climate

The Earth was going to force us to “erase” a second from our clocks in 2026. Climate change has changed everything

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For decades, the world’s metrologists have had to occasionally add a “leap second” to our clocks on Earth, since traditionally the tendency was for our planet to begin to slow down due to tidal friction caused by the Moon, making our days last a breath longer than the theoretical 86,400 seconds that science has always told us. but this trend has changedand now the Earth has started spinning faster. The consequence. Yes, when our planet was starting to slow down, I had to add one more second to our daily lives; When the opposite effect occurs, what should be done is to delete a second so that Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) does not become desynchronized from astronomical time. Something that will not be noticed, logically, but that has great importance in the causes that have led to this situation. Because? The answer to this temporal enigma was published in Nature where science calculated that the massive melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica has postponed the need for a second negative from 2026 to 2029, due to what is known as the ‘skater effect’ since an ice skater who turns on himself and wants to brake, extends his arms; If you want to speed up, you shrink them against your body. Now, if we take this concept to our own planet, we can see that when the ice at the poles melts, the entire mass of water flows and is redistributed around the equator as if it were ‘opening its arms’, moving mass away from its central axis of rotation. In this way, the law of conservation of angular momentum tells us that this phenomenon causes a slowdown in movement. Then we can affirm that the thaw has counteracted and surpassed the acceleration of the Earth’s core that we had previously detected. Your confirmation. What in 2024 was protection, today is backed by real-time mediations, and this means that if we go to the official data From the IERS, its most recent bulletins show us that the length of the day shows new positive values, so the acceleration has stopped and the Earth slows down slightly again. If we look at the literature, this fits perfectly with research published in recent years, where it is seen that between 2000 and 2020 the days have lengthened at a rate of 1.33 milliseconds per century due to melting ice. And among the reasons they give, the authors are categorical in stating that the redistribution of masses due to climate change currently dominates the Earth’s rotation, even surpassing the historical effect of lunar friction. It’s a race. Adding or subtracting seconds from our watches is not forever, since the International Bureau of Weights and Measures has already made the decision to definitively eliminate this practice starting in 2025. The reason? Current digital infrastructure, such as telecommunications networks, is at risk of collapsing every time time is manipulated. Images | POT In Xataka | A third of Spain will be completely dark for a minute or two: the astronomical event of the century is approaching

We have a surprising new “secret weapon” against climate change: beavers

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When we think about ways to capture carbon from the atmosphere, we often imagine huge, expensive technology installations; However, nature has its own systems to be able to clean the environment. One of these systems, as a new study has shown, is that beavers are true carbon sequestration machines thanks to the dams and canal systems that these rodents build. A Swiss experiment. Until now, we knew that humid ecosystems were important, but precise data was lacking to understand why. Now we know that the key was precisely in these animals, as a study has shown published in Nature. Here the researchers analyzed in detail an 800-meter stretch of a stream in northern Switzerland that had been modified by a beaver colony. What they saw was that the river corridor, after transforming it, acted as a net sink that could retain around 100 tons of carbon per year. In perspective. These figures are equivalent to trapping 26% of all the carbon inputs that enter that system, so over 13 years the wetland created by the beavers has reached store a whopping 1,194 tons of carbon. In short, this means that the area stores up to 10 times more carbon than similar river stretches where these rodents do not live, with a sequestration rate of approximately 10.1 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per hectare per year. How they do it. One might think that carbon is stored in accumulated wood or swamp plants, but the reality is much more complex. The study attributes that more than half of the carbon that has been removed from the environment is trapped below the surface, in the subsoil of the wetland. Added to this is the burial of organic carbon in the form of particles in the sediments. By flooding the area and slowing the flow, the beavers created the perfect conditions for carbon to settle and be locked underground for the long term. The methane problem. When we talk about creating new wetlands, any climate expert might raise an eyebrow, since these areas of stagnant water are known to be large emitters of methane, which is one of the gases involved in the greenhouse effect. On top of that, much more powerful than CO₂. However, the authors of the study also measured this factor and were pleasantly surprised: methane emissions in this system were surprisingly low, representing less than 1% of the total balance. But in addition, the carbon dioxide emissions that came from the sediments were also much lower than the carbon that the system managed to sequester. In this way, it can be concluded that the beaver wetland is a sink, not a source of emissions. Meeting objectives. The data collected in this Swiss stream opens an exciting door for climate migration policies, as encouraging the return of beavers can dramatically increase the resilience of our riverbanks. In fact, calculations suggest that the recolonization of floodplains by beavers could offset between 1.2% and 1.8% of Switzerland’s annual carbon emissions. Images | Francesco Ungaro In Xataka | Franco introduced an exotic sheep to Teide to please the hunters. Now it is destroying its ecosystem

