The stakes are considerable. The EU Green Deal commits member states to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent by 2030 and achieving climate neutrality by 2050, goals that hinge on scaling up renewable energy and battery technologies as fossil fuels are phased out. Under the Critical Raw Materials Act, the bloc aims by 2030 to raise domestic extraction, production and recycling of these metals and minerals to at least 10, 40 and 25 percent of annual European consumption respectively, while ensuring no critical raw material relies on a single non-EU country for more than 65 percent of its processing. Recycling alone, however, will not keep pace with surging global demand in the short term, meaning primary extraction — an activity often associated in the public mind with environmental degradation and ethical dilemmas — will remain central to the strategy. That tension makes public dialogue about supply chains, import reliance and mining impacts not merely desirable but urgent.

The researchers chose an unlikely laboratory for this conversation: the festival field. Informal education settings such as arts, cultural and science festivals offer dynamic environments where leisurely audiences can encounter technical concepts without the framing of a classroom, and previous research shows such audiences prize high levels of interactivity, hands-on participation and relaxed conversation with experts. The catch is time. For an engagement to work in a fast-paced festival setting, it must consume as little of the visitor’s time as possible while remaining attractive, informative, stimulating and fun. The team therefore set three objectives: create an eye-catching experience for potentially incidental audiences, promote genuine learning about the links between critical raw materials, decarbonisation and supply risk, and design an evaluation strategy concise enough to be, in their words, festival-friendly.

Development proceeded through three iterative phases of scoping, testing and refinement, each grounded in real-world field data. The scoping phase began at two Irish festivals: Féile na Bealtaine, a rural arts festival in Dingle, County Kerry, and the urban Cork Carnival of Science. Surveys of 32 participants in Dingle revealed high self-reported awareness of the topic overall, but notable weakness on the definition of critical raw materials and their connection to the Green Deal. When asked how they wanted to learn, 76 percent chose hands-on tasks and 66 percent wanted visual examples of the materials themselves. Open feedback echoed these preferences, with most respondents emphasising interactivity, creativity and visual stimulation, alongside a desire to understand how raw materials connect to daily life and supply chains.

Those responses shaped the first prototype, called Shopping to Decarbonise, a tabletop activity in which participants shopped for up to four key critical raw materials to build a solar panel and a wind turbine. Fifteen cubes representing different elements sat atop a periodic table, each carrying images of the pure metal or common ore and plain-language prompts about its uses — neodymium, a key material for wind energy, bore the clue spinning magnets equal electricity, while dysprosium’s prompt read maintains magnetic abilities. Trials at the Cork Carnival of Science with 22 participants confirmed the concept’s appeal but exposed a practical flaw: half of the participants dropped out before completing the 20-minute engagement and exit survey, signalling that the whole interaction simply took too long.

The testing phase transformed the prototype into GreenDealz, complete with a supermarket-style logo and a periodic table rebranded as Aisle 2050. The cubes gained barcodes so practitioners could act as cashiers, scanning shopping answers via mobile app, and import reliance data was woven into the experience through country-of-origin style labels on each cube. The number of cubes was trimmed to ten to respect festival time constraints, and a difficulty-based shopping score was introduced, awarding points for prompts rated easy, moderate or hard depending on how much critical thinking was needed to link a material to its technology. Tested at the National Ploughing Championships in County Laois — an agricultural festival drawing roughly 250,000 visitors over three days — the rebranded toolkit held attention with zero observed dropouts among the 40 consenting study participants, many of whom lingered to discuss the topic further.

Evaluation, however, proved the hardest nut to crack. A quick three-minute pre-and-post online quiz disrupted the natural flow of the engagement, and the three true-or-false knowledge items used showed reliability far below acceptable thresholds, failing to detect meaningful change. The team’s solution in the refinement phase was to embrace embedded assessment, an approach in which the evaluation tasks closely match the learning tasks of the activity itself. Three tasks were built from existing GreenDealz props: participants placed cubes representing everyday items containing critical raw materials into a basket, used cubes on a weighing scale to indicate how many times more mineral resources an onshore wind farm requires compared with a gas-fired power plant, and estimated how many of the EU’s 49 critical and strategic raw materials have import reliance above 75 percent. Scores were expressed as a ratio out of a maximum of 65.

