Climate change is often discussed in terms of rising temperatures, extreme weather and environmental loss. But there's another consequence that can be harder to see: The impact on our mental health.

In this exclusive video, we explore how heat exposure influences mental state, drawing on research by Kim Meidenbauer, a neuroscientist at Washington State University who studies the effect of heat on emotion and behavior.

Editor's Note: This text was updated at 12:30 p.m. EDT to correct the spelling of Kim Meidenbauer's name.

Burning up: How can we adapt to a warming world?

As the planet warms, our environment will be transformed, but so will our bodies. This video is part of a series where we investigate the health impacts of climate change, focusing on heat, air quality, food and infection risk. We also evaluate the promising solutions that could help us adapt to our warmer future.

This eye-catching astronaut photo shows the point where an ancient Patagonian lake has been split by a peculiar land bridge, creating two contrastingly colored bodies of water.

Lake Pueyrredón (on the left in the photo) is the Argentine half of a roughly 40-mile-long (65 kilometers) glacial lake, which stretches across the country's border with Chile in Patagonia — a region in South America that is well known for its diverse range of geographic features, including mountains, fjords, deserts and rainforests. The Chilean half of the lake is known as Lake Cochrane (not shown in this image). Both halves hold crystal-clear water that is up to 1,600 feet (500 meters) deep, giving Pueyrredón a deep blue hue when viewed from above.

Thousands of years ago, a thick sediment barrier formed across the southern section of Lake Pueyrredón, creating a new body of water known as Lake Posadas. This smaller body, which is roughly 5 miles (8 km) long, has a lighter, teal color due to its shallow water and a large influx of sediment from a nearby river, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

Other rivers from nearby hills have previously dumped large quantities of sediment along the western shore of Lake Pueyrredón (bottom of the photo), creating a trio of fan-shaped landforms, known as deltas, that increase in size from north to south (left to right in the photo).

Wind-driven currents and waves have pushed some of this sediment from the outer edges of the two smaller deltas, creating long, thin strips of land, known as sandspits, pointing down-current.

The strip of land separating Pueyrredón and Posadas looks similar to the sandspits. However, it is most likely a moraine — a barrier of sediment and larger rocks that formed along the edge of a hefty iceberg or long-lost glacier, according to the Earth Observatory.

Eagle-eyed viewers may be able to spot a narrow airstrip on the smallest delta (running almost parallel with its sandspit). While the area is largely uninhabited, it is popular with tourists, who travel to the lakes to camp, hike, fish and kayak, according to a local travel site.

Lake Posadas is also home to a unique island with a massive rocky arch (see below) that is also popular with tourists.

The two lakes in the astronaut photo sit within a large valley, which was carved by a massive ice sheet that once covered the area. The last remnants of this ice sheet are located in northern Patagonia, around 20 miles (30 km) west of Lake Cochrane, and have also been snapped from space by astronauts.

Patagonia is home to dozens of similar valleys and fjords that were carved out by the same massive ice slab. Around 210 miles (340 km) southwest of Pueyrredón and Posadas, a trio of ravines converge to create a rare configuration where a lake, river and glacier "touch" each other at a single point.

See more Earth from space

A volcanic eruption 22 million years ago froze a snapshot of the Andes in their youth, revealing a slow-and-steady formation of this formidable mountain range.

The eruption, which originated from the Lauca Caldera in what is now northern Chile, blanketed the landscape in a formation known as ignimbrite. This rock is left over after a pyroclastic flow ‪—‬ a mix of rock, volcanic gas and ash that sweeps over the landscape like a broiling tsunami. Pyroclastic flow is what buried the Roman town of Pompeii after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, preserving buildings and people where they fell.

Now, a new study published Sept. 11 in the journal Science Advances extrapolates the landscape under this Andean ignimbrite, revealing that it must have buried rolling foothills rather than craggy peaks.

"Pompeii shows how volcanic eruptions can freeze a moment in human history," Byron Adams, a geomorphologist at University College London, said in a statement. "This study shows that much larger eruptions can also freeze moments in Earth history, burying whole landscapes beneath volcanic deposits and preserving clues to how mountains were being built before the eruption. We cannot dig down to see the buried landscape, but we can use the shape of the volcanic blanket and what we know about how rivers shape mountains to infer what is hidden beneath it."

