ice

We have been searching for the origin of life in hot puddles for years. Bennu has shown that radioactive ice works just as well

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When the capsule OSIRIS-REx mission landed in the Utah desert in September 2023, NASA knew it had a treasure on its hands. We are talking about a bit of black dust that was collected millions of kilometers from Earth and that was about to rewrite one of the most important chapters of science: the origin of life. What we knew. Until now, the predominant theory regarding the origin of life told us that for “cook” all the basic components of life, such as amino acids, heat and liquid water were needed to make a kind of hot chemical soup. However, science has just flipped the script: the bricks of life They are not only formed in heatbut they can be born in the most extreme cold and under gamma radiation. And that completely changes our understanding of how we got here, and also of the possible presence of life in any corner of the Universe. The importance of Bennu. Definitely is the protagonist of this whole story, and it is nothing more than an asteroid of about 500 meters in diameter which functions as a fossil from the early solar system. But the most interesting thing is that it is approximately 4.6 billion years old, the same age as the Earth, although, unlike our planet, its surface has not melted or been drastically altered by geological processes throughout its ‘life’. And little by little we are learning more about this asteroid thanks to the samples brought by OSIRIS-REx that had already been confirmed in preliminary analyzes an unusual abundance of carbon, nitrogen, water and organic compounds. But what the team led by Penn State University has now found goes one step further. The surprise. This same team, when analyzing the isotopic composition of the amino acids present, especially glycine, came across a chemical signature that did not fit with the classical theory of formation in hot water. A radioactive freezer. Until now, we thought that amino acids in asteroids were formed primarily through aqueous alteration processes: ice melts from heat, liquid water interacts with rock, and voilacomplex organic chemistry. However, science now suggests that liquid water is not necessary for amino acids, an essential molecule of life, to form. Simply from simple ice they can arise without much problem. And there are many of these in the universe. The catalyst. The other important factor in this formation was the energywhich in this case came from gamma radiation emitted by radioactive elements that were abundant in the early solar system. And the energy could not come from thermal heat, since this process occurs in icy environments, long before the asteroid was compacted or heated enough to have liquid water. This explains why we found amino acids both in asteroids that underwent a lot of water heating and in those that remained “drier” and colder. Life, it seems, is more stubborn than we thought and can begin to develop in the most hostile conditions of the vacuum of space. An increasingly complex menu. But we are not just talking about simple molecules, since analyzes of Bennu samples have identified a variety of compounds. Among these is tryptophan, which is an essential amino acid, much more structurally complex, and vital for terrestrial life. Besides, DNA and RNA components have been detectedin addition to ammonia and amines, surpassing in richness many samples of famous meteorites such as that of Murchison. Backlash to Panspermia. If amino acids can easily form in irradiated ice grains in the solar nebula—before the planets even formed—it means that these “ingredients” are spread throughout the solar system. The fact that Bennu, a B-type carbonaceous asteroid, is packed with these compounds reinforces the idea that Earth didn’t have to produce all the components of life itself. A constant shower of asteroids and meteorites during the late intense bombardment could having “sown” our planet with a pre-made deep space biological starter kit. That is why in the end looking at a grain of Bennu dust is looking at ourselves. Or, at least, to the chemical great-great-grandparents who made us here today. Images | NASA Hubble Space Telescope In Xataka | NASA has just announced that this large asteroid has a 1% chance of impacting Earth. That’s not normal

Something dark keeps growing in the Greenland ice. And it’s melting the frozen mass at an unexpected speed