The results were striking. Using a quasi-experimental design across three Science Week events in Ireland, the team compared GreenDealz against a control activity in which participants matched rock and ore samples to a geological map of Ireland. Baseline knowledge scores were statistically equivalent between the two groups, hovering around 0.54 to 0.58. After engagement, the intervention group’s scores jumped significantly to 0.84, a mean difference of 0.266 with a large effect size, while the control group showed no change at all. Field observations added a qualitative dimension: the embedded tasks maintained conversation between practitioner and participant, streamlined the interaction and even evoked a sense of playfulness. For the researchers, this suggests embedded assessment may be a more appropriate way to measure the effects of public engagement in festival settings than traditional survey techniques, which are vulnerable to social desirability bias and prone to interrupting the experience they are meant to evaluate.

The pooled shopping scores offered further insights into how people interacted with the material. Most participants correctly identified the materials with the easiest prompts — 90 percent chose silicon for solar panels and 72 percent chose neodymium for wind turbines — but far fewer spotted the harder connections, with only 18 percent selecting gallium for solar and 25 percent choosing dysprosium for wind. Instead, many gravitated toward lithium and titanium, materials made familiar by the battery age and popular culture respectively, hinting at how relevance and prior exposure shape engagement with geoscience. Crucially, participants working in groups achieved significantly higher shopping scores than those engaging alone, suggesting that discussion during decision-making drives deeper critical thinking — a promising finding for festivals, where people typically attend and participate in social groups, and where conversations sparked at the exhibit may ripple outward into wider social networks.

The authors are candid about the study’s limits: sample sizes were modest, participants skewed highly educated, and findings from an Irish context may not generalise to other countries or populations. Yet GreenDealz, in its current form, is a budget-friendly toolkit whose materials and guidance are publicly available, ready for practitioners who wish to open conversations about the materials behind the green transition. The team envisions future iterations ranging from full-scale gamified shopping experiences at large festivals to digital, self-paced versions, and stresses that rigorous testing of the toolkit’s broader effectiveness is the natural next step. For now, the pilot stands as a template for a pressing problem: if Europe is to mine, process and recycle its way to climate neutrality, the public deserves a seat at the table — and sometimes the most effective way to invite them is with a shopping basket, a barcode scanner and an aisle named 2050.

Subject of Research: Public engagement with critical raw materials and the EU Green Deal through an informal education toolkit

Article Title: Development of GreenDealz: a public engagement toolkit addressing critical raw materials and the EU Green Deal at informal education settings

Article References: Blennerhassett, L. C., Schuitema, G., & McAuliffe, F. (2026). Development of GreenDealz: a public engagement toolkit addressing critical raw materials and the EU Green Deal at informal education settings. Geoscience Communication, 9(2), 161-183. https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-9-161-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gc-9-161-2026

Keywords: critical raw materials, EU Green Deal, public engagement, science communication, informal education, festivals, geoscience, embedded assessment, renewable energy, supply risk, GreenDealz, Ireland

The study, led by Maria Vittoria Gargiulo with Raffaella Russo and Paolo Capuano, evaluated the game with 206 secondary school students aged 15 to 18, drawn largely from science and technical tracks in Italian upper secondary schools. The cohort was nearly evenly split by gender, with 52 percent female and 47 percent male participants, and only 9 percent had any prior experience with educational escape rooms or gamified science activities. That inexperience matters, because it suggests the measured effects were not simply the enthusiasm of a self-selected gaming crowd. The researchers administered structured surveys before and after the activity, combining multiple-choice questions, five-point Likert scales, and open-ended responses, and then tested for statistical significance using Student’s t-tests with 206 degrees of freedom.

The numbers tell a consistent story. Students’ average self-rating of their climate change knowledge climbed from 3.2 to 3.9 on the five-point scale, a shift the authors report as statistically significant at the 99 percent confidence level. Awareness of climate risks in the students’ own region rose from 3.4 to 4.0, interest in geophysics jumped from a neutral 3.0 to 3.6, and interest in environmental science increased from 3.4 to 3.8. Even expectations about the virtual format itself improved, moving from 3.6 to 3.8, indicating that students who began the session skeptical of online learning ended it viewing the digital treasure hunt as a genuinely appealing way to engage with science. To ensure the survey instrument itself was reliable, the team calculated Cronbach’s alpha for both datasets, obtaining values above the conventional 0.70 threshold that indicate strong internal consistency.

