New images of gas churning inside an ancient starburst galaxy help explain why this galactic firecracker underwent such frenzied star formation.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, researchers have taken the most detailed views of the disk of star-forming gas that permeated the galaxy COSMOS-AzTEC-1, which dates back to when the universe was less than 2 billion years old. The telescope observations, reported online August 29 in Nature, reveal an enormous reservoir of molecular gas that was highly susceptible to collapsing and forging new stars.
COSMOS-AzTEC-1 and its starburst contemporaries have long puzzled astronomers, because these galaxies cranked out new stars about 1,000 times as fast as the Milky Way does. According to standard theories of cosmology, galaxies shouldn’t have grown up fast enough to be such prolific star-formers so soon after the Big Bang.

Inside a normal galaxy, the outward pressure of radiation from stars helps counteract the inward pull of gas’s gravity, which pumps the brakes on star formation. But in COSMOS-AzTEC-1, the gas’s gravity was so intense that it overpowered the feeble radiation pressure from stars, leading to runaway star formation. The new ALMA pictures unveil two especially large clouds of collapsing gas in the disk, which were major hubs of star formation.
“It’s like a giant fuel depot that built up right after the Big Bang … and we’re catching it right in the process of the whole thing lighting up,” says study coauthor Min Yun, an astronomer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Yun and colleagues still don’t know how COSMOS-AzTEC-1 stocked up such a massive supply of star-forming material. But future observations of the galaxy and its ilk using ALMA or the James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2021, may help clarify the origins of these ancient cosmic monsters (SN Online: 6/11/14).

One fine Hawaiian day in 2015, Geoff Zahn and Anthony Amend set off on an eight-hour hike. They climbed a jungle mountain on the island of Oahu, swatting mosquitoes and skirting wallows of wild pigs. The two headed to the site where a patch of critically endangered Phyllostegia kaalaensis had been planted a few months earlier. What they found was dispiriting.

“All the plants were gone,” recalls Zahn, then a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The two ecologists found only the red flags placed at the site of each planting, plus a few dead stalks. “It was just like a graveyard,” Zahn says.

The plants, members of the mint family but without the menthol aroma, had most likely died of powdery mildew caused by Neoerysiphe galeopsidis. Today the white-flowered plants, native to Oahu, survive only in two government-managed greenhouses on the island. Why P. kaalaensis is nearly extinct is unclear, though both habitat loss and powdery mildew are potential explanations. The fuzzy fungal disease attacks the plants in greenhouses, and the researchers presume it has killed all the plants they’ve attempted to reintroduce to the wild.

Zahn had never encountered extinction (or near to it) so directly before. He returned home overwhelmed and determined to help the little mint.
Just like humans and other animals, plants have their own microbiomes, the bacteria, fungi and other microorganisms living on and in the plants. Some, like the mildew, attack; others are beneficial. A single leaf hosts millions of microbes, sometimes hundreds of different types. The ones living within the plant’s tissues are called endophytes. Plants acquire many of these microbes from the soil and air; some are passed from generation to generation through seeds.

The friendly microbes assist with growth and photosynthesis or help plants survive in the face of drought and other stressors. Some protect plants from disease or from plant-munching animals. Scientists like Zahn are investigating how these supportive communities might help endangered plants in the wild, like the mint on the mountain, or improve output of crops ranging from breadbasket wheat to tropical cacao.

Beyond the garden store
Certain microbial plant partners are well-known, and there are scores of microbial products already on the market. Gardeners, for instance, can spike their watering pails with microbes to encourage flowering and boost plant immunity. But “we know very little about how the products out there actually do work,” says Jeff Dangl, a geneticist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “None of those garden supply store products have proven useful at large scale.”

Big farms can use microbial treatments. The main one applied broadly in large-scale agriculture helps roots collect nitrogen, Dangl says, which plants use to produce chlorophyll for photosynthesis.

Farmers may soon have many more microbial helpers to choose from. Scientists studying plant microbiomes have described numerous unfamiliar plant partners in recent decades. Those researchers say they’ve only scratched the surface of possibilities. Many start-up companies are researching and releasing novel microbial treatments. “The last five years have seen an explosion in this,” says Dangl, who cofounded AgBiome, which soon plans to market a bacterial treatment that combats fungal diseases. Agricultural giants like Bayer AG, which recently bought Monsanto, are also investing hundreds of millions of dollars in potential microbial treatments for plants.

