It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, May 05, 2026
Saving chocolate while restoring rainforests? Rock dust boosts soil nutrition and supports farmers
Steeley will discuss how enhanced rock weathering benefits cabruca and agroforestry systems at EGU 2026. Credit: Steeley et al., 2025, https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.70097
Credit: Steeley et al., 2025, https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.70097
Vienna, Austria – Chocolate is the food of the gods. The name of the tree from which the confection originates, Theobroma cacao, combines the Greek words for god (theós) and food (brôma). This small evergreen tree grows in tropical forests rich in both biodiversity and carbon. Over the past 40 years, demand for chocolate, the product of processing cacao pods, has surged, says Isabella Steeley, a doctoral student at the University of Sheffield in England. With that demand, she says: “more cocoa needs to be produced.”
Meeting it often means clearing tropical forests, replacing diverse, carbon-dense ecosystems with cacao plantations. Another path is to increase yield on existing farms. Average cacao yields are about 480 kilograms per hectare, but potential yields may be ten times greater, Steeley says.
In a study to be presented at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly this week, Steeley examines whether enhanced rock weathering can improve soil fertility and yields in two cacao systems in Brazil’s degraded, fragmented Atlantic Rainforest. One system involves reforesting degraded pastures with rows of cacao and shade trees in a commercial farm. The other, the traditional cabruca system, intersperses cacao trees within native forest. It preserves more forest than plantations, but is less productive, a compromise between yield and biodiversity, Steeley says.
In intact forests, plants recycle nutrients: roots suck them from the soil while organic matter replenishes them. Clearing trees breaks that cycle. Because of the heat and rainfall, tropical soil isn’t very sticky, which results in low nutrient retention. Moreover, soil become acidic, dropping uptake of already limited nutrition. Once cacao trees become established, their yields typically decline after a couple decades, while acidity facilitates the uptake of toxic elements like aluminum or cadmium. Enhanced rock weathering involves adding finely crushed rock: here, an andesitic basalt dust produced in Brazil. As the rock dust weathers, it neutralizes acidity, improving nutrient availability and potentially supplying essential elements to crops. And, it removes atmospheric CO2.
Steeley will share results from the first two years of a three-year study. Soil improvements were strongest in the commercial cacao farm, suggesting such farms could help reconnect fragmented rainforest.
Her team also introduces a new way to quantify how much rock dust has weathered, enabling calculation of how much carbon has been sequestered. Early results indicate that cabruca soils may capture more CO₂ than commercial farms through enhanced rock weathering, raising the possibility that smallholders could fund soil amendment costs by selling carbon credits.
Because most cacao is produced on farms smaller than 50 hectares, improving yields could directly benefit local communities. “This work is a collective effort, with local farmers and agronomists supporting the research,” Steeley says. Farmers are “really excited about any kind of innovation that can help sustain their livelihoods.”
Text written by Alka Tripathy-Lang.
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Note to the media:
When reporting on this story, please mention the EGU General Assembly 2026, which is taking place from 03– 08 May 2026. This oral presentation is part of Session SSS5.6 and will take place on Tuesday 05 May, at 09:25 CEST in Room 0.11/12. Isabella Steeley will be on site and available for interviews.
A Tulane University-led team of interdisciplinary researchers says coastal Louisiana’s climate-driven land loss and population shifts could position the state to become a global leader in planning for climate adaptation.
Their findings, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, argue that Louisiana’s accelerating shoreline retreat and coastal depopulation offer an opportunity to develop strategies for households, infrastructure and regional economies to adapt to climate change.
Due to global sea-level rise, many coastal populations worldwide will likely relocate inland during the next century. According to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Louisiana contains the most exposed coastal zone in the world, reflected in part by some of the highest rates of wetland loss. As a result, the region may offer an early preview of changes other coastal areas could face later this century.
While coastal populations globally continue to grow, Louisiana stands out as an exception. Nearly all the state’s coastal zone has lost residents since 2000, particularly following major hurricanes. The researchers say this trend suggests climate-driven depopulation has already begun and may accelerate as sea-level rise increases the impact of future storm surges.
A key finding highlighted in the study involves an ancient shoreline identified by geoscientist and co-author Zhixiong Shen, now a professor at Coastal Carolina University. The shoreline formed about 125,000 years ago north of Lake Pontchartrain, roughly 30 miles north of New Orleans. At that time, global temperatures were about 0.5 to 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial levels, and sea levels were 10 to 20 feet higher than today.
“With global climate now almost 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than in the mid-1800s and on track to exceed 2 degrees, we are likely already locked in for the shoreline to move that far inland,” said lead author Torbjörn Törnqvist, the Vokes Geology Professor in Tulane’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences in the School of Science and Engineering.
