The same question drives both the plot of Moana and decades of archaeological research: Why, after centuries of relative stability, did Polynesian voyagers suddenly begin settling islands thousands of kilometers away across the Pacific?

The latest Moana movie is a live-action adaptation of a Disney animated movie of the same name. While the films are fictional, they draw inspiration from the rich seafaring heritage of Polynesian peoples, whose ancestors undertook one of the greatest episodes of maritime exploration in human history.

New climate evidence may help us understand why they embarked on these voyages.

The backdrop to Moana is the mystery of the “long pause”. This was a period when Polynesian ancestors, the Lapita people, sailed east into the Pacific as far as the island archipelagos of Samoa and Tonga, arriving around 3,000 years ago. They brought with them distinct pottery styles and an island-based culture.

Human migrations into the Pacific:

Ancestral Polynesians only moved beyond Samoa and Tonga after a 1,700-year "long pause." The remaining island archipelagos were then settled rapidly. Credit: David Sear

Yet, for the next 1,700 years, there was little voyaging further east. Archaeological evidence suggests that populations in Tonga and Samoa grew and developed their own distinct post-Lapita culture.

Then, between 900 and 1100 AD, ancestral Polynesians suddenly undertook a massive phase of eastward migration. Over the next century, voyagers in huge double-hulled sailing canoes reached Hawaii, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and Rapa Nui (Easter Island). The spread of sweet potatoes around Pacific islands indicates they probably made contact with the continental Americas too.

When European navigators finally arrived centuries later, they were astonished to find even the smallest atolls peopled by communities sharing deep cultural and linguistic commonalities.

The mystery of the "long pause"

For generations, anthropologists and historians have debated what ended the long pause. Was it new sailing technology able to combat the easterly trade winds? Was it driven by social pressures and growing populations? Or was there a physical, environmental catalyst behind their choice?

To answer this, we have to look at the physical factors that make survival on a Pacific island possible: fresh water and food. As populations grow, resource demands intensify.

While ancestral Polynesians were highly adaptable and accustomed to seasonal droughts, prolonged and severe droughts during times of high population density might mean an island could no longer support its human population. Ultimately, island survival hinges on a single critical resource: rainfall.

Unlocking the climate record

Until recently, scientists lacked evidence from the Tonga and Samoa region of what the climate was like in this critical migration era. But we were able to reconstruct these past changes by analyzing hydrogen isotopes—slightly different forms of the same element—preserved in ancient mud from swamps and lakes.

In the tropics, the isotopic composition of rainwater reflects the amount of rainfall. As algae and plants grow and absorb this water, they lock this chemical signature into molecules that can survive in sediment for thousands of years, providing a natural archive of past rainfall.

Using this technique, we found evidence of a sustained, severe dry period in the southwest tropical Pacific between 850 and 1200 AD. Our results, recently published in the Journal of Pacific Archaeology, indicate this was the driest period the region had experienced in the past 2,000 years. Crucially, this drought coincided with a time when island populations were larger.

The great migration into the eastern Pacific coincided with a dry climate in the western Pacific:

Humans mostly arrived in the eastern Pacific soon after a dry period (marked orange) of long-term climate conditions further west (top graph) and a series of sudden ‘dry shocks’ (marked orange, in the middle graph). Credit: David Sear

Why would some islands experience a decades or centuries-long drought? Rainfall in the tropical South Pacific depends on the position of the South Pacific Convergence Zone, or SPCZ, a major belt of clouds and rain that shifts east and west over time, driven by patterns of sea surface temperature. Short-term shifts are linked to El Niño and La Niña, but the SPCZ can also move over much longer timescales, bringing decades of unusually dry or wet conditions to different parts of the Pacific.

All this matches up with genetic data that indicates Samoa’s population rapidly increased around 1000 AD, perhaps thanks to the arrival of new people. This suggests several factors aligned—severe climate stress, expanding populations, better canoe technology—to prompt daring exploration eastward.

