Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news that impacts science and scientists.

Astronomy is a field of temporal extremes. Some phenomena—the birth of stars, the ballet of galaxies within clusters, the growth of the Universe—take place over millions or billions of years, timescales too vast for the human mind to easily comprehend. Other events can happen in quick bursts that take you by surprise: Asteroids and comets flash by, a star goes supernova, pulsar beams sweep past at dizzying speeds, an exoplanet whips around a star in just a few hours.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is designed to watch it all.

The telescope, funded by the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy, has been 3 decades in the making, and it just released its first science images. Taken by a digital camera the size of a car in just over 10 hours of test observations, these images captured millions of galaxies and Milky Way stars and thousands of solar system asteroids.

The first look is…wow. Just wow. Take a look:

Named after pioneering dark matter astronomer Vera C. Rubin, the telescope has a 10-year primary mission during which it will create a wide-frame, ultra-high definition time-lapse record of the Universe.

From its perch atop Cerro Pachón in Chile, it will take thousands of images of the Southern Hemisphere sky every night and map the trajectories of millions of asteroids, comets, and interstellar objects in the solar system, enhancing planetary defense efforts. It will record the locations, distances, and brightness changes in distant supernovae, allowing for more precise calculations of the expansion rate of the Universe and deepening our understanding of mysterious dark matter and dark energy. And it might even help conclusively determine whether, and where, a large planet lurks in the far reaches of our own solar system.

And that’s just what we expect to see. Most scientists would say that the most exciting discoveries are the ones that they never even thought of before, the “unknown unknowns.” Humanity has never had a telescope quite like this one, and gosh, we just can’t wait to see what amazing discoveries are just around the corner!

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story idea about science or scientists? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org.

Text © 2025. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.

Climate.gov, NOAA’s portal to the work of their Climate Program Office, will likely soon shut down as most of the staff charged with maintaining it were fired on 31 May, according to The Guardian. The site is funded through a large NOAA contract that also includes other programs. A NOAA manager told now-former employees of a directive “from above” demanding that the contract remove funding for the 10-person climate.gov team.

“It was a very deliberate, targeted attack,” Rebecca Lindsey, the former program manager for climate.gov, told The Guardian. Lindsey was fired in February as part of the government’s purge of probationary employees. She said that the fate of the website had been under debate for months, with political appointees arguing for its removal and career staffers defending it.

“We operated exactly how you would want an independent, non-partisan communications group to operate,” Lindsey said. “It does seem to be part of this sort of slow and quiet way of trying to keep science agencies from providing information to the American public about climate.”

Another former NOAA employee noted that the climate.gov purge spared two website developers. For some, this raised concerns that the climate.gov site might survive, but host anti-science content and misinformation under the guise of a once-trusted source of climate science.

This move comes amid a slew of other anti-science actions from the Trump Administration, including blocking EPA science funding, halting maintenance of key Arctic data, removing access to longstanding NOAA datasets, proposing to slash NASA’s Earth science funding, and pulling U.S. scientists out of domestic and international climate change reports.

“Hiding the impacts of climate change won’t stop it from happening,” said one former NOAA contractor, “it will just make us far less prepared when it does.”

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org.

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Next time you explore a beach or a desert, look down at the sand. You might spot patches of small ripples just a few centimeters tall. Wind can shape these miniature dunes in less than half an hour and blow them away just as quickly. Unlike the processes that form larger dunes that define desert landscapes and shorelines, those that shape mini dunes have been elusive.

“There have been some observations of such small, meter-scale bedforms, but not many quantitative studies,” said Camille Rambert, a doctoral student at École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris and lead author on the new research. “And there have not been any models to explain their formation.”

Recently, a group of researchers used high-resolution laser scanning in the Namib Desert in Namibia to watch how tiny dunes form. Those scans informed dune formation models, which found that the key factor is how sand grains bounce on smooth versus grainy surfaces.

Blowing in the Wind

Although small sand bedforms are a common phenomenon in most sandy places, their ephemeral nature has made it challenging for geomorphologists to decode what makes a small dune form where only flat, featureless sand exists.

A team of researchers, including Rambert, set out to the Namib Desert in coastal southern Africa seeking to understand how these bedforms take shape. The team used a laser scanner sitting on the surface to collect repeated high-resolution topographic maps of nearby flat areas, roughly 5 meters wide × 5 meters long, nestled between larger dunes. The scanner measured the distance from the laser emitter to the ground and also measured near-surface wind speed and direction. The team could detect vertical changes to the surface of about half a millimeter and horizontal changes of about a centimeter.

“From those measurements, we can deduce how bedforms evolve,” Rambert said. “Do they grow and migrate, or do they shrink?”

They developed a mini dune formation model on the basis of well-established physics governing large dune formation, but with a key twist: The small dunes started on consolidated surfaces like gravel or hard-packed sand rather than on an erodible foundation such as loose sand. That difference altered how far wind could transport a sand grain and how the grain bounced or stuck when it landed.

“This difference in surface materials affects the sand transport,” Rambert said. “More sand can be transported on a consolidated surface than on the erodible surface.”

If a grain wasn’t swept away by the next gust of wind, its presence made the surface a little rougher and more likely to trap the next grain of sand—and the next. The gradual buildup of grains into tiny bumps altered near-surface wind patterns, which helped trap even more sand and created distinctive dune patterns in the bedform.

These patches of mini dunes disappeared when a strong enough wind blew the sand grains off the consolidated surface. If the wind had been gentler, those patches might have continued growing.

The team found that their model observations accurately portrayed what they saw in the laser scans from the Namib. They published these results in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

“This study highlights the importance of bed heterogeneities, such as whether a surface is sand covered or not, in how meter-scale bedforms evolve,” Joel Davis, a planetary geologist at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom, wrote in an email. Davis was not involved with the research. “It’s intriguing [that] those small-scale variations in dynamics…could influence whether these small bedforms become a larger dune field, or simply disappear.”

