Researchers have discovered a roughly 9 million year old tooth belonging to a large, water-loving relative of modern day capybaras in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. The fossilized molar adds to previous evidence suggesting that it's unlikely the Atacama, one of the driest places on Earth, was continuously dry for the last 40 million years.

The Atacama Desert, possibly the oldest desert on Earth, takes up the northern third of Chile. It's bounded by the Chilean Coast Range to the west, which blocks rain from the Pacific Ocean, and the enormous Andes to the east, which obstruct rain from the Atlantic Ocean. The driest part of the desert's hyperarid region gets less than 0.08 inches (2 mm) of rainfall a month.

Recent research estimates the Atacama's hyperarid core started forming between 47.8 million and 33.9 million years ago, in the Mid- to Late-Eocene, 20 million years before the Andes formed. It suggests the mountain ranges weren't the cause for the desert's aridification, and may have only intensified it.

Capybaras (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) ‪—‬ the world's largest rodent ‪—‬ exclusively live close to stable freshwater sources and feed on plants that also require water to grow, so the discovery of an extinct capybara relative (Hydrochoerus Cardiatherium) tooth in the Atacama Desert is very strange.

"Finding a capybara tooth in a marine deposit in what today is one of the driest regions on Earth is just freakish," Priscilla Martinez, a geoscientist at the University of Arizona and co-author of a new paper describing the discovery, said in a statement.

Capybaras are native to South America, although today, they are not found in Chile, where the tooth was unearthed, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

The tooth isn't the only clue that the Atacama was a wetter place in the late Miocene. Researchers found it in a layer holding the remains of a shallow marine environment that existed between 7 million and 10 million years ago, according to the statement. And they've also found microscopic pieces of plants, known as phytoliths, revealing that palm trees, grasses, gingers and other flowering plants grew there in what may have been a subtropical forest.

These findings and others are part of a growing body of evidence that the Atacama Desert was once wet enough for crocodiles and freshwater fish to thrive and palms to grow. The new study, published Sept. 5 in the journal Scientific Reports, shows that capybara relatives lived there as well during the late Miocene, which, because they are semiaquatic animals, is further evidence to support the hypothesis of a sporadically moist Atacama.

The researchers aren't sure how exactly capybaras moved into the Atacama Desert. Although there were capybaras in South America at the time, the Andes created an 18,000-foot-high (5,500 meters) barrier between their current habitats and the site where the tooth was found. The researchers theorized that, instead of traversing the mountains, the ancient capybaras migrated along the western coast of South America, following wetlands, rivers and other water sources.

According to Samantha Hopkins, an Earth sciences professor at the University of Oregon who was not involved in the study, it's unlikely the tooth found its way to the site without capybaras living there.

"If you wanted to find a way that this capybara could be here while the Atacama was still as dry as it is today, you'd have a hard row to hoe," she told Live Science in an email, because the size of the tooth makes it hard to transport it long distances. The desert wind couldn't have blown it such a long way, and while large carcasses can float down waterways for miles, "if you're going to invoke a large enough waterway to do this, you've demonstrated that the Atacama wasn't as dry as it is today anyway."

The sea surface temperature in a key section of the central equatorial Pacific Ocean has now surpassed all previous temperatures on record for this region, exceeding 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) for the first time, according to preliminary data released Monday (Oct. 5).

Specifically, these temperatures occurred in the Niño 3.4 region, located between 5 degrees north and 5 degrees south latitude, and 120 degrees west and 170 degrees west longitude. Researchers use this region to monitor the progression of El Niño, the warm phase of a multiyear natural climate pattern that's currently in full swing and steadily intensifying. But how significant is this new record, and could it be a harbinger of increasingly extreme El Niño events in the future?

At this time of the year, sea surface temperatures above 86 F are common in the western Pacific warm pool, a mass of water located northeast of Australia. But the Niño 3.4 region is nowhere near the warm pool and usually has much cooler temperatures. This latest data indicates "an exceptionally warm state for this part of the tropical Pacific," said Jin-Yi Yu, a professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine.

"If the reported daily El Niño 3.4 temperature above 30°C is verified in the observational dataset, it would be an extraordinary record," Yu told Live Science in an email.