The story of Polynesian expansion is remarkable in its own right. As Moana introduces new audiences to Pacific voyaging traditions, scientists are continuing to deepen our understanding of the environmental challenges these extraordinary navigators faced—and how they responded with ingenuity, resilience and exploration on an oceanic scale.

David Sear, Professor in Physical Geography, University of Southampton; Manoj Joshi, Professor of Climate Dynamics, University of East Anglia, and Mark Peaple, Research Fellow, Palaeoclimate, University of Southampton. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read full article

Comments

WD 1856 b is the only confirmed case of a planet that survived the death of a Sun-like star. It’s a Jupiter-size world orbiting a white dwarf—the burned-out remnant of a Sun-like star. Now, a team of astronomers has used the James Webb Space Telescope to take a closer look at this planet for the first time, and what they found makes an already strange system even stranger.

A feeding frenzy

WD 1856 b was an accidental discovery. Astronomers pointed the TESS observatory at a sample of roughly 2,000 white dwarfs in 2020. These stars are the remains of a Sun-like star that have already gone through a red-giant phase, leaving behind an Earth-size body that’s primarily composed of elements like carbon and oxygen. The TESS team was searching for small objects like comets or asteroids that might transit across the face of these dead stars.

What they found in the WD 1856 system was a gas giant. “As soon as they looked at it, they said, okay, that’s weird,” said Christopher O’Connor, a theoretical astrophysicist at Cornell University and co-author of the recent Nature study on WD 1856 b.

The white dwarf is about seven times smaller than the gas giant circling around it. Its brightness should be dropping to nearly nothing each time the planet crosses in front of it, but instead it’s dipping by about half. O’Connor thinks the reason is a grazing transit, where only the edge of the planetary disk clips the face of the star. “That’s a very unlikely viewing angle,” he said, “but it’s the only way to explain what we actually see.”

What’s more, the planet orbits at about 0.02 AU from the white dwarf, which goes against our ideas of how the death of a star should reshape its system. “When the star expands to become a red giant, it consumes the inner planets,” O’Connor explains. Then, in the process of shrinking down to a white dwarf, it loses about half of its original mass, which means its gravitational pull becomes weaker. “The outer planets, like gas giants, should migrate outward by about a factor of two,” O’Connor said.

WD 1856 b, though, apparently did not migrate outward. It got closer.

The discovery immediately has the science community buzzing. “It sent theoretical astrophysicists into a feeding frenzy,” O’Connor said. “When you find something that’s totally bizarre, totally in the wrong place, totally unexpected from any previous way of thinking about things—that’s the Universe inviting us to get creative.” First, though, scientists needed more data to get creative with, so O’Connor’s team booked time on the James Webb Space Telescope to take a closer look at what was going on in the WD 1856 system.

Eight minutes of light

The JWST observations were done on April 27, 2023, and captured a single transit that lasted just eight minutes. The viewing angle and the unusual size mismatch between the star and its planet posed an immediate technical problem. Standard exoplanet transmission spectroscopy assumes a smaller planet is entirely silhouetted against the face of a much larger star, which was not the case here.

To get around it, the team developed new equations to express the transmission spectrum as the time-varying area of the planet overlapping the star’s disk. Then, they modified POSEIDON, software for reconstructing exoplanets’ atmospheres based on JWST data to account for the grazing transit geometry (the software had been developed by Ryan MacDonald, the lead author of the study). When the scientists were done crunching numbers, WD 1856 b’s atmosphere proved somewhat surprising.

It turned out the planet is shrouded in aerosol hazes, and its atmosphere contains methane. It is also far hotter than the team expected. WD 1856 b apparently emits roughly 25 times more energy into space than it receives from its cooling host star. Even though its star, according to O’Connor, has been dead for about 6 billion years, the planet is glowing.

This extraordinary temperature, O’Connor argues, tells us a lot about WD 1856 b’s history.

Running hot

“We expected this planet to be roughly as hot as Jupiter, but it wasn’t,” O’Connor said. At about 0.02 AU from a white dwarf that has been cooling for 6 billion years, WD 1856 b should be somewhere between 150 and 200 Kelvin, close to the temperature of Jupiter’s cloud tops. Instead, it is around 400 Kelvin. “Whatever is causing this planet to glow, it must be an internally derived heat rather than just re-radiating energy from the star,” O’Connor said.

