climate

We have been looking for the end of Neanderthals in weapons and climate for decades. A study proposes to look for it in the placenta

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For decades, we have tried to explain why our species has persisted over time and Neanderthals don’t. We have blamed climate changeto competition for resources, to a supposed cognitive inferiority and even to the genetic assimilation. However, a new study suggests that the answer might not lie on the battlefield or in the weather, but in something much more intimate like the placenta. A new idea. In this case, science proposes a hypothesis controversial, since it suggests that Neanderthals could have become extinct, in part, due to genetic susceptibility extreme to preeclampsia. a disorder which is heard a lot today and which is nothing more than a hypertensive condition in pregnancy that can be lethal for both the mother and the fetuses. A price to pay. To understand the hypothesis, we must first understand the human “obstetric paradox”, since in our species we have an almost unique characteristic, which is deep hemochorial placentation. And it is something that may sound very bad, but it is actually necessary to feed a fetal brain as demanding as ours and that of Neanderthals. In this case, the placenta needs to aggressively invade the arteries of the uterus maternal to obtain maximum blood flow, although the problem is that it is something that carries a great risk. The possibilities. Faced with this invasion, the possibilities that open up are several. The first of them is that it works and that the fetus can develop its massive brain. But in the event that this fails, a great immunological and vascular reaction is unleashed in the mother, which is what we know as preeclampsia. This presents with severe hypertension, organ damage and risk of death for both the mother and the fetus. And it is a problem that today is quite significant among human pregnancies, but now science indicates that, although the Homo sapiens evolved a physiological “safety mechanism” to mitigate this impact, Neanderthals were not so lucky. A demographic winter. This study suggests that, as the Neanderthal brain grew, becoming larger than ours, its metabolic needs forced a increasingly aggressive placentation. The fact of penetrating further into the placenta significantly increases the risk of preeclampsia, and the problem is that Neanderthal women lacked the immune mechanism to tolerate this invasion. This is where researchers have created a scenario in which rates of preeclampsia and eclampsia in Neanderthals could have reached between 10% and 20% of all pregnanciescompared to much lower rates in preindustrial humans. The meaning. This scenario translates into logically devastating maternal and fetal mortality, and the direct consequence is that small and dispersed hunter-gatherer populations had a constant decline in reproductive success. And this is a much more effective death sentence than any war, since a sudden catastrophe is not necessary, but it is enough for more mothers and babies to die than are born over a few millennia for a species to end up disappearing. There is skepticism. Within the scientific world there are doubts about what is said in this study, since there is a lack of physical evidence to support this hypothesis. The first thing they point to is that there are no markers in the fossils that have been found that allow us to diagnose preeclampsia in a Neanderthal woman from 40,000 years ago. In addition to this, although we know genetic variants associated with the risk of preeclampsia in modern humans, such as genes linked to FLT1systematic screening of Neanderthal DNA has not yet been performed to confirm whether they possessed the “high-risk” variants or lacked the protective variants. Also like it. What makes this hypothesis attractive to biologists is that it fits with maternal-fetal conflict theory. As different previous reviews point out, pregnancy is not always a perfect cooperation, but rather a tense biological negotiation. In this case, the fetus “wants” more resources to survive, and the mother “wants” to limit that investment to survive and have future children. Preeclampsia is often the result of this conflict getting out of control, and so, if Neanderthals took the “big brain” strategy to the limit without developing the biological counterpart to protect the mother, their own reproductive biology could have become an evolutionary trap. Images | Nanne Tiggelman freestocks In Xataka | A mixture of 4,000 kilometers: we have the first detailed map of the coexistence between Neanderthals and Sapiens