Other experts agreed. A Niño 3.4 sea surface temperature above 86 F is a "very significant" new record, Timothy Osborn, a professor of climate science and the director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the U.K., told Live Science in an email. Mat Collins, a professor of climate systems and the head of mathematics and statistics at the University of Exeter in the U.K., also called the temperature "very significant" in an email to Live Science.

But it's important to note that absolute temperature is not the standard way of measuring the strength of El Niño, Osborn said. Researchers usually assess El Niño intensity by comparing sea surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region with the average conditions there or with sea surface temperatures across the rest of the tropics, with the latter method removing a skew in the data caused by the climate-change-induced heating of oceans globally.

"On those measures, the current event is already close to being the strongest [El Niño] on record and will likely soon exceed previous records given that the event is forecast to strengthen further," Osborn said. "For some measures, it is already record-breaking for the time of year."

"Super" El Niño

El Niño events happen when warm water in the western tropical Pacific Ocean migrates eastward along the equator, toward South America. This boosts global temperatures, triggering heavy rainfall and floods in regions like East Africa, southern China, the southern U.S. and the Pacific coast of equatorial South America, while places such as Indonesia, the Philippines, southern Africa and northern South America experience drought.

"El Nino impacts are greatest across the tropics and in the lands around the Pacific Ocean," Osborn said. "An El Nino with record strength is very significant because it greatly disrupts the atmospheric circulation which controls the weather patterns including patterns of rainfall."

As of Oct. 6, the temperature anomaly in the Niño 3.4 region is 6 F (3.34 C) above average and rising. A typical El Niño increases Niño 3.4 temperatures by a maximum of 1.8 to 3.6 F (1 to 2 C) above average, so the current condition is "exceptionally large," Yu said. "This indicates that a very strong, or what is sometimes called a 'super,' El Niño is developing."

This year's El Niño is being amplified by human-driven global warming, which has increased background ocean temperatures. As a result, it's likely that sea surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region will keep rising over the coming weeks and peak in November or December, before declining again in 2027, Collins said.

"The Niño 3.4 anomaly is very likely to remain extremely large and may increase further," Yu said, echoing forecasters' suggestions that it could reach 7.2 F (4 C) by November.

A new kind of El Niño?

The world is on the brink of crossing a critical warming threshold, raising the question of whether the current conditions can be considered a new normal for future El Niños.

While it's likely that future El Niños will be more extreme than past ones, on average, not every El Niño will be record-breaking and as dramatic as the one unfolding now, because these events tend to be very variable, Collins said.

As climate change intensifies, the big worry is that certain regions will be primed for extreme conditions even before an El Niño strikes, Osborn said. For example, regions that are getting drier due to global warming could see catastrophic droughts if they overlap with areas that experience dryness during El Niño events. Likewise, places that are getting wetter could see worse deluges of rain and flooding if they coincide with areas with higher precipitation during El Niños. But that doesn't necessarily mean extreme El Niños are the new normal, he said.

Instead, the location and duration of El Niño events may be transforming, Yu suggested. "In research by my group and collaborators, we have documented changes not only in El Niño intensity, but also in where the warming occurs and how long events persist," he said.

Yu and his colleagues helped to introduce the idea that we are seeing the emergence of two distinct types of El Niño: the eastern Pacific El Niño and the central Pacific El Niño. "Many El Niño events in the earlier observational record were dominated by warming in the eastern tropical Pacific, whereas Central Pacific El Niño events became much more prominent in recent decades," he explained, adding that El Niños have also been lasting longer.

Global warming may be creating a new kind of El Niño by strengthening atmosphere-ocean interactions in the subtropical Pacific, Yu said. If these interactions combine with processes in the equatorial Pacific, where eastern Pacific El Niños emerge, they might trigger unusually strong events with extreme heating in the central Pacific.

"That provides a physical reason to take the possibility of more frequent extreme El Niño events in a warmer climate seriously," Yu said. "But I would distinguish that from saying that every El Niño will become progressively stronger."

As the "super" El Niño is predicted to bring heavier storms and flooding to the U.S., experts recommend stocking up on food and other supplies. Floods and other disasters, like wildfires, are on the rise due to climate change, making disaster preparedness essential.

But how prepared are people for a disaster?

Preparedness levels vary; some people keep an emergency kit full of food and first-aid supplies, while others have a planned meeting place designated as a safe space. Having a plan can help people feel better about unpredictable events. But not everyone has thought this far ahead.

