The 2026 Porsche Macan Turbo EV is a two-row crossover with 630 horsepower and a 100-kilowatt-hour battery.

Weather forecasting relies on many different types of data to make accurate predictions: temperature, humidity and wind data are all used to build an accurate forecast. Researchers have now found a new way to improve weather forecasts, by adding data on water isotopes in the atmosphere.

For predicting weather, water vapour isotopes integrate key information on the history of their evaporation, condensation, mixing and transport. Heavy water (containing either deuterium or oxygen-18) exists in the atmosphere and the way that these water isotopes condense and evaporate is different to that of normal water molecules.

The release and absorption of latent heat when water condenses and evaporates is the primary energy source for atmospheric circulation. The vertical heating profile plays a major role in large-scale circulation, wave propagation, storm track positioning, cloud development and precipitation patterns. However, vertical heating structures and convective activity cannot be measured directly by satellite networks and have to be inferred instead, leading to biases and inconsistencies that degrade the accuracy of weather models.

Stable heavy water isotopes can provide a direct physical link between the latent heating processes in weather patterns through isotopic fractionation. Heavier water isotopes preferentially condense into the liquid phase because they have a greater binding energy and lower diffusive velocity. Additionally, heavy water doesn’t evaporate as easily as normal water.

Even though these water isotopes exist in small quantities, their relative abundance alters during evaporation and condensation. Observing this change in abundance of the isotopes allowed the researchers to understand where the water came from and what happened to it along the way – providing insights into the atmospheric conditions.

The research team – led by Kinya Toride from University of Colorado Boulder, NOAA and the University of Tokyo – examined data from the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI), which provides large amounts of accurate long-term data on water vapour isotope ratios in the mid-troposphere. The researchers fed the data collected from satellite observations into a weather model using a technique called data assimilation. This approach takes the different isotope signals and translates them into the atmospheric variables that are used in weather forecasting – as the vapour behaviour alone was not sufficient to reveal atmospheric variables such as temperature, wind and humidity.

They found that inclusion of these data improved the estimation of wind, temperature and water vapour in the atmosphere, leading to more accurate weather forecasts. This included improving forecasts for up to five days ahead and providing more accurate predictions on heavy rainfall across many regions.

While it has long been theorized that water vapour isotopes could improve weather forecasting, this is the first study that has been able to show it using real-world data, rather than inside a controlled lab environment. But while the study was performed in conditions close to real operational forecasting, the researchers emphasize that it’s not something that can be implemented straightaway.

This is because there are limited real-time isotope data available and the operational forecasting models employed today by meteorologists are not designed to use such data. For isotope observations to be used in our everyday weather forecasts, a lot more real-time data will need to be collected and processed. Then either new models that incorporate these data will have to be developed or the current models will need to be adapted to include the water isotope data.

However, with more and more satellites being launched into our atmosphere, and the costs of them continuing to come down, it’s likely that more weather satellites will be available to provide these data in the coming years – and both meteorologists and weather presenters should be able to make good use of them.

The study, published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, demonstrates the benefits of using water isotope data, particularly for predicting heavy rainfall. “Our long-term goal is to develop more accurate satellite observations of water vapour isotopes and integrate them into operational weather forecasting systems,” says co-author Kei Yoshimura from University of Tokyo in a press statement. “This additional layer of information can help make everyday forecasts more reliable.”

The post Heavy water isotopes make weather predictions more accurate appeared first on Physics World.

Earth has frozen over in the past — at least five times. Science fiction is full of takes about how it might happen again and the implications of a modern ice age. The problem: At a minimum, sci-fi gets the timetable for Earth turning into a “snowball” wrong — often laughably.

Here’s how some stories have portrayed it: Earth freezes. Humankind’s remnants huddle in ice caves, fending off giant alien monsters (Snowball Earth). Or people shelter in the New York Public Library as ice encases the Empire State Building (The Day After Tomorrow). Or a train hurtles in an endless loop, both protection and prison for Earth’s scant survivors (Snowpiercer).

These stories are all set in Earth’s near future, within a decade from now. And what makes their visions so chilling is that there’s at least a snowflake of truth in each. (Well, space monsters haven’t invaded Earth — yet.)

The most severe of Earth’s ice ages spanned from 720 million to 635 million years ago. It’s aptly been named the Cryogenian Period, from the Greek krýos (meaning cold) and génesis (meaning birth). At least twice during this period, glaciers extended from pole to pole. It could have amounted to a true Snowball Earth.

