile titania are too rare and too expensive. Other alternatives, including calcium carbonate and alpha aluminum, are plentiful but more difficult to evenly disperse in the atmosphere due to their tendency to create clumps. As a result, these chemicals are not likely to be as effective as sulfur, the researchers said.

The study was published on Oct. 21 in the journal Scientific Reports.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

As Congress faces a Sept. 30, 2025, deadline to fund the federal government, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has put the EPA on the chopping block. But even before Congress decides about the administration's recommendations to slash its staff, the EPA's political leaders have made even more significant cuts to the agency's workforce.

And a look at past efforts to cut EPA staff shows how rapidly those changes can affect Americans' health and the environment.

Using publicly available government databases and a collection of in-depth interviews with current and former EPA employees, the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a group of volunteer academics that we are a part of, has begun to put some numbers behind what many have suspected. Zeldin's cuts have diminished the EPA's staffing levels, even before Congress has had a chance to weigh in, affecting the environment, public health and government transparency.

How many people are being let go?

Precise numbers of staffing cuts are hard to pin down, but their historic scale in the first eight months of this administration is unmistakable. Released in May, Zeldin's budget proposal for the fiscal year starting October 2025 proposed to cut 1,274 full-time-equivalent employee positions from a total of 14,130 in the year ending Sept. 30, 2025 – a 9% drop.

A July 18, 2025, press release from the EPA said the agency had already cut 23% of its personnel, terminating the employment of 3,707 of 16,155 employees. Using employees – the number of people – rather than full-time equivalents makes these numbers difficult to compare directly with EPA's budget proposals.

Combining EPA data on staffing changes with conservative estimates of the pending cuts, the initiative has calculated that 25% of EPA staff are already out of the agency.

That calculation does not include other announced cuts, including a third round of deferred resignations taking effect at the end of September 2025 and December 2025. Those cuts may see the departure of similar numbers of full-time equivalents as in the past two rounds – approximately 500 and 1,500.

The agency has also reportedly planned to be cutting as much as two-thirds of research staff.

With those departure figures included, the initiative estimates that approximately 33% of staffers at the agency when Trump took office will be gone by the end of 2025. That would leave, at the start of 2026, an EPA staff numbering approximately 9,700 people, a level not seen since the last years of the Nixon and Ford administrations.

These cuts are deeper than past efforts to shrink the size of the agency. In his first term, Trump proposed eliminating 21.4% of staff at the EPA, though Congress made no significant changes to the agency's staffing. The largest actual cut to EPA staffing was under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s: He advocated for a 17.3% drop in staffing, although Congress held the cuts to 10%.

Effects of past cuts

In the past, cuts to the EPA caused problems and were reversed – but it took years.

The staffing and budget cuts that came during the first two years of the Reagan administration generated problems with meeting the agency's responsibilities.

For instance, rather than prosecute industry for polluting, Reagan's EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch told business leaders she would ignore their violations of environmental laws. Remaining staff were convinced that working on enforcement cases would be a "black mark" on their records.

Another top political appointee at Reagan's EPA, Rita Lavelle, who headed the Superfund effort to clean up toxic sites, faced prison time for her official acts. She was convicted of perjury and obstructing a congressional investigation because she lied about her ties to a former employer who had polluted the Stringfellow Acid Pits, a Superfund site near Riverside, California.

In the wake of the scandal, Lavelle was fired and Gorsuch and more than a dozen other political appointees resigned.

In a later report on the issue, Congress accused Gorsuch, Lavelle and others of poor job performance, noting that after four years of Superfund work, "only six of the 546 … of the most hazardous sites in the Nation have been cleaned up." The Stringfellow site, a focus of the investigation, was "threatening the health and safety of 500,000 people," the report noted.

With anger over the scandals from both Americans and Congress, Reagan reversed course and spent the remaining six years of his presidency building the EPA back up in both staffing and budget. Staffing, for example, increased from a low of 10,481 full-time-equivalent employees in 1982 to 15,130 in 1989. Reagan's EPA budget, which had fallen to US$4.1 billion in 1984, increased to $4.9 billion in 1989.

The existing Trump cuts, and those proposed – if enacted by Congress – would be deeper than Reagan's, reducing the number of people doing important research on environmental harms and the health effects of dangerous chemicals; suing companies who pollute the environment; and overseeing the cleanup of toxic sites.

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

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Buried deep in Greenland's ice sheet lies a puzzling chemical signature that has sparked intense scientific debate. A sharp spike in platinum concentrations, discovered in an ice core (a cylinder of ice drilled out of ice sheets and glaciers) and dated to around 12,800 years ago, has provided support for a hypothesis that the Earth was struck by an exotic meteorite or comet at that time.

Our new research offers a much more mundane explanation: this mystery platinum signature may have originated from a volcanic fissure eruption in Iceland, not space.

The timing matters. The platinum spike occurs near the beginning of our planet's last great cold period, the Younger Dryas Event. This lasted from about 12,870 to 11,700 years ago and saw temperatures plummet across the northern hemisphere.

This happened just as the planet had actually been warming up from the last ice age. Understanding what triggered this cold snap could help us understand how Earth's climate may change in the future.

We propose that this icy phase in Earth's climatic history was in fact caused either by a large volcanic eruption in Germany or by the eruption of an unknown volcano.

A climate mystery

Ice cores show that during the millennium-long Younger Dryas Event, temperatures across Greenland dropped to more than 15°C colder than they are today. Europe returned to near glacial conditions, with tundra replacing forests that had begun to flourish. Low-latitude rainbelts shifted to the south.

The traditionally accepted explanation involves a massive release of freshwater from melting North American ice sheets. This freshwater pulse disrupted the ocean circulation, affecting temperatures. However, other researchers have proposed that the event was triggered by a comet or asteroid impact over North America.

In 2013, researchers analyzing ice cores drilled as part of the Greenland Ice Sheet Project (GISP2) discovered platinum concentrations that were well above normal levels. The ratio of platinum to a radioactive element called iridium was also unusual because space rocks usually have high levels of iridium, while the ice core spike does not. The ice core signature was very different from anything seen in known meteorites or volcanic rocks.

The authors of the space impact paper suggested that perhaps the unusual ice chemistry reflected the impact of an unusual asteroid made up of iron.

A subsequent paper proposed that the ice chemistry could reflect the German Laacher See volcanic eruption, which had an unusual geochemistry and occurred around that time. To test this idea, we collected and analyzed 17 samples of volcanic pumice from deposits left behind by the Laacher See eruption. We measured platinum, iridium, and other trace elements to create a chemical fingerprint of the eruption.

Our results were clear: the Laacher See pumices contain virtually no platinum, with concentrations below or barely at detection limits. Even though some platinum may have escaped to the atmosphere before being trapped in the rock, the eruption was clearly not the source of Greenland's platinum spike.

Additionally, when we examined the timing carefully, using updated ice core chronologies, we found the platinum spike actually occurred about 45 years after the Younger Dryas began – too late to have triggered the cooling.

This result was arrived at independently but was consistent with previous research finding the same thing. Importantly, the elevated platinum concentrations lasted for 14 years, suggesting a prolonged event rather than an instantaneous asteroid or comet impact.

We compared the ice core's chemical signature with various other geological samples and found the closest match was with volcanic gas condensates (the products formed when gases released from a volcano cool from a gas to a liquid or solid state) particularly from submarine volcanoes.

Iceland's volcanoes can produce fissure eruptions lasting years or even decades, matching the 14-year duration of the platinum spike. During the melting phase that preceded the Younger Dryas, Iceland's volcanic activity increased dramatically as melting ice sheets reduced pressure on the Earth’s crust.

Crucially, submarine or subglacial eruptions interact with water in ways that could explain the unusual chemistry. Seawater can strip away sulphur compounds while concentrating other elements like platinum in volcanic gases. These platinum-rich gases could then travel to Greenland and be deposited on the ice sheet, explaining the odd geochemistry.

Recent research on historical Icelandic eruptions supports this mechanism. The 8th-century Katla eruption produced a 12-year spike in heavy metals like bismuth and thallium in Greenland ice cores. The 10th-century Eldgjá eruption resulted in a cadmium spike within glacial ice. Although platinum was not measured in those studies, these examples show Icelandic volcanoes regularly deliver heavy metals to the Greenland ice sheet.

A smoking gun?

Because of the chronological mismatch, whatever mechanism was responsible for the platinum spike didn't trigger the Younger Dryas. Our research does, however, highlight previous results showing a massive volcanic sulphate spike in multiple ice cores coinciding precisely with the onset of cooling 12,870 years ago.

This eruption, whether from the Laacher See eruption or an unknown volcano, injected enough sulphur into the atmosphere to rival the largest eruptions in recorded history. Volcanic eruptions can trigger cooling by releasing sulphur into the stratosphere, reflecting incoming sunlight and potentially setting off a cascade of positive feedbacks including sea ice expansion, changed wind patterns and disruption of ocean currents, though future research needs to explore this further.

The substantial volcanic forcing around the Younger Dryas onset – a time when climate was already sitting between a glacial and an interglacial (the periods between cold snaps) – may have provided the nudge that tipped Earth’s climate back into a cold state.

It is important to note that our research focused on the platinum spike and did not consider other evidence, such as spherules (spherical fragments of melted rock) and black mats (mysterious dark layers in soil), for an extraterrestrial impact. That said, based on our analysis of the new results and existing data, a large northern hemispheric volcanic eruption seems to be the most straightforward explanation for the Younger Dryas Event.

Understanding past climate triggers is vital for anticipating what lies ahead. Although the chance of a large meteorite impact or volcanic eruption in any given year is low, such events are virtually certain to occur eventually. Knowing how Earth’s climate responded in the past is therefore crucial for preparing for the consequences of the next major event.

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

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

As I walked out onto the frozen Arctic water off Utqiagvik, Alaska, for the first time, I was mesmerized by the icescape.

Piles of blue and white sea-ice rubble several feet high gave way to flat areas and then rubble again. The snow atop it, sometimes several feet deep, hides gaps among the blocks of sea ice, as I found out when one of my legs suddenly disappeared through the snow.

As a polar climate scientist, I have focused on Arctic sea ice for over a decade. But spending time on the ice with people who rely on it for their way of life provides a different perspective.

Local hunters run snowmobiles over the sea ice to reach the whales and seals they rely on for traditional food. They talked about how they know when the sea ice is safe to travel on, and how that's changing as global temperatures rise. They described worsening coastal erosion as the protective ice disappears earlier and forms later. On land, they're contending with thawing permafrost that causes roads and buildings to sink.

Their experiences echo the data I have been working with from satellites and climate models.

Most winters, sea ice covers the entire surface of the Arctic Ocean basin, even extending into the northern North Atlantic and North Pacific. Even in late summer, sea ice used to cover about half the Arctic Ocean. However, the late summer ice has declined by about 50% since routine satellite observations began in 1978.

This decline of summer sea ice area has a multitude of effects, from changing local ecosystems to allowing more shipping through the Arctic Ocean. It also enhances global warming, because the loss of the reflective white sea-ice surface leaves dark open water that absorbs the sun's radiation, adding more heat to the system.

What coastal communities are losing

Along the Alaskan coast, the decline of the Arctic sea ice cover is most apparent in the longer ice-free season. Sea ice is forming later in the fall now than it used to and breaking up earlier in the spring.

For people who live there, this means shorter seasons when the ice is safe to travel over, and less time when sea ice is present to protect the coastline from ocean waves.

Open water increases the risk of coastal erosion, particularly when accompanied by thawing permafrost, stronger storms and rising sea level. All are driven by greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, particularly burning fossil fuels.

In some places along the Alaskan coast, erosion threatens roads, houses and entire communities. Research has shown that coastal erosion in Alaska has accelerated over recent decades.

More weeks of open water also affect animals. Polar bears spend the summer on land but require sea ice to hunt their preferred food, seals. The longer the sea ice stays away from land, the longer polar bears are deprived of this high-fat food, which can ultimately threaten the bears' survival.

The ice is also thinning and getting younger

Across the Arctic, satellite data has captured how sea ice has been thinning and getting younger.

As recently as the late 1970s, about 60% of the Arctic sea ice was at least 1 year old and generally thicker than younger ice. Today, the amount of ice more than a year old is down to about 35%.

Local residents experience that change in another way: Multiyear sea ice is much less salty than new sea ice. Hunters used to cut blocks of multiyear sea ice to get drinking water, but that older ice has become harder to find.

Sea ice forms from ocean water, which is salty. As the water freezes, the salt collects in between the ice crystals. Because the higher the salt content, the lower the freezing point of the water, these enclosures in the sea ice contain salty liquid water, called brine. This brine drains out of the sea ice over time through small channels in the ice. Thus, multiyear sea ice, which has survived at least one melt cycle, is less salty than first-year sea ice.

Since the coastal landfast sea ice around Utqiagvik no longer contains much multiyear sea ice, if any, the hunters now have to take a block of lake ice or simply gallon jugs of water with them if they plan to stay on the ice for several days.

Why data shows a continuing decline

As long as greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, Arctic sea ice will generally continue to decline, studies show. One study calculated that, statistically, the average carbon dioxide emissions per person per year in the U.S. led to the disappearance of an area of summer sea ice the size of a large hotel room – 430 to 538 square feet (40 to 50 square meters) each year.

Today, when Arctic sea ice is at its minimum extent, at the end of summer, it covers only about half what it covered in 1979 at that time of the year. The Arctic still has around 1.8 million square miles (4.6 million square kilometers) of sea ice that survives the summer melt, approximately equal to the area of the entire European Union.

Climate models show the Arctic could be ice-free at the end of summer within decades, depending on how quickly humans rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

While a win for accessibility of shipping routes through the Arctic in summer, studies suggest that the large reduction of sea ice would bring profound ecological changes in the Arctic Ocean, as more light and heat enter the ocean surface.

The warmer the surface ocean water is, the longer it will take for the ocean to cool back down to the freezing point in the fall, delaying the formation of new sea ice.

What now?

Arctic sea ice will continue to form in winter for the next several decades. The months of no sunlight mean it will continue to get very cold in winter, allowing sea ice to form.

Climate models have estimated that it would take extremely high atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to warm the climate enough for no sea ice to form in the winter in the Arctic Ocean – close to 2,000 parts per million, more than 4.5 times our current level.