Live Science recently asked readers how prepared they are for a natural disaster and what sort of plans or supplies they have on hand. Over 130 people responded to the poll, with 51% of readers choosing "I've got an emergency kit ready for when the unexpected happens."

The comments reflected this majority, as one reader wrote, "We're on the edge of an area at risk for grass fires, so we bought/stocked an RV as an emergency bugout vehicle. Felt extreme initially, less so as time goes by. Gives us 3-5 days of margin before we need to resupply, with food, water and first aid for people and dogs."

Another commenter responded to the rest of the comments, writing, "This is just the begining [sic]. Get a greenhouse, plant food, learn to harvest water, build an outside toilet (for later), learn to be self sufficient. trade with your neighbors. Plant fruit trees, get solar panels and an electric transporation (bike, car whatever). Keep a de humidifier in your home. it's back to the 1930ie[s]."

Do you agree with these readers? Let us know in the comments section.

This eye-catching astronaut photo mosaic shows a rare "sunglint" transforming a snaking reservoir into a giant silver river.

The winding waterway at the heart of this image is a section of Lake Powell in southern Utah. The artifical reservoir starts around 70 miles (110 kilometers) southwest of the town of Moab and ends roughly 60 miles (100 km) northeast of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. When full, Lake Powell holds up to 1.2 billion cubic feet (33.3 million cubic meters) of water, making it the second-largest reservoir in the U.S. — close behind the nearby Lake Mead, which stretches across the Arizona-Nevada border.

Lake Powell is located on the Colorado River, inside a steep ravine known as Glen Canyon. The reservoir emerged in the 1960s, following the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam, which caused water levels to rise by around 200 feet (60 meters) over the next two decades. In addition to generating hydroelectric power, the artificial lake has become a popular tourist destination. (Lake Mead is also located along the Colorado River and was created by the construction of the Hoover Dam.)

This image mosaic, which stitches together several astronaut photos into a single image, was captured during a sunglint, according to NASA's Earth Observatory. This phenomenon occurs when sunlight bounces off a reflective surface directly into the line of sight of an observer in orbit, such as a satellite or an astronaut, giving the object a metallic, mirror-like gleam.

Normally, this effect would be visible only across a small section of the lake. But by combining photos taken as the sunglint moved along the reservoir's length, the entire body of water was illuminated.

The reservoir is named after John Wesley Powell, an explorer and former director of the U.S. Geological Survey, who mapped out Glen Canyon and other parts of the Colorado River in the late 1860s. Powell was particularly captivated by Glen Canyon, which contained a "labyrinth of overhanging cliffs, hanging gardens, sweeping river bends, and natural arches set amidst a backdrop of colorful buttes and mesas," Earth Observatory representatives wrote.

Powell later described his recollections of the canyon. "Past these towering monuments, past these mounded billows of orange sandstone, past these oak-set glens, past these fern-decked alcoves, past these mural curves, we glide hour after hour, stopping now and then, as our attention is arrested by some new wonder," Powell wrote in his 1875 book "Canyons of the Colorado."

Some of the sights that Powell marveled over still exist, including many smaller canyons that branch off the reservoir and are cast in deep shadow. A similar effect is seen in sections of Utah's Green River, a tributary of the Colorado River that has long perplexed geologists due to its ability to flow "uphill."

From above, one of the canyon's most striking geological features ‪—‬ a large, doughnut-shaped depression known as The Rincon ‪—‬ is visible as a dark ring surrounding a bend along one of the widest sections of the lake. This rusty doughnut, which is up to 3 miles (5 km) across, is a former section of the Colorado River that dried out thousands of years ago when part of the canyon collapsed, enabling water to bypass the rocky loop.

However, many of the other wonders that Powell described have been lost beneath the reservoir's elevated water level. These include a side canyon dubbed the Music Temple, which was shaped in a way that gave it remarkable acoustic properties, according to the Earth Observatory.

During periods of drought, when the reservoir's water levels temporarily drop, other lost geological treasures can be exposed. For example, in 2023, researchers found rare fossils from a mammal-like Jurassic creature lurking beneath the lake's high-water line.