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Greenland was for centuries synonymous with immobility, a territory that seemed oblivious to the passage of time, protected by an ice sheet so vast that even polar explorers could see it. like something eternal. From the first Inuit settlements to the European expeditions of the 19th century, the island was more a symbol of resistance than change, a place where the landscape imposed its own rules. Precisely for that reason, any alteration On its surface today it has a historical weight that goes far beyond what appears at first glance. A dark spot on the ice. Something seemingly insignificant is growing on the immense Greenland ice sheet, but with a disproportionate effect: microscopic algae that dye the snow green, red or grayish brown and reduce its ability to reflect solar radiation. In a warming Arctic up to four times more faster than the rest of the planet, this so-called “dark zone” accelerates the loss of hundreds of billions of tons of ice each year, directly contributing to sea level rise and adding a new layer of complexity to an already destabilized climate system. Dust, nutrients and a cycle. counted the new york times last week that much of the latest research shows that the wind blows phosphorus-rich dust from the rocky fringes discovered on the margins of Greenland into the ice, fueling algal blooms. Here’s the crux of it all, because as the ice melts, also releases trapped nutrients for decades or centuries in its deep layers, creating a kind of vicious cycle: one where more melting releases more food, algae proliferate, the ice darkens and melts even faster. This mechanism, time and time again, turns warming into a self-accelerating process that is difficult to stop once it has started. The measurable impact of a microscopic phenomenon. In southwest Greenland, one of the fastest melting regions, algae already explain about 13% of runoff water generated by summer thaw. In fact, studies published in journals such as Environmental Science and Technology and Nature Communications have shown that even minute amounts of phosphorus and nitrogen, released from the ice or transported through the air, are enough to sustain these biological communities, suggesting that the phenomenon could extend to areas much wider of the cap. A climate problem. Plus: ice darkening does not occur in a political or economic vacuum. The retreat of sea ice around Greenland is opening new sea routes and facilitating access to mineral, oil and gas resources, increasing the strategic interest for the region. Any additional industrial activity could release, for example, soot and particles that further aggravate the darkening of the ice, accelerating a process that, in the worst case scenario, could contribute to a global rise in sea level of up to seven meters if the ice sheet completely disappeared. What is known… and what is not yet. The scientists match in which algae are not the cause of global warming, but rather a consequence which amplifies its effects, while underlining that the root of the problem continues to be the burning of fossil fuels on the planet. However, it is still unknown precisely to what extent this “dark spot” can expand and how to integrate your impact in sea level rise models. Meanwhile, Greenland seems to offer us a most ominous warning (another one): that even the smallest changes, those invisible to the naked eye, can tip the balance of one of the largest and most fragile systems on the planet. Image | Jenine McCutcheon/University of Waterloo In Xataka | Why we find 50,000 meteorites in Antarctica if they fall the same all over the planet: ice has the answer In Xataka | Antarctica launches its “Doomsday Vault”: a sanctuary at -50 °C to save the memory of the glaciers

the secret was an invisible ice “blanket”

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For decades, planetary geologists have faced a paradox that didn’t quite add up. On the one hand, the missions like Curiosity in Gale Crater show irrefutable evidence that there were lakes of liquid water for thousands or millions of years. On the other hand, climate models insist that ancient Mars It was a cold place.with temperatures well below freezing point. A new paradigm. The question in this case is quite clear: how can there be stable liquid water on a planet where the thermometer barely rises above zero degrees? A new study led by Rice University and published in AGU Advances seems to have found the missing piece in the puzzle: seasonal ice shields. The LakeM2ARS model. To solve the mystery, the team of researchers developed a specific model called LakeM2ARS. This model included everything we know about terrestrials, but adapted to the extreme conditions that existed on Mars 3.6 billion years ago. That is, a climate with less sunlight due to a younger Sun, an atmosphere with much more carbon dioxide and much more aggressive freezing and thawing cycles than those on Earth. Using these models, the researchers began to apply different climatic situations, covering a period of 30 Martian years, which is equivalent to 56 Earth years. The results in this case pointed to something quite fascinating: the water in the lakes only froze on their surface, creating a shield of ice. A natural “blanket”. The research introduces the concept of “ice shield” or “natural blanket.” Instead of being a solid block of ice, the Gale Crater lakes they would have been protected by a seasonal ice sheet thin enough to allow dynamic processes beneath it. In this way, this “blanket” acted as a thermal insulator, since ice has a low thermal conductivity. The good thing about this is that once a layer forms on the surface, the liquid water underneath is “trapped” and protected from the frigid air, maintaining a stable temperature even if the thermometer plummets outside. Another advantage. Beyond this we can see that the low Martian pressure causes liquid water to tend to sublimate quickly. The ice thus acted as a physical plug, conserving the water inventory for decades or even centuries. But it is not that the water underneath was completely cold, but rather that since it was a thin layer, sunlight could pass through it (similar to what happens in the lakes of the Dry Valleys of Antarctica), generating a slight internal heating. The missing piece. One of the biggest criticisms of the cold Mars hypothesis was the absence of geomorphological traces. The big question we can undoubtedly ask ourselves is that if Mars was a freezer, where are the large moraine deposits and the scars left by the glaciers as they advance? The Rice University study gives an elegant answer: the ice was too thin. Since they were not massive glaciers, but rather thin and seasonal layers, they did not have the weight or dynamics necessary to erode the terrain drastically. This fits perfectly with Curiosity’s observations, which show fine-grained lake sediments, typical of calm waters, and not the chaos of rocks that a glacier would leave behind. Microscopic life. This discovery changes the rules of the game for astrobiology, which wants above all to search for evidence of life on the red planet. In this case, the theory is put forward that if Martian lakes were sealed by ice, they became extremely stable environments. Under the ice, life would have been protected from harmful UV radiation and extreme temperature fluctuations. This is why Mars did not need to be a tropical paradise to be habitable; It was enough for him to have a good “armor” of ice that would keep his liquid oases safe from the icy vacuum of space. Images | BoliviaIntelligent In Xataka | China has just resolved one of the biggest doubts about going to Mars with the birth of six space mice