However, winter sea ice will cover less area as the Earth warms. For people living along the Arctic Ocean coast in Alaska, winter ice will still return for now. If global greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced, though, climate models show that even winter sea ice along the Alaskan coast could disappear by the end of the 21st century.

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

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

There are a record number of conflicts raging around the world – from Ukraine and Gaza to Sudan and Myanmar. Alongside their devastating human toll, these conflicts are all wreaking havoc on the environment.

One of the key ways war leads to environmental harm is by leaving behind unexploded weaponry. Since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine has become the most landmine-contaminated country in the world. By January 2024, roughly 25,000 sq km of agricultural land there was estimated to have been contaminated with landmines and other so-called explosive remnants of war.

The contamination of Ukrainian farmland – alongside the physical damage from exploded mines – has contributed to a sharp decrease in agricultural activity, with wheat production in Ukraine falling by 41% between 2021 and the end of 2024. Ukraine has historically been one of the world's largest agricultural exporters.

The damage wars are causing to land is also occurring at a time when climate change is driving land degradation. Rising temperatures, increased aridity and the intensification of extreme weather events are leading to reduced soil fertility and desertification. This often compounds the impact of unexploded mines and bombs on the land.

The human toll from explosive remnants of war is quite visible, as the number of deaths resulting from unexploded mines and bombs can be traced. In April 2024, for example, the Ukrainian government reported that landmines and other unexploded ordnance had accounted for more than 1,000 civilian casualties since the start of Russia's invasion.

But the impact of explosive remnants on the land is less immediately apparent. Research in Cambodia, which was bombed extensively by the US military during the Vietnam war (1955-1975), suggests that unexploded ordnance continues to harm agricultural productivity there today.

Many of the bombs that landed on soft and highly fertile land failed to detonate. They continue to render the land hazardous. Due to the danger of unexploded bombs, many Cambodian farmers avoid using tractors and other agricultural techniques that could increase agricultural production.

Studies also show that explosive remnants of war affect soil quality. Unexploded bombs and landmines can leak heavy metals and toxic waste into the soil, polluting land and water. In rare cases, contaminants from a landmine have been detected up to 6km away from the initial explosion site.

The methods for clearing unexploded ordnance can contribute to land degradation, too. Heavy demining equipment can damage fertile top soil and contribute to erosion. Some methods of disposal, such as controlled detonations, can also release contaminants into the soil.

Research on soil quality in the Halgurd-Sakran National Park in north-eastern Iraq, a region that has seen decades of armed conflict, show evidence of the release of hazardous metals such as lead, cadmium and arsenic into the soil following demining activities.

These contaminants pose significant risks both to local ecosystems and human health through direct contact and the contamination of water sources and food chains. There are also risks of contamination through inhaling or ingesting dust.

Climate change complications

Climate hazards such as droughts, floods and wildfires can exacerbate the impact of explosive remnants of war. Floods and heavy rainfall can unearth landmines and other unexploded ordnance, sometimes displacing them into areas previously considered safe.

High temperatures from heatwaves can also cause abandoned munitions to explode. Six different munition sites exploded across Iraq during scorching hot summers in 2018 and 2019, when temperatures regularly topped 45°C. Heatwaves were blamed for a similar arms dump explosion in Jordan in 2020.

At the same time, the presence of explosive remnants in the environment can hamper responses to climate events. In eastern Ukraine, for example, the heavy contamination of forests with landmines and tripwires prevented fire crews from responding effectively to wildfires in 2020. The fires damaged houses and killed seven people.

Similarly, unexploded bombs from the second world war have been detonated recently by wildfires in the North York Moors, UK. This increases the unpredictability of the fires, inevitably endangering the the lives of fire crews.

In Libya, Storm Daniel destroyed two dams in 2023 and subsequently caused flooding in large parts of the eastern city of Derna. The displacement of unexploded ordnance and ammunition stores caused by the flooding complicated recovery efforts.

Explosives experts also had to be deployed during the destructive floods in South Sudan in 2024 to assess whether land was safe for the relocation of displaced people.

Climate disasters and environmental change can also prevent communities from benefiting from land that has been cleared of explosive remnants after the end of war.

In Angola, where there was a civil war between 1975 and 2002, drought has prevented farmers from planting crops in recently cleared fields. Increasing soil salinisation in Sri Lanka due to rising sea-levels has also affected the ability of farmers to plant rice in areas cleared of unexploded munitions.

Explosive remnants of war have a lasting impact, not only on human life but also the environment. Climate change is only making the threat more unpredictable and challenging to address.

It's more important than ever that measures to restore land, tackle climate change and manage the impact of armed conflict – including explosive remnants of war – are addressed together rather than in isolation.

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This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

For farmers, every planting decision carries risks, and many of those risks are increasing with climate change. One of the most consequential is weather, which can damage crop yields and livelihoods. A delayed monsoon, for example, can force a rice farmer in South Asia to replant or switch crops altogether, losing both time and income.

Access to reliable, timely weather forecasts can help farmers prepare for the weeks ahead, find the best time to plant or determine how much fertilizer will be needed, resulting in better crop yields and lower costs.

Yet, in many low- and middle-income countries, accurate weather forecasts remain out of reach, limited by the high technology costs and infrastructure demands of traditional forecasting models.

A new wave of AI-powered weather forecasting models has the potential to change that.

By using artificial intelligence, these models can deliver accurate, localized predictions at a fraction of the computational cost of conventional physics-based models. This makes it possible for national meteorological agencies in developing countries to provide farmers with the timely, localized information about changing rainfall patterns that the farmers need.

The challenge is getting this technology where it's needed.

Why AI forecasting matters now

The physics-based weather prediction models used by major meteorological centers around the world are powerful but costly. They simulate atmospheric physics to forecast weather conditions ahead, but they require expensive computing infrastructure. The cost puts them out of reach for most developing countries.

Moreover, these models have mainly been developed by and optimized for northern countries. They tend to focus on temperate, high-income regions and pay less attention to the tropics, where many low- and middle-income countries are located.

A major shift in weather models began in 2022 as industry and university researchers developed deep learning models that could generate accurate short- and medium-range forecasts for locations around the globe up to two weeks ahead.

These models worked at speeds several orders of magnitude faster than physics-based models, and they could run on laptops instead of supercomputers. Newer models, such as Pangu-Weather and GraphCast, have matched or even outperformed leading physics-based systems for some predictions, such as temperature.

AI-driven models require dramatically less computing power than the traditional systems.

While physics-based systems may need thousands of CPU hours to run a single forecast cycle, modern AI models can do so using a single GPU in minutes once the model has been trained. This is because the intensive part of the AI model training, which learns relationships in the climate from data, can use those learned relationships to produce a forecast without further extensive computation – that's a major shortcut. In contrast, the physics-based models need to calculate the physics for each variable in each place and time for every forecast produced.

While training these models from physics-based model data does require significant upfront investment, once the AI is trained, the model can generate large ensemble forecasts — sets of multiple forecast runs — at a fraction of the computational cost of physics-based models.

Even the expensive step of training an AI weather model shows considerable computational savings. One study found the early model FourCastNet could be trained in about an hour on a supercomputer. That made its time to presenting a forecast thousands of times faster than state-of-the-art, physics-based models.

The result of all these advances: high-resolution forecasts globally within seconds on a single laptop or desktop computer.

Research is also rapidly advancing to expand the use of AI for forecasts weeks to months ahead, which helps farmers in making planting choices. AI models are already being tested for improving extreme weather prediction, such as for extratropical cyclones and abnormal rainfall.

Tailoring forecasts for real-world decisions

While AI weather models offer impressive technical capabilities, they are not plug-and-play solutions. Their impact depends on how well they are calibrated to local weather, benchmarked against real-world agricultural conditions, and aligned with the actual decisions farmers need to make, such as what and when to plant, or when drought is likely.

To unlock its full potential, AI forecasting must be connected to the people whose decisions it’s meant to guide.

That's why groups such as AIM for Scale, a collaboration we work with as researchers in public policy and sustainability, are helping governments to develop AI tools that meet real-world needs, including training users and tailoring forecasts to farmers' needs. International development institutions and the World Meteorological Organization are also working to expand access to AI forecasting models in low- and middle-income countries.

AI forecasts can be tailored to context-specific agricultural needs, such as identifying optimal planting windows, predicting dry spells or planning pest management. Disseminating those forecasts through text messages, radio, extension agents or mobile apps can then help reach farmers who can benefit. This is especially true when the messages themselves are constantly tested and improved to ensure they meet the farmers’ needs.

A recent study in India found that when farmers there received more accurate monsoon forecasts, they made more informed decisions about what and how much to plant – or whether to plant at all – resulting in better investment outcomes and reduced risk.

A new era in climate adaptation

AI weather forecasting has reached a pivotal moment. Tools that were experimental just five years ago are now being integrated into government weather forecasting systems. But technology alone won't change lives.

With support, low- and middle-income countries can build the capacity to generate, evaluate and act on their own forecasts, providing valuable information to farmers that has long been missing in weather services.

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This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

The western United States is facing another destructive wildfire season, with more acres burned in Colorado alone in 2025 than in the past four years combined. If global warming continues on its current trajectory, the amount of forest area burned each year could double or even triple by midcentury.

In other words, more fire is coming, more often.

As U.S. forests burn, Congress and federal agencies are asking an important question: What role should federal land management play in reducing fire risk?

About two-thirds of forest land in the western U.S. is publicly owned, with the majority of it managed by federal agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. These public lands are treasured for recreation, wildlife habitat, timber production and open space. They are also where many of today's largest fires burn.

Historically, lightning- and human-ignited fires kept forests less dense and reduced forest litter and undergrowth that can easily burn. While some controlled burning continues today, the violent displacement of Native people, criminalization of Indigenous fire stewardship and more than a century of federal fire suppression have largely removed fire as a critical ecological process in fire-prone forests, leaving fuel to accumulate.

When those forests burn today, the result is often hotter and more severe fires that elude any attempt at control. And rising global temperatures are raising the risk.

Several of the current federal proposals for managing fire risk focus on increasing timber harvesting on federal lands as a solution. They also propose speeding up approvals for those projects by limiting environmental reviews and public oversight.

As experts in fire science and policy, we see some useful ideas in the proposed solutions, but also reasons for concern.

While cutting trees can help reduce the severity of future fires, it has to include thinning in the right places to make a difference. Without oversight and public involvement, increasing logging could skip areas with low-value trees that need thinning and miss opportunities for more effective fire risk-reduction work.

Harvesting timber to reduce fire risk

President Donald Trump cited wildfire risk in his March 2025 executive order calling for "an immediate expansion of American timber production." And the U.S. Forest Service followed with a commitment to increase timber sales on federal land by 25% over the next four years.

Trump, federal officials and members of Congress who are advancing legislation such as the Fix Our Forests Act have also called for speeding up approval of timber-harvesting projects by reducing public comment periods on proposals, limiting environmental analyses of the plans and curtailing the ability of groups to sue to block or change the projects in court.

These proposals are often framed as pragmatic solutions to clear the way for action to reduce fire risk faster. The urgency is real, and this argument can seem intuitive. No one wants burdensome processes to stand in the way of reducing wildfire damage. But it’s important to take a hard look at the problem and real solutions.

Environmental reviews aren't the problem

Research shows that environmental reviews are rarely the main barrier to forest projects aimed at reducing fire risk.

The bigger obstacles are the shrinking of the federal forest workforce over the past two decades, the low commercial value of the small trees and brush that need to be removed, and the lack of contractors, processing facilities and markets for low-value wood.

Data from the U.S. Forest Service supports these conclusions.

Between 2005 and 2018, over 82% of the U.S. Forest Service's land management projects were approved using categorical exclusions. Categorical exclusions allow agencies to skip environmental assessments and are the fastest and least burdensome form of National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, review, with limited analysis or opportunity for public involvement.

Less than 1% of the projects were challenged in court, and most of those challenges targeted the largest and most complex projects, where public oversight and analysis are critical to getting it right on the ground, such as large mining operations or forest management projects that would cover hundreds of thousands of acres.

An analysis of the bulk of U.S. Forest Service land management projects between 2009 and 2021 found that complying with NEPA took between 7% and 21% of the projects' timelines, often shorter than the timelines for issuing contracts.

Some degree of planning, intergovernmental coordination and public involvement must happen before starting a fuel-reduction project to know where the work is appropriate and necessary.

Why reviews and public oversight matter

What would be lost if environmental-analysis and public-involvement requirements were curtailed?

Oversight helps ensure that projects happen where they are needed to reduce fire risk. Without that, political and economic pressures can lead to more forest thinning in locations where there are mills and valuable timber – rather than in the areas where wildfire risk is higher but the trees aren't as valuable.

Environmental review and public comment are among the few tools communities have to shape fire-mitigation projects.

These processes also ensure that the work doesn't stop at federal boundaries. And they help partners, such as community organizations, state agencies and local fire departments, plan and work together.

Oversight doesn't just protect the environment — it enables funding and partnerships, safeguards communities and builds shared ownership of adapting to fire.

Solutions that work

So, what can Congress and the federal government do to reduce fire risk to communities? The answer starts with investing in forest management and projects that can reduce fire risk.

Joint projects involving communities and state, tribal and local agencies, like those under the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program, build partnerships to reduce fire risk across large landscapes and lower the risk of fire spreading to homes and federal wildlands. The Good Neighbor Authority, created in 2001, enables federal agencies to contract with states, counties and tribes to provide forest management work on federal lands.

Yet federal funding for state, tribal and private forest management is on the chopping block. Wildfire risk and the capacity to address the challenge are going in opposite directions.

The Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission, a bipartisan group of fire professionals, scientists, tribes, land managers and local officials, recently released recommendations for improving fire management that call for greater funding and collaboration at all levels to reduce the fire risk. The report emphasizes the importance of proactive solutions driven by local communities, shared decision-making and better use of prescribed fire. Achieving these goals will require sustained collaboration across jurisdictions and sectors, with communities engaged as full partners in the process.

Forest and fire management are complex jobs. It is reasonable to yearn for quick solutions to the wildfire crisis, but it's important that any fixes lead to lasting progress. Deregulation and disinvestment may ultimately exacerbate wildfire risk.