The planet, according to the team, cannot be radiating warmth left over from its formation. Something must have heated it at some point. Working backward through planetary cooling models, the team managed to estimate when it happened. Doing so, the scientists figured out the most probable reason why WD 1856 b got so close to its star.

The team initially came up with two competing scenarios to explain how WD 1856 b ended up in its current orbit. The first is a common-envelope model, in which the planet was originally in a close orbit and survived being engulfed when its star expanded into a red giant, emerging from the stellar envelope hot and tight against the remnant core. In the second, a high-eccentricity migration model, the planet started farther out, had its orbit destabilized by gravitational interactions with companion objects (WD 1856 has two distant stellar companions) and then spiraled inward over billions of years through a sequence of highly eccentric plunges.

One of the points at which these two scenarios differ is timing. Common-envelope evolution concludes when the star finishes its red giant phase, in this case roughly 5.4 billion years ago. High-eccentricity migration could deliver a planet to its current orbit billions of years later.

Running the planet’s current temperature backward through their cooling models, the team found that the reheating event most likely occurred 3 billion to 5.5 billion years after the end of the red giant phase—far too late for the common-envelope scenario. “We interpret the planet’s temperature as residual heat from its migration process,” O’Connor said. “And we think the timing is such that it can only have been through gravitational interactions with the companion stars.”

But this explanation comes with a caveat.

Search for survivors

The cooling models used in the calculation were built for objects with Jupiter-like atmospheric compositions, where methane accounts for roughly 0.3 percent of the atmosphere. On WD 1856 b, the methane content stands at roughly 7 percent. Because methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, this discrepancy might have skewed the models’ predictions. O’Connor says building new models of objects with atmospheric compositions closer to those of WD 1856 b might be necessary to ensure we have the evolution of the survivor planet right. “That’s going to take a pretty dedicated effort,” he said. Efforts like this, though, might soon pay off.

WD 1856 is only about 75 light-years from Earth—it’s practically our galactic neighbor. O’Connor takes the proximity as a hint that there might be more planets that outlived their stars out there. “Having one so close to us is a suggestion that there might be a lot more of these waiting to be found,” he said. Before embarking on the wide search for planetary survivors, though, the team wants to examine the WD 1856 system in more detail.

“We’ve already taken additional James Webb Telescope observations of this system. Those happened long after we submitted this paper. Our team has only really just started,” O’Connor said.

Nature, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10514-7

Read full article

Comments

If you're reading this while the blinds are drawn against yet another heat wave and wondering whether it’s finally time to buy an air conditioner, you're far from alone. At the end of June, as temperatures climbed well above 40° Celsius across Europe, shoppers in France literally forced their way into stores to snatch up portable fans and ACs before they sold out. Such scenes are likely to become more common. As the planet warms, the demand for cooling is rising worldwide. The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts two-thirds of households could own an AC by 2050.

Politicians are, of course, turning ACs into a weapon in their broader culture wars. Far-right figure Marine Le Pen pledged to roll out air-conditioning across France if her party comes to power, while the British Conservatives vowed to overturn net-zero rules that restrict AC installation in new builds. On the left, the argument runs that air-conditioning would mainly benefit the rich and not those who need it most. It would also lock Europe into the same high-energy cooling spiral seen in the US and Asia. To date, only around 20 percent of Europeans have AC at home (and a mere 4 percent in the UK), compared with roughly 90 percent in the US, where electricity is considerably cheaper.

In Europe, air-conditioning is no longer just about comfort. It helps adults stay productive through extreme heat, and children concentrate in poorly ventilated schools. It helps people nod off when the air is still stiflingly warm long after sunset. It can even save lives. One research group estimated that air-conditioning prevented nearly 200,000 premature deaths among people over 65 in 2019 alone.

