DENVER — A hidden landscape riddled with landslides is coming into focus in Yellowstone National Park, thanks to a laser-equipped airplane.

Scientists of yore crisscrossed Yellowstone on foot and studied aerial photographs to better understand America’s first national park. But today researchers have a massive new digital dataset at their fingertips that’s shedding new light on this nearly 1-million-hectare natural wonderland.

These observations of Yellowstone have allowed a pair of researchers to pinpoint over 1,000 landslides within and near the park, hundreds of which had not been mapped before, the duo reported October 9 at the Geological Society of America Connects 2022 meeting. Most of these landslides likely occurred thousands of years ago, but some are still moving.
Mapping Yellowstone’s landslides is important because they can cripple infrastructure like roadways and bridges. The millions of visitors that explore the park each year access Yellowstone through just a handful of entrance roads, one of which recently closed for months following intense flooding.

In 2020, a small aircraft flew a few hundred meters above the otherworldly landscape of Yellowstone. But it wasn’t ferrying tourists eager for up close views of the park’s famous wolves or hydrothermal vents (SN: 7/21/20, SN: 1/11/21). Instead, the plane carried a downward-pointing laser that fired pulses of infrared light at the ground. By measuring the timing of pulses that hit the ground and reflected back toward the aircraft, researchers reconstructed the precise topography of the landscape.

Such “light detection and ranging,” or lidar, data reveal details that often remain hidden to the eye. “We’re able to see the surface of the ground as if there’s no vegetation,” says Kyra Bornong, a geoscientist at Idaho State University in Pocatello. Similar lidar observations have been used to pinpoint pre-Columbian settlements deep within the Amazon jungle (SN: 5/25/22).

The Yellowstone lidar data were collected as part of the 3D Elevation Program, an ongoing project spearheaded by the United States Geological Survey to map the entirety of the United States using lidar.
Bornong and geomorphologist Ben Crosby analyzed the Yellowstone data — which resolve details as small as about one meter — to home in on landslides. The team searched for places where the landscape changed from looking relatively smooth to looking jumbled, evidence that soil and rocks had once been on the move. “It’s a pattern-recognition game,” says Crosby, also of Idaho State University. “You’re looking for this contrast between the lumpy stuff and the smooth stuff.”

The researchers spotted more than 1,000 landslides across Yellowstone, most of which were clustered near the periphery of the park. That makes sense given the geography of Yellowstone’s interior, says Lyman Persico, a geomorphologist at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., who was not involved in the research. The park sits atop a supervolcano, whose previous eruptions blanketed much of the park in lava (SN: 1/2/18). “You’re sitting in the middle of the Yellowstone caldera, where everything is flat,” says Persico.

But steep terrain also abounds in the national park, and there’s infrastructure in many of those landslide-prone areas. In several places, the team found that roads had been built over landslide debris. One example is Highway 191, which skirts the western edge of Yellowstone.

An aerial image of U.S. Highway 191 near Yellowstone shows barely perceptible signs of a long-ago landslide. But laser mapping reveals the structure and extent of the landslide in much greater detail (use the slider to compare images). It’s one of more than 1,000 landslides uncovered by new maps.
It’s worth keeping an eye on this highway since it funnels significant amounts of traffic through regions apt to experience landslides, Bornong says. “It’s one of the busiest roads in Montana.”

There’s plenty more to learn from this novel look at Yellowstone, Crosby says. Lidar data can shed light on geologic processes like volcanic and tectonic activity, both of which Yellowstone has in spades. “It’s a transformative tool,” he says.

It was the rift watched ‘round the world.

In July 2017, after weeks of anticipation, a massive iceberg about the size of Delaware split from the Antarctic Peninsula (SN: 7/12/17). Satellite images show that the orphaned iceberg, known as A68, ultimately disintegrated in the Southern Ocean. Now, researchers say they have pieced together the powerful forces that led to that final breakup.

Polar scientist Alex Huth of Princeton University and colleagues combined observations of the iceberg’s drift with simulations of ocean currents and wind stress. Iceberg A68a, the largest remaining chunk of the original berg, was caught in a tug-of-war of ocean currents, and the strain of those opposing forces probably pulled the iceberg apart, the team reports October 19 in Science Advances.
After A68’s separation from the Larsen C ice shelf, researchers had questions — such as what creatures live on the seafloor in the ice’s dark shadow (SN: 2/8/19). As for the iceberg itself, it took a while to get moving, lingering in the neighborhood for about a year (SN: 7/23/18). By December 2020, satellite images show, the berg had clearly seen some action and was just two-thirds of its original size.
The new simulations suggest how A68a probably met its fate. On December 20, 2020, the long, slender “finger” at one end of the iceberg drifted into a strong, fast-moving current. The rest of the ice remained outside the current. The tension rifted the berg, and the finger sheared off and broke apart within a few days.