Although “maybe it was more of a Slushball Earth,” says Thomas Algeo. A geoscientist, he works at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. Fossils, he says, suggest that even in the coldest times, seafloor-dwelling algae survived. They would have needed sunlight. So patches of open water must have persisted near the equator, he says.

All such past deep freezes set in due to a series of geologic events. Take the Cryogenian. It developed after shifting tectonic plates caused a supercontinent to split apart. That increased rainfall and rock weathering. These dramatically reduced atmospheric carbon dioxide, which triggered a runaway cooling effect. Widespread ice, which reflects the sun’s warming rays back into space, would have exaggerated that cooling.

All of these processes are slow, which is not ideal for action flicks. Fortunately, sci-fi can play with time. It’s not unusual for fiction to take natural or human-caused climate interactions (and feedback effects) and accelerate or amp them up for drama.

The Day After Tomorrow, for example, which hit theaters in 2004, is based on a real-world scenario: the potential shutdown of a part of a global system of ocean currents. These move heat around the planet. Known as AMOC, this system is short for the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Today, AMOC brings relative warmth to regions that might otherwise be frigid.

Back in the mid-1980s, geochemist Wallace Broecker suggested that large releases of freshwater to the North Atlantic Ocean could halt the AMOC. Such slowdowns or shutdowns in ocean currents have played a role in past ice ages, he said.

Scientists today fear it could happen again — and soon.

But to geologists, “soon” doesn’t mean in days to weeks (as portrayed in The Day After Tomorrow). For them, it means perhaps decades to a century.

The Day After Tomorrow’s filmmakers were “quite up-front” about their process, says Stefan Rahmstorf. For ultimate drama, they just “took known weather extremes — tornadoes, storm surges, cyclones, hail storms and blizzards — and amplified those.” Rahmstorf is a physical oceanographer at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. He fact-checked aspects of the film.

Despite its super-short timeline for turning the Northern Hemisphere into a deep freeze, this film did point to some very real science, he notes. For instance, the movie starts out with its science hero giving a talk at a United Nations science meeting. Its topic was “the possible risk of a shutdown of the North Atlantic Current. I gave a very similar talk at such a UN conference in Buenos Aires in 1998,” Rahmstorf notes. “I even showed the same diagram [as the movie’s scientist].”

Snowpiercer imagines a different deep-freeze scenario. Geoengineering goes haywire in this 2013 movie, 2014 graphic novel and TV series (which ran from 2020 to 2024). Here, scientists release aerosols into the sky to reflect sunlight back to space. Their goal was to slow global warming. This idea is, in fact, based on a real type of Earth engineering known as solar-radiation management.

But in this story line, the aerosols proved an overkill. They plunged Earth into a deep freeze within weeks (hours, actually, in the novel).

Geoengineering strategies could cool Earth — just not that quickly. They would more likely take at least a few years. And they wouldn’t be that potent, either. To bring on an ice age, aerosols would have to be deliberately and repeatedly injected over generations, says Douglas MacMartin. He’s a climate engineer at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

How Earth freezes in Snowball Earth is still something of a mystery, as the manga is still in progress (though a streaming anime version debuted in April). Here, the transition to an ice world takes about a decade. And — spoiler alert — giant alien monsters might have had something to do with it. (For that, scientists don’t really have an answer.)

But the premise behind these stories — that Earth could freeze over — is grounded in very real science. It’s happened before and could again. But it won’t happen quite the way these stories tell it.

Fluxnium's fibers can extract uranium directly from seawater, which has enough of the nuclear fuel to power thousands of generations.

Two NASA-funded studies trace how the Sun’s changing galactic surroundings may have altered Earth’s climate and helped warm the young planet.

The post The Sun’s Ancient Journey Through the Galaxy May Have Changed Earth’s Climate appeared first on Curiosmos.

A Hurricane-Free Atlantic Peak Unusually warm water in the tropical Pacific is steering weather thousands of miles away.

National outcry against data center construction has spread to Philadelphia, where officials suggested possible construction in a neighborhood already impacted by a now-defunct oil refinery.

The AI frenzy could push U.S. data centers to become one of the largest consumers of natural gas in the world.

As heatwaves become more frequent and severe, scientists are studying whether heat acclimation can help protect vulnerable populations.

