Picky, pragmatic, and enigmatic — a tiny fossil found in Southwestern Virginia eluded classification for more than 514 million years. Now, Virginia Tech geoscientists have restored this unique organism into its evolutionary lineage.

How do volcanoes work? What happens beneath their surface? What causes the vibrations – known as tremor – that occur when magma or gases move upward through a volcano's conduits? Professor Dr. Miriam Christina Reiss, a volcano seismologist at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), and her team have located such tremor signals at the Oldoinyo Lengai volcano in Tanzania. The findings provide new insights into how magma and gas are transported within the Earth and thus improve our understanding of volcanic dynamics.

In a paper published in SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences, the researchers combined Eulerian and Lagrangian methods to more accurately quantify surface eddy meridional heat transport (EHT) induced by both the stirring and trapping effects of mesoscale eddies. They find that stirring-induced surface EHT is 1–2 orders of magnitude larger than trapping-induced EHT throughout most of the global ocean. These results demonstrate that the horizontal stirring effect of mesoscale eddies is the dominant mechanism of EHT.

In a paper published in SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences, a team of researchers investigated a fine-scale lightning forecasting approach based on weather foundation models (WFMs) and proposed a dual-source data-driven forecasting framework that integrates the strengths of both WFMs and recent lightning observations to enhance predictive performance. Furthermore, a gated spatiotemporal fusion network (gSTFNet) is designed to address the challenges of cross-temporal and cross-modal fusion inherent in dual-source data integration. Experimental results demonstrate that the dual-source framework significantly improves forecasting performance compared to models trained solely on WFMs and outperforms both the ECMWF HRES lightning product and other deep-learning spatiotemporal forecasting models.

A team of scientists from Southern University of Science and Technology has published a paper highlighting the importance of human exploration in the three deeps – deep space, deep sea, and deep Earth. Their paper is published in the journal Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Research on September 11, 2025.