If astronomers have learned one lesson from 6,000 or so confirmed exoplanets, it’s to expect the unexpected. Even so, a giant planet orbiting a red dwarf star recently caught them by surprise. It is the largest planet relative to its host star yet discovered, and it defies the leading theory of giant-planet formation, according to a new study.

TOI-6894 b orbits an M dwarf star roughly one fifth the size and mass of the Sun—60% the mass of the next-smallest star with a giant planet. TOI-6894 b is the size of Saturn and half its mass. The planet is 40% the diameter of the host star, making it by far the highest planet-star size ratio yet seen.

“Because the star is so low mass, based on what we currently understand about planet formation and protoplanetary disks, we wouldn’t have expected it to be able to form a gas-giant planet,” said Edward Bryant, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick in the U.K. and first author of the study, published in Nature Astronomy.

The planet was first detected by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) in early 2020 and confirmed with additional observations over the following 3 years. TESS looks for the dip in a star’s brightness that occurs when a planet passes between it and Earth, blocking some of its light.

Bryant and his colleagues scoured observations of 91,000 stars in the TESS catalog to determine the frequency of giant planets around low-mass red dwarfs, which are the smallest and faintest stars in the galaxy and the most common. They reported the discovery of several such planets in 2023.

The team’s new analysis shows that the transits of TOI-6894 b are record breakers, reducing the star’s brightness by 17% and hinting at how large the planet is relative to its star. The transits also show that it orbits every 3.37 days.

The follow-up observations with ground-based telescopes measured changes in the star’s radial velocity—back-and-forth “wobbles” in its motion caused by the planet’s gravitational pull that revealed the planet’s mass.

A Special Case?

The leading theory of giant planet formation, called core accretion, posits that such worlds form early in a star’s lifetime, when it is still encircled by a protoplanetary disk—a wide disk of gas and dust that comprises the raw building materials for planets. Heavier materials coalesce to form larger and larger bodies, eventually creating a core that can be several times the mass of Earth. When the core grows large enough, it gobbles up the surrounding gas, building a layered giant planet similar to Saturn or Jupiter.

“The total amount of heavy material in the disk determines how big of a core you can make,” said Joel Hartman, a research astronomer at Princeton University and a member of the study team. “It’s a surprise to find a giant planet around such a tiny star because we just didn’t think there would be enough material there.” Some studies, he added, have suggested that stars less than about one third the mass of the Sun should not be able to form giant planets at all.

“Theorists who model planet formation [with core accretion] are not able to create planets like TOI-6894 b,” said Emily Pass, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the study. “So the question becomes, Are planets like TOI-6894 b special cases that formed in a different way, or does our entire model of giant planet formation need a revision?” Pass explained. “Understanding the occurrence rate of [such] planets will help test the various possibilities.”

Hinting at the Formation Mechanism

One possibility is a modified accretion mechanism, in which the growing planet hoovers up both heavy materials and gas simultaneously, forming a more mixed world.

Another possibility is direct collapse. “Instead of the core being built from the ground up, the disk fragments under its own self-gravity and directly collapses,” Bryant said. “If the disk becomes unstable in the right way, you can form giant planets around these low-mass stars. The problem is that some of the simulations predict that you would only form planets that are much, much more massive than Jupiter, which would be many times more massive than this planet. So none of these theories can really explain this planet. We’re really limited by our understanding of protoplanetary disks,” he said.

Hints of the planet’s formation mechanism may be found in its atmosphere, which is scheduled for study in the next year by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). As the planet passes in front of the star, starlight shining through the atmosphere will reveal its composition.

“We should be able to tell the difference in whether a planet formed from direct collapse versus core accretion by looking at the atmosphere’s metallicity,” which is the makeup of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, Hartman said. “In the gravitational instability case, all the materials collapsed together, so the elements should all be mixed together. In the core accretion model, all the heavy elements should be in the core, with a gaseous envelope on top of it.”

Because of the large transit signal, TOI-6894 b should be “amenable” to additional ground-based studies, Hartman said, although none are currently planned. “We’ll wait and see what JWST tells us,” Bryant said.

—Damond Benningfield, Science Writer

Citation: Benningfield, D. (2025), A new exoplanet resets the scale, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250235. Published on 30 June 2025.

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Lake Tahoe’s sparkling, clear water is a point of pride among locals and a draw for tourists. Although the water clarity—measured by how deep visible light can penetrate—has decreased since measurements began in 1968, conservation efforts over the past 2 decades have stabilized it.

However, a new study published last month in Limnology and Oceanography Letters shows that ultraviolet (UV) light tells a different story. The depths to which UV radiation reaches in Lake Tahoe vary dramatically between extreme wet and dry years. Because UV radiation can affect chemical and biological processes, shifting underwater light environments between years could have significant implications for Lake Tahoe’s ecosystem.

A Question of Clarity

To measure water clarity in Lake Tahoe, a 1,645-foot-deep (594-meter-deep) freshwater lake straddling the border of California and Nevada in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, scientists drop a white disk into the water and record how deep they can see it. They use a similar approach to measure UV light, but because it’s invisible to our eyes, they drop a sensor that measures different wavelengths of UV light as it sinks.

Eighteen years ago, scientists at the University of California, Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center began collecting UV data from the lake every 2 to 3 weeks, creating a long-term record rare for lakes anywhere in the world.

“You can use satellites to look at long-term trends in water clarity, and people have done that all over the U.S. and around the world,” said Kevin Rose, a freshwater ecologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, but “a multidecade record of UV radiation is a unique asset.” Rose was not involved in the study.

Several studies have used data from the record, but limnologist Shohei Watanabe at the Tahoe Environmental Research Center and his colleagues wanted to do a comprehensive analysis of whether Lake Tahoe was experiencing changes in the penetration of UV light between 2006 and 2023.

Watanabe initially expected to see a gradual decrease in UV penetration over the study period, mirroring the trend in visible light. “Instead, we found a huge fluctuation in UV transparency year to year,” he said.

In drought years, such as 2014–2015, UV radiation penetrated deeper than in exceptionally wet years such as 2017, when the Sierra Nevada received its second-highest amount of precipitation since 1910.

“It’s an amazing difference,” Watanabe said. The most dramatic differences occurred during the spring and early summer, when solar radiation is at its strongest. UV radiation was 100 times stronger 10 meters (32 feet) below the surface and reached up to nearly 4 times deeper in summers during drought years.

The phenomenon occurs because wet years wash more particulates and dissolved organic matter off the slopes of the surrounding mountains and into the lake, which blocks the UV radiation.

Visible light showed only a twofold difference in how deep it penetrated the lake between wet and dry years because the longer wavelengths of visible light are not as easily blocked by dissolved organic matter in the water. To the naked eye, visitors might notice some changes in the water clarity between years, “but it’s not like a 100-fold difference,” Watanabe said.

A Sunburn on the Ecosystem

The balance of UV light and visible light is crucial in freshwater ecosystems. UV radiation breaks down dissolved organic matter, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Just like UV light can give us a sunburn, it can harm freshwater organisms by damaging DNA and inhibiting photosynthesis. It can also affect zooplankton behavior—these organisms actively avoid harmful UV light by migrating deeper during the day.

For the most biologically damaging UV wavelengths, including 305 and 320 nanometers, the differences from year to year in Lake Tahoe were most pronounced.

UV radiation isn’t always harmful to the ecosystem, however. Rose noted previous research showing that it prevents invasive fish, such as bluegill, from successfully reproducing in Lake Tahoe’s clear waters because larvae don’t survive high UV exposure. The fish become restricted to murky nearshore areas such as marinas.

Drastic shifts in UV penetration between wet and dry years therefore imply big changes in the ecosystems in the lake—and those swings could get more intense with human-caused climate change. “When we think about Lake Tahoe, now, going through precipitation cycles, that also means potential biological damage,” Rose said. Fully understanding how these communities will react will require continued monitoring.

Similar UV cycles might also occur in other clear mountain lakes worldwide, but each lake system has unique characteristics that would influence light patterns. “I really want to stress the importance of long-term monitoring for this kind of environmental study,” Watanabe said.

Watanabe and his colleagues are now planning and performing studies to determine how these UV variations affect Lake Tahoe’s carbon cycle, primary productivity, and other biological processes. “That’s the next step,” he said.

—Andrew Chapman (@andrewchapman.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Chapman, A. (2025), Precipitation extremes drive swings in Lake Tahoe’s UV exposure, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250234. Published on 26 June 2025.