Europe is warming faster than any other continent, and countries that once had relatively mild summers are now experiencing increasingly frequent and intense heat waves. Research by Nicole Miranda and her colleagues at the University of Oxford suggests that countries such as the UK, Switzerland, Norway, and Finland could see some of the largest relative increases in heat exposure and cooling demand if global warming reaches 2° C above preindustrial levels.

“We will need more cooling to protect people”, says Miranda, a senior lecturer in engineering and carbon reduction manager at the university. “The question is how to provide it in a way that is efficient, equitable, and smart. Not by panic-buying inefficient, energy-intensive portable ACs.”

June’s record-breaking heat wave offered a glimpse of what lies ahead. In northern Europe, homes and offices built to retain heat during long winters turned into ovens. A recent report by the UK's Climate Change Committee warns that by mid-century, over 90 percent of existing homes could overheat during severe heat waves. Even further south, centuries-old architectural adaptations—such as thick stone walls, white-painted façades, blinds and small windows designed to block the sun—are reaching their limits. People in Europe are already fed up with the extreme heat.

But simply adding more air-conditioning is not necessarily the answer—at least not in its current form. Because air-conditioning is built on a paradox: The machines that keep us cool are also heating the planet. The electricity they consume already accounts for roughly 3 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, slightly more than the aviation industry. “We expect cooling to become one of the biggest drivers of electricity demand growth worldwide, along with data centers,” says Fabian Voswinkel, an energy-efficiency policy analyst at the IEA. With new units being installed worldwide every minute, electricity demand for space cooling could more than triple by 2050.

Solar power will help cut emissions, but it won’t clear air-conditioning’s bad reputation. Conventional ACs still run on a century-old principle: refrigerants cycle between liquid and gas to pull heat out of rooms and dump it outside. Manufacturers continue to refine the technology, but many of the refrigerants remain problematic. Fluorinated gases, for instance, have a global warming potential thousands of times greater than CO₂ if they leak into the atmosphere. The EU therefore introduced a regulation in 2024 to phase them out gradually. “In the next few years, air conditioners and heat pumps using these gases won't even be able to be sold here”, says Voswinkel. But alternative gases bring their own trade-offs: Propane is highly flammable, while ammonia is toxic.

This impasse has led some scientists and companies back to the drawing board to ask: Instead of searching for a better refrigerant, what if air-conditioning systems didn’t need one at all? Their answer lies in materials that change temperature when exposed to external forces—a field known as solid-state cooling, which could revolutionize how we cool the air around us.

Paul Motzki, professor of smart material systems at Saarland University in Germany, heads an EU-funded scientific consortium focusing on nickel-titanium. When the metal is stretched and released, it snaps back to its original shape, absorbing heat from its surroundings and generating what is known as an elastocaloric cooling effect. In practice, the technology could be used to cool rooms by 5° to 10° C and, according to Motzki, do so even more efficiently than conventional AC systems today. The team is currently testing the prototype in the lab, but expects to deploy it in new buildings within the next few years. If the technology works, it “could lead to disruption, even a paradigm shift, because the technology is so different from established cooling systems,” Motzki says. The group is collaborating with Irish company Exergyn, which is also developing a refrigerant-free heat pump.

Brooklyn-based Mimic Systems has developed a heat pump based on semiconductive materials capable of moving heat in and out of rooms when an electric current passes through. The prototype is being tested in an apartment in Vancouver. Magnotherm, a spinoff from the Technical University of Darmstadt, is using magnetic fields in refrigerators and will test its prototype in a German supermarket chain later this year before taking on air-conditioning. In the UK, University of Cambridge spinoff Barocal is experimenting with flexible plastic crystals that, when squashed and released in a pressurized chamber, release heat. The startup recently raised $10 million in seed funding.

Motzki says Europe is clearly at the forefront in solid-state cooling, including in efforts to bring the technology to market. “I see a major opportunity for Europe to achieve technological leadership all the way through to market maturity,” he adds. “Of course, this will all depend heavily on private capital and public funding.”