This is how climate change multiplied the devastation of the DANA in Valencia

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October 29, 2024 was marked as one of the most tragic days in the recent history of Spain due to the DANA that hit the region of Valencia and left 230 fatalities, billions in economic losses and rainfall that shattered records. And it is no wonder, because in stations like Turís, they accumulated 771.8 mm in just 16 hours and the national record for rainfall in one hour was broken with 184.6 mm. And now investigations are emerging about it. Climate change. We know that this effect is altering the hydrological cycle at a global level, but now a new and exhaustive published study in Nature led by researcher Carlos Calvo-Sancho, has managed to measure exactly how and how much this storm was ‘doped’ by blame for anthropogenic global warming. And the most interesting thing is that it opens the door to the fact that these phenomena may be more common in the coming years. Pure physics. Days after the disaster, rapid attribution initiatives such as Attribution and ClimaMeter They had already estimated, according to the most basic parameters, that this meteorological event had been twice as likely and 13% more intense due to climate change. Although at that time it was simply preliminary data that required confirmation and above all ‘sitting down’ to analyze it well. That analysis has arrived many months later in a new work that goes far beyond these quick figures and focuses on the physical fundamentals. Here the researchers used very high resolution simulations under an approach called ‘Pseudo-Global Warming’. A simulation. This approach is nothing more than recreating the October 2024 storm on a computer to see the devastation that occurred and then simulating it again by removing the effects of global warming from the formula. This is achieved by returning the atmosphere to the conditions of the pre-industrial era, which is like a reference point when talking about climate change. The data. By comparing both simulated worlds, the supercomputer results showed the tremendous impact of the human hand on the storm. The most interesting results that were obtained can be summarized in four different points: Six-hour rainfall rates intensified by 21% under current weather conditions. The territory affected by rains exceeding 180 liters per square meter, which for the AEMET is the red notice limit, was expanded by 55%. The total volume of water falling directly on the Júcar River basin increased by 19%. The intensity of rain in one hour increased at a rate of 20% for each degree Celsius of temperature, something that is very relevant. And to understand it, we have to go to the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship, which dictates that the atmosphere should retain 7% more water vapor for each extra degree of temperature. Something that was duplicated here. Because?. Here the question that many people can ask, both from the affected areas and from other parts of Spain, is clear: Why did it rain so much more than what the basic theory dictated? Here the science suggests that it all started with unusually high temperatures on the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, which reached record levels in the summer of 2024. This injected a huge amount of water vapor into the system, and when comparing the current simulation with the pre-industrial one, the scientists detected, among other things, an 11.9% increase in the water that could precipitate or 11.9% more violent and faster updrafts. The perfect cocktail. In short, the greater amount of water evaporated in the sea by high temperatures and air not only caused more rain, but also triggered an aerodynamic and thermal domino effect that made the storm much larger, longer lasting and more destructive than could be expected. Towards the future. These findings are important to understand exactly what happened here, but they also raise a big warning: extreme hydrometeorological phenomena in the western Mediterranean are evolving aggressively. In this way, the study highlights that the future scenarios projected by climatologists are already here, making it urgent and vital that we rethink our urban planning and our adaptation strategies to prepare for storms that are going to be increasingly more aggressive, as we keep seeing. Images | EMU Chris LeBoutillier In Xataka | Some say worrying about climate change is a “first world problem.” A macro survey proves him right

We knew that Mars has gravity. Now we have just discovered the unexpected effect it has on the Earth’s climate

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I don’t need to tell you that the Earth’s climate is not constant and it is not just because of the climate change: If we look at it in perspective, throughout the history of the planet it has gone through glaciations and warm periods. Many of these changes find explanation in the Milankovitch cycles or orbital variations, that is, the slow changes in the Earth’s orbit and the inclination of its axis due to the gravitational attraction of other planets. The surprising influence of Mars. It was known that the giant Jupiter or the nearby Venus are largely to blame, but now we have discovered another secondary actor that has gained importance: Mars, as explained this study collected in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and led by scientist Stephen Kane. What’s surprising about it? That Mars only has 10% of the mass of the Earth, hence there are simplified climate models that downplay its importance. The simulations. The hypothesis is: what would happen to the Earth’s orbit if Mars were much larger or did not exist? Since human research teams do not have millions of years to wait, they used simulations with a solar system model of ten million years each to study gravitational interactions. The only factor they changed in each simulation was the mass of Mars: from zero (Mars does not exist) to being ten times larger than Earth. Mars “weighs” much more than we think. And the results were conclusive: Mars is directly responsible for the “Great Cycle”, a 2.4 million year gravitational beat in which Mars rhythmically stretches and shrinks the Earth’s orbit, acting as a metronome that regulates the amount of solar radiation received and regulates the frequency of ice ages. Without Mars, that cycle would not exist. However, Kane nuance: “It doesn’t mean that without Mars the Earth wouldn’t have ice ages, but it would completely change the frequency with which they occur.” But if Mars were giant, Earth’s climate cycles would also change: they would be shorter and more extreme, going from an ice age to suffocating heat waves. In short, life adaptation would become more complicated. What would not change, according to the study, is the “great Jupiter – Venus cycle”, the 405,000-year gravitational pattern driven by a secular resonance of both planets that acts as the “master clock” of the Earth’s climate as it is the most stable and constant cycle in the planet’s geological history. Why is it important. Knowing better the influence of the planets around us on the climate is good news that helps us better understand our past and be able to glimpse the future with more precision. But it has an impact on the search for habitable exoplanets: it is not enough to find something similar to Earth, but you also have to look at its neighbors and pay attention to the fine print. That is, if it has a “Mars-type” planet nearby but of great mass, its climate has every chance of being too chaotic for life. In Xataka | Mars has just entered the exclusive club of planets with rays. This is discouraging news for NASA. In Xataka | We had been wondering for decades how Mars could have water, cold and life. Today we finally have an answer Cover | Photo of Planet Volumes in Unsplash