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

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Climate models are complex, just like the world they mirror. They simultaneously simulate the interacting, chaotic flow of Earth's atmosphere and oceans, and they run on the world's largest supercomputers.

Critiques of climate science, such as the report written for the Department of Energy by a panel in 2025, often point to this complexity to argue that these models are too uncertain to help us understand present-day warming or tell us anything useful about the future.

But the history of climate science tells a different story.

The earliest climate models made specific forecasts about global warming decades before those forecasts could be proved or disproved. And when the observations came in, the models were right. The forecasts weren't just predictions of global average warming – they also predicted geographical patterns of warming that we see today.

These early predictions starting in the 1960s emanated largely out of a single, somewhat obscure government laboratory outside Princeton, New Jersey: the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. And many of the discoveries bear the fingerprints of one particularly prescient and persistent climate modeler, Syukuro Manabe, who was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics for his work.

Manabe's models, based in the physics of the atmosphere and ocean, forecast the world we now see while also drawing a blueprint for today's climate models and their ability to simulate our large-scale climate. While models have limitations, it is this track record of success that gives us confidence in interpreting the changes we’re seeing now, as well as predicting changes to come.

Forecast No. 1: Global warming from CO2

Manabe's first assignment in the 1960s at the U.S. Weather Bureau, in a lab that would become the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, was to accurately model the greenhouse effect – to show how greenhouse gases trap radiant heat in Earth's atmosphere. Since the oceans would freeze over without the greenhouse effect, this was a key first step in building any kind of credible climate model.

To test his calculations, Manabe created a very simple climate model. It represented the global atmosphere as a single column of air and included key components of climate, such as incoming sunlight, convection from thunderstorms, and his greenhouse effect model.

Despite its simplicity, the model reproduced Earth's overall climate quite well. Moreover, it showed that doubling carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere would cause the planet to warm by about 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius).

This estimate of Earth's climate sensitivity, published in 1967, has remained essentially unchanged in the many decades since and captures the overall magnitude of observed global warming. Right now the world is about halfway to doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide, and the global temperature has warmed by about 2.2 F (1.2 C) – right in the ballpark of what Manabe predicted.

Other greenhouses gases such as methane, as well as the ocean's delayed response to global warming, also affect temperature rise, but the overall conclusion is unchanged: Manabe got Earth's climate sensitivity about right.

Forecast No. 2: Stratospheric cooling

The surface and lower atmosphere in Manabe's single-column model warmed as carbon dioxide concentrations rose, but in what was a surprise at the time, the model's stratosphere actually cooled.

Temperatures in this upper region of the atmosphere, between roughly 7.5 and 31 miles (12 and 50 km) in altitude, are governed by a delicate balance between the absorption of ultraviolet sunlight by ozone and release of radiant heat by carbon dioxide. Increase the carbon dioxide, and the atmosphere traps more radiant heat near the surface but actually releases more radiant heat from the stratosphere, causing it to cool.

This cooling of the stratosphere has been detected over decades of satellite measurements and is a distinctive fingerprint of carbon dioxide-driven warming, as warming from other causes such as changes in sunlight or El Niño cycles do not yield stratospheric cooling.

Forecast No. 3: Arctic amplification

Manabe used his single-column model as the basis for a prototype quasi-global model, which simulated only a fraction of the globe. It also simulated only the upper 100 meters or so of the ocean and neglected the effects of ocean currents.

In 1975, Manabe published global warming simulations with this quasi-global model and again found stratospheric cooling. But he also made a new discovery – that the Arctic warms significantly more than the rest of the globe, by a factor of two to three times.

This "Arctic amplification" turns out to be a robust feature of global warming, occurring in present-day observations and subsequent simulations. A warming Arctic furthermore means a decline in Arctic sea ice, which has become one of the most visible and dramatic indicators of a changing climate.

Forecast No. 4: Land-ocean contrast

In the early 1970s, Manabe was also working to couple his atmospheric model to a first-of-its-kind dynamical model of the full world ocean built by oceanographer Kirk Bryan.

Around 1990, Manabe and Bryan used this coupled atmosphere-ocean model to simulate global warming over realistic continental geography, including the effects of the full ocean circulation. This led to a slew of insights, including the observation that land generally warms more than ocean, by a factor of about 1.5.

As with Arctic amplification, this land-ocean contrast can be seen in observed warming. It can also be explained from basic scientific principles and is roughly analogous to the way a dry surface, such as pavement, warms more than a moist surface, such as soil, on a hot, sunny day.

The contrast has consequences for land-dwellers like ourselves, as every degree of global warming will be amplified over land.

Forecast No. 5: Delayed Southern Ocean warming

Perhaps the biggest surprise from Manabe's models came from a region most of us rarely think about: the Southern Ocean.

This vast, remote body of water encircles Antarctica and has strong eastward winds whipping across it unimpeded, due to the absence of land masses in the southern midlatitudes. These winds continually draw up deep ocean waters to the surface.

Manabe and colleagues found that the Southern Ocean warmed very slowly when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increased because the surface waters were continually being replenished by these upwelling abyssal waters, which hadn’t yet warmed.

This delayed Southern Ocean warming is also visible in the temperature observations.

What does all this add up to?

Looking back on Manabe's work more than half a century later, it's clear that even early climate models captured the broad strokes of global warming.

Manabe's models simulated these patterns decades before they were observed: Arctic Amplification was simulated in 1975 but only observed with confidence in 2009, while stratospheric cooling was simulated in 1967 but definitively observed only recently.

Climate models have their limitations, of course. For instance, they cannot predict regional climate change as well as people would like. But the fact that climate science, like any field, has significant unknowns should not blind us to what we do know.

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

NASA satellite imagery has revealed a new island off Alaska's coast that emerged after long-standing glacial ice melted, isolating a small mountain that was once part of the mainland.

The island sits in Alsek Lake, where the Alsek Glacier has been steadily thinning and flooding the region with meltwater. Two Landsat images — captured on July 5, 1984 by the TM (Thematic Mapper) on Landsat 5 and on Aug. 6, 2025 by the OLI-2 (Operational Land Imager-2) on Landsat 9 — show the transformation in striking detail, according to a statement from NASA.

Alsek Glacier once wrapped around a small mountain known as Prow Knob. Over the past four decades, both arms of the glacier have retreated more than 3 miles (5 kilometers), carving out a proglacial lake in the process. The recent imagery confirms the glacier has now completely separated from Prow Knob, which is surrounded by water and officially an island, according to the statement.

Glaciologists have been monitoring Alsek Glacier for decades. In the early 20th century, the glacier is believed to have terminated at Gateway Knob, about 3 miles (5 kilometers) west of Prow Knob on the opposite side of what is now Alsek Lake. Since then, the glacier has continued its steady retreat, with satellite data tracking its transformation.

The retreating glacier has fueled massive lake expansion. Alsek Lake has grown from roughly 17 square miles (45 square km) in 1984 to about 29 square miles (75 km²) today. Its growth is fed not only by Alsek Glacier's meltwater but also by nearby proglacial lakes such as Harlequin and Grand Plateau. In fact, Alsek Glacier remained connected with the northern arm of the Grand Plateau Glacier until around 1999, when both ice masses had receded further, creating a major branch of Alsek Lake seen in later satellite images.

The newly emerged island measures about 2 square miles (or 5 square km). Based on satellite imagery, scientists believe it formed sometime between July 13 and Aug. 6, 2025. With the separation of Prow Knob, the glacier is now less stable and more prone to calving, when large chunks of ice break off into the lake, according to the statement.

The emergence of this island reflects the accelerating pace of glacial retreat in Southeast Alaska and its ability to reshape landscapes within decades. Expanding lakes, unstable ice fronts and newly exposed terrain point to significant shifts underway, with researchers warning that continued ice loss in a warming world could alter the region's hydrology and ecosystems.

In August 2023, the deadliest fires the U.S. had seen in a century tore through Lāhainā, Maui, devastating the town and taking the lives of between 100 and 102 people, according to an official death count at the time — and, as the planet warms and the climate changes, scientists expect wildfires to grow in number.

Now, two years after those tragic Lāhainā wildfires, researchers have taken a closer look at the true mortality rate associated with the disaster by examining "excess deaths" in the region. This is a measure of the number of deaths that exceeded what's called the "baseline," or the number of deaths to be expected in a given region from any cause, not just wildfires.

The team found that all-cause mortality increased by 67% during the month of the fires. This is a big deal because it suggests the true toll of the fire is much larger than what was captured in official counts. The study's authors think the rise was largely due to indirect deaths not caused by the blaze itself, but rather factors like chronic health conditions being exacerbated or someone facing a disruption in their ability to access medical care.

The authors say their findings put a finer point on the need to find better emergency preparedness, access to medical care and ecological solutions to prevent future tragedies in communities as global warming, primarily driven by human activities like burning coal, continues to increase the severity of natural disasters. This is particularly true for Hawaii, where new developments and tourism demands on the land may have made it more vulnerable to wildfires.

"Native Hawaiians, for the centuries preceding colonization, had ways of stewarding the land so that there were built in mechanisms to mitigate climate crises and effects from potential wildfires," Michelle Nakatsuka, co-author of the study and medical student at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told Space.com.

Her paper corroborates other recent research, which suggests the public health impact of the Maui fires are greater than what our health-tracking systems are able to initially catch. A separate study published in August in JAMA, for example, linked the Maui fires to lingering respiratory problems and mental health problems like depression. As natural disasters become more common, studying not just the direct mortality rate but a medical system’s ability to absorb an increased burden of non-fatal health effects becomes imperative.

Why 'indirect' death numbers from wildfire are harder to find

Indirect deaths are typically missing from official death counts of disasters including wildfires, because they refer to people dying from causes not as easily attributed to the disaster itself, which mean getting caught in the fire or dying later at a hospital from wounds.

JAMA research on last winter's Los Angeles fires, for example, found that while there were 30 direct fatalities reported from the fires, more than 400 more deaths may be linked back to the disaster due to factors like poor air quality and disruptions in health care. Smoke from wildfires, for example, may be especially harmful for people with pre-existing conditions that affect the lungs. Heat waves, which have been named the deadliest form of natural disaster in the U.S., also affect people unevenly. Similar to the groups most at risk when the need to evacuate other disasters arise, people with lower mobility, older adults, very young children and people with certain existing health conditions are the most vulnerable to high temperatures.

Looking beyond direct deaths and instead at measures such as excess mortality may provide a more layered view on how wildfires or other natural disasters affect a particular community.

"What this shows really is that the impact of wildfires extends beyond the official deaths that are reported," Nakatsuka said. "And there's more insight that can be gained, I think, by looking at both direct and indirect deaths as can be captured by all-cause excess mortality."

Local solutions for a global climate problems

One problem potentially plaguing Maui and the Hawaiian islands' responses to natural disasters is a turn away from older, pre-colonial systems that may naturally be better suited to help prevent the spread of fires, according to Nakatsuka and the others of the Frontiers paper. These systems have to do with the layout of the land.

"They had a lot of what's called 'green breaks,' so ways to keep the land wet and resilient," Nakatsuka explained. This includes fish ponds (loko i'a) and other wetlands Nakatsuka said would help break up fires, should they occur.

Water diversion and the way the resource is also a factor, according to Nakatsuka. While the process looks different today, and much is diverted to more modern structures like shopping malls, water diversion in places such as Maui used to be laid out naturally flowing from the mountains to the ocean in land division called ahupuaʻa.

"It was basically these sort of pie slices that ran from the mountain to the ocean," Nakatsuka said. "And so in each slice of land, you sort of had everything a community would need to keep themselves alive."

What's more, removing invasive, more flammable grasses from the Hawaiian islands may also be an important step.

"Invasive grasses have been found to be actually more flammable than a lot of endemic species," Nakatsuka said. "Especially given their square square footage, you would expect them to be a lot less flammable than they actually are."

Importantly, looking for local-level ways to improve resilience to disaster involves bringing local leaders to the table. Indigenous solutions are not only not only culturally relevant, Nakatsuka said, but "in addition, very scientifically sound.

"I think by really allowing indigenous people to participate in policy decisions, we set ourselves up to protect our communities better," she said.

"These are the people who have been stewarding the land well for centuries before colonization happened, and know how to keep the people and the land healthy."

A study about these results was published this month in the journal Frontiers in Climate.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

The federal spending law passed in early July 2025, often called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, significantly reduces federal funding for efforts to create renewable or sustainable types of fuel that can power aircraft over long distances while decreasing the damage aviation does to the global climate.

Aviation contributed about 2.5% of global carbon emissions in 2023. It's particularly hard to reduce emissions from planes because there are few alternatives for large, portable quantities of energy-dense fuel. Electric batteries with enough energy to power an international flight, for instance, would be much larger and heavier than airplane fuel tanks.

One potential solution, which I work on as an aerospace engineer, is a category of fuel called "sustainable aviation fuel." Unlike conventional jet fuel, which is refined from petroleum, sustainable aviation fuels are produced from renewable and waste resources — such as used cooking oil, agricultural leftovers, algae, sewage and trash. But they are similar enough to conventional jet fuels that they work in existing aircraft tanks and engines without any major modifications.

Prior to Donald Trump's second term as president, the U.S. government had set some bold targets: by 2030, producing 3 billion gallons of this type of fuel every year, and by 2050, producing enough to fuel every U.S. commercial jet flight. But there’s a long journey ahead.

A range of source materials

The earliest efforts to create sustainable aviation fuels relied on food crops – turning corn into ethanol or soybean oil into biodiesel. The raw materials were readily available, but growing them competed with food production.

The next generation of biofuels are using nonfood sources such as algae, or agricultural waste such as manure or stalks from harvested corn. These don't compete with food supplies. If processed efficiently, they also have the potential to emit less carbon: Algae absorb carbon dioxide during their growth, and using agricultural waste avoids its decomposition, which would release greenhouse gases.

But these biofuels are harder to produce and more expensive, in part because the technologies are new, and in part because there are not yet logistics systems in place to collect, transport and process large quantities of source material.

Some researchers are working to create biofuels with the help of genetically modified bacteria that convert specific raw materials into biofuel. In one method, algae are grown to produce sugars or oils, which are then fed to engineered bacteria that turn them into usable fuels, such as ethanol, butanol or alkanes. In another effort, photosynthetic microbes such as cyanobacteria are modified to directly convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into fuel.