Lindsay Rasmussen sees the same potential. At Third Derivative, a climate-tech accelerator founded by the US nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute, she works with startups such as Mimic Systems and Magnotherm on next-generation cooling. She stresses that solid-state cooling technologies are still in their early stages—promising, but unproven at scale. But “the space can move quickly if the right capital and partnerships are in place.”

The real question is not just whether these new technologies will work, but who will scale them and how quickly. History suggests the path won’t be linear, nor will it necessarily stay in Europe. Solar photovoltaics, for instance, began with research breakthroughs in Europe, moved into commercialization in the US, and ultimately scaled in Asia through vertically integrated supply chains. Solid-state cooling could follow a similar trajectory. As Rasmussen explains, innovations typically leave the lab and startups once they become commercially viable and are picked up by major manufacturers. Today’s cooling market is already dominated by multinational conglomerates such as Daikin and Samsung, which closely track emerging technologies and are ready to move quickly.

As the world rushes to cool itself, one reality risks getting lost: Installing more air conditioners will not, on its own, solve Europe's overheating problem. Many of its cities trap heat in tightly packed buildings and concrete streets, and the challenge is how to cool them without compromising the aesthetics that make them so distinctive.

Both University of Oxford researcher Miranda and IEA analyst Voswinkel call for a “cooling hierarchy”: The priority should be preventing buildings from overheating in the first place—through trees, shade, reflective materials, and natural ventilation. Active cooling should come later, focused on the places that need it most, such as schools, hospital wards, and care homes. From Paris, where he is based, Voswinkel points to one efficient example: Ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics, the city expanded its district heating network to also distribute chilled river water through underground pipelines, cooling public buildings. “I think that these heat waves are making more and more policymakers realize that we have to face this new reality and make good plans,” he says.

This story originally appeared at wired.com.

Read full article

Comments

Back in 2024, we reported on the discovery of the Quest shipwreck, the polar exploration vessel that served Arctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton on his last voyage. Shackleton died before reaching their destination, and the ship itself sank in 1962. The Royal Canadian Geographic Society (RCGS) has now released the first images of the wreck more than 60 years after it sank, published in Canadian Geographic magazine.

Shackleton, of course, is most famous for his ill-fated voyage on the Endurance, which became trapped in sea ice in 1914 and sank. Shackleton and his crew defied the odds and survived. (The Endurance shipwreck was finally found in 2022.) By the time Shackleton got back to England, the country was embroiled in World War I, and many of his men enlisted. Shackleton was considered too old for active service. He was also deeply in debt from the Endurance expedition, earning a living on the lecture circuit. But he still dreamed of making another expedition to the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska to explore the Beaufort Sea. He got funding from an old school chum, John Quillier Rowett.

Shackleton purchased a wooden Norwegian whaler, Foca I, which his wife Emily renamed Quest. When the Canadian government withdrew its support, the mission shifted back to the Antarctic, and the Quest received an extensive retrofit. The improvements included a new deckhouse, a heated crow’s nest, a wireless set, and an odograph for tracing and charting the route automatically, as well as a Lucas deep-sea sounding machine, a large and pricey collection of cameras and photographic equipment, and even a small airplane.

The Quest expedition to Antarctica set sail in 1921. Shackleton never reached the planned destination, falling ill in late December just as the ship was about to leave Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He had begun drinking heavily to “deaden the pain,” despite not usually allowing alcohol while at sea. The Quest reached south Georgia on January 4, 1922, and Shackleton made his final diary entry before retiring to bed.

By 2 am, he was complaining of back pains and requesting painkillers. Ship physician Alexander Macklin suggested Shackleton might try leading a more normal life. Shackleton asked what Macklin thought he should give up. “Chiefly alcohol, boss, I don’t think it agrees with you,” the physician replied. Then Shackleton “had a very severe paroxysm” and died. The official recorded cause of death was coronary thrombosis. His body was buried in a Norwegian cemetery in Grytviken, the grave marked by a rough cross (later replaced by a granite column).

The expedition was cut short. There were a few scientific papers that came out of the journey and some useful geological and survey work, but on the whole, the expedition’s accomplishments were minor.

