Trust through transparency 

Science as a process 

1. Protect yourself and those around you
2. Reduce transmission and break infection chains
3. Trust in the thorough tests and the continuous monitoring of them

What we learned from Covid-19 

A different way of publishing science

Ten webinars, one global community

1. Abrupt Climate Change and Tipping Points — June 2025
2. High-Resolution Paleoclimate Data — July 2025
3. Greenhouse Gases and Climate Sensitivity — September 2025
4. Paleoclimate Modeling and Data Assimilation — October 2025
5. Impact of Past Climate Change on Ecosystems and Human Societies — November 2025
6. Ocean Circulation and Climate Change — December 2025
7. Polar Climate History — January 2026
8. Monsoon Variability — February 2026
9. Volcanism and Climate — March 2026
10. Paleoclimate of Extreme Events — April 2026

Looking back, and looking ahead

From servant to master?

To answer this question, we have to look back at what actually happened seventy years ago, when the relationship between technology and Earth science was forged. The mid-1950s marked the birth of computational geosciences. In April 1950, atmospheric scientists Jule Charney and Ragnar Fjørtoft, working alongside mathematician John von Neumann, used the ENIAC computer to produce the world’s first numerical weather forecast based on barotropic atmospheric equations. By 1954, operational digital forecasting had begun, and in 1956, meteorologist Norman Phillips published the world’s first general circulation model and managed to prove that digital computers could simulate global atmospheric motion using hydrodynamic equations. Within that same decade, the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and TIROS-1 in 1960 opened the satellite era, streaming raw observations directly into digital systems, while early hydrologists began formulating digital catchment models that laid the groundwork for modern hydrology.

Seventy years ago, technology entered geosciences as a servant to human intellect, or that's how I like to perceive it. The early computers were glorified calculators designed to execute known physical laws, such as Navier-Stokes or thermodynamic equations, that were simply too tedious for human beings to solve by hand using pencil and paper. Technology was an instrument of inquiry, a clearing in the woods that allowed scientists to see physical principles at work faster and across larger scales. Fast forward seven decades, and the dynamic has inverted. Technology is no longer merely a tool executing our physical theories; it has become the framework that dictates how science is conducted, evaluated, and communicated. In expanding our computational scale by orders of magnitude, we have inadvertently created a system where data volume and statistical emulation often replace physical explanation.

Digital shortcuts and "black-box" sciences

From my vantage point, this shift from physical explanation to computational scale has significant (if not catastrophic, if I may be dramatic) consequences for the public democratisation of science. Over the past three years, my mission has been to translate scientific research and findings into accessible narratives that journalists can interrogate and the general public can understand. But how do you democratise a black box? How do you build public trust in a climate forecast or a flood projection when the output comes from an opaque deep-learning emulator that even the lead authors cannot fully interpret in physical terms? When technology becomes a wall of computational complexity rather than a window into natural laws, science loses its legibility. Journalists are left reporting on model outputs as if they were divine oracles, without much ability to scrutinize the underlying reasoning, while the public becomes with time somewhat alienated from a scientific process that feels detached from human intuition and lived experience.

Seventy years ago, technological development began as a way to help expand the boundaries of human thought. It freed scientists from manual arithmetic and allowed them to observe global climate patterns that would otherwise have remained hidden. But as I reflect on seven decades of computing in the geosciences, maybe scientists are meant to ensure that the tool does not become the master. Technology serves science only when it illuminates physical principles rather than obscuring them behind statistical skill and computational scale. If we genuinely care about democratising science and bridging the knowledge gap between scientists, media, and society, our technological tools must remain grounded in conservation laws, transparent causality, and human-scale legibility. Only then can we ensure that the next seventy years of technology will serve science in optimal ways, rather than separating humanity from it.

Can we reimagine communication for a better future?

So, what could a different future look like? As a media professional sitting at this crossroads, I cannot accept that we are doomed to be passive spectators of an opaque, machine-driven science. If we want to prevent technology from driving us apart, we have to reimagine how scientists, communicators, and the public interact with these digital tools. Hear me out:

First, we need to redefine the role of a science communicator. We cannot merely act as the megaphone at the end of a computational assembly line, breaking down algorithmic outputs and packaging them with catchy press releases. We need to be in the room much earlier, acting as advocates for human legibility. Imagine a research and scientific culture where modelers and communicators collaborate from the get-go to ask, what I believe are the most important questions:

What is the physical story here? Where does the code end and nature begin? If this model fails, can we explain why software bugs?

When we request understanding before amplification, we are helping scientists keep their physical hypotheses at the center of their work.