What makes Finding Gaia technically interesting is how deliberately its game mechanics are wired to its learning objectives. The experience unfolds over roughly 90 to 120 minutes as a chain of stages, each containing a climate-themed puzzle whose solution, typically a keyword, code, or number, unlocks the next stage and triggers a short facilitated interlude. These interludes are not filler. They are structured slide sequences that walk students through foundational distinctions, such as the difference between weather and climate, clarifying the temporal and spatial scales that separate them, and explaining why short-term weather forecasts differ fundamentally from long-term climate projections. Later segments address industrial activity, greenhouse gas emissions, and long-term carbon dioxide concentration trends, before introducing emission scenarios that show how present-day choices shape future outcomes.

This alternation between gameplay and explanation is the pedagogical heart of the design. Rather than delivering climate science as a stream of isolated facts, the game positions each puzzle as a gateway to a coherent mental model of how climate knowledge is produced, interpreted, and contested. The gamification layer borrows recognizable elements from the field’s standard toolkit: points and rewards that feed leaderboard rankings, clues delivered in varied formats, progress tracking to sustain motivation, and, crucially, trained science communicators acting as game masters who monitor progress, dispense hints, and moderate discussion. The facilitator interaction adds a social dimension that pure apps lack, allowing teams to collaborate, share tips, and celebrate milestones in real time.

The authors are refreshingly candid about the contested status of gamification in the research literature. They note that while points, badges, and leaderboards can raise participation, an overreliance on such extrinsic motivators risks producing surface-level engagement rather than deep understanding or intrinsic motivation. Psychological critiques warn that poorly designed systems may fail to satisfy learners’ needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, while ethical critiques describe gamification as a persuasive technology that can subtly steer behavior, raising questions about manipulation and transparency. In the climate context specifically, there is a real danger that gamified approaches oversimplify complex socio-ecological systems or frame climate action as a matter of individual consumer choice rather than collective responsibility and structural change. Finding Gaia’s designers positioned their game not as a universal solution but as a carefully integrated component of a broader educational framework emphasizing systems thinking, collaboration, and reflection.

The qualitative evidence reinforces the quantitative gains. Of the 206 participants, 168, or 81 percent, provided written responses to at least one open-ended question, and an inductive thematic analysis of these responses surfaced five dominant themes: awareness and knowledge acquisition, engagement and motivation, teamwork and collaboration, perceived real-world relevance, and constructive suggestions for improvement. Students repeatedly described the activity as enjoyable, stimulating, and different from traditional lessons, crediting its structure and pacing with holding their attention and making science feel less abstract. Several remarked on the connection between game content and real environmental issues such as pollution, energy, and local climate risks. Two student reflections stand out as emblematic of the shift the researchers hoped to produce. One participant wrote, I never realized that science is actually everywhere and affects what we do every day. Another said, This activity made science feel more real to me.

The evaluation also borrowed a page from marketing analytics, measuring likeability, retention, and advocacy, the likelihood that students would recommend the activity to others. Respondents rated highly across all three dimensions, suggesting the experience was not only enjoyable in the moment but memorable enough to be worth recommending. When asked which educational goals the treasure hunt had achieved, participants most frequently cited the acquisition of new content knowledge and skills, followed by improved teamwork and increased motivation for geophysics, a distribution that maps closely onto the designers’ stated learning objectives. Facilitator observations, gathered through direct monitoring and post-activity reflection, corroborated the student accounts, contextualizing engagement levels and group dynamics in ways that surveys alone cannot capture.