500-meter ice dome melted 7,000 years ago and is now melting again

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When we think of Greenlandthe image that automatically comes to mind is that of a terrain with a large amount of snow and very cold. But science has bad news for this country belonging to Denmark: the Greenland ice sheet It is much more fragile than we could think.. And that is a problem. From the terrestrial bottom. This statement is not something that has been extracted on paper, but rather has been ‘seen’ in the depths of the earth. This way, after drilling more than 500 meters of ice at Prudhoe Domeresearchers have found evidence that this gigantic mass completely disappeared just 7,000 years ago and then resurface. And the worst thing is not that it happened thousands of years ago, but that now the temperatures that caused that collapse are the same ones we hope to reach by the year 2100. The GreenDrill project. The researchers recently published in Nature on this project, which has been made possible thanks to a technical feat. To achieve this, the team drilled about 509 meters to reach the sediments that rest beneath the base of Prudhoe Dome, a 2,500 km² ice dome in northwest Greenland. To find out exactly what happened there, scientists used a technique called cell dating. infrared stimulated luminescence. In this way, what is allowed is to see when was the last time that part of this deep ice was exposed to the radiation of sunlight. The results. They were pretty clear: the sediments beneath Prudhoe Dome saw the sun between 6,000 and 8,200 years ago. This can be translated into a very simple sentence: at that time, there was no 500 meters of ice above, so the dome simply did not exist. And that is now a problem. Because? At that time Greenland ended up melting due to the ‘Holocene Thermal Maximum’. During this period, temperatures in the Arctic were between 3 and 5 °C higher than the pre-industrial era. And this is exactly where the data becomes really worrying. Worrying because precisely those temperatures that thousands of years ago erased entire ice domes from the map are the exact range of heating that climate models predict for the end of this century if emissions are not drastically reduced. This is why the ice we see today is not an eternal relic of the Ice Age; It is a structure that has collapsed before under conditions we are about to replicate. The domino effect. Prudhoe Dome is just one piece of the puzzle, but its past disappearance suggests that much of the northwestern sector of the Greenland Ice Sheet was much reduced during the early Holocene. The conclusion to this is quite clear: if history repeats itself and the Greenland ice sheet completely melts, global sea level it would rise about 7.3 meters. But logically it is not something that will happen tomorrow, but rather the process of fusion of the entire island will still take several centuries. Although if the estimates are met, it may go faster than you think. Change the rules of the game. Until now, the central, thickest areas of Greenland were thought to be almost indestructible. This study demonstrates that even massive domes 500 meters thick can fade in geologically short periods. And this is something that has already happened as science points out. Images | Visit Greenland In Xataka | China has turned the Arctic into its own “Panama Canal.” And that explains the US obsession with Greenland

