Climate change itself is increasingly fueling climate change. Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases are driving up global temperatures, setting off dangerous feedback loops that we have not fully accounted for in our climate models—or our emissions-reduction goals.

Scientists have long warned that warming would propel further warming in various ways, but a growing number of observations and studies are at last providing a sharper sense of just how powerful these cascading effects could be. And, by extension, they’re showing how much faster the planet may warm in this century.

A study in Environmental Research Letters in September, synthesizing the results of previous papers, found that the additional carbon dioxide and methane released from thawing permafrost, intensifying wildfires, hotter lakes and reservoirs, and wetter, warmer wetlands alone could drive global average temperatures up 0.2 °C to 0.4 °C this century. That would come on top of the 2.6°C of warming above preindustrial levels that modelers are already expecting through 2100. The additional heat could subject many of the world’s cities to monthslong heat waves and expose hundreds of millions of people to flooding. 

None of the models that inform the major UN climate reports, which assess how much the planet will likely warm under various emissions scenarios, account for all these feedback effects. Many of them don’t incorporate any. That leaves a huge blind spot in our understanding of how much the world could actually warm in the coming decades—and how rapidly nations will need to slash emissions to stay within critical boundaries.

A separate analysis published in One Earth in March, which examined what the feedback problem means for our international climate goals, concluded that the world may be much further off track than is widely believed. It found that just three regional sources of warming-driven emissions—thawing permafrost, increasing fires in boreal forests, and warming tropical wetlands—may shorten by as much as 25% the time before the planet consistently breaches the 1.5 °C and 2 °C warming thresholds.

Our climate models and the UN’s reports clearly need to be updated to better represent these effects. Nations must also step up their efforts to reduce emissions to reflect this improving understanding of the dangers we face, says Sam Abernethy, the lead author of the paper and a climate scientist at Spark Climate Solutions, a San Francisco–based nonprofit research group. 

At least some of this is starting to happen. Spark kick-started an initiative, called the Warming-Induced Greenhouse Gas Emissions Model Intercomparison Project, through which more than 20 international teams are running the same set of analyses on different models to develop greater understanding of feedback effects’ potential power. Researchers involved hope that the UN will incorporate those results into its next major climate assessment, due out in 2029. That report will update estimates of the remaining emissions that can be released before the world crosses key temperature thresholds.

But what is already clear is that the planet is rapidly warming and that nations haven’t done nearly enough to cut fossil-fuel pollution. And even if we did manage to halt it, warming-driven emissions could continue. 

So a number of the research groups involved in the recent studies have started to explore what nations could do to get feedback emissions under control. Scientists at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts are, for example, investigating the possibility of preventing fires or rapidly detecting them and putting them out when they threaten to burn the vegetation and soil that help insulate particularly carbon-rich wedges of permafrost (a subject I explored at length in a recent feature story). In addition, the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Innovation Initiative has backed lab research on the potential of adding sulfate, iron, or other compounds to wetlands to counteract fast-rising methane emissions. 

Several startups are also exploring possibilities. They’re looking into suppressing the lightning strikes that are igniting more and more fires in high latitudes, placing synthetic mats above permafrost to prevent it from melting, and deploying autonomous drones to quickly suppress potentially high-emissions fires before they burn out of control.

Investigating all these ideas is worthwhile. But researchers are only in the earliest stages of figuring out how big a dent in emissions any such efforts could achieve across sprawling global ecosystems undergoing massive transformations. 

The surest path to reducing the effect of warming-driven warming remains the one we’ve known all along: breaking society’s addiction to fossil fuels. 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

Explore how Lake Energy connects XRP and other digital assets with renewable energy investment plans covering solar, wind, and energy storage projects.

— Xbox Chief Operating Officer Helen Chiang has suddenly left Microsoft after 21 years with the company, just months after landing the role in July. Her past roles include leading Mojang and the Minecraft franchise.

Verge first reported the news on Friday, citing a memo from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma that did not disclose the reason for her departure.

An Xbox spokesperson was likewise mum on details. “We don’t discuss individual personnel matters. We’re grateful for Helen’s years of service and wish her well,” the company said in an email to GeekWire.

Xbox has undergone a massive reorganization that included Chiang’s appointment, roughly 3,200 job cuts through the fiscal year — about 20% of the Xbox workforce — the spinoff of four game studios and a plan to dramatically flatten management.

