To the untrained eye, Xiaoyu Shan's lab bench looked like a home gardening experiment gone bad: dishes filled with dirt — some that looked like mud pies and others that were bone-dry — and not a plant to be seen.

But those dishes held a warning. The dirt that Shan, a postdoctoral research associate in biology and biological engineering at Caltech, was studying contained soil microbes. And those soil microbes were exhibiting a concerning propensity: In dried-out soil, they were evolving to become more antibiotic resistant.

The study describing those findings, published in March, systematically showed that drought conditions could fuel the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Most of this resistance is driven by humans' misuse of antibiotics, which spurs bacteria to evolve genes that help them ward off the drugs. But the Caltech study raised a new worry: As many places face increased drought conditions, climate change itself could act as a selective pressure that could supercharge the evolution of these drug-resistant superbugs.

"We can expect to have more resistant bacteria being selected for in certain places around the globe," said Dianne Newman, a Caltech microbiologist and co-author of the study.

Increased antibiotic resistance is just one way that climate change is likely to put new populations at risk of multiple types of infections.

And this increased disease burden will coincide with climate change scrambling supply chains, eroding nutrition and stressing our health in other ways.

"No individual metric really does justice to the overall risk and health and well-being of these multiple stressors being exacerbated all at once and compounding each other," said Marina Romanello, a principal research fellow at the Institute of Global Health at University College London.

Warm-weather disease

In the small mountain town of Bailey, Colorado, which lies at an elevation of 7,740 feet (2,360 meters), May often brings snowstorms that can blanket the ground in white even as the sun starts to bake the plains at lower elevations. But on Memorial Day 2026, the forest floor was dry and ticks quested their way along blades of grass, seeking a blood meal.

A mild winter in most of the country means ticks — and the diseases they carry — are a rising concern. In April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that emergency department visits for tick bites were at their highest for that month since 2017. That trend isn't a one-off, according to the CDC; as temperatures rise, insects and arthropods can survive longer in the year and farther north.

As a result, vector-borne illnesses such as Lyme disease (spread by black-legged ticks in the Ixodes genus) and West Nile virus (spread by mosquitoes) will become more common in increasingly northerly locations. Already, alpha-gal syndrome, which is not an infection but is transmitted by the Lone Star tick (Amblyomma americanum) and causes an incurable allergy to red meat, is also seeing a dramatic rise as the species expands its range across the Northeast. Positive tests for antibodies to the alpha-gal molecule have increased by 100 times between 2013 and 2024.

Right now, almost half a million people are treated for Lyme disease each year, and the CDC records more than 8,000 cases of other tick-borne diseases annually across the country. It's not clear how this will change as the climate warms. One 2022 study found major increases in Lyme disease only at levels of warming of 6.3 to 9.9 degrees Fahrenheit (3.5 to 5.5 degrees Celsius) by 2100, but that much warming that fast is now considered an implausible scenario. However, the researchers saw a huge amount of uncertainty in the numbers, given the number of variables that affect whether a spreading tick population will transmit more disease, such as how often people go outside or what steps they take to avoid tick bites. Tick-borne illnesses are likely also underreported, so even the true number of illnesses transmitted each year right now is unknown.

But ticks are responsible for spreading 90% of all vector-borne diseases in the U.S., so any trends in the suite of illnesses spread by ticks are likely to affect thousands to tens of thousands of people.

An even more ubiquitous bloodsucker, the mosquito, currently spreads only a few diseases in the U.S. The most common and most serious is West Nile virus, which mosquitoes catch from feeding on infected birds. As of Sept. 8, 504 cases of West Nile virus had been reported in the U.S. in 2026, with 363 of them affecting the central nervous system. And because fewer than 1% of West Nile cases progress to the central nervous system, those numbers likely represent a dramatic underreporting of milder cases, which can cause months of fatigue in some people, in addition to acute flu-like symptoms, such as fever, headache and body aches.

Mosquito-borne illnesses like West Nile are expected to spread more quickly in warming temperatures. Heat helps mosquitoes stick around longer during the year, much like it does for ticks. It also speeds up the transmission and replication of the virus inside the mosquito, since the insects are cold-blooded and thus their metabolism is ruled by the weather.

"Except for places that are already really, really warm, we should expect that the replication rate of the virus inside the mosquito will speed up," said John Drake, director of the Center for the Ecology of Infectious Diseases at the University of Georgia. "That shortens the generation time, and that means we expect there to be more transmission."