In recent years, some environmental groups have petitioned to drain Lake Powell and return Glen Canyon to its former glory as the "heart of the Colorado River," according to Newsweek. Such a change may help to alleviate pressure on the rest of the river, which has lost a significant amount of water in recent decades. But experts told Newsweek that this is unlikely to happen.

See more Earth from space

On Sept. 20, the Antarctic ozone hole peaked at 10.6 million square miles (27.4 million square kilometers), the second-largest size ever observed for this time of the year.

The last time the ozone hole was this big was in October 2015, when it reached a whopping 10.8 million square miles (27.9 million square km), records from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service show. So why is the hole in the ozone layer — the shield that protects life on Earth from harmful ultraviolet solar radiation — so big this year, despite other clues telling scientists that it is recovering as expected from the damage human-made chemicals did in the 20th century?

The ozone hole's extent is due to extremely low temperatures in the stratosphere, but it's also possible that we could be seeing a new long-term trend of large, persistent holes, experts told Live Science.

"This year's ozone hole shouldn't be a cause for alarm," Hannah Kessenich, a postdoctoral physicist at the University of Otago in New Zealand who predicted the 2026 ozone hole's extent using satellite data and a computer model, told Live Science in an email. "However, there are still many unanswered questions. It's something we need to keep a close eye on."

Accurate predictions

The latest figures from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service indicate that the size of Antarctica's ozone hole has dropped to around 8.9 million square miles (23 million square km) since Sept. 20, making it unlikely that this year will break the 2015 record. However, scientists think the hole will remain large and fluctuate over the next few weeks, Kessenich said.

Antarctica's ozone hole expands every year during the Southern Hemisphere's winter and spring. It typically reaches its maximum size between mid-September and early October, when temperatures are still freezing in the stratosphere and sunlight illuminates the frozen continent for the first time after months of darkness. The hole then shrinks again until late January as surrounding ozone-rich air mixes into the depleted region.

Antarctica's ozone hole was caused by emissions of ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) between the 1930s and late 1980s. These chemicals increased concentrations of chlorine in the stratosphere, thereby promoting a reaction that depletes the ozone layer. While countries signed the Montreal Protocol to phase out CFC use beginning in 1989, major CFCs have atmospheric lifetimes of 50 to 100 years, so the hole's recovery could take six decades, researchers estimate.

The ozone layer is particularly vulnerable above Antarctica due to the frigid conditions in the polar stratosphere. Temperatures below minus 108 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 78 degrees Celsius) trigger the formation of high-altitude clouds, whose icy surfaces turn inactive chlorine into its ozone-destroying form in the presence of sunlight. These conditions don't exist to the same extent in the Arctic, because warmer air from the midlatitudes mixes more readily with cold Arctic air than with Antarctic air, thereby blocking the formation of high-altitude clouds.

Changes in the polar vortex

This year's large ozone hole is caused by a very strong polar vortex, a wall of wind that encircles Antarctica and the Southern Ocean in the winter, trapping cold air above the continent. The polar vortex created colder-than-usual conditions in the stratosphere over Antarctica, accelerating the growth of the ozone hole.

Researchers haven't detected an increase in reactive chlorine, but the colder polar vortex has triggered more ozone depletion than usual, said Susan Solomon, a professor of chemistry and environmental studies at MIT who pioneered the study of Antarctica's ozone hole in the 1980s.

This size of this year's ozone hole is most likely a product of natural variability in atmospheric dynamics, Kessenich said.

"We expect ups and downs in the size of the hole from year to year," Solomon told Live Science in an email. "A year or a few years of bigger or smaller holes doesn't tell us anything about ozone loss or recovery; it is just variability. We have to look at the longer term trends, and those metrics continue to tell us that the ozone hole is slowly recovering as expected."

It's also reassuring that the ozone hole, while large, isn't as "thin" as in years past. The hole's extent is calculated based on the area above the continent with ozone values below 220 Dobson units, a measure of how many ozone molecules occur in a vertical column through Earth's atmosphere. Although the area of this year's ozone hole is huge, ozone values haven't dropped as low as in previous big-ozone-hole years, suggesting that there is less ozone "missing" from the hole compared with those years, Kessenich and her colleagues wrote in The Conversation.

But there's also the possibility that we've shifted to a new long-term trend of big ozone holes persisting until late spring, Kessenich said. Changes in global atmospheric dynamics unrelated to CFCs could be making longer-lived holes more likely, she and her colleagues wrote in the article.