All these approaches – and others being explored as well – aim to create sustainable, carbon-neutral alternatives to fossil fuels. Exciting as it sounds, most of this technology is still locked away in labs, not available in airports.

Blends are being tested

At present, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration allows airlines to fuel their aircraft with blends of up to 50% sustainable aviation fuel, mixed with conventional jet fuel. The exact percentage depends on how the fuel was made, which relates to how chemically and physically similar it is to petroleum-based jet fuel, and therefore how well it will work in existing aircraft tanks, pipes and engines.

There are two major hurdles to wider adoption: cost and supply. Sustainable fuels are much more expensive than traditional jet fuel, with cost differences varying by process and raw material. For instance, the raw price of Jet-A, the most common petroleum-based aviation fuel, had a wholesale price averaging US$2.34 a gallon in 2024, but one type of sustainable fuel wholesaled at about $5.20 a gallon that year.

The federal budget enacted in July 2025 reduces government subsidies, effectively raising the cost of making these fuels.

In part because of cost, sustainable fuel is produced only in small quantities: In 2025, global production is expected to be about 2 million metric tons of the fuel, which is less than 1% of the worldwide demand for aviation fuel. There is international pressure to increase demand – starting in January 2025, all jet fuel supplied at airports in the European Union must include at least 2% sustainable fuel, with minimum percentages increasing over time.

Planes can use these fuels

Companies such as General Electric and Rolls-Royce have shown that the jet engines they manufacture can run perfectly on sustainable fuels.

However, sustainable aviation fuels can have slightly different density and energy content from standard jet fuel. That means the aircraft’s weight distribution and flight range could change.

And other parts of the aircraft also have to be compatible, such as those that store, pump and maintain the balance of the fuel. That includes valves, pipes and rubber seals. As a visiting professor at Boeing in the summer of 2024, I learned that it and other aircraft manufacturers are working closely with their suppliers to ensure sustainable aviation fuels can be safely and reliably integrated into every part of the aircraft.

Those finer details are why headlines you may have seen about flights that burn "100% sustainable aviation fuel" are not quite the full story. Usually, the fuel on those flights contains a small amount of conventional jet fuel or special additives. That's because sustainable fuels lack some of the aromatic chemical compounds found in fossil-based fuels that are required to maintain proper seals throughout the aircraft’s fuel system.

Good promise, with work ahead

While many details remain, sustainable aviation fuels offer a promising way to reduce the carbon footprint of air travel without reinventing or redesigning entire airplanes. These fuels can significantly cut carbon dioxide emissions from aircraft in use today, helping reduce the severity of climate change.

The work will take research, and investment from governments, manufacturers and airlines around the world, whether or not the U.S. is involved. But one day, the fuel powering your flight could be much greener than it is now.

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

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Pollinators play a vital role in fertilizing flowers, which grow into seeds and fruits and underpin our agriculture. But climate change can cause a mismatch between plants and their pollinators, affecting where they live and what time of year they're active. This has happened before.

When Earth went through rapid global warming 56 million years ago, plants from dry tropical areas expanded to new areas – and so did their animal pollinators. Our new study, published in Paleobiology today, shows this major change happened in a remarkably short timespan of just thousands of years.

Can we turn to the past to learn more about how interactions between plants and pollinators changed during climate change? That's what we set out to learn.

A major warming event 56 million years ago

In the last 150 years, humans have raised atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations by more than 40%. This increase in carbon dioxide has already warmed the planet by more than 1.3°C.

Current greenhouse gas concentrations and global temperature are not only unprecedented in human history but exceed anything known in the last 2.5 million years.

To understand how giant carbon emission events like ours could affect climate and life on Earth, we've had to go deeper into our planet’s history.

Fifty-six million years ago there was a major, sudden warming event caused by the release of a gigantic amount of carbon into the atmosphere and ocean. This event is known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

For about 5,000 years, huge amounts of carbon entered the atmosphere, likely from a combination of volcanic activity and methane release from ocean sediments. This caused Earth's global temperature to rise by about 6°C and it stayed elevated for more than 100,000 years.

Although the initial carbon release and climate change were perhaps ten times slower than what’s happening today, they had enormous effects on Earth.

Earlier studies have shown plants and animals changed a lot during this time, especially through major shifts in where they lived. We wanted to know if pollination might also have changed during this rapid climate change.

Hunting for pollen fossils in the badlands

We looked at fossil pollen from the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming – a deep and wide valley in the northern Rocky Mountains in the United States, full of sedimentary rocks deposited 50 to 60 million years ago.

The widespread badlands of the modern Bighorn Basin expose remarkably fossil-rich sediments. These were laid down by ancient rivers eroding the surrounding mountains.

We studied fossil pollen because we wanted to understand changes in pollination. Pollen is invaluable for this because it is abundant, widely dispersed in air and water, and resistant to decay – easily preserved in ancient rocks.

We used three lines of evidence to investigate pollination in the fossil record:

• fossil pollen preserved in clumps
• how living plants related to the fossils are pollinated today, and
• the total variety of pollen shapes.

What did we discover?

Our findings show pollination by animals became more common during this interval of elevated temperature and carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, pollination by wind decreased.

The wind-pollinated plants included many related to deciduous broad-leaved trees still common in moist northern hemisphere temperate regions today.

By contrast, the plants pollinated by animals were related to subtropical palms, silk-cotton trees and other plants that typically grow in dry tropical climates.

The decline in wind pollination was likely due to the local extinction of populations of wind-pollinated plants that grew in the Bighorn Basin.

The increase in animal-pollinated plants means that plants from regions with warmer, drier climates had spread poleward and moved into the Bighorn Basin.

Earlier studies have shown these changes in the plants of the Bighorn Basin were related to the climate being hotter and more seasonally dry than before – or after – this interval of rapid climate change.

Pollinating insects and other animals likely moved 56 million years ago along with the plants they pollinated. Their presence in the landscape helped new plant communities establish in the hot, dry climate. It may have provided invaluable resources to animals such as the earliest primates, small marsupials, and other small mammals.

A lesson for our future

What lessons does this ancient climate change event have to offer when we think about our own future?

The large carbon release at the beginning of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum clearly resulted in major global warming. It dramatically altered ecosystems on land and in the sea.

In spite of these dramatic changes, most land species and ecological interactions seem to have survived. This is likely because the event occurred at about one-tenth the rate of current anthropogenic climate change.

The forests that returned to the region after more than 100,000 years of hot, dry climate were very similar to those that existed before. This suggests that in the absence of major extinction, forest ecosystems and their pollinators could reestablish into very similar communities even after a very long period of altered climate.

The key for the future may be keeping rates of environmental change slow enough to avoid extinctions.

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

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Each summer in the mountains above Juneau, Alaska, meltwater from the massive Mendenhall Glacier flows into mountain lakes and into the Mendenhall River, which runs through town.

Since 2011, scientists and local officials have kept a close eye on one lake in particular: Suicide Basin, an ice-dammed bowl on an arm of the glacier. Glacier ice once covered this area, but as the ice retreated in recent decades, it left behind a large, deep depression.

In the summers of 2023 and 2024, meltwater filled Suicide Basin, overflowed and escaped through tunnels in the ice, sending surges of water downstream that flooded neighborhoods along the river.

On Aug. 12-13, 2025, the basin flooded again.

The surge of water from Suicide Basin reached record levels at Mendenhall Lake on Aug. 13 on its way toward Juneau, the state capital. Officials urged some neighborhoods to evacuate ahead of the surge. As the water rose, new emergency flood barriers were able to limit the damage.

The glacial flood risks that Juneau is now experiencing each summer are becoming a growing problem in communities around the world. As an Earth scientist and a mountain geographer, we study the impact that ice loss can have on the stability of the surrounding mountain slopes and glacial lakes, and we see several reasons for increasing concern.

The growing risk of glacial floods

In many mountain ranges, glaciers are melting as global temperatures rise. Europe’s Alps and Pyrenees lost 40% of their glacier volume from 2000 to 2023.

These and other icy regions have provided freshwater for people living downstream for centuries – almost 2 billion people rely on glaciers today. But as glaciers melt faster, they also pose potentially lethal risks.

Water from the melting ice often drains into depressions once occupied by the glacier, creating large lakes. Many of these expanding lakes are held in place by precarious ice dams or rock moraines deposited by the glacier over centuries.

Too much water behind these dams or a landslide or large ice discharge into the lake can break the dam, sending huge volumes of water and debris sweeping down the mountain valleys, wiping out everything in the way.

The Mendenhall Glacier floods, where glacial ice holds back the water, are classic jökulhlaup, or "glacier leap" floods, first described in Iceland and now characteristic of Alaska and other northern latitude regions.

Erupting ice dams and landslides

Most glacial lakes began forming over a century ago as a result of warming trends since the 1860s, but their abundance and rates of growth have risen rapidly since the 1960s.

Many people living in the Himalayas, Andes, Alps, Rocky Mountains, Iceland and Alaska have experienced glacial lake outburst floods of one type or another.

A glacial lake outburst flood in the Sikkim Himalayas in October 2023 damaged more than 30 bridges and destroyed a 200-foot-high (60 meters) hydropower plant. Residents had little warning. By the time the disaster was over, more than 50 people had died.

Avalanches, rockfalls and slope failures can also trigger glacial lake outburst floods.

These are growing more common as frozen ground known as permafrost thaws, robbing mountain landscapes of the cryospheric glue that formerly held them together. These slides can create massive waves when they plummet into a lake. The waves can then rupture the ice dam or moraine, unleashing a flood of water, sediment and debris.

That dangerous mix can rush downstream at speeds of 20-60 mph (30-100 kph), destroying homes and anything else in its path.

The casualties of such an event can be staggering. In 1941, a huge wave caused by a snow and ice avalanche that fell into Laguna Palcacocha, a glacial lake in the Peruvian Andes, overtopped the moraine dam that had contained the lake for decades. The resulting flood destroyed one-third of the downstream city of Huaraz and killed between 1,800 and 5,000 people.

In the years since, the danger there has only increased. Laguna Palcacocha has grown to more than 14 times its size in 1941. At the same time, the population of Huaraz has risen to over 120,000 inhabitants. A glacial lake outburst flood today could threaten the lives of an estimated 35,000 people living in the water’s path.

Governments have responded to this widespread and growing threat by developing early warning systems and programs to identify potentially dangerous glacial lakes. In Juneau, the U.S. Geological Survey starts monitoring Suicide Basin closely when it begins to fill.

Some governments have taken steps to lower water levels in the lakes or built flood-diversion structures, such as walls of rock-filled wire cages, known as gabions, that divert floodwaters from villages, infrastructure or agricultural fields.

Where the risks can't be managed, communities have been encouraged to use zoning that prohibits building in flood-prone areas. Public education has helped build awareness of the flood risk, but the disasters continue.

Flooding from inside and thawing permafrost

The dramatic nature of glacial lake outburst floods captures headlines, but those aren’t the only risks.

Englacial conduit floods originate inside of glaciers, commonly on steep slopes. Meltwater can collect inside massive systems of ice caves, or conduits. A sudden surge of water from one cave to another, perhaps triggered by the rapid drainage of a surface pond, can set off a chain reaction that bursts out of the ice as a full-fledged flood.

Thawing mountain permafrost can also trigger floods. This permanently frozen mass of rock, ice and soil has been a fixture at altitudes above 19,685 feet (6,000 meters) for millennia.

As permafrost thaws, even solid rock becomes less stable and is more prone to breaking, while ice and debris are more likely to become detached and turn into destructive and dangerous debris flows. Thawing permafrost has been increasingly implicated in glacial lake outburst floods because of these new sources of potential triggers.

How mountain regions can reduce the risk

A study published in 2024 counted more than 110,000 glacial lakes around the world and determined 10 million people's lives and homes are at risk from glacial lake outburst floods.

To help prepare and protect communities, our research points to some key lessons:

1. Some of the most effective early warning systems have proven to be cellphone alerts. If combined with apps showing real-time water levels at a dangerous glacial lake, residents could more easily assess the danger.
2. Projects to lower glacier lakes aren’t always effective. In the past, at least two glacial lakes in the Himalayas have been lowered by about 10 feet (3 meters) when studies indicated that closer to 65 feet (20 meters) was needed. In some cases, draining small, emerging lakes before they develop could be more cost effective than waiting until a large and dangerous lake threatens downstream communities.
3. People living in remote mountain regions threatened by glacial lakes need a reliable source of information that can provide regular updates with monitoring technology.
4. Recently it has become clear that even tiny glacial lakes can be dangerous given the right combination of cascading events. These need to be included in any list of potentially dangerous glacial lakes to warn communities downstream.

The U.N. declared 2025 the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation and 2025-2034 the decade of action in cryospheric sciences. Scientists on several continents will be working to understand the risks and find ways to help communities respond to and mitigate the dangers.

This is an update to an article originally published March 19, 2025, to include the latest Alaska flooding.

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

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

The International Court of Justice issued a landmark advisory opinion in July 2025 declaring that all countries have a legal obligation to protect and prevent harm to the climate.

The court, created as part of the United Nations in 1945, affirmed that countries must uphold existing international laws related to climate change and, if they fail to act, could be held responsible for damage to communities and the environment.

The opinion opens a door for future claims by countries seeking reparations for climate — related harm.

But while the ruling is a big global story, its legal effect on the U.S. is less clear. We study climate policies, law and solutions. Here's what you need to know about the ruling and its implications.

Why island nations called for a formal opinion

The ruling resulted from years of grassroots and youth-led organizing by Pacific Islanders. Supporters have called it "a turning point for frontline communities everywhere."

Small island states like Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Barbados and others across the Pacific and Caribbean are among the most vulnerable to climate change, yet they have contributed little to global emissions.

For many of them, sea-level rise poses an existential threat. Some Pacific atolls sit just 1 to 2 meters above sea level and are slowly disappearing as waters rise. Saltwater intrusion threatens drinking water supplies and crops.

Their economies depend on tourism, agriculture and fishing, all sectors easily disrupted by climate change. For example, coral reefs are bleaching more often and dying due to ocean warming and acidification, undermining fisheries, marine biodiversity and economic sectors such as tourism.

