Anthropocene Magazine

For the last dozen years, scientists have been on the hunt for a killer that has claimed billions of lives. They’ve finally found it.

In 2013, researchers from Olympic National Park reported what looked like a sea star massacre: ochre sea stars with limbs that had split off from their decaying bodies. It was the first of what soon became a coast-wide underwater epidemic stretching from Mexico to Alaska.

Within years, the mysterious condition, dubbed sea star wasting disease, had wiped out billions of sea stars. It was declared the largest known disease outbreak in the open ocean. The effects were both devastating and gruesome for more than 20 species. Sea stars broke apart, their arms crawling away seemingly in a failed attempt to escape before dissolving into goo.

Many-armed sunflower sea stars as big as bicycle wheels were some of the hardest hit, declining by 99% in U.S. coastal waters and earning the designation of “critically endangered” from the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Scientists struggled to figure out what was behind this devastation. Initial suspicions of a kind of virus proved wrong. Warming waters appeared to play a role, but that in itself couldn’t explain it.

Starting in 2021, Canadian and U.S. scientists mounted a massive, 4-year hunt to find the culprit. Last week, they announced the results in Nature Ecology & Evolution: a bacteria called Vibrio pectenicida, part of a family of particularly nasty pathogens known to cause everything from cholera to scallop-killing outbreaks.

The discovery is a critical first step in figuring out how to protect or restore sea stars, which are linchpins of many coastal ecosystems such as kelp forests. Those forests are in decline partly because they are being devoured by sea urchins, once prey to sea stars. “Now that we’ve identified the disease-causing agent, we can start looking at how to mitigate the impacts of this epidemic,” said Melanie Prentice, a scientist at the University of British Columbia involved in the research.

The sleuthing involved years spent painstakingly narrowing down the possible causes of the disease, much of it at a U.S. Geological Survey laboratory in Washington state equipped to handle waterborne diseases.

 

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First, scientists tried different ways of exposing healthy sea stars: they put them in tanks with infected ones; added water from tanks with sick sea stars; and injected the sea stars with tissue from infected ones. All approaches proved deadly. Of 50 healthy sea stars, 46 succumbed.

The researchers zeroed in on a substance called coelomic fluid, likened to sea star blood. When sea stars were injected with the fluid from an infected individual, they grew sick. But when they received a version that had been heat-treated to kill live organisms, they remained healthy.

When the DNA of the contents of coelemic fluid from healthy and sick sea stars was scrutinized, the sick ones contained a lot of DNA from the Vibrio bacteria.

“When we looked at the coelomic fluid between exposed and healthy sea stars, there was basically one thing different: Vibrio,” said Alyssa Gehman, a marine disease ecologist at the Hakai Institute and the University of British Columbia. “We all had chills. We thought, ‘That’s it. We have it. That’s what causes wasting.’”

As a final test, they refined a pure sample of the bacteria, then injected it into 6 sunflower sea stars, while another 6 received doses inactivated by high heat. The ones with the live bacteria all died, while the others all survived.

“This is the discovery of the decade for me,” said Drew Harvell, an ecologist with the University of Washington and author of several books about ocean life “What’s crazy is that the answer was just sitting right there in front of us. This Vibrio is a sneaky critter because it doesn’t show up on histology like other bacteria do.”

Other factors, such as heat, might still play a role. It’s not known how the disease first reached sea stars on this coast. But Vibrio bacteria generally thrive in warmer conditions. In fact, scientists have called them a “barometer of climate change.”

The new discovery doesn’t mean scientists will be able to find a “cure.” But it can help guide their work to find sea stars that are resistant to the disease. And researchers can now monitor for outbreaks in the wild by taking water or tissue samples. That might help them decide where to release lab-raised sea stars to give them the best chance of surviving.

“This finding opens up exciting avenues to expand the network of researchers able to develop solutions for recovery of the species,” said Jono Wilson, head of ocean science for The Nature Conservancy’s California chapter, which helped fund the research. “We are actively pursuing studies looking at genetic associations with disease resistance, captive breeding and experimental introduction of captively-raised stars back into the wild.”

Prentice, et. al. “Vibrio pectenicida Vibrio pectenicida strain FHCF-3 is a causative agent of sea star wasting disease strain FHCF-3 is a causative agent of sea star wasting disease.” Nature Ecology & Evolution. Aug. 4, 2025.

