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Maya Classic Period (550-900 AD) rare polychrome pottery from the Jay I. Kislak collection, Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. See long file names for additional information.
The Trump administration’s National Science Foundation (NSF) has begun dismantling the infrastructure of a $368 million deep-ocean observing program critical to monitoring marine ecosystems, global currents, marine heat waves, and more, according to a 21 May announcement.
The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), funded by the NSF, has been collecting long-term oceanographic data at multiple deep-ocean sites since 2016. The information about ocean temperature, chemistry, currents, biological conditions, and more is used by scientists to understand a multitude of marine research questions including the activity of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a critical ocean current.
“I worry that … we’ll be losing this enormously valuable site where we could really contextualize and detect these changes going forward.”
“There’s a real danger that we lose the ability to keep looking for long-term changes [in the ocean]” as climate change alters Earth systems, said Hilary Palevsky, a marine biogeochemist who has used OOI data for a decade to study how the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide. “I worry that … we’ll be losing this enormously valuable site where we could really contextualize and detect these changes going forward.”
The NSF plans to remove all in-water arrays and infrastructure—including hundreds of deep-sea instruments—from four of the five currently-operating sites within the project: the Global Station Papa Array (in the Gulf of Alaska), Coastal Endurance Array (off the coasts of Oregon and Washington), Global Irminger Sea Array (southeast of Greenland), and Coastal Pioneer Array (off the coast of North Carolina). The removal is expected to occur over the next 15 months, though the process has already begun at the Endurance Array.
The Trump administration attempted previously to downscale OOI operations, proposing to cut its funding in 2025 and 2026, though Congress never approved the cuts.
The administration’s decision to dismantle the arrays “aligns with NSF’s wider strategy to have a nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies as well as a deliberate approach to smart life cycle management within its portfolio of research infrastructure,” Michael England, an NSF spokesman, told the New York Times.
As each array is dismantled, data streams will end, though all previously collected data from OOI networks will remain accessible, Jim Edson, principal investigator for the OOI, wrote in a letter to the oceanographic community.
Palevsky said there’s “a lot of real concern” among the oceanographic community that the Endurance Array is being dismantled just as an intense El Niño event—and associated marine heat wave—is expected this summer. “It would be especially important to be able to document the effect that [El Niño] is having on coastal physical circulation and ecosystems,” she said.
“We encourage the community to use the ten-plus years of OOI data by including it in proposals, publications, presentations, and conversations with colleagues. Continued engagement demonstrates the scientific impact and wide-ranging applications enabled by the OOI and its data, underscoring its importance as a resource for the oceanographic community,” the 21 May announcement stated.
There are other sources of data that researchers like Palevsky can use. But oceanographic research often requires stitching together different data sets, including OOI observations, satellite observations and observations from the U.S. research fleet. Many of these other sources of data are also facing uncertain futures.
Palevsky also worries about the loss of expertise that will occur as the program scales down. Installing these deep-sea observing networks was a huge achievement for U.S. science that will not be easy to replicate, she said. “If, in five years, we as a community decide we want to again be able to deploy this kind of complicated infrastructure in places that have really difficult oceanographic conditions … it’s going to be a lot of reinventing the wheel to figure out how to put things out again.”
“The complete cessation without community input or a community conversation about what’s going to happen to all this equipment and what’s going to happen with all of the expertise,” she said, “feels like a huge loss.”
—Grace van Deelen (@gvd.bsky.social), Staff Writer
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Maya Classic Period (550-900 AD) rare polychrome pottery from the Jay I. Kislak collection, Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. See long file names for additional information.
It’s long been clear that Italy’s Larderello region is supplied with abundant heat from Earth’s interior. The area, located in the center of Tuscany, is home to the world’s very first geothermal power plant and once bore the nickname “Devil’s Valley” for the steam vents that dot the rolling landscape.
The source of all of that heat has never been clear because the region has little volcanic activity. But now, new research points to the existence of a massive reservoir of magma, thousands of cubic kilometers in volume, hiding beneath Larderello.
“It’s beautiful to think that in a few hundred thousand years, we might find a supervolcano in there.”
The reservoir was discovered by University of Geneva geophysicist Matteo Lupi and his colleagues using a relatively new technique called ambient noise tomography (ANT). With ANT, the researchers peered deeper beneath the crust in the region, discovering anomalies that pointed to large volumes of magma.
The reservoir sits about 10 kilometers beneath the surface and is around 20 kilometers in diameter, the authors reported in a paper published in Communications Earth and Environment. Those dimensions make the reservoir comparable in size to those underlying so-called supervolcanoes like Yellowstone and Toba, though Lupi said there’s no apparent danger of an eruption anytime soon.
“I don’t think that, in human time frames, we should change the way we perceive the area,” he said. “Nevertheless, it’s beautiful to think that in a few hundred thousand years, we might find a supervolcano in there as well.”