The ship was retrofitted a couple more times over its existence. It was used in several other expeditions in the 1930s and on various rescue missions. Quest served in the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II as a minesweeper and light cargo vessel and returned to commercial sealing operations after the war. It was on one such seal-hunting expedition on May 5, 1962, when the plucky little ship was pierced by ice and sank—the same damage suffered by Endurance decades before. And like the Endurance, her entire crew survived.

A thriving ecosystem

The RCGS led the effort to locate the wreckage, investing some $365,000 in the project. CEO John Geiger spearheaded the search, which initially involved scouring through ship’s logs, navigation records, and other documents. The 23 crew members fought through dense fog and dealt with equipment issues after leaving port on June 5. But their patience was rewarded after 17 hours of scanning the ocean floor with sonar: Geiger spotted an odd shape pop onto his screen that was unmistakably the Quest.

This latest mission, with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) as a partner, relied on a Falcon remote-operated vehicle and an ALVIN deep submergence vehicle to explore the wreck site further, launching on July 2. These are just the first images; more will be forthcoming. The team ultimately plans to create a 3D digital twin of the wreck site using underwater photogrammetry technology.

Initial sonar images back in 2024 gave the team hope about the overall condition of the ship. These new images, however, revealed that Quest is in worse condition than previously thought, with fishing nets, floats, and other bottom trawling gear snagged on the stern and much of the starboard side. The bridge superstructure is missing entirely, although the aluminum bridge is still attached. Expedition research director Antoine Normandin was disappointed at first, but then realized that "Quest itself is now becoming a science experiment," he told Canadian Geographic.

WHOI biologist Kirstin Meyer-Kaiser told Canadian Geographic that the Quest shipwreck has been transformed into a thriving underwater ecosystem. The surviving structures and materials are now host to various marine life: soft corals clustered around the top of the bow, for example, and threatened species such as the spotted wolffish. “It’s really cool to me that the impact of human history is that we’re creating a habitat," she said. "We’re increasing biodiversity on the local scale of the wreck, and maybe also on the regional scale because now it’s a stepping stone for some of those things to spread.”

Read full article

Comments

US rare earths produced by Washington-backed companies are flowing to Japan and South Korea, as American demand has yet to materialize despite the Trump administration’s push to develop a national supply chain.

Rare earths products produced by MP Materials, Energy Fuels and Phoenix Tailings—which together have won billions of dollars in US government support—are being sold to companies in Asia, where the scale of magnet manufacturing remains larger than the nascent production in the US.

China’s lock on global supplies of rare earths and critical minerals has become a national security concern in the US and other Western nations, since Beijing started restricting access to them. The metals are crucial to 21st-century technology and are used in the manufacturing of everything from weapons guidance systems to electric vehicle batteries.

Nick Myers, chief executive of Phoenix Tailings, said Japanese customers were “clamoring” for the rare earth metals it produces, given the dramatic cut in exports of the materials from China this year.

The start-up’s customers were “primarily in Korea and Japan,” he said. “Unless the [US defense] primes move quickly, I will sell out... other companies are paying top dollar faster.”

Phoenix, backed by a CIA-funded venture capital firm named IQT, is scaling up production but is not yet a significant producer and does not disclose sales figures.

A host of US companies have outlined plans to mine rare earths and produce magnets domestically, but the industry will take time to grow, experts said.

“Today, there are two countries where [neodymium iron boron] magnets are produced at scale. One is Japan, the originator, and one is China,” said Thomas Kruemmer, author of the Rare Earth Observer blog. The magnets are used in everything from cars to fighter jets and the semiconductor industry.

MP Materials is the leading US rare earths producer by a wide margin. The Nevada-based company’s sales of neodymium-praseodymium (NdPr) oxide and metal—its largest division by revenue—were “primarily generated” under MP’s agreement with Sumitomo Corporation of Americas, which distributes the material to Japanese customers, its latest quarterly earnings show.

Some material also goes to an unnamed US technology and industrial company, under a deal penned in the first quarter of 2026.