When disasters hit, the cost of recovery often forces these countries to take on debt. Climate change also undermines their credit ratings and investor confidence, making it harder to get the money to finance adaptive measures.

Tuvalu and Kiribati have discussed digital nationhood and leasing land from other countries so their people can relocate while still retaining citizenship. Some projections suggest nations like the Maldives or Marshall Islands could become largely uninhabitable within decades.

For these countries, sea-level rise is taking more than their land — they're losing their history and identity in the process. The idea of becoming climate refugees and separating people from their homelands can be culturally destructive, emotionally painful and politically fraught as they move to new countries.

More than a nonbinding opinion

The International Court of Justice, commonly referred to as the ICJ or World Court, can help settle disputes between states when requested, or it can issue advisory opinions on legal questions referred to it by authorized U.N. bodies such as the General Assembly or Security Council. The advisory opinion process allows its 15 judges to weigh in on abstract legal issues – such as nuclear weapons or the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories — without a formal dispute between states.

While the court's advisory opinions are nonbinding, they can still have a powerful impact, both legally and politically.

The rulings are considered authoritative statements regarding questions of international law. They often clarify or otherwise confirm existing legal obligations that are binding.

What the court decided

The ICJ was asked to weigh in on two questions in this case:

1. "What are the obligations of States under international law to ensure the protection of the climate system … from anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases?"
2. "What are the legal consequences under these obligations for States where they, by their acts and omissions, have caused significant harm to the climate system?"

In its 140-page opinion, the court cited international treaties and relevant scientific background to affirm that obligations to protect the environment are indeed a matter of international environmental law, international human rights law and general principles of state responsibility.

The decision means that in the authoritative opinion of the international legal community, all countries are under an obligation to contribute to the efforts to reduce global greenhouse emissions.

To the second question, the court found that in the event of a breach of any such obligation, three additional obligations arise:

1. The country in breach of its obligations must stop its polluting activity, which would mean excess greenhouse gas emissions in this case.
2. It must ensure that such activities do not occur in the future.
3. It must make reparations to affected states in terms of cleanup, monetary payment and apologies.

The court affirmed that all countries have a legal duty under customary international law, which refers to universal rules that arise from common practices among states, to prevent harm to the climate. It also clarified that individual countries can be held accountable, even in a crisis caused by many countries and other entities. And it emphasized that countries that have contributed the most to climate change may bear greater responsibility for repairing the damage under an international law doctrine called "common but differentiated responsibility," which is commonly found in international treaties concerning the environment.

While the ICJ’s opinion doesn't assign blame to specific countries or trigger direct reparations, it may provide support for future legal action in both international and national courts.

What does the ICJ opinion mean for the US?

In the U.S., this advisory opinion is unlikely to have much legal impact, despite a long-standing constitutional principle that "international law is part of U.S. law."

U.S. courts rarely treat international law that has not been incorporated into domestic law as binding. And the U.S. has not consented to ICJ jurisdiction in previous climate cases.

Contentious cases before international tribunals can be brought by one country against another, but they require the consent of all the countries involved. So there is little chance that the United States' responsibility for climate harms will be adjudicated by the World Court anytime soon.

Still, the court's opinion sends a clear message: All countries are legally obligated to prevent climate harm and cannot escape responsibility simply because they aren't the only nation to blame.

The unanimous ruling is particularly remarkable given the current hostile political climate in the United States and other industrial nations around climate change and responses to it. It represents a particularly forceful statement by the international community that the responsibility to ensure the health of the global environment is a legal duty held by the entire world.

The takeaway

The ICJ's advisory opinion marks a turning point in the global effort to hold countries responsible for climate change.

Vulnerable countries now have a more concrete, legally grounded base to claim rights and press for accountability against historical and ongoing climate harm — including financial claims.

How it will be used in the coming years remains unclear, but the opinion gives small island states in particular a powerful narrative and a legal tool set.

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

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

A new wave of climate research is sounding a stark warning: Human activity may be driving drought more intensely — and more directly — than previously understood.

The southwestern United States has been in a historic megadrought for much of the past two decades, with its reservoirs including lakes Mead and Powell dipping to record lows and legal disputes erupting over rights to use water from the Colorado River.

This drought has been linked to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a climate pattern that swings between wet and dry phases every few decades. Since a phase change in the early 2000s, the region has endured a dry spell of epic proportions.

The PDO was thought to be a natural phenomenon, governed by unpredictable natural ocean and atmosphere fluctuations. But new research published in the journal Nature suggests that’s no longer the case.

Working with hundreds of climate model simulations, our team of atmosphere, earth and ocean scientists found that the PDO is now being strongly influenced by human factors and has been since the 1950s. It should have oscillated to a wetter phase by now, but instead it has been stuck. Our results suggest that drought could become the new normal for the region unless human-driven warming is halted.

The science of a drying world

For decades, scientists have relied on a basic physical principle to predict rainfall trends: Warmer air holds more moisture. In a warming world, this means wet areas are likely to get wetter, while dry regions become drier. In dry areas, as temperatures rise, more moisture is pulled from soils and transported away from these arid regions, intensifying droughts.

While most climate models simulate this general pattern, they often underestimate its full extent, particularly over land areas.

Yet countries are already experiencing drought emerging as one of the most immediate and severe consequences of climate change. Understanding what’s ahead is essential, to know how long these droughts will last and because severe droughts can have sweeping affects on ecosystems, economies and global food security.

Human fingerprints on megadroughts

Simulating rainfall is one of the greatest challenges in climate science. It depends on a complex interplay between large-scale wind patterns and small-scale processes such as cloud formation.

Until recently, climate models have not offered a clear picture of how rainfall patterns are likely to change in the near future as greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, power plants and industries continue to heat up the planet. The models can diverge sharply in where, when and how precipitation will change. Even forecasts that average the results of several models differ when it comes to changes in rainfall patterns.

The techniques we deployed are helping to sharpen that picture for North America and across the tropics.

We looked back at the pattern of PDO phase changes over the past century using an exceptionally large ensemble of climate simulations. The massive number of simulations, more than 500, allowed us to isolate the human influences. This showed that the shifts in the PDO were driven by an interplay of increasing warming from greenhouse gas emissions and cooling from sun-blocking particles called aerosols that are associated with industrial pollution.

From the 1950s through the 1980s, we found that increasing aerosol emissions from rapid industrialization following World War II drove a positive trend in the PDO, making the Southwest rainier and less parched.

After the 1980s, we found that the combination of a sharp rise in greenhouse gas emissions from industries, power plants and vehicles and a reduction in aerosols as countries cleaned up their air pollution shifted the PDO into the negative, drought-generating trend that continues today.

This finding represents a paradigm shift in our scientific understanding of the PDO and a warning for the future. The current negative phase can no longer be seen as just a roll of the climate dice – it has been loaded by humans.

Our conclusion that global warming can drive the PDO into its negative, drought-inducing phase is also supported by geological records of past megadroughts. Around 6,000 years ago, during a period of high temperatures, evidence shows the emergence of a similar temperature pattern in the North Pacific and widespread drought across the Southwest.

Tropical drought risks underestimated

The past is also providing clues to future rainfall changes in the tropics and the risk of droughts in locations such as the Amazon.

One particularly instructive example comes from approximately 17,000 years ago. Geological evidence shows that there was a period of widespread rainfall shifts across the tropics coinciding with a major slowdown of ocean currents in the Atlantic.

These ocean currents, which play a crucial role in regulating global climate, naturally weakened or partially collapsed then, and they are expected to slow further this century at the current pace of global warming.

A recent study of that period, using computer models to analyze geologic evidence of earth’s climate history, found much stronger drying in the Amazon basin than previously understood. It also shows similar patterns of aridification in Central America, West Africa and Indonesia.

The results suggest that rainfall could decline precipitously again. Even a modest slowdown of a major Atlantic Ocean current could dry out rainforests, threaten vulnerable ecosystems and upend livelihoods across the tropics.

What comes next

Drought is a growing problem, increasingly driven by human influence. Confronting it will require rethinking water management, agricultural policy and adaptation strategies. Doing that well depends on predicting drought with far greater confidence.

Climate research shows that better predictions are possible by using computer models in new ways and rigorously validating their performance against evidence from past climate shifts. The picture that emerges is sobering, revealing a much higher risk of drought across the world.

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

In June, more than 60 climate scientists warned that the remaining "carbon budget" to stay below a dire warming threshold will be exhausted in as little as three years at the current rate of emissions.

But if we pass that critical 1.5-degree-Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming threshold, is a climate catastrophe inevitable? And can we do anything to reverse that temperature rise?

Although crossing the 1.5 C threshold will lead to problems, particularly for island nations, and raise the risk of ecosystems permanently transforming, the planet won't nosedive into an apocalypse. And once we rein in emissions, there are ways to slowly bring temperatures down if we wind up crossing that 1.5 C threshold, experts told Live Science.

Still, that doesn't mean we should stop trying to curb emissions now, which is cheaper, easier and more effective than reversing a temperature rise that has already happened, Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, told Live Science in an email.

"Every fraction of a degree of warming that we prevent makes us better off," Mann said.

Delayed response

A report released June 19 found that the world has only 143 billion tons (130 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide (CO₂) left to emit before we likely cross the 1.5 C target set in the Paris Agreement, which was signed by 195 countries to tackle climate change. We currently emit around 46 billion tons (42 billion metric tons) of CO₂ per year, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

The world is currently 1.2 C (2.2 F) warmer than the preindustrial average, with almost all of this increase in temperature due to human activities, according to the report. But our emissions may have had an even bigger warming impact that has so far been masked, because the ocean has soaked up a lot of excess heat.

The ocean will release this extra heat over the next few decades via evaporation and direct heat transfer regardless of whether we curb emissions, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

This means that even if carbon emissions dropped to zero today, global temperatures would continue to rise for a few decades, with experts predicting an extra 0.5 C (0.9 F) of warming from oceans alone.

However, temperatures would eventually stabilize as heat radiated out to space. And over several thousand years, Earth would dial temperatures back down to preindustrial levels via natural carbon sinks, such as trees and soils absorbing CO₂, according to NOAA.

Why 1.5 C?

Climate scientists see 1.5 C as a critical threshold: Beyond this limit, levels of warming are unsafe for people living in economically developing countries, and particularly in island nations, said Kirsten Zickfeld, a professor of climate science at Simon Fraser University in Canada.

The 1.5 C limit is "an indicator of a state of the climate system where we feel we can still manage the consequences," Zickfeld told Live Science.

A huge amount of additional heat could be baked into the ocean and later released if we exceed 1.5 C, which is another reason why scientists are worried about crossing this threshold.

Speeding past 1.5 C also increases the risk of passing climate tipping points, which are elements of the Earth system that can quickly switch into a dramatically different state. For example, the Greenland Ice Sheet could suddenly tumble into the ocean, and the Amazon rainforest could transform into a dry savanna.

Reversing temperature rise

Although it's best to reduce emissions as quickly as we can, it may still be possible to reverse a temperature rise of 1.5 C or more if we pass that critical threshold. The technology needed isn't quite developed yet, so there is a lot of uncertainty about what is feasible.

If we do start to bring temperatures down again, it would not undo the effects of passing climate tipping points. For example, it would not refreeze ice sheets or cause sea levels to fall after they've already risen. But it would significantly reduce risks for ecosystems that respond more quickly to temperature change, such as permafrost-covered tundras.

Reversing temperature rise requires not just net zero emissions, but net negative emissions, Zickfeld said. Net zero would mean we sequester as much CO₂ via natural carbon sinks and negative emissions technologies as we emit. Negative emissions would require systems that suck carbon out of the atmosphere and then bury it underground — often known as carbon capture and storage.

Net zero may halt warming. But if we want to reverse warming, we must remove more carbon from the atmosphere than we emit, Zickfield said.

Scientists estimate that 0.1 C (0.2 F) of warming is equivalent to 243 billion tons (220 billion metric tons) of CO₂, which is a "massive amount," Zickfeld said. "Let's say if we go to 1.6 C [2.9 F] and we want to drop down to 1.5 C — we need to remove around 220 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide."

Currently, nature-based carbon-removal techniques, such as planting trees, sequester around 2.2 billion tons (2 billion metric tons) of CO₂ each year. "So we need to scale that up by a factor of 100 to drop us down by 0.1 C" in one year, Zickfeld said.

Due to competing demands for land, it is highly unlikely that we could plant enough forests or restore enough peatland to meaningfully reverse temperature change, Zickfeld said.

This means we will definitely need negative emissions technologies, she said. However, most negative emissions technologies are still being tested, so it's difficult to say how effective they would be, Zickfeld said.

These technologies are also extremely expensive and will likely remain so for a long time, Robin Lamboll, a climate researcher at Imperial College London and a co-author of the recent report, told Live Science in an email.

"In practice we will be doing quite well if we find that the rollout of these technologies does any more than bring us to net zero," Lamboll said. There is some uncertainty about how Earth might respond to net zero, and it's possible that the planet might cool at that point. "If we cool at all, we do so very slowly. In a very optimistic case we might go down by 0.3 C [0.5 F] in 50 years," Lamboll said.

There is no requirement under the Paris Agreement for countries to roll out negative emissions technologies. But the goal of the agreement to stay well below 2 C (3.6 F) means that governments may decide to ramp up these technologies once we pass 1.5 C, Lamboll said.

Figures from the recent report indicate that at the current rate of emissions, the remaining carbon budgets to stay below 1.6 C, 1.7 C (3.1 F) and 2 C could be used up within seven, 12 and 25 years, respectively.

"If we do pass 1.5 C, 1.6 C is a whole lot better than 1.7 C, and 1.7 C is a whole lot better than 1.8 C [3.2 F]," Mann said in an interview with BBC World News America in June. "At this point, the challenge is to reduce carbon emissions as quickly as we can to avert ever-worse impacts."

It's worth noting that the world is making progress with emission cuts, Mann added in the interview. "Let's recognize that we're starting to turn the corner," he said.

This story was provided by Live Science, a sister site of Space.com.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

While the dangerous effects of climate change continue to worsen, legal efforts to address a range of environmental issues are also on the rise.

