For five days in April of 2025, record-breaking winds swept through China, with speeds surpassing 45 meters per second in some areas. That’s roughly the same wind speed of a category 2 hurricane. However, a hurricane breezes through in a matter of hours. What caused this extreme wind event — that resulted in five deaths and caused more than $154 million in economic losses, according to the Ministry of Emergency Management — to persist at such strength for so long and across so much of the country?

Researchers say a spike in temperatures during an ice age 304 million years ago could inform what climate scientists are learning about rapidly changing conditions today.

Joint press release from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, Mainz, Germany

In a nutshell:

 Applied to a single rhodolith from the central Red Sea: The method reconstructed 133 days of temperature closely matching on-site measurements.

Preserved in the skeleton: The ratio of chemical elements in the growth layers reveals daily seawater temperatures

New method solves previous analysis problem: Growth measurements, 3D X-ray imaging, and data alignment merge the data from multiple algal branches into a single, continuous timeline. 

In a paper published in SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences, a team of researchers analyzed tidal data at 362,370 oceanic locations spotted by the Jason-3 satellite, revealing that the distribution of high and low tides directly contradicts the physical existence of two water bulges—a model that has been widely taught in textbooks. This discovery provides evidence for the recently proposed oceanic basin oscillation-driving mechanism of tides.

A study published in National Science Review shows that climate change is reorganizing China’s cropland nitrogen pollution. Although the humid south currently exports more nitrogen, rising rainfall may increase cropland nitrogen export from the arid and semi-arid north by 18.8%–53.2% by 2050. The findings call for source control in the north and stronger aquatic nitrogen removal in the south.