In addition, we should start bringing the "ground truth" back to the forefront of scientific storytelling. In our media narratives, we could try spending less time focusing on the scale of supercomputers and exabytes of data, and far more time on the human intuition, field observations, and fundamental physics that make sense of that data. When we report on a flood forecast, we shouldn't just showcase a predictive graph; but instead, we should can flip the focus towards the hydrologists reading riverbeds or the communities that already have that knowledge without technological interventions, because lived environments reminds everyone that technology is a lens through which we view nature, not a replacement for nature itself.

I believe that reconnecting society with science isn't about turning back the clock on 70 years of technological progress: Technology, and now artificial intelligence, have been speeding up processes that once took forever. But we must remember that we should not let technological advancements rob us of scientific curiosity and understanding. The sciences, in my view, should remain spaces where researchers, journalists, and the public can stand side by side, looking through different yet shared lenses, and seeing beyond mere predictions and statistics, but the living, breathing Earth behind them.

Geoscientific Model Development

Code accessibility and code quality across phases of the models of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project   - 20 August 2026

• Mekong Delta Living Lab researchers presented their research at the EGU General Assembly 2026 in Vienna, Austria
• EGU Journal Study reveals ocean sugars reach high altitudes, shaping Arctic cloud formation

• First, decide on what you want to use the blog posts for (e.g., reinforcing course content, evaluating students’ learning, broader impact, etc.)  
• Give a clear guideline for drafting a blog post. Here’s a good one to adapt.
• Give supportive assignments (e.g., browsing, reading and evaluating blogs) both as homework and in-class group activities. 
• Ask students to submit a draft to get your feedback before final submission. 
• Make blog publication optional but support those who decide to do it.

Plants are living weather archives

Teaching a model to read the past

Different ecosystems, different clocks

Learning from the past

References

What unfolded that night was a natural execution of an extraordinarily rare subterranean phenomenon known as a limnic eruption, or, in other words, a lake overturn. Lake Nyos had spent decades accumulating reservoirs of carbon dioxide in its depths, which act like a giant, pressurised soda bottle hidden in plain sight! When the physical balance holding the gas in solution finally snapped, the lake unexpectedly releasing millions of metric tons of suffocating gas into the atmosphere. The disaster has transformed our understanding of volcanic hazards, as it is proof that when geoscientists put their minds to unravelling subterranean mysteries, they may be able to ground a threat that could go off the charts.

The exact trigger that broke the lake’s equilibrium on that August night remains a subject of ongoing scientific study...

The components of disaster

To understand how a picture-perfect lake could become so deadly, one has to look beneath the African crust. Lake Nyos sits atop the Cameroon Volcanic Line, a chain of ancient volcanoes that stretch over hundreds of miles from the Atlantic Ocean into mainland Central Africa. Although the surface of Lake Nyos appears serene, deep mantle activity beneath the basin remains quite active.

Far below the lake bed, underground magma chambers leak subterranean gases non-stop, predominantly carbon dioxide. In typical active volcanic regions, these gases vent, without causing any harm, into the sky through cracks or steaming fissures. Beneath Lake Nyos, however, mineral-rich thermal springs saturated with dissolved gas discharge directly into the floor of the lake, almost 200 meters below the surface.

Under ordinary circumstances, tropical lakes experience something called mixing. As surface waters cool during rainstorms or colder seasons, they become denser and sink, consequently driving a cycle that circulates nutrients and keeps gas levels low throughout the entire water column. Lakes that mix regularly from top to bottom are referred to as holomictic. Lake Nyos, however, is meromictic, meaning its unique physical geometry, sheltered topography, and depth prevent the top and bottom layers of water from ever mixing naturally.

In the aftermath of the disaster, international scientific teams quickly realised that the threat was far from over.

For centuries, the gas sat trapped in the lake’s basin due to two -inevitable- physical principles: hydrostatic pressure and density stratification. At the bottom of Lake Nyos, the weight of the overlying water column exerts pressure that's twenty times greater than the atmospheric pressure felt at sea level. Much like a still, unopened, and pressurised soda bottle, deep water can hold massive amounts of dissolved carbon dioxide without forming bubbles. The weight of the water column kept the gas trapped at the bottom, where the heavy, gas-rich fluid settled beneath a lighter surface layer. Thus, by the summer of 1986, these deep waters were dangerously close to their gas capacity: a disaster on a countdown.

Cracking open the bottle?

