I first heard about a planned descent into one of the world’s deepest mines during a call with the biogeochemist Karen Lloyd. She had recently published a fascinating book called “Intraterrestrials,” exploring the microbial ecosystems that pervade Earth’s crust, know collectively as the deep biosphere.

There, the primary source of energy for life is not sunlight, but gases and compounds leached from the rock. In March, Lloyd would be joining a scientific expedition into a gold mine in South Africa to learn if this subsurface life might also be breathing oxygen. Did I wanna come?

A few weeks later, I found myself whizzing down a mine shaft that cut nearly two miles straight into the ground, squeezed into a three-story-tall lift called the Cage with a handful of geochemists and dozens of miners.

My story about the expedition and the mystery of dark oxygen came out this week in The New Yorker. I hope you read it!

Here I wanted to share some photos from the descent into the mine, which is called Moab Khotsong. With a shaft that extend more than three kilometers—nearly two miles—beneath the surface it’s a marvel of engineering. Around 6000 workers cover a 24-hour shift rotation to extract ever more gold and uranium from ever-deeper in the rock.

Although similar mines have scarred South Africa’s landscape (giant tailings piles lined the road down from Johannesburg), they offer a rare opportunity to investigate the deep biosphere up close. This mine in particular had been a hub for research since the discovery of water that had been trapped in its rocks for more than a billion years. This was a brine far saltier than the sea, and radioactive—yet things were living in it. “It smells like death, but it’s full of life,” as Lloyd put it to me.

The approach to Moab Khotsong:

Approaching the shaft:

Microbial ecologist Emil Ruff examines microbial goo. “It was like a kombucha!”

Entrance to Hell:

Microbiologist Ranjani Murali takes a sample from the mouth of a borehole at the bottom of the mine:

Water flowing out of the wall more than a kilometer beneath the surface:

Train:

Heeeeelllpppp:

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In other news…

Sorry it has been too long since writing here, so lots to share:

I recently joined the staff of the mighty Nature as a reporter covering geoscience, climate, energy, and beyond. I’m writing for the part of the magazine with the journalism, not the peer-reviewed research.

The first month has already been full of news about climate extremes, thanks to the ridiculously strong El Niño developing in the Pacific Ocean, the unprecedented wildfires in France and Spain, record-breaking temperatures across the world’s oceans, and fire clouds injecting smoke into the stratosphere.

If all that wasn’t enough cause for concern, look no further than what happened to forests 56 million years ago the last time hundreds of billions of tonnes of CO2 was erupted in the atmosphere.

So watch this space! Probably the easiest way is to sign up for the Nature briefing newsletter. A cool thing is that nothing is behind a paywall for the first ten days after it’s published (though you might have to enter an email).

North

In other deep mine news: in May, I got the chance to visit Snolab, an underground physics laboratory in northern Ontario. For Quanta, I wrote about how researchers there recently detected geoneutrinos that could offer a new view of the distribution of radioactive elements within the mantle.

East

New type of volcano just dropped in the north Atlantic. Researchers named it the Balerion Lava Field after the gargantuan black dragon from the TV series Game of Thrones, which they had been binging on the cruise out there.

South

Dunno if Earth’s core counts as ‘South’, but it does here. For Science, I wrote about some new high-pressure research on the melting point of iron that suggests the core may be as much as 1000°C cooler than thought. This work was led by the Carnegie geophysicist Zachary Geballe. The measurement, should it survive scrutiny, could help resolve a long-standing puzzle over how Earth’s magnetic field survived for billions of years before the solid inner core that helps power it today had formed.

West

65 billion gallons. That’s how much water Colorado River Compact states will have to cut under a much-anticipated federal report released in July. According to a helpful guide by Shannon Mullane in the Colorado Sun, Arizona will have to make the biggest cuts under the plan. Lake Meade and Lake Powell are currently at historic lows for combined storage. Maybe that’s one place the El Niño—normally associated with a wetter, snowier western US—could spell some good news?

Cheers,

James

Say hello with any questions, comments, tips, or curiosities by emailing jamesryandinneen at gmail dot com

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Real quick I want to share a big essay just published this morning in Aeon, in which I consider the deepest ways in which humans have changed the planet in the Anthropocene (hint: it’s not that superdeep hole in Russia).

It was a good opportunity to explore how thinking about ourselves in relation to the deep Earth can change how we imagine our role scraping by up here on the surface…

READ ESSAY HERE

Cheers,

James

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The Sepon copper and gold mine in southern Laos consists of an open pit cut out of the hills. Over the past twenty years it has more than quadrupled in size, now sprawling over more than 23 square kilometers (8.8 square miles) of former forest.

This is one of hundreds of mines around the world that are growing bigger, staying open longer, and digging deeper in what researchers say represents a fundamental shift in how new mining happens and the types of environmental risks it poses.

That is according to an analysis of satellite imagery and capital expenditures conducted by Deanna Kemp and at the University of Queensland in Australia and her colleagues. They identified more than 350 existing mines that have been expanding their footprint over the past two decades.

This was news to me: the number of new mines opening up has actually declined, even as global mineral production has increased. The only way for that to happen is if existing mines are producing more.

Brownfields

It’s no secret that the mining industry has a large and growing environmental footprint.

Research has linked growing volumes of metal production with growing impacts to water, land, and air. One study estimated existing mines cover 66,000 square kilometers, an area the size of the state of Georgia; others put it at 100,000 square kilometers. There are so many mines they’re actually difficult to count.

This expansion is largely being driven by the unquenchable demand for metals and minerals needed for the energy transition and, more recently, data centers. As Kemp and colleagues explain, meeting this demand at existing mines has advantages for mining companies: a large mine represents lots of sunk costs, and expanding at that site maximizes that value; exploring for more resources at a proven site isn’t as risky as searching for an entirely new resource; expansion can happen without as much regulatory approval as building a new mine.

But the researchers say this kind of “brownfield” development also poses a unique set of environmental risks. For instance, they found that at least 50 of these expanding mines — including Sepon — have expanded into or nearby ecologically-intact landscapes. They point to a study in the Amazon that found existing mines were already driving deforestation in areas slated for the development of new mines.

“If conservationists and policymakers assume that brownfield mining is a ‘lesser evil’ than establishing a new mine, they may miss some of the deeper, accumulating social and environmental risks of this practice,” the researchers write.

Digging deep

Another example is Voisey’s Bay in Canada, which doubled in size over the past twenty years. In 2024, the mine switched to underground operations, becoming one of at least three mines the researchers identified that are not only digging wider—but digging deeper.

Deeper mining poses a different set of challenges. Deeper shafts and underground mining can reduce the footprint of active mining operations (this is why it’s difficult to know if mines are getting deeper based on satellite imagery). But the greater volume of material extracted from below creates more waste and higher, wider tailings piles, which can expand the overall footprint.

These tailings piles can create other issues like contaminated groundwater, or even catastrophic tailings dam failures, such as the Brumadinho disaster in Brazil in 2019. At Sepon and other mines in Laos, cyanide runoff from "heap leaching" of gold ore risks contaminating surrounding waters and fisheries.

In a sign of this pattern (or maybe just the record-high price of gold), the deepest mine in the world—the Mponeng gold mine in South Africa—is currently sinking its main shaft from 3.9 kilometers to more than 4 kilometers to extend its life.

It is possible to manage these problems. But the researchers make a convincing case that brownfield development is currently almost invisible, and evades the scrutiny that is—we hope—afforded new mines. (The fact that new development is largely happening at existing mines suggests to me that opposition to new mines can be effective.)

Even in the most material-efficient, circular-economy, public transportation, all e-bikes-no-Cybertrucks future, the world is going to need a lot more metals and minerals. The more of that demand that can be met without expanding the mining industry’s already large footprint the better. And there are ideas: one study I wrote about a few months ago found the US could meet almost its entire demand for metals by processing ore more efficiently at existing mines—no new mines required.

But minimizing the damages from mining doesn't just mean keeping a close eye on new mines popping up. It means also means paying attention to what’s already underway underground.

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In other news…

This month in Science, I wrote about a chance discovery by the Martian rover Curiosity of rocks that preserved the rippled imprint of a sandstorm that blew on the Red Planet more than three billion years ago.

Today, the Martian atmosphere is about 200 times thinner than that of Earth. The geometry of the ripples indicates that the ancient Martian atmosphere would have had to be much thicker back then to be able to transport so much sand, a key condition for a more clement (i.e. habitable) Martian climate.

On Earth Day, I also had the opportunity to give a webinar for Mass Rivers Alliance about how to investigate aging dam infrastructure around the country. I mainly discussed a story I reported a few years ago about the problem after a double dam failure in Michigan. That problem looks to be rearing its head again with flooding in the state.

North

The potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could scramble the climate across the North Atlantic. Da Nian and colleagues found in a new study that slowdown of the current could also cause the ocean to release more CO2 into atmosphere, boosting concentrations by as much as 83 ppm (roughly 20% of today’s levels). Over centuries, this could lead to an additional 0.2C of global warming—and 6C (!) in Antarctica—even as the change in circulation leads to cooling in the Arctic.