What Zealand explains about climate change

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For decades, geography books taught us that the world was divided into six continents. In 2017, the scientific community made official the existence of a new “intruder” of colossal dimensions: Zealandia. With an extension of 4.9 million square kilometers —equivalent to the entire European Union—, this mass of continental crust separated from Australia and Antarctica about 80 million years ago. What makes Zealandia an absolute anomaly is not just its size, but how well it has been hidden. Unlike the rest of the continents, 94% of its body is sunk under the Pacific. Only its highest peaks manage to show their heads, forming what we step on today such as New Zealand and New Caledonia. This geographical timidity kept it as a “ghost continent” until technology allowed us, finally, to pierce the abyss. The mission to rescue the past from the abyss. Everything changed in the summer of 2017. Expedition 371 of the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) It was not a pleasure cruise: the ship JOIDES Resolution set sail with a mission almost surgical. For two months, 32 scientists worked piecework, in 24-hour shifts, to extract “witnesses” from the seabed: cylinders of rock and sediment recovered almost five kilometers deep. These sediment cores are not just mud and stone. They are, in the words of paleontologist Laia Alegret, in statements collected by The Conversation, authentic “libraries of climate history”. The findings were surprising, despite being under the sea today, the scientists found pollen from land plants and spores, in addition to thousands of microfossils of organisms They only live in very warm and shallow waters. This confirmed that Zealandia was not always an underwater world, but had periods of land covered in vegetation. The “mirror” of future climate change. The relevance of Zealandia goes far beyond a geological curiosity. According to researchers from Rice Universitythis submerged continent constitutes a “critical region” for climate science, precisely because it is one of the places where current climate models show the greatest deficiencies. If models fail to accurately reproduce Zealand’s past climate, they warn, their predictions of future global warming may be incomplete or biased. The focus of attention is placed especially on the Eocene, between 53 and 41 million years ago, a time in which the Earth functioned as a true “greenhouse planet”. Carbon dioxide concentrations were much higher than today and there were no permanent polar caps. Studying this period in Zealand allows scientists to “look back at our future,” offering a glimpse of how the planet will respond to conditions extreme greenhouse effect greenhouse effects similar to those we could achieve in the coming centuries. One of the hottest spots. One of the most disturbing findings was the identification of episodes of rapid warming—rapid in geological terms, that is, on scales of thousands of years—during which ocean currents changed unexpectedly. The sediments reveal the arrival of deep water masses originating near Antarctica, a phenomenon difficult to explain in a warm world without permanent ice. This discovery, underlined by The Conversationchallenges the current understanding of how heat is redistributed in the oceans and forces us to rethink some basic assumptions of global ocean circulation. The violent birth in the “Ring of Fire.” Zealand’s history is one of a geological “roller coaster” driven by plate tectonics. According to the results published by the expedition directorsRupert Sutherland and Gerald Dickens, the continent was sculpted by two major tectonic events: The Great Divorce: First, it was torn from Australia and Antarctica 85 million years ago, stretching and thinning until it sank. The Resurrection of Subduction: About 50 million years ago, something “globally significant” happened. What scientists call a “massive subduction rupture” began, giving rise to the Pacific Ring of Fire. In simplified terms, this process caused huge portions of the seafloor to curve, parts of Zealand to temporarily rise above sea level, and then the continent to sink back more than a kilometer to its current configuration. It was not a local phenomenon. These tectonic forces altered the direction and speed of movement of many tectonic plates across the planet, in one of the largest geodynamic readjustments of the last 80 million years. Microfossils and the response of life. To reconstruct these movements with surgical precision, scientists they rely on benthic foraminifera. These single-celled shelled organisms are “diagnostics of the deep.” By analyzing its remains in the ship’s laboratories, researchers can determine whether a rock stratum belonged to a shallow beach or an abyssal plain. Furthermore, complementary technical studies, such as those presented in Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology and marine Micropaleontologyanalyze the biotic response to hyperthermals (peaks of extreme heat). The results indicate that marine life does not react uniformly: the magnitude and speed of warming determine whether ecosystems adapt, reorganize or become stressed. These data are essential to improve predictive models of current climate change. A sea of ​​discoveries at risk. Zealandia’s exploration has shown that continents remain to be discovered and that the ocean floor holds the answers to the most pressing questions about our climate survival. However, science depends not only on curiosity, but on investment. Despite the scientific success of the 2017 expedition, there are countries that later do not intervene adequately due to lack of payments. This leaves future expeditions in the air that could continue to unravel the mysteries of this seventh submerged continent, a territory that, although hidden under thousands of meters of water, has a lot to say about the air we will breathe tomorrow. Image | Unsplash and World Data Center for Geophysics & Marine Geology Xataka | For thousands of years, human beings have avoided crossing the Taklamakan Desert. Now China is raising fish there

