Is the world being destroyed?

The LORD said, “I am going to destroy everything on earth, all human beings and animals, birds and fish. I will bring about the downfall of the wicked. I will destroy the whole human race, and no survivors will be left.

Or like those in the day of Noah, will we ridicule those who are prepared to make those necessary preparations, until they were swept away with the waters of the flood?

Summary: Tiny plastic particles aren’t just choking oceans and cities—they’re quietly infiltrating forests too. Scientists discovered that most microplastics arrive through the air, settling onto treetops before being washed or dropped to the forest floor in rain and falling leaves. Once there, natural processes like leaf decay help bury and store these particles deep in the soil. The findings reveal forests as hidden reservoirs of airborne pollution—and potentially a new frontline in the growing microplastics crisis.


The research team developed a customized method for analyzing microplastics on leaf surfaces. Credit: Collin Weber

Microplastics and nanoplastics are widely known for contaminating oceans, rivers, and farmland. New research now shows they are also accumulating in forests. Geoscientists at TU Darmstadt report this finding in a study published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, highlighting a largely overlooked form of environmental pollution.

The study reveals that forests are not just affected by local pollution sources. Instead, most microplastics arrive through the air and gradually build up in forest soils. According to the researchers, these tiny plastic particles first land on the leaves in the upper canopy.

"The microplastics from the atmosphere initially settle on the leaves of the tree crowns, which scientists refer to as the 'comb-out effect'," explains lead author Dr. Collin J. Weber from the Institute of Applied Geosciences at TU Darmstadt. "Then, in deciduous forests, the particles are transported to the forest soil by rain or the autumn leaf fall, for example."

How Plastic Particles Move Into the Soil

Once on the forest floor, natural processes take over. The breakdown of fallen leaves plays a key role in trapping and storing microplastics in the soil. The researchers found the highest concentrations in the top layer of leaf litter, where decomposition has just begun. However, significant amounts were also detected deeper underground.

This movement into lower soil layers is linked not only to the decomposition of organic material but also to biological activity, such as organisms that help break down leaves and redistribute particles.

Measuring Microplastics in Soil, Leaves, and Air

To better understand how microplastics accumulate, the research team collected samples from four forest sites east of Darmstadt in Germany. They analyzed soil, fallen leaves, and atmospheric deposition (the transport of substances from the Earth's atmosphere to the Earth's surface) using a newly developed method combined with spectroscopic techniques.

In addition, the scientists created a model to estimate how much microplastic has entered forests from the atmosphere since the 1950s. This helped them assess how much of the total pollution stored in forest soils can be traced back to airborne sources.

Forests as Indicators of Airborne Plastic Pollution

"Our results indicate that microplastics in forest soils originate primarily from atmospheric deposition and from leaves falling to the ground, known as litterfall. Other sources, on the other hand, have only a minor influence," explains Weber. "We conclude that forests are good indicators of atmospheric microplastic pollution and that a high concentration of microplastics in forest soils indicates a high diffuse input -- as opposed to direct input such as from fertilizers in agriculture -- of particles from the air into these ecosystems."

A New Environmental and Potential Health Concern

This research is the first to clearly show how forests become contaminated with microplastics and to directly connect that contamination to particles transported through the air. Until now, this pathway had not been thoroughly studied.

The findings provide an important foundation for evaluating the environmental risks of microplastics in both air and soil. "Forests are already threatened by climate change, and our findings suggest that microplastics could now pose an additional threat to forest ecosystems," says Weber. The results may also have implications for human health, as they underscore how microplastics travel globally through the atmosphere and may be present in the air we breathe.

The US has caused an eye-watering $10tn in global damages to the world over the past three decades through its vast planet-heating emissions, with a quarter of this economic pain inflicted upon itself, new research has found.

By being the largest carbon emitter in history, the US has caused greater harm to worldwide economic growth than any other country, ahead of China, now the world’s largest emitter that is responsible for $9tn in GDP damage since 1990, according to the findings of the paper.