East

Grand Army Plaza is getting a makeover. For anyone who has ever tried to enter Brooklyn’s Prospect Park from the north, this came as welcome news from the Mamdani administration. Hopefully, this will turn what is now a busy, dangerous intersection into a substantial expansion of the park—restoring Frederick Law Olmsted’s original design.

South

When it comes to tracing the history of Earth’s climate, ice cores get all the glory. But excrement can also be revealing. A study by Chuxian Li and colleagues uses the traces of mercury left behind by bird poop to track the size of an Antarctic seabird colony over the past 8000 years. They find there were fewer seabirds on the island during periods of less sea ice and more intense winds—both of which are expected with anthropogenic climate change this century.

West

For centuries, New Mexico’s storied acequias have transported water to farmers in the arid state. Tina Deines reports for Inside Climate News on how the hotter temperatures and lack of snowpack that have plagued the western US this year are causing acute water stress on this longstanding irrigation system.

Cheers,

James

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Locked in a safe on her desk at Boston University’s Institute for Astrophysical Research, cosmochemist Nan Liu keeps a shard of rock flecked with crystals older than the Sun.

This rock is part of a meteorite that formed in the earliest days of the solar system, melting down as the solar nebula began to collapse just under 4.6 billion years ago.

Most of the material in such pristine meteorites dates from that starting point. However, some microscopic grains — crystals smaller than a single bacterial cell — survive intact.

When I visited Liu late last year, she explained that these “presolar grains” can provide a direct measure of the material that was floating around in the interstellar medium of the even more distant past. The most ancient known presolar grains are more than 7 billion years old, shot from the nuclear furnaces of stars that could have formed up to 3 billion years before that.

Thus, this material offers a way of looking at the composition of stars more than two thirds of the way back to the beginning of the universe itself.

As I wrote about in a story for Quanta this month, these presolar grains may also offer a new view of the sequence of events that formed our solar system. In fact, we may have been born in the bubble of a far more massive star…

Read the story here.

In other (less cosmic) news…

North

The state of New York is installing thousands of high-tech electric induction stoves in public housing apartments. Lauren Dalban writes for Inside Climate News about some of the first installations in the Bronx. These stoves—in addition to being more energy efficient and cutting down on indoor pollution—are especially cool because they have a built-in battery. This enables them to plug directly into a regular wall socket, avoiding expensive electrical retrofits. This powers the oven too.

East

Not news, but I recently watched Lionel Rogosin’s extraordinary docu-fiction film Come Back, Africa. The film was shot in secret under the apartheid government in Johannesburg, South Africa with a cast of nonprofessional actors. It vividly captures the absurdity and cruelty of that system of segregation—including the role of the mining industry—and remains a powerful work more than sixty years after it was made.

South

Instead of an airport, how about a massive nature park in the middle of a city? Matthew Ponsford writes for Bloomberg about the enormous Lake Texcoco Ecological Park about to open in Mexico City, which could help to address the city’s chronic issues with water.

West

Two farmers, two divergent views on solar energy. I enjoyed this story by Henry Carnell in Mother Jones about a dispute in Oregon’s Willamette Valley over “agrivoltaics”—the idea of growing crops and grazing animals underneath solar panels. Back in 2023, I wrote about a similar dispute in Texas between prairie conservationists and a solar developer who wanted to use a massive solar development to replant native prairie on farmland.

Cheers,

James

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I’ve been following the news about the expiration this month of the New START nuclear arms control treaty between the US and Russia with trepidation. The treaty limited the number of nuclear warheads both countries could keep in their arsenals. Now, there are no limits.

According to the New York Times, Trump administration officials have also hinted at a potential return by the US to small-scale nuclear weapons testing, ostensibly to match recent tests they claim have been conducted by China and Russia.

Normally, nuclear arms control is far outside of my bailiwick, but it has come up surprisingly often during my research into the science of Earth’s interior.

That is because seismology—earthquake science—has played a central role in monitoring and constraining the development of nuclear weapons from the middle of the 20th century up to today.

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The story starts when nuclear weapons testing went underground.

Nuclear quakes

Between the first nuclear blast in 1945 in the desert of New Mexico and the early 1960s, the US, USSR, and other nuclear armed states—notably France—conducted more than 500 nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, oceans, and space. Many of the US tests were conducted in the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific, displacing the islands’ inhabitants and exposing them to harmful levels of radiation.

Plutonium isotopes from those tests spread around the world. In Algeria, where France conducted many of its tests, the radioactive dust is still detectable in trace amounts in the Saharan sands, some of which has been blown back to Europe in sandstorms.

Fortunately, that ended with a 1963 treaty banning atmospheric tests—but it wasn’t the end of nuclear testing. Instead, the nuclear states just doubled down on detonating nuclear weapons underground.

Between the 1963 treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996, the nuclear states carried out almost one underground test per week, totally more than 1,500 blasts. More than 2/3rds of these were by the USSR or the US. In 1971, the US conducted the largest of these in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands—a five megaton blast that left behind a huge crater:

Just like a large earthquake, these blasts sent seismic wave racing throughout the planet, vibrating all the way down through the center of Earth. The prospect of using these vibrations to monitor nuclear tests prompted major investments by governments in seismology. What amounted to a rounding error in defense budgets was a huge deal for the field.

Seismic shift

Earlier in the century, seismologists had been responsible for a series of major breakthroughs mapping the structure of Earth’s interior. That included the discovery of a solid inner core contained within the liquid outer core. In the 1950s, deep earthquakes detected in subduction zones had helped establish the basis for the theory of plate tectonics. But it had become a bit of a sleepier science since.

The sudden relevance of underground vibrations for national security revived things.

In Montana, for instance, the US military funded an array of more than 500 seismometers buried in deep boreholes, one of the most powerful seismic sensors ever built. This Large Aperture Seismic Array (LASA) made it possible to distinguish shaking produced by an earthquake from that of a nuclear blast on the opposite side of the planet. Another array, NORSAR, was built in Norway through a joint agreement with the US. Other seismic stations were built or renovated in more remote parts of the globe to ensure coverage.

At first this seismic information was used for classified reconnaissance purposes: who is blowing what up where? But the ability to reliably detect the blasts also became essential during negotiations to outlaw the underground tests, both because of their environmental consequences and in the name of non-proliferation.

“In this sense seismology is an enabling technology,” wrote the seismologist Paul Richards, who played a role in negotiating the eventual testing ban. Without it, a treaty could “…hardly be contemplated, since no nuclear weapons state would consent to a ban on its own nuclear test program and those of other countries without the capability to monitor global compliance.”

In 1996, after decades of negotiation, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty came into effect, banning all nuclear testing whether above or below ground. The treaty also established an international monitoring network, including nearly 200 seismic stations around the globe primed to ensure that if anyone blew up something big underground everybody would know about it.

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In the US, the treaty was immediately signed by President Bill Clinton, but was never ratified by the Senate. Russia initially joined, but withdrew from the treaty in 2023 to match the US position. Several nuclear armed states—India, Pakistan, North Korea—have still not signed the treaty, which won’t formally go into force until all nuclear capable state have ratified it.

Nonetheless, the treaty effectively ended all large-scale nuclear tests for the next decade. This quiet stretch ended when North Korea detonated a weapon underground in 2006. North Korea has since conducted five other underground nuclear tests—all of which the world immediately knew about thanks in large part to seismology.

Saber rattling

The specter of a return to nuclear testing by the US and the other major nuclear powers was raised in October last year. In a social media post, President Trump said he was instructing the War Department to begin testing nuclear weapons “on an equal basis” with China, which has been rapidly building up its nuclear arsenal.

In a speech last week at the United Nations, a State Department official explained Trump’s instruction was in response to apparent nuclear testing by Russia and by China. He said the US government “is aware” that China has carried out “nuclear explosive tests”, including one on June 22, 2020.

However, in a statement, the head of the organization that oversees the test ban treaty said the international monitoring network “did not detect any event consistent with the characteristics of a nuclear weapon test explosion at that time.”

“Any nuclear test explosion, by any state, is of deepest concern,” he said.

In other news…

I’ve had a few stories out since last writing, all in Science. They happen to fall somewhat into my directional schema:

North

Geoscientists will soon have two powerful new eyes on Earth. Despite concerns that Congress would grant the Trump administration’s request to slash NASA’s scientific budget, the agency is moving forward with two $355 million satellite projects. One will keep tabs on the stratosphere, helping understand the delayed recovery of the ozone layer. The other will take detailed 3D measurements of the surface of the entire planet, useful for mapping changes to ecosystems and ice.

East

Rock outcrops folded high on the Tibetan Plateau appear to be remnants of undersea super-eruptions that could have spelled disaster for marine ecosystems more than 200 million years ago. According to Jian-Jun Fan at Jilin University in China and colleagues, such “ghost eruptions” erased by subduction could be an undercounted source of extinctions through Earth’s history.

West

The plume of hot rock feeding Hawai’i’s volcanos may have split in two deep within the mantle. This is based on new modeling work by Jiashun Hu, a geodynamicist at the Southern University of Science and Technology in China. One consequence of this might be that tens of millions of years from now, two parallel island chains could form where the Hawaiian archipelago is now.

South

Some good news from Colombia. Christina Noriega reports for Mongabay on the birth of three new Andean condor chicks at an incubation facility. These extraordinary birds—their wingspan can reach 12 feet!—are critically endangered, with just under 7,000 birds remaining in South America. Efforts to reduce conflict between the birds and ranchers seem to be effective.

Cheers,

James

Say hello with any questions, comments, tips, or curiosities by emailing jamesryandinneen at gmail dot com

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As you may have seen on social media I have some exciting news: I’m writing a book about Earth’s deep interior, to be published by Viking/Penguin Random House! 🎉

I’ve been working away in semi-secret on this project for a while now, and I can’t wait to share with all of you what I’ve been learning about the deep Earth and its importance for life on the surface, both over geological time scales and in our short term response to climate change.

This is also the story of how over just the past century, geoscientists have transformed our view of the interior from one of myth and speculation into a remarkably detailed picture of the vertical geography beneath our feet.

It’s going to take me a while to write this thing, and I’ll be sure to share irregular updates, and interesting tidbits of all sorts here. So stay tuned in 2026, and subscribe here if you haven’t!!!

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In other news…

I’ve had a few stories out since last writing.

For MIT Tech Review, I got a sneak peak of a new engine in Boston that runs on aluminum and water—the largest such reactor ever built. The startup behind it, Found Energy, plans to use the heat generated by the reactor to help wean heavy industry off of fossil fuels, starting with aluminum recycling itself.

Here’s a link to the story, which explains the interesting chemistry behind the engine: This startup is about to conduct the biggest real-world test of aluminum as a zero-carbon fuel

I wasn’t allowed to take a picture of the engine itself for proprietary reasons. But I did get to see a can of soda water dissolve in a cloud of steam and hydrogen gas, which was pretty freaking cool. Here’s a video of what that looks like:

I had two stories come out in New Scientist.

The first featured an exclusive survey I conducted with my colleague Madeleine Cuff of more than one hundred leading climate scientists for their views and attitudes about solar geoengineering—the notion of injecting particles into the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight away from Earth and cool the planet. We were surprised to find that a majority of respondents expected someone would attempt large-scale geoengineering before the end of the century, even as a majority thought it was not a great idea.

Here’s a link: Climate scientists expect attempts to dim the sun by 2100

The second was a feature about the alarming state of the planet’s land carbon sink. For much of the past century, this land sink—to the great surprise of most ecologists—has taken up as much as a third of the CO2 we emit each year, playing a major role in slowing the pace of warming. But the past few years have seen sharp declines in the sink driven by heat and changing precipitation patterns. That’s bad news that contributed to a record jump in atmospheric CO2 in 2024.

Here’s a link: One of Earth’s most vital carbon sinks is faltering

Lastly, I had two stories in Science to finish off the year.

One was about new research showing that big earthquakes on the Cascadia Megathrust Fault off of the coast of Oregon may be able to trigger big earthquakes on the San Andreas fault to the south, and vice versa. Such a synchronized earthquake along much of the US West Coast would be a nightmare scenario; marine sediments suggest it has happened before.

Here’s a link: Big U.S. West Coast earthquakes could come as a one-two punch

Finally, to end the year deep in the Earth, I wrote about a new map of flowing rock along the core-mantle boundary that was presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans. This map was generated by interpreting the reflections of seismic waves generated by more than 5000 earthquakes, presenting one of the highest resolution views of this dynamic region of the planet to date.

Here’s a link: Ancient tectonic plates are oozing along Earth’s core

Atop a volcano

A final highlight of the year was a trip to visit a close friend in Ecuador. With far too little acclimatization, we climbed up to the summit of Cotopaxi—a 19,347 foot active volcano that erupted just two years ago and was only just reopened for visitors. It was a perfect day, with sulfurous steam pouring out of the ice-capped crater and warming the air. I descended full of inspiration for more science and more Earth in the new year.

Thanks for reading! And see you in 2026.

Cheers,

James

Say hello with any questions, comments, tips, or curiosities by emailing jamesryandinneen at gmail dot com

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First, some news since last writing. After just over three years, I’ve left New Scientist and have ventured back into the freelance thickets. I learned a huge amount about science and how to report on it during my time at the magazine, and I’ll miss my colleagues and their many curiosities.

But I’m looking forward to stepping back from the firehose of news to pursue other forms and delve deeper (stay tuned for some big announcements forthcoming along those lines).

Fortunately, I was able to kick off this new era with a real adventure. In early September, I travelled to North Carolina’s low-lying Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula on assignment for Science Magazine to join a group of ecologists searching amid the muck and mosquitoes for “ghost forests” — stands of dead trees drowned by flooding or poisoned by saltwater encroaching due to rising seas.

This area is where they shot most of The Notebook twenty years ago, and one wonders if the production designers realized the sultry southern forests they were capturing were in the midst of dying due to sea level rise.

But the ecologists had not come because of the film.

This ghost hunting expedition was guided by a new map of ghost forests that identified nearly 12 million dead trees (see examples below) standing in coastal forests between South Carolina and Maine. This reveals an overlooked consequence of climate change for carbon storage and biodiversity in these, dare I say, hauntingly beautiful ecosystems.

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This massive count of dead trees was largely thanks to the labors of Henry Yeung, a doctoral student at the University of Virginia. He spent hundreds of hours identifying more than 50,000 ghosts in aerial images of the forests in order to train a deep learning algorithm to churn through the remaining images.

Here’s an interactive map Yeung shared with me where you can zoom around to see clusters of dead trees identified by the algorithm. Not all of these trees were killed by water, but many of them likely were — over 6 million of the trees occur in low-lying areas prone to flooding.

But just as behind every apparently magical AI efficiency gain lies a deep well of human effort, this view from on high could only reveal so much. To learn more about what actually killed these trees (salt? flooding? insects? all of the above?), the researchers had to put the algorithms aside and get their hands dirty.

During the day out on the peninsula, we visited several different ghost forests, some flooded, some dry, all full of big, barren trees. These were concerning examples of natural systems in the midst of a not-so-natural transition, and not just from rising seas. Right next to one patch of ghosts we visited, a swath of forest had been cleared for a new housing development. Other flooding seemed less related to proximity to the coast than to drainage canals dug by legacy forestry projects.

At one point we stood belly-deep in Coca Cola-dark water surrounded by dozens of bone-white trunks. One of the researchers explained that saltwater intruding from the coast had set this area on course to become a salt marsh within a few decades. Eventually, maybe a century from now, it would be completely submerged, and the marsh would give way to a meadow of seagrass. By then, the trees around us wouldn’t remain even as ghosts.

In other news…

Here are some notable things happening elsewhere:

North

A Canadian CO2 removal company called Arca is developing a method to microwave rocks to absorb more CO2. According to a patent filing it seems to work. I wrote about the idea in New Scientist.

East

Chinese geologists have discovered a new type of uranium deposit in deep sandstone in Xinjiang’s Tarim Basin, per this release from the China National Nuclear Corporation. This is interesting given China is developing nuclear energy faster than anywhere else, but still imports most of its uranium fuel.

South

Between June 2024 and 2025, Chinese solar panel exports to Africa surged 60 per cent compared to the previous year, amounting to just over 15 gigawatts of power capacity imported over that period. As I wrote for New Scientist, this is a hopeful trend, given about 600 million people in Africa – nearly half of the continent’s population – lack access to reliable electricity. African countries have struggled to attract investment in renewable energy, receiving just 2% of the global total in recent decades.

West

Rock outcrops in Wyoming and Montana that capture the asteroid-driven extinction of the dinosaurs suggest the disappearance of these giant ecosystem engineers from the landscape also reshaped the flow of rivers. I wrote about this for Nautilus.

Thanks for reading. Please do share this newsletter with anyone who might be interested.

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Cheers,

James Dinneen

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Our society depends on soil. Formed from the slow breakdown of rocks by plants and microbes, soil enables farms and ecosystems to grow. It is the single largest store of carbon other than the oceans. It makes Earth’s rocky surface a good place to live.

Yet we don’t treat it with much respect. In many parts of the world, intensive farming and destruction of ecosystems have degraded soils, leading to rapid rates of erosion. Soil built up over millennia disappears in decades.

This shift is so significant researchers can mark the point at which human activity becomes the dominant influence on soil formation in the geological record, the start of what researchers call the “pedological Anthropocene” — pedological just means “soil.”

In some places, like the US, the change is relatively recent, just a few centuries past. Elsewhere, new research suggests we’ve been scouring the soil for much, much longer.

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The soil Anthropocene

This month I wrote in New Scientist about a new study in the journal PNAS that looked at human influence on soil over the past 10,000 years in the French Alps, where rates of erosion are among the fastest in Europe.

William Rapuc at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and his colleagues analyzed sediment cores from Lake Bourget, near Mount Blanc. Sediments eroded from the surrounding mountains drain into the lake and settle on the bottom. By drilling into this sediment, researchers can trace patterns of erosion far back in time.

Comparing this sediment record with separate archaeological and climatological records enabled them to tease apart the relative influence of changing climate vs. farming and grazing activities on soil formation and loss.

The team found that people have been the dominant influence on soil formation in the region for nearly four thousand years. “We destroyed the soils at a rate four to 10 times faster than they grew,” Rapuc told me.

This process happened in three stages. Initially, between 3,800 and 3,000 years ago, soil was mainly lost from high altitudes where people had started grazing livestock. Between 2,800 and 1,600 years ago, there’s was a surge from lower latitudes as people began farming there. From 1,600 years ago to the modern era, more intensive agriculture with ploughs and other tools sped things further.

Overall, this human-driven soil loss means the mountains have lost virtually all the soil that developed since the Alps were covered in ice.

Rapid erosion

The virtue of focusing on sediment from this single lake in a region with robust climatological and archaeological records is that human and non-human drivers of erosion could be cleanly separated. But this millennia-long pattern of soil loss is hardly limited to the Alps.

In earlier work, Jean-Philippe Jenny at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment and his colleagues looked at sediment in more than 600 lakes around the world. They found that at around a third of the lakes, rates of soil erosion from the surrounding landscapes accelerated starting about 4,000 years ago. This coincided with a decline in tree pollen in the sediment, suggesting human-driven deforestation was behind this global pattern of erosion.

These are striking illustrations of how rapidly we can transform landscapes. But this ancient soil loss is minor compared to the erosion made possible today by even more intensive farming powered by machines. Daniel Rath at the Natural Resources Defense Council told me that rates of soil erosion have been recorded in the US not 5 or 10 times higher, but more than 1000 times faster than pre-glacial conditions.

He pointed me to this study that looked at prairie remnants and farmland in the US Midwest. It found rates of erosion on farmland over the past 150 years averaged 1.9 millimeters per year, and reached above 4 millimeters per year in some places, exceeding erosion rates predicted by the USDA as much as 8 times. Eroded soil piled up in mounds around the edge of fields, no good for anyone.

This isn’t a new problem. In fact, it’s a very old one. But the long view of soil loss makes clear that even our preindustrial activities can transform the landscapes we rely on. We should tread carefully before the future blows away in the wind.

In other news…

It’s been a choc full summer (hurray for weddings!), and so I’ve missed a few newsletter editions. But there’s been lots of fun stuff out I want to highlight.

Many of you put up with me talking about extreme hail for a few months. This is why:

I delved into the quivering science of how fiber optic cables offer a new way to measure earthquakes and study the subsurface in unprecedented detail…

In Kansas, I visited one of the first wells in the US to drill in search of natural hydrogen fuel inside a rift in the heart of North America. Twas very muddy…

I also wrote about supergiant crustaceans, penguins and clouds, AI weather forecasts, using CO2 to mine nickel, panic in the carbon dioxide removal industry, the “ChatGPT” of biology, solar geoengineering with rockets, methane sea spiders, the Lizard peninsula, liming, and how covering open pit mines in solar panels could provide terrawatts of power.

Here are some notable things happening elsewhere:

North

These rocks in the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt along the shore of Canada’s Hudson Bay are probably the world’s oldest rocks, and the last remains of Earth’s Hadean crust.

East

This is old news by now, but just to make sure you heard, it appears that China’s CO2 emissions may have peaked. For the first time, emissions in the 12 months between May 2024 and May 2025 saw a slight decline even as demand for power increased. Other emissions drops have only happened during big economics contractions like during COVID lockdowns. This from an an analysis by Lauri Myllyvirta in Carbon Brief.

South

New Zealand’s South Island appears to be a mysteriously large carbon sink — 50-140 million metric tons of carbon per year larger than thought, per Radio New Zealand. The reasons for this are still uncertain, but could be down to mature indigenous forests taking up more CO2 than expected. Good news!

West

80 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we’re still learning more about the human impacts of not only dropping the bombs, but of building them. Science covered a study of increased cancer rates among people who grew up near a creek contaminated by nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project near St. Louis. My colleagues at New Scientist took a wider look on the podcast at this global environmental legacy of nuclear weapons, from uranium mining in the Congo to the Hanford Site in Washington state.

Thanks for reading. And I’ll try to get the next one out on time! Please do share this newsletter with anyone who might be interested.

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Cheers,

James Dinneen

Say hello with any questions, comments, tips, or curiosities by emailing jamesryandinneen at gmail dot com

…or send secure tips via Signal to jamesnesw.44

Follow me on Bluesky at jamesdinneen.bsky.social or X @jamesnesw

Human activity has transformed Earth’s surface. We’ve changed the composition of the atmosphere, the pH of the oceans, and the evolutionary trajectory of countless species. The idea of the Anthropocene, though still hotly contested, suggests we’ve changed things so much we are a geological force, deserving of our own epoch. I like to say it means we should think of ourselves more like volcanoes than chimpanzees.

However, for all the changes we’ve wrought on the surface, our activities don’t actually reach very far into Earth’s interior. The deepest mines and oil wells don’t reach more than a few kilometers into the crust. The deepest hole ever drilled reached down just 12 kilometers, hardly a scratch relative to the whole planet.

But this month, we learned that at least one change we’ve made on the surface has had much deeper consequences. According to a study published in Nature Geoscience, the emptying of the Aral Sea due to Soviet-era irrigation programs and drought has caused a rebound effect reaching all the way down to a layer of Earth’s upper mantle called the asthenosphere.

“To do something that would affect the asthenosphere is like, whoa,” one of the study’s authors Sylvain Barbot told me for my story in New Scientist. “It’s showing you how potent we are at changing the environment.”

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Rebound effect

This change in the deep Earth is due to a phenomenon called isostatic rebound, known more prosaically as the “mattress effect”. When a large weight is removed from the crust, the rocks slowly unbend, causing uplift on the surface. This process is ongoing in many of the regions that were covered by ice sheets during the most recent glacial period, such as Alaska. In some places, rising land is actually outpacing sea level rise.

Human activities that shift enough mass around can have a similar effect. In this case, the weight removed was around one thousand cubic kilometers of water in the Aral Sea in Central Asia — once considered the fourth largest lake in the world, extending across 70,000 square kilometers.

Starting in the 1960s, Soviet engineers diverted much of the water from the two main rivers feeding the Aral Sea to irrigate cotton plantations. Cutting off those rivers, combined with drought, drained the sea over the subsequent decades. Today, the Aral Sea has shrunk by more than 90 percent, leaving behind ruined fishing communities and a wide deserted plane.

In her book Pipe Dreams, the historian Maya K. Peterson describes how this huge diversion was part of a utopian project stretching back to tsarist Russia to civilize the “backward” region:

Visions of transforming the Aral Sea basin in to a fertile colony of the Russian and Soviet empires sometimes seemed like unattainable visions, no more tangible than smoke from an opium pipe. But with the material transformation of the twentieth century of large swaths of Central Asia, what were dreams for some became nightmares for others, in particular those who today still inhabit the toxic sandscapes where the Aral Sea used to be.

This environmental disaster, sometimes called the “quiet Chernobyl”, surely ranks among the most obvious artefacts of the Anthropocene on the surface. When the geophysicist Wang Teng first read about it, he told me he immediately realized its effects could reach much deeper.

To test this idea, he and his team analyzed precise satellite measurements of uplift in the Aral Sea region between 2016 and 2020. They found the area was rising around 7 millimeters per year on average, even decades after much of the water was removed. They then modeled different scenarios in the crust and mantle below to see which best matched the pattern of uplift seen on the surface.

They found that matching uplift on the surface required a response not only in the crust, but in the hot, weak region of the upper mantle below it called the asthenosphere. This mantle “creep”, they estimated, is occurring somewhere between 130 and 190 kilometers down. In fact, the slow response of the viscous mantle is why the uplift is continuing today even though most of the water has been gone for decades.

There are other instance where human activity has shifted around so much mass it has caused the crust to respond. The filling of large reservoirs like Lake Mead is one example, or the removal of vast quantities of groundwater in Central California. But as Manoochehr Shirzaei explained to me, the effects of the Aral Sea are likely to reach deeper because of the lake’s impressive breadth; the depth of the response is proportional to area where weight was removed, like an inverted pyramid reaching under the crust.

“It appears that humanity has messed with plate tectonics just to improve cotton yields,” wrote geoscientist Simon Lamb, in an perspective piece accompanying the study.

A deeper stratum

As far as I understand, this rebound effect doesn’t really matter, in the sense that it won’t have any lasting social or environmental consequences. The effect, for all its depth, is pretty minor relative to other natural shifts in the shape of the mantle, and the researchers’ modeling suggests it will have stopped within a few decades.

But it does strike me as yet another indicator that what we are capable of as a species really is geological in scale, not unlike the layer of radioactive particles from bomb testing that coat the planet, or the nearly 425 ppm CO2 now in the atmosphere. The ever-changing mantle won’t record anything nearly as long as that, but we can now say for sure the Anthropocene has touched even that deeper realm.

In other news…

This month in New Scientist I wrote about feeding cows fungus, degraded weather forecasts, a pro-science rally in NYC, beetles and wildfire, California and wildfire, the Kakhovka dam disaster (come to think of it there was probably some rebound effect here too), fear at NOAA, cloud seeding to study snow, China hydropower, cannibal spiders, illegal gold mining, budget cuts at NOAA, Rapa Nui and super-deep diamonds. Here are some notable things happening elsewhere:

North (and South)

The oceans in both the Arctic and Antarctic were covered in less sea ice than at any other time on record in February, according to data from the EU’s climate service Copernicus. That will have consequences beyond polar ecosystems, from faster warming for the rest of the planet to a slow-down in the overturning circulations of the oceans.

East

China launched a billion dollar initiative to create a detailed underground atlas of the entire country called SinoProbe II, according to a report in Science. In addition to supporting basic geological research, it could identify new mineral reserves and CO2 storage sites. It may also involve drilling some of the deepest holes every drilled in search of ultra-deep reserves of oil and gas.

South

Western Myanmar could see as many as four more earthquakes of magnitude 4 or greater this month, even as the country comes to grips with the devastating quake that hit the region at the end of March, that has left more than 3,000 people dead. This is according to a forecast from earthquake risk management company Temblor.

West

How do animals like coyotes and raccoons thrive in the urban environments in Alberta and beyond? I enjoyed this story in bioGraphic by Betsy Mason exploring how studying the “cognitive ecology” of urban animals could help us understand.

Thanks for reading. Please do share this newsletter with anyone who might be interested.

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Cheers,

James Dinneen

Say hello with any questions, comments, tips, or curiosities by emailing jamesryandinneen at gmail dot com

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Follow me on Bluesky at jamesdinneen.bsky.social or X @jamesnesw

The number “1.5” is totemic in the global conversation on climate change as the headline target of the Paris Agreement. Calls to “Keep 1.5°C Alive” once meant something even outside the arcane world of multilateral UN negotiations.

Another number that should be just as iconic—but isn’t—is “30 by 30”. This refers to the agreement reached by virtually all of the world’s countries in 2022 to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land and waters by 2030, and to restore 30% of degraded ecosystems. That’s a minimum if we are to have any hope of meaningfully slowing the pace of extinctions eroding biodiversity.

Yet as with the 1.5°C target, the prospects for hitting those 30 by 30 numbers don’t look good. In fact, more than two years after agreeing to the targets, not a single country has a plan that would achieve them.

COP flop

That countries are behind on biodiversity was already clear before this week’s meeting in Rome to conclude the COP16 biodiversity summit, the world’s main forum to take coordinated action on nature loss. This was a makeup session after the first meeting fizzled out in Colombia in November last year without agreement. Almost all countries had also missed a deadline to submit official plans on how they would achieve 30 by 30 and a raft of other biodiversity targets.

On this go around, the summit did make more progress. It ended with an agreement on a plan to marshal $200 billion a year towards protecting biodiversity. It also launched a new fund to encourage companies that rely on genetic data from biodiversity to put some of their revenue towards protecting it. About a dozen more countries submitted plans, and the majority have now put forward country-specific targets. Indigenous people, whose land contains a disproportionate share of biodiversity, also gained a more formal voice in future negotiations.

This was hailed by delegates as proof countries can still come together to deal with an environmental crisis despite a general retreat from international coordination amid rising geopolitical tensions. Representatives from the US, which is the only member of the UN not party to the biodiversity treaty, were not around to comment.

But at the conclusion of COP16 it remains obvious that the world is moving far too slowly to make plans to protect biodiversity, let alone to carry them out on time.

Bleak picture

Just look at what countries themselves have said they plan to do on biodiveristy.

In a recent paper in Nature Ecology and Evolution, Australian researchers Justine Bell-James and James E. M. Watson analyzed plans from the 36 countries that sent them in before the deadline. Presumably, these on-time countries—which include Canada, the European Union, Mexico, and China—are some of the most prepared to take action.

However, only 14 of those countries committed to protect at least 30% of land and water, and many of those did not make reference to the quality of areas to be protected, the researchers found. That could mean a country reaches the 30% number, but it doesn’t do much to help biodiversity because it didn’t protect quality ecosystems.

Furthermore, only 6 of the countries that submitted plans on time committed to restore at least 30% of degraded ecosystems. Not a single country’s plan committed to both of the targets. The researchers write this leaves a “bleak picture” for the chances of reaching these targets on time.

Speculating on why countries plans are so out of proportion with their promises, they add that “…it simply may be easier to agree on a target so ambitious that it is clearly unachievable, as highly aspirational targets can reduce the pressure of accountability.”

Things don’t look much better even considering additional plans submitted since that study. An analysis by the website Carbon Brief took into account a dozen or so more plans as well as less detailed targets submitted by more than one hundred countries. They found most countries plans would not see them achieve 30 by 30 within their own borders. That would mean others would have to protect even more to hit the mark.

30 by 30 on life support

Keeping the rise in global temperatures below 1.5°C is now almost certainly out of reach. Even 2°C will now be a scramble with the world on course for between 1.9 and 3.7°C warming by the end of the century under current policies.

But there is still ample reason to hope that 30 by 30 and all it entails for biodiversity and the carbon-rich ecosystems that contain it is not dead yet.

While these plans may not be up to snuff, they are just plans and they can change. The COP16 agreement suggests more money may start flowing for conservation. And there are still five years before 2030, and I hope a few more beyond.

Also, unlike the challenge of rapidly transforming the world’s energy system to meet climate targets, establishing protections for large swaths of land and water is fundamentally a political problem. There’s no technological barrier preventing it from happening tomorrow.

Yet 30 by 30 and the suite of other steps needed to halt biodiversity loss it represents is clearly on “life support”, to borrow another phrase first applied to 1.5°C. It would be a shame if it died without a fight.

In other news…

This month in New Scientist I wrote about Earth’s inner core changing shape, how erosion drives ice ages, electrodes made from bread, the state of glaciers, seismic measurements of California’s depleted aquifers, a volcano belching methane, a muzzle on talking about climate change at NOAA, enhanced rock weathering (cool video I shot here), the next 60,000 years of Earth’s “natural” climate, and a recreation of a FEMA climate risk map removed from a government website. Here are some notable things happening elsewhere:

North

Due to a lack of snow, the Iditarod dog sled race had to move its official start nearly 300 miles north to Fairbanks, Alaska for the first time in its history, says Ava White at Alaska Public Media. The ceremonial starting route of the 50-year-old race in Anchorage was also shortened due to lack of snow. Race officials had to scrape snow together from around the city to line the route.

East

Global demand for electricity is set to rise even faster over the next few years due to the shift to electric vehicles, air conditioning, industrial decarbonization, and data centers, according to a report from the International Energy Agency. One impressive stat: in China, fully a third of increased industrial demand for electricity in recent years comes from powering factories to make more solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles.

South

A giant ocean liner called the SS United States is on its way to Okaloosa County, Florida to be sunk offshore where it will become “the world’s largest artificial reef”, reports Bruce Shipkowski for the Associated Press. Local officials hope the planned shipwreck will become a diving destination. But first the 1,000 foot vessel, once the fastest ship in the world, will have to be cleaned. That will take more than a year.

West

A master-planned community in Irvine, California could offer a model for how to build neighborhoods that are more resilient to wildfires, writes Jack Fleming for the Los Angeles Times. Orchard Hills is surrounded by open space planted with vegetation like shrubs and cacti and broken up with wide roads; a low wall surrounds the neighborhood; strict building rules means there’s little exposed wood; there are restrictions on which plants can be planted and where. L.A. could adopt some of these ideas as it rebuilds, although city leaders have so far emphasized the speed of rebuilding over protections against future fires.

Thanks for reading. Please do share this newsletter with anyone who might be interested.

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Cheers,

James Dinneen

Say hello with any questions, comments, tips, or curiosities by emailing jamesryandinneen at gmail dot com

…or send secure tips via Signal to jamesnesw.44

Follow me on Bluesky at jamesdinneen.bsky.social or X @jamesnesw

A few newsletters ago I explained why geology is becoming ever more fundamental to tackling climate change. From battery metals to volcanic rock dust to next-generation geothermal energy, the underground is a key part of transitioning away from fossil fuels and taking excess CO2 out of the atmosphere.

(Check out the full piece linked here.)

This month I want to dig a bit further into a new development in one of these subsurface sectors: geologic hydrogen.

If lots of the naturally occurring gas can be found, it could serve as a flexible source of zero-carbon energy. It could power industrial processes and heavy machines that can’t easily be powered with electricity, and replace fossil-derived hydrogen used to make products like steel and fertilizer. Unlike green hydrogen made with renewable electricity, it wouldn’t require vast amounts of energy to make.

The problem is no one knows how much of it might exist in sizable reservoirs worth tapping into. And despite several years of searching by a handful of startups, no one has (publicly) claimed to have found anything really big.

But now, thanks to years of work by the US Geological Survey, there is a treasure map:

X marks the spot

This map was just released in January as part of a public report by three researchers at the USGS, Sarah Gelman, Jane Hearon, and Geoffrey Ellis. It represents years of research to better understand the obscure geology of hydrogen generated within the Earth, and decades more research to map the rocks of North America on the surface and below. So what are we looking at?

The areas in darker blue are the places where reservoirs of geologic hydrogen are most likely to occur, according to the researchers’ analysis of the underlying rocks. That overall index of “prospectivity” — ranging from no chance of finding a hydrogen reservoir to a certainty of finding one — combines three different map layers.

The first layer is the likelihood of hydrogen being generated underground at that spot. This could be from one of several different natural hydrogen generating processes. The best understood is called serpentinization, and involves water reacting with iron-rich rock, leaving behind its O’s and freeing up its H’s. Rocks derived from Earth’s mantle are especially well-suited for this.

Natural hydrogen can also be generated by radioactive rocks splitting water molecules. A much more speculative possibility is a “deep source” of hydrogen rising to the crust, perhaps leftover from the formation of the planet.

The second layer is the likelihood of there being porous rock where all that hydrogen can accumulate. And the third is the likelihood of there being a “cap rock”, or seal to prevent the famously reactive hydrogen molecules from escaping.

The top map below shows potential sources of hydrogen, the bottom left shows potential reservoir rock, and the bottom right shows potential for there to be a seal:

These researchers previous estimates of geologic hydrogen resources made no attempt to guess where it might be found. They simply estimated the total volume of hydrogen that might be down there. And they concluded there is a lot — anywhere from tens of billions to quadrillions of tons, containing far more energy than exists in all proven natural gas reserves. If even a small fraction of that could be extracted it could supply hydrogen demand for centuries and cut emissions from fossil fuels faster.

These shocking numbers played no small part in spurring the gold rush for geologic hydrogen that has played out over the past few years, especially after their big numbers were bruited about in a fantastic 2023 feature story in Science by Eric Hand. When I first spoke with Ellis about the estimates he said he initially thought there’d been a mistake.

This new map is nowhere near detailed enough to indicate specific areas where someone could go drill and expect to find a reservoir of hydrogen. There are no areas on the map where natural hydrogen is certain to be produced, let alone accumulate in a sizable reservoir and evade consumption by microbes.

But the map represents a far more detailed view than anything before it. It’s also worth recognizing how amazing it is that this is a public resource given how secretive the companies exploring for natural hydrogen tend to be about their prospects, something only enabled by many decades of robust federal funding for science…

Hydrogen hotspots

Some of the bluest areas of the map — e.g. Kansas-Nebraska-Iowa, part of central California — aren’t all that surprising as hydrogen hotspots. It’s been public knowledge for a while that companies like Koloma and Natural Hydrogen are searching in the Midwest, and the Coast Range ophiolite has hosted natural hydrogen research for years, although it has focused more on the deep microbial life the gas supports than its potential as an energy source.1

One unexpected region that catches my eye on the map is Michigan. According to the report, much of the blue in Michigan — as with other areas in the Midwest — is due to the potential for radioactive rock within the North American craton to generate hydrogen. This is the stable root of the continent, and it’s why most of the middle of the country is blue with hydrogen potential.

The blue on the eastern seaboard has a different source. There, the researchers propose hydrogen is generated by water reacting with mantle rocks buried beneath the seafloor that were “exhumed” during the breakup of the Pangaea supercontinent. This gas could then migrate beneath the southeastern coast, forming the distinctive circular Carolina bays that have sometimes been associated with natural hydrogen.

It remains to be seen whether or not this new treasure map leads to anything. But it is yet another thrilling example of geology driving the search for cleaner sources of energy.

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In other news…

This month in New Scientist I wrote about Mars’ possibly solid inner core, nitrogen pollution from clean shipping fuel, megadrought, mega-rain, large low-shear velocity provinces, prescribed burning, Antarctic ice, asteroid 2024 YR4 (see you in 2032!), the carbon footprint of cannabis, the US exit from the Paris agreement, renewed warnings we may be underestimating the pace of global warming, and alarm among researchers about losing essential climate data due to DOGE finagling. Here are some notable things happening elsewhere:

North

The Alaska Legislature passed a near-unanimous resolution urging President Trump to retain the name Denali for the tallest peak in North America, according to the AP.

East

The indigenous range of the tiger (Panthera tigris) shrunk more than 90% over the past 8500 years due to human disruption, according to researchers writing in the journal Diversity and Distributions. They use more than 70,000 tiger observations and ecological modeling to estimate the tiger’s former range. They find that the big cat once roamed through most of South and Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the eastern half of China, and part of its range extended all the way to present-day Turkey.

South

Sorry for more hydrogen stuff, but researchers in the Philippines reported the largest seep of natural hydrogen ever discovered. Gas was spewing from the Zambales ophiolite at a rate of more than 800 tons per year, they wrote in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy. The previous biggest flow came from a seep deep in an Albanian mine expelling a mere 11 tons per year.

West

Private and public entities on Colorado’s Western Slope hold the rights to store more than 2.6 million additional acre-feet of Colorado River water in not-yet-built reservoirs, according to a report by Heather Sackett in Aspen Journalism. It’s unlikely many of these “phantom reservoirs” ever get built, but that’s a staggering amount of water — more than the state currently uses from the Colorado River basin. Building even a few of those reservoirs could heighten tensions with other states about water rights on the already overused river.

Thanks for reading. Please do share this newsletter with anyone who might be interested.

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Cheers,

James Dinneen

Say hello with any questions, comments, tips, or curiosities by emailing jamesryandinneen at gmail dot com

Follow me on Bluesky at jamesdinneen.bsky.social or X @jamesnesw

Earlier this month I attended the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in Washington D.C. The nearly 30,000 researchers in attendance make it one of the world’s largest scientific gatherings, and it’s something to see, with a dizzying array of new findings on every aspect of Earth science. The scene feels a bit like the Earth itself asked its most intelligent species to hold a science fair to solve all of its problems at once.

Many of the findings were alarming. Wildfires large and intense enough to generate towering pyrocumulonimbus clouds are sending more smoke into the stratosphere. The Arctic tundra has now flipped from a sink to a source of carbon emissions. New projections of snow cover in the US show days with deep snow disappearing across most of the country by the end of the century, albeit under a very high emissions scenario. Just to name a few.

There was also a notably large number of talks on potential risks and benefits of solar geoengineering—the notion of cooling the planet by reflecting away sunlight. This has long been something of a taboo subject, due to both concerns about efficacy and unintended consequences, as well as sapping ambition to cut emissions. But with CO2 levels still rising it seems more researchers (and funders) now view solar geoengineering as something that might be needed as a last-ditch option to buy time for deeper emission cuts. I left AGU with a long list of ideas for 2025.

Ahead of the new year, I also thought it would be good to recount some highlights from my reporting in 2024, given I only started this newsletter in October. The hottest year on record has been absolutely packed with new developments in climate science, tech, and the climate itself. Thanks to the literally hundreds of researchers who shared their time and insight with me to make some sense of it, my editors for their curiosity and patience, and all of you for reading.

James’ favorites of 2024

In January, my cover story in New Scientist explored the rush to find reserves of geologic hydrogen, which may be an overlooked source of zero-carbon fuel. The story took me to Oman’s extraordinary Al Hajar mountains (see photo below), where hydrogen is naturally generated by water interacting with the iron-rich rocks of the Samail ophiolite. While many of the company’s interested in geologic hydrogen are in search of natural reserves, the start-up who showed me around in Oman—Eden Geopower—is exploring ways of stimulating production underground, effectively fracking for hydrogen. A year later, there still has not been the kind of major find that would prove this natural hydrogen might be a viable source of energy. But the potential is enormous and deserving of some hype.

In March, I spent a week with ecologist Giacomo Delgado in Costa Rica for a story on what is by some measures the world’s largest bioacoustic survey. By recording the sounds of intact and degraded rainforest at thousands of sites across the country, Delgado is aiming to establish a reliable acoustic measure of a healthy ecosystem. A highlight was an encounter with a group of peccaries trundling through the underbrush. They had a powerful musky odor. Might a future bioaromatic survey be in order?

In April, I had an investigative piece in Yale E360 about aging nuclear power plants’ potential exposure to extreme weather hazards with climate change, supported by a grant from the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. It’s clear nuclear power, including aging power plants, has an important role to play in decarbonization. But anti-nuclear advocates have argued some plants built decades ago weren’t designed to manage flooding or other extreme weather exacerbated by climate change. US nuclear power plants are exceedingly well-protected places, and are probably resilient to most climate extremes. But according to a report by the US Government Accountability Office, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, for all its rigor, hasn’t actually done the analysis to determine if this is true. One pro-nuclear advocate summed it up by saying: “We don’t know if it’s a problem.”

On the energy front, I was also fortunate to participate this year in the Energy Journalism fellowship at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, as well as the inaugural Climate Economics Journalism Fellowship at NYU. Both experiences have been tremendously useful for putting new research and advances in climate tech within the wider economic context of the energy transition. A particular treat was a visit to Lamont-Doherty’s seafloor sediment core archive (see photo below) which has informed much of what we know about the planet.

In fall, I discovered a newfound appreciation for cloud watching and the climate scientists who are making headway on the thorny question of how clouds will respond to climate change, the single largest source of uncertainty in projections of future temperatures. An unrelated story explored how the same genetic engineering technologies proposed for “de-extinction” might prove more useful to prevent species going extinct in the first place. Other biology-based schemes include a plan to harvest rare earth elements using seaweed in Alaska and to mine nickel using flowers in Albania.

In October, I descended into a cave in Oregon with paleoclimatologist Katie Wendt and colleagues (see video below), who are studying how wildfires burned in the region more than a hundred thousand years ago. Stalagmites and other such speleothems in caves have long been used to study the Earth’s climate past. It turns out fires burning on the surface can also affect groundwater in ways that leave a trace in speleothems below. Studying such “paleofires” could help reveal how wildfires will burn on a hotter planet this century.

Finally, beyond journalism, my band Gunderbus released our first EP, called Follow the Rope, available now on all streaming platforms. One track, Hydrocarbon Man, was inspired by Daniel Yergin’s essential history of the oil industry, The Prize.

Here are some notable things happening elsewhere:

North

In Albany, New York governor Kathy Hochul signed into effect a “Climate Superfund” law that will fine fossil fuel companies based on their emissions between 2000 and 2018, per Jonathan Allen at Reuters. The bill is expected to raise $75 billion to help pay for climate damages. Vermont passed a similar law earlier this year. Expect more states (and legal challenges) to follow in 2025.

East

On the morning of Christmas Eve, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe passed through the corona of the Sun, breaking its own record as the closest ever human-made object to a star. I’m counting this as East because the fly-by took place during sunrise in New York.

South

Facing a shortage of natural gas, the government of Iran has been forced to choose between heating people’s homes and generating electricity, per the New York Times. They chose heat. As in Cuba earlier this year, and now in Puerto Rico, the reliability of aging and overburdened power grids is a growing problem, just when electricity is becoming even more fundamental to most things we do.

West

During the Christmas break, I caught some powder in Arapahoe Basin, Colorado. I was excited to discover an excellent public bus called Snowstang now runs between Denver and many of the resort towns, offering a lower emissions way to enjoy the snow. A-Basin itself also now claims to be carbon neutral, and has some interesting projects in the works to electrify its fleet of vehicles and heating.

Thanks for reading. Be back in your inbox in 2025. And please do share this newsletter with anyone who might be interested!

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Cheers,

James Dinneen

Please say hello with any questions, comments, tips, or curiosities. Email jamesryandinneen at gmail dot com

Follow me on Bluesky at jamesdinneen.bsky.social or X @jamesnesw

So a few weeks ago I got an email from an engineering company with a fresh way to think about decarbonization. Their slogan:

“The energy transition is an underground transition.”

The company was publicizing a software platform called Seequent that uses geophysical data like seismic waves to create 3D models of the underground. These models had been used at geothermal power plants to identify and tap into reservoirs of hot fluids to generate clean electricity, as well as to secure offshore wind turbines to the seafloor.

Naturally, a company that analyzes subsurface data would say we’re in the midst of an “underground transition” desperately in need of services like theirs; the firm behind Seequent, Bentley Systems, also designs fossil fuel infrastructure.

But this slogan isn’t wrong, and it isn’t just a geothermal thing. As I’ll explain, thinking about the transition to net zero in geological terms is essential to any lasting solution to climate change.

The underground transition

We normally think about climate change as a matter of the atmosphere. But this change in the air is secondary to the shift underground. By extracting and burning fossil fuels, we have transferred hundreds of billions of tons of carbon from below-ground to above it, causing average surface temperatures to rise.1

Likewise, the underground has a central role in eliminating those planet-warming emissions.

Geothermal energy is one rather direct example. Heat within the planet leftover from its formation and generated by radioactive decay rises to the crust. Tapping into these geothermal fluids can spin a turbine to generate a steady supply of clean electricity, or be used to heat things directly. This generates a negligible share of the world’s power now and is limited to areas where the high-temperatures reach near the surface.2 But new methods imported from the oil and gas industry to drill deeper and stimulate the flow of hot fluids could make “enhanced geothermal” viable in more places.

Another much more speculative source of fossil-free energy from the underground is geologic hydrogen. As I’ve written about for New Scientist, some researchers and a slate of hydrogen wildcatters believe there may be large reservoirs of this carbon-free fuel. No one has yet demonstrated these exist other than in a few chance sites, but discoveries of such hydrogen deposits could be a boon for cleaning up everything that’s difficult to power with electricity alone. An even more out-there idea is to stimulate underground hydrogen production by pumping water into iron-rich rock below the surface.

The underground is also the source of the huge volumes of the metals and minerals needed for all things electric: lithium, cobalt, nickel (and now sodium) for batteries, rare earths for the giant magnets in wind turbines, sand to make the silicon in solar cells. One eyebrow-raising projection I recently read in Vince Beiser’s new book Power Metal (review here) anticipates we’ll use more copper in the year 2050 than was used in the entire 20th century. Solar panels and wind turbines might harvest the sun’s energy, but they are products of an underground transition.

Economic geologists, historically associated more with finding fossil fuels than ways to stop using them, are noting the role reversal. A recent editorial in Nature Geoscience makes the case that geologists, not just climate scientists, are at the “forefront” of the energy transition.

And it’s not just a matter of extraction. The underground is also a voluminous source of storage, both for things we want to use (hydrogen, surplus electricity) and things we don’t want to encounter again (CO2, nuclear waste). For instance, there’s been a flurry of research on using salt caverns to store hydrogen, a single kilogram of which can hog several cubic meters. In parallel, most CO2 removal/capture projects plan to pump the gas into underground reservoirs, back from whence it came. Other methods convert it into mineral form where it will eventually descend via subduction into the mantle.

It’s not net zero until it’s “geological net zero”

This underground emphasis may even extend to the entire notion of net zero emissions, which means balancing any emissions remaining with equivalent removals from the atmosphere. In theory, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will begin to decline after this point as natural sinks in the ocean and on land take up CO2.

But in a recent Nature perspective paper, Myles Allen at the University of Oxford and colleagues argue that net zero as currently understood has gone wrong because it allows for emissions passively taken up by these natural sinks to count against emissions from burning fossil fuels. By counting these natural sinks, they say net zero won’t lead to declining CO2 in the atmosphere, but will merely keep it steady, continuing to warm the planet.

Instead, they argue we should aim for “geological net zero”. This means any CO2 emissions remaining from fossil fuels should be returned to the “solid Earth” — that is, underground.

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In other news…

This month in New Scientist I wrote about ocean acidification sinking deeper, how to fix plastic pollution, lab-grown wood, a CO2 removal project in the East River, methane-sensing satellites, forecasting Mauna Loa’s next eruption, and carbon in Earth’s inner core. Here are some notable things happening elsewhere:

North

A record-breaking drought saw wildfires burning from New Jersey to Prospect Park, Brooklyn just up the road from where I live. These were puny by western standards, but a fire in a few much-loved acres of park was somehow more jarring than thousands of acres burned far out of sight. Here’s a shot from the ferry of the smoke from New Jersey floating towards Manhattan:

East

An analysis by Lauri Myllyvirta in Carbon Brief finds China is teetering on the edge of peak emissions due to the rapid buildout of solar power, hydropower recovering from last year’s low, and continued slow-down in the construction industry limiting emissions from steel and cement. The Global Carbon Budget projects China’s emissions will rise 0.2% this year, but peaking is still possible.

South

Antarctica is a peaceful place, in part because of the treaty that governs what countries can and can’t do there. The Economist reports on a concerning trend of hostilities there as countries eye Antarctica’s mineral and marine resources in waters increasingly free of ice.

West

I’m fascinated by coyotes. These critters thrive among us, and have conquered North America over the past century in a kind of reverse manifest destiny. One longstanding theory about their success despite many attempts at eradication, especially in the Western US, is that killing coyotes can boost their local populations as litter size responds to density and outsiders move in to fill the gaps. Now, as Laura Baisas write in Popular Science, a massive camera trap study finds evidence this dynamic is real, with persistently more coyotes in areas where hunting was allowed than where it wasn’t. A more effective way to keep coyote populations in check? Wolves.

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Cheers,

James D

Please say hello with any questions, comments, tips, or curiosities. Email jamesryandinneen at gmail dot com

Follow on X @jamesnesw (and also now jamesdinneen.bsky.social)

Thanks for reading the first real-deal edition of NorthEastSouthWest, a newsletter about Earth and other eco miscellany from science journalist James Dinneen (me). This month I’ll explain why it might actually be better for the climate to convert fossil fuels into edible food, rather than farm the way we do now.