There is also some evidence that climate change will strengthen the Antarctic polar vortex over time, which could lead to colder temperatures in the stratosphere and greater ozone losses in the spring, Kessenich said. If this year's polar vortex stays robust, the ozone hole could remain large well into November, she noted.

"It's too soon to tell what has been driving dynamical variability in recent years, but more research is needed," she added.

Help us improve Live Science Pro: We're always trying to make our content better. Leave us feedback about Pro here.

This year's exceptionally strong El Niño has brought a rare gift to Chile's Atacama Desert: rain. In one of the driest places on Earth, that rare moisture has awakened millions of seeds and bulbs that can remain dormant underground for years, transforming the landscape into a spectacular carpet of color.

Known locally as "desierto florido," or "flowering desert," the phenomenon is one of nature's most remarkable transformations. Patches of purple, pink, white, red and yellow now spread across hillsides and plains that for much of the year appear almost completely lifeless.

"It is a unique phenomenon; there are more than 200 plant species," Jorge Carabantes, head of the Protected Areas Department at the National Forest Corp. (CONAF) in Chile, told The Associated Press. "This is a flowering event that is obviously extraordinary and unusual, very different from other blooms that occur elsewhere on the globe."

Typically, the Atacama gets just 0.6 inches (15 mm) of rain a year. But thanks to the super El Niño, record levels of rain fell between July and August in several Chilean regions, including levels not seen since the 1950s, with some areas receiving more than 7 inches (190 millimeters), Carabantes told the AP.

While this unprecedented precipitation has caused flooding in some areas of Chile, it's created a 6,560-square-mile (17,000 square kilometers) swath of flowering blooms across the Atacama Desert. This is the most extensive desert bloom since 1997, CONAF representatives told the AP.

For photographers and tourists, the landscape is breathtaking, with bright colors contrasted against the dark Atacama mountains and Chile's cloudless skies. But the bloom is fleeting; by the end of the Southern Hemisphere's spring, many of the flowers will disappear, leaving behind seeds and bulbs waiting for the next extraordinary rains.

Here are five photos from Getty Images photographer Javier Torres that showcase the beauty of this rare event.

RELATED STORIES

—Bloom entombed in amber is the largest fossilized flower ever found

—Atacama Desert's center dried out 20 million years earlier than previously thought — before the Andes formed

—Hidden 'biosphere' of extreme microbes discovered 13 feet below Atacama Desert is deepest found there to date

The first animals may have appeared on Earth hundreds of millions years earlier than their fossils suggest, a new modeling study suggests.

Previously, the earliest fossil evidence of animals dated to around 574 million years ago, during the Ediacaran period (635 million to 538 million years ago). In the new paper, a research team argues that we can't just rely on the spotty fossil record, and suggests that animals first appeared up to 200 million years earlier than the oldest known animal fossils.

In the study, published Friday (Oct. 2) in the journal Science Advances, the researchers argue that the absence of animal fossils in some exceptionally well-preserved ancient rocks doesn't mean the animals were absent from history. Instead, they suggest that the fossil record may be missing a key chapter of animal evolution, potentially pushing the origins of animals back to between 800 million and 700 million years ago.

This would place the emergence of animals deep within the Neoproterozoic era (1 billion to 539 million years ago), possibly before or during some of Earth's most extreme ice ages.

Even though scientists haven't found undisputed animal fossils from the Neoproterozoic, that doesn't mean animals didn't live at that time. Fossils can be absent from rocks for several reasons, including because scientists are looking in the wrong places or the conditions were unsuitable for creating fossils, making it difficult to determine the earliest evolved animals.

"Until that evidence becomes available, the precise birth date of the animal kingdom remains uncertain," study co-author Ross Anderson, an associate professor of natural history at the University of Oxford, said in a statement.

Where are the animals?

Until now, most researchers relied on the well-preserved rocks from the Ediacaran period, including the roughly 590 million-year-old Weng'an Biota in China, to investigate the timing of animal evolution. Because rock deposits there contain uniquely preserved microscopic organisms but no definitive animal fossils, experts have sometimes treated them as a kind of upper limit for when animals could have evolved.