About 25% of this GDP dampening has occurred in the US itself, although other countries have borne a heavy toll, with economic losses disproportionately felt in the poorest countries. Since 1990, US emissions have caused an estimated $500bn of economic damage to India and $330bn in damage to Brazil, the research finds.

“These are huge numbers,” acknowledged Marshall Burke, an environmental scientist at Stanford University who led the new work. Burke added that the US has “a lot of responsibility, our emissions have caused damage not only to ourselves, but pretty substantial damage in other parts of the world”.

The new study, published in Nature on Wednesday, attempts to attach dollar amounts to “loss and damage” – a term used to sum up the harm suffered by societies baked by dangerously rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

Developing countries have called for wealthier nations, which have emitted most of the greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution, to assist them financially to deal with loss and damage stemming from disastrous heatwaves, floods, droughts and crop failures worsened by escalating temperatures.

This damage is summed up by the new research, which calculates how much global heating has constrained GDP and assigned responsibility for this to countries based on their emissions since 1990. This metric does not include all consequences of rising temperatures but does show when economies are hurt by heat that wilts workers and strains public health systems.

“If you warm people up a little bit, we see very clear historical evidence, you grow a little bit less quickly,” said Burke. “If you accumulate those effects over 30 years, you just get a really large change by the end of 30 years. It’s like death by a thousand cuts. And you have people being harmed who did not cause the problem, and that feels just fundamentally unfair.”

Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, said that “past emissions add up fast, and the damages from those emissions add up faster still. Paying the full social cost of carbon for future CO₂ and other greenhouse gas emissions pays for itself many times over.”

The US has long resisted the idea of being held legally liable for its planet-heating pollution, which has helped push the world into climatic conditions that haven’t existed in all of human civilization.

Donald Trump has accelerated this abrogation, however, withdrawing the US from a loss and damage fund set to up aid vulnerable countries, as well as removing the country from global climate treaties, urging a “drill, baby, drill” approach to oil and gas extraction, and taking extraordinary measures to hobble domestic clean energy projects.

“I don’t think our numbers can force the Trump administration back to the sort of negotiating table around loss and damage, but it certainly says it should,” Burke said.

Frances Moore, an expert in the social costs of the climate crisis at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the research, said the study is “useful” but may still not fully account for all of the weight of damage suffered by poorer countries from a climate crisis they did not cause.

“Many economists would argue that the consequences for wellbeing of a very poor person losing a dollar are much larger than for a much richer person,” she said. “This differential effect of dollar-valued damages on wellbeing in rich as opposed to poor countries is not considered in the paper.”

Atlantic Ocean currents that are vital for keeping Earth's climate in check will halve in strength by 2100 and may be closer to collapse than first thought, a new study finds.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) acts as an oceanic conveyor belt, circulating warm water north from the tropics and cold water south. This regulates climates across Europe, Africa and America while also sustaining aquatic life.

Now, a study estimates the AMOC will slow down between 43% and 59% by 2100 — a 60% stronger weakening than past models predicted. The research corrects for biases in previous estimates by including the temperature and saltiness of the Atlantic Ocean's surface, according to the study published Wednesday (April 15) in the journal Science Advances.

This "more substantial AMOC weakening" means that a critical planetary system is closer to a tipping point — an irreversible "point of no return" for the climate — than many past models suggest, the authors wrote in the study.

However, other experts note that the predicted magnitude and speed of an AMOC slowdown varies greatly from study to study.

"In my opinion there is a need to interpret new results for each study into a wider context," María Paz Chidichimo, an expert on ocean circulation at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and National University of San Martín in Buenos Aires, Argentina, told Live Science in an email.

"Studies predict AMOC decline on a range from small decline to large decline, but I think the magnitude and timing of AMOC decline are still uncertain given the large spread in model projections," she added.

Laura Jackson, an expert in North Atlantic ocean currents at the Met Office in the U.K., agreed. "It is still an open question as to which model AMOC projections are most likely," she told Live Science in an email.