The hope is that microbes can provide the next great revolution in agriculture — a revolution that’s sorely needed. With the human population predicted to skyrocket from today’s 7.6 billion to nearly 10 billion by 2050, our need for plant-based food, fibers and animal feed is expected to double.

“We’re going to need to increase yield,” says Posy Busby, an ecologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. “If we can manage and manipulate microbiomes … this could potentially represent an untapped area for increasing plant yield in agricultural settings.” Meanwhile, scientists like Zahn are eyeing the microbiome to save endangered plants.

But before microbiome-based farming and conservation can truly take off, many questions need answers. Several revolve around the complex interactions between plants, their diverse microbial denizens and the environments they live in. One concern is that the microbes that help some plants might, under certain conditions, harm others elsewhere, warns microbiologist Luis Mejía of the Institute of Scientific Research and High Technology Services in Panama City.

Save the chocolate
Cacao crops — and thus humankind’s precious M&M’s supply — are under constant threat from undesirable fungi, such as Phytophthora palmivora, which causes black pod rot. But there are good guys in cacao’s microbiome too, particularly the fungus Colletotrichum tropicale, which seems to protect the trees.
Natalie Christian, as a graduate student at Indiana University Bloomington, traveled to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute on Panama’s Barro Colorado Island in 2014 to study how entire communities of microbes colonize and influence cacao plants (Theobroma cacao). Christian suspected that the prime source of a young cacao tree’s microbiome would be the dead and decaying leaves on the rainforest or orchard floor.

To test this hunch and see what kind of protection microbes picked up from leaf litter might offer, Christian raised fungus-free cacao seedlings in a lab incubator. When the plants reached about half a meter tall, she placed them in pots outside, surrounding some with leaf litter from a healthy cacao tree, some with litter from other kinds of trees and some with no litter at all.

After two weeks, she brought the plants back into the greenhouse to analyze their microbiomes. She found nearly 300 kinds of endophytes, which she, Mejía and colleagues reported last year in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The microbiome membership differed between the litter treatments. Plants in pots with either kind of leaf litter possessed less diverse microbiomes than those without litter, probably because the microbes in the litter quickly took over before stray microbes from elsewhere could settle in. These results suggest that a seedling in the shadow of more mature trees will probably accumulate the same microbiome as its towering neighbors.
To see if some of those transferred microbes protect the cacao from disease-causing organisms, Christian rubbed a bit of black pod rot on the leaves of plants in each group. Three weeks later, she measured the size of the rotted spots.

Plants surrounded by cacao litter had the smallest lesions. Those with litter from other trees had slightly more damage, and plants with no litter had about double the damage of the mixed litter plants.

“Getting exposed to the litter of their mother or their own kind had a very strong beneficial effect on the resistance of these young plants,” says plant biologist Keith Clay of Tulane University in New Orleans, a coauthor of the study.

Scientists aren’t sure how the good fungi protect the plants against the rot. It may be that the beneficial fungi simply take up space in or on the leaves, leaving no room for the undesirables, Christian says. Or a protective microbe like C. tropicale might attack a pathogen via some kind of chemical warfare. In the case of cacao, she thinks the most likely explanation is that the good guys act as a sort of vaccine, priming the plant’s immune system to fight off the rot. In support of this idea, Mejía reported in 2014 in Frontiers in Microbiology that C. tropicale causes cacao to turn on defensive genes.

Cacao farmers may need to rethink their practices. The farmers normally clear leaf litter out of orchards to avoid transmitting disease-causing microbes from decaying leaves to living trees, says Christian, now a postdoc at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. But her work suggests that farmers might do well to at least hold on to litter from healthy trees.

Crop questions
Litter is a low-tech way to spread entire communities of microbes — good and bad. But agricultural companies want to grab only the good microbes and apply them to crops. The hunt for the good guys starts with a stroll through a crop field, says Barry Goldman, vice president and head of discovery at Indigo Ag in Boston. Chances are, you’ll find bigger and hardier plants among the crowd. Within those top performers, Indigo has found endophytes that improve plant vigor and size, and others that protect against drought.