Image: Wasting cookie sea star near Calvert Island. courtesy of Grant Callegari/Hakai Institute

There is little connection between price and quality of clothing items, according to a first-of-its-kind study that put 47 different t-shirts through a series of durability tests.

Consumers tend to use price as an indicator of clothing quality, but spending more money doesn’t guarantee a t-shirt will last longer. “If you spend £/$5 on a t-shirt, you may find that it performs better than that of a £/$50 t-shirt,” says Kate Baker, a graduate student at the University of Leeds in the UK, who presented the research at the Product Lifetimes and the Environment (PLATE) Conference in Aalborg, Denmark in July.

While a spendier garment can in some cases be more durable, “We are trying to encourage consumers that cheap does not equal disposable,” Baker says.

Physical durability is key to a more sustainable and circular fashion industry. People need to be able to keep wearing their clothing items for longer and pass them on in good condition.

But until now, there has been no objective, reproducible way to measure durability of clothing. “There is very little a consumer can identify at the point of purchase to understand whether a garment will last,” Baker says. “The aim of our research is creating a method to measure the durability of garments which can be used by brands going forward and in turn be communicated to consumers.”

Baker and her colleagues gathered 24 men’s and 23 women’s t-shirts offered by various UK clothing brands, from discount to luxury labels. They washed and tumble-dried the shirts 50 times.

Previous studies have only looked at single indicators of durability, but they used a suite of factors weighted by the most common reasons consumers get rid of a t-shirt: pilling, overall appearance, and changes to shape and shrinkage. The researchers also assessed fading and color change, as well as the strength of the garment’s seams and fabric.

 

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They added all these factors together for an overall score ranging from 0 (extremely poor) to 30 (excellent).

The researchers found no correlation between price and durability. Six of the 10 best shirts cost less than £15 and outperformed the most expensive shirt, which sold for £395. The most expensive shirt placed 28th out of 47; the least expensive shirt, sold for £4, came in 15th.

The most durable t-shirt cost £28, but the second-worst cost £29. The findings are in line with other research from the University of Leeds group indicating little correlation between price and durability, Baker says.

More durable t-shirts tend to contain a percentage of synthetic fibers such as polyester, polyamide, and elastane, the researchers found. All-cotton t-shirts shrink more than synthetic ones. But 100% cotton can be durable too: four of the top 10 shirts were made of this material.

Some of the durability factors are correlated. T-shirts that don’t pill also tend to look pretty good overall after 50 washes. T-shirts that don’t shrink also tend to maintain their shape.

For consumers on the lookout for a t-shirt that lasts, the researchers recommend choosing heavier rather than lighter weight cotton tees; considering a blend that includes synthetics; and resisting the assumption that higher price means better quality.

The researchers have also tested other clothing items, including casual and formal trousers, shorts, jeans, underwear, and pajamas, and aim to investigate whether the patterns of durability they identified in the t-shirt study also apply to other garments, says Baker.

Putting the findings into practice will require government action. “There are currently no laws around the performance of clothing going onto the market,” Baker says. But if clothing makers were required to conduct durability testing and report the results, consumers could have a lot more confidence in their purchases.

Source: Morris K. et al. “Measuring physical garment durability: An assessment of 47 T-shirts.” Proceedings of the 6th Product Lifetimes and the Environment Conference (PLATE2025), 2025.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine.

Adding biochar to the soil not only creates better growing conditions for cotton, but also reduces nitrogen run-off by up to 87%. These findings from a new research paper add to a growing body of work that shows the triple benefits biochar can have on crops, soil health, and the wider environment.

Using biochar made from sugarcane bagasse, the researchers tested out the carbon-rich, pyrolized material in a field experiment in the Lower Mississippi Delta, where fields of cotton are a common sight. Cotton is an extremely resource-intensive crop, inhaling over 200 liters of water per kilo on average in this region. It also consumes a lot of fertilizer, with large amounts showered over the soil where it grows.

Accentuating the problem, cotton is often cultivated on sandy loam soil that has a weaker, more porous structure through which water—and fertilizer nutrients—easily flow.

These twin environmental challenges were the focus of the researchers’ experiment. Between 2020 and 2022, they applied three different treatments of biochar in varying quantities to rows of cotton, and compared them against an experimental plot where no biochar was applied. Over the course of the growing period, the researchers took random samples of the soil for analysis.