Previous studies had posited the existence of large amounts of magma somewhere beneath Tuscany but never provided definitive evidence. A borehole project that concluded in 2018 revealed sudden temperature increases several kilometers down. Other studies using seismic vibrations to infer the structure of the crust in the region hinted at the presence of magma.
Lupi, along with colleagues in Italy, has been working to expand the use of ANT in Tuscany and elsewhere to make new and better images of structures deep underground. The technique involves using a network of seismometers to pick up on surface waves traveling through Earth that record a kind of background noise created by wind, ocean waves, and other subtle forces. Then, statistical algorithms help scientists find relevant seismic signals amid the static.
“Surface waves are sensitive to the shear properties of the rock,” said Brandon Schmandt, a geophysicist at Rice University who wasn’t affiliated with the research. “If you heat something or introduce a little melt, the shear properties weaken a lot. And so it’s a good way to find a big magma reservoir [in Earth’s crust].”
Using more than 60 seismometers spread across Tuscany and islands just offshore, Lupi and his team cross correlated surface wave data to produce a map of seismic velocities beneath Larderello. That map contains a large blob where seismic signals travel markedly slower than in other places. Those speeds align with a body of partially melted rock, Lupi said, surrounded by a region of slightly cooler and more solid “crystal mush.”
The researchers estimate the reservoir is about 5,000 cubic kilometers in volume, with molten rock making up about 80% of its innermost contents and about 20% of the surrounding crystal region.
The magma reservoir’s existence provides an explanation for the abundant geothermal activity in the Larderello region while simultaneously raising another question. The quantity of magma discovered could fuel a massive eruption on the scale of other supervolcanoes worldwide—yet no supervolcano exists in Tuscany.
Why Tuscany doesn’t host a caldera similar to Yellowstone in the United States is still an open question. There are several nonexclusive possibilities for the lack of eruptivity, said Federico Farina, a geologist and professor of geochemistry at the University of Milan who was also an author of the study. The magma under Larderello might be drier and therefore less eruptive, or it could have been produced, and therefore intruded into the crust, more slowly. Additionally, the structure of the crust in the region could have helped to trap the magma and prevent it from getting out.
Another clue to the region’s geological history comes from dating zircons, small crystals formed when magma cools and hardens. Farina has found zircons with different ages very close to each other in the rock matrix, which he said indicates a long-lived system where magma moves through different reservoirs as it cools. He said these zircons may also enable the researchers to model the size of the reservoir and better understand the speed and amount of magma accumulation there.
Discovering so much magma underneath Tuscany is a surprise, but Lupi thinks it’s likely to be far from the only large magma reservoir hiding beneath a volcanically quiet region. He noted that research he carried out in the Andes around a decade ago also suggested, though not conclusively, the existence of a large, hidden magma reservoir. That experience was, in part, what convinced him to use ANT’s deep imaging capabilities elsewhere.
“This is good momentum to encourage people to look at it from a magmatic system standpoint and not just focus on the vents at the surface.”
Schmandt agreed that large reservoirs are likely to exist in other places even when there’s little for human eyes to see. “This is good momentum in that direction to encourage people to look at it from a magmatic system standpoint and not just focus on the vents at the surface,” he said.
Lupi may not have to go far to discover his next massive pool of molten rock. He said his data indicated there may be another reservoir buried under nearby Mount Amiata that’s twice as big as the one beneath Larderello. That area was just at the edge of their seismometer network, meaning the team couldn’t fully resolve it.
—Nathaniel Scharping (@nathanielscharp), Science Writer
Thirty years ago, the blockbuster movie Twister featured a group of academics putting themselves at risk by chasing tornadoes in the name of science. Although the Hollywood story entailed a surfeit of sensationalism, special effects, and unrealistic stereotypes, the movie got a few things right. Specifically, the scientists were trying to study tornadoes using a large number of spatially distributed, home-built, low-cost (and potentially sacrificial) sensors.
Today, we commonly refer to the coordinated use of tens to hundreds of similar sensors that are spread out as “large-N” sensing. Such sensor distributions have led to important advances in seismology and infrasound science, where they have improved our understanding of seismic ground motion and helped shed light on volcanic eruption dynamics [e.g., Rosenblatt et al., 2022; Anderson et al., 2023].
The benefits of large-N networks and arrays include robust spatial sampling and signal extraction from noise. They are also advantageous for detecting small signals, sensing natural hazards in remote environments, and offering critical redundancies for sensors at risk from lava or debris flows, wildfire, weather, or even malicious mammals.
Since 2013, our research group in the Department of Geosciences at Boise State University (BSU) has worked to study infrasound from geophysical phenomena by capitalizing on the benefits of low-cost, large-N sensing technology [e.g., Slad and Merchant, 2021]. More than a decade on, this effort has yielded scientific successes from a variety of environments, and it is continuing to evolve.
Many violent natural processes, including landslides, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, avalanches, and meteors, produce infrasound.
