A new explanation for 'Snowball Earth'
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 28-May-2026 13:15 ET (28-May-2026 17:15 GMT/UTC)
The mysterious origin of an impressive cloud disturbance on Venus has now been revealed by a team including the University of Tokyo. Researchers used numerical models to show that an enormous 6,000-kilometer-wide atmospheric wave front, which circumnavigates the planet for days at a time, is caused by a large “hydraulic jump.” This is when a fluid abruptly slows down, changing from shallow and fast to deep and slow. On Venus, a sudden change in airflow in the lower cloud region is coupled with the creation of a strong updraft, forcing sulfuric acid vapor higher into the atmosphere where it condenses into a massive line of cloud. Future planetary studies can consider the potential impacts of this process, and what it might mean for any exploratory missions.
"Super quasars" – extremely bright galactic centers powered by supermassive black holes – are the likely culprits behind galaxies shutting down star formation long before they should have in the very young universe, according to a Nature paper led by a team of University of Arizona astronomers.
A new study published in Big Earth Data presents phenological metrics derived from Earth observation (EO) satellite time series—such as greening onset, senescence, and growing season length—which are essential for crop monitoring but challenged by the massive scale of EO data exceeding local processing capacities, and introduces a free, open-source Web Crop Phenology Metrics Service (WCPMS) built on the Brazil Data Cube platform for server-side extraction from large datasets. It further demonstrates the tool’s effectiveness by estimating soybean sowing dates in Brazil using phenological metrics and validating the results against field data.
Plants underpin the majority of life on Earth, yet climate change is rapidly reshaping their habitats and elevating their extinction risk in largely unknown ways. Now, in two studies, researchers use large-scale evolutionary modeling and climate projections to fill these gaps, revealing substantial losses of plant diversity and identifying priority species and limits of conservation strategies. Understanding the endangered statuses of plants is crucial to understanding the biosphere’s future and guiding effective conservation efforts. Yet plants are largely absent from global biodiversity assessments. Although more than two in five plant species are estimated to be threatened with extinction, only about 20% have global International Union for Conservation of Nature (ICUN) Red List assessments. Across two studies, Félix Forest and colleagues and Junna Wang and colleagues present two distinct predictive approaches that address the current gaps in available plant biodiversity data.
Using data from the latest version of the Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered index (EDGE2) and computational modeling, Forest et al. reconstructed large-scale evolutionary trees encompassing all 335,497 known angiosperm species and combined them with projected risk data. This allowed the authors to identify species that are both evolutionarily unique and at risk of extinction. According to the findings, roughly 21% of angiosperm evolutionary history is at risk of extinction. Moreover, the study identified 9,945 angiosperm species that, if conserved, would most effectively preserve the deep evolutionary heritage of plant life.
In another study, Wang et al. analyzed the geographic distributions of 67,664 vascular plant species to forecast how climate change may alter their habitats over time. By comparing the pace of environmental change with each species’ ability to relocate, the authors assessed whether plants could successfully track shifting conditions or face increasing extinction risk. Wang et al. found that the primary driver of plant extinction is not a plant’s limited ability to shift its ranges, but rather the widespread loss of suitable habitats caused by climate change. Using several greenhouse gas emission scenarios for the end of the century, the findings predict that between 7% and 16% of the species examined could face a high risk of extinction, as most of their viable habitats disappear. Although shifts in species’ geographic ranges are unlikely to substantially reduce global plant extinctions, they are expected to increase local plant diversity across roughly 28% of the Earth’s land surface. According to Wang et al., facilitating range shifts via conservation efforts may help sustain or even enhance regional richness. However, it does little to prevent the broader, worldwide loss of plant species.
“Although Forest et al. and Wang et al. used different scales of time and space and studied different, but largely overlapping, groups of plants, both studies revealed that plant extinctions do not occur randomly across geographical areas,” write Rosa Scherson and Federico Luebert in a related Perspective. “Large-scale predictive models such as those developed by [the authors] are a valuable tool to enable timely actions that cannot wait until complete knowledge about biodiversity loss is achieved.”
The appointment recognises his expertise at the intersection of AI, weather and climate science, and strengthens Singapore’s contribution to international efforts in this space.