The exact trigger that broke the lake’s equilibrium on that August night remains a subject of ongoing scientific study, though scientists point to two likely candidates: Either a rockfall along the crater walls that may have plunged into the depths and forced a pocket of gas-saturated water upward, or heavy seasonal rainstorms may have chilled the surface water enough to disrupt the upper boundary. Regardless of what provided the initial spark, the chain reaction that followed was instantaneous and deadly.

When the massive gas cloud erupted from the lake surface, its physical weight dictated everything that happened thereafter. Because carbon dioxide is circa one and a half times denser than the surrounding ambient air, it did not dissipate into the upper atmosphere. Instead, it behaved like a heavy, invisible fluid that hugged the contours of the terrain and rolled down the natural river valleys surrounding the crater. As the gas swept over the villages, it displaced the oxygen in the air entirely, which led to the asphyxiation to any living being that breaths.

Reducing future risk

In the aftermath of the disaster, international scientific teams quickly realised that the threat was far from over. Subterranean springs continued to pump fresh carbon dioxide into the lake basin, recharging the hypolimnion, and setting the clock for a second catastrophic release. To neutralise this hazard, geoscientists designed what I think is quite the elegant remediation strategy: controlled artificial degassing.

Scientists traveled to the lake and installed plastic pipes extending over six hundred feet down into the gas-laden waters, anchored to floating platforms on the surface. The system relies entirely on fluid dynamics to operate continuously. To begin the process, water is mechanically pumped up through the pipe from the deep layer. As the gas-rich water ascends and the surrounding pressure decreases, carbon dioxide bubbles spontaneously form inside the tube. Because the mixture of water and expanding gas bubbles inside the pipe is much lighter than the dense lake water outside, the natural buoyancy pushes the fluid upward, creating a continuous, self-sustaining siphon that shoots a fountain of gas and spray high into the air without requiring a single watt of external electricity.

Over the past two decades, these degassing fountains have thankfully relieved the internal pressure of Lake Nyos, and have been keeping the deep waters below their critical gas saturation limits. To monitor the lake's condition without hauling heavy lab equipment into the remote jungle, scientists developed innovative, low-cost monitoring techniques using underwater sound speed sensors. Because dissolved carbon dioxide speeds up the transmission of sound waves through water, measuring variations in acoustic speed allows researchers to calculate precise, real-time vertical profiles of dissolved gas concentrations across the entire basin.

While Lake Nyos and its nearby sister Lake Monoun have been stabilised through this clever engineering intervention, broader scientific attention has now shifted eastward to Lake Kivu, located along the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Lake Kivu is over two thousand times larger than Lake Nyos and holds hundreds of billions of cubic meters of dissolved carbon dioxide alongside massive reserves of dissolved methane, with over two million people residing along its shores. Fortunately, energy extraction projects are currently harvesting Lake Kivu’s dissolved methane to generate electricity, simultaneously turning a severe geohazard into a significant power source while lowering the risk of another limnic disaster.

We should look at events at the scale where they really happen, which is often larger than one river basin or one country.

Why clouds matter in a warming world

Reconstructing the past with proxy data

The drivers behind the changes

Current conditions in historical context

Looking ahead

Every year, global climate and energy communities celebrate August 10 as World Biofuels Day. It is a day usually bathed in optimistic, corporate green hues. The average citizen anywhere in the world is fed a reassuring narrative: biomass absorbs carbon dioxide while it grows, we burn it to power our trucks and airplanes, and that exact same carbon returns to the atmosphere in a tidy, perfectly closed biological loop. No net carbon added, hence, no geological guilt incurred, right?

Having dedicated my life and career to climate change action, now adaptation, I find myself standing at the edge of this narrative feeling quite conflicted. Earth System Science, which is the study of how the pedosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere tell a far more complicated story. When you step outside the thermodynamic ideal of a laboratory and look at the actual crust and sky of our planet, the simple promise of biofuel carbon neutrality begins to fracture, let's break down how.

Borrowing from biological time

To understand why biofuels captured the interest of many anti-fossil fuel minds, you have to look at the carbon cycle differently. Modern climate change is basically a problem of speed, or acceleration. Fossil fuels represent hundreds of millions of years of ancient sunlight, compressed into dense hydrocarbon seams. So, when humans burn oil and coal, we inject ancient carbon into our modern surface environment at a rate millions of times faster than natural geological processes can (re)bury it.

Biofuels promise to escape this trap by substituting geological time with biological time. Hear me out. When perennial energy crops like switchgrass or short-rotation poplar are harvested for energy, they pull carbon directly from our contemporary atmosphere. In a study published a couple of years ago in Biogeosciences, Egerer and colleagues demonstrated that replacing fossil fuel combustion with sustainably managed bioenergy crops can effectively avoid long-term carbon additions. When coupled with carbon capture and geological storage (a technology known as BECCS) biofuels can even cross the threshold into negative emissions to then trap atmospheric carbon in subsurface geological reservoirs for centuries.