Beneath every step we take, soils hold one of the planet’s largest reservoirs of carbon, a vast, slow-moving bank of organic matter that quietly regulates how much of the world’s carbon stays locked away and how much escapes into the atmosphere as greenhouse gas. Now a sweeping new review warns that climate-driven extremes, droughts, floods, and wildfires, are rewriting the rules of that subterranean economy in ways that conventional models and land-management practices have not yet caught up with. The analysis, led by environmental scientist Nanthi Bolan of the University of Western Australia and colleagues, including a corresponding authorship by Bolan himself, synthesizes a substantial body of global evidence on how extreme weather reshapes carbon inputs to soil, microbial processing, erosion, and the sequestration of carbon that underpins soil health, water retention, nutrient cycling, and agricultural productivity.

The work, published in the journal Carbon Research, is notable for the scale of its underlying evidence base. On 14 January 2026, the authors searched Google Scholar, PubMed, and Web of Science using terms spanning climate change, extreme weather, soil carbon, microbial activity, decomposition, erosion, dissolved organic matter, and leaching. The initial sweep returned 14,218 records; after removing duplicates and screening for eligibility, 3,754 articles remained for bibliometric and qualitative analysis. From those, 187 publications were selected for detailed synthesis based on relevance, methodological rigor, and the substantive quality of their findings. Keyword co-occurrence patterns were mapped with VOSviewer, a bibliometric tool that reveals the intellectual architecture of a research field. The result is a critical review grounded in structured literature screening rather than new experimental data, but its synthesis offers one of the most comprehensive maps yet of how extremes rearrange the soil carbon cycle.

The review’s central finding is that no two extremes act alike. Drought, the most widespread disturbance, operates largely through the plant side of the equation. When rainfall fails, photosynthesis slows, plant biomass production falls, and the total flux of carbon entering soils through roots, residues, and litter declines. There is a nuance here: under moderate water stress, plants may temporarily shift a greater proportion of their fixed carbon belowground, investing in roots to chase moisture. But prolonged drought overwhelms that compensatory response. Microbial biomass shrinks, litter decomposition stalls, and the living engine of the soil carbon cycle idles. Then comes the deceptive twist: when rain finally returns, rewetting triggers a rapid pulse of carbon dioxide as starved soil microbes seize upon the accumulated substrates left behind by months of suspended activity. That post-drought CO₂ flush, the review emphasizes, can erase much of the apparent “savings” that accumulated during the dry period. Across the assembled evidence, repeated and multi-year drought was consistently associated with declining soil organic carbon, with grasslands and arable croplands showing particularly pronounced losses, ecosystems that happen to anchor much of the world’s food production.

Flooding tells the opposite story, but it ends in many of the same places. Water saturation chokes off oxygen diffusion through soil pores, forcing microbial metabolism into anaerobic pathways. That shift changes everything downstream. Prolonged waterlogging can drive the chemical reduction of iron oxyhydroxides, minerals that in oxygenated conditions act as microscopic glues binding organic carbon to soil particles. When those minerals dissolve, the carbon they held is released as dissolved organic carbon, which can then be stripped away by erosion and leaching and exported to rivers, lakes, and ultimately the ocean. The review stresses, however, that flooding is not unambiguously a carbon loss story. Wetlands and other periodically inundated ecosystems can accumulate and retain enormous carbon stocks precisely because water constrains decomposition. Whether a flood event releases carbon or banks it depends on the interplay between plant inputs, oxygen availability, and hydrological transport, a delicate balance that shifting rainfall regimes are actively destabilizing.

Wildfire is the most dramatic and immediately visible of the three forces, and its effects cascade on multiple timescales. Combustion directly strips vegetation, litter, and soil organic matter, transferring carbon to the atmosphere in hours. But fire also rearranges the physical and biological landscape of the soil in subtler ways: it can increase erosion by removing protective ground cover, alter soil wettability in ways that change hydrological behavior, restructure microbial communities, and expose previously protected carbon, once shielded inside aggregates or mineral associations, to fresh decomposition. There is a paradoxical bright spot. Pyrogenic carbon, the charcoal-like residue of incomplete combustion, is chemically recalcitrant and can persist in soils for centuries or millennia, functioning as a long-term carbon sink. Whether a fire leaves a landscape as a net carbon source or stabilizes some of its carbon in pyrogenic form depends on fire severity, soil moisture, fuel load, ecosystem type, and the trajectory of post-fire recovery. The review is clear that this balance cannot be predicted from fire alone; it is contingent, site by site, on conditions that vary widely across the globe.