Even though mosquitos love water, climate-related drought could ironically nearly triple the number of human West Nile cases in the U.S. over the next 30 years from around 2,000 reported cases (according to CDC data) to between 5,000 and 6,000. That's likely because in drier conditions, more mosquitoes are infected, possibly because birds, the intermediate host of the virus, either congregate more closely with mosquitoes around water sources or breed less readily in drought, meaning the fraction of birds that carry the virus is higher than in more water-abundant times.

Mosquito-borne diseases long ago eradicated from the U.S. could also resurge with warming temperatures. The southeastern United States will become more prone to malaria and dengue fever transmission under all levels of warming; summer 2026 saw more than 40 locally-acquired cases of dengue fever in Florida. Public health surveillance and disease-control measures have largely stopped those transmission chains, but the likelihood is that society will have to pour more money into beating these diseases back again in future decades. For example, there are malaria vaccines approved for children, but currently, they are recommended only in areas where the illnesses are endemic. If malaria were commonly found in the southern U.S., millions of Americans might need vaccines, including susceptible adults.

"If we were to get endemic diseases like those in the U.S. again, it could become a huge burden and it could be quite costly," Drake said.

Disaster and disease

Flooding is another factor that's exacerbating vector-borne disease under climate change. As climate change worsens, extreme weather events will, too. Because warm air can hold more moisture, many areas will see increased episodes of heavy rainfall and hurricanes will become more intense.

"Flooding creates habitat for these mosquitoes," Drake said.

Disasters also spur the spread of other diseases that are usually quite rare in the U.S., such as leptospirosis, a bacterial infection that spreads from animals to humans via animal urine. Floodwaters may be contaminated by the bodies of drowned animals; in 2022, after Hurricane Fiora hit Puerto Rico, leptospirosis cases leapt by a factor of 3.6 to over 10 cases a week.

After Hurricanes Matthew and Florence in 2016 and 2018, respectively, North Carolina saw an 11% increase in emergency department visits for gastrointestinal illnesses. Black and American Indian residents were the most affected, likely because discrimination over generations has disproportionately pushed Black Americans and Native Americans to less desirable, more flood-prone land, the researchers found.

Cycles of precipitation, drought and subsequent dust storms can spur the spread of Valley fever, a fungal respiratory disease that causes an estimated 700 to 1,100 deaths per year, mostly in the U.S. Southwest. Valley fever is already on the rise, with cases in Arizona, one of the hotspots for the disease, doubling from about 64 cases per 100,000 people in 2005 to 145 cases per 100,000 people in 2022. As the West warms and dries, Valley fever is likely to spread from its stronghold in the Southwest and become endemic in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota, putting millions more people at risk.

The infectious disease risk from natural disasters tends to stack on top of other health problems stemming from these catastrophes. Flooded buildings can harbor mold that can worsen allergies, asthma and other respiratory illnesses. When major storms cause power loss, people turn to generators for electricity, which release pollutants linked to asthma. Though it's often hard to track the effects of these disasters, one study found that flooded regions after Tropical Storm Imelda in Texas in 2019 saw 10% more emergency department visits for asthma than nonflooded regions did.

Moreover, the threat to life and livelihood from these disasters can cause mental health conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, Romanello said. The problems compound on each other, she said; already, she has heard reports from Africa about malaria outbreaks, fed by warming, and health workers struggling to reach the affected regions because flooding, also exacerbated by warming, has washed out roads.

"What is the most concerning aspect is that all of that is happening together, so we're seeing all of this risk being exacerbated at once," she said.

Antibiotic resistance on the rise

As Newman and Shan's work shows, as spots around the U.S. face new infection risks, existing treatments may become less effective. Their work showed that drought concentrated the natural antibiotics that bacteria make in the soil, making it harder for bacteria susceptible to the compounds to survive. As a result, the microbes with genes for antibiotic resistance did better. The problem for human health is that bacteria are very good at gene swapping, so these soil microbes can easily pass their antibiotic resistance superpowers to bacteria that infect people, their research showed.

"Gardening, breathing dust ‪—‬ that's how it happens," Newman said of human and soil bacteria coming into contact. "We are constantly encountering bacteria in our environment."

The researchers found an association between drought and antibiotic resistance reported by hospitals.