If this were the entire equation, World Biofuels Day would deserve nothing short of endless celebrations! But Earth is not a single chemical reactor, and when we pull one lever in the biosphere, it creates massive ripples across soil, water, and air.

Beneath our boots? Soil carbon and land usage

The first major crack in the biofuel narrative lies under our feet. Soils are the heavyweights of the global carbon cycle since soil holds more carbon than the atmosphere and all terrestrial vegetation combined. When we decide to grow millions of hectares of biofuel crops, we inevitably disrupt this fragile terrestrial vault.

Writing in Earth System Dynamics, Melnikova and her team modeled the long-term impacts of expanding bioenergy crops across global land surfaces. Their findings may lead one to think instantly about ecological inertia: Converting natural forests, pastures, or native grasslands into energy cropland causes an immediate and massive loss of soil organic carbon. Root disruption, for instance, releases carbon that took centuries to accumulate, which creates what scientists refer to as a carbon debt.

Melnikova’s research revealed that over a century-long horizon, large-scale bioenergy expansion actually weakens the terrestrial biosphere's natural carbon sink. The researchers showed that aggressive cropland expansion for bioenergy offsets global land carbon uptake by over twelve percent and amplifies climate-driven terrestrial carbon losses. Harvested bioenergy croplands simply hold lower soil carbon stocks with far faster turnover rates than native ecosystems. In our rush to clean up the sky, we risk liquidating the carbon wealth of the ground.

"Over the 2000–2100 period, the LUC for BECCS leads to an offset of the CO₂ fertilization effect-driven carbon uptake by 12.2 % and amplifies the climate-change-driven carbon loss by 14.6 %. A human choice on land area allocation for energy crops should take into account not only the potential amount of the bioenergy yield but also the LUC emissions, and the associated loss of future potential change in the carbon uptake." says the paper.

The planetary thirst of green energy

Even if we manage to avoid high-carbon soils, we immediately run into another planetary boundary: the hydrosphere. Photosynthesis is a thirsty process, because for a plant to absorb a single molecule of atmospheric carbon dioxide, its stomata must open, losing hundreds of water molecules through transpiration into the surrounding air.

In a review published in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, Stenzel and colleagues mapped the global hydrological consequences of bioenergy production. The numbers are staggering. Depending on where and how bioenergy crops are grown, projected freshwater abstractions for biomass plantations range from over one hundred to more than nine thousand cubic kilometers per year.

To put that in perspective, the upper limit of that water footprint represents more than double the total volume of freshwater currently consumed by all human activity on Earth combined. Diverting such massive quantities of river water and groundwater to irrigate energy crops would drastically exacerbate regional water stress. In vulnerable catchments across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, large-scale biofuel production threatens to pit the energy demands of distant cities directly against the drinking water and food security of local communities.

Unseen haze in the troposphere

The final oversight in the popular biofuel story takes place high above the fields, in the atmospheric boundary layer. We tend to focus exclusively on greenhouse gas molecules, but combustion releases a complex cocktail of physical particles and reactive gases into the sky.

Research published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics by Kodros and colleagues highlights how biofuel aerosol emissions complicate global climate dynamics. Burning biofuels emits primary organic aerosols and black carbon, tiny particles that interact directly with sunlight and cloud microphysics. Kodros and his team demonstrated that the direct climate forcing of biofuel aerosols is fraught with uncertainty, ranging from net cooling to localized warming depending on particle size and atmospheric mixing. In certain regions, the localized radiative forcing from biofuel aerosols can reach up to positive zero-point-eight Watts per square meter, contributing directly to regional atmospheric warming.

Moreover, work in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics by Christian and team examining domestic and industrial biofuel combustion showed significant emissions of reactive trace gases, including volatile organic compounds and hydrochloric acid. These compounds alter tropospheric oxidation chemistry, creating localized smog and degrading air quality. The atmosphere, it turns out, does not distinguish between smoke from an ancient fossil fuel and smoke from a modern green crop; both alter cloud formation and regional climate dynamics in ways our simple carbon accounting models often ignore.

Thoughts on the future of bioenergy

As we reflect on World Biofuels Day, we shouldn't dismiss Rudolf Diesel's original insight. Plant-based fuels retain real value as energy carriers, particularly for hard-to-abate sectors like long-haul maritime transport and aviation. However, treating biofuels as an infinite clean alternative to fossil fuels is a dangerous miscalculation.