The company, working with cotton, corn, rice, soybeans and wheat, coats seeds with these microbes. Once the seeds germinate, the microbes cover the newborn leaves and can get inside via cuts in the roots or through stomata, tiny breathing holes in the leaves. The process is akin to what happens when a baby travels through the birth canal, picking up beneficial microbial partners from mom along the way.
For example, the first-generation Indigo Wheat, released in 2016, starts from seeds treated with a beneficial microbe. In Kansas test fields, the treatment raised yields by 8 to 19 percent.

Farmers are also reporting improved drought tolerance. During the first six months of 2018 with only two rains, the participating Kansas farmers had given up on and plowed over fields with struggling regular wheat, but not those growing Indigo Wheat, Goldman says.

In St. Louis, NewLeaf Symbiotics is interested in bacteria of the genus Methylobacterium. These microbes, found in all plants, are known as methylotrophs because they eat methanol, which plants release as their cells grow. In return for methanol, M-trophs, as NewLeaf calls them, offer plants diverse benefits. Some deliver molecules that encourage plants to grow; others make seeds germinate earlier and more consistently, or protect against problem fungi.

NewLeaf released its first products this year, including Terrasym 401, a seed treatment for soybeans. Across four years of field trials, Terrasym 401 raised yields by more than two bushels per acre, says NewLeaf cofounder and CEO Tom Laurita. One bushel is worth about $9. On farms with thousands of acres, that adds up.

Farmers are pleased, but NewLeaf’s and Indigo’s work is hardly done. Plant microbiome companies all face similar challenges. One is the diverse environments where crops are grown. Just because Indigo Wheat thrives in Kansas doesn’t mean it will outgrow standard varieties in, say, North Dakota. “The big ask for the next-gen ag biotech companies like AgBiome or Indigo … is whether the products will deliver as advertised over a range of field conditions,” Dangl says.

Another issue is that crop fields and plants already have microbiomes. “We’re asking a lot of a microbe, or a mix of microbes, to invade an already-existing ecosystem and persist there and do their job,” Dangl says. Companies will need to make sure their preferred microbes take hold.

And while scientists are well aware that diverse microbial communities cooperate to affect plant health, most companies are working with one kind of microbe at a time. Indigo isn’t yet sure how to approach entire microbiomes, Goldman says, but “we certainly are thinking hard about it.”

Researchers are beginning to address these questions by studying microbes in communities — such as Christian’s leaf-litter microbiomes — instead of as individuals. In the lab, Dangl developed a synthetic community of 188 root microbes. He can apply them to plants under stress from drought or heat, then watch how the communities respond and affect the plants.

A major aim is to identify the factors that determine microbiome membership. What decides who gets a spot on a given plant? How does the plant species and its local environment affect the microbiome? How do plants welcome friendlies and eject hostiles? “This is a huge area of importance,” Dangl says.

There’s some risk in adding microbes to crops while these questions are still unanswered, Mejía cautions. Microbes that are beneficial in one situation could be harmful in other plants or different environments. It’s not a far-fetched scenario: There’s a fungal endophyte of a South American palm tree that staves off beetle infestations when the trees are in the shade. Under the sun, however, the fungus turns nasty, spewing hydrogen peroxide that kills plant tissues.

And although C. tropicale benefits cacao, the genus has a dark side: Many species of Colletotrichum can cause leaf lesions and rotted fruit or flower spots in a variety of plants ranging from avocados to zinnias.
Microbes for conservation
Back in Hawaii, after that disheartening hike to the P. kaalaensis graveyard, Zahn pondered how to protect native plants in wild environments such as Oahu’s mountains.

In people, Zahn considered, antibiotics can damage normal gut microbe populations, leaving a person vulnerable to infection by harmful microbes. P. kaalaensis got similar treatment in the greenhouse, where it received regular dosing of fungicide. In retrospect, Zahn realized, that treatment probably left the plants bereft of their natural microbiome and weakened their immune systems, leaving them vulnerable to mildew infection once dropped into the jungle.

For people on antibiotics, probiotics — beneficial bacteria — can help restore balance. Zahn thought a similar strategy, a sort of plant probiotic, could help protect P. kaalaensis in future attempts at moving it outside.

For a probiotic, Zahn looked to a P. kaalaensis cousin, Phyllostegia hirsuta, which can survive in the wild. He put P. hirsuta leaves in a blender and sprayed the slurry over P. kaalaensis growing in an incubator.

