Study Shows Underwater "Storms" Affecting Glacier

Swirling underwater "storms" are believed to have aggressively melted the ice shelves of two vital Antarctic glaciers, with potentially "far-reaching implications" for global sea level rise.

Antarctica is like a fist with a skinny thumb stuck out toward South America. Pine Island Glacier is near the base of this thumb. Thwaites — known as the Doomsday Glacier because of the devastating impact its demise would have on global sea level rise — sits next to it.

Over the past few decades, these icy giants have experienced rapid melting driven by warming ocean water, especially at the point where they rise from the seabed and come afloat as ice shelves.

The new study, published last month in Nature Geosciences, is the first to systematically analyze how the ocean is melting ice shelves over just hours and days, rather than seasons or years, its authors say.

"We are looking at the ocean on very short 'weather-like' timescales, which is unusual for Antarctic studies," said Yoshihiro Nakayama, a study author and an assistant professor of engineering at Dartmouth College.

The underwater storms they focused on — called submesoscales — are fast-changing, swirling ocean eddies.

"Think of these like little water twirls that spin around really fast, kind of like when you stir water in a cup," said study author Mattia Poinelli, an Earth system science researcher at the University of California, Irvine and a NASA research affiliate. However, in the ocean, these eddies are not small — they can span up to around 6 miles.

They form when warm and cold water meet. To return to the cup analogy, it’s the same principle as when you pour milk into a cup of coffee and see tiny swirls spinning around, mixing everything together.

The phenomenon is similar to how storms form in the atmosphere — when warm and cold air collide — and like atmospheric storms, they can be very dangerous.

The eddies spin up in the open ocean and race underneath ice shelves. Sandwiched between the complex, rough base of the ice shelf and the seafloor, the eddies churn up warmer water from deeper in the ocean, which enhances melting when it "hits" vulnerable ice, Nakayama said.

The scientists used computer models as well as real-world data from ocean instruments to analyze the impact of these underwater storms.

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Romans Used Volcanic Ash ‘Hot-Mix’ As Concrete

Roman concrete is often hailed as a major engineering feat. It has allowed the Empire’s monumental structures to remain standing for two thousand years.

Many of the buildings, bridges, and aqueducts built by Roman architects are still operational.

Now, a new discovery at a perfectly preserved Pompeii construction site has revealed the long-held secret behind this legendary longevity.

"We were blessed to be able to open this time capsule of a construction site and find piles of material ready to be used for the wall. With this paper, we wanted to clearly define a technology and associate it with the Roman period in the year 79 C.E.," said MIT Associate Professor Admir Masic, who led the research.

The team uncovered the Romans' "hot-mixing" technique.

In hot-mixing, lime fragments, volcanic ash, and other dry ingredients were mixed before water was added, generating heat.

The intense heat generated during the mixing trapped highly reactive lime as tiny, gravel-like "clasts" within the concrete. When cracks inevitably formed over thousands of years, these lime clasts dissolved, actively filling and repairing the damage.

In this new research, Masic’s team analyzed an exquisitely preserved ancient construction site in Pompeii, unearthed from the 79 C.E. eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

The study involved analyzing samples from various construction stages: pre-mixed raw materials, a wall being built, completed walls (buttress and structural), and mortar used for repairs.

The Pompeii construction site provided the most definitive proof that the Romans employed hot-mixing for concrete.

Concrete samples from the site contained the characteristic self-healing lime clasts. The team also discovered intact quicklime fragments, pre-mixed with other dry ingredients, in a raw material pile, confirming the vital first step of the hot-mixing process.

"These results revealed that the Romans prepared their binding material by taking calcined limestone (quicklime), grinding them to a certain size, mixing it dry with volcanic ash, and then eventually adding water to create a cementing matrix," Masic noted.

The site also yielded a treasure trove of information about the volcanic ash itself.

Pumice particles, reacting with the concrete’s internal environment over time, created new mineral deposits, further strengthening the material.

This process significantly enhances the concrete’s long-term strength and its capacity for self-repair years after the monumental Roman structures were initially built.

"This material can heal itself over thousands of years, it is reactive, and it is highly dynamic. It has survived earthquakes and volcanoes. It has endured under the sea and survived degradation from the elements," said Masic.

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A New Recyclable Building Material That Absorbs CO2

Robots may not be pouring concrete yet, but biological chemistry just might, thanks to a new material that captures carbon instead of emitting it.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) researchers have developed a carbon-negative building material that could reshape what sustainable construction looks like.

The team has created enzymatic structural material, or ESM, a durable, moldable, and recyclable substance produced through a low-energy, bioinspired process.

The breakthrough comes from work led by Nima Rahbar, the Ralph H. White Family Distinguished Professor and head of the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering at WPI.

Rahbar’s team used an enzyme that transforms carbon dioxide into solid mineral particles. Those particles are then bound and cured under mild conditions, allowing the mixture to form structural components within hours.

That speed alone sets it apart. Traditional concrete demands high temperatures and weeks of curing. ESM forms far faster, and with a fraction of the environmental impact.

Rahbar says the global dependence on concrete urgently needs rethinking.