Shear stress is a previously unknown mechanism for large iceberg breakup, and isn’t represented in climate simulations, the team says. In the Southern Ocean, the melting of massive bergs can be a large source of cold freshwater to the ocean surface. That, in turn, can have a big impact on ocean circulation and the global climate.

U.S. millennials are rejecting suburbia and moving back to the city. That was a prevailing idea in 2019, when I started as the social sciences reporter at Science News. But when I began digging into a possible story on the phenomenon, I encountered an incoherent mess. Some research showed that suburbs were growing, others that suburbs were shrinking and yet others showed growth in both suburbs and cities.

Unable to make sense of that maze of findings, I shelved the story idea. Then, several months later, I stumbled across a Harvard University white paper explaining that disagreement in the field stems from competing definitions of what distinguishes a city from a suburb. Some researchers define the suburbs as areas falling outside census-designated cities. Others look only for markers of suburbanism, such as a wealth of single-family houses and car-based commutes, the researchers wrote.
I have encountered this type of fuzziness around definitions of all sorts of terms and concepts in the years I’ve covered the social sciences. Sometimes researchers simply assume that their definition of a key concept is the definition. Or they nod briefly at other definitions, and then go forth with whichever one they choose, without much explanation why. Other times, researchers in one subfield choose one definition, and researchers in another subfield choose a different one — each without ever knowing of the other’s existence. It’s enough to drive any reporter to tear their hair out.

“If you look … you will find this morass of definitions and measurements” in the social sciences, says quantitative psychologist Jessica Flake of McGill University in Montreal. My experience was a common one, she assured me.

Definitional morasses exist in other scientific fields too. Biologists frequently disagree about how best to define the word “species” (SN: 11/1/17). Virologists squabble over what counts as “alive” when it comes to viruses (SN: 11/1/21). And not all astronomers are happy with the decision to define the word “planet” in a way that left Pluto out in the cold as a mere dwarf planet (SN: 8/24/21).

But the social sciences have some special challenges, Flake says. The field is a youngster compared with a discipline like astronomy, so has had less time to sort out its definitions. And social science concepts are often inherently subjective. Describing abstract ideas like motivation or feelings can be squishier than describing, say, a meteorite.

It’s tempting to assume, as I did until I began researching this column, that a single, imperfect definition for individual concepts is preferable to this definitional cacophony. And some researchers encourage this approach. “While no suburban definition will be perfect, standardization would increase understanding of how suburban studies relate to each other,” the Harvard researchers wrote in that suburbia paper.

But a recent study taking aim at how we define the middle class showed me how alternative definitions can lead to a shift in perspective.

While most researchers use income as a proxy for class, these researchers used people’s buying patterns. That revealed that a fraction of people who appear middle class by income struggle to pay for basic necessities, such as housing, child care and groceries, the team reported in July in Social Indicators Research. That is, they live as if they are working class.

What’s more, that vulnerable group skews Black and Hispanic, a disparity that arises, in part, because these families of color often lack the generational wealth of white families, says Melissa Haller, a geographer at Binghamton University in New York. So when calamity strikes, families without that financial cushion can struggle to recover. Yet a government or nonprofit organization looking to direct aid toward the neediest families, and relying solely on income-based metrics, would overlook this vulnerable group.

“Depending on what definition you start with, you will see different facts,” says Anna Alexandrova, a philosopher of science at the University of Cambridge. A standardized definition of middle class, for example, could obscure some of those key facts.

In the social sciences, what’s needed instead of conceptual unity, Alexandrova says, is conceptual clarity.

Though social scientists disagree about how to go about solving this problem of clarity, Flake says that failure to tackle the issue jeopardizes the field as much as other crises rocking the discipline (SN: 8/27/18). That’s because how a topic is defined determines the scales, surveys and other instruments used to study that concept. And that in turn shapes how researchers crunch numbers and arrive at conclusions.

Defining one’s key terms and then selecting the right tool is somewhat straightforward when relying on large, external datasets. For instance, instead of using national income databases, as is common in the study of the middle class, Haller and her team turned to the federal government’s Consumer Expenditure Surveys to understand people’s daily and emergency purchases.