Then, Zahn placed a leaf infected with powdery mildew into the incubator’s air intake. The mint plants treated with the P. hirsuta slurry experienced delayed, less severe infections compared with untreated plants, Zahn and Amend, also at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, reported last year in PeerJ. The probiotic had worked.

Zahn used DNA sequencing to identify the microbes in the slurry. Many of the microbiome members probably benefit P. kaalaensis, but he thinks he’s found a major protector: a yeast called Pseudozyma aphidis that lives on leaves. “This yeast normally just passively absorbs nutrients from the environment,” Zahn says. “But given the right victim, it will turn into a vicious spaghetti monster.” When mildew spores land nearby, the yeast grows tentacle-like filaments that appear to envelop and feed on the mildew.

Emboldened by his results, Zahn trekked back to the jungle and planted six slurry-treated plants in April 2016. They survived for about two years, but by May 2018, they were all dead.
“It was still a huge win,” says Nicole Hynson, a community ecologist also at Manoa. After all, P. kaalaensis without probiotics last only months. And the probiotics approach might apply beyond one little Hawaiian mint, Hynson adds: “We’re really at the beginning of thinking how we might use the microbiome to address plant restoration.”

Zahn has since moved to Utah Valley University in Orem, where he’s hoping to help endangered cacti with microbes. Meanwhile, he’s left the Phyllostegia project in the hands of Jerry Koko, a graduate student in Hynson’s lab. Koko is studying how the yeast and some root-based fungi protect the plant.

Hynson says their goal is to build “a superplant.” With probiotics on both roots and shoots, an enhanced P. kaalaensis should be well-equipped to grow strong and resist mildew. In greenhouse experiments so far, Koko says, the plants with both types of beneficial fungi seem to sport fewer, smaller powdery mildew patches than plants that received no probiotic treatment.

While the restoration of a little flowering plant, or a few more bushels of soybeans, may seem like small victories, they could herald big things for plant microbiomes in conservation as well as agriculture. The farmers and conservationists of the future may find themselves seeding and tending not just plants, but their microscopic helpers, too.

THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS — A young, ultrabright Jupiter may have desiccated its now hellish moon Io. The planet’s bygone brilliance could have also vaporized water on Europa and Ganymede, planetary scientist Carver Bierson reported March 17 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. If true, the findings could help researchers narrow the search for icy exomoons by eliminating unlikely orbits.

Jupiter is among the brightest specks in our night sky. But past studies have indicated that during its infancy, Jupiter was far more luminous. “About 10 thousand times more luminous,” said Bierson, of Arizona State University in Tempe.
That radiance would have been inescapable for the giant planet’s moons, the largest of which are volcanic Io, ice-shelled Europa, aurora-cowled Ganymede and crater-laden Callisto (SN: 12/22/22, SN: 4/19/22, SN: 3/12/15). The constitutions of these four bodies obey a trend: The more distant the moon from Jupiter, the more ice-rich its body is.

Bierson and his colleagues hypothesized this pattern was a legacy of Jupiter’s past radiance. The team used computers to simulate how an infant Jupiter may have warmed its moons, starting with Io, the closest of the four. During its first few million years, Io’s surface temperature may have exceeded 26° Celsius under Jupiter’s glow, Bierson said. “That’s Earthlike temperatures.”

Any ice present on Io at that time, roughly 4.5 billion years ago, probably would have melted into an ocean. That water would have progressively evaporated into an atmosphere. And that atmosphere, hardly restrained by the moon’s weak gravity, would have readily escaped into space. In just a few million years, Io could have lost as much water as Ganymede may hold today, which may be more than 25 times the amount in Earth’s oceans.

A coruscant Jupiter probably didn’t remove significant amounts of ice from Europa or Ganymede, the researchers found, unless Jupiter was brighter than simulated or the moons orbited closer than they do today.

The findings suggest that icy exomoons probably don’t orbit all that close to massive planets.

Art historians often wish that Renaissance painters could shell out secrets of the craft. Now, scientists may have cracked one using chemistry and physics.

Around the turn of the 15th century in Italy, oil-based paints replaced egg-based tempera paints as the dominant medium. During this transition, artists including Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli also experimented with paints made from oil and egg (SN: 4/30/14). But it has been unclear how adding egg to oil paints may have affected the artwork.
“Usually, when we think about art, not everybody thinks about the science which is behind it,” says chemical engineer Ophélie Ranquet of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.