The number one enemy of the Spanish mountain is called climate change. And we have data to prove it.

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In 2024, they burned 47,700 hectares. In 2025, 340,000 were exceeded. And honestly, the reasons are manyalmost too many. Well, Marco Turco, from the University of Murcia, just demonstrated something that we already sensed: at a global level, the days of extreme fire risk They have increased 65% since 1980. That’s 12 more days a year. And, if that were not enough, the Mediterranean region is where lthe signs are clearer. What does all this mean? In general terms, this means that although the causes of the fires remain human (in Spain between 80 and 95% of firesin fact; the intentional ones there are many less), climate change has a lot to do with its spread. Increasingly. Why is it interesting? Because this study is the first to apply formal climate fingerprinting techniques on a global scale to fire risk. That is, that figure of 11.66 more days of extreme risk in 44 years is achieved with the most advanced methodology that we have at our disposal. And if the global data is bad, the Mediterranean data (where the days have doubled in these almost five decades) they are horrifying. But it’s not all bad news. After all, as Turco points outdespite the increase in risk, the burned area has not increased proportionally. And the reason, according to him, is the improvement of the means of extinction. However, “when extreme conditions coincide with ignition, the resulting fires are more virulent and extensive.” Why is it news now? Besides because the article has just been published in Science Advances, because the precedent of 2025 (a rainy spring and a terrible summer) It resonates a lot with what we have in 2026. We don’t even have to remember that we are talking about a handful of months with truly incredible accumulated rainfall and that is generating an amount of material in the field that can easily be end up turning Spain black. Because the core of Turco’s work is that the conditions that allow fire to spread and become a big fire They are stronger than ever. Furthermore, human exposure to these types of fires is increasing: according to recent work in Cataloniabetween 42 and 138% for each area burned since 1992. The great debate of the future. As we have repeated on several occasions, there is no debate about the effect of climate change on increasing the risk of fire. The work is summarized in how much, how and where. Therefore, the central debate is another: what. What we do with the cards that nature is dealing us. And the truth is that there is a lot to cut: whether to bet on extinction or preventionif investing more in the landscape management or begin to integrate the entire territory into urban planning schemes more ambitious and extensive. Etc, etc, etc. The debate is endless and we are always late. Because what is clear thanks to Turco is that the distance that separates the spark from the megafire is increasingly shorter. Image | Mikhail Serdyukov In Xataka | In Ourense there are towns that fear running out of water in the middle of the rainy season. The reason: the hangover from forest fires

Humanity has been wondering for years how to adapt to climate change. The Mayans already achieved it centuries ago