But often social scientists, particularly psychologists, develop their own scales and surveys to quantify subjective concepts, such as self-esteem, mood or well-being. Definitions of those terms — and the instruments used to study them — can take on a life of their own, Flake says.

She and her team recently showed how this process plays out in the May-June American Psychologist. They combed through the 100 original studies and 100 replications included in a massive reproducibility project in psychology. The researchers zoomed in on 97 multi-item scales — measuring concepts such as gratitude, motivation and self-esteem — used in the original studies, and found that 54 of those scales had no citations to show where the scales originated. That suggests that the original authors defined their idea, and the tool used to measure that idea, on the fly, Flake says. Research teams then attempted to replicate 29 of those studies without digging into the scales’ sources, calling into question the meaning of their results.

For Flake, the way to achieve conceptual clarity is straightforward, if unlikely. Researchers must hit the brakes on generating new ideas, or replicating old ideas, and instead interrogate the morass of old ones.

She points to one promising, if labor-intensive, effort: the Psychological Science Accelerator, a collaboration of over 1,300 researchers in 84 countries. The project aims to identify big ideas in psychology, such as face perception and gender prejudice, and accumulate all the instruments and resulting data used to make sense of those ideas in order to discard, refine or combine existing definitions and tools.

“Instead of running replications, why don’t we use [this] massive team of researchers who represent a lot of perspectives around the world and review concepts first,” Flake says. “We need to stop replicating garbage.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Wind turbines could offer a double whammy in the fight against climate change.

Besides harnessing wind to generate clean energy, turbines may help to funnel carbon dioxide to systems that pull the greenhouse gas out of the air (SN: 8/10/21). Researchers say their simulations show that wind turbines can drag dirty air from above a city or a smokestack into the turbines’ wakes. That boosts the amount of CO2 that makes it to machines that can remove it from the atmosphere. The researchers plan to describe their simulations and a wind tunnel test of a scaled-down system at a meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics in Indianapolis on November 21.
Addressing climate change will require dramatic reductions in the amount of carbon dioxide that humans put into the air — but that alone won’t be enough (SN: 3/10/22). One part of the solution could be direct air capture systems that remove some CO2 from the atmosphere (SN: 9/9/22).

But the large amounts of CO2 produced by factories, power plants and cities are often concentrated at heights that put it out of reach of machinery on the ground that can remove it. “We’re looking into the fluid dynamics benefits of utilizing the wake of the wind turbine to redirect higher concentrations” down to carbon capture systems, says mechanical engineer Clarice Nelson of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

As large, power-generating wind turbines rotate, they cause turbulence that pulls air down into the wakes behind them, says mechanical engineer Luciano Castillo, also of Purdue. It’s an effect that can concentrate carbon dioxide enough to make capture feasible, particularly near large cities like Chicago.

“The beauty is that [around Chicago], you have one of the best wind resources in the region, so you can use the wind turbine to take some of the dirty air in the city and capture it,” Castillo says. Wind turbines don’t require the cooling that nuclear and fossil fuel plants need. “So not only are you producing clean energy,” he says, “you are not using water.”

Running the capture systems from energy produced by the wind turbines can also address the financial burden that often goes along with removing CO2 from the air. “Even with tax credits and potentially selling the CO2, there’s a huge gap between the value that you can get from capturing it and the actual cost” that comes with powering capture with energy that comes from other sources, Nelson says. “Our method would be a no-cost added benefit” to wind turbine farms.

There are probably lots of factors that will impact CO2 transport by real-world turbines, including the interactions the turbine wakes have with water, plants and the ground, says Nicholas Hamilton, a mechanical engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., who was not involved with the new studies. “I’m interested to see how this group scaled their experiment for wind tunnel investigation.”

You might feel a spark when you talk to your crush, but living things don’t require romance to make electricity. A study published October 24 in iScience suggests that the electricity naturally produced by swarming insects like honeybees and locusts is an unappreciated contributor to the overall electric charge of the atmosphere.

“Particles in the atmosphere easily charge up,” says Joseph Dwyer, a physicist at the University of New Hampshire in Durham who was not involved with the study. “Insects are little particles moving around the atmosphere.” Despite this, the potential that insect-induced static electricity plays a role in the atmosphere’s electric field, which influences how water droplets form, dust particles move and lightning strikes brew, hasn’t been considered before, he says.
Scientists have known about the minuscule electric charge carried by living things, such as insects, for a long time. However, the idea that an electric bug-aloo could alter the charge in the air on a large scale came to researchers through sheer chance.