Many violent natural processes, including landslides, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, avalanches, and meteors, produce infrasound, defined as low-frequency sound below the threshold of human hearing (less than 20 Hertz). Such events may create audible sound as well, but the subaudible band is often much more energetic in terms of sound intensity, and it has long wavelengths that can propagate long distances with little attenuation. These characteristics make infrasound especially valuable for remote sensing of natural phenomena.
Our group at BSU grew more interested in developing our own inexpensive infrasound sensing solutions after costing out technology for commercial data logging systems, the compact electronic devices that record and store sensor data. These systems can be far more expensive than infrasound transducers—the sensors that actually detect sound—themselves.
The cost element became particularly relevant after we lost instrumentation deployed at the summit of Chile’s Villarrica volcano when it erupted a 2-kilometer-tall lava fountain on 3 March 2015 [Johnson et al., 2018]. In an instant, our hardware, including seismic and infrasonic sensors and their commercial multichannel data loggers, was entombed beneath falling lava. This financial loss incentivized our work to develop low-cost loggers that would match the technical specifications and fidelity of commercial systems.
The result was the customized Gem infrasound logger, which we created using the widely available and very economical Arduino open-source electronic prototyping platform and its low–power consumption microcontroller. The Gem is an all-in-one infrasound sensor and data logger with a high dynamic range (millipascals to 100 pascals), a 100-hertz sample rate appropriate for infrasound, and a built-in GPS for precise timing and synchronization [Anderson et al., 2018].
Although we initially conceived of the Gem as an alternative to commercial loggers to be deployed as single stations or in small arrays, we quickly realized its potential for use in high-density distributed sensing arrays that enabled new detection capabilities. In particular, its small package size (it has about the dimensions and weight of a paperback novel) and its ease of deployment—simply insert alkaline batteries, place it on the ground, and turn it on—have opened opportunities for rapid, large-N deployments in difficult-to-access environments.
The Gem’s inaugural field mission came in January 2020 during a return to Villarrica, where activity had returned to normal following its 2015 paroxysmal eruption [Rosenblatt et al., 2022]. Typical activity in the volcano’s normal state includes open-vent degassing from a small lava lake recessed deep within the summit crater, which produces its famously powerful volcano infrasound [e.g., Johnson et al., 2012].
To capture Villarrica’s infrasound in detail, a four-person team from BSU climbed the 3,000-meter-tall glaciated volcano and quickly installed 16 sensors around the crater rim, as well as another 16 sensors along an 8-kilometer linear transect from the summit down the northern slope (Figure 1). This unique sensor distribution permitted us to capture the infrasound wavefield and how it interacts with topography in unprecedented detail.
Deploying such an array configuration using much heavier, larger, and power-intensive conventional instruments would have taken far more time and resources, as well as a bigger group. With the Gems, however, the installation was feasible for our small team, each member of which could easily carry eight instruments and the batteries needed to power them.
To monitor volcanoes with infrasound, it is necessary to understand the influence of atmospheric effects.
Once in place, these sensors collected continuous data during the 2-week study that were used to quantify the diffraction of sound coming out of the volcanic crater [Rosenblatt et al., 2022] and to measure the sound’s attenuation as it propagated away. Such studies are important for investigating time-varying atmospheric parameters such as changing temperatures and winds, which can affect infrasound transmission, diminishing its amplitude or even—in extreme cases—completely silencing it in an acoustic shadow zone [Johnson et al., 2012]. To monitor volcanoes with infrasound, it is necessary to understand the influence of atmospheric effects.
Months later, another opportunity arose to demonstrate the Gems’ capability for large-N infrasound sensing. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, on 31 March 2020, a magnitude 6.5 earthquake occurred near Stanley, Idaho. The earthquake, the largest in the state since 1983, kicked off an energetic aftershock sequence, with more than 700 magnitude 3 or greater earthquakes occurring in 6 months. Most of these events produced significant local infrasound radiation, or “airquakes,” caused by ground-atmosphere coupling [e.g., Johnson et al., 2020].
Pandemic-related precautions inhibited a large team from venturing as a group into the field. However, a lone BSU researcher (coauthor Jacob Anderson), trudging through forest terrain and deep snow on skis, was able to deploy and activate 22 Gems in less than 4 hours in early April, thanks in part to the sensors’ compact size and ease of deployment.
This array captured hundreds of local infrasonic aftershocks within about 25 kilometers of their epicenters. It also recorded a far larger event 700 kilometers away, the 15 May magnitude 6.5 Monte Cristo earthquake in Nevada. The array detected the epicentral infrasound from the distant earthquake source, as well as infrasound from numerous secondary sources, including mountain ranges throughout the western United States that reradiated the ground motion as infrasound (Figure 2) [Anderson et al., 2023].
Detecting all these distinct signals was possible because of the enhanced array processing capabilities provided by the large number of sensors. Anderson et al. [2023] showed that when the data were processed from 3-sensor subsets of the 20+-sensor array—instead of from the whole array—it was possible to detect only the most intense earthquake infrasound arrivals. In other words, the larger array had much greater fidelity and sensing capabilities than smaller distributions of sensors.