Catastrophic collapse

An AMOC collapse would last for hundreds to thousands of years and have catastrophic consequences. It would send temperatures in northern Europe plummeting while southern Europe experiences extreme droughts. The sea level would rise along the northeast coast of North America. Disruption would spread across food webs and ecosystems in the ocean and on land — for example, the amount of land available for growing wheat and maize, which supply two-fifths of global calories, would be cut by more than half.

Modeling the AMOC slowdown

Observations reveal that the AMOC has weakened compared with its 1850 to 1900 baseline. Previous research has attempted to estimate the strength and pace of the AMOC slowdown, with some studies finding minimal weakening by the end of the century while others predict an imminent collapse.

However, because continuous AMOC monitoring only began in 2004, few previous studies have included real-world observations in their calculations. And where real data has been used, most studies only incorporated a single observable variable, such as past AMOC strength or average seasonal temperature changes, the authors wrote in the study.

Yet since AMOC is a complex system, multiple observable variables should be considered in climate models, the authors wrote.

In this new study, the researchers used different statistical methods to compare the performance of various climate models that project an AMOC based on different emission scenarios, evaluating which was most accurate at predicting the future AMOC's slowdown.

The scientists found that the most accurate model paired sea surface temperatures and salinity across the Atlantic with a statistical method rarely used in climate modeling. This method, called "ridge-regularized linear regression", reduced the prediction error of the model by 79% compared with the standard modeling approach.



The new study suggests that the greater the simulated sea surface salinity in the south Atlantic, the weaker the AMOC is estimated to be by 2100. (Image credit: Portmann et al, Science Advances (2026) CC-BY-NC)


This model estimated that AMOC will slow by around 51% from its 1850 to 1900 average. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 2022 report called a 50% AMOC slowdown a "substantial weakening."

"This is a key result with implications for the future climate of the Atlantic and beyond," the authors wrote in the study.

While these results are not particularly surprising, the finding that "the projected weakening is larger than previously thought is clearly worrying," David Thornalley, a professor of ocean and climate science at University College London in the U.K. who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email.

The predicted AMOC is "so weak that it is then very likely on the way to full shutdown," Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of ocean physics who heads the Earth system analysis department at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, told Live Science in an email.

Even so, experts told Live Science that AMOC model estimates are largely driven by which variables are included in the analyses, so results can vary. And although the new study corrects for previous biases, there "remains uncertainty in how well models can simulate and predict changes in the AMOC," Thornalley said.

Focusing too heavily on an AMOC collapse may not be the most helpful path forward, Chidichimo said. "We have enough scientific evidence of AMOC variability and slowdown, and we are already experiencing environmental changes associated with AMOC change which have important socioeconomic impacts world wide," she said. "Nations need to prepare now."

American farmers entered the spring planting season knowing fertilizer would be more expensive, fuel would be costly, and labor would be short. With the growing season now in full swing, they can add a record-setting drought and scarce water supplies to that list of headaches.

An overlapping series of headwinds—ranging from climate to economics and geopolitics—have made farming in the U.S. an exceptionally brutal profession in recent months. The headaches started last year when the Trump administration’s sweeping tariff regime warped the country’s trade policy, raising input costs for farmers and crowding out international buyers. This year, the war in the Middle East has caused the global fuel and fertilizer trade to sputter, further squeezing farmers’ margins.

And as spring continues, 61% of the continental U.S. is under moderate to exceptional drought conditions, according to NOAA, including 97% of the Southeast and two-thirds of the western U.S. For farmers, the upshot is reduced yields and potentially failed harvests. For everyone else, the towering pile of crises likely means higher food prices for the rest of the year.

“What’s unique about the current moment is that you have this perfect storm of factors,” David Ortega, an agricultural economist at Michigan State University, told Fortune.

An unseasonable hit

What makes the current drought stand out more than anything is its timing. Farmers are accustomed to dealing with sweltering temperatures and dry conditions in the summer, but not this early in the year. Last month was the warmest March on record.

The drought has spread over huge portions of the country’s agricultural land.