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Mars’s current atmosphere is downright tenuous—conferring less than 1% the pressure of Earth’s—but there’s good evidence that it was substantially thicker in the past. Researchers have now directly observed atoms escaping in a hitherto unobserved way.

That process, known as atmospheric sputtering, may have facilitated Mars’s transition from a watery planet to the arid world it is today, the team reported in Science Advances.

Since the early 2010s, planetary scientist Shannon Curry at the University of Colorado Boulder has pored over data from Mars, looking for signs that the Red Planet’s atmosphere is eroding. It’s been a long journey, she said. “I’ve been looking for this since I was a postdoc.” Colleagues even took to ribbing Curry that her search might be folly. “Every year, I would run my code, and I would look for it,” she said. “We started joking that it was like a unicorn.”

But Curry, the principal investigator of NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission, now has reason to celebrate: She and her colleagues believe they’ve finally captured the first direct observations of sputtering on Mars.

Escaping via Kicks

Planetary atmospheres are constantly changing; everything from solar eclipses to volcanic eruptions to fossil fuel burning can alter their composition, density, and structure. Atmospheres can also erode via several processes. One is photodissociation, in which photons break apart molecules, creating lighter constituents that can go on to escape. Sputtering is another. That process involves high-energy ions, accelerated by the Sun’s electric field, plowing through a planet’s upper atmosphere and colliding with neutral atoms. Those energetic kicks impart enough energy to the neutral particles that they go on to escape the planet’s gravitational field.

Sputtering plays only a minor role in the escape of Mars’s atmosphere today—the rate of sputtering is currently several orders of magnitude lower than that of photodissociation. “But we think, billions of years ago, it was the main driver of escape,” Curry said.

Thanks to nearly a decade’s worth of MAVEN observations, Curry and her collaborators had access to detailed records of the Sun’s electric field and neutral particles in Mars’s atmosphere. They focused on neutral argon, a heavy noble gas. It’s generally difficult to remove argon from the Martian atmosphere in other ways, said Manuel Scherf, an astrophysicist at the Space Research Institute at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Graz, Austria, who was not involved in the research. “The only really efficient escape mechanism at the moment is sputtering.”

Follow the Darkness

The team used simulations of Mars’s atmosphere to home in on where they might find a signal of sputtering. Looking above an altitude of roughly 360 kilometers seemed to be key, the modeling revealed. The team furthermore knew that it was critical to look at the side of Mars pointing away from the Sun. That’s because photodissociation dominates during the day. “We have to get out of the sunlight in order to detect sputtering,” said Janet Luhmann, a space scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the research team.

The researchers compared the abundances of argon in the Martian atmosphere in two altitude bins: 250–300 and 350–400 kilometers. They also compared periods during which the Sun’s electric field pointed either toward or away from Mars. Sputtering should preferentially occur in the higher-altitude bin when the Sun’s electric field points toward Mars—that’s when ions are accelerated toward the planet’s atmosphere. Indeed, Curry and her colleagues found statistically higher densities of argon in that group of data.

The team calculated that argon was being sputtered at a rate of about 10²³ atoms per second. That might seem like a large number, but it’s actually about 100 times lower than the current rate of photodissociation, Luhmann said. But billions of years ago, the Sun’s electric field was likely far stronger than it is today, and sputtering rates could have been much higher, possibly being the dominant contributor to eroding Mars’s atmosphere.

Such a shift could help explain what happened to Mars’s water.

There’s copious evidence that liquid water once existed on the surface of Mars—river valleys, dried lake beds, and other water-carved features persist to this day. This means that Mars’s atmosphere must have once been thick enough to support liquid water. “You need that atmospheric pressure pushing down on water to make it a liquid,” Curry said. But the Red Planet today is an arid world devoid of visible water. Sputtering could explain, at least partially, how the loss of pressure occurred.

And because liquid water is intimately tied to our conception of life, these results have important meaning, Scherf said. “You cannot know whether life can exist somewhere if you don’t understand the atmosphere and how it behaves.”

Curry and her colleagues are hoping to use MAVEN data for years to come, but the team recently learned that they may not have that opportunity: The mission is slated to be canceled in the proposed 2026 federal budget. That’s been a huge blow emotionally, said Curry, but the team isn’t giving up yet. “The United States right now is number one in Mars exploration,” Curry said. “We will lose that if we cancel these assets.”

—Katherine Kornei (@KatherineKornei), Science Writer

Citation: Kornei, K. (2025), Scientists spot sputtering on Mars, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250231. Published on 24 June 2025.

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Boreal peatlands in Canada provide crucial ecosystem services, from flood mitigation and water purification to storing colossal amounts of carbon and providing a habitat for species such as caribou.

Over the past several decades, more than 36,000 hectares of well pads have been constructed to house oil and gas drilling platforms in these landscapes, destroying the underlying vegetation and disrupting the flow of water through the ground.

Once drilling operations are finished, operators are required to return pads to a state similar to that before construction. Though restoration efforts have historically focused on tree planting, reintroducing the right mosses is crucial for restoring functional peatlands. A study in Ecological Engineering outlines a new approach to reintroduce these keystone plant species, tested for the first time at the scale of a full well pad in Alberta, Canada.

“We want to get as close to the original state as is possible and realistic, given the very long time scales that peatlands develop over,” said Murdoch McKinnon, a graduate student at the University of Waterloo and lead author of the study.

The challenge is providing the right hydrological conditions for mosses to thrive.

Removing Fill

Well pads are constructed by heaping crushed mineral fill onto a section of peat to create a harder level surface.

Traditionally, researchers in the region have reintroduced moss by first completely removing the fill, which lowers the surface so that it is closer to the water table. In some cases, they would bury some of the fill under the newly exposed peat, a technique referred to as inversion.

This process has been successful in establishing the Sphagnum mosses typical of bogs, which have acidic soil that is low in nutrients. It’s been less successful in reintroducing the Bryopsida mosses characteristic of fens, the nutrient-rich wetlands that make up almost two thirds of peatlands in Canada’s Western Boreal Plain.

To reestablish a moss community that could eventually turn into a fen, the team left some of the fill on the surface, which provided the minerals that Bryopsida mosses rely on for growth. The team then roughed up the surface with an excavator to create different microsites, which promotes species diversity.

After introducing mosses from a nearby donor fen and closely monitoring the site for two growing seasons, researchers found that conditions for the reestablishment of Bryopsida mosses were best when the water table was within 6 centimeters (2 inches) of the surface. That was often the case along the edges of the pad that received water from the adjacent peatland, whereas the mosses in the interior of the pad struggled with drier conditions.

“I think it’s a good approach, but maybe the surface of the pad was not low enough to have flowing water, which you need in a fen,” said Line Rochefort, an expert in peatland restoration at Université Laval in Quebec who was not involved in the study.

“Without addressing that, it’s hard to introduce and establish peatland vegetation on mineral substrate,” said Bin Xu, a peatland ecologist at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) who worked on the project. “On the flip side, when you do have good hydrobiological conditions, it’s really easy to support peat-forming vegetation, which is encouraging.”

An important takeaway from the study is the importance of decompacting the surface by roughing it up to allow for not only hydrological flow across the pad but also the natural vertical fluctuation of the water table, Xu said.

He and colleagues at NAIT have now applied these lessons to three additional well pads in Alberta, and industry experts have used a similar approach on around a dozen more, Xu said. “Through informing policy and sharing the learnings with industry, we can together address the need to reclaim well pads built in peatland across the province.”

—Kaja Šeruga, Science Writer

Citation: Šeruga, K. (2025), Surface conditions affect how mosses take to former well pads in Canada’s boreal fens, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250227. Published on 18 June 2025.

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Canada is home to more than 400,000 nonproducing oil and gas wells. These abandoned facilities still emit methane, which can contaminate water supplies and pollute the atmosphere with a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. The scope of these emissions may be greater than previously understood, according to a new study.

In 2023, nonproducing wells may have leaked 230 kilotons of methane, about 7 times more than the official estimates published in the government’s annual National Inventory Report (NIR). The NIR, compiled by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), informs the country’s greenhouse gas mitigation efforts and is submitted as part of Canada’s reporting obligations to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Methane estimates are calculated by multiplying the total number of nonproducing wells by emissions factors determined by well characteristics, such as the type of well (oil, gas, or unknown), depth, and whether it is plugged with concrete. These emissions factors offer only a rough idea of methane leakage, however.