— Seattle-based tech leader Philip Su has joined Anthropic as a member of technical staff on beneficial deployments. The management role focuses on AI applications in global health, life sciences, economic mobility and education.

Su started his tech career with 12 years at Microsoft and later worked for Facebook. He has launched multiple ventures, including Audere, a global health software nonprofit, and Superphonic, a podcast player. In 2021, he worked at an Amazon fulfillment center to experience the holiday rush.

Su also created and leads an annual course for University of Washington computer science students on how to maximize their personal and professional growth.

— More leadership changes are underway at SeekOut, a Bellevue-based recruiting startup launched in 2017. The company announced Monday that co-founder John Tippett is now president, moving from his role as chief client officer.

In April, SeekOut CEO and co-founder Anoop Gupta retired and passed the reins to enterprise software veteran Sean Thompson. In August, co-founder and chief technology officer Aravind Bala took over as CEO. Thompson is now listed as an adviser to the board.

Tippett will lead day-to-day operations and work with Bala “on the company’s direction,” according to a press release. SeekOut said it wants to integrate AI tools into customers’ operations to reduce recruiters’ workload.

SeekOut is No. 68 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Fred Hutch Cancer Center has appointed Michael (Mick) Merritt as vice president of strategy and partnerships, effective Dec. 7.

Merritt joins from Penn Medicine, where he was chief operating officer of Penn Signature Services. He has more than 25 years of experience in academic medicine, consulting, strategy, business development and operations.

— Industrial wastewater treatment startup Membrion has named Alexander Demihovsky as director of applications engineering. He joins the Seattle-based company from Xylem. His past employers include Evoqua Water Technologies and Bechtel National.

“Alex helps turn customer needs into viable project plans, mitigate execution risks and develop competitive proposals,” the company said.

Membrion is No. 160 on the GeekWire 200.

— Marine geothermal energy startup Endurance Energy has named Marty Calvert as the director of turbomachinery. Calvert joins the Seattle startup from Blue Origin. He was previously a turbomachinery engineer at NASA for more than 13 years.

Endurance completed its fifth deployment to the ocean floor last month, testing Adélie, a 100-kilowatt geothermal generator named for a penguin.

— Lattice Semiconductor, a Hillsboro, Ore.-based company, has added two directors to its board:

• Raejeanne Skillern, former VP and chief marketing officer of Amazon Web Services, who returns to Lattice after serving on the board from 2022 to 2024
• John McCool, senior vice president and special adviser to the CEO at Arista Networks

Emerald Nuclear today announced a $2.1 million award from The Research Council of Norway to support its efforts to bring nuclear energy to the shipping industry and offshore power. The Seattle-based startup is developing high-temperature gas reactors that use an encapsulated fuel designed to resist meltdowns.

“This award will enable Emerald Nuclear to work directly with our marine partners to validate integration of our technology with their state-of-the-art marine power distribution and control systems,” said Wesley Deason, co-founder and CEO.

The funding supports Norway’s Marine Nuclear Propulsion System Pilot project, which is being led by Emerald Nuclear’s Norwegian subsidiary.

Shipping accounts for roughly 3% of global carbon dioxide emissions, making it a significant target for lower-carbon energy solutions. Some ferries serving shorter routes are adopting hybrid-electric propulsion. Shipping companies are exploring methanol, ammonia, biofuels and other alternatives to heavy fuel oil, but their climate benefits depend on how those fuels are produced and used.

Nuclear reactors have powered U.S. Navy submarines for more than 70 years. Now, a new wave of companies is working to expand nuclear power’s role in commercial shipping and other marine applications.

The award supports an early development step for Emerald Nuclear, with substantial work remaining before commercial deployment. The company has yet to build its first reactor, and its plans will require additional financing, regulatory approvals and a reliable fuel supply. The startup has previously received an undisclosed amount of funding from angel investors.

Emerald Nuclear has five employees, most of them in Norway, and is targeting two applications: offshore ships that help construct facilities like oil platforms and wind turbines and lay deep-sea cables, and floating power plants for remote communities. Each reactor is designed to produce 5 megawatts (6,705 horsepower), according to the company.

Bringing nuclear to the marine environment poses several significant challenges. They include safety issues, regulations for vessels traveling internationally, management of nuclear fuel and waste, and the way shipping companies frequently buy and sell vessels.

