On 7 February, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., laid off 530 staff—around 8% of their more than 6,000-person workforce—along with 40 contractors. February’s layoffs were the latest in a series of cutbacks and slowdowns at NASA centers. JPL had already laid off 100 contractors in January, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center laid off contractors late last year, and work on several projects had slowed or frozen entirely. The sequence was precipitated by the lack of a federal budget for fiscal year (FY) 2024 for several months after the prior year’s appropriations ran out ..read more

Seventy percent of the world’s winemaking regions could become unsuitable for growing wine grapes if global temperatures exceed 2°C above the preindustrial average. This tally comes from a recent study in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment that compiled decades of research exploring the potential impact of climate change on viticulture. “The regions that are most threatened are regions that are already hot and dry because those regions are likely to get both hotter and drier,” said Gregory Gambetta, a viticulturist at the Université de Bordeaux in France and a coauthor on the study. However ..read more

Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface Arctic riverbanks are typically resilient, thanks to the power of permafrost. This permanently frozen soil locks in sediment, leading to low erosion rates. But as Arctic river water warms due to climate change, some researchers worry that riverbanks in the region will thaw and crumble. This, in turn, could cause problems, including the release of stored soil carbon and damage to infrastructure near rivers. But there’s a caveat to this concern: Existing models have predicted a more dramatic rate of Arctic riverbank erosion than has actually ..read more

In late March, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) issued a statement: The voting process that had rejected identifying the Anthropocene as a formal geological epoch a few weeks earlier was settled, and the downvote was valid. The statement came after a heated discussion about the vote’s validity and whether the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) had followed the statutes of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). Despite IUGS’s formal acknowledgment of the vote, “some uncomfortable facts will not go away,” said SQS’s second vice-chair Martin Head, a ..read more

Source: Geophysical Research Letters Little is known about the nature and evolution of Earth’s continental crust before a few billion years ago because cratons, or stable swaths of the lithosphere more than 2–3 billion years old, are relatively rare. But cratons are home to tiny particles of zircon, which contain multiple isotope systems such as uranium, hafnium, oxygen, or lead and offer one way of looking billions of years into the past. Detrital zircons, found in sediment that has been weathered out of rock, can hold more continuous records of Earth’s history than igneous zircon formed from ..read more

The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides. It is widely reported that the Chinese province of Guangdong is suffering a period of extreme rainfall, driving widespread flooding. Thousands of people have been evacuated and there is widespread damage. Less well reported is that these rains have also triggered many landslides. Particularly affected appears to be Jiangwan, a town located in the the Shaoguan City region. As is common in China, information is far from clear, but there are some images that sugges ..read more

Source: Earth’s Future Like humans, lakes are living systems that can suffer from a number of health issues, including circulatory and respiratory problems, infections, nutritional imbalances, and heat-related illnesses. Without treatment, these conditions can become chronic, harming lake ecosystems and those who depend on them. More than 12% of the world’s human population, for instance, lives within 3 kilometers of a lake. In a new study, Weyhenmeyer et al. suggest using human health terminology and approaches to assess and treat the world’s lake system issues. For example, lakes with multip ..read more

A group of toxic chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, slough off from household goods into local watersheds, eventually making their way down streams and rivers into the world’s oceans. But instead of staying locked underwater, ocean waves rerelease these PFAS into the atmosphere via sea spray. The amount of PFAS entering the atmosphere this way may be comparable to or greater than the contributions of other sources such as industrial plants, according to a study published in Science. “Even if we completely stop the use of PFAS right now, we will still have this cir ..read more

This is an authorized translation of an Eos article. Esta es una traducción al español autorizada de un artículo de Eos. Los núcleos de hielo, así como los anillos de los árboles, pueden contar historias sobre el pasado. Y en la Antártica, los núcleos han revelado un registro de 2,000 años de deposiciones de partículas de metales pesados provenientes del hemisferio sur. Los niveles de metales tóxicos como lo son el plomo y el cadmio—producidos por la minería y la metalurgia—aumentaron drásticamente después de que los españoles conquistaran a los Incas en el siglo XVI, de acuerdo a nuevas inve ..read more

Editors’ Vox is a blog from AGU’s Publications Department. Natural hazards are present on every part of planet Earth. Sometimes a natural event—such as extreme weather, a volcanic eruption, earthquake, or disease outbreak—turns into a disaster for humans, the environment, and the economy. A new book in AGU’s Advanced Textbook Series, Earth’s Natural Hazards and Disasters, synthesizes case studies of natural disasters with the science underpinning each event and strategies for minimizing fallout. We asked the book’s author about the distinction between hazards and disasters, the roles policy an ..read more