Despite these risks, the researchers say state and local governments, regional employers, small businesses and infrastructure providers still have time to begin long-term planning to prepare for for broader shifts in population and economic activity.
“Louisiana is in a unique position to build expertise and infrastructure that will be the foundation for coming generations,” said co-author Jesse Keenan, the Favrot II Associate Professor in Tulane’s School of Architecture and Built Environment. “Transition planning is not only key to maintaining continuity, but it offers significant economic opportunities, from land-building strategies to renewable energy and new housing development.”
The research combines coastal geology with archaeology, demography and public policy to outline a long-term vision for the region. Archaeological evidence shows Indigenous communities historically adapted to environmental change by relocating along the coast.
“Interdisciplinary teams offer the greatest capacity to translate knowledge into action in a manner that addresses one of the greatest societal and economic challenges,” Keenan said. “By connecting historical patterns of Indigenous adaptation to present-day migration pathways, we have attempted to take a fresh perspective on where the state will grow next.”
Törnqvist pointed to the city of Kiruna in northern Sweden as an example of how managed relocation can work. About 6,000 residents, including the city center, are currently moving due to mining activity beneath the town. The project, expected to finish in 2035, has taken roughly three decades to plan and implement.
“This case of managed relocation also demonstrates how it can spur urban renewal,” Törnqvist said. “But it also shows that planning must begin early.”
Researchers stress that reducing greenhouse gas emissions remains essential to limit future impacts. The window to keep global warming below the Paris Agreement target of 2 degrees Celsius is expected to close within the next few decades.
“If we fail to do so, the future shoreline will likely retreat even farther inland, eventually putting southern portions of Baton Rouge at risk of flooding,” Törnqvist said. “Rapidly reducing carbon emissions will be a major challenge, because we are currently on track for closer to 3 degrees of warming.”
Additional co-authors include sociologist Brianna Castro of Yale School of the Environment and archaeologist Jayur Mehta of Florida State University.
PULLMAN, Wash. -- A model developed by Washington State University researchers can predict how transmission towers might fail and collapse in extreme wind events.
The work, reported in the journal, Engineering Structures, could someday help power companies identify the most vulnerable transmission towers in extreme wind events and determine which should have retrofits to reduce the power outage risks.
“This can be really useful from the utility company's perspective because they want to investigate power outage risk within the region, but their power networks are often distributed across multiple counties,” said Ji Yun Lee, corresponding author and associate professor in WSU’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “They are dealing with many power grid components and transmission towers. They want to investigate which transmission tower might be the most vulnerable to wind events, and which tower might require some kind of mitigation or structural retrofit, so that they can reduce the power outage risk.”
Reliable power delivery around the U.S. and the world depends on numerous interconnected components for power generation, transmission, and distribution. Transmission towers that support high-voltage transmission lines and carry electricity over long distances are particularly vulnerable to natural hazards such as extreme wind. Their thin steel lattices often sit in windy spots, and when a hurricane or tornado occurs, the towers can topple or be damaged, causing power outages over large areas.
Unlike when a power line or power pole is damaged, a transmission tower failure can impact a large community and power network. In the case of one hurricane in 2021, for instance, 150-mile-per-hour winds destroyed hundreds of miles of transmission lines across the state of Louisiana with nearly 1 million people losing power.
“Transmission towers are not like individual buildings standing alone,” said Abdel-Aziz Sanad, first author and a PhD candidate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “They are a network connected together, so it’s really important to identify potential failure locations or weakness locations in this network.”
Researchers traditionally have looked at historical data for an area or assessed one tower at a time to decide if it is vulnerable, which is impractical for real-world operations to analyze tower designs over a large area simultaneously.
“That is the simplest approach, but it is very specific (to one tower),” said Sanad. “It’s hard to generalize to future cases. They don't have a lot of strong predictive capabilities for future events, which is something that is important -- we want to use this knowledge for the future.”
In their work, the researchers developed a physics-based simulation framework that used surrogate approximations to quickly estimate the likelihood of failure for different transmission tower designs across entire networks. The surrogate accounts for towers that might have different heights and sizes and follows a similar technique that has been used in other areas like, for instance, to understand and predict the behavior of bridges or buildings in earthquakes.
“An approximation reduces the computational time that we need to perform these heavy simulations,” said Sanad. “We approximate them, but we still maintain physical consistency and a high level of accuracy. Once these surrogates are created, they are so much faster to use in the real world.”
Their framework incorporates several separate factors that might impact a transmission tower and occur concurrently in an extreme wind event, including the wind speed, wind direction, and rainfall intensity. The researchers found that, on average, their model can predict the structural behavior of such towers with 96% accuracy. The work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
A drylands vesper mouse in Argentina is among the rodent species studied in a UC Davis study that found rodent-borne viruses in South America are expected to increase and expand as temperatures rise and rodent habitats shift with climate change.