As if we didn’t have enough climate worries on Earth, a new threat is coming: space tornadoes

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Before we looked at the sky to predict the weather. Now we look at the forecast in an app provided by incredibly powerful simulations based on radar and satellite data. Thus, we can see the path of a hurricane days before it makes landfall, potentially saving thousands of lives. But what about the “tornadoes” that come from space? Sorry? It turns out that interplanetary space is not a quiet vacuum, and a new study warns of a phenomenon that has already been baptized with a disturbing name: “space tornadoes.” They are not wind funnels that carry the debris of the galaxy with them; They are actually rotating vortexes of plasma and magnetic fields that travel at insane speeds through space. But the most worrying thing is not that they exist, but where are formed. The research reveals that these vortices do not necessarily originate from the Sun, but can be born spontaneously in deep space, as a result of collisions between larger solar storms. And yes, they are powerful enough to wreak havoc on Earth. A magnetic problem. When astronomers talk about space weather, they’re not talking about a meteor shower. The weather engine of our solar system is the Sun. From time to time, our star spits out gigantic eruptions of charged particles and magnetic fields. The most powerful event of this type is Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs). CMEs travel at speeds of up to 2,900 kilometers per second. When one hits the Earth, it interacts with our natural magnetic shield (the magnetosphere) and can cause a geomagnetic storm. The good thing is that this interaction produces incredibly beautiful northern and southern lights. The downside is that a severe geomagnetic storm can interfere with power grids, overheat transformers to the point of failure, and damage satellites vital to communications and GPS. The mystery of ghost storms. This is where the new research begins. In 2023, a team of scientists at the University of Michigan ran into a problem: They were recording geomagnetic storms on Earth that didn’t match any CME that had been predicted to hit us. They were “phantom storms.” The hypothesis: that smaller, more dangerous space weather events were forming on the way from the Sun to the Earth, rather than directly at the Sun. According to a paper by the researchers in The ConversationThe main suspect was structures known as “flux ropes,” bundles of magnetic fields twisted back on themselves that are affectionately referred to as magnetic tornadoes. They had already been observed, but their exact origin and whether they were powerful enough to cause problems on their own were unknown. The problem was how to detect them. Current space weather simulations are designed to look at “big” things (CMEs), not little vortices. These flux ropes were too small for the models to resolve. The researchers compare it to “trying to forecast a hurricane with a simulation that only shows you global weather patterns.” Since they couldn’t increase the resolution of the entire solar system (it would be computationally prohibitive), the team did something smarter: they created an ultra-high-resolution simulation “corridor,” nearly 100 times finer than previous models, centered on the path of a specific solar flare that occurred in May 2024. And then they saw them. The simulation revealed the birth mechanism of these tornadoes. It happened when the CME “crashed” into the slower solar wind in front of it. The researchers’ own analogy is perfect: it was like “watching a hurricane generate a cluster of tornadoes in its wake.” The study confirms this phenomenon for the first time through simulation. The collision between the CME and the solar wind creates an intense “current sheet.” In that area, a process called magnetic reconnection (when magnetic field lines violently break and reconfigure) “spits out” these mesoscale vortices. Why are they dangerous? The simulation demonstrated that these mesoscopic “flow ropes” are not minor phenomena. They contain magnetic fields (about 30 nanoTeslas) “strong enough to trigger a significant geomagnetic storm” on their own. The real danger is that, to our current systems, they are almost invisible. While a giant CME is an obvious and massive threat that we can track from the Sun, these “space tornadoes” that form along the way would appear, at best, as a “small blip” on monitors. We could be hit by a geomagnetic storm capable of damaging the electrical grid with little prior warning. Our best weapon. Satellite constellations. This discovery shows that our way of monitoring space weather is insufficient. Instead of single-point satellites (like the DSCOVR observatory, which can only measure what passes in front of it), we need a constellation of satellites flying in formation. Researchers have proposed a mission designed precisely for this. It would be called SWIFT (Space Weather Investigation Frontier) and it would be a constellation of four satellites flying in a tetrahedron formation, capable of measuring these vortices with precision. Only by measuring the same phenomenon from multiple points at the same time can we understand its real 3D structure and its danger. Image | NOAA, Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti and Chip Manchester In Xataka | NASA has calculated how much time we would have to prepare for a devastating solar storm and has set to work to get that time

