Once NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches this week, the mission is expected to explore the cosmos by surveying hundreds of millions of galaxies, capturing the sky in detail hundreds of times faster than even the Hubble Space Telescope.

“This enormous field of view will allow us to map astronomical objects in a way that we previously couldn’t,” said David Weinberg, a Distinguished University Professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University. “These better measurements may end up teaching us something extremely revolutionary about all kinds of matter in the cosmos.”

More than two dozen Ohio State faculty, students and postdoctoral scholars have played a role in designing Roman’s surveys, including the High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey, a portion of the mission aimed at probing the structure and expansion of the universe as it evolved through cosmic time. Anthony Harbo Torres, a senior graduate student in physics at Ohio State who helped calibrate Roman’s image detectors, said that mission success can be attributed to decades of human ingenuity and perseverance.

“With Roman, we'll be seeing some things for the first time, as well as revisiting places we've seen before but with an increased level of resolution,” said Harbo Torres. “It takes so many people to tackle a monumental undertaking like this and make it possible, so I hope that our images inspire a sense of wonder when people see the scale and detail of the things we find.”

The High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey aspect of the program plans to utilize the telescope to peer past the plane of the Milky Way to map about 12% of the sky in just under two years. In all, Roman's surveys will detect about a billion galaxies and 20 billion stars, more astronomical objects than have ever been detected by all of humanity’s telescopes put together, said Weinberg.

“For just one single point, displaying an image from this telescope would be like looking at a wall full of 4K televisions,” he said. “These will have an extraordinary image quality as it scans the sky for objects more than 100 million times too faint to see with the human eye.”

This preciseness is one that typically eludes scientists when trying to look through our planet’s blurring atmosphere, Weinberg said. Over the course of several months, Roman will settle into orbit at Lagrange point two (L2), a gravitationally stable point about a million miles away from Earth.

The Roman mission revolves around three core science themes — measuring dark energy, investigating exoplanets, and expanding the study of astrophysics and planetary science. Astronomers will use the data Roman sends back to study dark matter, an invisible substance that can only be perceived by its gravitational effect on other objects, as well as dark energy, a force that seems to have a hand in speeding up the universe’s expansion. Understanding these aspects can also offer insights into local galactic history and evolution.

“Mapping clusters of dark matter will help us figure out why gravity on the scale of the universe is so radically different from gravity on the scale of a solar system or galaxy,” said Weinberg. “Ohio State is part of the teams that are building the tools to actually do that advanced analysis.”

But just getting a better lay of the land isn’t Roman’s end goal. Creating a more detailed sketch of the cosmos will help scientists answer critical questions about the inner workings of the universe, such as whether stellar systems like ours are rare and how many black holes there may be in the Milky Way, and extend the search for potentially habitable exoplanets.

“Roman is going to allow us to find extremely rare things and things that don’t happen very often,” said Scott Gaudi, the principal investigator of the Roman Galactic Exoplanet Survey Project Infrastructure Team and a professor of astronomy at Ohio State. “It’s going to be those things that are likely going to surprise us and lead to new avenues of research.”

Compared to legacy instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope, Roman will map the sky about 1,000 times faster than its predecessor, a process made more efficient by its wide field-of-view, said Gaudi. Using a planet-hunting method called microlensing in tandem with the traditional transiting technique, researchers expect Roman will detect around 100,000 worlds, ideally expanding NASA’s exoplanet catalog to new heights.

Although Roman is currently slated as a five-year mission, researchers hope the data it uncovers, along with the lifespan of its sturdy science instruments, allows the mission to continue operating for decades to come. “Even though Ohio State has a large footprint on the mission, we don’t even begin to cover a fraction of the kind of science that can and will be done with Roman,” said Gaudi. “Our job so far has been to make sure it’s successful.”

The telescope’s first science findings are expected in mid-2027, but in the meantime, groups like the Roman Science Collaboration, of which Weinberg is a leading member, are looking forward to seeing how returns from this mission inform the next generation of astronomical priorities.

“The value of producing really big, vital datasets is that you then enable anyone in the world to go and make discoveries with it,” said Weinberg. “That’s a really powerful way of doing science, and I think bringing that to space-based astronomy is very inspiring.”

To celebrate their role in the achievement, as many as 20 members of the Ohio State cohort plan to be present on the beach when Roman lifts off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

This includes Christopher Hirata, another key member of Ohio State’s Roman science team and a professor of physics at Ohio State, who notes that as large data sets and machine learning algorithms become indispensable for studying the universe’s most fundamental parts, this mission is primed to reshape how future researchers interact with exciting new science tools.

“Roman’s technology will have a huge influence on the future of space science,” said Hirata. “From launch onward, it’s going to be spectacular.”

By examining small air bubbles trapped in ancient ice, scientists studied a 2,000-year-old record of how atmospheric methane evolved over time. They discovered that the concentrations found in Nevado Huascarán, the world’s highest tropical mountain, broadly agree with global fluctuations recorded in polar regions – but are slightly higher.

These results support the longstanding hypothesis that methane emissions from tropical sources like the Amazon rainforest likely dominated the Earth during the pre-industrial period, while a rise in human-driven agricultural and industrial emissions contributed to methane increases in later periods.

“Huascarán is a Goldilocks spot for capturing global methane, partly because of its high elevation to capture gases and location close to the equator,” said Kara Lamantia, lead author of the study and a former graduate student at the Byrd Polar and Research Climate Center at The Ohio State University. “While past studies hypothesized the tropical dominance of past methane sources, with this new core we can confidently confirm that the region was likely responsible for more of these emissions than we assumed before.”

The study was published today (Aug. 19, 2026) in Nature.

The second-most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon-dioxide, methane traps about 28 times more heat, meaning it contributes greatly to the planet’s warming. This study was the first to sample ice cores from Huascaran to identify the historic sources of these powerful gases.

After collection, five ice core samples were selected from different depths in the core to correspond to key periods in time. Lamantia’s colleagues then tested it for the presence of specific isotopes, chemical signatures that are used to determine the origins of the greenhouse gases.

“Depending on the source signature, it is possible to differentiate where the methane originated, letting us separate natural sources from fossil fuels,” said Lamantia, now a Royal Society Newton International Fellow at the University of Bristol. “Our sample revealed a globally well-mixed signature, but methane emissions lean slightly towards a more biogenic source, potentially from the wetlands in South America or Asia.”

Researchers also found that more recent measurements from the ice matched well with observations from the Mauna Loa base station in Hawaii, the global center for monitoring greenhouse gases.

According to the study, previous reconstructions of historical methane records point to the same trends shown in this paper, but because those were built solely around polar ice cores — collected from Greenland and Antarctica — they may have underestimated the importance of tropical emissions.

The researchers noticed spikes in their tropical methane record that could be attributed to events like the rise and fall of the Inca Empire, as well as the Little Ice Age, which could be helpful markers for assessing their data against other models.

Overall, the data from this work strengthens historical climate records and further solidifies the significant role the tropics play in both monitoring and understanding the distribution of global greenhouse gas emissions, said Lamantia.

Learning more about global sources of greenhouse gases can help researchers propose steps to mitigate increased warming, but opportunities to extend the analysis to more targeted ice core sampling in the tropics are rare due to rapid glacier melt. Still, these findings open up new pathways to help resolve other pressing environmental uncertainties, said Lamantia.

“My hope is that this data will be integrated into future climate models,” she said. “Because if we can understand Earth’s past, we can better understand the present and plan for our future.”

This study was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Volo Foundation.

Other co-authors include Lonnie Thompson, Mary Davis, Emilie Beaudon, and Ellen Mosley-Thompson from Ohio State, as well as Ben Riddell-Young from the University of Colorado Boulder, Newton Nguyen from Stanford University, and Ivo Strawson and Edward J. Brook from Oregon State University.

Green hydrogen, produced when water is split into hydrogen and oxygen using a process called electrolysis, is a promising tool for decarbonizing the planet: Unlike power created by burning fossil fuels, when run on renewable electricity, it has no negative impact on the environment.

Accordingly, as reliable energy sources become increasingly vital for ensuring a consistent and enduring global energy supply, many industries are pivoting to embrace next-generation zero-emission technologies, said Tomaz Neves-Garcia, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University.

“Carbon dioxide is an abundant resource that we need to make an effort to capture and utilize,” he said. “When paired with industrial waste, it can be transformed into valuable products, so we came up with a process where instead of releasing its energy, we actually harvest it from the capturing process to produce green hydrogen and valuable calcite.”

In the first demonstration of their technology, the team successfully captured carbon dioxide (CO₂) using industrial by-products such as steel slag and coal ash. The gas reacted with those materials to permanently form high-purity calcite, a widely used industrial mineral with applications ranging from construction materials to pharmaceuticals and agriculture.

The team’s results showed that the chemical reactions their process created reduced the energy required for water electrolysis and green hydrogen production. This also meant the team was able to produce hydrogen with negative emissions by employing widely available grid electricity, paving the way for hydrogen to be produced in a much more effective and cheaper way than traditional methods of generation, which require significant amounts of electricity.

“Our technology does not treat CO₂ as a burden that must be managed,” said Neves-Garcia. “Instead of wasting energy, we are actually creating value and creating energy. This is what makes the potential of this process really impactful.”

The study was published July 8 in the journal ACS Energy Letters.

While utilizing green hydrogen offers many environmental benefits, researchers have also noted that widespread adoption would greatly benefit the global economy.

For instance, because the team’s new chemical process doesn’t rely on specialized materials to capture carbon dioxide, their findings introduce a sustainable way for steel and coal industries to transform unwanted waste into valuable calcite products, said Robert Baker, senior author of the study and a professor in chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State.

“This technology is exciting because it takes two abundant waste streams and converts them to valuable products, which are in high demand for fuels and manufacturing,” said Baker. “It also has the potential to make a significant economic impact without relying on carbon credits, government subsidies or environmental mandates.”

According to the study, when combined with the value of the calcite co-product, the projected cost of production is less than $1 per kilogram, making their green hydrogen scalable and readily competitive with the cost of producing conventional fossil-fuel-derived hydrogen.

While both methods have limitations and advantages, if this team’s process is widely implemented across interconnected sectors, researchers estimate the study’s technology could prevent about 500 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution annually. Beyond helping to protect the environment, their solution to mitigate these greenhouse gases represents an abundant and inexpensive carbon source that could be utilized for sustainable manufacturing of many other much-needed complex materials and chemicals.

