Thanks to a satellite that happened to be flying over the 2025 Kamchatka tsunami not long after it formed, researchers have unprecedented insights – even more than land-based tools could provide – into the development and spread of this catastrophic wave. The findings establish the satellite as a powerful new tool for constraining earthquake source processes, with important implications for understanding tsunami hazards and the dynamics of subduction zones. Tsunamis from large subduction earthquakes deep below the ocean are among the most severe natural hazards. These long ocean waves can travel thousands of kilometers from their point of origin – crossing entire ocean basins – and devastate distant coastlines. However, despite their catastrophic potential, the physics underlying tsunami generation and propagation remain poorly understood due to the reliance on land-based seismic geodetic data and distant deep-water sensors. On July 29, 2025, the magnitude 8.8 Kamchatka earthquake and resulting Pacific-spanning tsunami illustrated these challenges. Although traditional monitoring using coastal gauges and seafloor sensors captured part of the event, these methods were limited by sparse coverage and attenuation of short-wavelength waves.

Now, Ignacio Sepúlveda and colleagues present direct observations of the tsunami using the NASA/CNES Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite, which happened to fly over the region roughly 70 minutes after the event began, offering high-resolution two-dimensional measurements of sea-surface height with centimeter-level precision. According to Sepúlveda et al., SWOT captured the full wavefield, including short-wavelength wave trains trailing the leading front. This revealed the directions, curvature, and wavelengths of the tsunami waves. Moreover, sensitivity analyses of the data reveal that the tsunami was generated within roughly 10 kilometers of the subduction-zone trench, which is an insight that is not possible to obtain using land-based measurements or seafloor sensors alone. By directly linking detailed, two-dimensional satellite observations of the tsunami’s dispersive wavefield to its near-trench source, the findings mark the first such high-resolution spaceborne evidence of tsunamigenesis.

For researchers interested in research integrity-related themes, author Ignacio Sepúlveda notes: “I strongly support open data and reproducible research, but I am more cautious about the growing role of non-peer-reviewed preprints, which can circulate findings before they have been adequately tested and validated. This practice can negatively impact the testing, validation and peer-review of a scientific discovery because it puts additional pressure on authors (i.e. publish before a pre-print without validation comes out). Without pre-prints, a discovery will be only delayed by a few months and because of a good reason: validation.”

A newly discovered fossil ape from northern Egypt is reshaping the understanding of early hominoid evolution, say researchers. The fossil finding suggests that the closest ancestors to modern apes may have emerged in northern Africa, outside the traditionally studied regions of East Africa. “[The] findings […] confirm that paleontologists might have been looking for crown-hominoid ancestors in the wrong place,” write David Alba and Júlia Arias-Martorell in a related Perspective. Dating to about 17-18 million years ago, the new species – Masripithecus – represents the closest known hominoid relation to the lineage that ultimately gave rise to all living apes, including humans. Today, it is widely accepted that the earliest apes (stem hominoids) originated in Afro-Arabia during the Oligocene Epoch, more than 25 million years ago, and diversified there before spreading into Eurasia by roughly 14 to 16 million years ago, during the Miocene. However, the emergence of modern apes – the group that includes all living species and their last common ancestor – remains uncertain, as fossils from this period are scarce, widely dispersed, and difficult to interpret. This uncertainty is compounded by the uneven fossil record in Africa, where discoveries have been concentrated in only a few regions, leaving much of the potential ancient range of Miocene-age apes unexplored.

Here, Shorouq Al-Ashqar and colleagues describe a newly identified fossil ape discovered in the Wadi Moghra region in northern Egypt, which lived ~17-18 million years ago. According to the authors, this new species, named Masripithecus moghraensis, adds to our understanding of early ape diversity and evolution at a pivotal moment when Afro-Arabia was becoming connected to Eurasia, enabling the spread of species out of Africa. To determine where this species fits into the evolutionary tree of humans, Al-Ashqar et al. employed a modern Bayesian “tip-dating” approach, which incorporates both anatomical traits and fossil ages to estimate relationships and divergence times. Their analysis suggests that Masripithecus represents the stem hominoid that is most closely related to the lineage that ultimately gave rise to all living apes. The authors argue that the findings support the notion that modern apes may have originated in northern Afro-Arabia, the Levant, or the eastern Mediterranean.