Scientists should abandon blanket optimism and in exchange, actually evaluate biofuels through spatial, hydrological, and atmospheric limits. Bioenergy cannot be built on the back of primary forest conversion, nor can it be allowed to drain vulnerable aquifers or pollute regional skies. If biofuels are to play a constructive role in our energy future, they must be sourced restrictedly from secondary agricultural wastes, non-food crop residues, and carefully targeted plantings on truly degraded land.

In the decades following the disaster, geoscientists have analysed the mechanisms that transformed a summer storm into an overwhelming surge of water, sediment, and debris. Published in Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences (NHESS), research on the Biescas tragedy has redefined our understanding of cascading anthropogenic or natural hazards, mountain check-dam dynamics, and urban spatial planning on alluvial fans.

The event was triggered when extreme atmospheric instability produced localised torrential rainfall over the upper reaches of the Arás basin. As documented by Tamir Grodek and Gerardo Benito in their paper,

"The Biescas flood occurred in the Central Pyrenees  in August 1996 (causing 87 deaths). The alluvial fan of the Rio Barranco de Aras was prone to flooding. Between 1926 and 1943, 36 check dams were built in the steep basin  to protect the road to France. In August 1996, > 200 mm of rain fell in 2 h, producing a flood peak of > 400 m³ s⁻¹, breaching a sequence of 32 out of the 36 check dams and entraining 0.17 Mm³ of 0.20 Mm³ of suspended sediment. The debris flow surge deposited at the fan head blocked the constructed mid-fan canal. The flow spread laterally, covering part of the fan, sweeping through a campsite and caravan park and dragging people and their caravans down to the Rio Gállego."

In steep mountainous terrains, intense, short-duration rainfall converts quickly into high-velocity surface flows. However, high rainfall intensity alone does not quite explain the destructive magnitude of the flood to its fullest. The primary amplifier was the failure of the structural flood control measures installed decades prior.

Engineering failures and the "Levee Effect"

To protect regional transportation routes, specifically the main road connecting Spain to France, engineering projects constructed a network of 36 check dams along the steep stream channels upstream of Biescas between 1926 and 1943. These torrential control structures were designed to trap sediment, reduce channel gradients, and prevent bed erosion. For decades, the system appeared effective. However, scientific evaluations demonstrate that structural mitigation measures carry inherent long-term vulnerabilities when subjected to extreme events. Highlighting how retention structures can inadvertently create a severe secondary hazard, Grodek and Benito note that:

"While these structures successfully mitigate the hazards of sediment transport to the alluvial fan, they themselves become vulnerable to damage from the retained sediments..."

During the August 1996 storm, unprecedented discharge overwhelmed the sediment-filled basins behind the aging check dams, which, of course resulted in a catastrophic reaction: as dams broke, the sudden release of water and stored sediment increased the stress on downstream structures, causing 31 of the 36 check dams to collapse in rapid succession.

The flood transformed from a water flood into a dense, destructive debris flow carrying significant sediment loads. When this mass reached the apex of the alluvial fan, it clogged the artificial discharge canal designed to route water safely past the area. Denied its artificial path, the debris flow breached the canal walls and spread across its natural, historical path, the active surface of the alluvial fan where the campsite had been constructed.

The presence of structural measures like check dams and artificial channels frequently creates a false sense of security among local planners and the public. The presence of these historical measures led planners to assume the alluvial fan had been permanently stabilised, making the land safe for commercial camping. When the engineering structures failed, the exposure of human life on the fan surface produced catastrophic consequences.

Rethinking spatial planning for alluvial fans

Thirty years after Biescas, geoscientists argue that traditional engineering approaches that rely solely on hard structural barriers in mountain basins must be re-evaluated. Mountain check dams inevitably fill with sediment or suffer structural fatigue, and this requires continuous maintenance. When extreme storms exceed historical records, degraded structures become liability multipliers rather than protective shields.

In response, scientists propose a shift in disaster risk reduction strategies on urbanised and active alluvial fans. Rather than attempting to completely block sediment transport in upper canyons, future planning must incorporate nature-based solutions and spatial redesign that accommodate natural fan dynamics.

As published by Grodek and Benito:

"Findings from disastrous events worldwide, together with 60 years of flood monitoring in the city of Eilat, highlight the potential for incorporating flood management within urbanised alluvial fans. It has been shown that, for long-term safety, the steep mountain basin should remain natural to allow the continuous evacuation of sediments. On the alluvial fan, the strategic placement of recreation areas, radial roads, and parks can effectively create space for incoming water and sediment."