“It’s really hard to predict emissions,” said Mary Kang, a study coauthor and associate professor of civil engineering at McGill University in Montreal. “There’s a range of engineering, geological, and policy-related factors that are all playing a role in what emissions rates are observed.”

Surprising Discoveries

To address this ambiguity, Kang and her colleagues measured methane flow rates at 494 nonproducing wells throughout Canada between 2018 and 2023 to define new emissions factors. While these sites account for only a fraction of the country’s abandoned wells, making uncertainty inevitable, the authors describe their data as the largest set of direct methane emissions figures collected through consistent methods.

They reported that the amount of methane leaked from the nonproducing wells was 1.5–16 times greater than NIR estimates.

Most of the departure from the NIR figures was driven by leaks from surface casing vents, narrow slits that ring the outermost steel layer surrounding the wellbore itself. Kang explained that emissions from surface casing vents indicate issues with a mine’s structural integrity and are trickier to manage than wellhead leaks, which may require only minor adjustments at the surface.

The researchers analyzed their measurements to gauge how different well attributes contribute to methane flow rates. Whether a well is more prone to leakage than others, they found, isn’t determined by a single emissions factor such as its age or operating company.

Still, Kang was surprised to discover how much flow rates varied by province, even between wells operated by the same company in similar locations. The highest rates were observed in Alberta, where 74% of Canada’s known nonproducing wells are located.

“The geology doesn’t care if you’re in one province or another,” she said. “It’s the same formation. So what’s going on?”

Kang noted that each province and territory has its own emissions regulations, and policy factors might explain the differences in methane flow rates, though other geological differences such as seismic activity could also be at play.

Continuous Improvement

Complicating any study of methane emissions from nonproducing wells is the large number of sites abandoned before contemporary recordkeeping practices were established, said Maurice Dusseault, professor emeritus of engineering geology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, who was not involved in the research.

A history of well abandonment practices in Ontario illustrates how hard it is to identify older wells throughout Canada. The first oil well in Ontario was drilled in 1858, but records were not mandatory in the province for another 60 years. Surface casings were often removed when a well closed so that the steel could be reused in other mines. This means some legacy wells cannot be detected with conventional magnetic techniques.

Still, Dusseault praised the researchers for their rigorous pursuit of better emissions estimates.

Kang and her colleagues returned to the field this year and last year, measuring methane flow at additional known well sites and revisiting previous sites to observe how leakage changes over time.

Meanwhile, their work is already affecting how the country approaches methane emissions. “Continuous improvement is a key principle of Canada’s NIR,” wrote ECCC spokesperson Cecelia Parsons in an email, noting that the improvement plan in the 2025 NIR draws from the new research.

—Lauren Schneider (@laur_insider), Science Writer

Citation: Schneider, L. (2025), Nonproducing oil wells may be emitting 7 times more methane than we thought, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250225. Published on 16 June 2025.

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California produces more than a third of the vegetables and three quarters of the fruits and nuts in the United States. But water constraints are leaving more and more fields unplanted, or “fallowed,” particularly in the state’s famed farming hub, the Central Valley.

In a study published in Communications Earth and Environment, researchers showed that these fallowed agricultural lands are producing a different problem: dust storms, which can cause road accidents and health problems and can have far-reaching environmental impacts. Using remote sensing methods, the team found that 88% of anthropogenic dust events in the state, such as dust storms, come from fallowed farmland.

California’s frequent droughts could mean a rise in fallowed farmland. In 2014, the state passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), a policy aimed at ensuring the sustainability of groundwater resources. A report by the Public Policy Institute of California suggested that to meet the SGMA’s demands, farmers may need to fallow hundreds of thousands of additional acres, potentially worsening dust events.

Tracking Down Agricultural Dust

Dust can come from both natural sources, such as wind blowing across a desert, and anthropogenic sources, such as when transportation, construction, or agricultural activities kick up particles. Previous studies identified agriculture as a significant source of human-generated dust, but study author Adeyemi Adebiyi and his colleagues wanted to narrow down which agricultural practices produced the most.

Fallowed land was a logical culprit. “If you stop irrigating the land, it becomes dry, and we’re already in a dry climate,” said Adebiyi, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Merced. “It’s easy for it to become a new dust source.”

The researchers started by pinpointing fallowed land across California between 2008 and 2022 using U.S. Department of Agriculture datasets. The data showed that 77% of the state’s fallowed land was in the Central Valley. 

The team then examined NASA satellite images of atmospheric aerosols, identifying which aerosols were dust particles on the basis of the way they scatter light. When they overlaid the regions that regularly experienced dust events with the agricultural data, they saw that dust events were tightly associated with fallowed fields.

The problem appears to be getting worse. Between 2008 and 2022, both the area of fallowed land and corresponding dust levels have increased: In this period, the amount of dust in the atmosphere over the Central Valley grew by about 36% per decade.

Having grown up in California and spent the first decade of his career studying dust in the Central Valley, Thomas Gill, an Earth scientist at the University of Texas at El Paso who wasn’t involved in the study, has long worried that land use changes could lead to dust issues. “This study by Adebiyi et al., unfortunately, shows that my worries have been coming true,” he said.

Daniel Tong, an atmospheric scientist at George Mason University who also wasn’t involved in the study, agreed that the work provides some much-needed conclusive data on the connection between land use and dust levels. “This is a very useful study,” he said.

Adebiyi’s team used additional remote sensing data to determine that compared with nearby nonfallowed land, fallowed fields have lower soil moisture and are about 4.2°C hotter. Combined with a lack of vegetation, these factors work together to make such areas more prone to wind erosion. “These fallowed land locations are emblematic of the properties you would normally see in a typical desert-type location,” Adebiyi said.

Far-Reaching Effects

The dust from fallowed fields has wide-reaching consequences. “California is already the state with the largest number of fatalities caused by dust storms,” said Tong, who authored a 2023 study about windblown dust fatalities in the United States. One concern, he said, is that more dust storms could increase road accidents. Dust also contributes to respiratory problems and cardiovascular disease and carries the Coccidioides fungus, which causes the dangerous infection valley fever. Cases of valley fever increased by 800% in California between 2000 and 2018.

“There’s also been a great population increase in the Central Valley,” Gill said. “So not only do you have more particulate matter, but you have more people living there who are vulnerable to its effects.”

Fallowed fields and the dust they produce may also work counter to the groundwater management goals of the SGMA. The Central Valley dust blows east into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where it speeds snowmelt, a significant reservoir of water for the state. The researchers also found that the heat concentrated in fallowed fields can spread out to nearby fields, causing surrounding crops to need more water. “It’s a double whammy,” Adebiyi said.

He noted the importance of preventing fields from becoming completely bare while still conserving water. One strategy is to plant native, drought-resistant plants that protect the soil from wind erosion without needing much irrigation.

The researchers are now conducting similar studies on the connection between fallowed lands and dust in other agricultural states, such as Kansas, Montana, and Washington. Their findings suggest that addressing dust problems will become increasingly important nationwide.

“The implications are beyond California,” Adebiyi said. “They’re across the United States.”

—Andrew Chapman (@andrewchapman.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Chapman, A. (2025), Fallowed fields are fueling California’s dust problem, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250223. Published on 13 June 2025.

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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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This is an authorized translation of an Eos article. Esta es una traducción al español autorizada de un artículo de Eos.

De vez en cuando, algunos árboles parecen necesitar una sacudida. Cuando es alcanzado por un rayo, el frondoso Dipteryx oleifera sufre daños mínimos, mientras que los árboles y enredaderas parásitas de las inmediaciones suelen marchitarse o morir por completo. Los investigadores estiman que la eliminación de la vegetación competidora multiplica casi por quince la producción de semillas de D. oleifera a lo largo de su vida.

Un bosque bien equipado

Panamá suele ser conocida por su canal homónimo. Sin embargo, la Isla de Barro Colorado, en el centro de Panamá, también alberga lo que los investigadores que trabajan en el área llaman “una de las zonas de bosque tropical mejor estudiadas de la Tierra”. Esto se debe a que cámaras y aparatos para medir campos eléctricos vigilan constantemente el bosque desde lo alto de una serie de torres de unos 40 metros de altura. Estos instrumentos pueden revelar, entre otros datos, la ubicación exacta de la caída de rayos. “Este es el único lugar de la Tierra en el que disponemos de datos precisos de seguimiento de rayos para saber si [un rayo ha caído] en una zona del bosque”, explica Evan Gora, ecólogo del Instituto Cary de Estudios de Ecosistemas y del Instituto Smithsoniano de Investigaciones Tropicales.