Headlines across the globe tout many of these legal actions: South Korea's Climate Law Violates Rights of Future Generations; Ukraine is Ground Zero in Battle for Ecocide Law; Paris Wants to Grant the River Seine Legal Personhood; and Montana Court Rules Children Have the Right to a Healthy Environment, to name a few recent examples.

As an environmental lawyer, I see that most of these suits use one of five legal strategies that have been developed over the past couple of decades. These approaches vary in terms of who is filing the lawsuit, against whom, and whether the underlying legal perspective is based on protecting human rights or the rights of the environment itself. But they all share an innovative approach to protect all life on this planet.

1. Right to a healthy environment

In 2022, the United Nations declared that humans have "the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment … essential to protecting human life, well-being and dignity." More than 150 countries have similar declarations in their constitutions or laws, often alongside protections for other human rights, such as those to education and medical care.

These rights are held by humans, so people can sue for alleged violations. Typically they sue one or more government agencies, whose responsibility it is to protect human rights.

One recent case using this approach was Held v. Montana, in which a group of young people in 2024 won a lawsuit against the state of Montana for violating the state constitution’s right to a "clean and healthful environment." The state Supreme Court agreed with the plaintiffs and struck down a law barring the consideration of climate effects when evaluating proposals for fossil fuel extraction. Similar cases have been heard in the U.S. and other countries around the world.

The International Court of Justice, the primary judicial body of the United Nations, ruled on July 23, 2025, that a "clean, healthy and sustainable environment" is a human right and said in a nonbinding decision that governments that do not protect people and the planet from climate change could be legally liable for the resulting harms.

2. The rights of future generations

A legal concept called "intergenerational equity" is the idea that present generations must "responsibly use and conserve natural resources for the benefit of future generations." First codified in international law in the 1972 Stockholm Declaration, the principle has been gaining popularity in recent decades. International organizations and national governments have enshrined this principle in law.

Focused on humans' rights, these laws allow people and groups to bring claims, usually against governments, for allowing activities that are altering the environment in ways that will harm future generations. One well-known case that relied on this legal principle is Future Generations v. Ministry of the Environment and Others, in which a Colombian court in 2018 agreed with young people who had sued, finding that the Colombian government’s allowance of "rampant deforestation in the Amazon" violated the pact of intergenerational equity.

3. Government responsibility

Another human-centered approach is the public trust doctrine, which establishes "that certain natural and cultural resources are preserved for public use" and that governments have a responsibility to protect them for everyone’s benefit.

While the concept of "public trust" has long existed in the law, recently it has been used to bring suit against governments for their failure to address climate change and other environmental degradation. In Urgenda Foundation v. the State of the Netherlands, a Dutch court held in 2019 that the government has a responsibility to mitigate the effects of climate change due to the "severity of the consequences of climate change and the great risk of climate change occurring." Since the decision, the Dutch government has sought to reduce emissions by phasing out the use of coal, increasing reliance on renewable energy and aiming to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

Government responsibility for the public trust was also a basis of the Juliana v. U.S. case, where a group of young people sued the U.S. government for breaching the public trust by not doing enough to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately declined to hear an appeal of a lower court's ruling, but the lack of a specific ruling by the nation's highest court has given continued hope to new cases, which continue to be filed based on the same principle.

4. Rights of nature

The rights of nature is one of the fastest-growing environmental legal strategies of the past decade. Since Ecuador recognized the rights of Pachamama, the Quechua name for Mother Earth, in its Constitution in 2008, more than 500 laws on the rights of nature have been enacted around the world.

The principle recognizes the legal rights of natural entities, such as rivers, mountains, ecosystems or even something as specific as wild rice. The laws that grant these rights don’t focus on humans but rather nature itself, often including language that the natural entity has the right to "exist and persist."

The laws then provide a mechanism for the natural entity – whether through a specific group assigned legal guardianship or other community efforts – to protect itself by filing lawsuits in court. In the 2018 Colombian case, the court found that the Amazon ecosystem has rights, which must be respected and protected.

Similarly, in Bangladesh in 2019 the courts recognized the rights of all the country's rivers, requiring, among other things, a halt on damaging development along the rivers that block their natural flow. The court also created a commission to serve as legal guardians of the country’s rivers.

5. Defining a new crime: Ecocide

In 2024, the governments of Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa formally proposed that the international community recognize a new crime under international law. Called "ecocide," the principle takes a nature-focused approach and includes any unlawful act committed with "the knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment."

Put another way, what genocide is to humans, ecocide is to nature. It is being proposed as an addition to the 2002 Rome Statute, which created the International Criminal Court to prosecute war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.

While the idea is relatively new, in addition to the international efforts, several countries have incorporated ecocide into their laws – including Vietnam, France, Chile and Ukraine. A Ukrainian prosecutor is currently investigating the June 2023 destruction of a dam in a Russian-occupied area of the country as a potential crime of ecocide, because of the widespread flooding and habitat destruction that resulted.

The European Union has also incorporated ecocide into its Environmental Crime Directive, which applies to all EU member countries, providing them with a mechanism to hear ecocide claims in their national courts.

Using these ideas

Each of these legal concepts has the potential to increase protection for the environment – and the people who live in it. But determining which strategy has the greatest chance of success depends on the details of the existing law and legal system in each community.

All of these legal strategies have a role in the fight to protect and preserve the environment as an integral, interdependent living thing that is vitally important to us as humans but also in its own right.

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

The European Space Agency has cleared another hurdle on the road to launching the second generation of the MetOp (Meteorological Operational) Earth-studying weather satellites. In early August 2025, the team sealed the MetOp-SG-A1 within the fairing of its Arianespace Ariane 6 rocket.

What is it?

The MetOp-SG-A1 is a specialized weather satellite hosting a suite of cutting-edge science instruments, including those for the Copernicus Sentinel-5 mission, which will help monitor Earth's atmosphere with ultra precision.

This A-type satellite will complement a B-type satellite, the MetOp-SG-B1, which ESA plans to launch next year. The pair of satellites will allow for better scanning and analysis of Earth's climate, including variables such as air pollutants and greenhouse gases.

Where is it?

The Ariane 6 rocket will launch the MetOp-SG-A1 satellite from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.

Why is it amazing?

The Ariane 6 is Europe's next-generation launch vehicle, designed to provide increased flexibility and cost-effectiveness for space exploration, according to its operators.

The rocket last flew on March 6, when it launched France's CSO-3 reconnaissance satellite into orbit. The upcoming launch will give ESA another chance to test the new rocket system while also helping to advance climate science.

Want to learn more?

You can read more about the Ariane 6 rocket and other weather satellites.

Astronomers are known for peering deep into the universe, but now, their observations might also help us better understand what's happening right here on Earth.

Scientists from the University of Warwick, in collaboration with Spanish institutions, have developed an algorithm that transforms stargazing instruments into climate sensors. Called Astroclimes, the algorithm uses starlight observations to measure greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.

As starlight travels to Earth, it interacts with gas and dust particles in our air and picks up extra absorption features known as telluric lines. Astronomers typically remove these lines to "decontaminate" their observations of starlight.

But Astroclimes developer Marcelo Aron Fetzner Keniger, a Warwick Prize Ph.D. student in the Astronomy and Astrophysics group at Warwick, realized that telluric lines could be useful in another way: tracking greenhouse gases (GHGs) like carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor in our atmosphere, specifically at night.

"Using telluric lines to measure the abundance of GHGs in the Earth's atmosphere has been extensively employed using solar spectra, for example by the COllaborative Carbon Column Observing Network (COCCON)," Keniger said in a statement. "However, since they rely on solar spectra, these measurements can only be carried out during the day, so Astroclimes can hopefully fill the gap with nighttime measurements."

To test the idea, the research team ran an observing campaign in July at the Calar Alto Astronomical Observatory in Spain, combining daytime solar measurements taken by the COCCON-Spain network with nighttime starlight measurements taken by Astroclimes to study the carbon cycle.

"The COCCON-Spain national network aims to address the latent lack of atmospheric GHG observations in Spain through the implementation of a network of stations for measurement on a national scale," Omaira García-Rodríguez, coordinator of the network, said in the same statement. "One of the main objectives of the COCCON-Spain network is to improve current knowledge of GHG sources and sinks, thus contributing to the development of mitigation and adaptation strategies for climate change."

Keniger is optimistic about Astroclimes' contributions. "If we can successfully calibrate Astroclimes with the help of COCCON measurements, it could provide a new network for measuring GHG abundances, complementing current networks with nighttime measurements," he said.

In May 2025, residents living around Lac Rouge discovered a washed-out road near the lake, triggering investigations that revealed the lake had completely emptied almost overnight, an extremely rare and puzzling event for the area.

Using both ground and air searches, experts found that the land around the lake had collapsed on itself, causing the lake to drain.

What is it?

Lac Rouge is a small lake, only about a 0.86 square miles (1.4 square kilometers) around. According to the European Southern Observatory, it was used by the Cree First Nation based in the nearby community of Waswanipi for fishing, hunting, and trapping.

Where is it?

Lac Rouge is based in the the Lac-Walker region of Sept-Rivières in Quebec, Canada.

Why is it amazing?

According to a statement from the Cree First Nation of Waswanipi, the cause of the lake draining is still unknown. Possible theories suggest wildfires, recent rainfall or snowmelt may have been involved. Wildfires raged near the lake in both 2019 and 2023 which could have weakened the soil.

While the Landsat 9 satellite, hovering in low-Earth orbit, captured images before and after Lac Rouge was drained, the actual timing of the draining is not known, with experts guessing it happened between April 29 and May 14, 2025.

According to ESO, the lake emptied by flowing to smaller ponds and rivers against its usual outflow path, where the water finally reached Lac Doda, around 6 miles (10 kilometers) away. Residents and visitors are worried that the draining will affect the local wildlife, such as moose and sturgeon.

As the Landsat 9 satellite was designed to study the Earth's processes, its ability to capture events like this show how serious the effects of climate change can be on our environment.

Want to learn more?

You can read more about Earth-scanning satellites and other flooding events.

Around the world, international borders are hardening. Nations are competing for resources, technology and even orbits. But in Vienna this June, a different vision took center stage. One where space is shared, data is open and no satellite orbits Earth on its own.

At the European Space Agency's (ESA) Living Planet Symposium 2025, the "Breaking Barriers" plenary presentation delivered the powerful message that international collaboration isn't just idealism, it's infrastructure. Without it, Earth science, climate resilience and disaster response as we know them would fall apart.

"International collaboration is in the DNA of what we do in Earth observation at ESA, but it's also really in the DNA of what Earth observation is," said Simonetta Cheli, ESA's Director of Earth Observation Programmes.

Working together from orbit

The "Breaking Barriers" plenary gathered leaders from space agencies across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, along with voices from the United Nations and international science bodies Many of them, like NASA's Karen St. Germain and JAXA's Hironori Maejima, reflected on decades of joint missions that have dramatically expanded our understanding of Earth systems, from oceans and forests to greenhouse gases and glaciers.

"At JAXA, international cooperation is very essential," said Hironori Maejima, Senior Chief Officer of Earth Observation missions at JAXA. "As we develop large scale or small scale missions, each of the missions requires international cooperation".

Others, like Kandasri Limpakom of Thailand's space agency GISTDA and Ariel Blanco from the Philippines Space Agency emphasized how critical partnerships have been in developing regional capacity and local expertise.

"It's very important that we have help from many partnerships to enhance our capacity in developing space technology and informative technology to address the challenges that we have in our nation," said Kandasari Limpakom, Deputy Executive Director, Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency (GISTDA), Thailand.

"We have to derive protection from space observation in terms of disaster risk, industrial management, in terms of monitoring of our environment. And we have to learn a lot from the different experiences and knowledge and expertise of different organizations," said Blanco, Director of Space Information Infrastructure Bureau, PhilSA. "For the space agency, we focus on communities, so [that means] bringing the benefits of space observation to the level of villages, communities and even individuals."

For emerging space nations, collaboration isn't just about science; it's about sovereignty, safety, and securing a seat at the global table.

"Space, by its nature, requires collaboration, because no one, no institution, no country, can afford all these principles," said Tidiane Ouettara, President of the African Space Agency.

ESA's Cheli pointed out that cooperation has matured from simply sharing data to building joint missions from the ground up. Joint European projects like EarthCARE with JAXA or Sentinel-6 with NASA showcase how pooling expertise multiplies impact.

"These are all examples of the success story of our international collaboration. But I think we really need to enhance it," said Cheli. "We need to make sure that the data sets are available to everybody, the free and open data policy of missions had helped a lot to enhance this collaboration and even to have the exploitation of the data sets by countries who haven't invested initially into the system but who are really benefiting and who have worked on the application".

A golden age (but only if we work together)

NASA's Karen St. Germain called this moment a "golden age" for Earth science, powered by a wave of new satellite missions and unprecedented data access. But that success was built over decades, and it depends on trust.

"We find ourselves in this golden age because of these strategic partnerships that have sustained over decades and the institutions that are joining along the way," said Karen St. Germain, Earth Science Division Director, NASA.

St. Germain acknowledges that these partnerships are crucial to both getting us to a "golden age" of Earth science but also in sustaining us through difficult times.

"Strategic partnerships, they get us to the golden age, and they also sustain us through the challenges," St. Germain said. "We've had many of those over the decades in the past, and we'll continue to have challenges and overcome them as we look into the future.

Meanwhile, Paul Bate of the UK Space Agency and chair of the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) underlined the importance of avoiding duplication and maximizing impact.

"We seek to avoid duplication, avoid fragmentation, and enhance cooperation, because providing the data that our scientists can use is a high fixed asset business," said Bate. "We know that we're in a world [in which] we've never had this level of data that our global scientific community can now analyze. Our jobs continue on that path, but we build an incredible foundation."

ESA's Strategy 2040 echoes this vision, calling for "autonomy with cooperation," where Europe can lead confidently while staying globally connected.

Science doesn't stop at borders

While the world grows more divided, Earth science is doing the opposite. Wildfires, floods, and droughts don't stop at borders. And neither do the satellites watching them.

"The challenges today are not one country's challenge, it's global challenges, climate change, extreme events that would not be overcome by just one person, one country," Limpakom said. "It's the collaboration and international partnerships that would help us to overcome these challenges".

This is especially true when it comes to climate change. The UN's IPCC reports rely on long-term, globally sourced satellite data, made possible only through decades of cross-agency cooperation and shared standards.