According to scientists, global warming will most likely lead to an Ice Age

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We usually imagine the climate change like an endless ascending line: more heat, melted glaciers and more acidic oceans. However, science has just put on the table a hypothesis that is not very intuitive: under certain extreme conditions, global warming does not end in hell, but in a real freezer. And the plankton, which seems harmless, has a lot to say in this regard. The identified. A team of researchers from the University of California, Riverside (UCR) and the University of Bremen has identified an instability in the carbon cyclea “glitch” in Earth’s climate operating system, suggesting that an ocean that is too warm and depleted of oxygen can trigger massive global cooling. The geological thermostat. To understand this finding, we must first look at how the Earth regulates its temperature in the long term. The classic mechanism is silicate weathering. Which basically means that when there is a lot of CO₂ in the atmosphere along with heat, it rains more and this rain dissolves the silicate rocks, dragging the carbon and the nutrients it stores to the sea, such as phosphorus. That’s where plankton uses that carbon to build their shells and, when they die, they sink, trapping CO₂ on the seabed. And although it may seem like good news that they store this gas that is seen as a great enemy on the seabed, the fact of reducing its concentration It means that the temperature drops. A paradigm shift. Until now, scientists saw this as a stable “thermostat”: if it is hot, the system works to cool the environment, and if it is cold it works less intensely. But now something radical arises: the thermostat has a catastrophic failure mode. According to their simulation models, when the system is coupled to the cycle of marine nutrients and biological productivity, the regulation can be unstable. And this is where the ideas of a future ice age begin. The plankton trap. For researchers, if we continue with extreme warming on our planet, erosion will increase to bring nutrients to the ocean. Something that will undoubtedly be appreciated by the phytoplankton and the algae that will accumulate it and when it dies, it will create an area in the water where there is not a hint of oxygen. In an ocean without oxygen, phosphorus once again dominates sea water which will create a vicious cycle where the algae They will consume large amounts of oxygen. The result is that the ocean floor begins to ‘suck’ CO₂ from the atmosphere at breakneck speedwhich is much faster than volcanoes or human activities can replenish it. The result is clear: a thermal collapse that can lead to a severe glaciation similar to what the Earth has experienced in the past. We had other fears. Right now on the table we had the suspicion that the collapse of the AMOCthe ocean currents that move water between various locations, will lead us to this situation. And they have a very important function: moving warm water from the tropics towards the north through the surface and cold, dense water towards the south through the depths. Something that a priori regulates global temperature. Global warming. A priori, anyone might think that continuing to emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is the solution to this. But the authors issue a warning: geological times are not human times. We are talking about a mechanism that operates on scales of hundreds of thousands of years, and that is why it will not cool the planet either in this century or the next. In fact, researchers suggest that if this mechanism were activated today, it would be an excessive correction that will occur long after we have suffered the consequences of global warming. The fragility of the system. The carbon cycle is not a simple scale that stays in balance, but is quite dynamic and complex. This is somewhat difficult, since it can easily become unbalanced. The idea that the planet can “overreact” to heat by causing extreme cold reminds us that the Earth has regulatory mechanisms that are indifferent to the survival of human civilization. Images | Javier Miranda Alberto Restifo In Xataka | The Earth is entering climate collapse with its first point of no return. Our only salvation is technology