As investment in green technologies grows worldwide, researchers say, this work emphasizes the importance of major chemical leaps in expanding energy systems and reducing our carbon footprint.

“Climate solutions do not only not have to be more expensive, they can also be simpler, scalable and economically attractive,” said Neves-Garcia. “We have the ability now to implement them.”

Corrado Masciocchi, an undergraduate research fellow at Ohio State, was also a co-author. This work was supported by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation.

As emerging threats such as warming temperatures, pollution and other cumulative stressors put pressure on freshwater populations and contribute to global biodiversity crises, experts have sought to assess how effective environmental protections are at curbing this decline. 

Now, researchers have revealed that long-term improvements in water quality, as well as the increased occurrence of certain aquatic species, are likely associated with the implementation of broad environmental regulations such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

“Rivers provide a lot of cultural, recreational and ecosystem services, and we also depend on fresh and clean water to survive,” said Casey Pennock, senior author of the study and an assistant professor in the aquatic ecology laboratory at The Ohio State University. “That’s really the motivation behind these conservation policies, to ensure that the natural environment is usable for both wildlife and all other things we care about.”

Aside from negatively impacting local biodiversity, contaminated water can destroy fishing industries and damage human health. It’s thanks to widespread environmental protections that water quality in the U.S. is better today than it was only a few decades ago, said Pennock. His team’s newfound evidence for this claim stems from water quality and aquatic species data collected between 1970 and 2023 across seven major river basins in Ohio. 

By using that data to analyze how fish, insects and freshwater mussel communities changed over time, the team’s findings showed that lower levels of pollutants in rivers — such as zinc, ammonia and lead — corresponded to increases in range for many aquatic species. These findings suggest the affected groups were those with heightened sensitivity to poor water quality.

Their observations indicated that as water quality improved, 71 fish species and 171 insect groups became more common across the state of Ohio, large river basins, with only a few species decreasing. Freshwater mussels, however, experienced mixed responses over time, with nine species increasing and 10 decreasing in occurrence. The composition of fish, aquatic insects and freshwater mussels also changed significantly over time in all seven river basins researchers studied.  

“Ecological communities are not static; they’re dynamic systems,” said Pennock. “Monitoring them is important to assessing how their trajectories change as new contaminants come online.” 

The study was recently published in the journal Ecological Indicators.

Despite how critical freshwater diversity is to the health of all of Earth’s ecosystems, it can be difficult for people to link the issue of conservation to the benefits they reap from it – such as protection from infectious diseases and a safe drinking water supply – in their everyday lives, said Lindsey Bruckerhoff, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor in the aquatic ecology laboratory at Ohio State.

“Our work revolves around trying to prevent further declines of imperiled species and keep diversity on the landscape,” she said. “So extensive research like this that highlights the positive effects of those systems on humans is incredibly rare.”

Additionally, as a lack of broad-scale monitoring efforts has made it difficult for researchers to document species-specific responses to prolonged environmental changes, this study, which compiles observations from numerous archives, is a vital addition to future conservation efforts.  

“We now have a dataset where we can actually analyze long-term biodiversity trends,” said Bruckerhoff. “It’s really exciting to be able to chart success in that way.”

According to the study, implementing nationwide policies also motivates municipalities to upgrade their own conservation initiatives. In response to the Clean Water Act, for example, Columbus instituted a $200 million municipal wastewater upgrade initiative for the Scioto River, leading to significant declines in levels of ammonia and heavy metals that continue to decrease today.

Overall, their results suggest that policies that promote conservation gains for animals like fish and insects and, by extension, protect human health, should remain in place, the researchers say. These outcomes also provide evidence of the benefits derived from environmental regulations. 

“This work shows there’s still more work to do,” said Pennock. “It tells us that if we deregulate or allow more pollution to happen, then those gains could reverse themselves, to our detriment.” 

This study was supported by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Ohio Biodiversity Conservation Partnership. Other Ohio State co-authors include Seth Drake and Nathaniel Shoobs, as well as Robert Miltner from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.

Paleontologists uncovered this finding by studying wear on the fossilized teeth of Maiasaura peeblesorum, a duck-billed dinosaur species that lived about 75 to 80 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous. First discovered in Montana, these large, herbivorous dinosaurs lived in herds and were thought to have been highly social creatures, especially in contrast to those that may have had different reproductive strategies. 

Extensive fossil findings of preserved Maiasaura nests have since made them a key species for understanding the reproductive behaviors and ecology of many other types of duck-billed dinosaurs. Now, closer analysis of their dental wear patterns has revealed that while juvenile Maiasaura teeth had significantly more crushing wear, adults exhibited more shearing wear, suggesting parents could have been bringing softer, higher-protein food to their children than they themselves ate. 

Today, this behavior is typical of birds whose young are confined to the nest for a time after hatching, said John Hunter, lead author of the study and an associate professor in evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University, meaning that these dinosaurs could have exhibited a level of parental care unusual for most species on Earth at the time.  

“The urge for a bird to feed a youngster is a very old behavior,” said Hunter. “What we’re providing is that evidence for that behavior probably goes much further than the origin of birds, perhaps to the origin of dinosaurs.”

Learning more about which social behaviors may have endured throughout evolutionary history can give scientists a better glimpse into how organisms made a living tens of millions of years ago, as well as help predict traits modern animals might pass on to their descendants. 

The study was recently published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.

Researchers specifically detail that juvenile Maiasaura likely ate more nutritious low-fiber foods like fruit while their caretakers consumed a greater proportion of tougher, nutritionally poor high-fiber plant parts. In mammals today, the same patterns of shearing wear would likely be present in grazers like horses, antelopes and cows, while low-fiber diet eaters like tapirs would have dental patterns similar to the young dinosaurs. 

In comparing the types of wear on dinosaur teeth, researchers also suggested that shifts in diet may have also performed an important role in early growth and development. In this instance, their results show that the diet of juvenile Maiasaura may have caused them to grow particularly fast in their first year.

The study also considers other interpretations of their results. Instead of consuming completely different fare, dinosaur parents could have been feeding their young partially regurgitated food, yet another behavior now common in birds. Alternatively, juveniles could also have left the nest to forage for themselves, an activity now seen in modern herbivorous lizards.  

While that solution is less likely as juveniles were helpless, and probably dependent on their parents to feed them during the first weeks after hatching, learning more about their remains can widen scientists’ perspectives of what sophisticated biological and social systems dinosaurs may have had, said Hunter.

“The further back in time you go, the less of a fossil record you have, so paleontologists have to draw from different sources of inspiration from different parts of the living,” he said. “So even among closely related dinosaurs, there is probably still quite a bit to learn about them.”

If possible, future studies could examine other fossils of the very youngest dinosaurs for dental microwear to test other hypotheses regarding dinosaur embryos and hatchlings.

Christine Janis from the University of Bristol and the University of Brown was a co-author. This work was supported by Brown University.

In a large-scale field experiment, researchers planted 640 tree saplings across 20 parks in Dayton, Ohio, and implemented varying irrigation methods. After monitoring sapling survival, growth and health in response to their irrigation methods and nearby temperatures, the team found that the effects of both water treatment and surrounding heat varied among tree species. 

An analysis of saplings at season’s end revealed an overall survival rate of about 48%, indicating that irrigation approaches impacted species’ health differently: Certain species, such as red maple, northern catalpa and honey locust, consistently thrived over others, particularly the white oak, black gum and sassafras saplings. 

Understanding the causes behind these environmental disparities could make urban forests both a lucrative and sustainable option for preventive climate action, said Erika Wright, first author of the study and a graduate student in entomology at The Ohio State University.

“People don’t necessarily think of how their yard connects to the surrounding environment, but we all contribute to the urban forest by planting in our own space,” said Wright. 

Urban forests — essentially functioning as citywide ecosystems because they include all the green spaces in a community — also provide valuable benefits to the health and well-being of local residents. Besides beautifying the environment and supporting biodiversity and wildlife, increased shade offers natural cooling that can reduce consumers’ summer electricity usage.  

Yet obstacles to expanding urban forests often include limited financial and labor resources to care for and maintain them, said Wright. To better consider these challenges, researchers sought to partner on a planting project with a legacy city, an urban area that once had a booming economy but whose shrinking population now lacks the means to manage long-term reforestation projects. 

“It’s going to keep getting hotter in the future,” said Wright. “So we need to know if we should be trying to create environments that are more resilient to those changes.”

The study was recently published in the journal Urban Forestry & Urban Greening. 

The study goal was to test the efficacy of different irrigation strategies on tree development, but with the saplings scattered throughout the city, researchers did not have access to public water sources and had to rely on water transported from nearby fire hydrants. 

Nonetheless, the team predicted that irrigation investments with higher input costs would lead to higher sapling survival, increased growth and improved health compared to less costly irrigation investments, outcomes expected to be partly related to lower water stress in regularly watered saplings.  

Actual sapling survival rates turned out to be slightly lower than the five-year post planting survival rates recorded in previous studies, but the researchers did find that the best watering tactic involved using gator bags – plastic bags that are typically applied for slow-release watering. 

While filling them once per month was not labor-intensive, researchers did note that the up-front and replacement cost of gator bags was high, illustrating the challenging nature of even securing the right supplies to successfully establish and expand urban forests, said Mary Gardiner, senior author of the study and a professor of entomology at Ohio State.

“When a city invests in reforestation of a park, you have to plant more trees than you want to last long term because there will be some percentage that dies off,” said Gardiner. “But even small differences in management can mean huge variations in survivorship.”

According to the study, of the 640 trees seeded, a large portion either went missing or were destroyed by outside factors, likely due to environmental or human interference. “Even after the trees were pretty well established, we saw losses, which was surprising,” said Wright.   

For legacy cities, such threats make gator bags a low- to mid-cost irrigation option as long as precautions like protective fencing are taken to ensure that the bags are not damaged. These investments, combined with having volunteers ensure sapling stock is of high quality before planting, could lead to impressive strides in future forest growth, said Gardiner. 

Overall, while the study’s results indicate that certain species performed better under heat and water stress, researchers don’t recommend limiting planting to only those few species, as urban forests with a mix of trees tend to be more resilient to pest and disease outbreaks.   

Instead, researchers recommend a tailored approach that takes elements like tree species, irrigation resources and surrounding infrastructure into consideration. It may also be worth exploring whether urban forest resilience could be bolstered by non-native tree species.

“Looking for cost-effective strategies for cities to be resilient in the face of a warming climate is an important tactic,” said Gardiner. “Conservation like this leads to a great payoff in the long term.”