Deason said the company’s approach helps address those concerns:

• The reactor will use TRISO fuel, which consists of a uranium-containing kernel surrounded by protective carbon and silicon-carbide layers. The uranium is in short supply, but Deason is confident it will be available by the time the company is ready to deploy.
• Nuclear regulations are still being developed for international vessels, though initial deployments will be within a single country’s jurisdiction.
• Emerald Nuclear will have seaside manufacturing, providing easy access for ships and floating power plants that need installations, repairs and exchanges of fresh and spent fuel.
• The company will lease, rather than sell, its systems, allowing customers to swap nuclear in or out depending on their needs.

Emerald Nuclear is designing its technology “to integrate with the unique power needs of the ship, but also to meet the ways that the maritime industry does business,” Deason said.

Other companies pursuing nuclear ship propulsion include Core Power, newcleo and Blykalla. Core Power, Westinghouse, Saltfoss Energy and Prodigy Clean Energy are also developing floating nuclear power stations. Russia’s state-owned Rosatom already has nuclear-powered icebreakers and a floating nuclear power plant in operation.

Prior to launching Emerald Nuclear, Deason, a nuclear engineer, worked for Ultra Safe Nuclear Corp. (USNC) developing reactors for space-based applications.

During his tenure at the Seattle company, a professor from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology approached USNC about applications for the maritime sector. USNC declared bankruptcy in October 2024 and the deal wasn’t pursued. But the idea interested Deason and Hallgeir Juliebø, a Norwegian entrepreneur who had been a consultant with USNC. The two co-founded Emerald Nuclear in 2024 and Juliebø serves as chief commercial officer.

Emerald Nuclear has signed a lease for an engineering center in Norway, where it’s designing and building its first prototype, a non-nuclear thermal device that will be used for the Marine Nuclear Propulsion System Pilot project.

Other partners for the project are VARD Group, Vard Electro, Island Offshore, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Imperial College London and Maskindynamikk, bringing together nuclear technology, ship design and integration, vessel operations and academic research.

The startup will build its first nuclear reactor, named the Gem Microreactor, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, with 2030 as its goal for completion. Emerald Nuclear will integrate equipment from Peregrine Turbine Technologies in Maine to convert the reactor’s heat into electricity.

The target for the first commercial deployment is 2031, on a Norwegian offshore vessel.

Deason is hoping to open a manufacturing site in the future in Western Washington on Puget Sound with an initial focus on floating nuclear power systems that replace diesel generators. That phase of growth is roughly targeted to the early 2030s.

Transformers are a crucial but nearly invisible part of our grid. The devices help efficiently move power across long distances, but they’re complicated and in short supply. And given that their basic design hasn’t changed much for about a century, they could use an upgrade. 

As the world races to meet rising electricity demand from EVs, data centers, and more, researchers and companies are looking to modernize transformers. New, solid-state versions could help relieve some of the supply concerns and make sure the grid can handle the growing pressure.

Conventional transformers generally rely on huge amounts of specialized steel alloys and miles of copper wire to do their work of transferring electricity between circuits. Solid-state models, in comparison, combine magnetic components with high-power semiconductors, making them more compact and allowing for more control over the flow of electricity. 

These devices are still in development, and can’t replace all traditional transformers today, especially the largest ones that work at the high voltages necessary for long-distance transmission. But a new generation of transformer technology could be a crucial part of our future grid.

The grid’s backbone

Moving electricity through the grid isn’t perfectly efficient: As electricity flows through power lines, some gets lost as heat. How much varies—the higher the voltage, the lower the current, and the less electricity gets lost. So a key function for the grid is stepping voltage up and down. 

Consider, for example, your local solar plant. For that electricity to efficiently travel to your home hundreds of miles away, it needs to reach a higher voltage than what’s generated by the solar plant. Enter transformers. 

In its path from the power plant to your outlets, electricity might go through one transformer at the solar farm and another at a substation nearby, stepping up the voltage twice to reach a high enough level to travel on high-voltage transmission lines. Solar panels also produce direct current (DC) electricity, which needs to be converted to alternating current (AC) via an inverter before it flows into a transformer. Closer to its destination, the voltage will be stepped down again, probably at least twice: once at another substation and again at a smaller transformer in your neighborhood.