In the lab, Ranquet and colleagues whipped up two oil-egg recipes to compare with plain oil paint. One mixture contained fresh egg yolk mixed into oil paint, and had a similar consistency to mayonnaise. For the other blend, the scientists ground pigment into the yolk, dried it and mixed it with oil — a process the old masters might have used, according to the scant historical records that exist today. Each medium was subjected to a battery of tests that analyzed its mass, moisture, oxidation, heat capacity, drying time and more.

In both concoctions, the yolk’s proteins, phospholipids and antioxidants helped slow paint oxidation, which can cause paint to turn yellow over time, the team reports March 28 in Nature Communications.

In the mayolike blend, the yolk created sturdy links between pigment particles, resulting in stiffer paint. Such consistency would have been ideal for techniques like impasto, a raised, thick style that adds texture to art. Egg additions also could have reduced wrinkling by creating a firmer paint consistency. Wrinkling sometimes happens with oil paints when the top layer dries faster than the paint underneath, and the dried film buckles over looser, still-wet paint.

The hybrid mediums have some less than eggs-ellent qualities, though. For instance, the eggy oil paint can take longer to dry. If paints were too yolky, Renaissance artists would have had to wait a long time to add the next layer, Ranquet says.

“The more we understand how artists select and manipulate their materials, the more we can appreciate what they’re doing, the creative process and the final product,” says Ken Sutherland, director of scientific research at the Art Institute of Chicago, who was not involved with the work.

Research on historical art mediums can not only aid art preservation efforts, Sutherland says, but also help people gain a deeper understanding of the artworks themselves.

What do you get when you flip a fossilized “jellyfish” upside down? The answer, it turns out, might be an anemone.

Fossil blobs once thought to be ancient jellyfish were actually a type of burrowing sea anemone, scientists propose March 8 in Papers in Palaeontology.

From a certain angle, the fossils’ features include what appears to be a smooth bell shape, perhaps with tentacles hanging beneath — like a jellyfish. And for more than 50 years, that’s what many scientists thought the animals were.
But for paleontologist Roy Plotnick, something about the fossils’ supposed identity seemed fishy. “It’s always kind of bothered me,” says Plotnick, of the University of Illinois Chicago. Previous scientists had interpreted one fossil feature as a curtain that hung around the jellies’ tentacles. But that didn’t make much sense, Plotnick says. “No jellyfish has that,” he says. “How would it swim?”

One day, looking over specimens at the Field Museum in Chicago, something in Plotnick’s mind clicked. What if the bell belonged on the bottom, not the top? He turned to a colleague and said, “I think this is an anemone.”

Rotated 180 degrees, Plotnick realized, the fossils’ shape — which looks kind of like an elongated pineapple with a stumpy crown — resembles some modern anemones. “It was one of those aha moments,” he says. The “jellyfish” bell might be the anemone’s lower body. And the purported tentacles? Perhaps the anemone’s upper section, a tough, textured barrel protruding from the seafloor.

Plotnick and his colleagues examined thousands of the fossilized animals, dubbed Essexella asherae, unearthing more clues. Bands running through the fossils match the shape of some modern anemones’ musculature. And some specimens’ pointy protrusions resemble an anemone’s contracted tentacles.
“It’s totally possible that these are anemones,” says Estefanía Rodríguez, an anemone expert at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City who was not involved with the work. The shape of the fossils, the comparison with modern-day anemones — it all lines up, she says, though it’s not easy to know for sure.

Paleontologist Thomas Clements agrees. Specimens like Essexella “are some of the most notoriously difficult fossils to identify,” he says. “Jellyfish and anemones are like bags of water. There’s hardly any tissue to them,” meaning there’s little left to fossilize.
Still, it’s plausible that the blobs are indeed fossilized anemones, says Clements, of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany. He was not part of the new study but has spent several field seasons at Mazon Creek, the Illinois site where Essexella lived some 310 million years ago. Back then, the area was near the shoreline, Clements says, with nearby rivers dumping sediment into the environment – just the kind of place ancient burrowing anemones may have once called home.

Weird materials called Weyl metals might reveal the secrets of how Earth gets its magnetic field.

The substances could generate a dynamo effect, the process by which a swirling, electrically conductive material creates a magnetic field, a team of scientists reports in the Oct. 26 Physical Review Letters.