They aren't the only ones. A recent study on Salmonella, a bacterium that causes about 1.35 million cases of food poisoning each year in the U.S. alone, found that temperature and rainfall promote antibiotic resistance in this microbe. "Globally, climate change was linked to about a 10% increase in Salmonella resistance gene abundance," said study first author Zhen-Chao Zhou, an ecology researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Other microbes show similar effects.

Meanwhile, warmer conditions help bacteria grow faster, adapt to stress and swap resistance genes, Zhou said, while drought concentrates them in limited water sources where they mingle freely. Climate-change-induced flooding can then, in theory, spread the resistant genes far and wide.

Combating the compounding risks requires both public health and climate mitigation approaches, experts say. Not only does the world need to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but people also need to use antibiotics more carefully, Zhou said; improve sanitation practices, such as sewage management, around the world so that antibiotic-resistant strains don't spread as easily; strengthen food safety; and expand disease surveillance. The public also needs to understand that climate change is a health issue, Romanello said.

"When we talk about tackling greenhouse gas emissions," she said, "what we're talking about is a sustainable livable future with healthy economies."

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Decades ago, Captain Kirk faced off against the Gorn on the uncharted desert planet Metron. But as we can see in new satellite imagery from NASA, that mysterious rocky world can actually be found right here on Earth in California.

What is it?

In this new image captured by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on NASA's Landsat 9 satellite, you can see the wide variety of rock and vegetation in the area around Vasquez Rocks Natural Area County Park in southern California.

The 25-million-year-old Vasquez Rocks is a magnificent natural area with an incredible range of unique, large rocks jutting out of the ground. In this false-color image, you can see the area in shortwave-infrared and near-infrared wavelengths that show the differences in vegetation across the landscape.

And this location hides some amazing history. Not only is Vasquez Rocks home to incredible rock formations and desert vegetation, it is also where Captain Kirk fought the Gorn in Star Trek the Original Series. It's not a surprise the series chose this location for its infamous fight scene (among many other Trek scenes), as the massive, sun-bleached boulders pointing to the sky and barren landscape give it a distinctly alien feel.

Why is it incredible?

While the rocky landscape of Vasquez Rocks is firmly fixed here on Earth, it has consistently made history as the backdrop to a whole host of iconic science fiction moments.

Indeed, Star Trek is one as Vasquez Rocks has been used for filming in a whole host of Trek episodes. It was even Spock's home world of Vulcan in the films Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Star Trek (2009).

But beyond Star Trek, the site has been used for filming sci-fi classics like Galaxy Quest, Battlestar Galactica and Planet of the Apes in addition to a whole host of cowboy movies and more.

It turns out that right here on Earth, we can find perfectly good alien worlds.

Abnormally high temperatures on the Tibetan Plateau triggered two catastrophic rainfall events halfway around the world in California and nearby states in early 2017 and 2023, a new study reports.

This is the first time that researchers have identified this link, known as a climate teleconnection. The results could improve forecasts of extreme weather in the western U.S., which, in turn, could improve warnings for coastal communities and potentially save lives as well as billions of dollars in property damage, the study's authors say.

In December 2016 and February 2023, the Tibetan Plateau was warmer than usual for these times of the year. Roughly one month after each of these hotspots appeared, parts of California, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Arizona received record-breaking precipitation, causing a total of around $6.6 billion in damage, according to the study, and killing at least nine people.

State-of-the-art forecast systems, which rely heavily on ocean conditions like El Niño, failed to predict this extreme rainfall, said study first author Yongkang Xue, a distinguished professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UCLA. The record precipitation occurred during La Niña years, which are typically associated with dry conditions in California and neighboring regions, further complicating the picture.

"This study provides the first evidence from observational data analysis and model simulations that abnormally high early-winter temperatures on the Tibetan Plateau led to stronger atmospheric rivers along the U.S. Pacific Coast, driving heavy regional precipitation," Xue told Live Science in an email.

Atmospheric rivers are narrow, elongated corridors of intense water vapor transport. They are key drivers of precipitation and floods in the western U.S., and in this case, they interacted with giant waves in Earth's atmosphere, called Rossby waves, to produce devastating rainfall in the winters of 2017 and 2023.

As temperatures increased over the Tibetan Plateau in late 2016 and early 2023, a strong gradient formed with the regions north and south of the plateau. This generated an atmospheric disturbance that propagated eastward along the jet stream via Rossby waves, triggering what is known as a Rossby wave train between the Tibetan Plateau and the Rocky Mountains, Xue said.