Según Gabriel Arellano, ecólogo forestal de la Universidad de Michigan en Ann Arbor que no participó en la investigación, este tipo de infraestructura es fundamental para localizar los árboles que han sido alcanzados por un rayo. “Es muy difícil hacer un seguimiento de los rayos y encontrar los árboles concretos que se han visto afectados”.

Esto se debe a que el impacto de un rayo en un árbol tropical rara vez provoca un incendio, explica Gora. Lo más habitual es que los árboles tropicales alcanzados por un rayo parezcan prácticamente intactos, pero mueren lentamente a lo largo de varios meses.

Siguiendo los destellos

Para comprender mejor cómo afectan los rayos a los grandes árboles tropicales, Gora y sus colegas examinaron 94 rayos que cayeron sobre 93 árboles únicos en la isla de Barro Colorado entre 2014 y 2019. En 2021, el equipo viajó a la isla para recopilar imágenes terrestres y aéreas de cada árbol impactado directamente y sus alrededores.

Gora y sus colegas registraron seis parámetros sobre el estado de cada árbol afectado directamente y del grupo de enredaderas leñosas parásitas conocidas como lianas: pérdida de la copa, daños en el tronco y porcentaje de la copa infestada de lianas. Las lianas colonizan las copas de muchos árboles tropicales, usándolas para darse estructura y compitiendo con los árboles por la luz. Piensa en alguien que se sienta a su lado y le arranca la mitad de cada bocado de comida que tomas, dice Gora. “Eso es efectivamente lo que hacen estas lianas”.

El equipo también examinó los árboles que rodeaban a cada uno de los que habían sido alcanzados directamente. La corriente eléctrica de un rayo puede viajar por el aire y atravesar también los árboles cercanos, explica Gora. Cuando las ramas de un árbol alcanzado por u nrayo están cerca de las de sus vecinos, “los extremos de sus ramas y las de sus vecinos mueren”, explica Gora. “Verás docenas de esos lugares”.

Creciendo prosperamente después de un rayo

Los investigadores descubrieron que en promedio una cuarta parte de los árboles alcanzados directamente por un rayo morían. Pero cuando el equipo dividió su muestra por especies de árboles, el D. oleifera (más conocido como almendro o haba tonka) destacó por su asombrosa capacidad para sobrevivir a los rayos. Los nueve árboles D. oleifera de la muestra del equipo sobrevivieron sistemáticamente a los rayos, mientras que a sus lianas y vecinos inmediatos no les fue tan bien. “Hubo daños considerables en la zona, pero no en el árbol directamente afectado”, explica Gora. “Éste nunca murió”.

(Otras diez especies del grupo de árboles de los investigadores tampoco mostraron mortalidad tras ser alcanzadas por un rayo, pero todas esas muestras eran demasiado pequeñas, entre uno o dos individuos, para extraer conclusiones sólidas).

Gora y sus colaboradores calcularon que los grandes árboles de D. oleifera son alcanzados por un rayo un promedio de cinco veces a lo largo de sus aproximadamente 300 años de vida. El equipo infirió que la capacidad de esta especie para sobrevivir a esos eventos, mientras que las lianas y los árboles vecinos a menudo morían, debería traducirse en una reducción general de la competencia por los nutrientes y la luz solar. Al usar modelos de crecimiento y capacidad reproductiva de los árboles, los investigadores calcularon que D. oleifera obtenía beneficios sustanciales de ser alcanzada por un rayo, sobre todo en lo que respecta a la fecundidad, es decir, el número de semillas producidas a lo largo de la vida de un árbol. “La capacidad de sobrevivir a los rayos multiplica por catorce su fecundidad», afirma Gora.

Los investigadores demostraron además que D. oleifera tendía a ser más alto y ancho en su copa que muchas otras especies de árboles tropicales de la Isla de Barro Colorado. Trabajos anteriores de Gora y sus colegas han demostrado que los árboles más altos corren especial riesgo de ser alcanzados por un rayo. Por tanto, es posible pensar que D. oleifera esté evolucionando para convertirse en un mejor pararrayos, afirma Gora. “Quizá los rayos estén moldeando no sólo la dinámica de nuestros bosques, sino también su evolución”.

Estos resultados fueron publicados en New Phytologist.

Gora y sus colaboradores partieron de la hipótesis de que la fisiología de D. oleifera debe de otorgar cierta protección contra la enorme cantidad de corriente impartida por un rayo. Trabajos anteriores de Gora y otros investigadores han sugerido que el D. oleifera es más conductor que el promedio; niveles más altos de conductividad significan menos resistencia y, por tanto, menos calentamiento interno. “Creemos que el grado de conductividad de un árbol influye mucho en si muere o no”, afirma Gora.

Seguir descubriendo otras especies de árboles resistentes a los rayos será importante para comprender cómo evolucionan los bosques a lo largo del tiempo. Es ahí donde más datos serán útiles, dijo Arellano. “No me sorprendería que encontráramos muchas otras especies”.

—Katherine Kornei (@KatherineKornei), Escritora de ciencia

This translation by Mónica Alejandra Gómez Correa was made possible by a partnership with Planeteando y GeoLatinas. Esta traducción fue posible gracias a una asociación con Planeteando and GeoLatinas.

Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Mississippi River ships and barges carry over 500 million tons of cargo through the Southwest Pass shipping channel at the river’s end to reach major ports that handle 18% of U.S. waterborne commerce. For almost 100 years, levees and other human-made flood control structures have lined the banks of the river, obstructing its land-building silt, sand and clay from naturally rebuilding land along coastal Louisiana.

That sediment is essential to rebuilding—or at this point, maintaining—the fragile coastline that has been receding for decades. Without it, the small towns that dot the lower part of the Louisiana Gulf Coast are left exposed, with no protection against storm surges and hurricane-strength winds. But to reverse coastal erosion, scientists found that they first had to understand where sediment that could be used to rebuild settles instead.

Most of the year, less than 10% of the river’s sediment reaches the critical Bird’s Foot Delta, according to scientists from the Mississippi River Delta Transition Initiative, known as MissDelta. The bird’s foot—at the southernmost reach of the river system that juts into the Gulf of Mexico—plays a vital role in coastal protection, navigation, fisheries and energy infrastructure.

In 2023, MissDelta launched a $22 million, five-year research project spearheaded by Tulane University and Louisiana State University, and funded by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The study aims to evaluate the Delta and Southwest Pass, the critical navigation channel, with hopes of finding management approaches that will benefit both the delicate ecosystem and the people who live and work in the delta region, including fisherpeople, charter-boat operators, offshore workers, shipyard builders, mechanics and petrochemical-facility operators.

During the first year-and-a-half of the study, researchers measured discharge by plunging a 200-pound sampler into the river at various depths. By tracking sediment from the sampler, the team can measure how much settles in the wetlands upriver versus how much exits into the deepwater Gulf, said Claire Kemick, a Tulane graduate student working to collect the samples.

The study’s early findings, announced at Louisiana’s State of the Coast conference, show that the Mississippi River loses substantial amounts of water and sediment above what’s called the Head of Passes, at the mouth of the river, where the Mississippi forms its distinct bird’s foot by branching into three directions: the Southwest Pass shipping channel (west), Pass A Loutre (east) and South Pass (center).

That means the Bird’s Foot Delta is headed toward further degradation, after losing ground for decades, said Mead Allison, co-lead of MissDelta and a professor in Tulane’s Department of River-Coastal Science and Engineering.

Above the Head of Passes, substantial amounts of sediment carried by the Mississippi River are lost through both natural and man-made channels, such as the rapidly expanding Neptune Pass near Buras, Louisiana, in lower Plaquemines Parish. But most is lost well before then.

Using data on sediment movement, the team can calibrate models to predict what will happen to the delta by 2100 under different scenarios, with varied sea-level rise, storm frequency and river-flow fluctuations. Once the researchers develop the models, they will use them to test various interventions that could save the delta, such as closing river exits and changing water-flow patterns.

In the fall, the MissDelta team will return to lower Plaquemines Parish to study the saltwater wedge that creeps up the river during low flow periods. For three years in a row, the wedge of heavy salt water has crept up the river underneath the fresh water, imperiling drinking water in the greater New Orleans area.