The study’s limitations are as instructive as its successes. The entire implementation took place under emergency conditions: school closures, remote learning platforms approved by school administrators, students participating from home, and a deliberately simplified survey designed to avoid compounding screen fatigue. The authors acknowledge that these circumstances make the experience analytically valuable but not directly replicable, and they caution that the findings, drawn from a specific sample of Italian high school students during a singular historical moment, cannot be assumed to generalize to other demographics, educational systems, or delivery contexts without further testing. They also stress that single-session interventions, however powerful as engagement tools, gain their greatest pedagogical value when embedded in sustained learning trajectories, a conclusion supported by prior meta-analytic work showing that serious games yield stronger cognitive and motivational outcomes when reinforced through repeated use and reflection.

Still, the broader implications are hard to dismiss. At a moment when public trust in science is fragile and climate anxiety among young people is rising, Finding Gaia offers a concrete, evidence-backed template for meeting students where they already are: online, in teams, and inside stories. The game’s structure is fully transferable, the authors argue, and could be adapted for classrooms, hybrid settings, or mobile platforms, with puzzles revised to reflect local climate risks and facilitation expanded to include teacher-led debriefings. Future research, they suggest, should examine how gender, socio-economic background, and family engagement shape outcomes, and should track the long-term retention of knowledge and shifts in scientific reasoning. For now, the study stands as a compelling demonstration that a well-designed 90-minute game, built under the worst possible conditions, could still move the needle on how teenagers perceive the most consequential scientific challenge of their generation.

Subject of Research: Gamified virtual treasure hunt for climate change education among secondary school students

Article Title: Finding Gaia: exploring climate change through gamification

Article References: Finding Gaia: exploring climate change through gamification. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-9-331-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gc-9-331-2026

Keywords: gamification, climate change education, science communication, serious games, treasure hunt, geoscience, student engagement, escape room, greenhouse effect, University of Salerno, Geoscience Communication, COVID-19 remote learning

The rationale behind the initiative rests on a well-documented structural problem in scholarly publishing. Positive results, meaning those that support a research hypothesis, are more likely to be written up, submitted and accepted than null or negative results. The authors of the editorial cite a broad body of evidence showing that this bias operates at every stage of the scientific process, from study design through data collection and analysis to interpretation, and that it can ultimately produce false positive findings. Because career progression and funding decisions reward publication counts and citation metrics, researchers have strong incentives to chase publishable, positive outcomes rather than to document the dead ends they encounter along the way.

The consequences of this bias are more than cosmetic. When errors and null results go unpublished, other scientists may repeat the same failed experiments, wasting time, effort and public resources. A widely used model may carry defects that are common knowledge inside the institute that developed it but invisible to external users of its output. A Springer Nature survey of roughly 11,000 researchers, cited in the editorial, found that only 15 percent of respondents were aware of journals that actively encourage the submission of null results, while 69 percent believed such results would not be accepted. Researchers, in other words, often do not know where to send the lessons they have learned, and so those lessons are shared only informally, in what the editorial describes as a body of knowledge that has only been shared at water coolers in academic hallways so far.

The new LESSONS format comes in two flavours. LESSONS Reports are short, peer-reviewed journal articles that follow the public peer review model used across EGU journals, in which reviews and author responses are published openly. They are deliberately constrained to roughly 1,000 to 2,000 words in the main text, with a commensurate number of figures, tables and references, a length intended to lower the barrier to submission in the same way as existing short formats such as Letters or Geoscience Communication Insights. LESSONS Posts, by contrast, are brief, non-peer-reviewed preprints of typically fewer than 500 words and a single figure, hosted on EGUsphere, the EGU’s interactive community platform. Posts are intended for early-stage reporting, to stimulate discussion or to attract co-authors for a fuller Report, and are checked only by an EGUsphere moderator for basic scientific quality and standards of civil discourse.

Both formats are collected in a new, ongoing interjournal compilation, which the editorial presents as a key design decision. Earlier attempts to publish failures have often foundered. The EGU journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences once ran a manuscript category called Black Swans and Scientific Falsifications, focused on unforeseen, high-impact events, but it was discontinued after several years without submissions. The editorial attributes that failure to a narrow scope, high expectations, availability in only a single journal and limited advertisement. Dedicated journals elsewhere have struggled too, with the Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine discontinued and the Journal of Trial and Error operating outside the mainstream. By embedding LESSONS within established journals rather than launching a standalone venue, the EGU ensures that every contribution meets the same scientific standards as regular articles while gaining the visibility of a dedicated compilation.