A Rossby wave train is a series of waves traveling in the same direction and at regular intervals around alternating high- and low-pressure systems. As the wave trains initiated over the Tibetan Plateau reached the northeastern Pacific Ocean, they suddenly broke, and this supercharged the weather above California and adjacent states, Xue explained.

"Over the eastern Pacific, the wave breaks — much like a towering ocean wave crashing near the shore," he said. "This wave-breaking mechanism reduces static stability and significantly intensifies atmospheric rivers, ultimately driving extraordinary, heavy precipitation along the West Coast."

The findings, published Wednesday (Sept. 9) in the journal Science Advances, are based on complex modeling and analyses of precipitation and surface temperature data, among other observations. The results are part of a new body of research examining the influence of land temperatures on weather patterns, and this is the first study of a winter season, Xue said.

The analysis is a "very specific and impactful case study," said Matthew Huber, a professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at Purdue University in Indiana, who was not involved in the research. The results build on the well-established idea that extra heat on a mountaintop affects Rossby waves almost as if the mountain had suddenly grown, Huber told Live Science in an email.

Large mountains and plateaus generate waves in the jet stream that are thousands of miles long — "so long that we also call them planetary waves," Huber said. An increase or drop in temperature so high up above sea level adds or subtracts from the atmospheric disturbance that already exists due to the elevation.

"You can imagine the waves in the jet are kind of like a motorcycle rider going off a jump," Huber said. "How far and how high they jump depends on how fast they are going and how big a ramp they are going over."

The models replicated the extreme weather with surprising accuracy, raising hopes that the Tibetan Plateau could be integrated into early warning systems for the western U.S., Xue said. "As similar, though less severe, events become more [frequent] and extreme weather escalates globally, understanding this teleconnection allows forecasting agencies to better warn coastal communities of impending extreme conditions," he said.

Huber agreed that the results could help to better prepare for weather hazards. "This study shows that accurate predictions of weather events in the U.S. West are very sensitive to tiny changes very far 'upstream' and these upstream features are identifiable and traceable," he said.

A volcano on an Indonesian archipelago began erupting on Sept. 4, and satellites in orbit have been watching closely.

What is it?

The volcano Anak Krakatau started spitting out ash and lava on Sept. 4. On an archipelago between Sumatra and Java, the island volcano's sudden eruption grounded flights, closed schools and even stopped fishing in the area.

The volcano launched ash into the air and into the city of Jakarta and the Lampung province during a 25-hour-long eruption. But even following this eruption, Anak Krakatau remained active throughout the weekend. In fact, the volcano is still so active that it could erupt again soon.

But it wasn't just people on Earth watching the volcano erupt this past weekend. The Landsat 8 satellite, operated by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), spotted a white plume of volcanic gas billowing into the atmosphere all the way from space. The white plumes of gas are thought to mainly contain water vapor, carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, while ash and debris make up the brown clouds surrounding the plumes.

Why is it incredible?

While Anak Krakatau simmers after this most recent eruption, this event isn't a major shock, as the volcano sits in what is known as the "Ring of Fire." This "ring" (a loose term, as it's not exactly a ring) snakes about 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers) around the Pacific Ocean and includes over 750 volcanoes, some dormant and some active.

In fact, in Indonesia alone there are 500 volcanoes, and 127 of them are active, including Anak Krakatau. And this volcano has a particularly interesting story: It emerged from the sea in 1927, rising from the caldera formed by the 1883 eruption of Krakatau (also known as Krakotoa), which was one of the most famous and destructive volcanic events in history. (Anak Krakatau means "child of Krakatau" in the Indonesian language.)

While not all geologists agree on the exact margins of the Ring of Fire, it rests on a string of tectonic plates and has existed for over 35 million years. And not only is this ring home to hundreds of volcanoes, it's also a hot spot for earthquakes.

In this excerpt from "The Carbon Wave" (MIT Press, 2026), author Leah Stokes, an associate professor of environmental politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, looks at a hopeful moment in U.S. politics when climate change took center stage: when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey ramped up calls for a "Green New Deal."

In September 2017, a still­-unknown Alexandria Ocasio-­Cortez watched as Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. Electricity went down for months. Like thousands of Puerto Ricans, her grandfather died in the storm's aftermath. She could see how climate change was hitting her community harder than others.