Why 20°C “ice slush” changes our search for extraterrestrial life

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Titan, the crown jewel of the moons of saturnjust gave us a slap of reality. For two decades, the official narrative of space exploration focused on what was hidden beneath its thick haze. a vast global ocean of liquid water. But now we know that we were wrong, or at least, it was not as we imagined. The study. Led by Flavio Petricca, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) from NASAand published this December 17, 2025 in Nature magazineproposes a radically different model: Titan does not have an interconnected ocean, but a dense, viscous layer of “slush ice” with pockets of trapped liquid water. The 15 hour lag. The Cassini probe ended its mission in 2017 crashing into Saturn, but its data remains a gold mine for physicists. Petricca’s team has therefore decided to reanalyze the probe’s Doppler data, that is, the changes in frequency in the radio signals generated by the moon’s gravity. But now with the most modern processing techniques that we have developed. The result of the analysis is a 15-hour lag in Titan’s tidal response. This means that when Saturn exerts its brutal force of gravity on Titan, the moon deforms as if stretched. In this way, if on its surface there would be pure waterthe response would be almost instantaneous as it is liquid. But what they saw is a 15-hour delay that indicated that the interior is highly viscous. What is it? The data collected suggests that the material on Titan behaves more like a pasty glacier or extremely dense slush. What seems ruled out is free-flowing water, where the existence of life in the future was already pointed out. A new Titan. With all the data that has been collected, it has been possible to completely define everything we knew about the internal geology of Saturn’s largest moon. Specifically, it is now known that the rock core has a radius of 2.26 km, and the layer that surrounds it is formed by high-pressure ice mixed with water. Although not everything has to be so cold, it also has hot water pockets due to the internal heat. This is what keeps liquid water lakes near the rock core at about 20ºC. The question of life. At first glance, eliminating a global ocean of liquid water may seem like a bad idea for astrobiologists who had hoped for life here. But for the members of this study, the opposite is true. In the new “slush” model, the liquid water in the pockets is in direct contact with the rock core. This is very important, as it allows the water to dissolve essential nutrients from the rose and also have a temperature of 20°C which is ideal for complex chemical reactions. But also, having a small size, all these components are more concentrated. Dragonfly. This discovery puts all the pressure on this NASA mission whose launch It is planned from 2028. Dragonfly is an octocopter designed to fly over the surface of Titan, but its most important instrument in this context is its seismometer. What was expected is that this mission would measure the tides of a deep ocean. Now their mission will be to confirm whether seismic waves propagate through this viscous “hail.” In the event that the characteristic vibrations are detected, we will have confirmed that Titan is the most promising chemical laboratory in our solar system. Images | Wikipedia Matt Hardy In Xataka | NASA changes hands in the middle of the space race with China: private astronaut Jared Isaacman will be its new director

30 years ago a young Chinese man set up an ice cream stand. Now he leads an emporium with more stores than McDonald’s