These samples held some interesting telltale clues. The soil where 20 Mg of biochar had been applied per hectare showed a significant 63% reduced concentration of nitrate, compared to the control site. The research team also measured samples for the volume of water they contained, and used soil probes on the research plots to determine the volume of run-off from the soil.

Their efforts revealed two intriguing things. Firstly, that the soil on biochar-treated plots retained more water than those without the soil amendment. This is because biochar creates a more stable, varied structure that inhibits the freeflow of water, and also provides more matter to absorb water, compared to sandy loam soils.

 

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Below about 15cm, the biochar’s stabilizing effect was reduced. But nevertheless its effect on topsoil seemed to provide a powerful knock-on benefit, because the run-off on biochar-treated plots contained strikingly lower concentrations of nitrates, the researchers found.

In fact, at soil depths of between 46cm and 81cm, biochar applications reduced nitrate losses through run-off by between 49 and 87%, and 42 and 102% during the fallow period of the cotton harvest, compared to the control.

The researchers also think that nitrate run-off was better-controlled under the treated cotton, because biochar increases the amount of soil organic carbon in the earth, which is a food source for millions of soil microorganisms. These microbes consume and fix nitrogen, too—so, as biochar increases, microorganisms fix more nitrogen, leaving less to slip into water and seep into the surroundings.

Now that the researchers have identified an effective, simple solution to some of cotton’s biggest challenges, what are the future plans for this work? The researchers say that they intend to scale up their experiments to the field level, and partner with farmers to evaluate the benefit of biochar on their lands.

They also hope to see whether biochar can deliver the same, or similar, benefits on fields of corn and soy.

Sharma et. al. “Biochar impact on soil properties and soil solution nutrient concentrations under cotton production.” Journal of Environmental Management. 2025.

Image: © Rytis Bernotas| Dreamstime.com

Sewage is not something most people want to give a second thought to, but it contains a trove of valuable nutrients. One of those is ammonia, a key ingredient of fertilizer.

Now, researchers report a way to use sunlight to recover ammonia from wastewater. The cheap, efficient process is a practical way to reuse the nutrient on farms and keep it from reaching the environment, where it can cause harm. The work appears in the journal Nature Sustainability.

Ammonia is a source of nitrogen in fertilizers. Around 240 million tons of ammonia are produced every year globally using the Haber-Bosch process. The method, while critical for feeding the world, takes huge amounts of energy and has a large carbon footprint.

Meanwhile, two-thirds of the fertilizer farmers apply to their fields escapes into the ground as run-off. The excessive nitrogen reaches water bodies where it can harm aquatic life and lead to toxic algae blooms.

 

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Removing ammonia from wastewater is doable but the process is expensive so treatment plants mostly decompose ammonia into less harmful compounds. So researchers have been devising various techniques and developing novel materials to capture ammonia and other nutrients from wastewater.

Ning Xu and colleagues at Nanjing University came up with an efficient solar-driven method. They made a solar still—a container with a clear plastic or glass top—that uses the sun to purify water. The sun’s heat evaporates water in the sill, and the clean vapors are condensed and collected.

Because fertilizer runoff and industrial wastewater mostly contain ammonia in the form of ammonium, the team devised a way to convert the ammonium into ammonia. They coated a plastic sponge with a thin layer of a black, heat-absorbing substance called titanium carbide. Then they attached chemical groups called amino groups to the surface of the sponge.

Floating on the wastewater enclosed in the solar still, the black sponge absorbed heat while its amino groups converted the ammonium in wastewater into ammonia. The heat evaporated both the ammonia and water, which were condensed and captured for use.

Focusing sunlight on the sponge cleans it for reuse while producing another useful commodity: hydrochloric acid. The researchers analyzed the economics of the method in 24 different regions of China. Taking into account the cost of the specialty sponge materials, they found that it had “excellent economics benefit and revenue” generating a profit of $90 per square meter of the sponge, and a payback period of about 3.5 years.

Source: Qi Zhang et al. Solar-driven efficient and selective ammonia recovery from ammonium-containing wastewater. Nature Sustainability, 2025.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

 

Maps suggest the ocean has been getting a lot more protection lately. But satellites offer a much less encouraging view.

On paper, the size of so-called marine protected areas (MPAs), designed to shield ecosystems from harm by humans, has grown from less than 5 million square kilometers at the start of the century to over 25 million today. That’s more than 9% of the world’s oceans.