The scope of the new article type is broad, and the editorial is careful to stress that the words in the LESSONS acronym are illustrative examples rather than exclusive categories. Errors, for instance, can include the misuse of a widely adopted method, such as a study showing that a commonly used 31-day running window introduces a bias into estimates of expected extreme frequency, or hardware that does not behave as its documentation promises, such as a comparison of 16 commercial solar regulators whose power consumption diverged substantially from manufacturers’ specifications. Limitations and shortcomings cover methods applied beyond their valid boundaries, poor calibration, and software bugs in community codes, provided the bug constitutes a genuine learning moment for many scientists.

Surprises form another rich vein. The editorial recounts how ecologists studying salt-marsh seedling establishment noticed ragworms pulling seedlings into the sediment, a chance observation that ultimately revealed the worms play a prominent role in seedling establishment and even garden their own food. In a similar spirit, researchers testing relationships between river discharge and plastic transport found their only strong correlation was with floating organic material, chiefly water hyacinths, which turned out to entangle plastic pollution so effectively that they can now be used strategically to extract plastics from rivers. Null results from carefully controlled studies also qualify, as do demonstrations of non-reproducibility after substantial effort, and so-called origin myths, in which authors trace how a widely used model, metric or method acquired a misunderstood or oversimplified history.

Quality control remains central. LESSONS Reports are held to the same criteria of scientific significance, quality and presentation as any other journal article: the theory must be sound, the methodology appropriate, the data properly analysed and the conclusions logically drawn. Crucially, the editorial insists that the quality of a study is separate from its results, so a null outcome does not in itself signal weak science. The insight must be novel, meaning not formally described in the literature before, and must offer a takeaway that can caution or benefit other researchers beyond the author’s own group. Entirely predictable errors or simple careless mistakes do not qualify, unless they are believed to be common in the community and a review would be useful. Reviewers are given specific guidance, including checking whether the failure could reasonably have been anticipated and whether others are likely to repeat the same approach.

The editorial also situates LESSONS within a wider movement to reform research assessment. The EGU has endorsed the declaration of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment, which calls for moving beyond traditional publication and citation metrics, and the new article type aligns with the union’s existing commitment to transparency, exemplified by its public peer review model and mandatory documentation of manuscript histories. Unlike registered reports, which guarantee publication of negative results by reviewing study protocols before data are collected, LESSONS focuses specifically on the reporting of errors and lessons after the fact, a niche that pre-registration does not cover. The authors also argue that publishing failures can give long-overdue recognition to field researchers, who are more likely to generate null results, and to model developers who spend time finding and fixing bugs rather than chasing new short-term features.

Whether the initiative succeeds will depend on the community embracing it. The editorial points to sustained interest in dedicated EGU General Assembly sessions on failures, including the interdisciplinary BUGS session on Blunders, Unexpected Glitches and Surprises, which attracted 21 abstracts in 2025 and 25 in 2026, as evidence of appetite. The authors close with a direct appeal: submit a LESSONS article, take part in the public discussion on EGUsphere, and encourage local journals to join the compilation. If the format takes hold, the scientific record could become not only more honest but more useful, capturing the full arc of trial and error on which scientific progress actually depends, rather than only its triumphant final chapters.

Subject of Research: A new EGU article type for publishing non-positive results, errors and lessons learned in geoscience research

Article Title: Editorial: Introducing a new article type: Limitations, Errors, Surprises, Shortcomings and Opportunities for New Science (LESSONS)

Article References: Proske, U., Hillier, J., Gaillard, S., Blume, T., Queiroz Alves, E., Buiter, S., Carslaw, K. S., von Elverfeldt, K., van Emmerik, T. H. M., Ervens, B., Hut, R., Illingworth, S., Klotz, D., & Pyschik, J. (2026). Editorial: Introducing a new article type: Limitations, Errors, Surprises, Shortcomings and Opportunities for New Science (LESSONS). Geoscience Communication, 9(3), 371-383. https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-9-371-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gc-9-371-2026

Keywords: LESSONS, EGU, publication bias, null results, open science, peer review, geoscience, scientific publishing, reproducibility, research integrity, EGUsphere, negative results