During its 2-month deployment, the Stanley array also detected sounds from other distant nonearthquake sources, including waterfalls 195 kilometers away and thunder more than 900 kilometers away [Scamfer and Anderson, 2023]. Such enhanced detections, facilitated by large-N sensing, demonstrate an improved capacity to monitor a range of Earth phenomena continuously over a wide range of distances.
Since those proof-of-concept deployments, Gems have been used to monitor snow avalanches, lahars, river flow discharge, stratospheric sounds (while mounted aboard a solar balloon), and numerous volcanoes during field experiments [e.g., Tatum et al., 2023; Bosa et al., 2024; Rosenblatt et al., 2022; Brissaud et al., 2021]. Given their ease of use, small size, and low replacement cost, they’ve also been tested in hazardous environments where the risk to more expensive hardware could be considered unreasonable.
The motivation to put sensors in harm’s way is to gain insight into geophysical phenomena by recording subtle signals close to the source that may not be detectable from farther away.
The motivation to put sensors in harm’s way is to gain insight into geophysical phenomena by recording subtle signals close to the source that may not be detectable from farther away. For example, at Villarrica, Rosenblatt et al. [2022] suspended a Gem on a cable 100 meters above a lava lake to collect infrasound data from a unique, bird’s-eye perspective over the crater (Figure 1c). (Stringing the cable across the crater proved far more challenging than deploying the sensor itself, which slid down the cable until finding its resting place at the bottom of the cable’s arc.)
In another case, we landed a pair of Gems on the ground near a frequently exploding crater at Fuego volcano in Guatemala using a drone (see video below). We later retrieved one of the sensors from high on the volcano’s flanks. Another was lost because high winds initially posed too great a risk to fly the drone back for it. Then the following day after the wind subsided, we could not locate the stranded Gem, which was probably a casualty of a nighttime explosion.
Our group at BSU also has nascent interest in using Gems to study fire in natural environments. Wildfires produce infrasound from a spatially extensive source region corresponding to actively burning areas. Because of the source complexity and the fact that fire infrasound is low amplitude and tremor-like [Johnson et al., 2025], enhancing signal-to-noise ratios in recorded infrasound is critical. This enhancement is enabled by using large-N monitoring networks, making infrasound wildfire surveillance a promising area of investigation.
Low-cost, rapid infrasound deployments could one day be used as an effective operational tool.
Toward this objective, our group installed 76 sensors ahead of a prescribed burn in Reynolds Creek, Idaho, in October 2023 to begin developing infrasound as a tool for monitoring and mapping wildfire. We have also deployed Gems for infrasound studies of naturally occurring wildfires, such as the Emigrant wildfire in Oregon in August and September 2025 (Figure 3). During that active wildfire response, a team safely and quickly installed tens of sensors within a matter of hours in an area facing dynamic hazards from the rapidly expanding fire, which eventually covered 33,000 acres (about 13,354 hectares). Luckily, no instruments were lost, and the data have shown the potential to track a wildfire as it advances.
Preliminary results suggest that low-cost, rapid infrasound deployments could one day be used as an effective operational tool. For example, in firefighting responses, infrasound might complement intermittent aerial observations, from aircraft or drones, because it provides a continuous record of fire activity. Infrasound surveillance might also be able to “hear” combustion sources within a burn area that is obscured to optical sensing because of clouds or nightfall.
Five years ago, the single-sensor Gem was a cutting-edge infrasound logging solution. While it remains a powerful and economical tool for large-N arrays and for sensing in hostile environments, it is evolving.
We have now developed the Gem into an even more versatile version called the Aspen, which can log four independent sensors at a sample rate of 200 hertz, double that of the Gem. The Aspen retains the small size, low weight, low power consumption, and low cost of the Gem, but with the capability to record higher-resolution 24-bit, time-synchronized data from a triaxial seismic sensor and an infrasound transducer.
Recording synchronous seismoinfrasonic data on the same logging platform offers the advantage of sensing both ground shaking and infrasonic oscillations. The ability to measure waves propagating in the ground and in the air simultaneously could facilitate work in the growing field of environmental seismology, which focuses on geophysical sources at Earth’s surface like debris flows and volcanoes.
Although we have focused on seismoacoustic geophysical measurements in our work, the concept of gathering data with low-cost instrumentation in harm’s way or from coordinated arrays of numerous sensors holds promise across Earth and environmental sciences. Such approaches could be used, for example, with tiltmeters (which measure slope changes), gravity meters, or near-infrared thermometers (e.g., optical pyrometers), all of which would offer additional data streams complementing seismoacoustic observations in geophysical studies of volcanoes.
With the diversity of emerging uses, it’s clear that large-N sensing—infeasible or cost prohibitive in many cases until recently—could transform how we measure many facets of Earth, helping to reveal the inner workings of volatile volcanoes, twisting tornadoes, and more.