“We were actually interested in understanding how atmospheric electricity influences biology,” says Ellard Hunting, a biologist at the University of Bristol in England. But when a swarm of honeybees passed over a sensor meant to pick up background atmospheric electricity at the team’s field station, the scientists began to suspect that the influence could flow the other way too.

Hunting and colleagues, including biologists and physicists, measured the change in the strength of electric charge when other honeybee swarms passed over the sensor, revealing an average voltage increase of 100 volts per meter. The denser the insect swarm, the greater the charge produced.

This inspired the team to think about even larger insect swarms, like the biblical hordes of locusts that plagued Egypt in antiquity (and, in 2021, Las Vegas (SN: 3/30/21)). Flying objects, from animals to airplanes, build up static electricity as they move through the air. The team measured the charges of individual desert locusts (Schistocerca gregaria) as they flew in a wind tunnel powered by a computer fan. Taking data on locust density from other studies, the team then used a computer simulation based on the honeybee swarm data to scale up these single locust measurements into electric charge estimates for an entire locust swarm. Clouds of locusts could produce electricity on a per-meter basis on par with that in storm clouds, the scientists report.

Hunting says the results highlight the need to explore the unknown lives of airborne animals, which can sometimes reach much greater heights than honeybees or locusts. Spiders, for example, can soar kilometers above Earth when “ballooning” on silk threads to reach new habitats (SN: 7/5/18). “There’s a lot of biology in the sky,” he says, from insects and birds to microorganisms. “Everything adds up.”

Though some insect swarms can be immense, Dwyer says that electrically charged flying animals are unlikely to ever reach the density required to produce lightning like storm clouds do. But their presence could interfere with our efforts to watch for looming strikes that could hurt people or damage property.

“If you have something messing up our electric field measurements, that could cause a false alarm,” he says, “or it could make you miss something that’s actually important.” While the full effect that insects and other animals have on atmospheric electricity remains to be deduced, Dwyer says these results are “an interesting first look” into the phenomenon.

Hunting says this initial step into an exciting new area of research shows that working with scientists from different fields can spark shocking findings. “Being really interdisciplinary,” he says, “allows for these kinds of serendipitous moments.”

Aye-ayes are true champions of nose picking.

A new video offers the first evidence that these nocturnal lemurs of Madagascar stick their fingers up their noses and lick off the mucus. They don’t use just any finger for the job, either. The primates go spelunking for snot with the ultralong, witchy middle finger they typically use to find and fish grubs out of tree bark.

A reconstruction of the inside of an aye-aye’s head based on CT scans shows that this spindly digit probably pokes all the way through the animal’s nasal passages to reach its throat, researchers report online October 26 in the Journal of Zoology.
“This is a brilliant example of how science can serve human curiosity,” says Michael Haslam, a primate archaeologist based in London who was not involved in the new work. “My first take was that it’s a cool — and a bit creepy — video, but [the researchers] have gone beyond that initial reaction of ‘What on Earth?’ to actually explore what’s happening inside the animal.”

The new footage stars Kali, a female aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis) at the Duke Lemur Center in Durham, N.C. “The aye-aye stopped eating and started to pick its nose, and I was really surprised,” says evolutionary biologist Anne-Claire Fabre, who filmed the video. “I was wondering where the finger was going.” An aye-aye is about as big as a house cat, but its clawed middle finger is some 8 centimeters long. And Kali was plunging almost the entire digit up her snout to sample her own snot with dainty licks.

“There is one moment where the camera is [shaking], and I was giggling,” says Fabre, of the Natural History Museum of Bern in Switzerland. Afterward, she asked her colleagues if they had ever seen an aye-aye picking its nose. “The ones that were working a lot with aye-ayes would tell me, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s happening really often,’” says Fabre, who later witnessed the behavior in several other aye-ayes.
This got Fabre and her colleagues curious about how many other primate species have been caught with their fingers in their nostrils. The researchers scoured the literature for past studies and the internet for other videos documenting the behavior.

Unfortunately, “most of the literature that we were finding were jokes,” Fabre says. “I was really surprised, because there is a lot of literature on other types of pretty gross behaviors, such as coprophagy,” or poo eating, among animals (SN: 7/19/21). But between all the bogus articles, the team did find some real reports of primate nose picking, including research done by Jane Goodall in the 1970s.

Aye-ayes are now the 12th known species of primate, including humans, to pick their noses and snack on the snot, the researchers found. Others include gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and macaques. Nose pickers tend to be primates that have especially good dexterity and use tools.

“The team [has] given us the first map of nose picking across our primate family tree, which immediately raises questions about just how much of this behavior is happening out there, unseen or unreported,” Haslam says. He remembers once seeing a capuchin monkey using a twig or stem to pick its nose (SN: 9/6/15).