Other co-authors include Ellen Danford and Samuel Ward from Ohio State and Christopher Riley with the Bartlett Tree Research Laboratories.

Now, using a novel technique that enables researchers to directly analyze millions of individual particles at once, a new study has revealed that specks of dust trapped in Antarctic ice likely originated from a common source during the last Ice Age, between about 120,000 and 11,500 years ago. 

To determine this, a team led by Stanislav Kutuzov, lead author of the study and a researcher in earth sciences at The Ohio State University, examined more than 2 million particles from ice core samples taken from Taylor Glacier in coastal East Antarctica. The researchers found that major shifts in the number and concentration of dust grains that settled during this time period were likely linked to large-scale environmental shifts in Earth’s southern hemisphere. 

“This result implies that atmospheric circulation changed when we transitioned to a warmer period, and sources like Australia and New Zealand began to contribute to local dust deposition,” said Kutuzov.

Gaining a better understanding of these sources can offer clues into ancient climate systems, as well as improve  predictions about how those systems may behave in the future. 

Overall, the breadth of compositional data gathered in this work is consistent with results from past ice core investigations. However, this team’s more precise measurement method – identifying and analyzing thousands of distinct particles with a specific type of mass spectrometry – offers substantially more insight about the mineralogy of the dust particles, confirming that this new technique can act as a powerful tool for environmental nanoscience. 

“Normally, we are limited with analysis due to our sample volume,” said Kutuzov. “But the way this new technique works, it only requires a tiny amount of water to detect a huge amount of information about each particle.”

The study was recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Ice cores, precious scientific tools for studying Earth’s past environmental memories, are increasingly endangered as global temperatures rise. Before they are lost to glacier melt, scientists are racing to survey and preserve them from as many global areas as they can. 

Tropical glaciers such as the Quelccaya Ice Cap or Nevado Huascarán, for instance, have dust records that reflect regional signals, whereas dust found in more environmentally pristine areas such as Greenland and Antarctica tends to capture global changes to Earth’s atmosphere. 

What’s more, unlike traditional ice cores that are drilled vertically from the glacier’s surface down to bedrock, the Taylor Glacier ice core samples were collected horizontally, a method that can give researchers a more detailed look into a single specific time period. 

This ability allowed the team to observe that the type and amount of dust in the atmosphere changed during this period, as well as note an uptick of iron in the air, a critical nutrient associated with ocean bioactivity. 

“We went from a much colder, drier, dustier world to transitioning toward a more humid world leading up to the Holocene,” said Kutuzov. “We see a relative enrichment in iron oxide at this time and with so much soluble iron available, theories suggest these conditions could have supported a lot more life.”

Their analysis also identified the presence of thousands of volcanic particles in the ice core, likely as a result of occasional Victoria Land volcano eruptions nearly 14,800 years ago. Kutuzov said scientists could use these findings to develop a much-needed reference database for various minerals such as volcanic glass and dust from well-known source regions, especially as next-generation technologies inspire new ways to study ice cores. 

“Using this new method to confirm what was known before with more certainty shows that it could be applied to different places and events where we don’t know what happened,” he said. Other such places could even include other planets, as researchers prepare for future glacial explorations on those that also have water-ice, like Mars or Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. 

“There’s so much excitement for these instruments that more and more researchers are applying them to look at their data from a completely different angle,” said Kutuzov. “There are still unknowns, but discoveries like this are what push science.”

Co-authors include John Olesik, Madeleine Lomax-Vogt and Lucas Carter from Ohio State; Gregory Lowry, Garret Bland, Jonas Wielinski and Ryan Sullivan from Carnegie Mellon University; and Paolo Gabrielli from the University of Turin in Italy. This study was supported by the U.S. Ice Drilling Program. 

Using satellite data from NASA’s GRACE missions, results show that these extensive glacier systems, often called the “water towers of Asia,” experienced significant losses in mass between 2002 and 2023. These findings reveal that if the extreme conditions that led to this decline continue, enhanced glacier melt could intensify short-term flood risks and substantially reduce long-term meltwater availability. The researchers say the findings underscore the need for reduced greenhouse gas emissions to stave off glacier melt and preserve a larger fraction of the region’s cryospheric water storage. 

Because communities in the area often rely on the glacier’s large meltwater stores for hydropower generation, renewable energy and large-scale irrigation systems, any changes in glacier size will have direct implications for local water security, agriculture and natural hazard management, said Jaydeo Dharpure, lead author of the study and a former postdoctoral research associate at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at The Ohio State University. 

“Decreasing glacial mass change can threaten infrastructure and increase the risk of loss of life,” he said. “While some ice losses and major disturbances are inevitable, glaciers play an important role for people living beside them, so learning to better monitor their evolutions is a must.”

The study was recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.

There are currently more than 95,000 glaciers located in High Mountain Asia, most of which are spread across about 15 sub-regions, or smaller ecological areas. 

To better grasp the extent of mass loss from these critical glaciers, researchers examined changes in Earth’s gravity field to determine how much frozen water was lost or added to the glaciers each year. Machine learning models were also used to address mission gaps in long-term glacier monitoring. In all, the team found that while water and ice loss steadily went up throughout the years, there was pronounced melt variability across certain subregions. 

Eastern Kunlun, for example, a mountain system that lies between the Tibetan Plateau and the Tarim Basin in western China, gained ice over the last few decades, but West Tien Shan, a mountain range that stretches in the opposite direction, did experience rapid mass losses. 

According to the study, the differences in outcomes for these subregions could have been caused by rising global temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, or even radiation emitted by the sun. But while challenging to study, because the glacier system in High Mountain Asia significantly influences global climate regulation, using new techniques to understand how the region reacts to these drivers as a whole is potentially one of the best ways future scientists can create more accurate global climate models, said Dharpure. 

“This is important work, because if these glaciers vanish in the future, downstream communities won’t just experience drinking or agricultural water shortages,” he said. 

Instead, melting glaciers would form new, uncharted lakes and rivers that continue to accumulate water, putting nearby communities in jeopardy, he said. “So scientists should be prepared to monitor how dangerous the many issues that disappearing glaciers cause will be for the billions of people they touch,” said Dharpure. 

Co-authors include Ohio State’s Ian Howat and Akansha Patel from Texas A&M University AgriLife. This work was supported by Ohio State’s Byrd Postdoctoral Fellowship. 

The team’s AI, called the LoRA-Enhanced Ground-view Generation (LEGG) diffusion model, is trained on real aerial drone images that it uses to create highly photorealistic 3D reconstructions of the ground. Creating imagery detailed enough to fully capture a region’s physical characteristics distinguishes this synthetic model, enabling it to recognize complex visual patterns and predict where structures may be damaged, even in densely populated urban areas.  

“What our algorithm does is generate thousands of pairs of semi-realistic photos of what a building looks like on the top and from the ground,” said Rongjun Qin, co-author of the study and a professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University. “Having such data is vital, as drones gather important information from above, but people actually make emergency decisions from ground-level views.”

Similar studies on the aftermath of devastating earthquakes relied on UAV or lidar-based detection methods to survey collapsed buildings and structures from above, but none had addressed how damage might have looked on the ground prior to prolonged rescue efforts. Moreover, depending on the severity of the earthquake, manual damage assessments can take days or weeks to fully complete, which isn’t ideal for rapid recovery missions.   

In this paper, Qin and his colleagues introduce a framework for bridging these gaps using AI-generated images, with the aim of laying the foundation for more accurate disaster assessment and better earthquake preparedness. 

“This simulation is essentially a map, but an experienced and well-trained AI could offer an additional supply of information that would be really helpful for emergency crews in making quick decisions about where to go when the clock is ticking,” said Qin. 

The study was published in the International Journal of Remote Sensing.

To test the applicability of their proposed algorithm, researchers conducted a case study on a real-world disaster, the 2023 Kahramanmaras, Turkey, earthquake, a powerful 7.8 magnitude quake that destroyed 280,000 buildings and damaged at least 700,000 more. Comparing drone imagery from 2015 to photos taken in the days after the shake revealed dramatic changes in the local built environment, such as collapsed buildings and temporary shelters in open areas. 

After showing their AI a dataset of only 3,000 of these city structures, the model was able to create images that enhanced the recognition of a number of building issues, including façade cracks, building tilts and partial collapses, demonstrating that it could extract subtle cues from multiple sources to generate high-resolution, photorealistic street-level views.

This advanced capability stems from the combination of drone and ground imagery that researchers injected it with to ensure the model had a strong starting point for understanding potential structural damage and its community effects, said Qin. 

“As long as you have good data, AI can serve as a very generous predictor of past and future outcomes,” he said. “It’s a tool that can be incredibly helpful.”

In the future, applying the team’s framework to novel scenarios or areas could inspire governments and engineers to design more resilient infrastructures as well as reshape post-disaster assessment and emergency management policies. 

“This work presents a great opportunity for engineers and other decision makers to remotely assess the damage in structures soon after a disaster,” said Halil Sezen, co-author of the paper and a professor of structural engineering in civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at Ohio State.

That said, their algorithm will likely be utilized in tandem with other emergency or resource planning tools, said Qin, noting that with more in-depth experiments, the model could help anticipate destruction levels in other earthquake-prone environments, like Japan or California. 

“There is still a lot of work to be done to bring in the kind of perspective AI offers,” said Qin. “But the more good quality data that we have, the faster we’re going to achieve our goals.”

Co-authors include Ohio State’s Ningli Xu, Abdullah Türer, Abdulmajeed Batarfi, and Hessah Albanwan from Kuwait University. This work was supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye, the Ministry of Environment, Urbanization, and Climate Change of the Republic of Türkiye as well as the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) and the Office of Naval Research. 

As one of the most mysterious of our planet’s natural disasters, earthquakes’ location and timing have been impossible to precisely predict. But scientists do know that the most destructive of these events occur in subduction zones, regions where tectonic plates often collide and shift past one another. 

These zones of immense activity make them ideal places to search for phenomena that could herald future quakes. To that end, previous studies have suggested that satellite data could be the key to early warnings months ahead of big earthquakes, challenging the belief that large earthquakes are immune to precision forecasting in time. 

Now, by analyzing measurements made by NASA’s GRACE and GRACE-FO satellites, researchers found that relying on precursors formed from single data points is largely invalid, said Lei Wang, author of the study and an associate professor in civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University. 