More information about low-cost infrasound sensing solutions can be found at https://sites.google.com/boisestate.edu/infravolc/home. Development of the Gem infrasound logging platform was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (EAR-2122188).
Anderson, J. F., et al. (2018), The Gem infrasound logger and custom‐built instrumentation, Seismol. Res. Lett., 89(1), 153–164, https://doi.org/10.1785/0220170067.
Anderson, J. F., et al. (2023), Remotely imaging seismic ground shaking via large-N infrasound beamforming, Commun. Earth Environ., 4(1), 399, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-023-01058-z.
Bosa, A. R., et al. (2024), Dynamics of rain-triggered lahars and destructive power inferred from seismo-acoustic arrays and time-lapse camera correlation at Volcán de Fuego, Guatemala, Nat. Hazards, 121, 3,431–3,472, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-024-06926-1.
Brissaud, Q., et al. (2021), The first detection of an earthquake from a balloon using its acoustic signature, Geophys. Res. Lett., 48, e2021GL093013, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL093013.
Johnson, J. B., et al. (2012), Probing local wind and temperature structure using infrasound from Volcan Villarrica (Chile), J. Geophys. Res., 117, D17107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2012JD017694.
Johnson, J. B., et al. (2018), Forecasting the eruption of an open-vent volcano using resonant infrasound tones, Geophys. Res. Lett., 45, 2,213–2,220, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL076506.
Johnson, J. B., et al. (2020), Mapping the sources of proximal earthquake infrasound, Geophys. Res. Lett., 47, e2020GL091421 , https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL091421.
Johnson, J. B., J. F. Anderson, and K. Yedinak (2025), Infrasound produced by a small pile fire, Appl. Acoust., 231, 110559, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2025.110559.
Rosenblatt, B. B., et al. (2022), Controls on the frequency content of near-source infrasound at open-vent volcanoes: A case study from Volcán Villarrica, Chile, Bull. Volcanol., 84(12), 103, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00445-022-01607-y.
Scamfer, L. T., and J. F. Anderson (2023), Exploring background noise with a large‐N infrasound array: Waterfalls, thunderstorms, and earthquakes, Geophys. Res. Lett., 50, e2023GL104635, https://doi.org/10.1029/2023GL104635.
Slad, G., and B. Merchant (2021), Evaluation of Low Cost Infrasound Sensor Packages, Sandia Rep. SAND2021-13632, Sandia Natl. Lab., Albuquerque, N.M., https://doi.org/10.2172/1829264.
Tatum, T., J. F. Anderson, and T. J. Ronan (2023), Whitewater sound dependence on discharge and wave configuration at an adjustable wave feature, Water Resour. Res., 59, e2023WR034554, https://doi.org/10.1029/2023WR034554.
Jeffrey B. Johnson (jeffreybjohnson@boisestate.edu), Jacob F. Anderson, Madeline A. Hunt, Owen A. Walsh, and Jerry C. Mock, Department of Geosciences, Boise State University, Idaho
clgkhkrf54 posted a photo:
Maya Classic Period (550-900 AD) rare polychrome pottery from the Jay I. Kislak collection, Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. See long file names for additional information.
Magma on the move can cause the ground around a volcano to heave in measurable ways. But surface deformation doesn’t always point to an impending eruption—new results show that the terrain around a volcano can also shift during episodes of heavy rainfall. Researchers studying Japan’s Mount Fuji spotted instances of centimeter-level ground deformation tied to intense precipitation. Fortunately, such events can be readily differentiated from deformation caused by magmatic activity, the team reported in Geology.
Volcanoes around the world, from Kīlauea in the United States to Calbuco in Chile, are outfitted with arrays of sensors. Mount Fuji is no exception—the region around the edifice is equipped with dozens of instruments to detect ground movement, infrasound, and other signs of potential volcanic unrest. All that monitoring is warranted: Shin-Fuji (“Younger Fuji”)—the youngest of Mount Fuji’s three overlapping volcanoes—is currently active.
Shuo Zheng, a hydrological geodesist at Hong Kong Polytechnic University in China, and his colleagues recently mined some of those Mount Fuji data. The team focused on Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) observations—otherwise known as GPS data—collected daily from 2017 to 2023.
Zheng and his collaborators found several instances in which the two GNSS stations located within 10 kilometers of the summit of Mount Fuji recorded clear signs of uplift. Those signals, reflecting changes of roughly 1–2 centimeters, far exceeded the sensors’ millimeter-level precision. And when the team correlated the timing of that uplift with rain gauge records, they found that the ground often tended to rise almost immediately during periods of heavy precipitation (defined as several tens of millimeters of rain falling per day).
“They can store and transmit groundwater, acting like aquifers.”
There’s likely a physical link behind that correlation, the researchers surmised. The explanation involves the so-called clinkers that cap each of Mount Fuji’s subterranean layers of lava. Clinkers are layers of small rocks that form when the surface of a lava flow rapidly cools, and these structures persist in the shallow subsurface of Mount Fuji. “They can store and transmit groundwater, acting like aquifers,” Zheng said.