Dynamos are common in the universe, producing the magnetic fields of the Earth, the sun and other stars and galaxies. But scientists still don’t fully understand the details of how dynamos create magnetic fields. And, unfortunately, making a dynamo in the lab is no easy task, requiring researchers to rapidly spin giant tanks of a liquefied metal, such as sodium (SN: 5/18/13, p. 26).
First discovered in 2015, Weyl metals are topological materials, meaning that their behavior is governed by a branch of mathematics called topology, the study of shapes like doughnuts and knots (SN: 8/22/15, p. 11). Electrons in Weyl metals move around in bizarre ways, behaving as if they are massless.

Within these materials, the researchers discovered, electrons are subject to the same set of equations that describes the behavior of liquids known to form dynamos, such as molten iron in the Earth’s outer core. The team’s calculations suggest that, under the right conditions, it should be possible to make a dynamo from solid Weyl metals.

It might be easier to create such dynamos in the lab, as they don’t require large quantities of swirling liquid metals. Instead, the electrons in a small chunk of Weyl metal could flow like a fluid, taking the place of the liquid metal.
The result is still theoretical. But if the idea works, scientists may be able to use Weyl metals to reproduce the conditions that exist within the Earth, and better understand how its magnetic field forms.

Oceans may be shrinking — Science News, March 10, 1973

The oceans of the world may be gradually shrinking, leaking slowly away into the Earth’s mantle…. Although the oceans are constantly being slowly augmented by water carried up from Earth’s interior by volcanic activity … some process such as sea-floor spreading seems to be letting the water seep away more rapidly than it is replaced.

Update
Scientists traced the ocean’s leak to subduction zones, areas where tectonic plates collide and the heavier of the two sinks into the mantle. It’s still unclear how much water has cycled between the deep ocean and mantle through the ages. A 2019 analysis suggests that sea levels have dropped by an average of up to 130 meters over the last 230 million years, in part due to Pangea’s breakup creating new subduction zones. Meanwhile, molten rock that bubbles up from the mantle as continents drift apart may “rain” water back into the ocean, scientists reported in 2022. But since Earth’s mantle can hold more water as it cools (SN: 6/13/14), the oceans’ mass might shrink by 20 percent every billion years.

A new species of hulking ancient herbivore would have overshadowed its relatives.

Fossils found in Poland belong to a new species that roamed during the Late Triassic, a period some 237 million to 201 million years ago, researchers report November 22 in Science. But unlike most of the enormous animals who lived during that time period, this new creature isn’t a dinosaur — it’s a dicynodont.

Dicynodonts are a group of ancient four-legged animals that are related to mammals’ ancestors. They’re a diverse group, but the new species is far larger than any other dicynodont found to date. The elephant-sized creature was more than 4.5 meters long and probably weighed about nine tons, the researchers estimate. Related animals didn’t become that big again until the Eocene, 150 million years later.
“We think it’s one of the most unexpected fossil discoveries from the Triassic of Europe,” says study coauthor Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki, a paleontologist at Uppsala University in Sweden. “Who would have ever thought that there is a fossil record of such a giant, elephant-sized mammal cousin in this part of the world?” He and his team first described some of the bones in 2008; now they’ve made the new species — Lisowicia bojani — official.

The creature had upright forelimbs like today’s rhinoceroses and hippos, instead of the splayed front limbs seen on other Triassic dicynodonts, which were similar to the forelimbs of present-day lizards. That posture would have helped it support its massive bodyweight.

WASHINGTON — After a stunningly explosive summer, Kilauea, the world’s longest continuously erupting volcano, finally seems to have taken a break. But the scientists studying it haven’t. Reams of new data collected during an unprecedented opportunity to monitor an ongoing, accessible eruption are changing what’s known about how some volcanoes behave.

“It was hugely significant,” says Jessica Larsen, a petrologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and “a departure from what Kilauea had been doing for more than 35 years.”
The latest eruption started in May. By the time it had ended three months later, over 825 million cubic meters of earth had collapsed at the summit. That’s the equivalent of 300,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, Kyle Anderson, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geologic Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., said December 11 in a news conference at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

As the summit crater deflated, magma gushed through underground tunnels, draining out through fissures along an area called the lower eastern rift zone at a rate of roughly 50 meters per day. That lava eventually covered 35.5 square kilometers of land, Anderson and his colleagues reported in a study published December 11 in Science.