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It’s hard to believe in a world dominated by big brands and multinationals, but there is a hospitality chain with more stores than McDonald’s and Starbucks that you’ve probably never heard of. His name is Mixue (Mìxuě Bīngchéng) was founded in the late 90s by a university student from Zhenghou, China, and today it is considered the largest food and beverage chain in the world. This is how it is recognized, for example, by the magazine TIMEwhich has included it in your listing of the 100 most influential companies of 2025. It is estimated that it has more than 46,000 stores spread throughout Asia, Australia, the Middle East and South America, a vast network of stores offering a menu based on ice creams, smoothies, coffees, traditional teas and bubble teas. Bigger than McDonald’s? Yes, if we talk about the number of establishments. The benefits already they are something else. While McDonald’s boasts of having more than 43,000 restaurants spread across more than a hundred countries and Starbucks managed 40,576 stores At the end of the first quarter of fiscal year 2025, Mixue surpasses (and quite comfortably) both figures. A few months ago the magazine TIME assured that the chain has more than 45,000 spread mainly throughout mainland China, although it also operates in other regions. Do you have so many stores? Yeah. Fortune calculate which exceeds 46,000 points of sale throughout Asia, Austria, the Middle East and South America. Other sources speak of more storesraising the total network to 53,000 points selling. Beyond these dancing numbers, one thing is clear: Mixue is normally considered the food and beverage chain with a greater deployment of establishments in the world. In addition, its branch network continues to expand to good If in the West its brand is less known to us than McDonald’s or Starbucks, it is because (despite the international jump that has given in recent years) most of the Mixue stores they remain focused in China. The firm also has another handicap that helps understand its global expansion: while in the case of Starbucks more than 50% of the stores are in the hands of the company itself, in Mixue practically all They operate through franchises. What is your story? Mixue’s is the typical story of improvement and accelerated growth that gives shine to the classes of coaching business. The father of the company is Zhang Hongchao, who laid its foundation almost 30 years ago from scratch. Your story starts in 1997in Zhengzhou, when Zhang, then a university student, managed to get his grandmother to lend him 3,000 yuan ($420) to set up a small slushie and soft drink stand. Despite the challenges that were encountered along the way (and some other business failure), Zhang moved forward, managed to adapt to the changes in Zhenghou, reinvested in machinery and found the key to creating a million-dollar business. Sam Tang account that his first success came in 2006, when he launched ice creams for one yuan. In 2014, its brand already had 1,000 stores. In 2020 there were 10,000. And how has it succeeded? The big question. Mixue’s business model has several clear characteristics. The first, its commercial approach. The chain basically sells ice cream. soft servesmoothies, tea drinks and bubble teasalthough in your menu coffee and Fortune assures which in the future plans to expand its offering with beer. The other great features of your menu are the affordable priceswith ice creams for less than one euro. Other peculiarities of the company are its commitment to dominate the supply chainits commitment to a clearly identifiable brand thanks to symbols such as its mascot (Snow King) and, above all, an expansion through franchises. In a report from a few months ago the company itself recognizes that almost all of its stores (99%) are opened and operate through franchises. Mixue is responsible for supervising businesses, choosing locations, decoration and assessing the capacity of the staff. For her, the business is not so much in the fee that those stores then pay as in the equipment, merchandise and packaging that she sells to them. And the future? It doesn’t look bad. In spring the company went public in Hong Kong and managed to raise nearly 450 million of dollars, starring in one of its best premieres of the first half of 2025. The company seems willing also to get into the powerful (and disputed) US market. According to precise Fortuneduring the first half of the year the company reached a revenue volume of 2,000 million dollars (40% more than in 2024) with profits of 370 million. Despite its humble origins, its founder and his brother now manage a fortune of billions of dollars. Images | Choo Yut Shing (Flickr) 1 and 2 and Jeremy Thompson (Flickr) In Xataka | One of the biggest wine critics is French and has toured China. There is no good news for French wine

China aims to break records with the largest ice park in the world. And he has already begun to lift it block by block

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At the end of November, in Harbin, the image is repeated every winter, with a scale that has not stopped growing in recent editions: cranes, machinery and workers begin to raise structures on a surface that weeks later will become walls, towers and slides made of ice. According to official dataconstruction is advanced this year thanks to the ice stored during the previous season and preserved for more than ten months. This material allows work to begin even before the river freezes completely again, with the aim of preparing an area that this winter will have 1.2 million square meters. Harbin Ice-Snow World It has grown from a local celebration to a seasonal theme park that rises again each winter. It functions as an enclosure with defined entrances, circulation areas, walkable structures and spaces to stay for hours, especially when it gets dark and the lighting changes the perception of the place. It is not just a setting for photographs, but a park designed to be walked, used and visited for a few weeks, while weather conditions allow it. When ice stops being landscape and becomes infrastructure Upon entering the venue, the experience is more similar to that of a theme park than a temporary exhibition. You can walk between buildings, climb platforms, slide down ramps or access areas prepared for snow activities. The architectural elements are not presented as immobile pieces, but as part of the route. For this edition, those responsible have announced spaces intended for ice fishing, cross-country skiing and collective snow gamesas well as an additional stage that will complement the cultural activities of the already usual Dream Stage. The proposal does not focus solely on showing structures, but on facilitating their use within a planned and temporary environment. Before erecting ice structures, Harbin already celebrated winter through local practices. Hand-carved ice lanterns began to be used in the city in the middle of the last century and gave rise to the first Harbin Ice and Snow Festival, held on January 5, 1985. indicate official pages. The jump to the current format came in 1999, when Harbin Ice-Snow World was created as an independent venue, with specific access and design. Since then, the evolution has been constant: more surface area, greater volume of materials, presence of machinery and planned construction processes. The park, under construction in November 2025 Harbin has turned winter into a source of economic activity. According to data released by Xinhuathe city received 90.36 million visitors during the last season, with estimated income of 137.22 billion yuan (almost 17 million euros), an increase of 16.6% compared to the previous year. Ice-Snow World does not explain these figures on its own, but it acts as one of the main focuses of attraction and as an element that concentrates tourist services, accommodation, restaurants and transportation during the weeks in which it remains open. The construction mobilizes technical profiles, operators and specialists in structure and lighting, while the opening requires personnel for visitor service, security, maintenance and tourist support. Many of these roles are temporary, but require prior coordination and planning. When comparing Harbin to other major winter events, such as the Sapporo Snow Festival in Japan or Quebec Winter Carnival in Canadathe difference is not only in size, but in structure. Sapporo distributes its sculptures in various urban spaces and Quebec combines culture, parades and outdoor activities, but neither of them functions as a theme park concentrated in a single venue, as occurs in Harbin. Harbin uses hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of ice and snow, according to official data, and builds walkable structures that are part of the route and not just the landscape. It is not so much a festival as a temporary recreational facility. Harbin Ice-Snow World has been integrated into the city’s tourism calendar as a seasonal facility. It is built every year, it opens for a few weeks and It is dismantled when temperatures no longer guarantee stability. This temporary nature does not prevent its planning: the prior storage of ice, the mobilization of workers and the associated services indicate that it is an organized activity and not simply a one-off event. The park functions as a generator of temporary employment, concentrates the winter tourism offer and channels activities that are subsequently complemented by the interior ice and snow enclosure, designed to operate all year round as an extension of the exterior park. There is no pretension of permanence, but of repetition adjusted to the climatic conditions. This repetition has allowed the consolidation of technical, logistical and tourist processes linked to winter as a seasonal economic resource. Images | The Harbin International Ice and Snow festival | Harbin Government In Xataka | Someone wants to build a 144 meter high skyscraper in the middle of the port of Malaga. The reason: luxury tourism