“Earthquake risk can be affected by a lot of different factors,” said Wang. “Many also happen over hundreds and tens of hundreds of years apart, so a few decades of modern data isn’t sufficient enough to accurately predict them.” The research was recently presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

While scientists have gained insights into the processes that trigger earthquakes, being able to offer advance notice of these volatile events is still a challenge they haven’t overcome. Instead, such programs work by detecting fast-moving seismic waves quickly enough that those nearby can be alerted, usually only seconds to minutes before shaking arrives.

In contrast to earthquake data gathered by sensor instruments on the ground, the twin GRACE satellites monitor changes in Earth’s gravity and track mass water redistribution in reservoirs over land, ice and in the oceans. In this study, the team used their data to determine if large-scale gravity changes had been detected several hundred miles below ground in the months before the 2010 8.8 Maule earthquake in Chile and the 2011 9.0 Tohoku megathrust earthquake in Japan. 

After comprehensively analyzing and comparing multiple gravity data solutions with other anomalous GPS statistics around the globe, the team concluded that satellites are no better at predicting changes under the earth than any other conventional geodetic techniques. 

“If satellites actually could detect anomalous changes to Earth’s uniform gravity, it would revolutionize our understanding of earthquake mechanisms and shed new light on prediction and mitigation science,” said Wang. “But there’s no solid evidence for it.”

Even if satellites could reveal signs of future earthquakes, it’s likely this method wouldn’t be useful on a global scale, especially in areas that show distinct earthquake mechanisms, said Dhamsith Weerasinghe, co-author of the study and a PhD student in civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at Ohio State. 

“Even if we modeled a known place, we couldn’t apply those findings to another because of the different geometry and different material in that environment,” said Weerasinghe. “It’d take too long to discover and understand certain changes.”

To keep refining the method, the team plans to examine if there were any notable gravity precursors to the 8.8 earthquake that took place this year in Kamchatka, Russia. In the meantime, Wang hopes this work will help future scientists learn how to combine historical data with new advances in geodesy and environmental monitoring. 

“To accurately predict an earthquake that is days or hours away, the technology we have now is a little premature,” said Wang. “That’s why we need some young people with passion to jump in and make promising strides in the field.”

To unravel the cause behind this spike, researchers used nationwide forest data to examine how six environmental factors may have contributed to the increase in carbon sequestered by forests. They found that natural forces such as increasing temperatures, shifting precipitation, and carbon fertilization are among the largest contributors to carbon gains, but human drivers, like letting forests get older and planting trees, are also becoming bigger factors.

Since most decarbonization efforts focus on curbing active emissions, this new analysis aims to help researchers better separate what portion of carbon held by forests is related to human action and which portion isn’t, said Brent Sohngen, co-author of the study and a professor of environmental and resource economics at The Ohio State University.  

“Identifying and separating these influences hasn’t really been done before,” said Sohngen. “But with this data, the U.S. can be much more explicit about its carbon accounting, and that ability will provide a lot more information and long-term benefits for people who manage their forests and try to create carbon sinks.”

The study was published recently (Jan. 20, 2026) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Forests act as vital tools to slow warming of the planet, as the more carbon that trees sequester, the less there is in the atmosphere. Large areas such as the Amazon Rainforest and the Congo Basin are known as “passive” carbon sinks because they absorb more carbon than they release without the need for human intervention. 

In temperate regions, forests like Ohio’s Wayne National Forest are more likely to become carbon sources because they require extensive active inputs, such as tree-planting or other forest management activities to remain a strong sink, said Sohngen.

“The forests that we aren’t managing are doing exactly what we want them to do, which is to be ecosystem buffers,” he said. “That’s a good thing, but as we hit global carbon thresholds, the strength and size of that sink is slowing down in all these forests.”

The study looked at six drivers – temperature, precipitation, carbon dioxide, management, age composition and area – and the team was surprised by exactly how much natural factors influenced the total amount of carbon stored by U.S. forests. For instance, changes in temperature and precipitation from 2005 to 2022 led to an increase of 66 million metric tons of carbon sequestration per year. 

During the same period, human intervention had both negative and positive effects, as human-caused deforestation reduced stored forest carbon by about 31 million tons per year, while activities like tree-planting and reforestation added about 23 million tons per year. Yet it was forest age — mostly structural changes in the peak growth stages of local trees — that helped lock in the most carbon, by 89 million metric tons per year.

Overall, these results suggest that while climate policies are doing their part to mitigate current climate challenges, scientists should also recognize the extent to which natural processes continue to shape our world. 

This work also highlights the vast difference in the amount of carbon forests can absorb naturally versus when they are actively managed. If used in tandem with other environmental analyses, these findings may help other countries better plan how to utilize their national forest inventories to meet future net-zero requirements, said Sohngen. 

Going forward, researchers may seek to localize their observations further, as having more detailed state or county carbon forestry data could help inform conservationists and wildlife managers on how to optimize the well-being of their land on a local rather than regional level.

“We have to think about how we start to address the impacts of climate change in parts of the country where there’s a slowdown of forest growth, and figure out how to adapt a region’s forests  to the best climate future possible,” said Sohngen.  

Co-authors include Eric C. Davis from the United States Department of Agriculture-Economic Research Service, and David J. Lewis from Oregon State University. The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. 

Trees are the planet’s living lungs; they remove carbon from the atmosphere to clean the air, and filter our water. Yet depending on their species, not all record long-term environmental changes, such as fires, floods and droughts, in the same way. 

By analyzing how various types of tree rings grow in response to these distinct weather-related events, researchers discovered that some can act as useful tools in managing local watersheds, that drain water into nearby streams and rivers. 

Specifically, they found that trees in the Midwest are extremely apt at recalling past wet and dry conditions, noting that using more than one type of tree’s rings to reconstruct previous environmental periods can paint a much more accurate picture of the region’s current water ecosystem.

“One human lifespan is not going to show us the big picture,” said Alessandra Bertucci, lead author of the study and a graduate student in food, agricultural and biological engineering at The Ohio State University. “So using trees to address these gaps of understanding is really important for managing water resources, even in intensively managed watersheds.“ 

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, healthy watersheds serve nature by helping to ensure water quality, connecting aquatic habitats and ecosystems, and shaping diverse biological communities. But when left unprotected, they eventually degrade, leading to issues like less productive fisheries and polluted drinking water.

Consequently, as the planet continues to warm and water resources are impacted, learning new ways to manage altered watersheds is an urgent priority, said Bertucci. The research was presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

While tree ring chronologies are often used to understand long-term climate changes in the western United States, the tool is often left out of similar studies of the Midwest, where large-scale agricultural production relies heavily on the health of local watersheds. Additionally, already scarce instrumental data in some areas can make it difficult for researchers to grasp historical trends in the region, resulting in misleading estimates about past events, said Bertucci. 

These hurdles motivated Bertucci’s team to retrieve tree cores from places where watershed data reporting is sorely lacking, such the Old Woman Creek State Nature Preserve near Lake Erie in northern Ohio. There, they took samples from three species of common riparian trees and will plan to compare aspects like ring width and density to real recorded climate data.

Now, with updated measurements, the team expects to be able to build models that could predict how weather and local water flow will change over the next few decades. 

“If we can round out that historical data and understand what to expect, we can better plan for how to manage our water resources in the future,” said Bertucci. These improved solutions might include helping local resource managers determine which environmental conditions to focus on accounting for when coming up with smart water-saving strategies. 

In the future, the team will work to increase the range of tree species they sample and utilize the expanded data they gather to create better reconstruction models of other important watersheds. These models may be especially helpful to farmers in the Midwest, and later on, the United States as a whole. 

“Water is life,” said Bertucci. “We literally cannot live without it, so it’s important to protect and make sure that we are taking care of it, because that is our lifeline.”

Bertucci conducted the research with Lorrayne Miralha, assistant professor of food, agricultural and biological engineering at Ohio State. 

From transportation and telecommunications to finance and public infrastructure, nearly all sectors depend on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) such as GPS for critical positioning, navigation and timing information. Yet as these signals are highly susceptible to interference like intentional jamming and spoofing, new technologies are needed to counter this dependence. 

Now, by exploiting signals from the Starlink and OneWeb constellations — satellites primarily used to deliver secure internet connectivity — researchers found they could be used to improve ship navigation accuracy in the Arctic, an area where GPS coverage and signals are typically degraded. Results showed that exploiting Starlink and OneWeb LEO signals with height data from a ship sailing off the west coast of Greenland significantly increased navigation accuracy, effectively reducing errors from more than a kilometer (without GPS) to 27 meters.

Being able to yield more precise navigation data in such a challenging region like the Arctic means that safe and effective satellite “eavesdropping” may be feasible from nearly anywhere on Earth, said Zak Kassas, co-author of the study and TRC Endowed Chair in Intelligent Transportation Systems and professor of electrical and computer engineering at The Ohio State University. 

“When you lose GPS on a plane or a ship there is no solution at the time being,” said Kassas, who is also director of Ohio State’s Department of Transportation Center for Automated Vehicles Research with Multimodal AssurEd Navigation (CARMEN). “What we showed is that there are solutions ready to be deployed in the field with existing systems.”

The study was recently presented at the 43rd IEEE Military Communications Conference in Los Angeles. It won the IEEE Frederick W. Ellersick Award for the Best Paper in the Unclassified Technical Program. 

This work builds off previous work from Kassas’ ASPIN lab that was the first to exploit Starlink for positioning. Efforts to scale up that research led the team to seek ways to improve their system using ground receivers that can passively listen to frequencies emitted from multiple LEO satellite constellations. Since then, Kassas’ team has demonstrated navigation with LEO satellites across the U.S., from St. Louis on a stationary receiver, to Pittsburgh on a ground vehicle, to Albuquerque on an extremely high-altitude balloon, to Columbus on a ground vehicle and a drone. In their latest experiment, they decided to leave the heartland.

In this experiment, they decided to test their work in the Arctic, as OneWeb’s 600 satellites are plentiful near the north and south poles, while Starlink’s more than 7,000 satellites are present across all other latitudes. 

“We can be smart about what we have already in the environment and use it to navigate,” said Kassas. “Ambient signals, whether they are terrestrial or non-terrestrial (such as LEO), are extremely useful for navigation if you know how to use them.”

According to Kassas, the researchers did not need assistance from the satellite operators (SpaceX and Eutelsat) to use the signals, and they emphasized that they had no access to the actual data being sent through the satellites – only to publicly available information related to the satellites’ downlink transmission frequency and a rough estimate of the satellites’ location.