The goal is to find management approaches that can help build up this region, which Allison has called one of the most threatened places in the nation, if not on Earth.

But they cannot forge management solutions without an understanding of how the muddy Mississippi carries its load of sandy sediment in the lower delta. “Right now, we don’t know very much about where the sediment is in the Lower Mississippi River,” Kemick said. Further research will help determine where the coarse sand is settling in the riverbed.

Sediment loss is especially high during low or average river flow, when the water is traveling slowly enough to allow the heavy sand particles to sink to the bottom. When the river floods, the faster-moving river brings sand from throughout the drainage basin to Louisiana. But it doesn’t necessarily help to build up the Bird’s Foot area. Instead, it falls out in the channel, creating a need for more dredging to maintain the ship route.

The Mississippi River’s sediment is an important resource for coastal restoration, Allison said. “Sand is white gold for Louisiana. We need to keep it.”

The Louisiana Coastal Master Plan was built upon this principle, with an ambitious plan for a sediment diversion, the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, that would be one of the largest environmental infrastructure projects in the history of the U.S.

But the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has suspended the permit to build the keystone project.

On Wednesday, more than 50 Louisiana business and civic leaders sent a letter to Gov. Jeff Landry urging him to resume construction of the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion at the size and scale that it was designed and permitted for.

“These business and civic leaders are part of the backbone of Louisiana—people who live, work, and invest in this region every day,” said Simone Maloz, campaign director for Restore the Mississippi River Delta. “Delaying or downsizing the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion threatens not just our coast, but our economy, our safety and our credibility as a state.”

Conversations about the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion were absent from this year’s State of the Coast conference, an interdisciplinary forum hosted by the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana.

“In some ways, I feel like Mid-Barataria is kind of haunting this conference,” said Alisha Renfro, a coastal scientist with the National Wildlife Federation. She is hopeful that Louisiana can find a pathway to resume the project, after investing $500 million into planning.

The state is also in danger of losing billions in federal funding if its leaders don’t commit to finishing the construction.

It may be time to look for alternative coastal restoration projects, some scientists say. For Allison, that means not only determining how the Mississippi River sediment moves now but also where dredged sand could best restore coastal wetlands like the Barataria Basin.

Currently, dredge spoil used for coastal restoration remains relatively close to where it came from in the river. In the Barataria Basin, one project to restore approximately 302 acres of brackish marsh known as Bayou Grande Cheniere required nearly eight miles of pipes to move the sediment.

Other solutions might involve closing gaps where sediment leaks out before reaching the Bird’s Foot Delta. The Army Corps is essentially testing this theory now, Allison said, with its plan to reduce the flow at Neptune Pass, a nearby branch in the river that is creating new land in Quarantine Bay.

The plan could boost land-building in the Barataria Basin, Allison said. While the Army Corps proposes using rocks to limit the size of the channel’s entrance and minimize the risk of navigational hazards, the construction at the outflow could reinforce the crevasse’s land-building power, he said.

In addition to building sediment retention structures, the Army Corps could pump sand out of the river and place it directly at the outflow of the channel, allowing the water to redistribute it into a more natural wetland building pattern.

“It’s really encouraging that the Corps is thinking about these forward-looking strategies to better use dredged material,” Allison said.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.

—Delaney Dryfoos (@delaneydryfoos.bsky.social), The Lens

Antarctica is Earth’s most remote continent, barely touched by human activities.

It is, however, not immune to the kind of environmental damage that plagues more populated parts of the world. In a new study, researchers found chemicals originating from everyday personal care products (PCPs), such as cosmetics, detergents, pharmaceuticals, and deodorants, in Antarctic snow.

Contaminants in PCPs—loosely defined as semivolatile organic compounds that are industrially produced at a global scale, used in large volumes, and relatively persistent in the environment—are increasingly being recognized as pollutants. Both the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme and the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research have encouraged further research on PCP ingredients and the creation of monitoring plans for tracking their presence at the poles.

Looking for these pollutants, researchers collected 23 surface snow samples from 18 sites along the Ross Sea coast during the Antarctic summer of 2021–2022. Though some sampling locations were near areas with human activity, including Italy’s seasonally occupied Mario Zucchelli research station, the majority were situated hundreds of kilometers from human settlements.

The scientists reached these remote locations by piggybacking on helicopter rides transporting other teams maintaining weather stations or deploying scientific instruments. “This way we halved the impact of our sampling, because they needed to go there in any case,” said Marco Vecchiato, an analytical chemist at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, Italy, who led the study.

Back in Italy, Vecchiato and his colleagues analyzed the snow samples under clean-room conditions to prevent contamination.

They found PCP chemicals in every sample, with varying chemical concentrations suggesting different capacities for atmospheric transport. Of the 21 chemicals analyzed, three compound families were particularly notable. Salicylates, commonly used as preservatives in cosmetics (including lotions, shampoos, and conditioners) and pharmaceutical products, were the most prevalent, followed by UV filters associated with sunscreens. Fragrances such as musks were also detected.

Most of these substances were dissolved in the snow. The UV filter octocrylene, however, which has been associated with coral reef damage and banned in places like the U.S. Virgin Islands and Palau, was found bound to solid particles within the snow.

The researchers observed an unexpected seasonal variation in the amount of PCPs within the samples: Samples collected later in the summer had about 10 times higher PCP levels than those collected earlier in the season, though the relative proportions of each pollutant within a sample remained consistent.

Seasonal fluctuation suggests that Antarctic summer air circulation plays a role in transporting pollutants from distant sources to the continent’s interior. During summer, oceanic winds blowing inland dominate over winds originating from the polar plateau, which are stronger during the rest of the year. That shift may push pollutants far inland.

“This very different behavior during the season means that [PCPs] are very sensitive to the environmental conditions,” Vecchiato said.

One of the researchers presented the team’s preliminary findings at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in May, and the scientists have a more comprehensive analysis currently underway, according to Vecchiato.

A Local or Distant Source

Finding organic pollutants in seemingly pristine polar environments isn’t surprising. In the 1960s, scientists found large concentrations of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), including the widely used pesticide DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), in Antarctica. POPs don’t degrade naturally and travel thousands of kilometers through the atmosphere, with some eventually getting trapped in snow and ice. Permanently frozen places such as glaciers and polar regions become natural traps. Starting in the early 2000s, the United Nations’ Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants established international cooperative efforts to eliminate or restrict the production and use of POPs.

Though they might travel by a mechanism similar to that used by persistent organic pollutants, unlike POPs, PCPs “do break down in the environment,” said Alan Kolok, a professor of ecotoxicology at the University of Idaho. However, “if those fragrances are not coming from the [research] stations themselves,” he asked, “where are they coming from?”

To rule out a local origin for the PCP pollutants, researchers analyzed sewage from the Mario Zucchelli research station. The outpost did contribute some pollution, but the relative abundance of each compound in the sewage differed from that found in the snow, suggesting that the PCPs detected in the broader Antarctic environment likely originated from more distant sources.

“My suspicion is that for these types of compounds—personal care products, pharmaceutical products—there must be a local source,” said Ricardo Barra Ríos, an environmental scientist at the Universidad de Concepción in Chile who has analyzed PCP pollution in Antarctic coastal waters related to research stations. “Thousands of people are currently accessing the Antarctic continent, and my conclusion is that wherever we humans go, we bring contaminants.”

Vecchiato disagreed. In a separate study published earlier this year, he and other colleagues found PCPs, including fragrances and UV filters, in the snows of the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic. In that study, the researchers linked the presence of these compounds to atmospheric patterns that carried pollution from northern Europe and the northwestern coast of Russia.

“Most of these contaminants should have a limited mobility, but actually, we found them in remote regions,” Vecchiato said. “Does that mean that the models are wrong or that our analysis is wrong?” he asked. “No, probably we are missing a piece [of the puzzle], or maybe the use of these contaminants is so huge that we still have a relevant concentration in remote areas, even if they should not be prone to this kind of transport.”

—Javier Barbuzano (@javibar.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Barbuzano, J. (2025), Is your shampoo washing up in Antarctica?, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250209. Published on 3 June 2025.

Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

This is an authorized translation of an Eos article. Esta es una traducción al español autorizada de un artículo de Eos.