Climate change is likely to drive rodent-borne arenaviruses into parts of South America that have never faced these diseases, putting new communities of people at risk, finds a study from the University of California, Davis.
For the study, published in the journal npj Viruses, scientists incorporated climate projections, shifting rodent populations and the risks of human infection into a model to offer an early risk projection for arenaviruses and other diseases in the next 20 to 40 years.
“As climate change accelerates, our study shows how the outbreak risk of dangerous New World arenaviruses could ride on shifting rodent populations to reach millions more people across South America,” said lead author Pranav S. Kulkarni, a postdoctoral scholar in the UC Davis Weill School of Veterinary Medicine and its Department of Population Health and Reproduction.
South American New World arenaviruses
Arenaviruses can cause severe hemorrhagic fevers with high hospitalization rates and fatality rates ranging from about 5% to 30%. South American New World arenaviruses include Guanarito virus in Venezuela and Colombia, Machupo virus in Bolivia and Paraguay, and Junin virus in Argentina. Despite having caused multiple outbreaks in humans, they are relatively understudied compared to Old World arenaviruses, such as Lassa fever in Africa.
With funding from Wellcome Trust, the researchers built an interactive, open-source platform called AtlasArena, to understand how climate change is reshaping the risk of zoonotic spillover for arenaviruses and other hard-to-track viruses. They integrated climate projections, habitat suitability for six rat and mouse species linked to the viruses, human population density, and transmission risk into machine learning models. This approach allowed the team to identify complex relationships among climate, land use, rodent ecology and human exposure that traditional models may miss.
Where arenaviruses may next emerge
“Our study connects the dots between changing climatic conditions and land use, shifting rodent populations and human infection risk, making it possible to see where the next generation of zoonotic arenaviral outbreaks could emerge,” said senior author Pranav Pandit, an assistant professor of veterinary epidemiology at the UC Davis Weill School of Veterinary Medicine.
For example, the models project that:
Guanarito virus, which is found in central Venezuela, is expected to spread to parts of Colombia, the borders of Suriname and northern parts of Brazil.
Machupo virus is expected to move from the plains and flatlands of Bolivia to the Andes foothills and mountain regions.
Junin virus is expected to move from the grassland regions to other parts of Argentina, reducing risk in some regions while expanding risk to other areas.
In all cases, populations with little or no prior exposure would be encountering these viruses for the first time, potentially increasing their vulnerability to infection and severe disease.
The risk of spillover is primarily driven by changes in temperature, precipitation and land use, such as expanding agricultural and urban areas within rodent reservoir habitats.
Coordinated, transboundary public health needs
The authors say the results underscore an urgent need for coordinated climate-adaptive public health policies and transboundary collaboration among countries at risk.
“The first thing a study like this can inform is where we expect the risk to increase,” Kulkarni said. “Then we can look at why it is happening in more detail, identify ways to reduce the risk, and start planning for the long term and ways to reduce the spread of disease.”
The authors note their work with the AtlasArena platform is ongoing, freely available, and that its insights can be adapted to study other poorly monitored, climate-sensitive diseases spread by animals.
The study’s additional coauthors include Nuri Flores-Perez of UC Davis and currently San Diego Zoo, and Andie Jian, Brian Bird, Christine Johnson and Marcela Uhart from the UC Davis Weill School of Veterinary Medicine.
MIAMI— A new study published in the journal npj Climate and Atmospheric Science, shows that electronically tagged sharks can serve as mobile sensors, collecting ocean climate data in regions that are difficult to observe using conventional methods.
The study is led by Laura H. McDonnell, Ph.D., who conducted the research as a doctoral student at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science and the Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy. Its findings demonstrate that temperature and depth data gathered by tagged sharks can enhance ocean forecast accuracy in dynamic regions of the Northwest Atlantic.
By incorporating shark-collected data into a seasonal climate model, McDonnell and her team found that forecast errors at the ocean surface decreased substantially in certain regions, with improvements reaching as much as 40 percent in specific cases.
This is the first study to experimentally integrate animal-borne sensor data into a seasonal climate model and quantify its impact on forecast performance, suggesting potential for future operational use.
“Sharks are already moving through parts of the ocean that are challenging for us to observe,” said McDonnell, now a postdoctoral investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). “This research shows that data they collect can help fill important gaps and, when used carefully, can improve how we predict ocean conditions.”
Interdisciplinary collaboration fuels innovation
The study originated from an interdisciplinary collaboration between former Rosenstiel School shark scientist Neil Hammerschlag, Ph.D. and atmospheric scientist Ben Kirtman, Ph.D., now dean of the Rosenstiel School. In 2018, they recognized that the data from shark-tagging studies used by Hammerschlag’s lab to study shark ecology could also benefit climate modeling.