This discovery, that even satellites that were not intended for navigation can be repurposed and tailored for location services, means that substantially advancing next-gen GNSS systems may be closer and more affordable than researchers thought. According to the study, these results have vital implications for aerospace and defense, and more importantly, because signals from LEO satellites are thousands of times more powerful than GNSS, they would be more secure and much harder to interrupt by bad actors. 

“If someone wants to interfere with LEO signals, they would have to put more effort into it,” said Kassas. The study also suggests that better navigation signal security might lower the risk of international incidents, as many officials suspect escalating cyberattacks caused both the Strait of Hormuz ship collision and the downing of the Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243. 

“Those cyberattacks on GPS are becoming the bread and butter of electronic warfare, and it’s spilling over to civilian systems,” said Kassas. Unsurprisingly, these issues mean that scientists and policymakers can’t afford to wait years to engineer new GNSS workarounds. Instead, the team feels that implementing the systems they’ve presented may be where optimization lies. 

“Our approach is economical, alleviating the need to build and operate new dedicated navigation systems, and sustainable, preserving the scarce spectrum and our space environment, so we believe it will be integrated into future navigation systems,” said Kassas. “We are showing that this dream can be a reality.”

Other co-authors include Will Barrett and Sharbel Kozhaya from Ohio State and David Marsh from The Wilson Center. 

Findings showed that communities that added green infrastructure — systems designed to protect the natural water cycle, such as rain gardens or constructed wetlands — saw a notable reduction in cadmium, copper, nickel and zinc being sent into local waterways. All of these are heavy metals harmful to human health in large concentrations. 

Using these systems to manage stormwater flow at the source is imperative to preserving our environment, said Joseph Smith, lead author of the study and a researcher in food, agricultural and biological engineering at The Ohio State University. 

“Humans cause a lot of alterations to the environment,” said Smith. “So things like rain gardens allow nature to return to how it’s supposed to work.” 

The study was recently published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials. 

The project is part of Blueprint Columbus, a 30-year community effort to install green infrastructure into local neighborhoods. The goal is to address sanitary sewer overflows and reduce total suspended solids pollution in runoff by 20%.

After studying the performance of two watersheds in the Clintonville neighborhood of Columbus in managing stormwater pollution for about 3.5 years, researchers found that once installed, green infrastructure systems exceeded expectations, from mitigating peak storm flow rates and pollution to potentially improving residents’ well-being and altering local biodiversity. In one particular neighborhood, researchers noted that rain gardens worked to prevent a good amount of heavy metal pollution from entering downstream waterways. 

Additionally, because their results were compared to a control watershed – one without green infrastructure – the study was robust enough to determine that the changes the team saw in hydrology, water quality and heavy metals were due to the presence of rain gardens, not seasonal or annual fluctuations in climate, said Smith. 

In short, implementing more of these systems in urban areas could make the city’s ecosystems healthier and more resilient, said Smith. “Not only does green infrastructure improve water quality, but it also helps cities to be cooler because it adds more green space. The goal is to design spaces where people want to walk around and enjoy beautiful surroundings and experience the many ecosystem services created,” he said. 

According to the paper, many of these benefits can also be attributed to the design and continued maintenance of the city’s connected green infrastructure systems. 

“Ohio State’s been involved in this project from multiple angles,” said Smith. “But what made our study really special is that we could see changes that were happening at the pipe level leading to the stream.”

Their results also suggest that engaging with communities to improve public acceptance and functionality of these green measures is of the utmost priority, said Smith. Notably, the long-term success of the project may be achieved by educating homeowners about the benefits of having and maintaining these systems, as some citizens have opposed the addition of green systems to their neighborhoods, raising concerns over safety and convenience. 

“Being involved in this watershed-scale rain garden project has made me realize that while there are lots of benefits for the community, there’s also more we can do to explain how these projects help individuals who live there,” said Smith. 

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, investing in green infrastructure also helps create jobs and other lucrative economic development opportunities for the public. 

For the time being, Blueprint Columbus is expected to continue retrofitting more areas of the city with green infrastructure through at least 2043. Hundreds of rain gardens already exist across the city, but this work emphasizes how important and beneficial it is to protect the environment through proven, eco-friendly methods. 

“Columbus is becoming a leader and model for other municipalities that are facing similar problems,” said Smith. 

Other co-authors include Kay Bernard, Kathryn Boening-Ulman, Jay Martin, R. Andrew Tirpak, David Wituszynski and Ryan Winston, all from Ohio State. This study was supported by the City of Columbus, Ohio. 

This suite of open-source tools, called ECODATA, was designed to support the analysis and visualization of complex datasets, as valuable observations about animal movement are often made by analyzing massive amounts of wildlife tracking data. 

Their tool accomplishes this by creating animations that help ecologists study animal movement, such as how extreme weather conditions or seasonal vegetation growth might influence a species’ normal activities, said Gil Bohrer, co-author of the study and a professor in civil engineering and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University.

“We’re not creating new information, but we are taking data that ecologists typically find hard to utilize and making it easy and accessible,” said Bohrer. “This can help users understand an ecosystem and quickly identify what’s going on, or test a good hypothesis they have.”

ECODATA works by combining direct wildlife location observations with complex remote sensing and geospatial data to process image frames into multiple layers of customizable maps.

For example, in one case study, the researchers used the software to animate movements of elk and wolves in relation to roads, wildlife crossing structures and changes in seasonal vegetation near Banff National Park in Canada.

Although interpreting and integrating large datasets into research and other wildlife applications can be a difficult and tedious process, ECODATA makes it easy to create animations that act as powerful tools for illustrating study results, supporting animal exploration in uncharted territories, and even aiding wildlife managers in garnering support for conservation efforts, said Bohrer. 

“These animations are very effective,” he said. “They can process and plot lots of changing environmental conditions and corresponding animal movement in a really temporally dynamic way.”

The study was recently published in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

Previous attempts at creating user-friendly research software required scientists to have some programming skills, but what makes ECODATA unique is that it is flexible enough that scientists don’t need technical skills to employ it, said Justine Missik, lead author of the study and a researcher in civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at Ohio State.

“There are all sorts of environmental datasets that are out there that are difficult for people to work with,” she said. “Our project was helping address those research gaps.”

In this paper, researchers demonstrated ECODATA’s abilities through two case studies, both of which answered very different questions about its potential uses, said Bohrer. 

In the case study of elk and wolves in Banff, the animation researchers developed showed that both species migrate from the northeast during late spring to their summer range, where some spend considerable time near highways, including during times that coincide with peak annual traffic volumes. 

The second case illustrated how the software could be used in wildlife management, as ECODATA’s animation could inform wildlife managers about the timing and location of caribou movements during their birthing season. These visual insights helped reveal territory in the caribou’s seasonal range that management hadn’t previously recognized. This can help wildlife managers understand the conservation impacts of caribou movements.  

That ECODATA can help identify such situations makes it a valuable resource for many purposes, most notably as an asset for protecting all kinds of wildlife. “These animations are tools to explore the data in a different way, by many different users in many different contexts,” said Bohrer. 

Moving forward, the team hopes that the custom animations ECODATA provides work as a complement to existing research tools and inspire more detailed explorations of ecological models used for impactful, sustainable decision-making. 

Other Ohio State co-authors include Sarah Davidson and Madeline Scyphers, as well as Mark Hebblewhite from the University of Montana, Allicia Kelly from the Government of Northwest Territories in Canada, John Fieberg from the University of Minnesota, Roland Kays from the North Carolina State University, Ashley Lohr from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, and Kelsey Russell and Mike Suitor from the Government of the Yukon in Canada. This work was supported by NASA and the MathWorks MATLAB Community Toolbox Program.

By studying how six months of elevated ocean temperatures would affect a species of coral from the northern Red Sea called Stylophora pistillata, scientists found that although these organisms can certainly survive in conditions that mimic future warming trends, they don’t thrive.

Stylophora pistillata tend to be tolerant of high ocean temperatures, but when continuously exposed to temperatures of 27.5 and 30 degrees Celsius (81.5 and 86 degrees Fahrenheit) — baseline warming expected in tropical oceans by 2050 and 2100 — scientists saw various changes in coral growth, metabolic rates, and even energy reserves. For instance, coral in 27.5 degrees Celsius waters survived, but were 30% smaller than their control group; those placed in 30 degrees Celsius waters wound up being 70% smaller. 

“In theory, if corals in the wild at these temperatures are smaller, reefs might not be as diverse and may not be able to support as much marine life,” said Ann Marie Hulver, lead author of the study and a former graduate student and postdoctoral scholar in earth sciences at The Ohio State University. “This could have adverse effects on people that depend on the reef for tourism, fishing or food.”

Overall, the team’s results suggest that even the most thermally tolerant coral species may suffer in their inability to overcome the consequences of warming seas. 

The study was published today in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

While current predictions for coral reefs are dire, there is some good news. During the first 11 weeks of the experiment, researchers saw that corals were only minimally affected by elevated baseline temperatures. Instead, it was the cumulative impact of chronic high temperatures that compromised coral growth and caused them to experience a higher metabolic demand. 

The coral later recovered after being exposed for a month to 25 degree Celsius waters, but had a dark pigmentation compared to corals that were never heated. This discovery implies that despite facing ever longer periods of threat from high ocean temperatures in the summer months, resilient coral like S. pistillata can bounce back when waters cool in the winter, researchers say. 

Still, as ocean temperatures are expected to increase by 3 degrees Celsius by 2100, expecting coral reefs to predictably bend to projected climate models can be difficult, according to the researchers. 

This team’s research does paint a more detailed picture of how coral reefs may look and function in the next 50 years, said Andrea Grottoli, co-author of the study and a professor in earth sciences at Ohio State.

“Survival is certainly the No. 1 important thing for coral, but when they’re physiologically compromised, they can’t do that forever,” said Grottoli. “So there’s a limit to how long these resilient corals can cope with an ever increasing warming ocean.”

Gaining a more complex understanding of how warming waters can alter coral growth and feeding patterns may also better inform long-term conservation efforts, said Grottoli. 

“Conservation efforts could focus on areas where resilient coral are present and create protected sanctuaries so that there are some ecosystems that grow as high-probability-success reefs for the future,” she said. 

For now, all coral reefs are still in desperate need of protection, researchers note. To that end, Hulver imagines future work could be aimed at investigating the resilience of similar species of coral, including replicating this experiment to determine if sustained warming might cause trade-offs in other biological processes, such as reproduction. 