“I’m surprised that there aren’t more reports on nose picking, especially from zoos where animals are watched every day,” Haslam adds. “Perhaps our own social stigma around it means that scientists are less likely to want to report nose-picking animals, or it may even be seen as too common to be interesting.”
The fact that so many primate species have been spotted picking their noses and eating the boogers makes Fabre’s team and Haslam wonder whether this seemingly nasty habit has some unknown advantage. Perhaps eating germ-laden boogers boosts the immune system.

For now, untangling the evolutionary origins and potential perks of nose picking will require a more complete census of what species — primate or otherwise — mine and munch on their own mucus.

A new analysis of nearly a quarter million stars puts firm ages on the most momentous pages from our galaxy’s life story.

Far grander than most of its neighbors, the Milky Way arose long ago, as lesser galaxies smashed together. Its thick disk — a pancake-shaped population of old stars — originated remarkably soon after the Big Bang and well before most of the stellar halo that envelops the galaxy’s disk, astronomers report March 23 in Nature.

“We are now able to provide a very clear timeline of what happened in the earliest time of our Milky Way,” says astronomer Maosheng Xiang.
He and Hans-Walter Rix, both at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, studied almost 250,000 subgiants — stars that are growing larger and cooler after using up the hydrogen fuel at their centers. The temperatures and luminosities of these stars reveal their ages, letting the researchers track how different epochs in galactic history spawned stars with different chemical compositions and orbits around the Milky Way’s center.

“There’s just an incredible amount of information here,” says Rosemary Wyse, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved with the study. “We really want to understand how our galaxy came to be the way it is,” she says. “When were the chemical elements of which we are made created?”

Xiang and Rix discovered that the Milky Way’s thick disk got its start about 13 billion years ago. That’s just 800 million years after the universe’s birth. The thick disk, which measures 6,000 light-years from top to bottom in the sun’s vicinity, kept forming stars for a long time, until about 8 billion years ago.

During this period, the thick disk’s iron content shot up 30-fold as exploding stars enriched its star-forming gas, the team found. At the dawn of the thick disk era, a newborn star had only a tenth as much iron, relative to hydrogen, as the sun; by the end, 5 billion years later, a thick disk star was three times richer in iron than the sun.

Xiang and Rix also found a tight relation between a thick disk star’s age and iron content. This means gas was thoroughly mixed throughout the thick disk: As time went on, newborn stars inherited steadily higher amounts of iron, no matter whether the stars formed close to or far from the galactic center.

But that’s not all that was happening. As other researchers reported in 2018, another galaxy once hit our own, giving the Milky Way most of the stars in its halo, which engulfs the disk (SN: 11/1/18). Halo stars have little iron.

The new work revises the date of this great galactic encounter: “We found that the merger happened 11 billion years ago,” Xiang says, a billion years earlier than thought. As the intruder’s gas crashed into the Milky Way’s gas, it triggered the creation of so many new stars that our galaxy’s star formation rate reached a record high 11 billion years ago.

The merger also splashed some thick disk stars up into the halo, which Xiang and Rix identified from the stars’ higher iron abundances. These “splash” stars, the researchers found, are at least 11 billion years old, confirming the date of the merger.

The thick disk ran out of gas 8 billion years ago and stopped making stars. Fresh gas around the Milky Way then settled into a thinner disk, which has given birth to stars ever since — including the 4.6-billion-year-old sun and most of its stellar neighbors. The thin disk is about 2,000 light-years thick in our part of the galaxy.

“The Milky Way has been quite quiet for the last 8 billion years,” Xiang says, experiencing no further encounters with big galaxies. That makes it different from most of its peers.

If the thick disk really existed 13 billion years ago, Xiang says, then the new James Webb Space Telescope (SN: 1/24/22) may discern similar disks in galaxies 13 billion light-years from Earth — portraits of the Milky Way as a young galaxy.

In my opinion, the most satisfying science documentary TV series ever made was a 1970s British production called Connections. Hosted by impish historian James Burke, wearing bell-bottoms and thick-framed tortoiseshell glasses, each episode revealed how one small innovation from earlier human civilizations led to another and then another and another, culminating in the invention of some ultramodern (for the 1970s) technology.

Watching these pieces of the past come together was deeply gratifying, if not a little dizzying. The present is so familiar that it feels inevitable. But it was striking to see modern civilization, even modern humans, in context, to recognize how all that we are now actually hinges on countless moments of invention, improvement and experimentation in the deep past.

