Earth News
- Home
- Earth News
- For most of the year, the Barnes Ice Cap in the Canadian Arctic lies quiet under a blanket of snow. By summer, that snow melts back, and the ice cap transforms in texture, its bare ice dotted with turquoise ponds and its surface threaded with meltwater channels. In summer 2026, this seasonal awakening arrived fast and early.
- The West Eifel Volcanic Field comprises more than 100 maars—circular lakes formed by explosive eruptions. Until now, little was known about when these volcanic eruptions occurred. A research team from Heidelberg University, Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and the University of Göttingen has now reliably dated the most recent eruptions of the maar volcanoes.
- The processes that capture carbon from the atmosphere and store it on the seabed are crucial for climate balance. However, assessing these mechanisms is often complicated because it requires measurements ranging from the surface to the deep ocean.
- Salty water flowing through Antarctica's Blood Falls contains a distinct community of marine-specific microorganisms, providing evidence that the brine system beneath the glacier has a marine origin, according to a paper published in Nature Geoscience. The findings offer new insights into how microbial communities can persist through major environmental transitions.
- El Niño continues to intensify steadily and is expected to dominate global climate patterns in the August to October 2026 season, increasing the likelihood of above-normal temperatures across much of the world and driving significant shifts in rainfall patterns, according to the World Meteorological Organization.
- When a hurricane roars toward land, forecasters try to predict how high sea levels will rise to help coastal communities prepare for the worst impacts.
- While Earth's core consists mostly of iron, its density implies that lighter elements are also mixed in. Because hydrogen is abundant in the universe and can mix with iron under certain conditions, scientists suspect it makes up part of the lighter-element composition. Data from earthquakes suggest the inner part of the core also changes with depth, but scientists aren't sure exactly how this occurs. Now, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that hydrogen likely exists in a gradient within the inner and outer core that arises from thermodynamic equilibrium.
- Earth's oceans repeatedly lost oxygen and produced metal deposits during the planet's deepest ice ages. An international team of researchers analyzed manganese and other chemical signatures preserved in more than 27,000 ancient seafloor samples collected from six continents.
- For decades, scientists have asserted that the leakage of warm, salty Indian Ocean water south of South Africa into the Atlantic is a major contributor to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a component of the global ocean conveyor system.
- More than 100 shallow lakes stretching over 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) along the Atlantic coast of southern Brazil and Uruguay could become one of the world's most important natural laboratories for understanding how climate change and human activities reshape freshwater ecosystems.
- Along the three coasts of the contiguous United States, a silent race unfolds. Fueled by climate change, sea levels rise faster than at any time in recent geologic history. Meanwhile, coastal wetlands cling to a slim lead, lifted on newly accumulated sediments or moving inland as encroaching tides nip at their heels.
- Thick smoke from massive wildfires has been spreading in North America and Europe once again in 2026. The health impacts of breathing this particle-filled air are becoming well known, but wildfires' influence on the weather is less widely recognized.
- A brewing "super" El Nino cycle is poised to unleash heat waves, floods and drought worldwide, with the effects amplified by long-term human-caused climate change.
- A team of Brazilian researchers discovered the first direct evidence that goethite—the mineral responsible for the brown color of soils—can withstand extreme pressures and temperatures all the way to the planet's interior inside a diamond just 3 millimeters (0.1 inch) long, within a microscopic impurity. Goethite forms in soil and on the ocean floor from iron-rich minerals in the presence of water. It incorporates some of these water molecules into its mineral structure. The study suggests that goethite may transport and release water into a region known as the lower mantle.
- Facing wind and cold, with only half as much oxygen to breathe as in the valley, a German-Turkish research team surveyed the glacier on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey for the first time in July, at more than 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) above sea level. For two weeks, the team explored the ice field, which until then had been a blank page for researchers. Their goal was to find out whether the ice on Turkey's highest mountain preserves a unique archive of climate and cultural history.
- An international team of volcanologists working on Carlingford Mountain has found that liquid "magma chambers" do not always exist beneath volcanoes. The team instead demonstrated that magma "plumbing systems" beneath Earth's surface can fluctuate between solid- and liquid-dominated states, providing an improved view of how active volcanoes evolve through time.
- The rapid intensification of a hurricane ranks among the most dangerous weather events on Earth. Storms such as Hurricane Michael, which crashed ashore in the Florida Panhandle with winds of 160 mph (about 257 km/h), and Hurricane Otis, the costliest hurricane to strike Mexico's Pacific coast, caught communities unawares when they intensified at a rate that computer models failed to anticipate.
- Recently, a government minister in the Northern Territory, pitching a plan to make Darwin "the data center capital of the globe," suggested it might be a good idea to pump out groundwater to keep Earth's spin steady. If we don't, she said, we might risk "flipping the poles again."
- Permafrost in the Arctic stores large quantities of organic carbon. When frozen ground thaws or coastal sections erode, this carbon can enter the sea, where microorganisms can break it down and convert it into climate-damaging greenhouse gases. The extent to which this carbon actually enters the atmosphere, however, and how much remains in the ocean have hardly been quantified to date.
- Two of the world's most fire-prone regions have followed strikingly different wildfire trajectories despite both experiencing a warming climate. Burned forest area has surged across the U.S. Southwest, while eastern Australia has not seen the same increase.
Photographer: