When two tectonic plates collide, one plate sinks below the other – a process known as “subduction”. An international research team led by Göttingen University has discovered a rock in Papua New Guinea that, four million years ago, travelled over 90 km down into a subduction zone. The rock records an unusual journey, with higher-than-expected temperature conditions at a depth of around 45 km. This change from very hot subduction at this depth to the more common colder subduction at its final depth challenges scientists’ view of the thermal structure of subduction zones. The results were published in Nature Geoscience.

Global climate and weather forecasting use predictive models which divide the Earth’s atmosphere into a grid, with each section typically covering tens to hundreds of kilometers. Now a new model, run by a team at the University of Tokyo, has narrowed this grid spacing down to just 220 meters. This higher resolution removed instances of “popcornlike” rain, bursts of heavy rain which appear on simulations but not in real life, providing more accurate predictions of extreme local weather from a global model.

All eyes were on Quaise Energy at the 2026 Geothermal Rising Conference, the flagship conference for the geothermal industry, in late September. The news related to Quaise included: the announcement of up to $25 million funding from the US Department of Energy, a talk on the company’s progress to date on what it believes will be the world’s first commercial superhot geothermal power plant, and major awards to two employees.

Precipitation plays an important role in glaciers and ice sheet behaviour. To establish the relationship between atmospheric climate variation, precipitation patterns and glacier and ice sheet behaviour beyond the observable past, a new MARUM-led study created a precipitation record for southern Greenland. The authors found that positive North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) phases over at least the last circa 5,000 years consistently resulted in cooler but wetter conditions over southern Greenland. This in turn likely influenced local glacier advance or retreat, as well as the mass of the glaciers themselves. Their findings are now published in Nature Communications.

A new study from the University of Kansas appearing in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLOS One shows the differences between male and female uintatheres might not be as vast as paleontologists have long believed.