However, scientists with access to the unblinking eyes of satellites have found that many of these supposed protected areas are still being targeted by industrial fishing fleets. The new research shows the pitfalls of relying on simply declaring new reserves as a way to meet numerical targets, like the widely-touted goal of protecting 30% of the ocean by 2030.

But it’s not all bad news. There are hints that strict, enforced protections might help ensure these places live up to their promises. And some of the same high-tech tools used by these scientists could help.

“Fisheries monitoring must be strengthened and made more transparent,” wrote Raphael Seguin, an ecologist at the University of Montpelier in France, and lead author of one of two studies on the issue that appeared last week in Science.

Seguin and colleagues scrutinized more than 6,000 protected areas along the world’s coastlines. These spots represented just 17% of the area covered by such reserves, because many of the largest ones are far from shore. But the spots closer to land often encounter the heaviest fishing pressure. And they also fall under the gaze of the European Union’s Sentinel-1 satellites, equipped with radar that can detect larger boats.

When the scientists checked these satellite images, supplemented with tracking information from beacons required on most large vessels, they found industrial fishing vessels inside nearly half of these reserves between 2022 and 2024. Around two-thirds of those visits were “invisible” to people monitoring the beacons, either because a boat didn’t have one, it’s transmission wasn’t being picked up, or someone had turned it off to avoid detection. But they couldn’t dodge the satellites.

While there is debate about whether all kinds of fishing need to be banned for a healthy reserve, there is widespread agreement among conservation researchers that industrial-scale fishing isn’t compatible with robust protected areas. For instance, guidelines set by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) excludes such fishing from any of six types of marine reserves.

 

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In the new study, scientists estimated that vessels spent an eye-popping 24 million hours fishing in these coastal reserves, based on observations paired with a computer model. And that doesn’t account for smaller boats that wouldn’t use beacons or be seen by the satellites. The biggest hotspots tended to occur in wealthier countries which have both active fishing fleets and more of the ocean inside protected reserves, including Japan, the United Kingdom and Spain. Likewise, the places where fishing boats were most crowded together inside protected areas was offshore of Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as China.

At first glance, it might appear that the reserves with the most restrictions did a better job of keeping out fishing. Places that fell in the IUCN’s toughest categories, I and II, tended to have fewer fishing boats. But those places also tended to be harder to reach. When the scientists took into account the size and remoteness of each of the reserves—factors that affect how attractive they are to fishers—the places with tougher rules performed no better. For Seguin, this suggests that policymakers are imposing strict regulations where it’s easy to score “points” for conservation, rather than where fishing pressures are highest.

“This reveals an opportunistic strategy for locating MPAs, often placed in little-fished areas in order to more easily achieve international objectives,” he wrote in a commentary for The Conversation (translated from French).

The findings suggest the results from a companion study published in the same issue of Science might not be as encouraging as they appear. A different group of scientists used similar methods to scrutinize how much fishing was happening inside the most tightly regulated marine reserves.

They found these patches of ocean were largely devoid of fishing boats. In 455 protected areas spanning 3.2 million square kilometers, satellite images revealed just one fishing boat for every 20,000 square kilometers—9 times fewer boats per square kilometer than in unprotected coastal waters.

The overall message, is “that proper investment in protected areas will pay off and that satellite technology can be one of the key tools to help ensure that such investments are kept safe,” wrote Boris Worm, a biologist at Canada’s Dalhousie University who was not involved in either study.

The scientists behind this more upbeat paper wrote that the seemingly contradictory findings compared with the other study might be the result of their use of a more comprehensive rating system, created by the organization ProtectedSeas, to find the most highly regulated reserves.

But part of their analysis suggests the results could also be shaped by the same factors Seguin’s group identified—that these spots weren’t popular fishing spots to begin with. When the group looked at 72 places where there were satellite or beacon observations before and after strict reserves were created, 61 of them had little to no fishing activity before. The results “suggest that many MPAs may have been placed in areas with little prior fishing,” the scientists wrote.

The main exception was the Palau National Marine Sanctuary, where fishing activity fell from 51,000 hours per year to just 215 once the sanctuary was created, the researchers found.

While the work by the two groups takes different views of the current state of marine reserves, they both agree on one thing: tools such as satellites could be powerful ways to watch for illegal fishing inside reserves in the future, and to make sure these aren’t just “paper parks” created for show.

