Extreme heat has become more common—both research and lived experience document this—but when it arrives is a different question. A new study finds that rather than occurring only during warm seasons, extreme heat events have become more frequent in the months before and after, too.

Coral as an environmental archive: Core samples reveal the settlement history of the Mississippi over the past 270 years.

Stress despite high resilience: One of the most resilient U.S. reefs is increasingly suffering from nutrient pollution and warming.

The Mississippi as the source: The majority of the nitrogen in the Gulf comes from the Mississippi River basin.

Deteriorating conditions: Nutrient overload and heat stress are leading to the first instances of coral bleaching and disease outbreaks on the reef.

Extreme heatwaves disrupt life in soil. Soil bacteria that produce and resist antibiotics switch into survival mode, temporarily reducing the number of resistance genes. At the same time, heat and drought are causing significant damage to soils and ecosystems, especially in cold, wet regions such as the Netherlands. This is evident from a large-scale European study by soil ecologist Franciska de Vries (University of Amsterdam) and colleagues.

A new study has found that forests with a greater diversity of tree species are more resilient to extreme climate events.

Published in Nature Communications and using data from over 88,000 forest plots across the United States, the research also discovered that forests are more vulnerable when extreme weather events such as heatwaves and droughts occur simultaneously.