Perhaps the most consequential theme running through the synthesis is that carbon responses cannot be inferred from the type of extreme event alone. Land use, soil mineralogy, hydrology, salinity, vegetation composition, microbial community makeup, and the timing of events within a season all determine whether carbon ends up stored, mobilized, or released. Iron and aluminum oxyhydroxides and clay minerals, for instance, provide mineral protection that can shield organic matter even under stress, while sandy or low-clay soils offer little such refuge. Managed croplands respond differently from native grasslands; saline coastal soils behave differently from acidic forest soils. And compound events, drought followed by wildfire, or alternating drought and flooding in rapid succession, may produce effects that are qualitatively different from those of isolated disturbances, as when a dried landscape burns more intensely, or when post-fire soils, stripped of vegetation, wash away in the first heavy rain. The review argues that the climate science and soil science communities have largely studied these disturbances one at a time, while the real world increasingly delivers them in combination.

The implications for climate mitigation and adaptation are substantial. Soil organic carbon is frequently invoked in national climate pledges and voluntary carbon markets as a bankable sink, yet the review suggests that the security of that bank depends heavily on how often and how severely extremes strike. If multi-year droughts steadily drain carbon from grasslands and croplands, or if fires repeatedly reset accumulation cycles, the effective permanence of soil carbon storage becomes far more fragile than many accounting frameworks assume. Conversely, protecting and rebuilding soil carbon delivers benefits well beyond climate: it improves water retention in drought-prone regions, supports nutrient cycling, stabilizes soil structure against erosion, and sustains the microbial diversity on which fertility depends. Carbon stewardship, in other words, is not separable from food security or ecosystem resilience; it is the same problem viewed from different angles.

The authors are candid about the limits of the current evidence base. The article does not report newly generated datasets and does not present a dedicated limitations section, and its conclusions rest on a qualitative synthesis of selected publications. Consequently, they call for improved and more consistent evidence across soil types, land uses, and both terrestrial and aquatic environments, and across multiple temporal scales, from the instantaneous CO₂ pulse after rewetting to the multi-decadal trajectory of carbon storage. Standardizing measurements of carbon pools, microbial functions, and event intensity, they argue, would make results comparable across ecosystems and enable more confident generalization, something the field currently struggles to achieve given heterogeneous methods and site-specific reporting.

Looking forward, the review sketches a research agenda that is as technologically ambitious as it is mechanistically focused. The authors recommend integrating high-resolution remote sensing with ground observations, advanced spectroscopy, molecular analyses, and integrated modeling to track carbon as it moves through soils and into waterways. They single out several priorities: characterizing microbial genomic and functional diversity as it responds to stress, quantifying carbon stoichiometry, probing the interactions between organic matter and iron and aluminum oxyhydroxides, understanding clay-mineral protection mechanisms, tracking long-term storage outcomes, and systematically studying the sequencing of compound extreme events. Each of these threads addresses a gap in the mechanistic chain that links a weather event in the atmosphere to a molecule of carbon, stabilized or released, in the soil.

What emerges from the review is a picture of the soil carbon cycle not as a stable background process but as a dynamic, contested system whose behavior under climate extremes is far less predictable than once assumed. The same storm that floods a rice paddy and exports carbon to a river delta may, a few hundred kilometers away, end a drought and briefly green a grassland, with opposite consequences for the atmosphere. As extremes grow more frequent and more compound, the review makes the case that understanding, and safeguarding, the carbon held beneath our feet will require science that is as interconnected and as restless as the weather itself.

Keywords

soil organic carbon, extreme weather, drought, flooding, wildfire, carbon sequestration, microbial activity, dissolved organic carbon, erosion, pyrogenic carbon, climate change, soil health

Proxima Fusion said Wednesday it plans to build a €140 million ($162.6 million) factory to produce fusion-grade high-temperature superconducting (HTS) tape, which will provide the startup with key component to its reactor design.

The four-year agreement will cover rice farms across three Indian states, reaching about 100,000 hectares at peak delivery.

What will the weather be like tomorrow, or next week or, indeed, in a month’s time? Today’s numerical weather predictions can easily answer the first two parts of this question, but they fall short beyond about 14 days. New work on predictability limits by scientists at the University of Miami and the NOAA Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS) say that this maximum could be extended to around 129 days – but probably no further. Whether this limit can be reached in practice, however, will depend on future improvements in forecasting technologies, they say.