Dunes Beyond Earth

Scientists have discovered dunes on both Mars and Saturn’s moon Titan, but the instruments that have explored those distant worlds are far less advanced than the laser scanners on Earth.

“Studies like these, on the dynamics of Earth dunes, are particularly useful for investigating dunes in a planetary setting, such as on Mars or Titan,” wrote Davis, who studies Martian dunes.

Some of Mars’s dunes form inside craters, which presumably trap a lot of loose sand, but they are also found outside the craters in less sandy areas. “We don’t really know why they have formed in these locations, but perhaps bed heterogeneities are a control on this,” Davis wrote. “It would be interesting to see if we could identify any metre-scale bedforms in these expansive interdune areas of Mars…similar to the Namibia examples.”

What’s more, Earth’s dunes tend to be either very short (centimeters) or very long (tens to hundreds of meters). Though hundreds of dunes near Mars’s north pole are the same shape as Earth dunes, most of them are 1–2 meters long. Planetary geologists are still puzzling over this.

“This is a hotly debated topic that is rapidly evolving,” wrote Lior Rubanenko in an email. Rubanenko is a planetary surfaces researcher at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., who was not involved with the new research.

“Mars, and also other planetary bodies such as Titan, are, in a way, laboratories where the physical conditions are different than on Earth­—different atmospheric density, different grain size and material type,” Rubanenko wrote. “This allows us to conduct and observe ‘planet-size’ experiments which challenge our current paradigms.”

“Comparing observations of dunes between these planets can help us better understand the mechanisms that govern sand transport and dune formation,” he added.

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer

Citation: Cartier, K. M. S. (2025), Mini dunes form when sand stops bouncing, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250216. Published on 11 June 2025.

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Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.

In a move that worried politicians and space scientists alike, President Trump announced on 31 May that he will withdraw his nomination of Jared Isaacman for the position of NASA administrator, according to Semafor. Isaacman’s nomination received bipartisan support and he was expected to easily pass a Senate confirmation vote in a few days.

Trump cited a “thorough review of prior associations” as the reason for withdrawing the nomination. It was not immediately clear whether he was referring to Isaacman’s past donations to Democrats or his ongoing associations with former DOGE head and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who spent the weekend distancing himself from the president. Both of these associations were public at the time of Isaacman’s nomination.

Isaacman, a billionaire, private astronaut, and CEO of credit processing company Shift4 Payments, was questioned by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in a nomination hearing in April. Despite a few contentious moments regarding Isaacman’s association with Musk and some waffling over NASA’s Moon-to-Mars plan, the committee ultimately approved Isaacman’s nomination with strong bipartisan support.

When Trump announced Isaacman’s nomination in December 2024, very early for a NASA administrator, space scientists greeted the news with cautious optimism. Isaacman had vocally expressed support for the imperiled Chandra X-ray Observatory, and is a known space enthusiast.

Now, with the withdrawal of his nomination just days after a president’s budget request that would devastate Earth and space science, scientists fear for the future of NASA.

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org.

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Ammonia released from penguin poop helps produce cloud-seeding aerosols in Antarctica, which can affect local climate by increasing cloud formation. The discovery came when scientists measured air downwind of two colonies of Adélie penguins on the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Penguin poop emitted 100–1,000 times baseline levels of ammonia. New aerosol particles formed when that ammonia mixed with sulfur compounds from marine phytoplankton. The research was published in Communications Earth & Environment.

“This shows a deep connection between the natural ecosystem emissions and atmospheric processes, where emissions from both local seabird and penguin colonies and marine microbiology have a synergistic role that can impact clouds and climate,” said Matthew Boyer, a doctoral student in atmospheric science at the University of Helsinki in Finland and lead author of the study.

Strong Whiffs of Ammonia

Although only trace amounts of ammonia exist in Earth’s atmosphere, scientists have found that when it mixes with certain sulfur compounds it creates ultrafine particles (<0.1 micrometer in size). Those aerosols can grow into cloud condensation nuclei.

“Aerosol particles are necessary for cloud formation; liquid water will not condense to form cloud droplets without the presence of aerosol particles,” Boyer explained.

The presence of these aerosols is especially important in pristine environments such as Antarctica that have low background levels of cloud-forming particles.

“The new particle formation process doesn’t strictly need ammonia to proceed, but ammonia boosts the rate of the process considerably—up to 1,000 times faster,” Boyer said. Gases emitted from natural sources such as penguins and the ocean are an important source of aerosols in the region, he added.

But the extremely low concentrations of gaseous ammonia, combined with the remoteness of Antarctica, have made understanding this cloud formation pathway challenging.

To tackle this problem, the researchers set up atmospheric samplers on the ground near Argentina’s Marambio Station, located on Seymour Island near the northernmost tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Two large colonies of Adélie penguins nested a few kilometers away, one with about 30,000 breeding pairs and another with roughly 15,000 penguin pairs, as well as 800 cormorant pairs.

From 10 January to 20 March 2023 (during austral summer), the team measured concentrations of ammonia, fine aerosol particles, and larger cloud condensation nuclei, as well as relative abundance of certain elements, cloud droplet distribution, and other atmospheric properties. By late February, the penguins left their breeding grounds and traveled to their wintering site, enabling the researchers to analyze the atmosphere with and without the birds present.

When wind blew air from the nesting grounds to the monitoring station, the team found that the penguin colonies emitted up to 13.5 parts per billion of ammonia, more than 1,000 times more than background levels without poop. However, when winds blew in from the sea, the Southern Ocean was a “negligible” source of ammonia.

Even after the penguins migrated, the poop they left behind continued to elevate ammonia to 100 times higher than background levels, which was the most surprising discovery for Boyer.

“This means that the footprint of ammonia emissions from penguins may cover more area of coastal Antarctica than indicated by the location of their colonies alone,” he said.

The team found that 30 times more aerosol particles formed when gaseous ammonia mixed with sulfuric gases released by marine phytoplankton. When that combination then mixed with dimethylamine gas, also emitted by penguin poop, aerosol formation increased 10,000-fold.