En 2017, Paulo Tarso Oliveira, profesor de hidrología en la Universidad de São Paulo, se encontró con una noticia sobre una pequeña aldea a orillas del río São Francisco, uno de los principales ríos del noreste de Brasil. El artículo informaba que los habitantes estaban presentando tasas inusualmente altas de hipertensión arterial, y relacionaba esta anomalía con el clima seco de la región y el bajo caudal del río. A medida que el nivel freático descendía, el agua oceánica comenzaba a infiltrarse hacia el agua subterránea de la región, elevando los niveles de sal en el suministro y provocando problemas de salud entre la población.

Intrigado, Oliveira investigó más a fondo. Más adelante descubrió que el flujo del río estaba disminuyendo porque los pozos estaban extrayendo agua del acuífero subyacente. “Muchas veces, la gente no se da cuenta, pero las aguas superficiales y subterráneas están conectadas y deben considerarse como un todo”, señaló Oliveira.

En lugares donde el nivel freático se encuentra bajo el lecho de un río, el río puede filtrar agua hacia el acuífero subyacente. Este proceso, conocido como filtración del caudal fluvial, ocurre de forma natural dependiendo de las formaciones geológicas subyacentes y los niveles de agua subterránea. Sin embargo, la construcción de pozos que extraen agua en exceso de los acuíferos puede intensificar este fenómeno.

Oliveira y sus colegas descubrieron que la situación en la cuenca del São Francisco no es un caso aislado. Al evaluar pozos en todo Brasil, los investigadores encontraron que en más de la mitad de ellos el nivel del agua estaba por debajo del nivel de los arroyos cercanos.

Mapeo de pozos

En 2023, Oliveira y el estudiante de maestría José Gescilam Uchôa comenzaron a mapear los ríos de Brasil para identificar zonas en riesgo de pérdida de agua. Se basaron en datos públicos sobre niveles de ríos y ubicación de pozos, proporcionados por el Servicio Geológico de Brasil. Sin embargo, la mayoría de los pozos registrados carecían de información suficiente. Como resultado, se enfocaron en 18,000 pozos con datos completos, distribuidos a lo largo de miles de ríos en el país.

Los investigadores compararon el nivel del agua en cada pozo con la elevación del arroyo más cercano. En el 55 % de los casos, el nivel del agua en los pozos era inferior a la elevación de los arroyos vecinos.

“Nuestros datos sugieren que el uso de aguas subterráneas está afectando significativamente el caudal de los ríos”, señaló Uchôa. “Este es, y seguirá siendo, un motivo de creciente preocupación para la gestión del agua en el país”.

El estudio, publicado en Nature Communications, también identificó regiones críticas, incluida la cuenca del São Francisco, donde más del 60 % de los ríos podrían estar perdiendo agua debido a la intensa extracción subterránea. Esta extracción se asocia principalmente con actividades de irrigación.

En la cuenca del Verde Grande, en el este de Brasil, donde la irrigación representa el 90 % del consumo de agua, el 74 % de los ríos podrían estar perdiendo agua hacia los acuíferos.

Oliveira considera que los resultados son conservadores y que la situación podría ser aún peor, ya que los investigadores no tomaron en cuenta los pozos ilegales. Un estudio realizado en 2021 por el geólogo Ricardo Hirata, de la Universidad de São Paulo, estimó que alrededor del 88 % de los 2.5 millones de pozos en Brasil son ilegales, al carecer de licencia o registro para operar.

Hirata, quien no participó en la nueva investigación, advirtió que el estudio se basó únicamente en el 5 % de los pozos existentes, ubicados principalmente en regiones donde la explotación de aguas subterráneas es más intensa.

Hirata también subrayó que, aunque los investigadores identificaron ríos que potencialmente están perdiendo agua hacia los acuíferos, esos datos por sí solos no son suficientes para determinar si los ríos realmente se están secando. Para evaluar eso, se deben considerar otros factores, como la cantidad de agua extraída del acuífero en comparación con el caudal del río, el grado de conexión entre el acuífero y el río, y cuánta agua se extrae del acuífero en relación con las variaciones estacionales del caudal.

“El hecho de que el nivel de agua de un pozo esté por debajo del de un río cercano no necesariamente afecta al río o al acuífero”, explicó Hirata.

Las áreas identificadas como críticas por el estudio se ubican principalmente en regiones áridas, donde ya se esperaba que ocurriera filtración del caudal de manera natural, señaló André F. Rodrigues, hidrólogo de la Universidad Federal de Minas Gerais, quien no participó en la investigación.

El estudio es relevante porque resalta un problema creciente, dijo Rodrigues, pero se necesitan análisis más locales para obtener una imagen más detallada del problema y considerar, por ejemplo, los efectos del clima y los cambios estacionales. “Quizá esto también esté ocurriendo en otras regiones del país con alta demanda de irrigación, y simplemente no lo sabemos por falta de datos”, comentó.

Un problema en crecimiento

La expansión descontrolada de pozos y la extracción excesiva de agua subterránea no solo afectan la salud de las personas, el abastecimiento de agua y la agricultura, sino que también pueden desestabilizar el suelo, provocando hundimientos (subsistencia). Fenómenos similares se han observado en regiones de China, Estados Unidos e Irán.

El panorama no es nada alentador para Brasil. Es probable que la cantidad de pozos se multiplique, ya que se espera que las áreas de riego se incrementen en más del 50 % en los próximos 20 años, según la agencia nacional del agua de Brasil.

“Probablemente veremos un círculo vicioso de degradación, en el que la disminución en la cantidad y calidad del agua superficial, combinada con el aumento de los períodos de sequía, obligará a los agricultores a perforar más pozos para mantener la producción de alimentos, intensificando aún más la extracción de aguas subterráneas y agravando el problema”, advirtió Oliveira.

La sobreexplotación de aguas subterráneas es una preocupación a nivel mundial. La mayoría de los acuíferos han mostrado un descenso en lo que va del siglo XXI, y los estudios por modelado sugieren que la filtración de caudales será más común en las próximas décadas. Aun así, este problema ha sido en gran medida ignorado en regiones tropicales como Brasil, que alberga el 12 % de los recursos de agua dulce renovables del planeta.

Esta falta de atención se debe en parte al escaso financiamiento y vigilancia, y en parte a una creencia persistente de que en los países tropicales y húmedos los ríos suelen ganar agua de los acuíferos y no perderla, mencionó Oliveira. “Debemos actuar ahora si queremos evitar que regiones enteras queden devastadas en el futuro”.

Los investigadores hacen un llamado a realizar más estudios y establecer un monitoreo sistemático de los pozos para identificar las zonas más secas y evaluar el impacto de nuevos pozos sobre los ríos. Actualmente, Brasil solo cuenta con 500 pozos de observación monitoreados constantemente por el gobierno, en comparación con los 18,000 que existen en Estados Unidos, a pesar de que ambos países tienen extensiones territoriales similares. “La vigilancia es extremadamente importante y está tremendamente subestimada”, enfatizó Uchôa.

—Sofia Moutinho (@sofiamoutinho.bsky.social), Escritora de ciencia

This translation by Saúl A. Villafañe-Barajas (@villafanne) was made possible by a partnership with Planeteando and Geolatinas. Esta traducción fue posible gracias a una asociación con Planeteando y Geolatinas.

Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

The textbook explanation of how hailstones grow goes something like this: Nuclei collect frozen layers as they are repeatedly lofted up and fall through clouds. But scientists have had hints that this up-down cycle doesn’t always reflect real hailstones’ journeys. Now researchers have revived an old technique to track dozens of hailstones. The new results, published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, suggest that many hailstones take simpler paths.

The idea that hailstones grow as they repeatedly rise and fall on repeat arose as a way to explain stones’ alternating layers of different transparencies, said Xiangyu Lin, an atmospheric scientist at Peking University in Beijing and an author on the new study. But scientists don’t have any direct observations of individual hailstones’ paths in clouds because the severe storms that produce hail are difficult, even dangerous, to observe.

“The vast majority of our understanding of how hail grows has come from numerical modeling,” said Matthew Kumjian, an atmospheric scientist at Pennsylvania State University who wasn’t part of the study. The new research is “a nice piece of experimental evidence” to validate those models, he said.

At a seminar at Peking University in 2018, Kumjian showed a simple arcing trajectory—rather than a yo-yoing one—for simulated hailstones. Seeing those results, one of Lin’s colleagues at Peking University, atmospheric scientist Qinghong Zhang, wondered whether she could find real hailstones that followed a similar path. That year she started collecting hailstones, using social media to ask the public to save the icy orbs. “Over the past 8 years, we have collected more than 3,000 hailstones,” she said.