“For coral, six months is still a very small snapshot of their lives,” said Hulver. “We’ll have to keep on studying them.”

Other Ohio state co-authors include Shannon Dixon and Agustí Muñoz-Garcia as well as Éric Béraud and Christine Ferrier-Pagès from the Centre Scientifique de Monaco, and Aurélie Moya, Rachel Alderdice and Christian R Voolstra from the University of Konstanz. The study was supported by the National Science Foundation and the German Research Foundation. 

While only 10% of Earth is covered in glacial ice, these masses have far-reaching impacts on all the world’s ecosystems. Rapid melting can trigger natural disasters, and glaciers help to regulate the planet’s temperature and sea level and are sources of pristine fresh drinking water.

To better differentiate between seasonal ice loss and that caused by long-term climate trends, researchers studied the fluctuating heights of three glaciers: the La Perouse Glacier in North America, the Viedma Glacier in South America and the Skamri Glacier located in Central Asia.

Their analysis revealed that between 2019 and 2023, the Viedma Glacier (Argentina) and the La Perouse Glacier (Alaska) experienced consistent thinning, but the Skamri Glacier (Pakistan)  had been stable enough to experience a small net gain of ice, said Rongjun Qin, co-author of the study and an associate professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University.

Measurements in this study were made using daily high-resolution images gathered by the PlanetScope satellite constellation, which researchers then used to create 3D reconstructions of how glacial ice flows evolved over time. By incorporating local and global climate data into these models to explore seasonal variations of glacier melt, the team essentially designed a way to monitor the behavior of glaciers across diverse regions.

“This is something that we’ve been thinking about for a long time, because existing glacier studies have such sparse seasonal observations since it’s difficult to get data out of remote areas,” said Qin, who is also a core faculty member of Ohio State’s Translational Data Analytics Institute. “What we wanted to do is to use medium-to-high resolution data to broaden those capabilities and improve the accuracy of the 3D models generated from that data.”

The study was recently published in the journal GIScience & Remote Sensing.

According to the study, while many modern 2D tracking techniques can provide valuable insights into glacier flow, previous studies tend to capture only short-term snapshots or else offer observations without in-depth motion analysis or high-resolution 3D data. This team’s work may help scientists keep better track of seasonal climate issues like glacier melt and expand long-term observations of these masses, and their 3D model method also reveals new data about how quickly the glaciers react to changes in the weather.

The Viedma and Skamri Glaciers, for example, exhibit a 45-day lag time in response to changes in local climate conditions like rain or snow. The La Perouse Glacier, however, was shown to react to changes almost immediately, meaning that its flow can very quickly become faster or slower based on how much precipitation it has accumulated.

In another finding, researchers concluded that behavior differences in all three are driven by distinct environmental and climatic conditions, but suggest that both local and global factors, rather than any single one, are responsible for patterns in glacier motion dynamics worldwide.

Such observations are vital to deepening our global understanding of glacier science, and with further improvements, this study’s algorithm could also be a useful tool for future disaster prediction and management, said Qin. Already, scientists have used similar systems to warn communities of natural disasters that would have led to tragedy.

In all, researchers hope that supporting modeling works like this one will inspire more scientists to utilize satellite data to investigate other types of important environmental research questions.

“Hopefully we can build on all sorts of applications that people are interested in with this,” said Qin.

Shengxi Gui of Ohio State was a co-author. This work’s data was provided by PlanetScope.

Take, for instance, the Pacific Ocean. The largest and deepest ocean basin on the planet, it is a vital wheel in many complex ecological systems, including the carbon cycle. But despite its vast influence, much of what scientists know about the Pacific stems from only a few continuous long sediment core records recovered over the last five decades, said Elizabeth Griffith, co-author of a new paper and a professor in earth sciences at The Ohio State University.

“It's easy to forget that two-thirds of our planet is covered with salty ocean water, especially when you don’t live near the coast,” said Griffith. “It’s also hard to realize just how much of it we haven’t explored yet.”

The commentary paper was recently published in the journal Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology.

In past decades, studying the physical environment of the deep ocean could be a challenging endeavor, partly due to how difficult and time-consuming it is to reach these dark and undiscovered depths. Fortunately, scientists today largely rely on scientific ocean drilling to collect important marine samples, a process that involves specialized ships that use cutting-edge technology to bore down and extract sediment cores from the ocean floor.  

Depending on where sediment cores are collected, scientists are able to learn many novel things about Earth’s history and dynamics. For example, samples retrieved from places known as Pacific Highs, undersea shallow geological features that have the potential for well-preserved paleoceanographic records, have helped scientists answer key research questions about subjects like the evolution of life, past extinction events, Earth’s tectonic and volcanic history as well as slight changes in its orbit. 

While only eight of these sites, found in the central and western North Pacific, have ever been explored using modern drilling technologies, discoveries made in these locations offer valuable insights into some of the most dynamic environmental shifts of the past 100 million years, said Griffith. 

“When you’re extrapolating from such a huge time and spatial scale, you need more than one or two data points to get complete records and ground truth modeling,” she said. 

Yet as global temperatures continue to rise and cores collected from these sites are depleted of material that might help reveal key events, new data is needed to continuously improve future climate models and transform our understanding of Earth’s complex life systems. 

To better prioritize research questions best answered by future ocean drilling discoveries, the international scientific ocean drilling community held a workshop in October 2024 at The Ohio State University’s Stone Laboratory.

Participants determined that in order for ocean discovery science to move forward, scientists will need to create both short- and long-term plans for recovering these sediments. 

“One of the benefits of the ocean drilling community has always been that it’s a larger effort,” said Griffith. “There’s support for this idea that we’re answering big questions on a scale that you just can’t do in a single lab or just working with a small subset of people.”

Overall, researchers suggest that future reconstructions of Earth’s past environmental stages will require more data, as gaps in spatial and temporal data coverage hinder the community’s ability to test various hypotheses and validate model simulations of the Pacific Ocean’s behavior during different climate states. Notably, existing sediment core materials are too degraded to apply some new techniques to test these models. 

The paper also notes that taking the time to dig deep into whatever long-buried secrets our ocean floors hold will also be beneficial in predicting what tomorrow’s climate future might entail, said Griffith. “Warm periods in Earth’s recent history might tell us something about future conditions on Earth and how life will respond to those changes,” she said. 

Nevertheless, while drillship expeditions allow scientists to study some of Earth’s most challenging environments, they also require massive amounts of coordinated international collaboration. Ocean drilling science must expand on these opportunities to grow, but with the recent loss of a U.S. riserless drillship, next-generation scientists worry that losing access to vital data now could jeopardize the field. 

“Working with legacy core material is a crucial part of my research, but it will never replicate the experience of sailing on a deep-sea scientific drilling expedition and fostering international collaboration at sea,” said Batoul Saad, co-author of the paper and a PhD student in earth sciences at Ohio State. 

While private and public sector leaders work to preserve U.S. federal research funding, scientific experts suggest identifying new opportunities to expand international, collaborative science and help sustain ocean drilling science.

“As individuals, much of the work of supporting science involves just being curious about the planet that we live on and that sustains us,” said Griffith. “Once you become curious, realizing how much you impact your surroundings leads to better decisions and new scientific discoveries.”

The U.S. Science Support Program provided financial support for U.S. participants in the workshop, while Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling MagellanPlus Workshop Series Travel Grant, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, and Australian and New Zealand International Scientific Drilling Consortium provided support for international participants. The National Science Foundation is supported by the U.S. Science Support Program. 

Thomas Westerhold of the University of Bremen in Germany was a co-author. 

Gathered in support of future human activities in space, students, professionals and researchers from numerous industries assembled in April for the third annual Workshop for Research in Low-Earth Orbit, hosted by The Ohio State University.  

Presented by Starlab Space Inc. and the Mitsubishi Corporation, the two-day event involved scientific talks and panels aimed at preserving and advancing research in low-Earth orbit (LEO), an orbital plane relatively close to the planet’s surface. Many satellites, including the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope, operate at this altitude.  

Due to the weightlessness of this unique environment, there are major benefits to doing research in microgravity. Because removing Earth’s gravity from the equation may reveal new insights about forces on the ground, scientists can use space as a test bed to investigate and study new phenomena and processes. Experiments conducted in LEO have led to the development of next-generation materials across a multitude of fields, including communications, defense, medicine and green energy.  

“Low-Earth orbit is going to push us in terms of our design capability,” said Kate Rubins, a former NASA astronaut, during a speech where she offered new perspectives of life aboard the ISS and recounted how she became the first person to sequence DNA in space. “Thinking about all these things that we’re going to design anyway for spaceflight hardware, that’s going to make this perfect equipment to take to other places on Earth.” 

During the workshop, panelists showcased their vision for the growing commercial space industry by sharing emerging technologies best suited to support human space exploration. Discussion topics ranged from devices next-gen travelers might use to enhance space station living to gadgets for astronaut health monitoring and advances that will help scientists refine future space food systems.  

Marta Nowak, a professor of architecture at Ohio State, presented student-devised ideas for addressing spaceflight habitability issues, or how astronauts interact with the spaces and objects within their built environment. Some proposals suggested specialized sleep and storage modules for work, while another recommended using furniture as an exercise component to help astronauts maintain their health.  

“The International Space Station, after more than 25 years in orbit, has proven humans can survive in space, but thriving remains elusive,” said Nowak. “NASA recognized early that improving astronauts’ quality of life would lead to better mission outcomes.”  

A one-size-fits-all approach to designing comfortable and accessible habitats won’t work to keep people connected in such confined spaces, so adapting custom living solutions for future micro-environments will be vital for successful space exploration, said Nowak.  

In advance of the many challenges NASA is likely to face over the next few decades of long-duration space exploration, speakers emphasized the need for more human-centered development in commercial research as well. “There is nothing in these [commercial] LEO stations that we are not going to need on the way to the moon or Mars,” Rubins said.  

Most notably, tech-heavy portions of the event focused on Starlab’s forthcoming research facilities, an upcoming commercial space station which, in collaboration with Ohio State’s George Washington Carver Science Park (GWCSP), promises to create essential infrastructure to prioritize scientific discovery for both astronauts in space and those of us at home. 

“Our job is to reinvent how we assist the modern world and the people in it,” said John Horack, Neil Armstrong Chair in aerospace policy at Ohio State and one of the co-hosts of the event. “That link starts with knowledge gained through research and education.” 

The event concluded with an announcement of the winner of the GWCSP Innovation Pitch Competition, a contest that invited space startups to present creative ideas on how to harness LEO for advanced scientific goals.  