Houses built on the sea are part of the US identity. Until climate change began to engulf them

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Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, has a problem. The Atlantic is devouring their houses. Literally. For years, the chalets raised on stilts and built on the coast were one of its most emblematic sights, but their privileged position has become a trap as the sea level rises and hurricanes occur like those that hit the area a few days ago. The result: eight houses demolished in record time. What has happened? That hurricanes Humberto and Imelda have left an unusual impression on the Outer Banksthe chain of islands that covers much of the coast of North Carolina, on the Atlantic coast of the United States, where the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. Recently the virulence of the waves devastated eight houses of the area, causing them to collapse in a matter of a few days. On Tuesday, September 30, the storm struck five homes in less than an hour in Buxton (Cape Hatteras), the sixth collapsed that same night amid waves of several meters, the seventh suffered a similar fate on the first day of October and the eighth did not last much longer. The buildings were unoccupied. Why is it important? Beyond how shocking it is to see homes swept away by waves, what happened on the North Carolina coast is interesting for several reasons. To begin with, because these are not typical houses. As can be seen in the videos and photos released by C.B.S., AP, BBC either NBC The buildings were houses similar to stilt housessupported on exposed wooden piles. Hence they are a unmistakable piece of the landscape from areas like Rodanthe. Are they the first to fall? No. And that is the second reason why what happened in recent days in the Outer Banks is much more than a curiosity or a misfortune attributable to two virulent hurricanes. A quick search in the newspaper archive arrives to find similar news: two houses on wooden stilts collapsed in September 2024 in Rodanthe, another in November in the same community, another demolished in 2023 precisely because of the threat of the Atlantic waves… the list goes on and on until there are more than a dozen cases. USA Today calculate that since mid-2020, at least twenty houses have been lost throughout the Outer Banks. Very similar data handles Washington Postthat assures that during the last five years 17 buildings have collapsed in Rodanthe and Buxton alone, a list that could soon be expanded, since there are other houses that are also in a precarious situation. “It’s becoming commonplace,” he resigns Rob Young, director of a program focused on coastal studies at Western Carolina University. “It’s not a problem here. There are homes on the verge of collapse in many places.” Why do they fall? In the case of the houses that collapsed in recent days, the final trigger was the Hurricanes Humberto and Imeldabut in reality the problem is broader. Their position, the sandy nature of the terrain but above all the intensification of storms and the rise in sea level caused by climate change is leaving them in a complicated situation. The reason: coastal erosion, a phenomenon that is already is felt in Rodanthe and Buxton. How does it affect them? As I remembered last year in X the architect Pedro Torrijos, the Cape Hatteras It is already such a narrow strip of land that it is difficult not to build near the coast, but in the last 40 years erosion has acted in such a way that today there are houses that have remained practically above the sea. And so it’s a problem. Piles that were once surrounded by dunes are now sometimes covered by the ocean, affecting their foundations. In 2024 the state Department of Environmental Quality published a report which concludes that of almost 8,800 structures built facing the sea in North Carolina, 750 They are in a delicate situation due to erosion. What do the US authorities say? They are aware of the problem, they are controlling the houses that give in and explore solutions“These are typical elevated coastal-style homes, situated on stilts, with a concrete driveway, parking, and septic system. Many private properties adjacent to Rodanthe, which previously contained patio land, dunes, and dry sand, are regularly partially or completely covered with seawater,” the National Park Service acknowledges. “During severe weather events, private homes facing the sea and in vulnerable areas are hit by strong winds and large waves, which has caused homes to collapse in recent years,” recognize the agency, which has counted 21 collapsed houses since 2020 in Seashore. And what is the way out? Good question, difficult answer. There are those who have chosen raise your houses or even move them away to leave them safe from the waves (for now), but it is not a cheap solution and time is against them. Another option is for the authorities to take care of them, although it has its weaknesses: two years ago the Park Service acquired two houses in Rodanthe to demolish them and thus open an area of ​​public access to the beach. They cost him $700,000. Images | Cape Hatteras National Seashore (Flickr) and National Park Service In Xataka | Milton once again puts a big problem on the table: houses on the beach are losing their value due to climate change