When water fills up the pore space within a clinker, there’s no place for the overlying ground to go but up. It therefore makes sense that GNSS stations located atop old lava layers would exhibit uplift in response to intense rainfall, the team concluded.
When Zheng and his collaborators analyzed data from the nine GNSS stations located between 25 and 40 kilometers from the summit, however, they found that the ground actually tended to subside during periods of heavy precipitation. “There are two different responses,” said Kosuke Heki, a geophysicist and geodesist at Hokkaido University in Japan and a member of the research team. That subsidence is a known effect, and it’s been observed in a variety of locales. The subsidence doesn’t dominate closer to the summit of Mount Fuji because of the presence of the clinker layers there, the team reasoned.
“Uplift by rain easily terminates when it stops raining.”
The uplift that the team recorded close to the summit of Mount Fuji tended to last just a day or two; it disappeared when the rainfall ceased. That timing is key for differentiating precipitation-induced uplift from magma-induced uplift. “Uplift by rain easily terminates when it stops raining,” said Heki. “But magma has a much longer timescale. It continues for weeks or months.”
That difference is critical, said Luca Caricchi, a volcanologist at the Université de Genève who was not involved in the research. There’s long been the mindset that ground deformation means that an eruption is imminent, but these new findings show that a heaving volcano doesn’t always mean that magma is on the move, said Caricchi. If the deformation is short-lived, the explanation might just be precipitation, he said. “You don’t need to worry.”
Zheng and his colleagues have looked for a similar effect for other volcanoes in Japan. They didn’t find any conclusive trends when they analyzed a chain of island volcanoes south of Tokyo, however. Perhaps that’s because the clinker layers beneath those edifices are so close to the sea that water efficiently drains out of them, the team hypothesized.
—Katherine Kornei (@KatherineKornei), Science Writer
Heat, air pollution, and flooding can affect a city and the health of city residents. Yet few cities have a comprehensive network of weather stations providing accurate measurements of rainfall, humidity, and air temperature across different neighborhoods. Some of this information can be filled in by community members’ personal weather stations, like those connected through Weather Underground. But because of a lack of sensors and inconsistencies in data collection, these types of community networks are often not reliable on their own. Furthermore, most personal weather stations are located in higher-income neighborhoods, with very few in lower-income, underserved neighborhoods.
The same is true in Baltimore, where personal weather stations are more prevalent in higher-income, majority-white neighborhoods around and stretching north from the Inner Harbor but are lacking in lower-income and majority-Black neighborhoods to the west and east. Furthermore, only one National Weather Service sensor is present in the city itself, in the Inner Harbor, and another sensor is located about 12 kilometers (8 miles) away at Baltimore/Washington International Airport.
Waugh et al. describe a partnership between universities, state agencies, and Baltimore residents to build the Baltimore Community Weather Network (BCWN) that addresses the missing data coverage around the city. Unlike the patchwork of personal weather stations, community members participating in the BCWN are from underserved areas in the city and are actively involved in data collection and interpretation.
Weather stations are placed in open spaces to avoid obstacles like buildings or trees affecting measurements of temperature, rainfall, or wind. This careful placement is designed to ensure that the data collected are as close as possible to the conditions experienced by actual residents.
BCWN sites are carefully monitored and managed by community members. Baltimore residents are actively involved in data collection, weather station management, and decisionmaking with scientists and local organizations to help promote engagement, education, and community empowerment.
Because Baltimore is not the only U.S. city that has historically lacked accurate weather data coverage, the BCWN system could be applied to other locations—or even used to monitor other environmental exposures, such as air pollution, the authors say. (Community Science, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025CSJ000154, 2026)
—Rebecca Owen (@beccapox.bsky.social), Science Writer
clgkhkrf54 posted a photo:
Maya Classic Period (550-900 AD) rare polychrome pottery from the Jay I. Kislak collection, Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. See long file names for additional information.
Since 1989, Utah’s Great Salt Lake has lost some 70% of its surface area, reducing its ecosystem services and creating stretches of drying lake bed (playa) that send toxic dust into the air.
That drying ground has also provided opportunities for scientists to survey what lies below the lake’s floor. In a study published in Geosciences, researchers revealed glimpses of fresh water and salt water, with some fresh water lurking only a few meters below the surface. The work could provide clues for conserving the lake, a crucial resource for both the ecology and the economy of the region.
In 2023, Michael Thorne and colleagues began using a technique known as electrical resistivity tomography (ERT), which can reveal the presence of fresh or salty water, at dozens of spots near the southern and eastern edges of the Great Salt Lake. Thorne is a geophysicist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and a coauthor of the new study.
The lake’s desiccation allowed the researchers to access areas where “at previous times, you would never be able to do measurements because [they] would be underwater,” said Thorne.