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Beyond its architecture, urban planning and art, there is an aspect of the Mayan civilization that fascinates archaeologists: its decline. Over time, historians have understood that the decline was not sudden nor did it respond to a single factor, rather there was a sum that included changes in trade routes, wars and, above all, adverse weather, with droughts. severe and prolonged. Now we know something more. Even during the stages of Classic Terminal (800-1000 AD) and Postclassic (1000-1500 AD), while large urban centers succumbed, there were settlements that adapted to climate changes. What has happened? Which a group of archaeologists has just published an article in which they capture their years of research in a Mayan settlement located in ‘Birds of Paradise’, some wetlands located in the north of Belize. The site itself is not new. Scientists identified it long ago a few years with the help of lidara tool that is revolutionizing archaeology. What is new are the conclusions that its analysis has left. He study is published in the magazine PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science) and, among other issues, concludes that the wetland offers valuable information about how the Mayans responded to the social and environmental changes they dealt with during two crucial stages of their history: the Classic Terminal and Postclassic, a period that goes from the 9th to the 16th centuries. What have they found out? As they explain from New York University (NYU), to which the main author of the study belongs, one of the most interesting readings that the site leaves is the extent to which the Mayans adapted to the vagaries of the climate. Basically, researchers have proven that at a time when large urban centers were abandoned, pressured in part by intense droughtsthere were Mayan settlements that managed to survive in the wetlands. As? For its ability to adapt to the environment. And how did they do it? Taking advantage of the means they had at hand. “Wetlands provided resources for hunting and fishing to ancient populations, in addition to serving as refuge in periods of drought and social upheavals,” they explain from NYU. The environment supplied them with something else, equally or even more valuable for their settlements: construction materials. The site in question that they have analyzed in Belize in fact includes eight mounds of earth that could have served as a base for building buildings and a large elevated limestone platform. The experts also rescued wooden posts, animal remains and ceramic artifacts, clues that tell us about how life continued while other nearby urban centers declined. What do the experts say? “Together these findings reveal a highly adaptable community with diverse tools, food and construction materials. It shows us that Mayan communities could change habitats and survive extreme climates,” explains Timothy Beachprofessor at the University of Texas at Austin, who nevertheless recognizes that “we still do not know the size of this wetland population and its functioning.” Now archaeologists aim to go one step further. “Our next moves include expanding the excavations to understand how the Mayans built with unconventional wood, how they ate, and how this settlement fit into a region that was suffering from widespread abandonment.” Why is it important? Because of the historical era we are talking about. In their article, the researchers assure that the Belize site demonstrates the ability of the ancient Mayans to adapt to “the profound challenges” that they had to live through from the 9th century AD. For reference, a team led by the University of Cambridge discovered not long ago that between 871 and 1021 they happened eight persistent droughtsof at least three years, in the Yucatán Peninsula. The worst of all actually lasted more than a decade. The scientists arrived at that conclusion after analyzing a stalagmite from a Yucatan cave. And, beyond how spectacular it may be, the data is interesting because it tells us about the challenges that the Mayans faced during the Terminal Classic (800-1000 AD), when the limestone cities of the south they were abandonedthe dynasties declined and civilization moved north, losing part of its political and economic power in the area. Are there more conclusions? “As the large urban centers of the Mayan regions succumbed to interconnected socio-environmental factors, the communities of the Birds of Paradise complex persisted through that transition by constructing a series of elevated structures of earth, stone and wood with direct access to the abundant resources and connectivity offered by the riparian wetland system,” reads the article published in PNAS. “It provides evidence for persistent populations between the Elevated Interior Region and coastal regions during the Terminal Classic to Postclassic. While nearby highland urban centers were abandoned, this population continued to emphasize wetland agriculture and provides our best evidence for other subsistence strategies, such as fishing and gathering other proteins, reflected in the faunal assemblage,” they add the researchers. What did they dig? That is another of the surprises that the study leaves behind. Archaeologists discovered what NYU describes as “the largest collection of architectural wood” located inland, as well as artifacts that help historians understand everyday life in the wetlands. It may seem like a minor issue, but it is not common to find remains of wood in Mayan sites. On the contrary. Their very nature causes them to degrade in tropical environments. In Belize, experts have discovered “a unique opportunity” which allows them to better understand how the ancient Mayans built, what types of wood they used and how they used each one. Is it so uncommon? The majority of preserved Mayan wooden remains are figurines, spears and boxes that were recovered mainly in caves in Belize at the beginning of the 20th century. Remains have also been found in mountainous and saline areas in the south of the country. The new findings go further. “It challenges long-held beliefs that sites like this could not survive in the American tropics and suggests we might be overlooking similar sites,” admits Lara Sánchez-Morales, professor of anthropology … Read more

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

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