The meeting arrives at a moment when the geosciences are increasingly central to public debates about climate, water, minerals, and planetary exploration. Denver offers an unusually fitting stage for those discussions. The city sits at the foot of the Colorado Rockies, a range that geologists still regard as one of the most puzzling mountain systems on Earth, and the region carries both a rich mining heritage and some of the nation’s most pressing water challenges. Meeting organizers have built the program around three interlocking themes: Celebrating a Century of Continental Drift: Understanding Earth in Motion; Riverscapes in Transition: Dynamics, Hazards, and Human Futures; and Innovations in Exploration from Deep Earth to Deep Space. According to GSA, these themes are three tines on the same fork, separate yet interrelated, working together toward a shared goal of understanding and appreciating the workings of Earth and other planets.

The continental drift theme marks a century since the scientific community began to accept that continents move, an idea that transformed geology from a static science into a dynamic one. Sessions under this theme will revisit how plate tectonics is understood today, including a Pardee Keynote Symposium titled Bottoms Up: Perspectives from “Bottom-up” and “Top-down” Approaches to Tectonic Reconstructions, which will examine competing methods for reconstructing ancient configurations of Earth’s surface. The riverscapes theme, meanwhile, addresses how rivers and their corridors are changing under the combined pressures of natural dynamics and human activity, a topic with direct implications for flood hazards, water supply, and ecosystem management.

The third theme extends the meeting’s reach beyond Earth itself. Innovations in Exploration from Deep Earth to Deep Space will highlight research that spans from the planet’s interior to other worlds, reflecting a growing overlap between terrestrial geology and planetary science. That connection will be on prominent display in the noontime lecture series. On Monday, 12 October, Kelsey Young will deliver a lecture titled Artemis II to the Moon and Back: The First Step in a New Era of Crewed Scientific Exploration, with a livestream available for remote audiences. The talk arrives as NASA’s Artemis program prepares to return astronauts to the Moon, a mission profile in which field geology expertise plays a central role.

The Pardee Keynote Symposia, among the most closely watched sessions at any GSA meeting, will cover an unusually broad sweep of contemporary issues this year. In addition to the tectonic reconstructions session, the lineup includes Geoheritage Values in a World of Resource Extraction; Mineral Resources and Society; and From Deep Earth to Digital Twins: Artificial Intelligence and Predictive Groundwater in Earth System Science. The latter session signals how machine learning and digital modeling are entering mainstream hydrogeology, offering new tools for predicting groundwater behavior in systems that are increasingly stressed by drought and demand. The mineral resources sessions arrive as governments and industries worldwide confront supply chains for critical minerals needed for batteries, electronics, and renewable energy infrastructure.

Several distinguished lectures round out the scientific program. GSA President Glenn Thackray will deliver the Presidential Address, The Many Paths of Geoscientists, at noon on Sunday, 11 October, followed by the society’s Awards Ceremony, both of which will be livestreamed. The Michael T. Halbouty Distinguished Lecture will be given by Dr. Paul Doss, whose talk is titled Geologists in the Critical Zone…in a Critical Time, a reference to the near-surface zone where rock, soil, water, air, and living organisms interact and where many of society’s environmental challenges play out. On Tuesday, 13 October, Marilyn Russell and Sabrina Kainz will present a noontime lecture titled Connecting People to Place: A Community Engagement Model for Advancing Geoheritage Stewardship, also with a livestream available.

Organizers have also prepared topical sessions aimed specifically at journalists and public information officers covering critical subjects, with curated resources on fire, climate change, volcanoes, and planetary geology, along with a complete list of technical sessions for those planning their coverage. The science communication offerings are particularly strong this year. On Sunday, 11 October at 5 p.m., a panel discussion titled From Research to Bookshelf: Bringing Science to the Public will be moderated by GeoGirl Rachel Phillips and will feature authors Amy Atwater of The Fossil Keeper’s Treasure, Paul Bierman of When the Ice Is Gone, David Montgomery of ReGen, and Rob Thomas of GSA’s Montana Rocks!, with a book signing to follow. On Monday, 12 October at 4 p.m., Bierman will host a screening of the Emmy Award–winning film The Memory of Darkness, Light, and Ice, based on his book When the Ice Is Gone, followed by a discussion and book signing.

