7 September 2026 / Kiel. A strong earthquake near the Arctic island of Jan Mayen triggered a massive rock avalanche in March 2025. The resulting debris buried part of the Kjerulf Glacier beneath rock and rubble. A study by researchers at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel indicates that climate change likely played a crucial role in this event. Long-term warming and permafrost degradation weakened the rock, making it more susceptible to earthquake shaking. These findings highlight how natural hazards in polar regions are changing – with potential implications for glacier and permafrost areas worldwide. The study is published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal.

A recent study published in National Science Review has revealed that the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), traditionally regarded as a single climate mode, consists of two distinct types with different physical mechanisms and climate impacts. The findings advance the understanding of Indian Ocean variability and provide new insights into how IOD events influence regional climate.

Improving the subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) forecast skill for East Asian winter cold surges remains a grand challenge in operational meteorology. Using ECMWF hindcast data, a research team systematically identified the "high-skill windows" of week-3 cold surge forecasts. They found that a "warm-west/cold-east" sea surface temperature dipole over the mid-latitude North Pacific emerges as a consistent precursor of these windows under both El Niño and La Niña conditions, but that the dipole alone is not enough: high skill emerges only when the SST anomalies in all the key regions, including the Barents-Kara Seas, the Indian Ocean and the tropical Pacific, meet their thresholds at the same time. This makes it possible to pre-screen a subseasonal forecast's reliability before it is issued. The work was published in SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences.

New study shows that catastrophic fractures begin not with an explosive crack, but with tiny two-dimensional patches that creep almost imperceptibly before suddenly racing through a material. The findings offer a new picture of material failure, with implications ranging from detecting fractures to understanding how earthquakes begin.