And it wasn't just Ocasio-­Cortez's community: the year before, she'd traveled to Standing Rock, North Dakota, to see firsthand how the fossil fuel industry was harming Indigenous people. It was mere weeks after the 2016 election, and the resistance to Trump had found its center in a makeshift camp along the Missouri River. People had united to oppose an oil pipeline.

Serendipitously, the day after Ocasio-­Cortez left the protest, a progressive organization reached out to ask her to run for Congress. Moved by the activists at Standing Rock, she said yes. In 2018, she ran a long-­shot primary campaign in a Bronx district occupied by a ten-­term congressman in House leadership. Her platform included an idea that some had bandied about before, but no one had developed in earnest: a Green New Deal. As she told journalists that summer, "The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan. We must again invest in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy, but this time green energy." In June, she won the primary. Her election signaled the beginning of a broader shift: climate change was back on the political agenda.

That fall, the world's leading climate science organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change —­ often called the IPCC —­ released a short report concluding that limiting warming to 1.5°C would require emissions to fall by almost half by 2030. The news ricocheted around the world, with headlines like "We Have 12 Years to Limit Climate Catastrophe." In my own neighborhood, someone printed a copy and stuck it in the free lending library, labeling it "important reading." The report changed how many people thought about the problem: it wasn't something we could deal with in 50 years; it was something we had to deal with today.

In the November 2018 midterm elections, two years into the first Trump administration, Democrats won big, paving the way for Nancy Pelosi to return as Speaker of the House after eight years as the minority leader. Days later, a group of young activists from the Sunrise Movement staged a sit-in at her office. Their bright yellow and­ black signs read "We have 12 years. What’s your plan?" referencing that scientific report.

Newly elected Representative Ocasio-­Cortez joined the action that day. She told the organizers they needed a clear ask and encouraged them to call for a Green New Deal. The idea broke through, sparking widespread coverage across the country. It was a new, hopeful vision for climate policy. These young people were not just talking about the climate disasters we needed to avoid —­ they were explaining how investments in clean energy could create good jobs. They were showing us the better world we could build together. If we only tried.

I watched these developments unfold in DC from my office by the Pacific Ocean and wanted to be a part of it. I wouldn't have to wait long. The Green New Deal held a force like gravity, pulling people into its orbit. By chance, I met some of the people tied to Ocasio-­Cortez at a conference and was invited to an early gathering to develop the idea into more detailed policy. By then, she'd released a framework for the plan with Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts.

The meeting was held in March 2019, at a hip hotel in DC's Adams Morgan neighborhood, miles away from the Capitol. A wide swath of people were invited: youth activists, environmental justice leaders, political organizers, think tank wonks, and a few academics like me. It was a contentious meeting that opened with a protest, revealing fissures in the movement that would eventually grow into large cracks. Some people believed that frontline communities facing the greatest pollution burdens were not being adequately consulted or invited to participate in the event. At the time, I didn't understand these dynamics between the climate and environmental justice movements. I was just a political science professor trying to understand how I could make my work more practical and help get a climate law passed if we got the chance.

It was at that event that I met Varshini Prakash, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement. I’d seen her photo many times, standing in the middle of Pelosi's office with her dark red jacket over a black­ and yellow T-­shirt, surrounded by young people sitting on the floor. Four months had passed since the sit-­in, and Varshini had ricocheted to the center of the climate movement. But she was also a recent college grad in her mid-­twenties, feeling a heavy burden from the climate crisis and the work involved in fighting it. At one point during the meeting, she spoke frankly about the stress that was on her and other young activists and cried. I found her vulnerability moving.

The fact was, Varshini had already changed history. She'd given me, and millions of others, a sense of hope and possibility. It was her actions, alongside all the other organizers in the Sunrise Movement, that brought us together in that first DC convening, and in countless other meetings to come. She inspired me to believe that I could do something bigger if I tried.

Too often, the way we think about cause and effect is simplistic. We're fed a linear model that favors the immediate. One person is responsible for their own carbon footprint. One person only has one vote. One person can only do so much. From this perspective, standing against more than a century of fossil fuels running through the heart of our society, it can feel like there's nothing we could do to shake the system loose. We're too small. Mere drops. But drops in the ocean can make waves.

Excerpted from The Carbon Wave: A Story of Democracy, Parenthood, and the Race to Protect Our Planet by Leah C. Stokes. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright 2026.