This thought hit me a few weeks ago when I interviewed the energy scholar Vaclav Smil for New Scientist magazine. The man is a machine! He’s written more than 40 books, including the tome Energy and Civilization, in which he rigorously quantifies in watts the energy required to power basically everything humans have ever done — from plowing fields to landing on the Moon.

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We mainly discussed his latest book How to Feed the World, which is about food, the original energy source. (Here’s a link to my full chat with Smil, btw.) The book is packed with numbers, and is a useful overview of what powers the global food system. For the most part, that is fossil fuels.

More than we usually recognize, farming, fishing, fertilizing, shipping, freezing, trucking, refrigerating are all processes now largely dependent on fossil fuels.

We are effectively eating fossil fuels.

How much fuel does it take to produce our food?

To help illustrate this, Smil, ever the quantifier, has calculated the rough amount of energy required to produce different foodstuffs in terms of diesel fuel. According to his figures, an average 250 gram baguette uses 30 milliliters of diesel. A kilogram of roasted chicken uses 300 milliliters. Tomatoes grown in a heated greenhouse and shipped far away uses more than 600 milliliters per kilo.

In extremely energy-intensive cases, the food weighs about as much as the fuel used to make it. Farmed sea bass fed on smaller wild-caught fish captured by roving ships use two full liters of fuel per kilo, the fuel easily outweighing the fish. A kilo of shrimp caught in hard-to-reach cold waters requires an extraordinary 10 liters of fuel, enough for the shrimp to swim in.

Of course, the precise amounts depend on the specifics of where and how food is grown, and where it goes next. But I find these food-to-fuel ratios both fun and illuminating. Already they have begun invading my thoughts in the grocery store. How much hydrocarbon was combusted for this delicious autumn mango?

Forget the food, eat the fuel

This line of thinking reminded me of a fascinating paper out a few months ago in the journal Nature Sustainability entitled “Food without agriculture”, by Steven Davis at Stanford and colleagues. Agriculture is responsible for around a third of global greenhouse emissions and is a dominant driver of biodiversity loss.

Given that environmental footprint and the large amounts of fossil energy already embodied in our food, the researchers ask, might it be better just to eat the fuel?

They point out most of the processes to produce edible things from hydrocarbons or other carbon sources exist. Fats could be had using only synthetic chemistry, no living things involved. Carbohydrates and proteins could be produced through a combination of chemical synthesis and fermenting microbes. All three macronutrients together add up to food.

On the face of it, an industrial process to convert fossil fuels into these edible molecules doesn’t sound all that green. But incredibly, the researchers find synthesizing fats from natural gas would generate fewer emissions (~0.8 grams of CO2 per kilocalorie with the current US energy mix) than the equivalent calories produced by growing soy or oil palm on farms (1 to 3 grams of CO2 per kilocalorie, depending on where its grown and how much forest is cut to grow it).

You could also do this without involving fossil fuels at all. Using CO2 sucked out of the atmosphere as the carbon source and powering the process with renewable electricity would produce nutrients that are deliciously near zero-emissions. (See this schematic from the authors on the whole range of carbon sources and chemical processes that could deliver proteins, fats, and carbs.)

Such synthetic foods aren’t a technical pipe dream either. A company in California called Calysta (at least since 2016) has used cheap fossil methane to produce protein for animal feed, using a methane-eating bacterium called Methylococcus capsulatus to make hundreds of thousands of tons of feed every year. I couldn’t immediately find numbers on how much the company is producing now, but according to an August press release it has just begun large-scale shipments of its “FeedKind Pet” brand feed to Europe and China. It’s possible your pup is eating natural gas.

An earlier-stage startup called Savor is making butter and other fats from fossil syngas, and is backed by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures. (One of the authors of the Nature Sustainability paper also now works at the company.) My colleague at New Scientist Madeleine Cuff has written about the CO2 butter and sampled it. Casting a bit of British shade, she compares the taste to American butter. I can’t believe it’s not…!

Other companies like Solar Foods and Arkeon are trying to use CO2 captured from industrial emissions to feed microbes that produce protein. Once someone else starts making carbohydrates from CO2 we’ll have the foundations for a fully farm-free diet.

Butter-taste aside, a meal made of oil, gas, and coal doesn’t sound that appetizing to me. It adds several ultras to ultra-processed food. And the petrochemical industry does not need another growth area. But until we clean up the real-food system it might not be the worst idea ever.

Let’s not forget how much fossil fuel we’re eating already.

Here’s some other things I found notable this month, arranged roughly by cardinal direction from where I happen to be:

North

Keeping with the alternative agriculture theme, this story by Moira O'Donovan in Ambrook Research explores whether we should consider insect welfare as we begin to farm more of them. A black soldier fly farm in Quebec is thinking hard about this question, and whether it is most humane to kill the flies by grinding, boiling, or freezing in liquid nitrogen.

East

Would you live inside of a wind turbine? A design company in the Netherlands called What If Lab has converted the housing for the generator on a wind turbine tower into a tiny home, writes Joshua Hill in Renew Economy. It comes complete with heat pump and solar panels.

South

Another round of island-wide blackouts plunged Cuba into darkness as aging power plants ran out of crude oil, following declining imports from Venezuela, Russia, and Mexico. This was the longest blackout in at least thirty years, according to David C. Adams writing in the New York Times.

West

I was dismayed to find this large section of forest clear-cut along a mountain biking trail I visit every few years near Hood River, Oregon. It made me realize how shielded most outdoor recreation areas are to other ways of using the land. A bike trail through timber industry makes it real.

Thanks for reading. Be back in your inbox soon.

Cheers,

James Dinneen

Please say hello with any questions, comments, tips, or curiosities. Email jamesryandinneen at gmail dot com

Follow: @jamesnesw

A compass. North, East, South, West. Fairly standard. But why the “T”? Spells “NEST”. Ok, but why? What do nests have to do with compasses?

I admit that, like many stick and pokes, this design was conceived of spontaneously and the specific reasoning behind it is largely lost to history. Yet I’ve now had to explain this horrible pixelated tattoo enough times that it has gained a certain meaning. It is a friendly reminder, I’ve come to say, that each of us are situated within a nest of geography. The places we’ve been, where we are, and where we are going shape who we are and what we can think.

This often acts as a constraint. We are parochial beings. But the cardinal directions that surround us — each of us always has a North, East, South, and West — can also be used to escape those boundaries. They are a perpetual invitation to reorient. When you find yourself thinking South once too often, think North. When you’ve have enough of West, go East. Think out and around rather than in. This is what I take from the tattoo.

What’s this newsletter?

At risk of regretting the tattoo even more than I do, I’ve now figured that same stick and poked sentiment would be a useful organizing idea for this newsletter, which I expect will deal with a lot of counterintuitive things occurring in a lot of different places, and will often involve maps. That’s almost a given when writing about science and the environment, which is what I’ve written about as a journalist for nearly eight years.

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This work has taken me all sorts of unlikely directions, first as a freelancer and more recently on staff at the British weekly magazine New Scientist. I’ve written about dam failures in Michigan and neuroscientists fishing for giant squid axons off Cape Cod. I’ve written about how folk tales about the world’s rarest ape are disappearing from its Chinese island home, and about the hunt for naturally occurring reservoirs of hydrogen in Oman. One story took me all across the Four Corners in search of a most ancient potato. Usually, climate science, energy infrastructure, or biology are somehow involved. I like stories where humans are interacting with Earth in ways that wouldn’t make any sense were it not for some obscure scientific idea.

My aim with this (I hope monthly) update is to keep anyone interested abreast of what I’m reporting on at the moment. I’ll also use it to dig further into ideas that were too obscure or weird or speculative to warrant coverage in an actual publication with editors. Or to expand on a thread of a story that didn’t make the final cut.

I’ll also use this newsletter to point you to some notable things I’ve encountered since last writing. In the spirit of the stick and poke, as well as geographical fairness, I’ll organize these in each issue roughly by cardinal direction in relation to where I happen to be. Like so:

North

The leaves are changing in the Adirondacks. This is Heart Lake near Keene Valley, with Algonquin in the background:

East

The animated documentary Waltz with Bashir captures one Israeli soldier’s surreal memories of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. This is from 2008, but offers historical context for fighting between Israel and Hezbollah today, and a reminder of the brutality and regular absurdity of war.

South

The COP16 biodiversity summit gets underway next week in Cali, Colombia. See Carbon Brief’s exhaustive coverage of this meeting where countries will debate the future of life of Earth. Along with progress updates on plans to protect 30% of land and ocean by 2030, I’ll be closely watching some of the debates around synthetic biology in conservation and how best to share the benefits of the planet’s genetic data.

West

Salmon have returned to parts of the Klamath River in Oregon for the first time in decades, just weeks after the completion of the largest dam removal in US history. This was accomplished after decades of advocacy by Indigenous groups focused on restoring the once massive salmon run to the river. See this story by Kurtis Alexander in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Thanks for reading. Be back in your inbox soon.

Cheers,

James Dinneen

Please say hello with any questions, comments, tips, or curiosities. Email jamesryandinneen at gmail dot com

Follow: @jamesnesw