Numerical weather prediction was developed in the late 1940s. Indeed, it was one of the first major applications of electronic computers. As these have advanced, so have the predictions. Indeed, thanks to ever more sophisticated mathematical models capable of analysing increasing amounts of observational data, we can now predict, for example, when hurricanes will occur as far as eight days in advance – something that was deemed impossible even a few decades ago. But how far ahead can such predictions be made?

Previous attempts to determine this predictability limit have largely relied on analysing the behaviour of very small perturbations in the atmosphere. These tiny errors, however, are inaccessible either observationally or via numerical modelling, explains Zoltan Toth of the NOAA who led this new study together with his colleague Wei Zhang. “These past studies therefore had to make some assumptions about the behaviour of the small errors, and these assumptions are necessarily somewhat arbitrary.”

Analysing the energetic balance of the atmosphere

The method developed by Toth, Zhang and their colleagues makes no reference to this error behaviour and instead goes back to analysing the energetic balance of the atmosphere, which continually absorbs solar radiation on the molecular level. In their approach, the researchers began by considering how our planet’s atmosphere would behave as a closed system, the deterministic dynamics of which preserves information about its initial state, assumed to be perfectly known. In theory, such a hypothesis would allow forecasts of the atmosphere’s behaviour right out to infinity. This is not possible in reality, they explain, because the atmosphere is obviously not a closed system: it receives and emits radiation. In the real atmosphere, the phases of photons in sunlight are completely random and cannot be determined, injecting quantum-scale uncertainty into the atmosphere.

These unknown quantum characteristics act as noise and destroy any retained information, beginning first of all on the smallest scales, explain the researchers. As these scales become bigger, noise eventually affects all parts of the system. When the total energy in the atmosphere is entirely replaced, the ability to make any prediction is completely lost.

“Using the relatively well-measured quantities of total energy in the atmosphere and the incoming and outgoing solar radiation fluxes at its upper boundary, we estimate that the range of skilful forecasts could potentially be extended from 14 days as at present to 129 (±7) days at the most,” explains Toth.

Very different from the mainstream discourse

“This result is very different from the mainstream discourse about atmospheric predictability, which to this day is strongly influenced by early publications in the field,” adds Toth. “More recently even, the authors of a 2018 article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society speculated on whether current forecast systems are reaching their limits for when it comes to predicting tropical cyclones. In 2020, we argued that this limit is at least decades, if not much farther away.”

The theoretical foundation for the new methodology to determine the time limit of predictability is rather simple, he says. “At its core is a conceptual realization, which came to us intuitively. This is that the energy turnover time (that is, the time it takes for all energy in the atmosphere to be replaced by incoming solar radiation) is equivalent to the upper limit of predictability.”

While there is no complex mathematics involved, Toth notes that he and his colleagues had to find a way to describe the technique in a readily understandable way – something that was not easy, he admits, given the complexity of the subject.

Looking ahead, the researchers, who detail their present work in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, are now looking into several other independent ways to estimate the limit of predictability. “There is no doubt, this limit has a theoretical feel to it,” Toth tells Physics World. “Yet there are a number of very practical implications for both traditional equation- and AI-based modelling of the atmosphere following on from the theory of predictability that we are also exploring in a series of ongoing studies.”

The post How far ahead can we predict the weather? appeared first on Physics World.

A viral video shows sprinklers soaking a green lawn outside a denver data center during severe water restrictions.

Fusionality is developing control systems and simulation environments to help fusion power startups move faster.

Eat more fatty fish.

That dietary advice has changed the way the world consumes salmon, pushing consumer demand ever upward and production to higher and higher levels. Most of that demand is being met with farmed salmon: Today, nearly 70 percent of the salmon consumed on the planet are raised in pens and cages.

The US Department of Agriculture’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend eating at least 8 ounces of fish a week and urges people to choose salmon or other species that are similarly high in “heart-healthy” Omega-3 fatty acids. But new research led by USDA scientists finds that levels of these fatty acids in farmed salmon have dropped considerably, potentially making the agency’s own advice, and similar recommendations, including from the American Heart Association, outdated and insufficient.

Read full article

Comments

© Manuel Romano/NurPhoto

For several decades, paleontologists have described Miracinonyx trumani -- an extinct species of cheetah-like felid that roamed the North American prairies and steppe terrains more than 13,000 years ago -- as North America’s answer to the African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus).