Gaseous ammonia lasts only a few hours in the atmosphere, but the aerosol particles it creates can survive for several days. Under the right wind conditions, those particles could travel out over the Southern Ocean and generate clouds where cloud condensation nuclei sources are limited.

The new results align with past research that examined the impact of Arctic seabirds on atmosphere and climate. They also agree with past laboratory and modeling studies of Antarctic cloud formation, which have been considered more reliable in the past than in situ measurements.

“Measuring ammonia on its own under normal circumstances can be tricky,” said Greg Wentworth, an atmospheric scientist with the government of Alberta in Canada who was not involved with the new research. “To do all the sophisticated measurements required to tease apart the details of new particle formation is remarkable, especially since they did this at the ends of the Earth!”

Penguin Feedback Loops

“This study provides the most compelling evidence to date that ammonia and sulfur compounds…are an important source of cloud condensation nuclei during summertime in Antarctica,” Wentworth added. “How remarkable is it that emissions from penguin poop and phytoplankton can kick-start chemistry in the atmosphere that can alter clouds and affect climate?”

The polar regions are experiencing dangerous levels of warming, and more cloud cover can help cool things down…sometimes. Higher concentrations of aerosol particles tend to create thicker, low-atmosphere clouds that are more reflective and can cool the surface, Boyer said. Thinner clouds high in the atmosphere tend to trap heat and warm the surface.

Understanding whether seabirds generate aerosols at a consistent, high-enough rate to cool local climate would require more atmospheric monitoring and climate modeling, he added.

A connection between penguins and their environment means that when one is threatened, both feel the impacts. As climate change warms the polar regions and endangers the species that live there, the loss of those species could reduce cloud cover and further accelerate warming.

“It’s important to understand how ecosystems, especially sensitive ones in remote regions, will respond to climate change,” Wentworth said. “It’s doubly important to understand those changes when components of those ecosystems also impact climate change.”

“The more we understand about specific processes that impact ecosystems and climate change, the better we can predict and adapt to change,” Wentworth said.

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer

Citation: Cartier, K. M. S. (2025), Pungent penguin poop produces polar cloud particles, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250201. Published on 22 May 2025.

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Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.

Early on 22 May, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a massive GOP-backed bill that seeks to push forward President Trump’s domestic policy agenda. Within the bill’s 1,082 pages are sweeping repeals of regulations that defend the environment, mitigate climate change, and protect public health.

In their place, the bill promotes fossil fuel production and burning; scales back safety net programs such as Medicaid and supplemental nutrition and assistance program (SNAP); rescinds funds and blocks plans for natural resource management; reforms student loan lending and repayment; advances aggressive anti-immigration policies; and funds tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy.

Some of the Earth science-related provisions in the bill would:

• Rescind unused funding allocated to maintain facilities for NOAA and the National Marine Sanctuary;
• Bring an earlier end to clean energy tax credits and subsidies provided under the Inflation Reduction Act;
• Repeal rules related to vehicles’ greenhouse gas emissions and vehicle fuel economy standards;
• Rescind Clean Air Act funds related to environmental and climate justice, as well as other funds meant to reduce or regulate greenhouse gas emissions, improve air quality at schools, and require businesses to publicly report their carbon footprints;
• Rescind funds that would have invested in coastal communities to build climate resilience, and that helped U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service protect federal land;
• Interfere with several states’ plans to manage their own resources, including in Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and along the Colorado River;
• Enhance timber production and logging on National Forest Service lands and allow mineral mining in Alaska to move forward.

The bill passed by a 1-vote margin in the House (215-214). It now moves to the Senate, where it is expected to face additional opposition from the Democratic Party and GOP deficit hawks.

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org.

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Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.

The Trump administration has blocked funding for the EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD), the agency’s main science division.

An email sent 7 May and first reported by E&E News said that research laboratory funding had been stopped except for requests related to health and safety. Nature then obtained additional internal e-mails regarding the funding freeze which were confirmed by anonymous EPA sources.

“Lab research will wind down over the next few weeks as we will no longer have the capability to acquire supplies and materials,” one of the emails said.

The freeze appears to disregard a Congressional spending agreement that guaranteed EPA funding at 2024 levels through September.

On 2 May, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced a “reorganization” within the EPA to ensure that its research “directly advances statutory obligations and mission-essential functions.” Zeldin assured members of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology that ORD would not experience significant changes during the reorganization, and this latest funding freeze seems to break that promise.

“We are unsure if these laboratory activities will continue post-reorganization,” the 7 May email stated. “Time and funding would be needed to reconstitute activities.”

The EPA told E&E News that the email was “factually inaccurate” and that ORD is not part of the planned reorganization.

But Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, who served as principal deputy assistant administrator at ORD during Trump’s first presidency, said that “They have basically shut ORD down by cutting off the money.”

The 2 May reorganization announcement also included a deadline for the nearly 1,500 ORD staff to either apply for a new position within the EPA, retire, or resign. That deadline is at 11:59 on 9 May. Fewer than 500 new jobs have been posted at the agency, and hundreds of EPA employees have already been fired.

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org.

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Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.

In a joint statement yesterday, Mexican and U.S. officials announced that Mexico will immediately transfer some of its water reserves to the United States and also allow a larger share of the Rio Grande River to flow into the United States. This concession from Mexico, which will last through at least October, seems to have averted the threat of additional tariffs and sanctions threatened by President Trump in early April.

Mexico and the United States share several major rivers, including the Rio Grande, the Colorado, and the Tijuana. Control over how much water each country receives from these rivers was set in a 1944 treaty. Under the treaty, Mexico must deliver 1.75 million acre-feet of water to the United States from six tributaries every 5 years, or an average of 350,000 acre-feet every year (An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to cover 1 acre of land to a depth of 1 foot.)