Satellite tags attached to sharks record depth and temperature as they travel through the ocean, collecting and transmitting this data in near real time. While these tags have long helped scientists track shark movements, the collaboration opened a new application and a chance to create a novel proof of concept: using the same data to improve climate forecasts.
“Marine predators like sharks naturally seek out dynamic ocean features such as fronts and eddies,” said Kirtman. “These are areas where models often lack sufficient observations.”
Supported by a grant from Cisco Systems, the team conducted fieldwork and tested the concept.
Testing sharks as ocean observers
McDonnell and Hammerschlag tagged 18 blue sharks (Prionace glauca) and one shortfin mako shark (Isurus oxyrinchus) in the Northwest Atlantic. The sharks transmitted more than 8,200 temperature-depth profiles across a wide range of locations and depths—down to nearly 2,000 meters. WHOI oceanographer and study co-author Camrin Braun, Ph.D., helped facilitate this field work off Cape Cod, MA by connecting McDonnell and Hammerschlag with a local fisherman and co-led the forecast data analysis.
“Key to this study was repurposing a more advanced tag capable of transmitting location data along with temperature and depth information,” said Hammerschlag, co-author of the study and executive director of the Shark Research Foundation. “This allowed us to link subsurface ocean conditions directly to specific locations with known accuracy.”
Kirtman integrated a subset of these data into the Community Climate System Model, a coupled ocean–atmosphere–ice–land model used in seasonal forecasting applications that forms part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s operational North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME) system, of which Kirtman is the lead scientist.
The team compared the actual resulting climate conditions with the forecasted predictions from traditional models as well as the ones that integrated the shark collected data.
The results showed measurable improvements in forecast performance, particularly in dynamic coastal and shelf regions that are important for marine ecosystems and fisheries.
The researchers emphasize that animal-borne sensors are not a replacement for traditional observing systems but a complementary tool.
“Tagged sharks won’t replace conventional observing systems,” added McDonnell. “What the preliminary results do show is that tagged marine predators can provide complementary in-situ observations at the surface and at depth.”
Why it matters
Accurate ocean forecasts are critical for fisheries management, marine operations, and understanding how climate variability affects coastal communities. However, forecasts are often least reliable in regions where conditions change rapidly and observational data are lacking.
Animal-borne sensors could enhance predictions that support decision-making across multiple sectors, ranging from seafood supply chains to climate adaptation planning.
“Marine animals are already being tracked to understand their behavior in relation to environmental conditions, but this study reveals how these data can also be leveraged for forecasting and climate applications,” said Hammerschlag.
“For fisheries and coastal communities, small improvements in ocean forecasts can make a big difference,” said Braun. “Reducing uncertainty helps people plan, whether that’s where to fish, how to manage resources, or how to respond to changing conditions.”
Funding for the research was provided by Cisco Systems (AWP-014524) and the University of Miami Abess Center.
The authors and their affiliations for this study are as follows: Laura H. McDonnell & Neil Hammerschlag,Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science, and the Leonard and Jayne Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy at the University of Miami. Ben P. Kirtman, Rosenstiel School and the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies, and the Frost Institute for Data Science and Computing, all at the University of Miami, and Camrin D. Braun, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
About the University of Miami and Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science
The University of Miami is a private research university and academic health system with a distinct geographic capacity to connect institutions, individuals, and ideas across the hemisphere and around the world. The University’s vibrant academic community comprises 12 schools and colleges serving more than 19,000 undergraduate and graduate students in more than 180 majors and programs. Located within one of the most dynamic and multicultural cities in the world, the University is building new bridges across geographic, cultural, and intellectual borders, bringing a passion for scholarly excellence, a spirit of innovation, and a commitment to tackling the challenges facing our world.The University of Miami is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities (AAU).
Founded in 1943, the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science is one of the world’s premier research institutions in the continental United States. TheSchool’sbasic and applied research programs seek to improve understanding and prediction of Earth’s geological, oceanic, and atmospheric systems by focusing on four key pillars:
*Saving lives through better forecasting of extreme weather and seismic events.
*Feeding the world by developing sustainable wild fisheries and aquaculture programs.
*Unlocking ocean secrets through research on climate, weather, energy and medicine.
*Preserving marine species, including endangered sharks and other fish, as well as protecting and restoring threatened coral reefs.www.earth.miami.edu
Example shark-derived temperature–depth profiles across four regions, with the distribution of all transmitted profile locations (October 2021–April 2022). Top panels compare tag-derived profiles within a 1° × 1° grid cell on a given day to the concurrent control (CFSR) profile (black), with shark tag data showing minimum (blue) and maximum (red) temperatures. Summary statistics for each grid cell are provided in-panel. The bottom map shows all profile locations and maximum depths (N = 8,242), with colored diamonds marking example profiles, orange lines indicating the Gulf Stream, and the black line marking 200 m depth.