Seguin, et. al. “Global patterns and drivers of untracked industrial fishing incoastal marine protected areas.” Science. July 24, 2025.

Raynor, et. al. “Little-to-no industrial fishing occurs in fully and highly protected marine areas.” Science. July 24, 2025.

Worm, B. “A catch in ocean conservation.” Science. July 24, 2025.

Photo:© Athanassios Lazarides | Dreamstime.com

Many individuals and companies eager to reduce their climate impact purchase carbon “offsets,” paying for an equivalent amount of carbon to be removed via projects that protect or restore forests, wetlands, and other natural ecosystems that sequester carbon.

But these schemes haven’t been as effective as hoped, in part because they create an incentive for quantity over quality of nature-based climate solutions, researchers argue in a new study published in the journal Nature.

“Currently, nature-based climate solutions and forest carbon markets are struggling to deliver effective climate mitigation,” says study team member William Anderegg, a forest ecologist at the University of Utah. “Our study provides a roadmap to improve these programs in four critical areas and also proposes a novel funding mechanism that could support projects without carbon offsets.”

The study focuses on forests because of their ability to capture such large volumes of carbon. But forests don’t just store carbon; they can also change patterns of cloud cover, release volatile organic compounds and aerosols, and alter the color of the landscape. All of these changes can have either a warming or a cooling effect. So the first requirement for an effective project is to make sure that it results in net cooling, the researchers say.

Second, in order to truly benefit the climate, projects must keep carbon out of the atmosphere for the long term. Most projects don’t guarantee carbon will be kept out of the atmosphere anywhere near long enough. And disturbances from wildfire, drought, pests, and so on can upend even the best intentions. Anderegg and his collaborators are working on strategies for assessing and managing disturbance risks, and aim to publish their findings in the coming months.

Third, a nature-based carbon sequestration project must result in additionality, meaning climate benefits beyond what would have occurred without it. You can’t sell carbon credits for not cutting down a forest that wasn’t going to be cut down anyway. But it can be difficult to estimate alternative outcomes in a rigorous way.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:In the race to pull carbon from the air, did rocks just overtake trees?

 

Finally, projects need to account for “leakage:” It’s no good preventing a forest from being cut down if a different forest just gets cut down instead.

The researchers also propose an alternative to the current system of carbon offsets, suggesting that corporations could instead make financial contributions to climate mitigation. Although this wouldn’t aid them in the quest to say they had achieved net-zero emissions, it could be a more scientifically and legally sound way to reduce their climate impact and avert accusations of greenwashing.

Companies could set aside a certain amount of money per ton of emissions to contribute to nature-based climate solutions (essentially levying a carbon tax on themselves), or commit to contributing a certain percentage of profits to such projects.

“An estimated US$27 billion per year could be generated if just 141 high-profit companies spent $100 per ton they emit, representing a small percentage of their profits,” the researchers write.

A contribution approach would reverse the current incentives in the field and instead create a drive for quality over quantity, with project developers striving to create the most effective, most rigorously documented forest carbon sequestration projects.

“What consistently surprises me is how fast this space is evolving and changing,” says Anderegg. “Innovation is excellent, but it has to be based on the best available science and come with careful policy changes to reflect that science. That’s what’s needed next.”

Source: Anderegg W.R.L. et al. “Towards more effective nature-based climate solutions in global forests.” Nature 2025.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine.

 

Reducing meat consumption is one of the most powerful levers to bring down greenhouse gas emissions: this is now widely acknowledged. But something that gets less attention is how eating less meat could also improve water quality. 

A new study presents the case, showing that replacing just 10% of meat with alternative proteins in the United States could have a large potential impact on groundwater—a major source of drinking water in the country—reducing the risk of water pollution there by up to 20%.

Although agricultural groundwater pollution is a global problem, the U.S. was a good starting point for the research, as the global leader in annual meat consumption. Livestock require large amounts of feed, which itself requires significant inputs of nitrogen fertilizers to grow—one third of which is lost to the environment each year in the U.S. The result is that half of groundwater from the main aquifers sampled in the country contain nitrate concentrations above natural levels.  

Increasing meat consumption therefore doesn’t bode well for the long-term health of these reservoirs and the people who rely on them. The question is whether meat alternatives would be much better, considering that they all require agricultural inputs, too. 