I had a similar reaction to The Rise and Reign of the Mammals, paleontologist Steve Brusatte’s sweeping history of the animals that have, for the moment, inherited the Earth. Moving generally forward in time, the book describes how the mammalian line progressively acquired a range of features that have come to define what a mammal is.

Some of the moments of evolutionary invention that led to what we now think of as a mammal are remarkably subtle. There’s the hard roof of the mouth that created a dedicated airway to the lungs, allowing mammal ancestors to eat and breathe at the same time. There’s the change from a spine that bends from left to right (which produces the classically reptilian side-to-side gait) to one that enables bending up and down, which ultimately allowed mammals to take in more oxygen as they moved, helping them run faster. And there’s the variety of tooth shapes — incisors, canines, premolars and molars — that made it possible for mammals to eat many kinds of food. A reptile, by contrast, tends to have just one tooth type.

Some mammalian characteristics are very familiar: milk production, warm-bloodedness, hair. But there’s one less–well-known evolutionary advance that was in its humble way quite profound, setting “us apart from amphibians, reptiles, and birds,” Brusatte writes. It’s a joint in the jaw that makes chewing possible (SN: 8/17/19, p. 8). The ability to chew was “a major evolutionary turning point,” he writes. “It triggered a domino chain of changes to mammalian feeding, intelligence, and reproduction.”
Brusatte also describes a second small, curious adaptation: the transformation of two bones in the reptile jaw, which migrated to the inner ear to become two members of a famous trio, the hammer and anvil (the third is the stirrup). These inner ear bones are the basis for yet another key mammalian feature: the ability to hear a wide range of frequencies, particularly in the upper register (SN Online: 12/6/19).

The story of the Age of Mammals is often told as the flip side to the dinosaurs’ demise. But the fossil record reveals that mammals were hardly newcomers: They arose around the same time as the dinosaurs, over 200 million years ago. Even during the Age of Dinosaurs, “in the smaller and hidden niches, it was already the Age of Mammals,” Brusatte writes. “Mammals were better than the dinosaurs at being small.”

Within just a few hundred thousand years of the asteroid impact that wiped out all nonbird dinos some 66 million years ago, mammals moved in to fill the vacancy, rapidly getting a lot bigger, ballooning from, say, mouse-sized to beaver-sized (SN: 12/7/19, p. 32). Pretty soon, they got a lot smarter too. In a geologic blink — a scant 10 million years — mammals’ brains caught up with their brawn, and then the Age of Mammals was off to the races (SN: 5/7/22 & 5/21/22, p. 18).

Paleontology narratives often require refocusing a story’s lens in a way that can be jarring, zooming out to encompass Earth-wide climate cataclysms and mass extinctions and then in again to describe tiny bones and obscure species. Brusatte, though, is a nimble storyteller and he’s chosen an engrossing story to tell.

As a science writer, I often find myself focusing on minute advances, studying tiny threads. So it’s satisfying to sit back and admire the full tapestry as presented in The Rise and Reign of the Mammals. Reading this book reminded me what I most enjoy about geology, paleontology and the evolution of life on Earth: This planet has got some epic stories.

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Nuclear submarines might provide rogue nations with a path to nuclear weapons. But neutrinos could help reveal attempts to go from boats to bombs.

Neutrinos, lightweight subatomic particles that are released from the reactors that power nuclear subs, could expose the alteration or removal of the nuclear fuel for nefarious purposes, physicists report in a paper accepted in Physical Review Letters. Crucially, this monitoring could be done remotely, while a submarine is in a port with its reactor shut off.
To ensure that countries without nuclear weapons don’t develop them, international inspectors monitor the use of many types of nuclear technology around the world. Nuclear submarines are particularly worrisome. Many use highly enriched uranium, a potent type of fuel that can be weaponized relatively easily. But submarines are protected from monitoring by a loophole. Unlike nuclear power plants, nuclear submarines are used for secretive military purposes, so physical inspections could infringe on a country’s national security.

“Neutrino-based methods can considerably reduce the intrusiveness by making measurements at a distance, without having to physically access the vessel,” says nuclear scientist Igor Jovanovic of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who was not involved with the research.

These particles — specifically their antimatter variety, antineutrinos — stream in droves from operating nuclear reactors. The particles interact feebly with other matter, allowing them to pass through solid material, including a submarine hull. So a neutrino detector placed near a submarine could reveal what’s going on inside, say neutrino physicists Bernadette Cogswell and Patrick Huber of the Center for Neutrino Physics at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.