Eligibility for media credentials is clearly defined. Working press includes journalists, photographers, videographers, bloggers, authors, and filmmakers representing bona fide news media organizations, who must present a press card, letter, or business card from their publication. Freelance science writers must show a current membership card from organizations such as NASW, ISWA, regional affiliates, CSWA, ACS, ABSW, or EUSJA, along with evidence of science reporting published in 2024, 2025, or 2026; the society notes that authorship on technical research does not qualify for press credentials. Public information officers from scientific societies, educational institutions, and government agencies are also eligible. All press registrations are issued at the discretion of the GSA Press Office and are non-transferable.

Working media receive complimentary registration, which permits access to technical sessions, the exhibit hall, and the on-site Media Resource Center, a pressroom reserved exclusively for working press to conduct interviews, write stories, and take a break between sessions, with coffee and snacks available and a welcome gift for pre-registered attendees. Media preregistration is encouraged before Friday, 2 October 2026, with onsite registration available afterward by contacting the GSA press office. Presenters who are also journalists must pay the standard meeting registration fee, and journalists and PIOs must pay for any additional events they wish to attend. Media representatives may book hotel rooms at their own expense within GSA hotel blocks. Reporters unable to attend in person can register to receive press releases, daily tip sheets, and livestream information for the noontime lectures, ensuring that the meeting’s science reaches audiences far beyond Denver.

Subject of Research: Media registration for the Geological Society of America's GSA Connects 2026 annual geoscience meeting in Denver

Article Title: Media Invitation: GSA Connects 2026 in Denver

Article References: Media Invitation: GSA Connects 2026 in Denver. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: GSA Connects 2026, Geological Society of America, geoscience, Denver, continental drift, riverscapes, planetary exploration, Artemis II, groundwater, mineral resources, science communication, media registration

The jet stream is a narrow, meandering current of air near the tropopause, the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere, typically located several kilometres above the surface and flowing from west to east at speeds that can exceed 50 metres per second in winter. Over the Atlantic–European sector, this current is maintained by the temperature contrast between the warm subtropical ocean and the cold polar region, a contrast that generates pressure gradients at upper levels of the atmosphere. Because the jet acts as a kind of atmospheric conveyor belt, guiding storm systems from the ocean toward the continent, even modest shifts in its strength or position can reshape winter weather across Britain, Scandinavia, central Europe and the Mediterranean.

Understanding how the jet responds to greenhouse warming has been one of the more contested questions in climate dynamics. One influential line of argument holds that rapid Arctic amplification—the fact that the high northern latitudes are warming several times faster than the globe as a whole—reduces the equator-to-pole temperature gradient near the surface. A weaker gradient, in this view, should sap the energy available to the jet, producing weaker winds, larger meanders and a greater tendency toward persistent blocking patterns that lock cold air over Europe for weeks at a time. Another line of argument emphasizes that the upper troposphere warms more strongly than the surface in the tropics and mid-latitudes, which increases the vertical shear of the winds and can actually strengthen the jet aloft while shifting it poleward.

The new analysis addresses this debate by looking not only at the average behaviour of the Atlantic–European jet in winter but at the full distribution of its variability, including the extreme tail. Using observational and reanalysis datasets—long records of atmospheric conditions reconstructed from weather observations and satellite data—the researchers tracked jet strength over recent decades and examined how frequently the jet reached its most intense values. The central result is a nuanced one: the typical winter jet has become stronger, consistent with the expectation that upper-level warming and changes in the temperature gradient enhance the mean flow, but the extremes of jet strength have not kept pace. In relative terms, the jet is becoming a steadier current rather than a more violent one.

This distinction between the mean and the extremes matters for how scientists and society interpret jet stream change. A stronger mean jet is generally associated with a more vigorous storm track, which can bring more frequent passages of Atlantic low-pressure systems and the mild, wet, windy weather they deliver to northwestern Europe. Extreme jet episodes, by contrast, are often linked to exceptional weather: an unusually intense jet can coincide with explosive cyclogenesis, in which storms deepen rapidly and cause damaging windstorms, while an unusually weak or displaced jet can coincide with prolonged cold spells or drought. If the mean strengthens while the extremes moderate, the net effect on hazardous winter weather may be less dramatic than either a simple strengthening or a simple weakening story would suggest.