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In the event of a global catastrophe, such as a nuclear war, an enormous volcanic eruption or large asteroid strike, the best place to be is Australia, according to a new study.

Researchers looked at the places that were most resilient to global catastrophic risks, which are events that would kill more than 10% of the global population over several months or years.

"These kinds of catastrophes are under-researched" because they are not very likely, study first author Florian Ulrich Jehn, a researcher at FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany, told Live Science. "That makes them easy to ignore."

But they are still possible — and no country would be unaffected if they occurred, he said. And some places are more vulnerable than others.

In the new study, published Aug. 23 in the journal Global Challenges, researchers analyzed studies across a variety of disciplines such as food security, biological weapons, and volcanism, to identify potential global catastrophic risks and the factors that helped communities to endure them in the past or on a smaller scale. They also brought in subject experts to add discipline-specific papers to their database.

The team identified three broad types of risk: events that would block out sunlight, such as nuclear war or a huge volcano explosion); events that destroy global infrastructure, such as a geomagnetic storm or massive cyber attack; and biological hazards, such as natural or human-caused infectious diseases that would kill much of the population.

These events, the authors wrote, would have significant and long-lasting global consequences. Many would result in global famine from crops failing and trade networks falling apart. "The food system is often the thing that gets you," Jehn said.

A trade-off of risks

The team identified characteristics that made countries more resilient to catastrophe and better able to feed their inhabitants. And while "no single place on Earth" would be resilient against all catastrophic risks, the authors wrote, some would fare better than others.

The team found that wealthier countries and regions with a strong industrial base that are not highly reliant on global trade are better able to weather global disasters.

With a strong industrial base, countries are able to manufacture goods that they cannot import, making them more resilient.

Geography also plays a role. Large islands have an advantage over continents because they can easily isolate, but they also need to have an economy that can at least partially support itself, the researchers said. If an island is highly reliant on international trade, like Japan, it will struggle if global trade networks are disrupted, the study found.

Certain countries and regions are less resilient in the face of some types of catastrophes, even if they are wealthy. For example, countries with nuclear capabilities, such as the U.S., the U.K., France, Israel, Russia, Pakistan, and India, are more at risk of being involved in nuclear war. This makes the Northern Hemisphere, where NATO countries are situated, more vulnerable to nuclear attack than places in the Southern Hemisphere.

There are also fewer volcanoes in the southern half of the globe, while the Southern Hemisphere has more ocean to act as a climate buffer, making countries there more resilient to a huge volcanic eruption, the study found.

Global resilience

There are some factors that make all countries better able to endure disasters in general, such as democratic processes and equality, Jehn said.

"When these catastrophes happen, you have to make the right decisions, and this depends on whether your country has functional governance," Jehn said. "Inequality makes governance worse, because it leads to things like elite rivalries, or less state capacity."

Australia came out as the best location to weather a catastrophic event that decimated global populations. It is in the Southern Hemisphere, so far away from the most likely location of a nuclear conflict (although the authors warn that it is allied with the U.S., which might increase its risk exposure). It is a major food producer, with diverse climatic zones, and has significant energy infrastructure.

Next best spots are Argentina, Brazil and New Zealand. New Zealand ranks lower than Australia because it has active volcanoes, a small industrial base, and is surrounded by water and vulnerable to tsunamis. Meanwhile, Brazil and Argentina have high levels of inequality and historical political instability, the authors wrote.

They also note that Iceland was a contender for a safe refuge, but its location in the far north makes it vulnerable to temperature shocks if a major incident were to block out sunshine.

The U.S. is not particularly well-placed to weather a global catastrophe, the study found. The country is exposed to the threat of geomagnetic storms because of its location and to nuclear war. The authors also pointed to the country’s poor COVID-19 outcomes, which appeared to be due to "a lack of political will and poor social cohesion."

David Denkenberger, director at Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED) and a researcher at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, told Live Science that the new study aids our understanding of future risks by considering a wider range of catastrophes.

"No country is resilient to every catastrophe, and this is an important central finding," he said. "A useful next step would be to quantify the relative likelihood and severity of different catastrophes, and the importance of different resilience factors, because these factors can involve significant trade-offs," said Denkenberger, who has previously collaborated with Jehn but is not an author on the paper.