Scientists have previously suggested using neutrinos to detect other nuclear misdeeds, such as nuclear weapons tests (SN: 8/20/18).

But submarines, often on the move, are hard to monitor with stationary instruments. When the vessels do sit in port, their nuclear reactors may be turned off. So the researchers came up with a solution: They’d look at neutrinos produced by the decays of varieties of chemical elements, or isotopes, that remain after a reactor shuts down. A detector located in the water about 5 meters underneath the sub’s reactor could measure neutrinos produced in decays of certain cerium and ruthenium isotopes. Those measurements would reveal if nuclear material had been removed or swapped out.

This method of monitoring a reactor that’s off is “very clever,” says physicist Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in California.

But the idea would still require buy-in from each country to agree to detectors in submarine berths. “Something like this would be so much better if it wouldn’t require cooperation,” says physicist Giorgio Gratta of Stanford University.

Submarine monitoring may become more pressing in the near future. So far, all countries that have nuclear submarines already possess nuclear weapons, so the issue was hypothetical. But that’s set to change. The United States and the United Kingdom, two nuclear weapons states, announced last September that they are entering into a cooperative security agreement with Australia and will help the country, a non-nuclear weapons state, acquire nuclear submarines.

There’s little suspicion that Australia would use these submarines as a cover for a nuclear weapons program. But “you still have to worry about the precedent that that sets,” Cogswell says. So, she says, monitoring nuclear submarines is newly important. “The question was how the heck to do that.”

There are things I will always remember from my time in New Mexico. The way the bark of towering ponderosa pines smells of vanilla when you lean in close. Sweeping vistas, from forested mountaintops to the Rio Grande Valley, that embellish even the most mundane shopping trip. The trepidation that comes with the tendrils of smoke rising over nearby canyons and ridges during the dry, wildfire-prone summer months.

There were no major wildfires near Los Alamos National Laboratory during the year and a half that I worked in public communications there and lived just across Los Alamos Canyon from the lab. I’m in Maryland now, and social media this year has brought me images and video clips of the wildfires that have been devastating parts of New Mexico, including the Cerro Pelado fire in the Jemez Mountains just west of the lab.
Wherever they pop up, wildfires can ravage the land, destroy property and displace residents by the tens of thousands. The Cerro Pelado fire is small compared with others raging east of Santa Fe — it grew only to the size of Washington, D.C. The fire, which started mysteriously on April 22, is now mostly contained. But at one point it came within 5.6 kilometers of the lab, seriously threatening the place that’s responsible for creating and maintaining key portions of fusion bombs in our nation’s nuclear arsenal.

That close call may be just a hint of growing fire risks to come for the weapons lab as the Southwest suffers in the grip of an epic drought made worse by human-caused climate change (SN: 4/16/20). May and June typically mark the start of the state’s wildfire season. This year, fires erupted in April and were amplified by a string of warm, dry and windy days. The Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon fires east of Santa Fe have merged to become the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s recorded history.

Los Alamos National Lab is in northern New Mexico, about 56 kilometers northwest of Santa Fe. The lab’s primary efforts revolve around nuclear weapons, accounting for 71 percent of its $3.9 billion budget, according the lab’s fiscal year 2021 numbers. The budget covers a ramp-up in production of hollow plutonium spheres, known as “pits” because they are the cores of nuclear bombs, to 30 per year beginning in 2026. That’s triple the lab’s current capability of 10 pits per year. The site is also home to radioactive waste and debris that has been a consequence of weapons production since the first atomic bomb was built in Los Alamos in the early 1940s (SN: 8/6/20).

What is the danger due to fire approaching the lab’s nuclear material and waste? According to literature that Peter Hyde, a spokesperson for the lab, sent to me to ease my concern, not much.

Over the last 3½ years, the lab has removed 3,500 tons of trees and other potential wildfire fuel from the sprawling, 93-square-kilometer complex. Lab facilities, a lab pamphlet says, “are designed and operated to protect the materials that are inside, and radiological and other potentially hazardous materials are stored in containers that are engineered and tested to withstand extreme environments, including heat from fire.”

What’s more, most of roughly 20,000 drums full of nuclear waste that were stored under tents on the lab’s grounds have been removed. They were a cause for anxiety during the last major fire to threaten the lab in 2011. According to the most recent numbers on the project’s website, all but 3,812 of those drums have been shipped off to be stored 655 meters underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.