The volcano also taught scientists a thing or two.
Scientists previously believed that groundwater plays a big role in how a caldera collapses. When craters were drained of their magma, “cooling, cracking depressurized the caldera, allowing groundwater to seep in and create a series of explosive eruptions,” Anderson said. “But groundwater did not play a significant role in driving the explosions this summer.”

Instead, the destruction of Kilauea’s crater is what’s called a piston-style caldera collapse, he said. Sixty-two small collapse events rattled the volcano from mid-May to late August, with each collapse causing the crater to sink and pushing the surrounding land out and up. By the end, the center of the volcano sank by as much as 500 meters — more than the height of the Empire State Building.

That activity didn’t just destroy the crater. “We could see surges in the eruption rate 40 kilometers away whenever there was a collapse,” Anderson said.
Life finds a way
Under the sea, life moved in around the brand-new land surprisingly quickly. Using a remotely operated vehicle to explore the seafloor, researchers in September found evidence of hydrothermal activity along newly deposited lava flows about 650 meters deep. More surprising, bright yellow, potentially iron-oxidizing microbes had already moved in.

“There’s no reason why we should have expected there would be hydrothermal activity that would be alive within the first 100 days,” Chris German, a geologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth, Mass., said at the news conference. “This is actually life here!”

The discovery suggests “how volcanism can give rise to the chemical energy that can drive primitive microbial organisms and flower a whole ecosystem,” he said.

Studying these ecosystems can provide insight into how life may form in places like Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn. Hydrothermal activity is common where Earth’s tectonic plates meet. But alien worlds don’t show evidence of plate tectonics, though they can be volcanically active, German says. Studying how hydrothermal life forms near volcanoes that aren’t along tectonic boundaries on Earth could reveal a lot about other celestial bodies.

“This is a better analog of what we expect to them to be like,” says German, but “it is what’s least studied.”

What comes next
As of December 5, Kilauea had not erupted for three months, suggesting it’s in what’s called a pause – still active but not spewing lava. Observations from previous eruptions suggest that the next phase of Kilauea’s volcanic cycle may be a quieter one. But the volcano likely won’t stay quiet forever, says Christina Neal, the head scientist at the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and a coauthor of the Science paper. “We’re in this lull and we just don’t know what is going to happen next,” she says.Life finds a way
Under the sea, life moved in around the brand-new land surprisingly quickly. Using a remotely operated vehicle to explore the seafloor, researchers in September found evidence of hydrothermal activity along newly deposited lava flows about 650 meters deep. More surprising, bright yellow, potentially iron-oxidizing microbes had already moved in.

“There’s no reason why we should have expected there would be hydrothermal activity that would be alive within the first 100 days,” Chris German, a geologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth, Mass., said at the news conference. “This is actually life here!”

The discovery suggests “how volcanism can give rise to the chemical energy that can drive primitive microbial organisms and flower a whole ecosystem,” he said.

Studying these ecosystems can provide insight into how life may form in places like Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn. Hydrothermal activity is common where Earth’s tectonic plates meet. But alien worlds don’t show evidence of plate tectonics, though they can be volcanically active, German says. Studying how hydrothermal life forms near volcanoes that aren’t along tectonic boundaries on Earth could reveal a lot about other celestial bodies.
Scientists are tracking ground swelling near the Puu Oo vent, where much of Kilauea’s lava has flowed from during the volcano’s 35-year eruption history. That inflation is an indication that magma may still be on the move deep below.

The terrain surrounding this remote region is dense with vegetation, making it a difficult area to study. But new methods tested during the 2018 eruption, such as the use of uncrewed aerial vehicles, for example, could aid in tracking the recent deformation.

Scientists are also watching the volcano next door: Mauna Loa. History has shown that Mauna Loa can act up during periods when Kilauea sleeps. For the past several years, volcanologists have kept an eye on Kilauea’s larger sister volcano, which went silent last fall, after a period with few earthquakes and intermittent deformation. “We’re seeing a little bit of inflation at Mauna Loa and some earthquake swarms where it had been active, Neal says. “So that’s another issue of concern for us going into the future.”

When an outbreak of a viral hemorrhagic fever hit Nigeria in 2018, scientists were ready: They were already in the country testing new disease-tracking technology, and within weeks managed to steer health workers toward the most appropriate response.