If we want to know how climate change will affect the Pyrenees, you should not look at heat or level. You have to study the caves

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Sometimes we have already talked about the threat that climate change supposes for the Pyrenees, for their ecological balance and for one of the key elements in the economy of the region, skiing. The mountainous regions are vulnerable areas in the face of changes in the weather, but to discover how we do not have to look at their snow, but in their stones. 16,500 years. A new study He has studied The evolution of temperatures in the surroundings of the Pyrenees during the last 16,500 years. The study allows us to establish a correspondence between the evolution of temperatures on this natural border of the Iberian Peninsula and the evolution of the climate in other regions of the world. Almost seven degrees. One of the details emphasized by the study responsible for the study is a sharp change in the temperature of the region registered about 14,600 years: an increase of about 6.7º Celsius (with a margin of error of about 2.8º) in the temperature of the mountainous environment. This increase in temperatures corresponds to a change in the climate of the northern hemisphere that occurred during the same era and has a counterpoint: a decrease of more than six degrees occurred almost two millennia later, about 12,800 years ago, during the event known as Younger Dryastowards the end of the last glacier period. This increase in temperatures corresponds to a change in the climate of the northern hemisphere that occurred during the same era and has a counterpoint: a decrease of more than six degrees that occurred almost two millennia later, about 12,800 years ago, during the event known as Younger Dryas, towards the end of the last glacier period. Analyzing stalagmites. The study was conducted by applying A new technique It allows to extract new climatic data from the incursions of water trapped in stalagmites, the mineral deposits that are formed in numerous tests, similar to the stalactites but whose growth occurs from the bottom up. The analysis was carried out in two caves of Ostolo and Mendukilo, in the north of Navarra. According to The team stands out Responsible for the study, the new analysis allows us to “not only identify the qualitative temperature changes of the last 16,500 years, but also to offer quantitative numbers of these variations with high chronological precision.” The details of the study have been published In an article In the magazine Climate of the past. Learn for the future. The new study is proof that our environment responds “quickly and synchronized” to changes in the global climate and also does so in relatively short time scales. This can help us to prevent the local impacts of future changes in the weather with greater precision, something of unique importance in an environment already vulnerable to these alterations. “Know how the climate in the past It helps us to better understand what can happen in the future in the face of similar disturbances. So that the future predictions of the climatic models are as robust as possible need data from the past to understand how the climate has worked in the face of phenomena such as the thermhaline circulation stop or previous increases in CO2 ”, stood out in a press release Ana Moreno, co -author of the study. In Xataka | The Pyrenees have become a huge weather laboratory: torrential rains have multiplied by four in Spain Image |

Before the great fire wave in Spain, science already has a culprit of its propagation: climate change