But there’s still 3,500 cubic meters of nuclear waste in the storage area, according to a March 2022 DOE strategic planning document for Los Alamos. That’s enough to fill 17,000 55-gallon drums. So potentially disastrous quantities of relatively exposed nuclear waste remain at the lab — a single drum from the lab site that exploded after transport to Carlsbad in 2014 resulted in a two-year shutdown of the storage facility. With a total budgeted cleanup cost of $2 billion, the incident is one of the most expensive nuclear accidents in the nation’s history.

Since the 2011 fire, a wider buffer space around the tents has been cleared of vegetation. In conjunction with fire suppression systems, it’s unlikely that wildfire will be a danger to the waste-filled drums, according to a 2016 risk analysis of extreme wildfire scenarios conducted by the lab.

But a February 2021 audit by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Inspector General is less rosy. It found that, despite the removal of most of the waste drums and the multiyear wildfire mitigation efforts that the lab describes, the lab’s wildfire protection is still lacking.

According to the 20-page federal audit, the lab at that time had not developed a “comprehensive, risk-based approach to wildland fire management” in accordance with federal policies related to wildland fire management. The report also noted compounding issues, including the absence of federal oversight of the lab’s wildfire management activities.
Among the ongoing risks, not all fire roads were maintained well enough to provide a safe route for firefighters and others, “which could create dangerous conditions for emergency responders and delay response times,” the auditors wrote.

And a canyon that runs between the lab and the adjacent town of Los Alamos was identified in the report as being packed with 10 times the number of trees that would be ideal, from a wildfire safety perspective. To make matters worse, there’s a hazardous waste site at the bottom of the canyon that could, the auditors wrote, “produce a health risk to the environment and to human health during a fire.”

“The report was pretty stark,” says Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “And certainly, after all the warnings, if they’re still not doing all they need to do to fully mitigate the risk, then that’s just foolishness.”

A 2007 federal audit of Los Alamos, as well as nuclear weapons facilities in Washington state and Idaho, showed similar problems. In short, it seems little has changed at Los Alamos in the 14-year span between 2007 and 2021. Lab spokespeople did not respond to my questions about the lab’s efforts to address the specific problems identified in the 2021 report, despite repeated requests.

The Los Alamos area has experienced three major wildfires since the lab was founded — the Cerro Grande fire in 2000, Las Conchas in 2011 and Cerro Pelado this year. But we probably can’t count on 11-year gaps between future wildfires near Los Alamos, according to Alice Hill, the senior fellow for energy and the environment with the Council on Foreign Relations, who’s based in Washington, D.C.

The changing climate is expected to dramatically affect wildfire risks in years to come, turning Los Alamos and surrounding areas into a tinderbox. A study in 2018 in Climatic Change found that the region extending from the higher elevations in New Mexico, where Los Alamos is located, into Colorado and Arizona will experience the greatest increase in wildfire probabilities in the Southwest. A new risk projection tool that was recommended by Hill, called Risk Factor, also shows increasing fire risk in the Los Alamos area over the next 30 years.

“We are at the point where we are imagining, as we have to, things that we’ve never experienced,” Hill says. “That is fundamentally different than how we have approached these problems throughout human history, which is to look to the past to figure out how to be safer in the future…. The nature of wildfire has changed as more heat is added [to the planet], as temperatures rise.”

Increased plutonium pit production will add to the waste that needs to be shipped to Carlsbad. “Certainly, the radiological assessments in sort of the worst case of wildfire could lead to a pretty significant release of radioactivity, not only affecting the workers onsite but also the offsite public. It’s troubling,” says Lyman, who suggests that nuclear labs like Los Alamos should not be located in such fire-prone areas.
For now, some risks from the Cerra Pelado wildfire will persist, according to Jeff Surber, operations section chief for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forestry Service’s efforts to fight the fire. Large wildfires like Cerra Pelado “hold heat for so long and they continue to smolder in the interior where it burns intermittently,” he said in a May 9 briefing to Los Alamos County residents, and to concerned people like me watching online.

It will be vital to monitor the footprint of the fire until rain or snow finally snuffs it out late in the year. Even then, some danger will linger in the form of “zombie fires” that can flame up long after wildfires appear to have been extinguished (SN: 5/19/21). “We’ve had fires come back in the springtime because there was a root underground that somehow stayed lit all winter long,” said Surber.

So the Cerro Pelado fire, and its occasional smoky tendrils, will probably be a part of life in northern New Mexico for months still. And the future seems just as fiery, if not worse. That’s something all residents, including the lab, need to be preparing for.

Meantime, if you make it out to the mountains of New Mexico soon enough, be sure to sniff a vanilla-flavored ponderosa while you still can. I know I will.