Initiatives like the Global Forest Observations Initiative, Sentinel Asia, and the UN's Space for Sustainable Development Goals turn satellite data into action: issuing flood warnings, tracking deforestation, and improving food security.

"I think I worked 30 years in the UN, but to me, this is still the best example, managing the UN Spider program within the office, which is a program dedicated to disaster management and space technology. When the General Assembly established [it] in 2006 they said go and find centers of excellence around the world that can help you," said Lorant Czaran, Scientific Affairs Officer, The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA)

"We now have 31 or so regional support officers around the world who voluntarily came together to support the implementation of that mandate. There are space agencies, universities, centers of excellence, others who are doing this with us on a voluntary basis, because they all consider this partnership as important," said Czaran.

Facing the future together

Looking ahead, ESA and its partners are not just planning missions; they're reimagining what it means to collaborate in a world shaped by artificial intelligence, big data and climate urgency.

ESA's Technology Strategy 2040 paints a picture of the future: satellites that are faster, smarter, and more connected. These next-generation systems will be able to talk to one another across international borders and respond to events like wildfires or methane leaks in real time. But while the technology is promising, it comes with a major challenge: making sure the right people can actually use it.

Aarti Holla-Maini, Director of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, raised a key concern in this area: too often, vital data isn't reaching the people who need it most.

"We are concerned that despite Earth observation generating huge volumes of valuable data and so much of it being available or archived for free that there remains a significant data divide even when space agencies spend millions on high-resolution commercial imagery and make it available for free to others," Holla-Maini said. "We see that it does not land in the hands of those that need it the most. They may not even know it's available or how or where to access it and very often they have no idea how to turn those valuable pixels into progress".

This so-called "last mile problem" is one of the most pressing in Earth observation today. Having the data isn't enough, governments, communities, and individuals need support in knowing it exists, knowing how to access it, and understanding how to act on it.

That means outreach must go far beyond the usual science and policy circles. As Christian Feichtinger of the International Astronautical Federation reminded the audience, the public must be part of the conversation, because they're also the ones funding the programs.

"We need to reach out to the non space sector, to the general public, because at the end of the day they are providing the funds that are necessary to initiate important programs," said Christian Feichtinger, Executive Director, International Astronautical Federation (IAF).

Making data meaningful also means balancing global reach with local relevance. It's one thing to produce scalable, one-size-fits-all tools, but it's another to tailor those tools to real communities. That's where true collaboration comes in.

"There's some tension between having scalable data products that could be quickly and broadly produced and disseminated and tailoring information with local knowledge and challenges in the particular circumstances," said St. Germain. "I think the answer there is more collaboration".

This kind of user-focused approach, where local knowledge, education, and partnerships are part of the mission design, isn't just aspirational. It's essential. And it aligns with global frameworks like the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, where the final target, Goal 17, is devoted entirely to partnerships.

The fragile but powerful promise of space

At this year's symposium, ESA celebrated 50 years of space science and cooperation. But behind the celebration was a warning: the global divide in access to space is growing. And with it, the risk that only a few countries will have the tools to respond to planetary crises.

Today, a growing divide is forming between countries that have access to space and those that don't. And that gap isn't just about technology. It's about fairness, opportunity, and the ability to respond to real-world crises like climate change and food insecurity.

"We stand on the platform that we collectively built, and that means we can see further than we've ever seen before," said Bate. "The consequence of that is that we can see what could go wrong. I think it's more important that we see what has gone right and learn from that, and so that we don't take the path that might lead to darkness.;

"But instead, we see space as a beacon of hope."

The U.S. and India just sent a powerful new set of radar eyes into the sky.

The NISAR satellite, a joint mission of NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) lifted off today (July 30) from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in southeastern India, opening a new era of radar Earth observation.

NISAR is "the most sophisticated radar we've ever built," Karen St. Germain, director of NASA's Earth Science Division, said during a prelaunch briefing on Monday (July 28). "The science of NISAR will advance our understanding of the Earth system with cutting-edge technology capable of studying changes in land and ice — changes as small as a centimeter, in any weather and in both darkness and light."

NISAR (short for NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) rose off the pad today at 8:10 a.m. EDT (1210 GMT; 5:40 p.m. India Standard Time) atop a GSLV Mk II, one of India's brawniest rockets.

The three-stage, 170-foot-tall (52-meter-tall) launcher (whose name is short for Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark II) did its job, deploying NISAR into a 463-mile-high (745-kilometer-high) orbit about 18.5 minutes after liftoff as planned.

"I am extremely happy to announce that GSLV Mk II vehicle has successfully and precisely injected the NASA ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite, NISR satellite, bringing 2300 kg into its intended orbit," ISRO Chairman Dr V. Narayanan said to mission operators and guests in attendance at the launch after confirmation of payload separation. "Let me congratulate all the teams from ISRO and NASA JPL on this outstanding success."

Following his remarks, NASA Deputy Associate Administrator Casey Swails said, "on behalf of NASA, I just I want to congratulate all of the teams. It is been just an incredible decade, culminating in this moment, from the technical collaborations, the cultural understandings, getting to know each other, building that team across continents, across time zones."

"This Earth science mission is one of a kind, and really shows the world what our two nations can do. But more so than that, it really is a pathfinder for the relationship building that we see across our two nations," she said.

Mission team members will spend the next 90 days or so checking out NISAR and its various systems, making sure everything is working well. Then, the satellite will begin its ambitious Earth-observing mission.

NISAR will scrutinize our planet's surface using synthetic aperture radar (SAR), which can peer through clouds and operate in all lighting conditions. The spacecraft sports two SAR instruments, one built by NASA and the other by ISRO. Their radar signals will be beamed down to Earth by a 39-foot-wide (12-meter-wide), NASA-built antenna reflector, which launched in a folded configuration. The gold-plated mesh reflector will also catch the returning waves, which will hold lots of interesting information about the surface that bounced them back.

"With NISAR, we will see the precursors to natural hazards, such as earthquakes, landslides and volcanoes," St. Germain said during Monday's briefing.

"We'll see land subsidence and swelling, movement, deformation and melting of mountain glaciers and ice sheets covering both Greenland and Antarctica, and, of course, we'll see wildfires," she added. "We'll also see human-induced land changes, such as farm and ranch production, use of water for municipal drinking and farm irrigation and infrastructure, land development, houses, commercial buildings, railroads, highways and bridges."

NISAR's orbit takes it over both poles, so the satellite will get a good look at Earth's ice sheets. NISAR will scan almost all of the planet's ice- and land-covered area every six days, and it will do this work for at least five years. (The NASA SAR instrument has a three-year baseline mission life, but its ISRO counterpart is supposed to operate for five.)

The total cost of the NISAR mission is about $1.5 billion, according to India Today. NASA is footing about 80% of that bill, the outlet reported.

NISAR's roots go all the way back to 2007; the mission was a response to the Earth-observation priorities laid out that year in a "decadal survey" published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. The NISAR partnership was officially forged on Sept. 30, 2014, with the signing of documents by then-NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and then-ISRO Chairman K. Radhakrishnan.

The world is losing fresh water at an unprecedented rate, two decades' worth of satellite data has revealed.

Measurements from NASA's twin GRACE satellites and GRACE follow-on missions have shown that since 2002, the amount of land suffering from water loss has been increasing year on year by twice the area of the state of California. That includes the loss of water from surface reservoirs such as lakes and rivers and underground aquifers, which are an important source of drinking water around the globe.

Mega-drying regions have emerged across the Northern Hemisphere with the worst-hit areas extending across the western coast of North America, Southwestern North America and Central America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

As a result, 75% of the world's population now lives in areas suffering from fresh water loss, with repercussions on agriculture, sanitation, and climate change resilience. The trend is also likely to cause further desertification of areas already suffering from insufficient rainfall.

The researchers said that the loss of continental water now contributes more to the global sea level rise than the melting of ice sheets.

The GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) and its successor GRACE Follow-on missions measure variations in the strength of Earth's gravity, which depends on the distribution of mass inside the planet as well as on landscape features on the surface. Both missions consist of a pair of satellites, which respond to the gravity of the changing water masses below.

The study, led by researchers from Arizona State University, revealed that even areas that previously showed tendencies to increased wetness are now getting drier or at least not getting wetter at the previously detected pace.

"The data show that the continents have undergone unprecedented terrestrial water loss since 2002," the researchers said in a statement.

The scientists behind the study said that bad management of groundwater resources is the main culprit together with the effects of climate change, such as lengthy droughts in Europe and permafrost melt in Arctic regions.

The data showed that the drying sped up in 2014 when the strongest El Niño — a repetitive weather pattern associated with warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean — threw the global climate off-kilter. That El Niño, which lasted well into 2016, brought about a powerful hurricane season in the Pacific region and contributed to devastating droughts in Africa and at that time record-breaking surface temperatures all over the world. The subsequent inverse La Niña phenomenon, which usually facilitates a temporary cooling, didn't reverse the progressing water loss.

As climate-related effects are hard to control, the researchers urge that better water management practices are urgently needed.

"Overpumping groundwater is the largest contributor to the rates of terrestrial water storage decline in drying regions, significantly amplifying the impacts of increasing temperatures," the researchers wrote in the paper. "The continued overuse of groundwater, which in some regions like California, is occurring at an increasing, rather than at sustainable or decreasing rates, undermines regional and global water and food security."

They added that the depleted groundwater won't get replenished "on human timescales," causing a "critical, emerging threat to humanity," which risks triggering a cascade of further calamities.

"[Groundwater] is an intergenerational resource that is being poorly managed, if managed at all by recent generations, at tremendous and exceptionally undervalued cost to future generations," the researchers wrote. "Protecting the world's groundwater supply is paramount in a warming world and on continents that we now know are drying."

The study was published in the journal Science Advances on Friday, July 25.

A carbon dioxide-mapping satellite and four Earth-observation spacecraft launched successfully tonight (July 25) from South America.

A Vega C rocket, operated by the French company Arianespace, lifted off from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana on schedule tonight at 10:03 p.m. EDT (11:03 p.m. local time in Kourou; 0203 GMT on July 26).

The four-stage, 115-foot-tall (35 meters) Vega C is carried five satellites on the mission, which Arianespace called VV27.

One was MicroCarb, a project led by the French space agency CNES. This 400-pound (180-kilogram) satellite "is designed to map sources and sinks of carbon dioxide (CO2) — the most important greenhouse gas — on a global scale," CNES officials wrote in a mission description.

MicroCarb will be able to determine CO2 concentrations with a precision of one part per million. The satellite will operate in sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 404 miles (650 kilometers), for at least five years, if all goes to plan.

The other four satellites will make up CNES' CO3D ("Constellation Optique en 3D") Earth-observing constellation. Each spacecraft in the quartet weighs about 550 pounds (250 kg) and will operate in sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 312 miles (502 km) for at least six years, according to CNES.

The satellites, which were built by Airbus, "have a unique optical instrument with a spatial resolution of approximately 50 cm [20 inches] in the red, green and blue visible bands and in the near-infrared," CNES wrote in a mission description. "After processing on the ground, their data will yield 3D maps of all of Earth’s land surfaces between -60 degree and +70 degree latitudes."

The CO3D satellites were deployed on schedule around 57 minutes after liftoff, and MicroCarb followed suit 44 minutes later.

VV27 was the fifth launch overall for the Vega C, and the third since an anomaly in the rocket's second stage caused a mission failure in December 2022.

The most recent three flights, counting tonight's have all been successful. The Vega C also lofted the Sentinel-1C Earth-observation satellite and Biomass forest-monitoring spacecraft, both of them European Space Agency missions, in December 2024 and April 2025, respectively.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 10:13 p.m. ET on July 25 with news of a successful liftoff, and again at 12:25 a.m. ET on July 26 with news of satellite deployment.

A recent study that tapped into satellite data has revealed that 2023 marked an unprecedented year for marine heatwaves, with record-breaking levels of duration, reach and intensity observed across the world's oceans.

The study's scientists say tackling this growing climate threat will require better forecasting tools, smarter adaptation strategies, and faster action toward curbing climate change, which is primarily driven by human activities like burning coal for cheap power.

"The North Atlantic [marine heatwave], lasting 525 days, revealed the scale of persistent ocean warming," wrote the research team in the paper published in the journal Science, "whereas the Southwest Pacific [heatwave] surpassed previous records with its extensive spatial coverage and prolonged persistence. In the Tropical Eastern Pacific, [marine heatwaves] peaked at 1.63°C during El Niño development, and the North Pacific sustained an ongoing anomaly over 4 years."

These prolonged periods of abnormally high sea surface temperatures can severely disrupt marine ecosystems, often triggering mass coral bleaching events and ecological stress. Beyond environmental consequences, the impacts ripple into human systems — reducing fishery yields, straining aquaculture and affecting industries that rely on stable ocean conditions.

While the impacts of marine heatwaves are increasingly clear, the processes that drive their onset, persistence and intensification remain only partially understood, though experts have indeed connected them to regional climate shifts as well as global warming.

A climate tipping point?

In their analysis, the researchers based in China explored the regional forces behind these extreme ocean warming events, linking them to broader disruptions in Earth's climate system. To do this, they looked to high-resolution ocean data from the ECCO2 (Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II) reanalysis project as well as satellite-based OISST (Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature) measurements.

They also incorporated a mixed-layer heat budget to help track where heat in the upper ocean is coming from and where it's going. The goal was to understand how different physical processes contribute to the extreme warming observed.

"This comprehensive approach leverages the strengths of ECCO2's capabilities and OISST's observational accuracy, providing critical insights into the variability and mechanisms sustaining [marine heatwaves] across different regions," they wrote.

They report that several key phenomena were contributing to 2023's record-breaking year. In the North Atlantic, fewer clouds let more sunlight reach the ocean surface, warming the water. At the same time, weaker winds led to a thinner surface layer, which made the ocean heat up more quickly. Together, these changes caused a noticeable rise in sea surface temperatures. In the Southwest Pacific, a similar story played out — less cloud cover meant more solar heating, and changes in wind patterns further helped trap that heat at the surface.

In the North Pacific, stronger sunlight and less heat escaping from the ocean led to steady warming, with these factors accounting for most of the temperature rise. Some additional warming came from deeper waters being pushed upward. In the Tropical Eastern Pacific, marine heatwaves were mainly driven by changes linked to El Niño, which moved warm water around.