To trace the hailstones’ trajectories, the team turned to stable isotopes. At lower altitude, the ice that forms on hailstones tends to have a greater concentration of heavier isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen than the ice that forms higher up. Researchers can measure the ratio of heavy and light isotopes in a layer, providing a postmark of sorts for the altitude at which the ice originated.

The scientists analyzed 27 hailstones from nine different storms spread across eastern China. They sliced each stone in half to reveal its layers. Then they cut the hailstones down layer by layer, so they could melt each layer and measure its isotopes. To find the link between isotope concentrations and height in a storm cloud, the team used temperature, humidity, and pressure data from weather balloons that floated through the atmosphere near each storm.

Hailing from Where?

The isotopes showed that of the hailstones they analyzed, only one had more than one upward flight segment. A few hailstones grew at a relatively constant altitude, and 16 either rose or fell steadily as they grew.

Eight hailstones ascended once before falling to the ground. These eight hailstones were significantly larger than the other stones, Lin said. Hailstones primarily grew between −10°C and −30°C, the team found. With their up-and-down path, these eight stones seem to have spent more time in that zone, causing them to grow larger than others.

Scientists used stable isotope analysis on hailstones some 50 years ago, but the technique fell out of favor, Kumjian said. Many of those early studies analyzed a small number of stones from few storms or sometimes a single storm. The new study is “bringing back this old type of analysis with modern methods,” he said.

But the analysis required assumptions that might cloud results. For instance, updrafts can mix air from different altitudes, Kumjian said. That can affect the isotopes in a hailstone’s layers.

Scientists are still exploring questions about hail across a range of scales from stone to storm. Though researchers know what sorts of storms can produce damaging hail, it’s hard to predict which will rain down baseball-sized stones or where exactly hail will fall. Meanwhile, the physics of hailstones’ growth is tricky. Researchers typically model stones as perfect spheres—a far cry from the bumpy lumps that fall from the sky. But those shapes affect how fast hail falls and the damage it can produce, Kumjian said.

Researchers are using modeling, radar observations, and isotope studies such as this one to improve forecasts. Hail can knock out crops, damage structures, and shatter solar panels. Even 10 minutes of warning is enough for people to move cars and prevent damage, Zhang said.

Kumjian is part of a team that is launching instrumented Styrofoam spheres into clouds that could provide insights on actual paths taken by stones. Zhang’s team is continuing to study isotopes in layers, now looking at larger stones that formed in storms over Italy. “It’s a very exciting time in the hail world,” Kumjian said. “We’re going to learn a lot in the coming years.”

—Carolyn Wilke (@CarolynMWilke), Science Writer

Citation: Wilke, C. (2025), Isotopes map hailstones’ paths through clouds, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250206. Published on 30 May 2025.

Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Sixty-seven extreme heat events have occurred since May 2024. All of these events—including a deadly Mediterranean heat wave in July 2024, an unprecedented March 2025 heat wave in central Asia, and extreme heat in South Sudan in February 2025—broke temperature records, caused major harm to people or property, or did both.

According to a new analysis, each of these extreme events was made more likely by climate change. The number of days with extreme heat is now at least double what it would have been without climate change in 195 countries and territories. Climate change added at least an extra month of extreme heat in the past year for 4 billion people—half the world’s population. 

“There’s really no corner of the globe that has been untouched by climate-driven extreme heat,” said Kristina Dahl, a climate researcher at the climate change research and communication nonprofit Climate Central who was part of the report team. “Half the world’s population is experiencing an extra month of extreme heat. The numbers are staggering.”

The authors of the report say it serves as a stark reminder of the dangers of climate change and the urgent need for better early-warning systems, heat action plans, and long-term planning for heat events across the globe. 

The report was created by scientists at Climate Central; World Weather Attribution, a climate research group; and the Red Cross Climate Centre. 

More Frequent Heat

In the new report, scientists calculated the number of days between 1 May 2024 and 1 May 2025 in which temperatures in a country or territory were above 90% of the historical temperatures from 1991 to 2020. Then, they analyzed how many of these extreme heat days were made more likely by climate change using the climate shift index, a methodology developed by Climate Central that compares actual temperatures to a simulated world without human-caused climate change. 

The team found that climate change made extreme heat events more likely in every country.

Over all the countries and territories, climate change added the greatest number of extreme heat days to the Federated States of Micronesia (57 days), and Aruba had the most extreme heat days in total over the past year, 187 days. The report’s authors estimate that in a world without climate change, Aruba would have experienced just 45 days of extreme heat.

Other Caribbean and Oceanic islands were among the countries and territories most strongly affected by climate change. People in the United States experienced 46 days of extreme heat, 24 of which were added by climate change. 

Of the 67 extreme heat events that occurred in the past year, the one most influenced by climate change was a heat wave that struck Pacific islands in May 2024. Researchers estimated the event was made at least 69 times more likely by climate change. 

The findings are not a surprise to Nick Leach, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the report. “We’ve understood the impact of climate change on temperature and extreme heat for quite some time…[including] how it’s increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme heat,” he said. Research has consistently shown that heat events on Earth are made more likely, more intense, and longer lasting as a result of climate change. 

Leach said the new report gives a good overview of how climate change is influencing heat waves worldwide. However, defining extreme heat as temperatures above the 1991–2020 90th percentile creates a relatively broad analysis, he said. Studies using a more extreme definition of extreme heat may be more relevant to the impacts of extreme heat, and studies estimating those impacts are typically more policy relevant, he said.

The report’s authors chose the 90% threshold because heat-related illness and mortality begin to increase at those temperatures, Dahl said. 

Taking Action on Heat Waves

For rising global temperatures, “the causes are well known,” the report’s authors wrote. Burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas has released enough greenhouse gases to warm the planet by 1.3°C (2.34°F; calculated as a 5-year average); 2024 marked the first year with average global temperatures exceeding 1.5°C (2.7°F) above preindustrial temperatures.

“Only comprehensive mitigation, through phasing out fossil fuels, will limit the severity of future heat-related harms,” the authors wrote.

Extreme heat puts strain on the human body as it tries to cool itself. This strain can worsen chronic conditions such as cardiovascular problems, mental health problems, and diabetes and can cause heat exhaustion and heat stroke, which can be deadly. Extreme heat is particularly dangerous for already-vulnerable populations, including those with preexisting health conditions, low-income populations lacking access to cool shelter, and outdoor workers. 

Heat Action Day on 2 June, hosted by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, raises awareness of heat risks across the globe. This year, the day of action will focus on how to recognize signs of heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Dahl recommends using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tips on heat and health to stay safe. “Most heat-related illness and death is preventable,” she said.

—Grace van Deelen (@gvd.bsky.social), Staff Writer

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2025), Climate change made extreme heat days more likely, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250208. Published on 30 May 2025.

Text © 2025. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Data from the spacecraft that created the most accurate map of the Milky Way are being used to study objects in our own solar system. Information provided by the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite have now enabled astronomers to measure the masses of hundreds of asteroids, allowing for improved orbital calculations.

“Everyone benefits from more accurate [orbital tracking] of the asteroids, from missions that are going there to observers on the ground that want to look at them from various telescopes,” said Oscar Fuentes-Muñoz, a NASA postdoctoral fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Fuentes-Muñoz presented the masses of 231 asteroids he and his colleagues determined using Gaia last month at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference in Houston.

The new research more than doubles the number of known asteroid masses, and the results are only the beginning.

“This work…is really pushing for high precision with novel techniques,” said Kevin Walsh, a solar system dynamicist who studies asteroids at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado. Walsh was not part of the study.

Gravity Assist Asteroids

The new research relied on a familiar staple of Newtonian physics, taught in high schools everywhere: When two objects interact, each mass exerts a gravitational force on the other. The result is often negligible—the gravitational force of your phone isn’t going to pull you across the room.

But if the objects are moving and the mass difference is large enough, the more massive object will change, or perturb, the path of the less massive one. Fuentes-Muñoz called the phenomenon a “gravitational assist” and compared the relationship between massive and less massive asteroids to the way Earth’s mass perturbs the orbit of a satellite. “The mass of the satellite doesn’t affect the motion of the Earth,” he explained, but the path of the satellite can be dramatically altered.

Although they were not part of its primary mission, the star mapper Gaia was developed with solar system observations in mind and was able to tease out such interactions in incredible detail before being decommissioned in March. According to Gaia team member Mikael Granvik of the University of Helsinki, the telescope’s precision was comparable to observing a 2-euro coin on the Moon while standing on Earth.