The United States and Mexico renegotiated parts of the treaty last year under the Biden Administration, allowing Mexico to meet its treaty obligations with water from other rivers, tributaries, or reserves. Yesterday’s announcement marks a commitment from Mexico to adhere to the amended treaty, rather than striking a new deal.

As climate change has worsened drought conditions in Mexico the country has struggled to meet the obligations of the treaty while supporting its farmers. Mexico’s current water debt to the United States is roughly 1.3 million acre-feet (420 billion gallons). Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum acknowledged this water debt but said that Mexico has been complying with the treaty to “to the extent of water availability.”

In 2020, tensions over these water deliveries boiled over into violence: Mexican farmers rioted and seized control of a dam near the U.S.-Mexico border to halt deliveries. Mexican officials worry that increasing water deliveries during the hottest and driest months of the year will once again spark civil unrest among farmers.

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org.

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Where do meteorites come from? A new analysis of 75 fall events suggests that meteorites with different geologies travel from different places in the asteroid belt, which separates Mars and Jupiter. Researchers traced some types of meteorites to particular asteroid families, creating a geologic map of meteorite origins. Most meteorites were generated by just a few recent collisions between asteroids.

“Understanding the asteroid belt is really looking into the past, into the formation of the solar system, and into all the dynamics that happened at that time,” said Peter Jenniskens, coauthor on the new analysis and a meteorite astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. Those early interactions and collisions matter because much of the water on Earth and a lot of the organics likely came from primitive asteroids, he added.

Tracking Falls

Spacecraft have returned small volumes of material from the Moon, comets, and asteroids, but meteorites remain the primary way that scientists get their hands on space rocks.

“By reconstructing where specific meteorite types formed, we gain a clearer picture of the compositional and thermal gradients that existed when the solar system was young,” said Michaël Marsset, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory in Santiago, Chile. “This has major implications for understanding how habitable environments emerge, not just here but potentially in other planetary systems as well.” Marsset studies small solar system objects and Earth impactors and was not involved in the new study.

But matching a meteorite to the asteroid it came from is a tall task.

“Asteroids in space look quite a bit different than the meteorites that we have in our laboratories, because the asteroids in space are covered by regolith and debris and they are exposed to solar radiation and solar wind,” Jenniskens said. A meteorite might come from an asteroid’s interior, which could look entirely different from its surface. That makes it challenging to use astronomical observations alone to match meteorites to their asteroid parents.

When someone witnesses a meteorite falling to Earth, scientists can try to backtrack its orbit to a point of origin. Combining this information with the meteorite’s geochemistry, mineralogical structure, and age, they can then figure out which asteroid or asteroid family—a group of asteroids that originate from the same collision event—sent it hurtling toward Earth.

The trouble is that meteorites fall more or less at random, Jenniskens explained. It has taken a while to document enough falls to spot patterns, he said. Just 6 years ago, there were fewer than 40 meteorite falls with well-measured trajectories.

“The number of falls has doubled since that time,” Jenniskens said.

Meteorite researchers have set up more than 2 dozen global camera networks that have detected many of these recent falls—roughly 14 falls per year. Also, the rising popularity of dash cameras and doorbell cameras has contributed to the surge of recent detections.

In the new analysis, about 36 of the 75 falls were recorded by residential security cameras, Jenniskens said. People report fireball sightings and submit videos for analysis. “We really depend on the citizen science.”

Meteorite Ancestry

Jenniskens and his colleague Hadrien Devillepoix of Curtin University in Perth, Australia, reviewed the trajectories, geochemistry, mineralogy, and size of 75 meteorites. They also looked at the meteorites’ ages, calculated on the basis of how long a rock’s surface has been exposed to cosmic rays.

Though a few asteroids are suspected sources of certain meteorite types, a meteorite’s age was often the key factor in figuring out which asteroid family produced the meteorite. The positions and movements of asteroids within a family evolve in a predictable way over time, and if this so-called dynamical age matched a meteorite’s cosmic ray age, that family was more likely to be the meteorite’s source.

Most of the meteorites originated from a handful of asteroid families, and different classes of meteorites could be traced to different parts of the asteroid belt.

Jenniskens and Devillepoix confirmed that very low iron LL-type meteorites, such as the Chelyabinsk meteorite, originated from the extensive Flora family in the inner asteroid belt. They tracked H-type chondrites to debris clusters in the Koronis, Massalia, and Nele families. They also traced low-iron L chondrites to the Hertha asteroid family, rather than to the previously determined Massalia family.

“Hertha is covered by dark rocks that were shock blackened, indicative of an unusually violent collision,” Jenniskens said. “The L chondrites experienced a very violent origin 468 million years ago when these meteorites showered Earth in such numbers that they can be found in the geologic record.”

Marsset has also worked to trace meteorites to their asteroid origins, though his team used astronomical observations of asteroids and numeral modeling, rather than meteorite data. “Even with these different approaches, we’re mostly converging on similar conclusions,” Marsset said. “Where we disagree, well, that’s part of the fun! For example, I’d gladly bet a pint with Dr. Jenniskens and Dr. Devillepoix that L chondrites come from the Massalia family, not Hertha,” he joked.

The team also looked at howardite, eucrite, and diogenite (HED) meteorites, achondrites that have long been tied to the Vesta asteroid family. According to the new analysis, the volume of HED material that made its way to Earth must have come from a collision so large that it only could have happened on Vesta itself. (Vesta is the second-largest object in the asteroid belt.) What’s more, the cosmic ray exposure ages of HED meteorites closely match the ages of particular impact craters on Vesta’s surface that were mapped by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft.

“It turns out that, yes, our HED meteorites seem to come from Vesta, not from its family,” Jenniskens said.

Decoding Solar System History

“What’s remarkable about this work is the broader picture it starts to paint,” Marsset said. “We are finally able to map specific classes of meteorites that fall on Earth to distinct regions in the asteroid belt and to specific asteroid families.… That’s a major step toward understanding the compositional structure of the asteroid belt and, ultimately, how our solar system formed and evolved.”