Establishing a network of ERT sensors requires robust fieldwork. Over the course of long days in the field, Mason Jacketta, lead author of the new study, and others placed electrodes into the ground a few meters apart, making lines that stretched hundreds of meters. Between pairs of electrodes, they measured the resistance to electrical current. Salty water, filled with electricity-conducting ions, has lower resistance than fresh water.
Paired with information on the rock and sediment beneath the surface, as well as with measurements from nearby wells, the ERT data allowed the team to work out a profile of how electrical resistance varied with depth and to figure out what kind of water seeped through pores in the ground below. The team shared the results of their work on the southern part of the lake in Geosciences, while more in-depth findings about the eastern shore will appear in an upcoming publication.
“What this is really showing is that [fresh water is] prevalent all over the place.”
At many of the sites, Jacketta and others found fresh water near the surface.
“What this is really showing is that [fresh water is] prevalent all over the place,” said Elliot Jagniecki, a geologist at the Utah Geological Survey who wasn’t part of the work.
That fresh water was often in close proximity to patches of salty groundwater. At one spot in the southeastern part of the lake, the team found a shallow layer of brine. But right below that, at only 5 meters of depth, they encountered fresh water. At the team’s most northern study site, they found fresh water around 2 meters deep. On the southern shore, they found fresh water in some places as shallow as 2.8 meters.
The team’s results also helped explain curious features around the Great Salt Lake, including mounds made of salt and islands made of reeds.
The lacy-looking layers of the lake’s so-called mirabilite mounds form in the winter, when the cold freezes upwelling salty water, concentrating its salts. With measurements taken next to where some mirabilite mounds form, the researchers could visualize the underground conduits that send salty water to the surface.
While mirabilite mounds form close to shore, mounds made of Phragmites reeds appear in the lake’s interior as well as along its periphery. Thorne and his colleague William Johnson first noticed these mysterious circles popping up in Google Maps more than a decade ago. When they went to investigate, they found Phragmites.
“The population of Phragmites around the Great Salt Lake is really not allowing fresh groundwater to go back into the Great Salt Lake.”
In the new work, the team placed a line for electrical resistivity tomography straight through a Phragmites mound. These reeds wouldn’t be able to survive in the lake’s briny water, Thorne said, but the team’s results showed fresh water rising right to where the invasive reeds grew thick.
“The population of Phragmites around the Great Salt Lake is really not allowing fresh groundwater to go back into the Great Salt Lake,” said study coauthor Tonie van Dam, a geophysicist at the University of Utah. The reeds suck up some 70,000 acre-feet of fresh water that could go back into the lake, she said. In “sucking up [fresh water] for their own existence,” van Dam explained, the reeds crowd out native plant species that provide habitat for native birds.
Overall, the study provides a new picture of the fresh and salty groundwater beneath the lake and how these resources feed what people observe at the surface.
It’s also helped to prompt other work, Thorne said, including one recent study in which researchers used a helicopter carrying a wire loop to create and sense electrical currents underground. That study, published in Scientific Reports, suggested there could be a large amount of fresh water under one part of the lake.
But that work is a proof of concept, Jagniecki said, and accessing such potential aquifers might not be sufficient to help address the lake’s current desiccation. Even if they could, refilling them could take thousands of years. “I just don’t think that’s a solution,” he said.
Saline lakes are fragile ecosystems sensitive to climate change, Jagniecki said. The Great Salt Lake harbors plenty of life, such as brine shrimp that become food for a host of migratory birds that use the lake as a stopover. Mineral extraction and the use of brine shrimp for feed in aquaculture are important drivers of Utah’s economy.
Getting a better understanding of how saline lake systems function could be helpful in conserving them and maintaining the resources they provide humans, Jagniecki explained.
“It’s actually more than that. It’s a beautiful landscape,” he said.
—Carolyn Wilke, Science Writer
JUNE 11 — For as long as cities have existed, accessibility has shaped the value of land. This principle is not disappearing, but it is being revised. The digital economy has not made physical space irrelevant. It has made location more complex. Land is still valuable because of where it is, but “where” now means more than distance to roads, rail, town centres, or customers. It also means whether a location sits within a delivery radius, is visible to platform algorithms, is connected to digital infrastructure, and can support data-driven urban services.
Foot traffic still matters, but service radius now matters too. Zoning plans still shape development, but algorithms increasingly influence how places perform. Traditional infrastructure remains important, but digital infrastructure is becoming part of the new urban value equation.
Retail value is no longer only about foot traffic
A good retail location was once mainly defined by strong foot traffic. That logic still applies, especially for businesses that depend on visibility and walk-in customers. However, it is no longer the only logic that matters. For many businesses, service radius has become just as important. A shop on a quieter secondary street may perform well if it is surrounded by dense residential areas and can serve customers efficiently through delivery platforms. A small food operator may no longer need premium frontage if most orders come through an app. A pharmacy, grocery store, laundry service may derive value not from how many people walk past, but from how many customers it can reach within 15 or 30 minutes.