"Concrete is the most widely used construction material on the planet, and its production accounts for nearly 8 percent of global CO2 emissions," he said. He added that the new method "doesn’t just reduce emissions—it actually captures carbon."

According to the researchers, producing a single cubic meter of ESM sequesters more than 6 kilograms of CO2.

In contrast, the same amount of conventional concrete emits around 330 kilograms.

Beyond emissions, ESM’s ability to cure quickly, adjust in strength, and be recycled makes it a candidate for applications such as wall panels, roof decks, and modular building parts.

Its repairability could also reduce the long-term costs of upkeep, an often overlooked component of construction waste.

"If even a fraction of global construction shifts toward carbon-negative materials like ESM, the impact could be enormous," Rahbar said.

The potential applications stretch far beyond everyday buildings. Lightweight, fast-forming, and low-energy structural materials are valuable in disaster relief zones, where speed can shape recovery.

ESM could also play a role in affordable housing, climate-resilient infrastructure, and circular manufacturing systems that prioritize recycling over disposal.

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Pi Formula Is More Than Just Math

More than a hundred years ago, long before anyone imagined supercomputers or black hole simulations, there was one legendary Indian mathematician named Srinivasa Ramanujan who wrote down a set of formulas to calculate the digits of π (pi).

These equations, just 17 short expressions, were mysterious even to mathematicians of his time, as they produced incredibly accurate digits of pi using very few mathematical steps. Today, pi has been computed to over 200 trillion digits, using algorithms whose foundations trace back to Ramanujan’s ideas.

However, a new study by researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) has revealed something far more surprising. It suggests that Ramanujan’s old mathematical tricks are not just clever; they naturally appear in modern physics, popping up in models that describe turbulence, percolation, and even aspects of black holes.

"Ramanujan’s motivation might have been very mathematical, but without his knowledge, he was also studying black holes, turbulence, percolation, all sorts of things," Faizan Bhat, first author of the study and an ex-PhD candidate at IISc, said.

The study authors focused on a simple but deep question. Why do Ramanujan’s formulas work so beautifully? Mathematicians have admired the formulas for more than a century, and they form the basis for modern pi-computing methods such as the Chudnovsky algorithm, but their origin has always felt almost magical.

Instead of looking for a purely mathematical answer, the researchers tried something new. What if Ramanujan’s mathematics naturally arises from physical laws? In other words, could there be a real physical system where these formulas appear without being forced in?

To find out, they searched through different areas of high-energy theory. Their attention settled on conformal field theories (CFTs)—powerful frameworks used to describe systems that look the same no matter how much you zoom in. A well-known example is the critical point of water, where liquid and vapor become identical, and the system shows repeating behavior.

Within this large family, they looked at a special subset called logarithmic conformal field theories (LCFTs). LCFTs describe phenomena right at the edge of order and chaos, places where small changes ripple outward dramatically.

These include percolation (how things spread or seep through a network or material), turbulence onset (when smooth fluid flow suddenly breaks into chaotic eddies), and certain black hole descriptions, where spacetime behaves in exotic ways.

Using detailed mathematical examination, the researchers discovered that the starting structure of Ramanujan’s pi formulae, the part that sets up how the series expands, exactly matches the structure that appears in LCFTs.

Once they recognized the match, they used Ramanujan’s mathematical machinery to compute complicated quantities inside these physical theories. Calculating these values normally requires long, heavy computations, but Ramanujan’s approach—which was originally designed to compute digits of pi swiftly—allowed them to do it much faster and more efficiently.

This created a perfect mirror. Just as Ramanujan used a simple starting expression to generate many accurate digits of pi, the physicists used the same underlying structure to generate accurate physical predictions in LCFTs with surprisingly little effort.

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Ancient Norwegian Reindeer Trap Discovered

Some researchers believed that the changing climate is a key factor in uncovering jaw-dropping artifacts from over 1,000 years ago.

As Live Science reported, archaeologists in Norway discovered a 1,500-year-old reindeer trap made of hundreds of wooden logs. The ancient structure was revealed by melting ice in the Aurlandsfjellet mountains.

Alongside the trap, the researchers found other artifacts, including reindeer antlers, iron spearheads, and wooden arrows. The discovery has provided new insights into ancient hunting practices in the region.

"This is the first time a mass-capture facility made of wood has been revealed from the ice in Norway, and the facility is probably also unique in a European context," according to a Vestland County Municipality news release.

Archaeologist Øystein Skår added: "This finding makes us certain that the facility was used for mass hunting. All antlers have markings, which gives us deeper insight into the hunting activity itself."

According to Skår, cold temperatures meant the tool stayed covered in snow year-round. And based on how well-preserved the antlers were, this ice encasement process happened quickly following its use by ancient Norwegians.

Over time, it was buried in even more ice and snow, securing the device in an icy tomb for centuries. However, because of rising global temperatures and steadily melting ice, these artifacts have now seen the light of day for the first time in 1,500 years.

Ice and snow each have a high albedo, meaning they are highly reflective. Their surfaces are able to bounce sunlight and heat back into space, helping to cool the planet. But as heat-trapping pollution continues to fill the atmosphere and raise temperatures, ice and snow are melting at rapid paces, diminishing their abilities to absorb solar energy and heat. This creates a feedback loop that accelerates the warming.

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