How to be more resilient

Even though these global catastrophes are unlikely, it is important to include them on national risk registers and have international trade agreements in place in case they come to pass, Jehn said. "When global catastrophes happen, then you would likely have to restructure the food system — where it is produced, where it is traded," he said. "The chance to find a good compromise after the catastrophe has happened seems slim."

Denkenberger echoed his comments. The study, he said, "makes it clear that regional resilience to global catastrophic risk requires investment in practical preparedness, including food-system resilience, critical infrastructure, coordinated trade and governance."

Two distinct climate regimes that could trigger runaway methane emissions are emerging in Siberia due to Arctic warming, new research suggests.

While western Siberia is becoming wetter in response to rising heat and moisture transported from the North Atlantic Ocean, eastern Siberia is getting drier and more prone to wildfires, a study published Aug. 6 in the journal Science finds. The Yenisei River (also spelled Yenisey) in central Russia delineates the separate environmental states — referred to as regimes because they describe specific types of climates — on each side of the basin, the study authors said.

Between 2010 and 2023, methane emissions from Siberia rose by 5% per year, with western Siberia releasing methane mainly via microbial activity in thawing soils and eastern Siberia discharging the powerful greenhouse gas through biomass burning, the results showed.

"Given the observed increases in permafrost thaw, wetland activity, and wildfire occurrence, an increase in methane emissions was expected," study co-author Paul Palmer, a professor in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh, told Live Science in an email. "What is surprising is how large and sustained the increase appears to be."

Annual methane emissions grew by about 13.2 million tons (12 million metric tons) over the study period, almost mirroring the rate of increase in methane emissions from wetlands worldwide. Although Siberia currently makes up only about 5% of global methane emissions, the region is becoming one of the fastest-growing natural methane sources on the planet, Palmer said.

In their study, Palmer and his colleagues integrated satellite observations with near-surface measurements to map methane emissions from Siberia over time. Instead of adding up individual methane sources on the ground, the researchers used a modeling method known as a methane flux inversion system, which helped them limit the uncertainty in their estimates to roughly 10%.

Siberia is vast, remote, sparsely instrumented and currently inaccessible for many scientists due to the Russia-Ukraine war, making it hard to monitor methane consistently by any means other than satellites. Although satellites rely on sunlight, of which Siberia gets very little in the winter, most methane emissions are thought to occur in the spring and summer, when Siberia gets more sunlight, Palmer said.

The results of the study show that Arctic warming amplifies methane emissions via distinct pathways in western and eastern Siberia because the regions are influenced by different climate patterns. The researchers also used climate models to predict future methane emissions from Siberia and found that additional warming could unleash millions of tons of greenhouse gases stored in forests and permafrost, which would further accelerate the warming trend.

In western Siberia, methane is released mainly from permafrost, or ground that has stayed frozen for at least two consecutive years. Siberia holds 46% of the Northern Hemisphere's permafrost, and this icy sediment traps vast amounts of carbon that have accumulated for thousands of years, Palmer said.

Western Siberia is influenced by the Scandinavian pattern of atmospheric circulation, a climate connection that consists of a main circulation center over Scandinavia and opposing weaker centers over Western Europe and eastern Russia. Global warming makes the Scandinavian pattern transport more warmth and moisture to western Siberia from the North Atlantic. Together with soaring temperatures in western Siberia itself, this triggers extensive permafrost thaw and unlocks carbon that microbes can convert into methane.

Conversely, eastern Siberia is influenced by a climate pattern known as the Arctic Oscillation, which causes atmospheric air pressure to "seesaw" between the Arctic and the Northern Hemisphere's middle latitudes. Climate change affects the Arctic Oscillation, leading to persistent high-pressure systems that intensify heat waves, reduce cloud cover and promote wildfires in eastern Siberia, Palmer said.

The climate models showed that methane emissions will increase with temperature rise and that the increase could become steeper the hotter the world gets, triggering a feedback loop.

"Eastern Siberia appears to be the main driver of the projected increase because it is warming faster than western Siberia and has seen a sharp rise in extreme wildfires," Palmer said. "Whether that trend continues will depend on how much vegetation remains available to burn, but there is also evidence that fires may be accelerating permafrost thaw and the release of methane from previously frozen ground."

However, the rise in methane emissions reported in the study is small relative to global and projected future emissions, especially if wildfires are already destabilizing eastern Siberia's permafrost, Palmer said.

"Siberia's vast permafrost carbon store is a sleeping giant," he said. "Continued warming risks waking up a much larger source of greenhouse gases."