Researchers find a piece of ice from six million years ago. What is really valuable is the air trapped inside

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A team of scientists has achieved something extraordinary in the frozen Allan Hills, east of Antarctica: extracting 6-million-year-old ice samples, the oldest ever directly dated. Trapped inside are air bubbles that date back to Earth’s Miocene atmosphere, when our planet was much warmer and sea level considerably higher than today. A time capsule in the form of ice. The discovery, published in the journal PNAS on October 28 and led by Sarah Shackleton of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and John Higgins of Princeton University, more than doubles the age of the oldest known ice so far, which dated to about 2.7 million years ago. “Ice cores are like time machines that allow scientists to take a look at what our planet was like in the past,” explains Shackleton. “The Allan Hills cores help us travel much further back than we thought possible.” How they found it. Between 2019 and 2023, the Center for the Exploration of Older Ice (COLDEX) team drilled between 100 and 200 meters deep into the ice sheet in the Allan Hills region, located about 2,000 meters above sea level. Just like they count From the Middle Space, this area is especially valuable because the topography of the terrain and ice flow patterns allow extremely old ice to be preserved closer to the surface, unlike the Antarctic interior where it would be necessary to drill more than 2,000 meters to reach similar ages. Dating. The researchers They determined the age of the ice measuring the radioactive decay of argon isotopes present in trapped air bubbles. This method allows ice to be dated directly, without the need to examine the rocks or soil around it. The result: 6 million years, a time when the Earth was home to now extinct creatures such as saber-toothed tigers, arctic rhinos and the first mammoths. Cooling. Analysis of oxygen isotopes in the cores revealed that the Allan Hills region has cooled approximately 12 ºC during the last 6 million years. It is the first direct evidence that quantifies how much the Antarctic climate has cooled since that ancient warm period. Ed Brook, director of COLDEX and paleoclimatologist at Oregon State University, stands out that “the team has built a library of what we call ‘climate snapshots’ about six times older than any previously reported ice core data.” Why does it matter? While Antarctica and the Earth as a whole have progressively cooled for millennia, humans are now rapidly increasing global temperatures by release large amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Studying these bubbles of ancient air will allow scientists to reconstruct past greenhouse gas concentrations and ocean heat levels, which could give us clues to what natural factors have contributed to the climate. climate change throughout the entire history of our planet. Surviving extreme conditions. “We are still discovering the exact conditions that allow such ancient ice to survive so close to the surface,” points out Shackleton. “Along with the topography, it’s likely a mix of strong winds and intense cold. The wind blows fresh snow and the cold slows the ice almost to a stop. That makes Allan Hills one of the best places in the world to find shallow old ice, and one of the toughest to spend a season in the field,” he continued. Next steps. The COLDEX team plans to return to Allan Hills in the coming months to carry out more drilling. They hope to recover even older samples and produce a more detailed record of Earth’s ancient atmosphere. “Given the spectacularly old ice we have discovered in Allan Hills, we have also designed a new comprehensive long-term study of this region to try to extend the records even further in time, which we hope to carry out between 2026 and 2031,” concludes Brook. Images | COLDEX In Xataka | What are sixth generation fires: the megafires that create their own weather