Of the three team finalists, Spaero Systems, a group that includes Ohio State students Ian Harris and Nikolas Harris, placed first and received the top prize of $5,000.  

The study, recently published in the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, suggests that the genetic variation of two species, the Brazilian sibilator frog and the granular toad, both amphibians native to northeastern Brazil, were shaped by different processes.  

Results showed that the genetic variation in the sibilator frog was shaped mostly by population demographic events in response to habitat changes that occurred over the last 100,000 years.   In contrast, genetic diversity in the granular toad was mostly shaped by contemporary landscape factors – toads that are relatively more isolated, either by geographic distance or inhospitable habitat, were more likely to be genetically different.

While previous investigations have explored the effects of historical demographic and landscape factors on genetic diversity of these amphibians, they were conducted with separate sets of data for these factors, making it difficult to discern which was the most important. Now, researchers involved with this paper are the first to use artificial intelligence to consider how both processes shape genetic diversity equally, rather than making manual assumptions about which may have been more vital. 

“Prior to this work, we had to ask questions independently because you couldn't investigate both influences in the same framework,” said Bryan Carstens, co-author of the study and a professor in evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University. “What AI allows us to do is to simulate processes that are both happening ecologically in the present and during deep-time evolutionary events and compare those findings to the actual data that we collect from these frogs.”   

Due to the sheer amount of data that’s become available to geneticists and other wildlife biologists over the past few decades, it can be challenging for researchers to identify specific factors that might be important in certain experiments, said Carstens. But by integrating large swaths of information into simulations that can account for those elements in a single analysis, it’s possible to get a much more complete chronicle of a species’ development. 

“It takes a long time to build and train our AI models, but we wanted one l that could capture the range of potential variation in the species’ histories in a way that was as faithful as we could be to what we knew about the biology of the system,” said Carstens. 

For example, while the species this study investigated dwell in the same region, there are many differences in their natural histories. Despite both their eggs and larvae being fully aquatic, the sibulator frog reproduces continuously throughout the wet season and in underground chambers, while the granular toad’s reproductive events happen explosively because they are dependent on heavy rainfall. 

Combined with their machine learning approach, the researchers’ simulation determined their model scenarios were 100% supported regarding historical explanations for the sibilator frog’s expansion, and over 99% supported for those of the granular toad. 

One of the reasons their model is so accurate is due to its ability to account for recent demographic events, including measuring how events like human development or habitat change may have affected animal genetic diversity over a long period of time. 

But even when using AI, researchers have to be careful to avoid deceptive patterns in their results, said Carstens. 

“No analysis that we do is going to capture every single factor that has been important to these species over millions of years,” he said. “So we have to allow for a range of possibilities without making it so broad that essentially any model would be able to fit the data.”

That said, as technological strides allow researchers to answer niche ecological questions and test new hypotheses, their work is a precursor to creating an upgraded machine learning framework that could be applied to unique investigations of other species, said Carstens. 

“We’re likely to continue using different combinations of these AI tools in different ways to try to understand evolutionary history,” said Carstens. “And as we keep learning, the tools we’re using will change, and they’ll evolve to be even better.”

Emanuel M. Fonseca, who earned his doctorate from Ohio State in 2022, was a co-author. The study was supported by the Ohio Supercomputer Center, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior in Brazil.

These deposits, known as megabeds, were found in the western Marsili Basin, an area at the bottom of the Tyrrhenian Sea that surrounds the Marsili Seamount, a large undersea volcano. 

By combining geophysical data acquired from a Spanish research project and data from sediment cores collected from a nearby Ocean Drilling program site, scientists were able to show that three deposits are made up of alternating beds of volcaniclastic sand and mud, while the fourth is a volcaniclastic debris flow, a more dense mixture of volcanic sediment and water. 

The study’s findings, published in the Journal Geology, suggest that these structures were deposited during a volatile time when the Campi Flegrei caldera and the Neapolitan Yellow Tuff supereruption were active. 

The new study suggests that these megabeds originated not from nearby volcanoes, but from a volcanic province to the north. That province, researchers think, was an area once near the Campanian Ignimbrite (CI) supereruption of Campi Flegrei, the largest one of its volcanic eruptions since the caldera’s formation nearly 50,000 years ago.

This still volcanically active region could pose immense danger in the future, said Derek Sawyer, lead author of the study and an associate professor of earth sciences at The Ohio State University. The discovery of these previously unknown megabeds is pivotal for understanding and measuring the impact of such recurring geohazards over time.

“Megabeds are important components of deep-sea basins and are thought to be the result of major catastrophic events,” he said. “So studying them can serve as an important archive into how these events affected the Earth.”

The CI supereruption was so violent an incident that it had a profound effect on the planet and had a hand in shaping Earth’s climate and ecosystems, as well as a huge chunk of human migratory and geologic history. Thanks to the huge amounts of dust and ash that were left behind on land and eventually traveled into the ocean, Sawyer and his team were able to discern the age and composition of the four sediment deposits, and determined that their interpretation that the megabeds originated from the Campi Flegrei caldera to the north is likely supported.

More evidence supporting the theory came from the researchers’ discovery that tiny marine microbes called benthic foraminifera that reside within these megabeds were found not to have originated from Marsili as previously assumed, but from the Campi Flegrei caldera.  

Though scientists can now better predict potential ruptures and other types of seismic hazards, recent volcanic and hydrothermal activity in the Mediterranean has raised scientists’ concerns over whether the Marsili Seamount, which rises 3,500 meters from the seafloor to a depth of 489 meters below sea level, will erupt soon. 

“This is the part of Italy, the Phlegrean Fields, where Mount Vesuvius is and it’s still a very volcanically active area, so it’s a known hazard and continuously monitored,” said Sawyer. “In doing marine geoscience studies like these, we’re working to help understand past eruption events to aid in the effort to build resilient communities that have as much information as they can in order to avoid getting displaced.”

If a volcano in this region were to erupt today, the movement of such vast magma deposits beneath the surface could trigger tsunamis threatening nearby coastal cities and cause a variety of other ecological disasters.

While the study did find that megabeds recur in the Marsili Basin about every 10,000 to 15,000 years, Sawyer said that because not every eruption creates a megabed, scientists should be vigilant in watching for events that don’t adhere to these timescales. As the last one is estimated to have happened about 2,100 to 3,000 years ago, there’s still some uncertainty regarding when the next one will occur. 

“We have to be cautious about these predictions, but in order to be prepared for it, more research is needed,” Sawyer said.

Other co-authors are Roger Urgeles and Claudio Lo Iacono, both of the Institute of Marine Sciences in Spain. This study was supported by the National Science Foundation, as well as the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, and Agencia Estatal de Investigación. 

Researchers found that by listening to the signals of eight LEO satellites for about 10 minutes, their algorithm could achieve unprecedented accuracy in locating a stationary receiver on the ground and was able to converge on it with an error of only about 5.8 meters.

The research, led by Zak Kassas, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at The Ohio State University and director of the Department of Transportation Center for Automated Vehicles Research with Multimodal AssurEd Navigation (CARMEN), was presented last week at the IEEE/ION Position Location and Navigation Symposium (PLANS) 2023 conference in Monterey, California. Along with Ohio State PhD students Sharbel Kozhaya and Haitham Kanj, the paper, which demonstrated the first ever exploitation of unknown OneWeb LEO satellite signals, won the conference’s Best Student Paper award. 

The researchers did not need assistance from the satellite operators to use the signals, and they emphasized that they had no access to the actual data being sent through the satellites – only to publicly available information related to the satellites’ downlink transmission frequency and a rough estimate of the satellites’ location.

From transportation to communication systems to the power grid and emergency services, nearly every aspect of modern society relies on positioning, navigation and timing data from global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), or GPS, that orbit the Earth. Despite this, because GPS system signals are weak and susceptible to interference, they can often become unreliable in certain places such as indoor environments or in deep urban canyons. In addition, GNSS signals are spoofable, which poses serious security risks in safety-critical applications, such as aviation.

In the long term, such complications could lead to a number of navigational and cybersecurity issues, especially as virtually all of our current systems rely heavily on GPS, Kassas said. Technologies on the rise, such as autonomous vehicles, he noted, are beginning to amplify the limitations of our current GNSS systems.

“It’s becoming more pressing to find civilian and military alternatives to GPS, whether as a backup or in the case when GPS isn’t there whatsoever,” said Kassas. 

This study builds on previous research by Kassas’ lab that solely used six SpaceX satellite signals to pinpoint a location within 10 meters of accuracy, which was recently reduced to 6.5 meters.

“The Starlink study scratched the surface of what is possible,” said Kassas.

His work suggests utilizing signals from LEO satellites as an alternative for humans’ positioning, navigation and timing needs, as they reside about 20 times closer to Earth compared to GNSS satellites, which reside in medium Earth orbit – a little more than 20,000 kilometers above the planet. According to Kassas, the technology could potentially usher in a new era of positioning, navigation and timing. 

“We are witnessing a space renaissance. Tens of thousands of LEO satellites will be launched into space over the next decade, leading to what is referred to as mega-constellations,” he said. “Signals transmitted by these satellites will revolutionize numerous technologies and benefit scientific inquiry in fields such as remote sensing.” 

What also makes the study so different from all other attempts at creating an alternative to GPS is, unlike previous studies, this algorithm doesn’t reverse engineer the signal, said Kassas.  

“Our algorithm is agnostic to the LEO constellation,” said Kassas. “Our receiver can listen to virtually any satellite signal, trains on the data it’s receiving on-the-fly, then deciphers certain features of the signal in a way where we can reconstruct what they are transmitting into location data.” To demonstrate the team’s new approach, the team applied the algorithm to four different LEO satellite constellations: Starlink, OneWeb, Orbcomm and Iridium. The algorithm cracked all these signals, with virtually no prior knowledge about what is being transmitted.

Additionally, their algorithm is so sophisticated that the researchers were also able to estimate where the satellites are in space. In order to use the satellite to position ourselves, we need to know where the satellite is located. “That’s a very challenging problem because LEO satellites don’t normally broadcast their location, and our publicly available estimates of where they are is off by a few kilometers,” said Kassas.

During a stationary experiment to test how the signals worked as an accurate positioning system, researchers set a ground receiver's initial position estimate to the roof of an engineering parking structure at the University of California, Irvine, a spot more than 2,000 miles away from its actual position: the roof of Ohio State’s Electroscience Laboratory (ESL) in Columbus, Ohio. Using the satellite constellations to guess where exactly in the country the receiver actually was, the algorithm was only off by about 5 meters. 