Furthermore, they also outline concrete land-allocation guidelines necessary to prevent future Biescas-scale disasters:

"Our approach to disaster risk reduction proposes a shift in urban planning priorities to incorporate flood management by allocating 20 %–35 % of the alluvial fan – including the fan head and several wide radial road corridors down to the fan toe – for stream migration and sediment deposition."

Thus, designing dedicated corridors across alluvial fans that can safely absorb hyper-concentrated flows and debris during rare extreme storms enables municipalities to protect human and non-human lives without relying solely on fragile, hard-engineering barriers.

As climate change accelerates the frequency of extreme weather, how will several communities globally adapt their land-use planning to work with nature rather than against it?...

Geoscientific Model Development

From continental to street scales: climate change impacts on atmospheric composition over Europe and London - 21 July 2026

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• "More disturbing than feared": EGU paper shows Earth is far more sensitive to Antarctic ice loss

Instead, the line-scan camera did send back some data. Just a few minutes after Viking 1 landed, an alien landscape emerged on television screens across Earth. There stood the footpad, and for the first time, humanity looked at the surface of another world from the ground up.

As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of those first images this July 20, 2026, the emotional resonance of that moment remains undiminished. It shifted our place in the cosmos which traded science fiction fantasies for a harsh, beautiful reality.

First things first: Why is humanity interested in Mars in the first place?

So, why did these images taken by Viking 1 matter?

“Look at that sky—light blue sky—and the reddish hue! It's a very exciting thing to see, this distinct reddish coloration to the surface. These are subtle hues. It's a geological scene, a natural scene. Even in the deserts here on Earth the reds are not crayon reds as painted by a child. This is a surprisingly terrestrial‐like desert scene.” said Dr. Thomas A. Mutch of Brown University, a geologist and leader of the picture‐making team.

50 years late: A renaissance?

This anniversary arrives at a moment of spectacular scientific revision. For decades, textbooks taught that Viking’s biology experiments yielded a definitive negative result for life, which rendered Mars as a self-sterilizing wasteland. However, a recent perspective indexed on PubMed argues that the scientific community spent a half-century misinterpreting the mission's gas chromatography data.

The 2026 study highlights that when the Viking instruments heated the Martian soil to look for organic compounds, they inadvertently triggered a destructive chemical reaction with native perchlorates: oxidizing salts (like perchlorate) that were entirely unknown to scientists in 1976. This reaction incinerated the very organic molecules the mission sought to find and left behind chemical residues that the original teams dismissed as terrestrial contamination. The authors suggest that the positive metabolic signals Viking recorded are completely compatible with a specialized ecosystem of Martian microbes, a hypothetical model named BARSOOM (Bacterial Autotrophs that Respire with Stored Oxygen on Mars).

Concurrently, researchers publishing with European Geosciences Union (EGU) have breathed new life into the mission's data. Climate scientists publishing research in EGU's journal Geoscientific Model Development have combined Viking’s historic, multi-year atmospheric baselines with modern satellite observations to create 3D global climate models. These simulations trace the movement of dust storms and water-ice clouds across the planet and demonstrate that Mars possesses seasonal dust and an atmospheric cycle that continuously shapes its surface features.

The road ahead

In 2026, Mars exploration is transitioning to a commercial and international era. Following recent domestic budget constraints that left the initiative unfunded, private and international alternatives are accelerating. China is steadily advancing its Tianwen-3 Mars Sample Return mission for a 2028 launch. Concurrently, NASA announced last month that is set to launch the Aeolus atmospheric orbiter on a commercial rocket. Engineers are also testing advanced deep-space infrastructure, including a nuclear electric fission prototype outlined under NASA's Space Reactor-1 Freedom pathfinder to shorten transit windows for future crewed expeditions.

These modern exploration models would probably not have been possible without the data established by Viking 1. The atmospheric density profiles captured during Viking’s 1976 descent still calibrate the entry, descent, and landing systems used by modern rovers and upcoming commercial spacecraft alike. The climate models tracking Martian dust cycles expand upon the continuous atmospheric baseline that Viking started fifty years ago. Viking 1 remains the genesis, the mission that provided the foundational proof that landing on Mars was achievable, and supplied the data that makes current plans for human exploration viable.

My brain is blowing with questions right now: "Did terrestrial life as we understand it originate in Mars"? Did Mars have oceans and rivers? Will Mars ever be habitable by Earthlings?