The Earth is headed for a new ice age, according to a Science study. And it is precisely because of global warming

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Science is largely in agreement when it suggests that the Earth’s temperature it increases more and moreand logic could lead us to think that the world is going to become in a real desert like the one in Almería. But to everyone’s surprise, what can happen is a great ice agethat is, everything ends up covered in ice. And although it may seem illogical, science wanted to give light about this topic. They have been new models from the University of Bremen and the University of California Riverside, published in Sciencewho have located right there one of the great unexpected dangers of terrestrial geochemistry: under certain conditions, excess heat can activate “biological accelerators” that then cool the planet beyond its original state. Even to reach an ice age. Beyond the rocks. Something that may be unknown to many is that the Earth has a temperature control system like the thermostat in our home. The most accepted was regulation by the slow wear of silicate rocks. However, geological records show episodes in which this natural “thermostat” fails: the Earth freezes from pole to pole, as during the Precambrian glaciations. What is missing from the equation? The new study points to the decisive influence of marine biology and nutrient cycles, especially phosphorus and oxygen. An unexpected loop. When CO₂ emissions and global temperatures rise, the arrival of phosphorus into the oceans also increases, fertilizing the proliferation of algae. These remove CO₂ thanks to photosynthesis in the water, and when they die, they transport that carbon to marine sediments, where it can be trapped for millions of years. As if it were a dumping ground for carbon dioxide on the seabed.. But the key to the loop is oxygen: the explosion of algal productivity consumes the oxygen in the water, meaning that almost no living being can live here. Under these conditions, phosphorus stops being buried and instead of being eliminated it is recycled from the sediment. This fuels new “super blooms” and closes a vicious cycle: ‘More nutrients → more algae → less oxygen → more nutrient recycling → extreme cooling’. The result is that the biological thermostat goes crazy, sequestering carbon at a frenetic pace that the rocks’ slow thermostat cannot compensate for. The new model. The new model integrate these quick feedbacksadding sedimentary chemistry, the phosphorus cycle and the oxygenation state to the traditional silicate weathering models. Surprisingly, when predicting the effect of the “great human experiment” of releasing CO₂, he finds that the system does not always smoothly return to the previous statebut it can overcompensate and take the planet to colder times, in deep glaciations, for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years.​​ This only occurs when the atmosphere is less rich in oxygen, something common in Earth’s past, which may explain why ice ages coincide with intermediate periods of planetary oxygenation. Today, that same loop would make the “reward” much smoother, although there would still be the risk of long-term cooldown. If we continue burning fossils. In this way, other scientific studies already suggest that large inputs of phosphorus, whether due to massive mining or increased weathering induced by climate change, can increase the risk of anoxia and abrupt cooling events, although this scenario would take centuries or millennia to develop. This is why the acceleration of the phosphorus cycle together with the increase in CO₂ concentrations is conditioning us to the climate changes that we will see in a few million years. And although the Earth system may have the mission of stabilizing, the reality is that this system cannot always be trusted. Images | Denise Schuld In Xataka | We have just identified the oldest glaciers in the world. Where: under South Africa’s big gold mines

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