“It’s unusually dry in various parts of the country,” Ariel Ortiz-Bobea, a resource economist at Cornell University, told Fortune. “It’s been hitting hard in the Central Plains and in parts of the South, all along the Cotton Belt.”

Huge swaths of staple crops in the South and the Midwest are under drought conditions, according to NOAA, including nearly 70% of all U.S. winter wheat production, 29% of soybeans, and 26% of corn.

Drought conditions can be lethal to farming as they sap moisture out of the air and soil. Crops are most vulnerable around this time of year, Ortiz-Bobea said, and a lack of moisture this early in the season can stunt their growth, prevent pollination, and lower yields later on. And because of an unusually warm winter in the West, farms are also facing low levels of snowpack, the seasonal accumulation of slow-melting snow and ice that acts as a natural freshwater reservoir to help farmers weather the naturally dry summer season.

And this summer might end up even warmer than usual in some parts of the country. There is a high likelihood the U.S. will be blanketed by an El Niño later this year, a cyclical climate phenomenon that can shift temperature and rainfall patterns across the country. These events typically bring warmer temperatures to the northern U.S. and cooler days to the South, potentially—but not always—accompanied by wetter conditions. A strong El Niño would mean warmer temperatures across parts of the U.S., which might suck even more moisture out of the air, Ortiz-Bobea said.

Cascading effects

Challenging weather conditions add on to what was already a troubled year in the U.S. agricultural sector.

For months, farmers have dealt with steadily rising input costs—required expenses including fertilizer, livestock feed, labor, and fuel. President Donald Trump’s tariffs were an early disrupter, as fertilizers were quickly drawn into the trade war between the U.S. and Canada, saddling farmers with higher costs.

Those conditions have persisted this year as shipping ground to a halt in the Strait of Hormuz, the critical Middle Eastern waterway Iran has exerted control over during its war with the U.S. and Israel, and a chokepoint for one-third of global fertilizer shipments. A survey of 5,700 farmers published last week by the American Farm Bureau Federation found that around 70% of farmers cannot afford the fertilizer they need for the season.

The other pressure point has been fuel, prices for which have soared in the U.S. as one-fifth of the world’s oil supply is locked up in the Persian Gulf as long as the strait remains closed to most shipping traffic. The closure has been particularly painful for diesel users, including farmers operating heavy machinery.

The extent to which the drought impacts crop yields will most likely depend on how long conditions last, but farmers are already reeling from the consequences of these higher input costs.

“What I think we’re going to see is a one-two punch of higher energy prices and higher fertilizer costs,” Richard Volpe, an agricultural economist at California Polytechnic State University and a former researcher at the USDA’s Economic Research Service, told Fortune.

“We’re feeling energy now,” he said. “Then as we get into late summer and into the fall, that’s where we’re really going to start seeing the impact of the higher fertilizer costs.”

The multitude of overlapping challenges is already causing food prices to rise. While tariff pain was partially contained to specific categories of food, rising fuel and fertilizer prices promise across-the-board increases, Volpe said. The USDA’s latest price forecast, published in March, projected food prices will rise 3.6% in 2026, up from 3.1% predicted in February.

And if drought conditions persist to the point that crops start failing, reduced yields could lead to higher prices for livestock feed, snowballing into more expensive meat and dairy products for years. Today, beef inflation rapidly outpaces regular food inflation due, in part, to severe drought conditions starting in 2022 that raised feed prices and discouraged farmers from breeding cattle.

Michigan State’s Ortega said longer, unseasonable, and more severe droughts are becoming more frequent partly because of human-induced climate change. Farmers have some protection from adverse weather in the form of crop insurance, when the government compensates for failed harvests and lost revenue. But if fuel or fertilizer become too expensive, farmers are often on their own. Higher input costs and food prices can follow, and the whole country ends up on the hook.

“You can ensure yields, you can ensure revenue. But you’re not insuring against these costs,” Ortiz-Bobea said. “It’s kind of an unprecedented confluence of things. Some naturally occurring, some geopolitical, and then some domestic policy that is all kind of converging.”