This changes the economic meaning of location. A less visible shop lot may become commercially viable if it is strategically located within a high-demand residential catchment. In many Malaysian cities, secondary shop lots, neighbourhood retail units, cloud kitchens, and small fulfilment points are gaining new relevance supporting delivery-based business models. Foot traffic is not irrelevant. It has simply been joined by another value driver: digital reach. The best location is no longer only where people pass through. It may also be where people can be reached quickly, affordably, and repeatedly.
Urban land value is no longer shaped only by roads, rail stations, zoning plans, and visible development patterns. It is also shaped by less visible digital systems. Algorithms now influence which areas receive demand, which businesses are discovered, which parcels become logistically attractive, and which routes become commercially viable. A logistics operator deciding where to locate a micro-fulfilment centre studies order density, travel time, delivery performance, customer behaviour, and platform demand patterns. A food delivery platform may increase the visibility of some restaurants because they sit within a high-demand service radius. A ride-hailing algorithm may repeatedly direct vehicles through certain neighbourhoods because the route is faster, even if this increases pressure on residential streets.
This means location advantage is increasingly co-produced by physical infrastructure and digital visibility. A shop lot may be physically accessible, but commercially weaker if it is poorly positioned within platform search, delivery coverage, or customer data flows. Conversely, a less prominent location may become viable if it performs well within algorithmic systems that connect demand, distance, and delivery efficiency.
At the same time, digital infrastructure is becoming part of the basic urban system. Broadband connectivity, data centres, cloud infrastructure, digital payment systems, urban sensors, platform networks, and geospatial data are no longer separate from the built environment. They influence where businesses locate, how services are delivered, how people move, and how land is used. This creates a new planning reality. Local authorities continue to regulate land through zoning, density control, infrastructure provision, and development approval, while private platforms quietly shape urban activity through routing, ranking, pricing, and service allocation. These systems may reinforce each other, but they may also work at cross purposes.
The issue is not that algorithms or digital tools are bad for cities. They can help local authorities understand land use patterns, detect congestion pressure, optimise infrastructure use, monitor pollution, and plan cleaner urban development. The concern is governance. If algorithms and digital infrastructure increasingly influence land value and urban activity, their effects must be made more visible, explainable, and accountable.
For the built environment sector, this marks an important shift. Planners, valuers, developers, quantity surveyors, and policymakers can no longer assess land value only through frontage, accessibility, surrounding development, and infrastructure. They must also consider digital indicators such as platform visibility, service radius, delivery efficiency, data connectivity, proximity to demand clusters, and exposure to algorithmic traffic flows.
The digital economy should not be treated only as a technology agenda. It is also a land use agenda, an infrastructure agenda, and a governance agenda.
Economic resilience in the digital age
The digital economy also changes how cities absorb shocks. Floods, traffic congestion, pandemics, supply chain delays, rising operating costs, and changing consumer behaviour all affect how businesses survive. In the traditional urban economy, many businesses depended heavily on physical access. If customers could not reach the shop, revenue declined. If a road was flooded, a shopping district became temporarily inactive. If workers could not commute, office-centred economic activity slowed.
The digital economy introduces a second channel. Businesses can now reach customers through online platforms, delivery networks, digital payment systems, social media marketing, and remote service models. A cafe, pharmacy, grocery shop, tuition centre, clinic, or small retailer is no longer limited only to walk-in customers. This does not remove vulnerability, but it creates redundancy. A city that depends only on foot traffic is more exposed. A city where businesses operate through both physical and digital channels has more room to adapt. When one channel weakens, another can partially absorb the pressure.
In Malaysia, this has practical significance. Monsoon floods disrupt road access. Traffic congestion affects delivery reliability and business productivity. Urban households increasingly expect convenience, speed, and flexible services. Under these conditions, digital capability becomes part of economic resilience. However, digital resilience is not automatic. It depends on infrastructure quality, affordability of digital tools, platform fairness, logistics capacity, data governance, and the ability of small businesses to participate. Large firms are often better positioned to use data and optimise delivery networks. Small retailers may struggle with platform fees, digital skills, and visibility in crowded online marketplaces.
This is where urban policy matters. Cities need reliable broadband, efficient logistics spaces, flood-resilient infrastructure, inclusive digital support for small businesses, and better coordination between land use planning and platform-driven urban activity. The digital economy should not be romanticised as a cure for urban vulnerability. It is better understood as an additional layer of resilience. It gives businesses alternative ways to reach customers, gives cities better data to manage disruption, and gives local economies more flexibility when physical systems are under stress.
The digital economy has not made land less important; It changes what makes land valuable. In Kuala Lumpur, urban value is now shaped by layered interactions between roads, buildings, zoning, foot traffic, digital reach, and algorithms. Yes, location still matters, but rules that define a valuable location are being rewritten.
* The authors are senior lecturers at Faculty of Built Environment, Universiti Malaya.
** This is the personal opinion of the writers or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
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