But it’s just as important to understand where meteorites aren’t coming from, he pointed out.

“While one might expect the meteorite flux to represent a broad sampling of material from across the entire asteroid belt, we now know that it is actually dominated by a few recent fragmentation events,” Marsset said. “This insight helps us better understand the natural sampling bias in the meteorites we collect on Earth, and it also highlights which asteroid populations are underrepresented. That, in turn, can guide the targets of future space missions aimed at filling in those missing pieces.”

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer

Citation: Cartier, K. M. S. (2025), A geologic map of the asteroid belt, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250165. Published on 28 April 2025.

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Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.

Update, 8 May 2025: Six more NOAA products related to marine and climate science have been slated for decommissioning by mid May to June. Three more NOAA tools have been immediately retired, including the increasingly utilized “Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters” product. Some of these data have been archived online.

17 April 2025: NOAA has quietly reported that they will soon decommission 14 datasets, products, and catalogs related to earthquakes and marine, coastal, and estuary science. According to the list, these data sources will be “decommissioned and will no longer be available” by early- to mid-May.

Though NOAA regularly evaluates its data products to ensure they are still relevant, data sources are usually merged with or replaced by other products rather than outright removed. The agency did this just 7 times in 2024 and 6 times in 2023.

On social media, scientists are urging their colleagues to access and download these data before they are removed so that scientific analyses can continue and the value of the data is not lost.

The announcement of the removals comes days after environmental and science groups sued the Trump administration for the removal of climate and environmental justice websites and data.

“The public has a right to access these taxpayer-funded datasets,” Gretchen Goldman, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement about the lawsuit. “From vital information for communities about their exposure to harmful pollution, to data that help local governments build resilience to extreme weather events, the public deserves access to federal datasets. Removing government datasets is tantamount to theft.”

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org.

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In a few weeks, Earth scientists will launch a satellite that will provide unprecedented, high-resolution coverage of some of the most remote and rapidly changing parts of the world. The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) satellite, a joint mission between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), will scan nearly the entire globe twice every 12 days to measure changes in Earth’s ecosystems, cryosphere, and land surface.

“In my eyes, it’s orbiting magic,” said Alex Gardner, a glaciologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., and a member of NISAR’s cryosphere science team. NISAR will provide high-resolution radar imagery that will enable scientists to track glaciers and ice, biodiversity, soil moisture and water placement, and land displacements from events like earthquakes and landslides.

“When there’s an earthquake, and you can see displacements from 500 kilometers up that you wouldn’t even be able to notice if you were standing on the ground…that’s orbiting magic,” Gardner said.

Double Radar

NISAR is currently anticipated to launch in June from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in India. It will be the largest, but not the first, satellite collaboration between NASA and ISRO, explained Paul Rosen, NISAR project scientist at JPL. “We had some other collaborations in both planetary and Earth science, but not at this level of magnitude,” he said.

The satellite will host two synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems that operate at different microwave wavelengths, one longer (L band, at a wavelength of 24 centimeters) and one shorter (S band, at a wavelength of 10 centimeters). SAR is a technique used to create high-resolution images from lower-resolution instruments. The instruments emit continuous pulses of microwave radiation and use the light that bounces back, as well as the time delay, to create backscatter images.

“We made sure that the two radars could work together,” Rosen said. “They’re highly in sync, and we can turn them on together or operate them separately.”

Unlike visible-light imaging, SAR is not limited by the time of day or the weather, explained Deepak Putrevu, an engineer and colead of NISAR’s ISRO science team at the Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad, India. “It uses microwaves for imaging, so that that makes it able to penetrate the clouds and to image even during the nighttime.…The SAR technology enables us to have day and night coverage and all-weather imaging capability.”

NISAR’s orbit will cause it to pass over the same locations every 12 days. Because SAR can map an area both as it approaches (ascending orbit) and departs (descending orbit), NISAR will be able to scan each area twice every 12 days. Each space agency provided one of the radar systems, as well as other components of the satellite, the launch system, and the data management infrastructure.

“We jointly operate the mission and jointly do the science,” Rosen added.

“It’s got a lot to deliver on, but I don’t feel that nervous about it,” Gardner said. “Aspects of these technologies have flown before,” he added. For example, the European Space Agency’s Sentinel satellites carry SAR instruments that have helped scientists understand the cryosphere, Earth surface processes, and ecosystems. But NISAR’s dual radar frequency bands are a first for Earth-observing satellites. The systems will be able to detect changes at different physical scales—L band for large structures and S band for smaller ones—as well as provide higher-resolution images together than can be achieved individually.

Global Surface Changes

One of NISAR’s primary science objectives is to observe changes to the cryosphere and glaciers around the world. That’s Gardner’s wheelhouse.

“Glaciers are just these really fantastic living creatures,” he said. NISAR will monitor seasonal growth and retreat patterns of glaciers around the world, with a special focus on those of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet like Pine Island and Thwaites.

“They just have such large societal consequence that there’ll be a lot of attention there,” Gardner explained. More broadly, he said, those seasonal patterns can be a good predictor of long-term changes in the cryosphere.

NISAR will also be able to observe the vertical displacements of ice sheets, which Gardner said will allow cryosphere scientists to map where floating ice sheets meet grounded ice, a boundary called the grounding line.

“It’s really hard to measure, and it’s been done locally but not really at large scale,” he said. “We can watch that position of that grounding line change with time, which is an indicator of vulnerability” to warming temperatures.

NISAR will also measure global biodiversity and soil moisture. The two radar frequency bands will be especially helpful with this, Putrevu explained. “With forest biomass, the L-band system will be able to see the dense forest with more sensitivity. But when we use the S-band system, you can use it for sparse vegetation, as well.”

The SAR systems will be able to see through crop cover and measure soil moisture, Putrevu added, which will provide key information for farmers and agribusiness. He also highlighted the importance of closely monitoring changes in land deformation, which might suggest imminent earthquakes or landslides.