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This 2025 It has been a devastating year for Spain and Portugal Because of the A large amount of forest fires that they have been giving, In many cases intentionallybut that were fueled without control. A new scientific analysis has concluded that the climatic crisis has played a determining role, multiplying by 40 the probability that the extreme weather conditions that fueled the flames would be given. Not just that. The study determines that these phenomena were 30% more intense than they would have been in a world without global warming. And this is important to highlight it: the study does not indicate that climate change causes fires, but they intensify their force of destruction when they make them uncontrollable more likely. Putting figures. The reportprepared by the World Weather Attribution network, put figures to a catastrophe of historical dimensions. On September 1, the fires had calcined about 380,000 hectares in Spain and 260,000 in Portugal. In total, 640,000 hectares, an area four times higher than that of London and represents approximately 1% of the surface of the Iberian Peninsula. In historical terms, for Spain 2025 it will close as the fifth year with the highest burned surface since there are records in 1961. If we are going to European, we can affirm that the worst year since The EFFIS system (European Forest Fire Information System) began registering data in 2006, with more than one million hectares calcined, being two thirds of those corresponding to Spain and Portugal. Impresses researchers. “The size of these fires has been amazing”, affirms Clair Barnes, scientist at Imperial College in London and co -author of the study. “Warmer, dry and flammable conditions are becoming more severe with climate change and are giving rise to fires of an unprecedented intensity.” And it is that the surprise is logical. According to the data they have analyzed, they point out that these extreme risk conditions for the propagation of fire will be given every 15 years with the current climate. This is something that only happened once every 500 years in the preindustrial era. An explosive cocktail. The fuel of these megaincendios was an unprecedented weather situation. The large amount of fires occurred during a heat wave in Spain that was one of the longest ever registered, with a duration of 16 days (from August 3 to 18). But it was not only the longest, but also the most intense, with an upper 4.6 ° C temperature anomaly compared to a pre -industrial climate. The impact of climate change in this extreme heat is even more pronounced. According to the analysis, a ten -day heat wave as intense as the lived is now an event that is expected once every 13 years. Before humans began to heat our environment, such a heat was extremely rare and it was only expected to happen less than once every 2,500 years. It is not just the weather. Although the report points to climate change as the great amplifier, it is not the only factor. Scientists highlight that both in Spain and Portugal, rural depopulation and population aging have left large extensions of forest land without managing, creating a massive accumulation of dry vegetation that acts as a perfect fuel. One of the examples that is put is in the decrease of traditional practices such as extensive grazing has reduced natural control over that vegetation. David García, applied mathematician of the University of Alicante and co -author of the study, points out that the public debate in Spain has focused a lot on the decline of these rural activities. It points to that “much less the effect of climate change has been discussed in these fires, which, as has been demonstrated, has been immense.” To this is added that human ignition, whether accidental or intention, is behind about 90% of fires whose causes are identified. With huge fuel loads and extreme weather conditions, minor human actions can trigger catastrophic results. The science behind. To reach these conclusions, the research team analyzed the weather conditions that the fires propitiate using the daily severity index (DSR), which is a metric derived from the Canada Fire Meteorological Index (FWI). In summary, this index combines long -term rainfall data, temperature, humidity and wind to estimate the probability and severity of a fire. In this way, the scientists compared the meteorological data observed in the current climate (which has been heated from the pre -industrial era) with a counterfactual of how these conditions would be in a climate without that warming. In this way, with the methodology used, the “footprint” of climate change in a specific extreme event can be isolated and quantified. The result. The climatic crisis is taking the ecosystems and response capacity to the limit. For the first time, Spain activated the EU Civil Protection mechanism to request help in the fight against forest fires, and now they are already raised to apply new regulations with the aim of preparing for the future that awaits our country. Images | Ume (x) Matt Palmer In Xataka | The plan to clean the air capturing as a blow of reality has just received: the earth does not have as much space as we believed

Despite drought and climate change, Andalusia is today greener than in the 90s. It is not as positive as it seems

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A few months ago we count that Spain was getting greener. We did not refer to renewablesbut to the spectacular effects of a spring Exceptionally rainy that He moved the ghosts of the past. The problem was what would happen after those rains and If the drought would call back to the door. Now we are in a totally different scenario: heat waves and, Like every summer of recent years, The fight against fires. In spite of everything, and to climate change, NASA shows that Andalusia is today more “green” than in the 90s. And it is not to be too excited. Short. Spain is a country with drastic microclimal changes on which the flora depends. In the south of the peninsula, they are the Mediterranean forests Those who occupy 26% of Andalusia and the conditions of much of the soil have made pines and holm oaks are the dominant speciesS, since they adapt well to areas without plant cover. Andalusia is a good study scenario because climate change clearly draws its effects, such as upward temperature, decline rains and increased aridity. And, as we see in Physa team of researchers has published in Ecological Indicators How these forests have responded during the last 30 years. Tools. For the analysis, the researchers used more than 5,000 satellite images captured between 1994 and 2021 obtained Thanks to Landsat 5 and Landsat 7NASA. In total, they analyzed 2,358 plots that compared with data from Google Earth Engine and created an “greenery” index measured by Ndvi. They are the acronym of ‘Standardized Difference Vegetation Index ”, a way of quantifying, through satellite images or remote sensors, how much living vegetation there is in an area. In short, it is something that indicates the amount and vigor of the vegetation, being a tool widely used in studies of agriculture, natural resources management or those associated with climate change. Black squares represent 2,358 farms analyzed. In the most dependent areas of agriculture, the effects are much more limited What do we see. In general, except red eucalyptus, all species have shown an increase in this NDVI value, something that points to sustained revergeration. In trees such as holm oaks, cork oaks and pines, the maximum moment of activity is concentrated in the soft winter months, falling in the summers. And the chestnut, which is the only deciduous species of the study, operates on the contrary. The Effects of climate change And aridity have a decisive role in these cycles, extending the activity period of the Carrasco pine and the resin in the driest places and shortening that of other pine species, such as the wild, and that of the wild olive tree. Between 1994 and 2005, the growth of these species was evident, and followed its course from 2005 to 2021, although at a more moderate speed. ¿Because? The result is that, the green territory is now greener and the conclusion is that many species have maintained or increased its green coverage. There are several explanations, and very diverse. Carrasco or Encina pine are designed to support heat and droughtwhich allows them to remain active when other species lower the activity. Here the policies of natural reforestation and regeneration have played a role, as well as global factors such as the increase in Atmospheric co₂ that would act as fertilizer. There are also factors directly related to human activity, such as a progressive abandonment of farmland in certain areas that has favored the natural regeneration of the forest, as well as changes in land use, such as the decrease in livestock pressure that reduces the degradation of the undergrowth. We have also influenced the contrary, as with a cork oak, which we extract cork periodically, limiting the regeneration of the tree. Nuances. The study is very useful to see the current situation of the Andalusian Mediterranean forest, but also to observe which are the most resilient species and those that best adapt to changing conditions and a rampant aridity. And the conclusion of the study is that things are not going well, but due to that resilience of some species and, despite the continuous increase in annual average temperatures, most species did not demonstrate a relationship between phenological metrics and that temperature increase. And, perhaps, the most important thing is that the greenest does not equals a healthier vegetation, since various factors (natural and human) intervene and we see that this revergence is nothing uniform, with a south and this drier in which the vegetation is hardly growing. But well, as researchers point out, see what species are more resistant and adapt better is something that allows you to find the best options for adequate reforestation policies, Not how we are doing in many places in Europe. Before we talked about that rainy spring that moved the ghost of drought and that summer was returning to reality. And the Recent restrictions in Galicia They are a sad sign of this. Image | José Sánchez Rodríguez and Rafael Palomo López In Xataka | Spain has been dismissing its forest firefighters in winter for years. Fire show that it may not be a good idea