Their findings highlight how local ocean-atmosphere dynamics are being reshaped by global warming — potentially setting off feedback loops that could make such events more frequent and severe. Worryingly, these patterns may be early indicators of a 'climate tipping point,' the scientists say, where interconnected systems begin to shift rapidly and irreversibly.

"These events can stress ecosystems beyond recovery thresholds, potentially triggering coral reef collapse, reducing species richness, increasing mortality rates, and causing redistribution of fish species, which has already led to the decline of key fisheries, such as the Pacific cod fishery," wrote the scientists.

Since nearly 90% of the excess heat trapped by Earth's climate system ends up in the ocean, understanding what’s driving these record-breaking marine heatwaves is more important than ever. Protecting marine ecosystems, coastal economies, and the communities that depend on them must be a global priority as ocean heatwaves continue to intensify.

A major climate report, the U.S. government's primary, peer-reviewed climate assessment that is completed every four to five years, will not be published on NASA's website, reversing course after the White House indicated the space agency would make the document publicly available online.

The decision complicates public access to the National Climate Assessment (NCA), which contains key scientific findings used to track risks and impacts of climate change across the United States. NASA says it will not post the climate report to its website, citing lack of legal obligation. The move contradicts a July 3 statement from the White House naming NASA as the new host for the documents after their original site, globalchange.gov, was shut down, according to an Associated Press report.

"NASA has no legal obligations to host globalchange.gov's data," NASA's press secretary Bethany Stevens said in an email to Space.com. She added that the USGCRP — the U.S. Global Change Research Program, responsible for overseeing the study and previously published the findings on its own website — "met its statutory requirements by presenting its reports to Congress," Stevens said.

The NCA is a legally-mandated report that is issued about twice a decade, and provides peer-reviewed analysis of climate change impacts across the U.S. It outlines localized risks climate change pose to public health, agriculture, infrastructure and more, and is used to guide municipalities' mitigatory steps in the face of natural disasters like floods, heatwaves, storms and droughts on an ever-warming Earth.

While past reports can still be accessed in some form in the online annals of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the official USGCRP website remains down. As of yet, no other agency has been publicly assigned to host the reports.

The breakdown in public access has drawn concerns about government transparency and long-term support for climate research. The White House's FY2026 budget proposal for NASA already suggests stripping the agency of 47% of its science funding, though that may now be getting some pushback from lawmakers in Congress.

The next NCA is scheduled to be published in 2028, but its future is uncertain. According to the New York Times, hundreds of scientists already working on the upcoming report were dismissed by the Trump Administration in April.

Two wildfires in Northern Arizona, sparked from lightning, have burned at least 60,000 acres in a little over a week — and, while firefighters work around the clock trying to contain the fires, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s satellites are aiding the fight from space. The fires have also spread to the Grand Canyon.

The first wildfire to directly impact Grand Canyon National Park was the Dragon Bravo Fire, which began on July 4. Dragon Bravo has already scorched thousands of acres and continues to destroy a number of structures, including the monumental Grand Canyon Lodge, along its path within the park’s North Rim. Five days after the Dragon Bravo Fire began, another thunderstorm resulted in the creation of the White Sage Fire, which rapidly grew and expanded during a period of dry and hot weather accompanied by powerful wind gusts.

In order to fight the fires from all angles, firefighters, weather forecasters and community leaders depend on information gathered in space from satellites. Some satellites are equipped with instruments that can monitor a wildfire's progression and growth, as well as provide high-resolution photos of both the fire itself and the associated smoke plume. There are two satellite constellations from NOAA that particularly tag-team with wildfire updates: the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) and the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS). Together, the satellites can paint a picture using tools they're equipped with, with JPSS tracking the United States in a non-geosynchronous orbit while 512 miles (824 kilometers) above us and GOES orbiting around the Earth at the same speed in a geosynchronous orbit while 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above.

So, how do satellites gather information that's crucial in the fight to contain a wildfire?

There are different filters and spectral bands that can be used to get that information., and tools on the satellites are able to analyze just those two things. These tools capture high-resolution images of the growth and expansion of a wildfire in almost real-time. They can also show, via time-lapse, the direction that fire and smoke are moving. If we look at the time-lapse of images taken by the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) aboard NOAA's GOES-18 satellite, you can see where the fire originated, its rapid growth and expansion, and how the direction of the wind steered the flames over time (in this view, the winds were blowing from the north/northwest).

Another instrument that regularly provides important information about wildfires lives on NOAA's JPSS satellites, NOAA-20 and NOAA-21. Even after the sun goes to sleep, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) can continue to snap photos of the wildfire. These details keep first responders and community leaders aware of the fire's behavior — and alert them if any growth, new hot spots, or updates critical with fighting the wildfire can be seen. These monitoring tools thus remain of extreme importance, continuously providing information to help us understand a wildfire with a level of accuracy and precision that ground reports alone cannot offer.

You can find more information on both the Dragon Bravo and White Sage fires through the InciWeb site and any closure details from Grand Canyon National Park are located here.

As climate extremes intensify and global tipping points loom, Earth science has never been more vital — but not everyone is treating it that way.

In the United States, NASA's science programs are facing historic funding cuts. A new proposed federal budget slashes the agency's Earth science division by nearly half and downsizes its workforce by a third.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the European Space Agency (ESA) is taking the opposite approach. At the Living Planet Symposium 2025, held in Vienna, Austria, ESA leadership showcased the agency's ambitious forward-looking vision for Earth observation, one that extends not just to the next fiscal cycle but decades into the future.

"Earth observation within the organization [ESA], agency is a major priority," said ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher during the ESA Living Planet 2025 opening ceremony.

ESA is betting big on Earth — and it's a message many of us are thrilled to hear.

A brutal budget year for NASA science

In March 2025, the Trump administration released a proposed federal budget for fiscal year 2026 that shocked many in the scientific community. It called for a 24% overall cut to NASA's budget, including a 47% reduction in Earth science funding and significant staffing losses.

"I don't think it is an overstatement to say that morale among U.S.-based scientists is at an all-time low," Sarah Horst, an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at The Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, previously told Space.com. "People are afraid for their jobs, their students, the projects they've often spent decades working on, and they are afraid for the future of the United States."

The proposed budget would cancel several flagship missions and reduce NASA's ability to monitor wildfires, atmospheric carbon, sea-level rise, and extreme weather events — all during what scientists say is the most critical decade for climate action.

But the proposal is already facing pushback. In July, the U.S. Senate appropriations committee advanced a bill that would reject the 47% science cut, instead funding NASA at $24.9 billion and preserving key Earth and planetary missions. However, negotiations are ongoing, and the bill must still pass both chambers of Congress to take effect.

While the outcome remains uncertain, the proposed cuts signal that climate-focused science faces an increasingly uncertain future in U.S. federal space policy.

ESA's Earth-first strategy

ESA, by contrast, is doubling down, and doing so with a clear sense of purpose and urgency.

Leaders at the Living Planet Symposium laid out a bold, long-term approach to Earth and climate science, centered on collaboration, innovation, and open access.

"Climate change is the defining challenge of our generation, requiring us to transform observation into immediate action, the energy transition and sustainable development of our infrastructure demand reasonable steps from all of us," said Peter Hanke, Austrian Federal Minister of Innovation Mobility and Infrastructure, during the opening ceremony.

"It is a good thing that we now have more powerful tools at our disposal than ever before."

One of those tools is Copernicus, ESA's flagship Earth observation program. With a constellation of satellites continuously monitoring the planet, Copernicus has become the backbone of Europe's environmental data infrastructure.

"Together, we have created Copernicus, a European Space infrastructure that has become the international gold standard for Earth observation," Hanke continued. "Copernicus satellites deliver more than 25 terabytes of data reliably and without interruption. This data is accessible to everyone, scientists, businesses, public institutions and citizens, because space is for everyone."

Eyes in the sky

ESA's upcoming missions will revolutionize climate science and Earth observation with new monitoring technologies and artificial intelligence (AI).

First up, there's Biomass, a satellite that launched earlier this year and whose first images were revealed at the Living Planet Symposium. The mission will measure global forest carbon stocks using a massive radar antenna that can penetrate forest canopies — a first for space-based instruments. Then, Harmony, slated to launch in 2029, is a dual-satellite mission to monitor Earth's surface motion, glaciers, and ocean currents with stunning precision. In addition, six future Copernicus Expansion Missions aim to launch next-gen Sentinel satellites designed to track greenhouse gases, polar ice, air quality and more.

Each mission is purpose-built to understand our planet's systems in real time, providing open-access data that informs everything from farming practices to disaster response.

AI at the edge: The future of climate satellites

ESA's Earth science ambitions don't stop at new satellites; they extend to the digital revolution happening onboard them as well.

New missions are being designed to process data directly in space using AI, quantum sensors and edge computing. That means satellites won't just collect data, they'll analyze it in real-time, making them faster and more efficient in responding to events on Earth.

"We've been really making an effort in ESA and in Europe overall, trying to integrate more and more digital technologies into the traditional world of Earth observation," said Simonetta Cheli, ESA Director of Earth Observation, during the symposium's opening ceremony.

Cheli pointed to one AI experiment already flying. "We launched last year an AI payload on the satellite Φ-sat-2. The onboard AI is designed to detect clouds and eliminate those images before downloading them with the clouds and it's working well," Cheli told Space.com in an interview.

AI, Cheli noted, is rapidly becoming essential. "[AI is] one domain that will revolutionize our world, and we're trying to integrate it in our daily work."

This evolution is front and center in ESA's 2040 Technology Strategy, which states that "AI-driven innovations will enable smarter, more efficient space operations." That vision isn't just shared within ESA: it's being championed at the highest levels of European policy.

"Thanks to the digital revolution and artificial intelligence revolution, we want to offer world-class data, information and services," said Andrius Kubilius, European Commissioner for Defence and Space, during the symposium. "The 21st century will be the century of space — and along with it, a space revolution driven by AI."

Science without borders

Despite geopolitical tension and national budget woes, one message rang out loud and clear at Living Planet Symposium 2025: Earth science is a global mission. ESA has long fostered partnerships with NASA, JAXA, ISRO and many other space agencies and those collaborations continue to underpin the progress being made today.

"International collaboration is in the DNA of what we do in Earth observation at ESA, but it's also really in the DNA of what Earth observation is," Cheli said during a plenary session.

"We find ourselves in this Golden Age because of these strategic partnerships that have sustained over decades and the institutions that are joining along the way," said Karen St Germain, division director of NASA's Earth Science division, in the same session.

"These strategic partnerships sustain us through the challenges, and we've had many of those over those decades in the past, and we'll continue to have challenges and overcome them as we look to the future," St Germain continued.

If NASA must pull back, Europe is ready to step up — and do so with open arms.

"And I think what could be really reinforced is the notion of autonomy and strategic autonomy of Europe, but also Europe being at the forefront in terms of the number of satellite infrastructure, space infrastructure, satellites available and data available to support environment, climate and sustainability," Cheli told Space.com.

"So I think overall, we have to be positive in Europe, in terms of capabilities that we have acquired in terms of perspectives of even potentially an increased role of Europe in this domain overall if there are missing areas, or if there are gaps from other partners, I think we have a role to play," Cheli said.

What's next?

The stakes couldn't be higher. Scientists warn that we are rapidly approaching planetary tipping points, moments where feedback loops could push glaciers, forests, or oceans into irreversible decline.

But at Living Planet Symposium 2025, the tone wasn't one of despair. It was one of urgency and optimism.

Tools are being built. Satellites are being launched. Collaborations are deepening. The work is happening now.

"Space alone will not save our planet, but I'm not sure that our planet will be able to sustain and continue to thrive without space," said the executive director of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF), Christian Feichtinger.

Climate scientists in the United States are to be cut off from satellite data measuring the amount of sea ice — a sensitive barometer of climate change — as the U.S. Department of Defense announces plans to cancel processing of the data for scientific research.

The changes are the latest attacks by the U.S. government on science and the funding of scientific research in an effort to slash the budget to enable tax cuts elsewhere. Already, these attacks have seen the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Science Foundation evicted from their offices, references to climate science removed from websites, funding of data for hurricane forecasts cancelled, and dozens of NASA missions under threat and their project teams asked to produce close-down plans as the space agency's budget is slashed.

Now, scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), based at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who have been using data from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder (SSMIS) that is flown on a series of satellites that form the United States Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, have been told they will soon no longer have access to that data. SSMIS is a microwave radiometer that can scan Earth for ice coverage on land and sea. The Department of Defense uses this data for planning deployments of its own ships, but it has always made the processed data available to scientists, too — until now.

In an announcement on June 24, the Department of Defense declared that the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center operated by the U.S. Navy would cease the real-time processing and stop supplying scientists with the sea-ice data, although NPR reports that, following an outcry at the suddenness of this decision, it has been put back to the end of July.

Politics aside, purely from a scientific point of view, this is madness. The sea-ice index, which charts how much ice is covering the ocean in the Arctic and Antarctic, is strongly dependent upon global warming, with increasing average temperatures both in the ocean and in the atmosphere leading to more sea-ice melting. Sea ice acts as a buffer to slow or even prevent the melting of large glaciers; remove that buffer and catastrophic melting of glaciers moves one big step closer, threatening dangerous sea level rises. Without the ability to track the sea ice, scientists are blinded to one of the most significant measures of climate change and become unable to tell how close we are getting to the brink.

But there's even a commercial side to knowing how much sea ice is present on our oceans. The fewer icebergs there are, the closer cargo ships can sail around the north pole, allowing them to take shorter, faster routes.

Of course, the United States is not the only country to operate climate instruments on satellites. For instance, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has a satellite called Shizuku, more formally known as the Global Change Observation Mission-Water (GCOM-W). On board Shizuku is an instrument called the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2, or AMSRS-2, which does pretty much the same job as SSMIS.

Researchers at NSIDC had already been looking to transfer over to AMSRS-2 data, perhaps having got wind that the Department of Defense's decision was coming down the pipeline. But the switch will take time for the calibration of the instrument and data with NSIDC's systems, leading to a gap in scientists' data — a blind spot in our monitoring of the climate that we can ill afford.