The physical reasoning behind such a divergence can be traced to how different components of the climate system respond to warming. The mean jet strength is governed largely by broad-scale temperature gradients and by the vertical structure of tropospheric warming, both of which evolve smoothly and predictably with rising greenhouse gas concentrations. Extreme jet episodes, however, often depend on transient processes: the phasing of planetary-scale Rossby waves, the life cycles of individual baroclinic storms, and episodic coupling with the stratospheric polar vortex. Some of these transient drivers may weaken or become less variable under warming, damping the upper tail of the jet distribution even as the background flow intensifies. The study’s results are consistent with such a mechanism, in which variability about the mean contracts even as the mean itself rises.

The findings also speak to a long-running scientific controversy about Arctic influence on mid-latitude weather. Over the past decade, a vigorous debate has played out in the journals over whether sea-ice loss and Arctic warming make European winters more prone to blocking and severe cold. Proponents of this view point to episodes such as the cold winters of recent decades and to modelling experiments in which reduced sea ice favours a wavier jet. Critics counter that the observational record is short, that internal variability is large, and that model projections more often show a strengthened, poleward-shifted jet with reduced waviness in winter. By documenting a strengthening yet less extreme jet, the new work lends weight to the second camp, while underscoring that the answer may differ by season, by region and by which aspect of the jet is measured.

Methodologically, the study illustrates the value of going beyond simple averages when assessing climate change signals. Jet stream behaviour is notoriously noisy: individual winters can differ enormously, and the Atlantic–European sector in particular is influenced by modes of variability such as the North Atlantic Oscillation, which swings between phases that strengthen or weaken the westerlies on timescales from weeks to decades. Separating a forced climate signal from this internal noise requires careful statistical treatment, long datasets and, in many cases, large ensembles of climate model simulations in which many parallel realizations of the same warming scenario are run to isolate the common response. The researchers’ focus on the distribution of jet strength, rather than a single metric of average speed, allows a more complete picture of how the flow is evolving and reduces the risk of drawing conclusions from a few memorable extreme winters.

The implications extend to practical forecasting and adaptation. Winter storm risk assessment for Europe depends on assumptions about how often severe windstorms strike, and those assumptions are typically based on historical statistics. If the character of the jet is changing—stronger on average but with moderated extremes—then the historical record may be an imperfect guide to the coming decades. Insurers, infrastructure planners and emergency services all have an interest in knowing whether the tail risks of winter weather are growing or shrinking. The new results suggest that for jet-driven wind extremes, at least, the most catastrophic outcomes may not intensify as rapidly as the mean conditions do, although the researchers caution that other hazards, such as precipitation extremes associated with a moister, warmer atmosphere, continue to worsen independently of the wind field.

There remain open questions. The observational record of the upper atmosphere is only a few decades long, and reanalysis products carry uncertainties, particularly in the earlier satellite era and in the data-sparse regions of the North Atlantic. Disentangling the roles of tropical upper-tropospheric warming, Arctic amplification, stratospheric variability and ocean circulation in shaping the jet will require further modelling work. Nevertheless, the study offers a clear and somewhat reassuring refinement of the picture: the Atlantic–European winter jet is not collapsing into weakness and chaos, nor is it becoming uniformly more ferocious. Instead, it is strengthening as a background current while its wildest excursions become relatively less extreme—a reminder that climate change rarely moves every aspect of a system in the same direction, and that the most useful science is often found in the details between the averages and the extremes.

Subject of Research: Winter strengthening and reduced extremity of the Atlantic–European jet stream

Article Title: A strengthening yet less extreme Atlantic–European jet during winter

Article References: Brönnimann, S., Brugnara, Y., & Kallabis, P. (2026). A strengthening yet less extreme Atlantic–European jet during winter. Nature Geoscience. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-026-02069-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41561-026-02069-z

Keywords: jet stream, Atlantic–European jet, winter climate, North Atlantic Oscillation, Arctic amplification, storm track, climate variability, reanalysis, stratosphere, extreme weather, climate change, geoscience