“All the applications have a societal benefit attached,” Putrevu said. “It gives a great deal of satisfaction that this will actually be useful for society.”

A Data Deluge

After launch, it will take 90 days for the satellite to conduct its commissioning tests and reach its science orbit. “But as we progress, we’re going to get little peeks behind the curtains that we are going to be so enthusiastic about as we see the imagery start to really mature, and the data processing mature, the data acquisition mature,” Gardner explained. “There’ll be a progression from a first light image to science ready data.”

Every pass of the satellite will provide an order of magnitude more data than past satellites have delivered. Much of the final preparation before launch has involved developing the infrastructure needed to efficiently receive, process, and make available such large quantities of data.

“Once NISAR comes online, the sheer volume of new data that we’re going to be dealing with requires the development of novel tools,” Gardner said. “NISAR is really leaning into cloud architecture” for data storage, availability, and computing, so that users don’t have to download massive quantities of data to individual servers. “Moving data around is one of the largest bottlenecks with missions like this.”

“We have been preparing for the last couple years to get all of our algorithms working really efficiently in the cloud,” Gardner said, “so that when the fire hose of data comes online, we can get in there, plug into that data stream, and benefit from it really early on.”

Putrevu said that scientists and students across India have been participating in workshops since 2014 to learn how to access, process, and produce science from NISAR’s data. “That shows how the community is getting geared up to use the data,” he said. “Everyone is eagerly looking forward to [launch] day.”

Because the volume of information requires such novel processing tools, Gardner cautioned that it might be a year or two before NISAR data yield new scientific outcomes. The mission’s nominal lifetime is 3 years, and once the analysis gets up to speed, discoveries derived from those data will likely continue for decades.

“Without a doubt, it will be a legacy dataset,” Gardner said. “It’s going to be transformational.”

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer

Correction 22 April 2025: NISAR’s launch date has been updated.

Citation: Cartier, K. M. S. (2025), “Transformational” satellite will monitor Earth’s surface changes, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250140. Published on 17 April 2025.

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Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.

The initial draft of President Donald Trump’s budget request proposes devastating cuts to NASA’s science research, future space missions, and field centers. The draft budget request, reported by Ars Technica and The Washington Post, proposes an overall 20% cut to NASA’s budget, from about $25 billion to $20 billion.

“This is an extinction-level event for NASA science,” Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Planetary Society, told The Washington Post. “It needlessly terminates functional, productive science missions and cancels new missions currently being built, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars in the process. This is neither efficient nor smart budgeting.”

The overwhelming majority of the cuts would come from NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD), which would face a more than 50% cut from $7.5 billion to just $3.9 billion. This division includes all planetary science, Earth science, astrophysics, heliophysics, and biological and physical science research.

The draft budget request proposes a 68% cut to astrophysics (from $1.5 billion to $487 million), a more than 43% cut to heliophysics (from $805 million to $455 million), a 30% cut to planetary science (from $2.7 billion to $1.9 billion), and a 53% cut to Earth science (from $2.2 billion to $1.033 billion).

The proposal retains funding for the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, but kills funding for the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is fully assembled, on budget, and on schedule to launch in 2 years.

Also on the chopping block are the funding for the DAVINCI+ mission to Venus and the Mars Sample Return joint mission with the European Space Agency, which has been a budgetary flashpoint for years.

NASA’s Earth science division within SMD is home to NASA’s Earth observing satellite programs and climate research. Combined with continued attacks on NOAA and the National Weather Service, such steep budget cuts to NASA Earth science would nearly eliminate the United States’s capacity to study climate change and protect people from increasingly severe climate impacts.

The draft budget also appears to seek to force the closure of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., which employs more than 10,000 civil servants and contractors.

“NASA Goddard and the NASA science missions are critical to discovering the secrets of the universe and the planet we live on and have a direct bearing on our leadership in technological innovation and our national security,” wrote U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) in a statement. Van Hollen is the Ranking Member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies.

“This is a wholly unserious budget proposal,” Van Hollen noted. “I will fight tooth and nail against these cuts and to protect the critical work being done at NASA Goddard.”

On 9 April, Jared Isaacman, Trump’s nominee for NASA administrator, said in his Senate hearing that he had no knowledge of any planned budget cuts to NASA and had no present intentions of cancelling existing programs. Notably, he did not commit to keeping all NASA field centers open given multiple chances to do so. Isaacman repeatedly emphasized that he was committed to ensuring U.S. dominance in the space race against China, which also seeks to put humans on the Moon and Mars, as well as expand its exploration science program throughout the solar system. These budget cuts would make that goal much harder to achieve.

The draft containing these proposed cuts, known as “passback” documents, were given to NASA officials on 10 April (though rumors of these cuts circulated in early March). NASA typically has 72 hours to review the documents and submit appeals with justifications, which are incorporated into the official President’s Budget Request. If adopted as is, this President’s Budget Request for NASA would be the lowest (adjusted for inflation) since 1961, before the start of the Apollo program.

“NASA Goddard and the NASA science missions are critical to discovering the secrets of the universe and the planet we live on and have a direct bearing on our leadership in technological innovation and our national security,” according to Van Hollen. “To gut NASA Goddard and the NASA Science Mission Directorate is not just shortsighted, it’s dangerous.”

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org.

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After decades of nondetections and tantalizing maybes, astronomers have definitively detected an aurora on Neptune. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers detected an infrared auroral glow and the spectral signature of a key tracer of aurorae in Neptune’s upper atmosphere for the first time. The spectrum of this ionized molecule also suggests that Neptune’s upper atmosphere has cooled significantly since Voyager 2’s flyby 34 years ago.

Aurorae have been seen on planets and moons throughout the solar system. Theories predicted that Neptune should have aurorae, too, but previous attempts to detect them failed, said Henrik Melin, a planetary aurora researcher at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom (U.K.).

“I’ve spent many, many nights up a mountain trying to detect this stuff using ground-based telescopes. You spend four nights staring at Neptune, and you see nothing,” Melin said.