The “cold stain” of the North Atlantic is one of the greatest enigmas in the oceanic climate. We may have already solved it

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There is a region of the North Atlantic that for years intrigue to experts in weather and oceanography. They call her The “cold stain” of the Atlantic And it is a small oasis in an ocean whose waters have been tempered over the years. In a matter of weeks, two studies bring us closer to the resolution of this enigma. Two studies. The two new research published in recent weeks, one in the magazine Communications Earth & Environment And the other in Sciences Advances They address the enigmatic stain and give differentiated but complicitary explanations of the oceanographic dynamics behind this cold spot on the surface of the sea. One of the central axes for both studies is The southern overturning circulation of the Atlantic (AMOC)one of the most important sea currents for the climate on both sides of the “puddle.” A cold stain. The cold stain of the Atlantic is a relatively small region of the ocean surface whose average temperature has dropped (about 0.3º Celsius) instead of ascending as has happened with most surface waters. La Mancha is located south of Greenland, not far from the coasts of Newfoundland, near the waters of the Arctic Ocean. AMOC. Both works indicated directly to the AMOC current as the centerpiece of this climate puzzle. But what is exactly AMOC? The southern overturn circulation of the Atlantic is a current connected to the thermhaline circulation that transports water from north to south and from south to north in the Atlantic Ocean. The North Atlantic the current transports through the surface layers of the ocean the warm waters of tropical latitudes towards high latitudes and the border with the Arctic. Arrival to these latitudes, the water cools and descends to the deepest layers of the ocean, where it is dragged into a current back towards the South Atlantic. This current not only transports water masses of different temperature but also of different salinity: the water of the tropics is warmer more salty than the water in the Arctic environment. A weakened current. He first of the studies He focused on the weakening of this current observed in recent years. In its analysis, the team used direct observations of the current in the last two decades with indirect measures taken throughout the last century in order to “rebuild” the changes in this circulation. They contrasted these data With predictions that different oceanographic models generated under different assumptions. According to its analysis, only a weakened AMOC current could be linked to the data corresponding to compiled observations. “It’s a very robust correlation,” explained in a press release Yuan Li, co -author of the study. “If you look at the observations and compare them with all simulations, only a monoc-debilitated scenario reproduces the cooling in this unique region.” By sea and by air. He Second study He pointed out, however, the weakening of the AMOC current may not be the only relevant factor in the appearance of the Atlantic cold stain. According to this study, the weakening would have been The initial triggerbut the cooling of the stain would have reduced in turn evaporation and moisture in the atmosphere of the region. Since water vapor is a greenhouse gas, this would have been in turn in the reduction of this effect and therefore a regional cooling. “Reduce the greenhouse effect, so to speak, it will feed back the surface and amplify the existing cold anomaly,” also pointed to a press release Yifei Fan, co -author of this second study. In Xataka | 200,000 abandoned radioactive barrels are sought off the coast of Galicia: we have only found 1,000 Image | NASA Scientific Visualization Studio

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