"So the game is basically how much does it predate our first fossil discovery by and what happened in that evolutionary black box between when they actually originated versus when we get our first fossil window," Karma Nanglu, an assistant professor of evolutionary paleobiology at the University of California, Riverside who wasn't involved with the study, told Live Science.

But the researchers wondered whether other fossil sites from known animal periods actually had evidence of animal fossils.

To find out, Anderson and his colleagues studied more than 140 samples from the Kheseen Biota in Mongolia, which is more than 40 million years younger than the 590 million-year-old Weng'an Biota deposit. Given that it's a younger deposit, the researchers hypothesized that there should be evidence of animal life left in the rock. Using electron scanning microscopy, the researchers saw microscopic fossils preserved in extraordinary detail, including tiny, spherical organisms and embryo-like structures containing internal cells.

Yet, despite the quality of preservation, the researchers couldn't identify any of the microfossils as animals. That's important, because by the time the Kheseen Biota was deposited, animals were present elsewhere on Earth.

"The Kheseen Biota breaks the argument that the exceptional microfossils of Weng'an mean we would have seen animal fossils in the assemblage had they existed at the time," Anderson said. "The Kheseen microfossils are just as well-preserved, yet animals continue to be absent — despite the fact we know at that point they existed."

Using molecular clocks

Given the absence of fossil evidence, Anderson and his collaborators turned to another common method used to date ancient life: molecular clocks. Molecular clocks estimate when evolutionary lineages diverged by comparing genetic differences among living organisms and combining those differences with rates of genetic change. For example, if two bird species have five DNA changes and one DNA change takes about 1 million years to accumulate, scientists could estimate that the two species diverged around 5 million years ago.

"Molecular clocks are useful when we don't have a particularly good fossil record for a group of interest or a time period of interest," Nanglu said.

When the analysis was constrained by the younger Weng'an deposit, the estimated origin of animals was comparatively recent. When they used older geological constraints — specifically rock formations in Norway, Australia and Arizona deposited between around 850 million and 730 million years ago that have been used in the past for trying to find animals' early ancestors, the timeline changed. By comparing modern animal DNA to reference dates from the fossil record along with evolutionary rates of change — their estimate shifted back by roughly 200 million years, to between about 800 million and 700 million years ago.

"Pre-Ediacaran animal body fossils still elude us, and this analysis does not prove that animals existed 800 million years ago," study first author Orin Lole Durbin, a doctoral student of paleobiology at Virginia Tech who was a University of Oxford undergraduate at the time of the study, said in the statement. "Meanwhile, our molecular-clock analyses show how much further back their evolutionary history could extend."

Could animals have lived before "Snowball Earth"?

There are other clues that animals may have a longer history.

Chemical fossils, or biomarkers, have been interpreted as evidence consistent with sponges living at least 650 million years ago, tens of millions of years prior to the oldest known animal fossils.

If animals did originate 800 million years ago, their emergence would also intersect with the Cryogenian period, which began around 720 million years ago as part of the Neoproterozoic era. During this interval, Earth experienced enormous glaciations often referred to as "Snowball Earth."

Although there is no definitive answer to whether animals survived this uncertain time, the researchers plan to search additional Neoproterozoic rocks with different environments and preservation conditions to find more evidence for their analysis.

"Fossils themselves are by definition kind of hidden from general sight," Nanglu said."Beyond that there's an even more hidden world, and that has a lot of potential to tell us about animal origins."

Think you know about natural selection? Try your hand at our evolution quiz!

This year's "super" El Nino means the U.S. will likely face a higher risk of stormy weather and flooding, so experts are recommending Americans stock up on food.

And flooding is just one of the natural disasters people will face — many people are at risk of wildfires, power outages or earthquakes. While some disasters are unexpected, preparation can make a significant difference in how much they impact peoples' daily lives.

But is anyone actually prepared for the worst?

Levels of preparedness vary widely. Some may keep an emergency kit stocked with food, water and first-aid supplies, while others may have an evacuation plan, emergency contacts or designated meeting place for their household. And others do nothing at all. Although a recent study revealed there's no single place on Earth that's best prepared for global disaster, there are steps people can take to feel well equipped.

Experts recommend stocking up on food supplies and other essentials, especially in areas that might be more disaster prone. But how prepared are you? Answer our poll below, and share how you've prepared for emergencies or what you have in your disaster kit in the comments.

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."