In the same quarter a year ago, the largest portion of MP’s sales by revenue—mined material, not NdPr—went to China’s Shenghe Resources. But MP has stopped selling to Shenghe as part of its deal with the US government.

MP ultimately plans to produce its own magnets at scale, which would require it to consume much of what it produces. Mined rare earths are turned into oxides, which are used to make metals and alloys that go into magnets.

The company has penned agreements with General Motors and Apple to supply them with its magnets. It said in May that it expected to begin shipping finished magnets to GM this year.

Meanwhile, Energy Fuels—which won $725 million in conditional government funding in June—plans to scale its production of rare earths and also has eyes on Asia.

“We will be sending oxides in the near-term to Korea,” said chief executive Ross Bhappu. Last year, a major South Korean manufacturer made a small amount of Energy Fuels’ NdPr into magnets.

Energy Fuels is in the process of acquiring Australian Strategic Materials, which owns a rare earths metal-making plant in South Korea. It also announced a $1.9 billion deal to buy German magnet maker Vacuumschmelze (VAC) in June, which Bhappu said would result in more of Energy Fuels’ products going to VAC’s US operations.

China is the largest global producer of the widely used neodymium iron boron magnets. Outside China, Japan produces 10,000-15,000 tonnes per year, while South Korea produces 2,000-3,000 tonnes annually, and the US produces 1,000 tonnes or less, according to John Ormerod, a rare earths consultant at JOC LLC. There is also some production in Europe.

Phoenix, which secured a conditional $500 million from Washington in June, said government funding would help it scale up metal and oxide production, which would “expand the pie for everyone.”

MP’s recent earnings have been boosted by the money it receives under its US government deal—which guarantees a minimum sale price for some products and tops up any shortfall from the price paid by third parties.

© 2025 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied, or modified in any way.

Read full article

Comments

Earth is the only planet we know of with buoyant, silica-rich continents. But, despite decades of research, geologists still don't agree on how they formed. "The continents started appearing around about four billion years ago—that's the oldest continental rock we know about,” said Tim Johnson, a geologist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. “The Earth is four and a half billion years old, so why they started appearing then is unknown, as is the mechanism to make that continental crust."

Johnson and his colleagues are now arguing that the formation of continents on Earth was caused largely by an intense, sustained barrage of asteroid impacts that kept the early crust hot and thin enough to make buoyant continents possible. In short, the lands we live on are here because of ancient bombardment from space.

Plates and plumes

The problem with studying the formation of continents is that the geological evidence of this process is almost gone. The oldest known continental-type rocks crystallized around 4.03 billion years ago, right at the end of the Hadean eon (the earliest era in Earth’s history, spanning the first 500 million years of its existence). Rare basaltic rocks date back about 4.2 billion years, and a handful of the oldest zircon crystals push the record back to 4.4 billion years. Beyond that, there's hardly anything else. So, scientists looking into the origin of continents had to rely largely on educated guesses. “There are huge debates about what was going on in the early Earth, because the data is so scarce,” Johnson said.

One dominant idea holds that plate tectonics, much like today's, was already running in the Hadean, with continental crust forming above subduction zones—areas where tectonic plates collide. The other claims that early Earth was too hot for rigid plates, and that crust instead formed above mantle plumes rising from deep within the planet, a phenomenon comparable, Johnson said, to the wax blobs rising inside a lava lamp.

The issue with both these ideas, though, was that Earth, based on most models, appeared too cold for all this to happen. “People have tried to understand Earth's heat budget through time, and nobody could make it fit,” Johnson said. “Nobody could make it fit because we did not consider the energy coming from outside of Earth.” This energy, he argues, came from asteroid and meteorite impacts that were far more frequent back when the solar system was young. Adding these impacts to the early Earth’s heat budget, though, proved rather challenging because Earth has a peculiar way of healing its scars.

The moon shot

The reason we don’t really know what was happening on Earth four billion years ago is that plate tectonics effectively recycles the surface of the planet back into the mantle. “One place where we do know what was going on back then is the Moon,” Johnson said. “We have sent people there. We have collected sample from there. We have immense amounts of high-quality data from the Moon." Because the Moon does not have plate tectonics, its crust is a single, solid, continuous shell. And this shell, Johnson’s team noted, is peppered with impact craters.