The original slope of the volcanic flow from Lauca Caldera was about 1.5 degrees, Adams and his colleagues wrote in the new paper. The researchers also calculated the erosion of the landscape to figure out how fast the rocks in the area were rising as the oceanic Nazca Plate pushed under the continental crust of South America, which is how the Andes were built.

They found that prior to the eruption, the uplift of the crust was no more than 0.16 mile (0.26 kilometer) per million years — quite a sluggish process. This finding corresponds to earlier work that used the formation of certain minerals within rocks to determine when a particular rock rose through the crust and approached the surface.

"There is debate over whether the Andes grew slowly and steadily over 40 or 50 million years or whether they rose extremely slowly and then popped up more recently, in the last six to 10 million years," Adams said. "Our findings, which cover a large part of the middle of that history, support the slow but steady hypothesis."

The same method could be applied to other mountain ranges worldwide, the researchers added.

Scientists have a new view of the ground under Los Angeles, and it's a bit shaky.

The 3D model of the Los Angeles basin shows that downtown LA is underpinned by up to 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) of sediment, which will likely amplify shaking from any earthquake that hits the region. That's not entirely new information, but the underground map is more precise than ever before, and it should help earthquake scientists better understand which areas of the city are most vulnerable.

"With this improved model of the basin, we now know the shape of the edges of the basin in a lot more detail," Elizabeth Cochran, a U.S. Geological Survey seismologist who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.

That's important, Cochran said, because irregular edges can focus or direct earthquake waves. In the magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake in 1994, Santa Monica experienced more shaking damage than expected because of the way the seismic waves traveled along the basin edge, she added.

Los Angeles sits in a sedimentary basin, a low spot where layers of sediment have accumulated for at least 15 million years. At first, the basin was underwater, so the lowest layers of these sediments were oceanic sediments. Later, when tectonic forces brought the basin onto dry land, additional sediment accumulated from the mountains nearby.

Researchers knew the general shape of the basin, but not in great detail. "Previous surveys were just linear arrays that went through just one cross section on the LA Basin, but this was the first full three-dimensional map," said Valeria Villa, a doctoral student at Caltech and co-author of the new paper describing the map, published Aug. 4 in the journal JGR Solid Earth.

The data from the new map came from 273 temporary seismic stations deployed around LA. These stations detected faint earthquake waves from distant quakes that couldn't be felt by humans. The paths and timing of these waves as they traveled helped researchers build a 3D map of the rock layers below the surface.

The central part of the basin, under downtown LA, holds the deepest sediments, which could amplify shaking. The edges of the basin are thinner, with 0.6 to 2.5 miles (1 to 4 km) of sediment before the hard crystalline rock that serves as the basin's bottom.

On its own, the map doesn't tell geophysicists exactly where shaking might be the worst in the case of a big LA earthquake, but researchers can now update their models and simulations to test different scenarios, Villa told Live Science. The damage will ultimately depend on a lot of factors, such as which fault causes the quake. Los Angeles is surrounded by many faults, including the famous San Andreas, which could give off a magnitude 7.8 quake that would jolt Southern California.

One important factor in the amount of damage to buildings during such a quake is "resonance" ‪—‬ whether buildings shake in time with the sediments below them, Cochran said. When buildings and sediments are in resonance, the damage is worse. A better understanding of the sediment layers beneath downtown LA will help researchers ensure buildings are designed to avoid resonating with the shaking basin, she said.

"You can, for example, change the stiffness of your building and do other things to offset this effect," Cochran said. "What is important is that you know what the ground is like, and what the larger geologic structure is like, underneath the region where you are building the building to know that this could be an issue."

Weakening Atlantic Ocean currents could cripple agriculture in some of the world's major breadbaskets, threatening global food security and raising the price of basic commodities, new research finds.

The study, which hasn't been peer-reviewed yet, investigated how a roughly 60% decline in the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) would impact global food production. The AMOC is a system of ocean currents that regulates the global climate and brings heat from the tropics to the Northern Hemisphere.

However, the system is currently the weakest it's been in more than 1,000 years, having lost 10% to 20% of its strength due to climate change, estimates show.

In the new study, researchers used a computer model to simulate the AMOC's future decline. They modeled 100 years of change, assuming 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) of warming above preindustrial levels. The team forced an AMOC slowdown over the first 50 years in one simulation but didn't modify the circulation in a second experiment, which enabled them to compare the world with and without an AMOC failure.