In another experiment, the researchers tested how the algorithm would fare on a moving vehicle, and mounted the receiver onto the top of a car. First, they used today’s navigation technology, which relies on a GPS receiver coupled with an inertial navigation system (INS). They navigated for about 100 meters before cutting GPS off, after which they drove for nearly a kilometer. They found that by relying on today’s GPS-INS system, they were said to be located about 500 meters away from their true location, but with their algorithm, they were found about 4.4 meters away. “Our result showed that our system is getting close to what you can do with GPS today,” said Kassas.

Although a patent has been filed on the algorithm, the team does plan to continue evolving all of the algorithm’s technical abilities, said Kassas.

“GPS is a very mature system that we trust with our lives,” he said. “To be able to trust new types of signals with our lives, there will have to be more studies on their accuracy, integrity and continuity.”

Other Ohio State co-authors were Joe Saroufim, Samer Hayek and Mohammad Neinavaie. The work was supported by the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Department of Transportation and the National Science Foundation.

They found that only 6% of 178 countries provide for all their citizens in an ecologically sustainable way in both carbon sequestration and water consumption.

The study found that while 67% of nations operate safely and sustainably in regard to water use, only 9% do in regard to carbon sequestration, or reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. 

The study showed the United States was among the majority of countries that was able to safely and justly provide water to its citizens. While it provides for its citizens in regard to carbon use, it is not doing so in an ecologically sustainable manner.

The study was published recently in the journal One Earth.

For a country to be self-sufficient, its population needs access to food, water and energy, resources that can often only be provided by the surrounding ecosystem. Yet because human activities tend to cause unintended side effects like global warming or ozone depletion, said Bhavik Bakshi, co-author of the study and a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State, it’s imperative that experts look for ways to develop society in an ecologically sustainable manner. At the same time, in order to be socially just, countries need to secure resources to meet the basic needs of all of its citizens. 

“Most engineering disciplines traditionally ignore the role that nature plays in supporting our activities and more broadly, our well-being,“ said Bakshi, who has been working to advance the concept of sustainable engineering – the practice of designing products or systems with nature-positive decisions in mind – for decades. “In this study, we sought to ensure we could quantify these challenges in a way engineers could use to make better decisions.” 

This study’s framework was created using a system called the framework of planetary boundaries and the concept of a “safe and just operating space,” which identifies a country’s ecological ceiling, or the scope human activities must work within to reduce the risk of causing irreparable damage to the Earth.

Ideally, human activities should exist between the limits of a society’s ecological ceiling and its social foundation, a boundary that describes the resources necessary to avoid critical human deprivation of food, water or energy, said Bakshi. 

“If you are exceeding the ecological ceiling, then you're not sustainable from an environmental perspective,” he said. “If you’re below the social foundation, then you’re not meeting basic human needs, and that can be frustrating from an equity point of view.”

Using recent water and carbon sequestration data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and other international agencies, Bakshi and his co-author and former PhD student Yazeed Aleissa analyzed how the needs of 178 nations around the world stacked up against their regions’ ecosystems. 

The team found that the majority of countries emit far more than their national ecosystem can handle in terms of carbon, but tend to operate close to their water supply limits.

Sometimes countries do not have much of a choice. Findings showed that 37% of countries do not have the ability to provide for their citizens in a safe and just way in terms of carbon sequestration, and 10% lack the ability to do that with regard to water.

While the socioeconomic status of countries is often related to how well they can provide for their citizens in a sustainable manner, it doesn’t always work that way, the researchers said. “There are rich countries that are doing well and there are also some poor countries that are doing well, but the reasons for their successes are very different,” Bakshi said. 

These differences often come down to how a nation deals with supply and demand.

Take Canada, a large, rich country with a relatively low population that has a large supply of natural capital like forests and lakes that can capture carbon. Because it has more than enough resources for its population, consumption levels would meet the safe and just limits of the framework.

On the other hand, poor countries such as Gabon have adequate natural capital to support more activities that improve human well-being, Bakshi said.

Other countries, such as those in the Middle East, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, cannot meet safe and just requirements for carbon because they lack vegetation to help carbon sequestration – capturing the carbon the country emits. Essentially, they need to rely more on carbon capture technologies and global trade.

Despite the study’s potentially bleak outlook, the researchers believe their work offers a glimmer of hope in combating the environmental risks of human development. The team’s results imply that many nations could secure the necessary resources they need to thrive at a much lower demand than current levels suggest.

One way to do this would be to adopt more renewable energy resources, introduce more plant-based diets into our food cycles, and change the way we produce certain goods and services to develop a sustainable circular economy instead of a linear one, said Bakshi. 

Furthermore, if implemented when considering future engineering projects, the study suggests the framework could be used to guide technology, policy and trade decisions to better assist nations to meet their needs in a more safe and just fashion.

“From a positive perspective, our work provides opportunities for engineers and other professions to innovate and come up with new ways of doing things right,” said Bakshi. “Whoever is going to figure that out is going to be the future of a more sustainable and just world.”

Home to one of the largest groundwater basins in the western United States, the Central Valley supplies about one-fifth of the nation’s groundwater demand, a large part of which is used to provide crop irrigation and aid agricultural production. 

The same area also accounts for about 75% of the region’s subsidence – the scientific term for the gradual sinking of an area of land. The leading cause of subsidence is the removal or disturbance of groundwater, which is found underground in soil and between rocks and sand. 

Combined with California’s large population, long history of drought and tendency to be battered by nearly every form of climate change, massive groundwater pumping is aggravating water scarcity, said Xuechen Yang, lead author of the case study and a graduate student in earth sciences at The Ohio State University. 

But it is not just California that has a growing issue with water scarcity.

“By 2025, more than 5 billion people around the world will live in water-stressed conditions,” said Yang. “Because land subsidence often makes human-made areas uninhabitable, those conditions can cause water and food insecurity issues.” These problems can lead to national security concerns, political instability, and even human migration disasters.

To help investigate solutions to these issues, Yang said that researchers are using satellite radar altimetry, which has a four-decades long record of observing the Earth, with creative new techniques to understand how Earth’s complex geophysical processes impact human life.

Satellite altimetry measures the time it takes a radar pulse to travel from the satellite to the Earth’s surface and back. Tiny changes in these measurements over time can indicate whether a specific point of land is rising or falling.

“Satellite radar altimetry is a mature technology and was designed to measure ocean topography and to monitor their changes over time,” said Yang. “Recent research demonstrated its feasibility in measuring elevation changes of relatively flat terrain, including land subsidence over aquifers, such as Central Valley, California, and other coastal regions.”

Using altimetry data from the European Space Agency’s Cryosat-2 mission, Yang’s team generated a low-gradient, two-dimensional map of land subsidence over Central Valley. 

Data from radar altimetry satellite missions including European Space Agency's Envisat satellite, as well as NASA’s and the French Space Agency (CNES)’s Jason-2 and Jason-3 satellites were processed to create a subsidence time series, an data analysis that spanned a decade or longer. After validating the Cryosat-2 derived results, the researchers were able to successfully detect the largest subsidence bowl near the city of Corcoran, California, which sinks at about a rate of about 30 to 35 centimeters per year.

Yet to advance their work, Yang said more data and better processing methods are needed before their tool can detect smaller deformations in other parts of the state. 

The research was presented last month at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

The study concluded that satellite altimetry could become an effective tool to monitor land subsidence. Additionally, because of its pinpoint accuracy and long data record, Yang said the research could be used to complement other geodetic techniques used to measure changes on the land.

“There is a very long history of drought in California, and the people who live there are struggling with it continuously,” said Yang. “Our work could be used to improve groundwater aquifer monitoring systems, and change hydrological policy for the better.”

Co-authors of the poster include C.K Shum of Ohio State, the principal investigator of the NASA Earth Surface Interior Program (ESI) project, and Ting-Yi Yang of Polaris Geospatial Services, who initiated the research project. The work was supported by the NASA ESI Program and the Topcon Positioning System Inc. Fellowship.

All cells need energy to survive, but because the kinds of chemicals available during the planet’s early days were so limited compared to today’s vast scope of chemical diversity, multicellular organisms had a lot less energy to build the complex organic structures that make up the world we know today. 

New research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides evidence that many of the organisms borne from Earth’s primordial soup heavily relied on metal molecules, specifically nickel, to help store and expend energy. 

Current theories about how microbial life arose suggest that while cells used carbon dioxide and hydrogen as a fuel source, they also inhabited areas rich in reduced metals like iron and nickel. These first chemical reactions were also largely driven by an enzyme called acetyl coenzyme A synthase, or ACS, a molecule essential for energy production and forming new chemical bonds. 

But for years, scientists in the field have been split on how this enzyme actually works – whether the chemical reactions it spurred could be assembled randomly or if its chemical constructions followed a strict roadmap. Hannah Shafaat, co-author of the study and a professor in chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University, said her team’s artificial model of the enzyme reveals a lot about how its native ancestor might have acted during Earth’s first few billion years.

Compared to what scientists find in nature, this model protein is much easier to study and manipulate. Because of this, the team was able to conclude that ACS does, in fact, have to build molecules one step at a time. Such information is crucial to understanding how organic chemistry on Earth began to mature. 

“Rather than taking the enzyme and stripping it down, we’re trying to build it from the bottom up,” Shafaat said. “And knowing that you have to do things in the right order can basically be a guide for how to recreate it in the lab.” 

As scientists hope to understand what may have emerged first out of the primordial soup, Shafaat said the study demonstrated that even simple enzymes like their model could have supported early life. Shafaat, who has worked on the project for nearly five years, said that while the study did run into some challenges, the lessons the team learned were worth it in the long run. 

In addition to being important for understanding primordial chemistry, their findings have broad implications for other fields, including the energy sector, Shafaat said. “If we can understand how nature figured out how to use these compounds billions and billions of years ago, we can harness some of those same ideas for our own alternative energy devices,” she said. 

At the moment, one of the biggest challenges the energy sector faces is making liquid fuel. Yet this study could be the first step in finding a natural energy source that could replace the gasoline and oil humans overuse, Shafaat said. Now, her team is working on streamlining their product, but will continue to investigate whether there are other primeval secrets their enzyme might divulge. 

Co-authors were Anastasia C. Manesis and Alina Yerbulekova of Ohio State, and Jason Shearer of Trinity University. This work was supported by the U.S Department of Energy.