Calibrated against dated lunar samples, crater counts on the Moon let Johnson’s team estimate how frequently large bodies were hitting our closest celestial neighbor shortly after the Earth had formed. “Scaling that flux up to Earth’s larger size and stronger gravity makes it clear the planet must have been hit by thousands of impactors that were greater than 10 kilometers in diameter,” Johnson said. When his team determined the most probable frequency of impacts and the size of impactors, they could calculate how much energy this immense bombardment delivered to Earth and, consequently, how much heat it produced.

It turned out it was a lot of heat.

Most prior modeling of early Earth's heat budget focused on internal sources like heat left over from accretion and core formation plus the ongoing decay of radioactive isotopes—we thought these were absolutely dominant. Johnson’s space bombardment model showed they were not.

Bringing the heat

The team focused on modeling how the kinetic energy of each impact would ultimately end up as heat. The physics, Johnson said, is straightforward even if the details are complex. "It really is as simple as converting the size and the velocity of the impactor into energy," he explains. When a large body hits, some of the impact energy goes into vaporizing or melting rock right at the impact site. But, especially when an impactor is big, most of it propagates into the mantle below. "This energy basically heats up the entire upper mantle," Johnson said.

This heat drives more melting and more basaltic volcanism, a process that plays out not just in the minutes-to-hours timescale of the actual collision, but in tens or even hundreds of millions of years afterward. When Johnson and his colleagues added up these contributions, impact heating exceeded radiogenic and core heat for most of the Hadean by roughly an order of magnitude.

Feeding this reworked heat budget into geodynamic simulations led the team to the conclusion that the Earth’s crust in the Hadean was thin and largely molten underneath. The models suggest it was less than 5 kilometers thick, with widespread partial melting starting just 2 to 3 kilometers below the surface. At around 5 kilometers depth, melt fractions exceeded 30 percent by volume—well past the point where rock can hold together as a coherent slab.

The key takeaway was that plate tectonics could not work in such conditions. "Subduction and plate tectonics require that your lithosphere is rigid and it can jostle around and subduct,” Johnson said. “That's just not possible if our calculations are anywhere close to the mark.”

The simulations that captured the localized effects of individual large impacts also produced wholesale recycling of crust back into the mantle, with material dripping down to depths of at least 600 kilometers. Johnson thinks this recycling explains why so little Hadean crust survived to the present. It also explains, he argues, the near-total absence of shock-deformed Hadean zircons in the geological record. The researchers suggest that with so much melt present at shallow depths, it would have absorbed and scattered shock waves before they left lasting deformation in surviving crystals.

A turning point

The impact flux didn't stay high forever; it declined more or less exponentially. Between 3.9 and 3.5 billion years ago, it had dropped enough that internal heat sources took over as the dominant influence on the crust. As impact heating faded, the upper mantle cooled, and the once-thin basaltic crust thickened.

The team's modeling suggests crustal thickness reached around 30 kilometers by the early Archean, the era that came after the Hadean. This thicker, cooler, more rigid crust was also finally able to support plate tectonics, and it's around this same time that the first continental rocks show up in the geological record. "As soon as you can create thick crust and you can create a mantle lithosphere underneath, you can start building continents," Johnson said.

The team admits much of the argument rests on physics-based modeling rather than rock samples. In the absence of geological evidence, though, Johnson thinks reliance on modeling is justified. “We need to start taking seriously the outputs of these models rather than just say, well, we can't find any rocks, so let's give up," he said. But ancient rocks, as hard to find as they are, may also pop up in near future—the Earth is extremely good at covering the tracks of its history, but it’s not perfect.

“In Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Canada, a team of North American researchers has recently dated a dark, mafic rock as 4.2 billion years old,” Johnson said. “I also know another group has found a rock which is possibly even older. Hopefully you will be able to read about it in the next couple of months.”

Science, 2026.  DOI: 10.1126/science.aeb5402

Read full article

Comments