The model's outcomes mirrored the results of previous studies, showing broad cooling in the Northern Hemisphere and a southward shift of the belt of clouds and rain that encircles the globe near the equator. As in past studies, these effects were irreversible on human timescales, said study co-author Michael Hinge, a senior economist at the nonprofit Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED).

"Once the damage is inflicted, it stays there," Hinge told Live Science, adding that in the 50 years after the peak rate of AMOC slowdown in the model, the circulation weakened by an extra 20%. The study was posted on ALLFED's website July 7.

An agricultural "shock"

Hinge and his colleagues ran three models to look at the most common varieties of wheat, maize and rice, layering these models on top of the AMOC simulations. They found that global yields for these crops decreased by 5.3% by the 50-year mark, once the AMOC had weakened substantially.

"Lots of these effects manifest earlier, so it's a moving target," Hinge said.

He added that the results were based on a single warming scenario that was run once and used monthly rather than daily data, so they should be interpreted as a proof of concept. "We've set up a pipeline that is ready to take pretty much any AMOC scenario that can generate high-resolution climate data and see what it implies for crops," Hinge said.

While there was a 5.3% decrease overall, that global metric concealed huge differences between regions. For example, countries like Germany and Ukraine lost up to 19% of their cereal yields due to sudden, sharp cooling, while Canada showed a 12% decline in production for the same reason.

"Scandinavia, the United Kingdom and Canada are particularly exposed," Hinge said, "but there are many other [vulnerable] locations, some of which may be surprising even to the people who are living there."

For instance, the model produced a "very nasty brown splodge" of reduced precipitation over India, Pakistan and big parts of China, he said. Iran, Sudan and Eritrea, which are already water-stressed countries, also exhibited severe declines in rainfall, indicating that a portion of the agriculture there may not survive an AMOC collapse.

The 5.3% result also hides variability among years, Hinge said, because it's an average. So there may be years when global cereal losses reach 10% or more, which would bump up food prices, in part because countries might stockpile crops instead of trading them.

Global response

The regional effects of an AMOC slowdown would interact with climate change, triggering unpredictable outcomes. In particular, maladaptation — taking actions that end up backfiring — is a worry, Hinge said.

"You're preparing and setting up for much hotter temperatures or trying to develop areas for these temperatures and the trends you're seeing, and suddenly you see something different," he said. "That may cause an even larger compounding effect [on agriculture]."

The findings build on prior research led by Paul Ritchie, a climate scientist at the University of Exeter in the U.K., whose team explored the effects of an AMOC collapse on agriculture in Great Britain. That study, published in 2020, had similar limitations as the new one, so it's best to interpret both papers as a suggestion of what might happen rather than a precise forecast, Ritchie told Live Science in an email.

"I think the new study is valuable in showing the potential scale and geographic distribution of the initial agricultural shock," said Ritchie, who was not involved in the latest work. "What that would ultimately mean for food production and food security is more uncertain, because there are many possible responses by farmers, markets and governments." For that reason, the regional predictions may be more informative than the 5.3% global average, he said.

Average food prices worldwide could rise by 17% to 40% if the AMOC weakens to the extent it did in the model, the study predicts. The level of increase depends on how countries respond to the shock and their degree of preparedness, as well as on whether agriculture can be sustainably expanded in places like the African Sahel (the semi-arid zone directly south of the Sahara Desert) and Brazil, the analysis suggests.

The U.S. would not be spared from this price jump, and the model indicated that the country could see crop losses of about 3% for domestic wheat and corn. This loss would likely impact other foods that rely on cereal inputs, like meat, Hinge said. "The variety of foods available in the stores may well diminish for periods," he added.

An AMOC collapse would fundamentally deepen the need for countries to trade with each other, because some regions — such as the Indian subcontinent, China, Iran, Russia, Ukraine and Canada — could endure this giant shift only if they imported more food, Hinge said.

"Should countries turn inwards and start to restrict exports in an effort to ensure access for their own citizens first, or deal with the uncertainty, or offset concerns, then this will massively magnify the effects of AMOC," he said.

If governments behave as they have during past shocks, such as the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, they may restrict trade and start stockpiling food if and when the effects of AMOC weakening begin to show, Hinge predicted. The researchers hope their work and future modeling can help people understand the need to take swift, effective action if a collapse were to occur, he said.

Currently, "if that warning light starts flashing, we're not sure what to do with it," Hinge said. "There are no easy answers here; an AMOC [collapse] would be deeply catastrophic."