Maybe one day, I'll return to this blog, with a smirk, thinking: It's an honour to be alive in times where these questions have solid answers.

A frontline in both directions

Cautious optimism, not complacency

Watching the consequences of that, in real time, may be the most relevant mangrove science question of the year.

References

Please tell us a bit about the European Critical Raw Materials Act signed in 2024. Why should geoscientists be paying attention?

Your team produced a policy brief about the European Critical Raw Materials Act, which was funded by the EU. What impact do you hope it will achieve?

How do Earth Observation and Machine Learning support access to and management of critical raw materials?

Where do you see the biggest gap between scientific advances in these fields and their uptake in EU policy?

What can geoscientists do to close this gap and make an impact?

The foundation of a sustainable future

A paradigm shift in geodynamics

From orientation to magnitude

Final thoughts

• Beyond neutrality. The discussion explored the meaning of scientific neutrality and its limits, examining the ethical responsibilities of researchers both working in contexts shaped by conflict, colonial legacies, and political power, also in relation to their own national and institutional settings. Participants debated how research agendas, funding structures, and institutional collaborations are never fully detached from geopolitical interests and inequality, while also reflecting on how to define ethical boundaries without undermining scientific exchange, individual agency, while avoiding the reproduction of exclusionary forms of knowledge production.
• Ethical procurement and institutional due diligence. Participants discussed how goods, services, data, and collaborations are sourced in ways that uphold ethical principles, especially with respect to human rights, environmental sustainability, and social responsibility throughout the entire supply chain. In the context of global conflicts and threats to human rights, participants also discussed on how and by whom due diligence should be carried out, to avoid complicity in harm, increase awareness of dual-use and potential misuse, and promote transparency and accountability of research institutions.
• The dilemma of cooperation and conscientious objection. Participants debated whether continuing collaborations with institutions implicated in human right violation risks normalising or legitimising violence, while also reflecting on how to support dissenting scholars within those same institutions and protect researchers who take ethical or political positions from retaliation. The debate highlighted broad support for collective forms of protest, including petitions, refusal of funding linked to human rights violations, and institutional pressure.

Funding opportunities

• Public Engagement Grants,
• Science Journalism Fellowship,
• Cutting-edge Galileo Conferences,
• Topically focused Conference series,
• Sponsoring specialist training schools,
• Developing high education teaching resources,
• Working as a scientific advisor in the EU Parliament,
• EGU Geoscience Days science communication events,
• EGU Special Activity Fund for "out-of-the-box", high profile activities,
• and delivering online workshops series for Early Career Scientist career development, science-for-policy, peer-review training, and science communication.

EGU resources

• Imaggeo, our open-source community-contributed resource for geoscience photos and videos
• Our monthly newsletter, the Loupe
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• Publications Highlights, from our scientific journals
• The EGU Jobs page, which lists current open research positions
• Educational resources for higher and university-level education
• Our interface toolkits, such as for engaging the media and policymakers

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Interested in getting involved?

• Enjoying the benefits of EGU membership, such as access to financial support, lower registration costs at geoscience meetings, discounts for publishing with EGU journals, and more!
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• Scientists at EGU General Assembly Present New Insights Into Phobos’ Internal Structure
• What geomythology can teach us and why Dante was talked about at during EGU26

Queer climate vulnerability

While social vulnerability increases, the storms get stronger

Barriers to research

Fossil-fuelled transphobia

Learning from histories of resistance

What can we do now?

• Recognition: Through whatever work that you're doing, recognise that all communities that are already climate vulnerable contain people who are further marginalized by gender or sexual difference. We are on the precipice of major strides - or major backslides - to the recognition of LGBTQ+ people in global climate governance. Naming us explicitly in policy is not a courtesy; it is a condition for our survival.
• Resourcing: Yes, the queer and trans community is resilient, but resilience must be resourced. We must find mechanisms to move money towards multiply-marginalised communities. While the UNCCC process has created a robust mechanism for loss & damage, as long as that funding is moved at the level of the nation-state, it will be difficult for politically persecuted communities to receive those benefits. We need alternatives. Community-controlled funds, mutual aid networks, and direct partnerships with queer-led organisations are among the most promising models.
• Resistance:  If you can take risks, take them! Leverage your privilege to promote research, dialogue, funding, and policy regarding climate change and the inclusion of queer and trans people in disaster risk reduction and management. Push back against the defunding of LGBTQ+ health research. Defend Women's and Gender Studies programs. Expose fossil-fueled transphobia, endorse the fossil fuel treaty, and support researchers and community organisations facing surveillance, funding cuts, and legal threats for doing this essential work.