To investigate, the researchers considered beef, poultry, and pork, and compared these to three protein alternatives: plant-based protein, insect-based protein, and cultured meat. Looking at the period between 1985 and 2020, they assessed the impact of conventional meat production methods on groundwater quality, and then used a model to simulate the potential changes that would result from a switch to the protein alternatives in each case.

Firstly, their study showed that the growth of agriculture, and livestock in particular, has consistently increased groundwater nitrate exceedance—the point at which nitrates pass the designated safe limit for environmental and human health—over the last 60 years in the U.S. 

The next clearest trend the researchers picked up on through their modeling analysis, is that beef is the most resource intensive across the board—consuming more fertilizer, water, land, and producing more greenhouse gases than any other variety of meat or meat-alternative. It was followed by poultry and pork. 

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:To reduce meat consumption, what message works best: animal welfare or climate change? 

 

However, the meat alternatives aren’t footprint-free. Many plant-based meat alternatives are made from soybeans, which of course require fertilizers to grow. Insect protein farms, too, are often supplied with a diet of crops to sustain them. Even cultured meat that’s produced in a lab depends on corn and soybean feedstocks: on average, a kilo of cultured meat requires 5.6 kg of corn and 0.03 kg of soybean to sustain it, the study says.

And yet, despite the associated fertilizer use, meat alternatives still had a significantly lower groundwater impact. Per unit of protein generated, plant-based alternatives in particular stood out: “By directly consuming plant protein rather than raising animals for feedstock conversion, plant-based meat consumes fewer soybeans, which requires minimal fertilizer”—26.4 grams of fertilizer per kilo, compared to beef’s 519.5 g, the researchers explain in their work. 

This translated to significantly lower groundwater impacts in the simulation. Calculating across the three alternatives, switching just 10% of meat consumption in the U.S. to plant protein, insect protein, or cultured meat, would reduce fertilizer use by 3.4%. That’s enough to cut the risk of nitrate excess in groundwater by 20%. That would reduce the number of groundwater sites currently registering unhealthily high levels of nitrates by up to 16%. 

This depolluting effect could be much greater if the U.S. ate even less meat and more alterative protein. For instance, substituting 50% of meat with alternatives holds the greatest potential for reducing nitrate pollution, the researchers found. But at these higher rates, there were trade-offs that revealed some nuances of the American agricultural landscape. 

For instance, in regions of the country where corn and soybeans are intensively farmed, a dramatic national increase in the consumption of alternative proteins could trigger to an expansion of crop production that leads to more fertilizer being dumped into the soil and infiltrating groundwater. So the solution may not be as simple as blanket-switching to alternative proteins. 

The researchers also note that the groundwater benefits of eating less meat also depend to some degree on precipitation levels, and how much water regularly infiltrates the deeper layers of the soil. In drier regions, for example, their proposed dietary switch would have measurably more success at keeping nitrogen out of groundwater. 

With these nuances in mind, the researchers settled on 10% substitution as a starting point—an amount small enough to be feasible, which could still deliver significant benefits to water quality, human, and ecological health. 

Zheng et. al. “Changes in meat consumption can improve groundwater quality.” Nature Food. 2025.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine / Ai-generated

An educational video on the World Health Organization’s calls it “the plastic problem that no one is talking about.” They mean cigarette butts, the most common type of plastic litter globally. Per the WHO, 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are thrown in the environment every year.

Conventional and electronic cigarette butts not only contain plastic, they are loaded with nicotine salts, heavy metals, and lead. When disposed improperly, cigarette waste leaches that toxic waste into the environment. But now researchers have found a use for those cigarette butts.

Instead of litter on roads, they propose using the butts as an additive to asphalt that would strengthen roads. In a new study published in the journal Construction and Building Materials, they say that the additive would improve crack resistance and reduce the need for repairs.

To increase the sustainability of transportation, there has been a push recently to include recycled materials in road construction. Waste plastic, bio-based materials and scrap tire rubber have all been put to use to make roads.

A convenient, plentiful material for recycled roads though is old asphalt that is removed from road surfaces during maintenance or reconstruction. This recycled asphalt can be crushed and mixed with new asphalt or concrete to make the base material for roadways.

But old asphalt does not have the same strength and low-temperature resistance, so it can make roads deteriorate faster. So it has to be mixed with special chemical agents, and for this mixing to be uniform, encapsulating the recycling agents in fiber pellets is key.