This auroral detection is “completing the set” of giant planet aurorae, he added. “We have Jupiter, we have Saturn, we have Uranus. We now have Neptune.”

Chilly Aurora

Aurorae occur when charged particles from the solar wind or a nearby volcanic moon, for example, interact with a body’s magnetosphere and upper atmosphere. Some aurorae glow in visible light, like on Earth and some of Jupiter’s moons. Mercury’s aurorae shine in X-ray light.

On planets with hydrogen-dominated atmospheres like Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, aurorae typically glow in the infrared or ultraviolet and are traced by the presence of the trihydrogen cation (H₃⁺). Anywhere they occur, aurorae can help scientists understand the inner workings of a planet’s magnetosphere.

“Auroral emissions provide important insight into the space environment of a planet, and this is particularly important for Neptune, which has a very bizarre magnetic field,” said Jonathan Nichols, a planetary aurora researcher at the University of Leicester in the U.K. who was not involved with the new discovery.

Voyager 2’s brief 1989 flyby suggested that Neptune’s magnetic field is both tilted from its axis of rotation and offset from the center of the planet. The flyby also detected some hints of a possible aurora that astronomers have been hoping to confirm ever since. Models of Neptune’s atmosphere and magnetic field have suggested that Neptune’s aurorae should also be traceable by H₃⁺ and have even predicted the longitudes at which they should appear. But detecting the aurorae proved elusive.

In June 2023, Melin and his colleagues obtained near-infrared JWST spectra of Neptune, originally intending to explore the circulation of Neptune’s middle atmosphere. The observations unexpectedly revealed an infrared auroral glow as well as a shockingly clear infrared spectrum of H₃⁺ emitted by the planet’s upper atmosphere.

The intensity of the H₃⁺ spectrum suggests that the upper atmosphere generating the aurora is 85°C (358 K), a significant cooldown from the 477°C (750 K) temperature measured by Voyager 2.

“That was quite a surprise,” Melin said.

Neptune’s seasons are roughly 41 Earth years long, so this dramatic cooling took place faster than the seasonal timescale. The researchers don’t yet understand what might be driving the cooldown, Melin said, though it is likely unrelated to the unseasonably cool summer observed elsewhere in Neptune’s atmosphere.

“The consequence of these really cold temperatures means that the auroral emissions are extremely faint,” Melin said. That explains why Neptune’s aurorae eluded the gazes of ground- and space-based telescopes before. “It was just really, really cold.”

“It’s great to see this addition to the family portrait of solar system auroras,” Nichols said. “Now we know how bright the infrared emission is, we can work out the intensity in other wavelengths such as ultraviolet, and we can run models to see what the upper atmosphere is like.”

The researchers published this discovery in Nature Astronomy.

A Neptunian Day

These JWST data were clear enough to trace aurorae to specific latitudes and longitudes, “producing the first map of the aurora at Neptune,” Melin said.

What’s more, the aurorae appeared at the exact longitudes in the southern hemisphere predicted by long-standing theories.

“This was not a given,” Nichols explained, “since the length of the planet’s day was determined more than 3 decades ago, and the uncertainty was such that we were supposed to have lost track of what the time is at any point on Neptune.” (Uncertainty in planetary day lengths is pretty common.)

“But it appears as if it is more accurate than we thought!” Nichols added.

Later this year, the team will point JWST at Neptune several times over the course of a month to learn more about what drives its aurorae and how the planet’s magnetosphere responds to different levels of solar activity.

“By studying the morphology of the aurorae and its changes over time, we can figure out what drives it,” Melin said. The team needs more data to do that, “but this is the tantalizing starting point of really getting to understand Neptune.”

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer

This news article is included in our ENGAGE resource for educators seeking science news for their classroom lessons. Browse all ENGAGE articles, and share with your fellow educators how you integrated the article into an activity in the comments section below.

Citation: Cartier, K. M. S. (2025), After 30-year search, scientists finally find an aurora on Neptune, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250130. Published on 10 April 2025.

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Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.

In late February, delegates from more than 190 countries met in Hangzhou, China to make preliminary decisions about the timing and content of the seventh assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Trump administration barred U.S. delegates from attending the February meeting, one step among many the president has taken to abandon America’s global leadership on climate change.

The IPCC is a United Nations body that reviews the science behind climate change. Since 1990, the group has produced assessment reports that evaluate the latest developments in climate science, impacts, adaptation, and mitigation. The reports also assess whether counties are doing enough to combat the climate crisis (spoiler: not nearly enough) and play an important role in influencing climate policy around the world. Those reports depend on the contributions of scientific experts nominated by IPCC member countries and Observer Organizations.

To supplement nominations by the federal government, the U.S. Academic Alliance for the IPCC (USAA-IPCC) is facilitating nominations to the seventh assessment cycle for the IPCC. The alliance is a network of U.S. universities that are registered observers with the IPCC and is hosted by AGU, which publishes Eos. U.S. researchers can submit materials to self-nominate as experts, authors, and review editors for the next IPCC assessment report.

“This new alliance will help the U.S. maintain a preeminent position in global science-policy assessments,” Pamela McElwee, professor of human ecology at Rutgers University and chair of the USAA-IPCC steering committee, said in a statement. “The benefits to U.S. researchers from involvement in the IPCC are tremendous, and we want to ensure that our scientists continue to play an important leadership role internationally.”

Nominations are open through Friday, 4 April. U.S.-based experts in climate research or practice who are U.S. citizens are eligible. Learn more about the nomination process here and at the video below:

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer

Correction 1 April 2025: An earlier version of this article mistakenly listed AGU as an IPCC Official Observer and has been edited to clarify.

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Boots On the Ground

In mid-January, a team of scientists were sailing aboard a research vessel in frigid Antarctic waters. They planned to investigate an unexplored section of the Bellingshausen Sea and the creatures that live there, but were stymied by more sea ice than they expected.