Could introduce space anthropology to our readers?

Cultural behaviors are often adaptive technologies in disguise.

How are values and rituals expressed in space missions?

Why is it important that there is a legal framework for rituals and other social behaviours in space?

You also work towards bettering inclusion and equity in space research. Could you share some of the work you do with us?

Do you have any advice for people wishing to build inclusive communities in research?

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• Run annually between September-October

This month a team of scientists has published a paper in Hydrology and Earth System Sciences that changes how we can map and predict water behavior. Led by Ryoko Araki, a researcher in the joint doctoral program at San Diego State University and UC Santa Barbara, the study delivers a comprehensive, observation-based map of dominant hydrological processes across the contiguous United States.

To build this map, the authors compiled daily hydroclimatic records from 14,146 watersheds using the Caravan, a global open-source hydroclimatic database, and GAGES-II, a dataset maintained by the USGS. This resulted in a sample size roughly ten times larger than most previous continental-scale studies, which gave the scientists the opportunity to capture the true diversity of the continent's landscape. Instead of treating streamflow as a single, blunt metric, the researchers calculated so-called 'hydrologic signatures'. These signatures are statistical properties of river flow, such as: how quickly a river recedes after a storm; how much flow is sustained by groundwater during dry spells; and how often a basin experiences extreme high-flow events. Collectively, these signatures act as a functional fingerprint and therefore reveal the hidden flow patterns of the landscape.

Mapping the continent’s hidden plumbing?

When the authors plotted these signatures across the country, striking regional patterns emerged that prove that hydrology operates on vast, predictable gradients.

In the East, they traced a hydrological transition along the elevation gradient. High up in the rugged Appalachian spine, rivers are heavily sustained by deep baseflow and display slow yet complex recession rates. As you move down into the rolling hills of the Piedmont, the thin soils store very little water, leading to fast, flashy runoff. Once you reach the sandy aquifers of the Eastern Coastal Plain, the system shifts back to slow, groundwater-dominated baseflow.

In the Midwest, a massive outer ring of peculiar water behaviour traces the edge of ancient glacial sheets. Near the Great Lakes, sandy glacial soils absorb rain like a sponge and keep streamflow steady all year! Further south and west, where the soils turn to heavy, poorly drained clay, the landscape behaves entirely differently, as it actually sheds water quickly and produces intense runoff events.

In the west, the contrast is even more dramatic. Coastal mountain ranges experience heavy, wet winters with rapid surface runoff. Just a few miles inland, across the Cascade and Sierra Nevada crests, hydrology is dictated by massive winter snowpacks that slowly release water throughout the dry summer months.

The East-West divide: Who is in the driver’s seat?

Perhaps the most significant breakthrough of the study is how it reveals the real, complex drivers of these water patterns. For years, most large-scale computer models have operated under the assumption that climate is the dominant influence on hydrology, but when the team trained a random forest machine-learning model to predict these water fingerprints, they discovered a divide between the two halves of the continent.

In the western United States, climate indeed reigns supreme. Attributes like snow fraction, aridity, and precipitation seasonality are the primary controls on how watersheds behave. If the climate shifts, the water cycle shifts almost immediately. In the eastern United States, the physical landscape itself is in the driver's seat. Here, soil texture, geological age, and topography play a far more dominant role in shaping water pathways than local weather patterns. In these watersheds, the physical structure of the earth acts as a powerful buffer, filtering and shaping how water moves regardless of short-term climate variability.

The model also highlighted a third, highly localized driver: human activity. In major metropolitan areas across the East and Midwest, population density and built infrastructure became the dominant predictors of streamflow signatures, easily overriding natural soils and geology to create fast, artificial, and flashier runoff patterns.

Why does this new map matter for our water future? 

This study has (as you have probably guessed by now) some valuable implications for how we manage water in an era of rapid environmental change. For hydrological modelling, it provides a much-needed reality check. Modern flood-forecasting and climate-prediction systems frequently struggle with structural biases, simulating water pathways that do not match reality. By comparing these models against the team's empirical process maps, scientists can quickly identify where their simulations are structurally flawed; such as modelling a groundwater-dependent basin as a fast surface-runoff zone.

For water managers and urban planners, the maps offer a guide towards an even more effective climate resilience. In the climate-controlled west, water systems are vulnerable to rising temperatures that shrink mountain snowpacks. In the landscape-controlled East, water security is closely tied to land-use decisions. Paving over a recharge zone or draining a wetland in a geology-driven watershed will have immediate impacts on local water supplies and flood risks.

Final reflections