 

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So a team from the University of Granada and the University of Bologna found a way to encapsulate the recycled asphalt into fibrous pellets made from waste e-cigarette butts. E-cigarette filters are made mainly of cellulose and polylactic acid fibers. After removing the ashy residue from the ends of used e-cig filters, the team shredded and mixed the clean e-cig butts with a wax binder. Then they pressed, heated, and cut the mixture into the form of pellets.

Finally, the researchers mixed the pellets with old asphalt and added about 40 percent by weight of this mixture to fresh asphalt material. When the pellets come into contact with the hot fresh asphalt, the wax melts and releases the recycled cellulose and plastic fibers from the cigarette butts.

The fibers reinforce and strengthen the asphalt and also make the material more ductile and flexible, making it more resistant to cracking under stress. Tests showed that the encapsulated recycling agent showed six times higher crack-resistance than pellets made only of the e-cig waste fiber. Plus, the wax changes the asphalt’s viscosity, allowing it to be produced at lower temperatures, which consumes less energy.

The researchers write that “future research should focus on optimizing the production processes for recycling agent-encapsulated fibre pellets or increasing the dosage of recycling agent to further enhance their performance characteristics.”

Source: Yunfei Guo et al. Use of engineered pellets containing E-cigarette butts and a recycling agent for stone mastic asphalt mixtures incorporating recycled asphalt. Construction and Building Materials, 2025.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

Stop for a minute and picture a few endangered species. What came to mind? For most, it’s probably charismatic animals like a wolf, condor or dolphin. Some might go a bit further and think of insects, like monarch butterflies. Perhaps plants—rare orchids, ancient redwoods.

But will anyone think of a soil-dwelling fungi? I thought not.

Now maybe you will, if a group of scientists get their way. They just released a global map of mycorrhizal fungi, along with a paper in Nature that documents a troubling phenomenon. While these fungi are critical to plant health and sequestering carbon, less than 10% of the most species-rich spots on the planet enjoy any official protection.

“For centuries, we’ve mapped mountains, forests, and oceans. But these fungi have remained in the dark,” said Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist and executive director of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), which created the new map. “This is the first time we’re able to visualize these biodiversity patterns—and it’s clear we are failing to protect underground ecosystems.”

It’s easy to see why they have gone under appreciated. These organisms form hairlike underground networks that are easy to overlook. Even if you are digging around in the soil, you might not notice a handful of tiny white threads in a spadeful of dirt.

Despite their invisibility, these fungi are biological marvels critical to life on the planet. They form vast interconnected systems that shuttle nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous to plants, while collecting carbon in return. Scientists have tracked how these seemingly simply organisms can form smart “waves” that spread through the soil, homing in on the most promising plant roots. At least 80% of plant species are known to be plugged into these networks. The carbon funneled into the soil by these fungi totals 3.6 billion tons per year, a third of global fossil fuel emissions.

 

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But a lot isn’t known about these species and their health. A tiny fraction – .001% – of the Earth’s surface has been sampled in the search for mycorrhizal fungi. To begin assembling a more complete picture, scientists with SPUN and universities around the world turned to artificial intelligence.

They compiled data from 25,000 soil samples containing more than 2.8 billion fungal DNA sequences representing more than 150,000 different species. They then used that information to train a high-powered computer model to predict where the different fungi are likely to occur across the planet. The model took into two dozen different factors that seemed to influence what fungi turned up in a bit of soil, including soil chemistry and structure, climate variables such as average temperature and rainfall, the types of vegetation and the geography. The result is a set of digital maps that predict the mycorrhizal fungi of the Earth’s land surface broken into 1-kilometer squares.

These maps reveal that not all parts of the planet are created equal. Some places stand out for the rich variety of soil fungi or for the high numbers of unique, rare fungi. Those locations vary depending on the type of fungi. Arbuscular mycorrhizae (AM), which integrate themselves inside the cells of plant roots, are the most common, found in around 80% of all plants, including crops, grasslands and tropical forests. Their hotspots are concentrated in tropical regions of South America, Africa and Asia. Less common ectomycorrhizae (EcM) form a sheath around a plant’s roots, rather than penetrating the root cells. They are concentrated in cooler places like boreal forests in Canada and Siberia. Some of the rarest ectomycorrhizae, however, are predicted to be in far flung places including northern tundra, mountain forests in Indonesia and conifer forests in Central America.