Lassa fever, which is transmitted from rodents to humans, pops up every year in West Africa. But 2018 was the worst season on record for Nigeria. By mid-March, there were 376 confirmed cases — more than three times as many as by that point in 2017 — and another 1,495 suspected. Health officials weren’t sure if the bad year was being caused by the strains that usually circulate, or by a new strain that might be more transmissible between humans and warrant a stronger response.
New technology for analyzing DNA in the field helped answer that question mid-outbreak, confirming the outbreak was being caused by pretty much the same strains transmitted from rodents to humans in past years. That rapid finding helped Nigeria shape its response, allowing health officials to focus efforts on rodent control and safe food storage, rather than sinking time and money into measures aimed at stopping unlikely human-to-human transmission, researchers report in the Jan. 4 Science.

While the scientists were reporting their results to the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, they were also discussing the data with other virologists and epidemiologists in online forums. This kind of real-time collaboration can help scientists and public health workers “see the bigger picture about pathogen spread,” says Nicholas Loman, a microbial genomicist at the University of Birmingham in England who was not involved in the research.

Portable DNA sequencers, some as small as a cell phone, have allowed scientists to read the genetic information of viruses emerging in places without extensive lab infrastructure. Looking for genetic differences between patient samples can give clues to how a virus is being transmitted and how quickly it’s changing over time — key information for getting outbreaks under control. If viral DNA from several patients is very similar, that suggests the virus may be transmitted between people; if the DNA is more distinct, people might be picking up the virus independently from other animals.

The technology has also been used amid recent Ebola and Zika outbreaks. But the Lassa virus presents a unique challenge, says study coauthor Stephan Günther, a virologist at the Bernhard-Nocht-Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, Germany. Unlike Ebola or Zika, Lassa has a lot of genetic variation between strains. So while the same small regions of DNA from various strains of Ebola or Zika can be identified for analysis, it’s hard to accurately target similar regions for comparison among Lassa strains.
Instead, Günther and his team used a tactic called metagenomics: They collected breast milk, plasma and cerebrospinal fluid from patients and sequenced all the DNA within — human, viral and anything else lurking. Then, the team picked out the Lassa virus DNA from that dataset.

All told, the scientists analyzed Lassa virus DNA from 120 patients, far more than initially intended. “We went to the field to do a pilot study,” Günther says. “Then the outbreak came. And we quickly scaled up.” Preexisting relationships in Nigeria helped make that happen: The team had been collaborating for a decade with researchers at the Irrua Specialist Teaching Hospital and working alongside the World Health Organization and the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control.

Analyzing and interpreting the massive amounts of data generated by the metagenomics approach was a challenge, especially with limited internet connection, Günther says. Researchers analyzed 36 samples during the outbreak — less than a third of their total dataset, but still enough to guide the response. The full analysis, completed after the outbreak, confirmed the initial findings.

A metagenomics approach could be useful in disease surveillance more broadly. Currently, “we look for things that we know about and expect to find. Yet evidence from Ebola in West Africa and Zika in the Americas is that emerging pathogens can pop up in unexpected places, and take too long to be recognized,” Loman says. Sequencing all DNA in a sample, he says, could allow scientists to detect problem pathogens before they cause outbreaks.Instead, Günther and his team used a tactic called metagenomics: They collected breast milk, plasma and cerebrospinal fluid from patients and sequenced all the DNA within — human, viral and anything else lurking. Then, the team picked out the Lassa virus DNA from that dataset.

All told, the scientists analyzed Lassa virus DNA from 120 patients, far more than initially intended. “We went to the field to do a pilot study,” Günther says. “Then the outbreak came. And we quickly scaled up.” Preexisting relationships in Nigeria helped make that happen: The team had been collaborating for a decade with researchers at the Irrua Specialist Teaching Hospital and working alongside the World Health Organization and the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control.

Analyzing and interpreting the massive amounts of data generated by the metagenomics approach was a challenge, especially with limited internet connection, Günther says. Researchers analyzed 36 samples during the outbreak — less than a third of their total dataset, but still enough to guide the response. The full analysis, completed after the outbreak, confirmed the initial findings.

A metagenomics approach could be useful in disease surveillance more broadly. Currently, “we look for things that we know about and expect to find. Yet evidence from Ebola in West Africa and Zika in the Americas is that emerging pathogens can pop up in unexpected places, and take too long to be recognized,” Loman says. Sequencing all DNA in a sample, he says, could allow scientists to detect problem pathogens before they cause outbreaks.