As asteroids interacted, Gaia captured how their orbits shifted over 66 months. Fuentes-Muñoz and his colleagues used that information to determine the gravitational mass of the larger objects. Gravitational mass is a way to measure an object’s mass on the basis of how it moves in gravity, rather than calculating the object’s absolute mass in kilograms, for example. This type of measurement is commonly used to estimate the masses of solar system bodies as well as Earth-orbiting satellites and spacecraft.

Most of the 1.4 million known asteroids are too small to have their masses measured, however. “We can estimate things that are maybe…a thousand times smaller than Ceres, but not a million times,” Fuentes-Muñoz said.

Of the more than 1,000 large asteroids they observed, the researchers were able to more precisely calculate the gravitational masses of nearly 300 previously discovered objects. This calculation significantly increases the precision of asteroid orbits.

The dwarf planet Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt, and Fuentes-Muñoz calculated its gravitational mass, providing “ground truth” to previous measurements. The new research puts Ceres’s gravitational mass at 62.650 cubic kilometers per square second, which closely matches previous estimates and demonstrates the accuracy of the researchers’ technique. (For comparison, Earth’s gravitational mass is 398,600 cubic kilometers per square second.)

Gaia Is the Gift That Keeps Giving

Gaia wrapped up its mission after more than a decade in space, but new results continue to pour in. That’s due in part to the strict scrutiny the Gaia team uses before releasing data publicly.

Fuentes-Muñoz used the focus product release (FPR), sort of a halfway step between Gaia’s data release (DR) 3, released in 2022, and DR4. DR4 will be released no sooner than this summer, and DR5 won’t be released before the end of 2030.

“It was interesting to see that they got so many accurate masses already from just the FPR,” said Granvik, who reported the first observations of asteroid mass using Gaia in 2022.

Granvik said Gaia will eventually provide “up to a tenfold increase in the sheer number of objects that we have masses” for.

Walsh said increased precision “will just really help nail down masses and the perturbative effects down to smaller and smaller asteroids.”

“It’s a significant change overall,” Fuentes-Muñoz said. “We’re going to get hundreds of asteroid masses.”

—Nola Taylor Tillman (@astrowriter.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Tillman, N. T. (2025), The late, great Gaia helps reveal asteroid masses, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250204. Published on 29 May 2025.

Text © 2025. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

Pine Hollow Arboretum’s founder, John W. Abbuhl, began planting trees around his Albany, N.Y., home in the 1960s. He planted species native to surrounding ecosystems but also made ambitious choices—bald cypresses, magnolias, pawpaws, sweetgums—that were more climatically suited to the southeastern United States.

Now, those very trees are thriving, said Dave Plummer, a horticulturalist at Pine Hollow. 

Other Pine Hollow trees, such as balsam firs native to New York, have struggled with this century’s warming winters. “We’re noticing they’re not doing as well as they were maybe 5 to 10 years ago,” Plummer said. “These are trees that are just meant to be in more northern climates where the winters are harsher, and we just don’t have those winters [anymore].”

Pine Hollow Arboretum is one of many botanical gardens rethinking their planting strategies as the climate warms. These strategies range from testing out new, warmth-loving plants to putting more resources toward pest and invasive species management. 

Planting Zones Shift North

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recognizes 13 plant hardiness zones based on a region’s coldest annual temperatures, averaged over a period of 30 years. These zones guide gardeners’ planting decisions by advising which species of plants, especially perennials, are most likely to thrive in a specific zone.

A new report from Climate Central, a climate change research and communication nonprofit, lays out stark changes to these zones.

Scientists compared 30-year coldest temperature averages from the past (1951–1980) and present (1995–2024) at 247 locations across the United States using NOAA’s Applied Climate Information System dataset. They found that 67% of locations have shifted to warmer zones since the 1951–1980 period.

They also used the most recently released phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) to simulate how planting zones might shift by mid-century. In the CMIP6 scenario they used, carbon emissions decline but do not stay under Paris Agreement limits, a framework consistent with the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 2-4.5 “middle of the road” scenario.

The models predict that the mid-century average annual coldest temperatures during the 2036–2065 time period will warm in 100% of the country by an average of 3.1°C (5.6°F). Coldest annual temperatures in the Upper Midwest, Alaska, the Northern Rockies and Plains, and the Northeast and Ohio Valley were projected to warm the most. 

Longer Seasons, Looming Threats

The results match what staff at Pine Hollow and Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., have seen. At the cemetery (which is also a botanical garden), staff have begun to test whether plants that traditionally couldn’t survive cold Massachusetts winters can now thrive. For example, staff there have begun testing crepe myrtles and paperbush, two flowering shrubs that have survived recent winters.

In Minnesota, plant hardiness zones have shifted by about half a zone since 1951–1980.

Laura Irish-Hanson, an educator and horticulturist at the University of Minnesota, tells students and local gardeners to pay attention to the hardiness map when shopping for perennials and to consider planting species more adapted to warmer climates. “Don’t just look at things that, 200-300 years ago, were native to Minnesota,” she said. “Try things that, historically, maybe are native to Iowa, or Illinois, or parts of Wisconsin that are warmer.”

Mount Auburn is also taking the long view. “The effects of a changing climate on plants and plant communities will be significant and, unfortunately, without precedent,” said Ronnit Bendavid-Val, vice president of horticulture and landscape at Mount Auburn Cemetery, in an email. “We can make informed guesses about a certain plant’s resiliency and toughness based on what is known about its adaptability to extremes in the habitats where its species evolved over millennia. However, horticulturally speaking, ‘plant hardiness’ and fitness can be a vexing subject.”

Anchorage, Alaska, is among the cities that have experienced the largest increase in average annual coldest temperatures, according to the Climate Central report, jumping from −29.8°C (−21.6°F) during 1951–1980 to −24.8°C (−12.6°F) during 1995–2024. 

At the Alaska Botanical Garden in Anchorage, hardiness zone changes aren’t the sole climate consequence affecting plants. Will Criner has been gardening there for 12 years as the garden and facilities manager. In that time, he’s noticed the growing season lengthen and, in turn, the time between the first and last frosts dwindle. “We’re definitely seeing a season extension,” he said. 

While warming temperatures could expand growing ranges for some specialty, high-value crops like oranges, almonds, and kiwis, they could also expand the ranges of pests. In Alaska, for instance, warmer winters have made it easier for the spruce beetle, a native insect capable of decimating entire tree stands, to thrive, Criner said. And Plummer expects that the spotted lanternfly, an invasive species that threatens fruit and hardwood trees in particular, will become a problem in Albany as its range expands northward. 

Warmer temperatures may also make it easier for invasive plant species to establish themselves because they would be able to spread their seeds earlier in the year. Non-native species planted intentionally in gardens may more easily grow out of control, too.

Such non-native species could outcompete other garden plants for water, sunlight, and nutrients, forcing gardeners to change their planting strategies. “I could imagine, as we get longer seasons, that some of these [non-native] plants would have to be removed from our database and deaccessioned” for other plants to thrive, Criner said.

Planting for Precipitation

As the climate warms, gardeners and horticulturists across the country have begun to think about how to better protect their plots. 

In the Midwest, gardeners increasingly face oscillating weather conditions—extreme drought and extreme flooding—that can damage and drown plants. That makes gardening even more of a challenge, Irish-Hanson said. For areas facing intensifying rainstorms, water-loving plants can help mitigate damage to a garden, she said, but they must be planted in low-lying spots to receive adequate water.

Plummer, who grew up in Albany, said he’s seen less snow and more ice and wind storms than when he was a child. Those storms can damage plants—a March 2024 ice and wind storm at Pine Hollow Arboretum felled multiple trees, which harmed other specimens. Moving forward, the facility may begin planting species more suited to a warmer climate.

Irish-Hanson recommends gardeners adapt their mindset along with their planting decisions. “Even if we do everything perfectly right and choose the right plant for our environment, it can still die,” she said. “We can be so frustrated, but then [we should] think of it as an opportunity to try something else, to do something new with that space, and not try to fight with the environment.”

Criner has similar advice: “[We should] try to be mindful of the plant choices we make and how plants interact with the surrounding environment, not just if they look pretty or not.”

—Grace van Deelen (@gvd.bsky.social), Staff Writer

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2025), As climate changes, so do gardens across the United States, Eos, 106, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EO250203. Published on 28 May 2025.

Text © 2025. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.