The post Ancient DNA Rewrites Story of Enigmatic ‘American Cheetah’ appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

At Earth’s poles, much of the heat leaving the planet is invisible to human eyes. NASA’s two PREFIRE CubeSats are measuring that far-infrared energy directly, and a new animation built from two complete seasonal cycles shows just how differently the Arctic and Antarctic warm and cool. The Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment began […]

The post NASA’s PREFIRE Satellites Show How the Poles Trade Heat With Space appeared first on Curiosmos.

Battery materials startup Sila will use a $1.4 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Defense to scale production at its factory in Washington state.

The economist John Maynard Keynes once remarked, “In the long run we are all dead.” From an astronomical standpoint, this is true for the Earth itself. In roughly 5 billion years, the Sun will exhaust the hydrogen at its core and enter the next phase of its life as a Red Giant, where it will swell up large enough to engulf and destroy the Earth.

Currently, the Sun is still in its main-sequence phase, where it fuses hydrogen into helium in its core. Although it remains relatively stable during this phase, it will gradually grow brighter with time. As the Sun shines brighter, the increased heat and radiation will raise Earth’s surface temperature, potentially pushing it past the threshold for life to survive. 

One of Earth’s geological processes that helps regulate its surface temperature is the carbon cycle. Over millions of years, carbon moves from the Earth’s interior into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide or CO₂, where it functions as a greenhouse gas that traps heat. Plants take in this CO₂ through photosynthesis and move carbon through the biosphere. 

Meanwhile, rain and rock weathering draw carbon into the oceans and rocks. By pulling CO₂ out of the atmosphere, the carbon cycle could mitigate Earth’s warming as the Sun brightens over time. Today, human activities are increasing atmospheric CO₂ and warming the planet. However, over billions of years, the carbon cycle could gradually remove enough CO₂ from the atmosphere that eventually too little would remain to support photosynthesis. 

With these challenges to life on Earth in mind, the researchers Jacob Haqq‐Misra and Eric Wolf investigated how long Earth’s biosphere could last in the distant future. The team used computer models to calculate the balance of energy that Earth would receive and emit over time, accounting for the effects of increasing sunlight and changing atmospheric CO₂ concentrations. They followed this up with calculations using the ExoCAM model to determine the temperature and atmospheric conditions of future Earth across different latitudes. They related these conditions to a habitability metric to determine their impact on the biosphere.

To estimate the biosphere’s maximum possible lifespan, the team conducted 29 simulations representing the planet’s conditions over the next 2 billion years. In one set of simulations, the Earth’s carbon cycle contributed little to regulating surface temperature, with the atmosphere’s CO₂ concentration fixed at approximately modern levels of 400 parts per million (ppm) and surface temperatures continuing to increase. In another, the carbon cycle worked to keep Earth’s average surface temperature fixed at the modern average of approximately 59℉ (15℃), no matter how much it had to reduce CO₂ in the atmosphere. 

In the scenario with a fixed CO₂ concentration, the team found that in 1.7 billion years, Earth’s surface reached an average of 122°F (50°C), which is too hot for most land plants. After 1.9 billion years, it reached 149°F (65°), becoming too hot for all land plants to survive as temperatures continued to rise. 

They also found that in the fixed average surface temperature scenario, atmospheric CO₂ dropped below the 150 ppm level that most plants require for photosynthesis within 500 million years. After 1.4 billion years, CO₂ levels fell below 10 ppm, leaving only a few land photosynthesizers and aquatic plants alive. After about 1.8 billion years, atmospheric CO₂ dropped to 1 ppm, leaving only microbes capable of photosynthesis.

The researchers’ findings generally extend the estimated lifetime of Earth’s future biosphere compared with earlier, simpler models that suggested maximum lifespans of 100 million to 1.5 billion years. However, they clarified that other scientists should verify their results by running tests with other models, especially under extreme conditions of high incoming solar radiation and low atmospheric CO₂. 

Lastly, Haqq‐Misra and Wolf noted that their model did not account for major evolutionary changes that could help life adapt to future conditions. Over time, plants could evolve to tolerate higher temperatures or lower atmospheric CO₂ levels. Future humans or another intelligent species might also engage in large-scale geoengineering projects to prevent the end of life on Earth. If life on Earth proves adaptable enough, the biosphere may endure until a Red Giant fills the daytime sky.

The post The long-term fate of Earth’s biosphere appeared first on Sciworthy.