While the maps reveal these fungi occur just about anywhere you find plants, it also shows that places with the richest or rarest fungal communities frequently lie outside protected areas such as national parks. Just 9.5% of the most biodiverse fungal hotspots occurred in land with some kind of protection. The picture for the rarest collections was slightly better, with 23% of those places protected.

It’s perhaps no big surprise that conservation efforts up to this point haven’t focused on species that, though important, are largely invisible and not very charismatic. Scientists involved in the project hope these new maps will call attention to what’s underfoot, and help make future decisions about where to protect or restore ecosystems more fungi-friendly.

“For too long, we’ve overlooked mycorrhizal fungi,” said Merlin Sheldrake, a biologist, SPUN member and author of the bestselling book about fungi, Entangled Life. “These maps help alleviate our fungus blindness and can assist us as we rise to the urgent challenges of our times.”

Van Nuland, et. al. “Global hotspots of mycorrhizal fungal richness are poorly protected.” Nature. July 23, 2025.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine/AI-generated

Open-pit mines around the world have enough room for solar panels to generate more than 4,700 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity per year, according to a new study. The findings represent the first global analysis of an efficient new approach to renewable energy siting.

Solar power is growing fast in many countries, and that’s stimulating increasing land-use conflicts. The locations that are good for generating this renewable form of energy also tend to be valuable for agriculture, or host important natural ecosystems.

Instead, why not put solar farms in locations that are already disturbed and aren’t being used for anything else—such as abandoned open-pit mines?

The idea has a lot of potential advantages. Abandoned mines tend to have decent road access and solid connections to the grid, ready-made infrastructure that could be useful for solar installations. What’s more, solar projects on abandoned mine sites could also help revitalize mining community economies.

A few hundred abandoned mines around the world host solar installations, but these are scattered, pilot-scale efforts so far. Until now, no one has gotten a handle on the global potential of the approach.

In the new study, researchers gathered publicly available information about the locations of open-pit mines and used an artificial neural network to analyze the feasibility, optimal placement, and power generation potential of using open pit mines as solar installations.

There are 61,822 mining patches around the world that are larger than 10,000 square meters, the area necessary for a sizeable solar farm, the researchers report in the journal Nature Sustainability. Collectively, these mining patches cover 47,900 square kilometers.

That’s about ten times the area covered by solar facilities globally in 2018.

 

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What’s more, the mines are at least as promising locations for solar as existing solar farms, the researchers found when they analyzed potential power generation across both types of sites. Solar panels installed at all these mine sites could produce 4,764 TWh per year, enough to meet projected 2050 electricity needs at a global scale.

In reality, solar panels would best be deployed on spent mines that have been left alone for a while, so as not to interfere with either ongoing mining activities or restoration efforts. (However, solar could also aid restoration by keeping bare soils from drying out or blowing away and making it easier for plants to get established.)

The researchers analyzed vegetation changes over time via remote sensing data to zero in on abandoned mine sites. They constitute the majority of mining patches globally—39,737 of them.

How much abandoned-mine solar gets built out and how fast will depend on global economic growth, electricity demand, and the prices of clean energy and fossil fuels. Exactly where it gets built will depend on things like the local economy, available sunlight, and ease of access to the site.

The researchers fed 16 such factors into their artificial neural network and used it to estimate the probability of solar installations across the world’s mining patches. China, Chile, the United States, Australia, and Russia have the greatest potential for abandoned-mine solar, essentially because they have the most expansive mining industries.

“Given the vast area of open-pit mining sites in China, if fully used, the country could become the largest producer of solar energy globally, with productions reaching 849.5 TWh of electricity, which is nearly equivalent to its total electricity consumption for the year 2023,” the researchers write.

Meanwhile, the largest group of near-shovel-ready projects are found in the Mediterranean region. In contrast, Africa has great sunlight conditions at mining sites, but relatively few mines—and infrastructure and policy barriers to turning them solar.

Anywhere in the world, though, it will take government policy and financial support to take abandoned-mine solar from a niche idea into the mainstream, the researchers say.

Source: Wang K. et al. “Deploying photovoltaic systems in global open-pit mines for a clean energy transition.” Nature Sustainability 2025.

Image: Alan Levine via Flickr.