“We found ourselves restricted to a smaller area,” said Patricia Esquete, a marine biologist at the Universidade de Aveiro in Portugal and expedition co–chief scientist. “Instead of Bellingshausen Sea, we were restricted to the Ronne Entrance.” The team made the most of the situation, and their research vessel, Schmidt Ocean Institute’s R/V Falkor (too), settled in to conduct science operations in front of the ice shelf.

While checking satellite images of sea ice extent, they noticed that a crack had formed along the edge of the George VI ice shelf about 30 kilometers from their location. They jotted it down but didn’t worry about any dangers it posed. Such cracks can take weeks or months to fully force a break from the shelf and form an iceberg, Esquete explained.

But when the next batch of satellite images came through a few days later, the team was surprised to see that a 510-square-kilometer (209-square-mile) iceberg had broken off and was drifting along (and occasionally bumping against) the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. The departure of the Chicago-sized iceberg, A-84, revealed a patch of polar seafloor that had been covered by ice for years, and possibly centuries.

“As soon as we realized that the iceberg had moved on and left that space for us to sample, we immediately decided to go there and see [what] the seafloor looks like under the ice,” Esquete said. When they arrived, they found a thriving ecosystem rivaling those in nutrient-rich open waters.

Luck and Daring

Before A-84 calved, the team was poised to document the biodiversity of a nearby deep-sea ecosystem, collect sediment samples, study underwater ocean dynamics, and create seafloor maps.

“A holy grail for oceanography is not only mapping the entirety of the deep seabed in high resolution in terms of its shape and structure, but also in terms of specifically what lives there and how,” said Dawn Wright, an oceanographer and chief scientist at Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri) in Redlands, Calif., who was not involved with this expedition.

Sea ice impedes that goal: Research vessels can’t get too close to the ice shelf, and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles can travel only so far from the ship to explore under the ice.

The procedures involved in securing funding and scheduling a ship can make seagoing research in the Antarctic a slow process, explained Joan Bernhard, a biological oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Planning an expedition like the one in January can take years or even decades, with few exceptions.

Some expeditions have been able to mobilize when seafloor is newly exposed. After Larsen C calved in 2017, for example, research vessels arrived in the area about a year later—much faster than average. Changes at the surface take time to affect the seafloor, but even with such a quick response time, researchers still missed the opportunity to establish a precalving baseline.

After most calvings, “any newly exposed seafloor will have been subject to open-water conditions for years; currents could import alien species potentially impactful to indigenous taxa,” said Bernhard, who was not involved with the Falkor (too) expedition.

Iceberg A-84 calved on 13 January. Falkor (too) reached the newly exposed seafloor just 12 days later.

After relocating, the researchers conducted the same suite of science observations they had originally planned, just in the newly exposed location. Thanks to the quick pivot, the team was able to observe the area as if it were still covered by the ice—an “incredibly rare” opportunity, Bernhard said.

“In my view, nowhere has serendipity in ocean science proved more critical,” Wright said of the expedition. Operating in those conditions is hard enough, and it’s even tougher to be in the right place at the right time, she added.

Esquete acknowledged the expedition’s fortune. “Good luck played a huge role. We cannot deny that,” she said. “But there’s also value in daring to explore the unexplored.” The team would have missed the opportunity had they not already been exploring one of the most remote parts of the world.

Thriving Beneath the Ice

The researchers collected sediment samples, used lidar to create bathymetric maps, and studied the water column and ocean currents. They are still analyzing those data. They also deployed the ROV SuBastian to document the biodiversity of the deep sea and found a thriving ecosystem spanning the trophic web: corals, sponges, invertebrates, cephalopods, king crabs, and krill, as well as a few unknown species.

“I was excited to see what appeared to be meter-tall sponges, ‘giant’ pycnogonids (sea spiders), and large ophiuroids (brittle stars), all similar to those known from the McMurdo Sound region,” Bernhard said.

“What surprised me was the sheer variety of organisms that were found, as well as the huge sizes of some of the deep-sea sponges that had apparently been growing for hundreds of years under such harsh Antarctic conditions,” Wright said.

What’s more, the team found several species that filled discrete ecological niches, which suggested that the ice-covered ecosystem received a steady, high-level influx of nutrients and may have been there for a while, Esquete said.

“Basically, we found the same type of ecosystems that you can expect in that area of the Bellingshausen Sea,” Esquete said. But unlike the other areas the team studied, this ecosystem thrived “in an area that’s been permanently covered by ice for probably centuries.”

That in itself was surprising, she said. Most deep-sea ecosystems that aren’t covered by thick ice receive nutrients that trickle down from photosynthetic organisms near the surface. Scientists think that nutrients carried on deep-sea currents supply nutrients to benthic ecosystems where ice prevents top-down nutrient delivery.

“I was mildly surprised by the plethora of sea anemones on a boulder adjacent to a barrel sponge because all are filter feeders,” Bernhard said. “Such abundance implies currents are strong enough to transport sufficient organic matter to this area.”

A Future Without Ice

The Falkor (too) researchers returned to the mainland after weeks studying the newly discovered Bellingshausen habitat. They already hope for a return trip to investigate how that patch of seafloor changes now that its icy cover has drifted off. Nutrients trickling down from photosynthetic algae might now be available, but the ecosystem has already adapted to and thrived on a lower nutrient supply.

“Open-water conditions may imperil these ecosystems,” Bernhard said. “More settlement of organics to the seafloor…could cause an ecological imbalance.”

As climate change melts Antarctic ice, this ecosystem could be a bellwether for changes across polar ecosystems.

“The accelerating loss of polar ice that protects these ecosystems, including channeling of nutrient-rich currents to them, does not bode well for their vitality,” Wright said. “But there is so much that we just don’t know. The oceanographic community will be watching the results of this expedition as they become available with intense interest. It has direct bearing on the overall health of the planet.”

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer

Citation: Cartier, K. M. S. (2025), Thriving Antarctic ecosystem revealed by a departing iceberg, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250124. Published on 31 March 2025.

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