If you’re in the US, electricity from a solar plant might be converted to AC by an inverter at around 480 volts, get stepped up to 115,000 volts for the transmission lines, and finally get stepped back down to 120 volts and 240 volts for your home.

Conventional transformers do this work using what essentially amount to loops of wire. The core of a transformer is typically made of a special type of steel called grain-oriented electrical steel. Coils of copper wire sit on either end of that core. 

The number of loops in each coil determines the voltage on either end of the transformer: If there are more loops on the secondary coil than the primary, the voltage steps up, and if there are fewer, it steps down. When incoming electricity passes through loops on the upstream end of the transformer, that forms a magnetic field in the core. That field induces a voltage in the loops on the other side of the device, which is what allows the energy to continue flowing at a new voltage. This process is called magnetic induction.

Transformers form the backbone of electricity transmission and distribution, says Srdjan Lukic, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University. In addition to doing the job of stepping up and down voltage, transformers also often provide what’s called galvanic isolation, meaning there’s no direct electrical path flowing through them. That can help limit disturbances from moving through the grid, improving safety.

The problem is that today’s transformers are big and bulky, and they’re also difficult and expensive to replace, Lukic says.

A solid option

Solid-state transformers essentially add so-called power electronics—semiconductors that convert and control electricity to the typical blueprint of today’s transformers.

While a conventional transformer operates at the frequency of the part of the grid it’s connected to, a solid-state transformer actually controls the frequency of the current. Typically, a solid-state transformer first converts incoming AC power from the grid to DC power, and then to a higher-frequency AC power using switches made of a semiconductor like silicon carbide. 

From there, a magnetic component changes the voltage. Because the advanced semiconductors allow transformers to exert so much control over the frequency and stability of the current, the magnetic core can be much smaller than in a conventional transformer. Some come in at roughly one-tenth the size but have the same capacity, Lukic says.

Finally, additional power electronics convert the electricity from high-frequency AC to its required form—generally back to DC power and finally to lower-frequency AC.

Today, stepping voltage up and down is many transformers’ only job. But solid-state transformers can do much more. They absorb the jobs of devices like rectifiers and inverters (which convert AC to DC power and vice versa), shrinking the total footprint of the electrical equipment and potentially cutting the amount of power lost in the system.

In August, the New York Power Authority and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) tested a one-megawatt solid-state transformer under realistic utility conditions at EPRI’s test site. The device was built in Lukic’s lab, and it was the first such test for a transformer of that capacity, he says. 

The prototype was roughly 98% efficient—meaning it lost only 2% of the energy fed in. An equivalent conventional transformer and rectifier, by comparison, would be about 96% efficient together, Lukic says. A difference of 2% might seem small, but it is significant, since it means the solid-state transformer could cut power losses from conventional equipment in half, Lukic says. 

One major goal of the project was to help utilities gain more confidence in these new components, Lukic says. That’s crucial, since these devices could be used on the power grid in the future. In the near term, solid-state transformers could be used within data centers to provide electricity for server racks. 

The prototype is still a relatively low-voltage system, operating at about 15,000 volts. Industrial facilities like larger data centers often require higher-voltage connections, and transmission lines typically operate at hundreds of thousands of volts. Adapting solid-state transformers to these higher voltages will require further engineering development. But the test was a successful demonstration that solid-state transformers can work under real conditions, Lukic says. 

Companies developing solid-state transformers are largely focused on data centers right now, Lukic says. There’s an influx of money to support developing the new technology, and the voltage requirements aren’t as high as they will be for larger transformers that will be needed for long-distance transmission. 

In February, Heron Power raised $140 million to commercialize its solid-state transformer, which the company calls the Heron Link. The technology could be used in data centers, solar power arrays, and grid batteries, says Drew Baglino, the founder and CEO. The company is starting to test its technology at larger scales now, Baglino says. Ten megawatt-hours’ worth of batteries at Heron’s headquarters in Scotts Valley, California, will soon undergo testing with Heron transformers. The company is also planning a pilot with a nearby solar farm, Baglino says.

One challenge for solid-state transformers is that their power electronics have more failure modes than conventional transformers. In a traditional device, a failure means that the entire device will typically be taken offline, resulting in power interruptions. But Heron designs with that in mind, Baglino says: The company uses a modular design, with many small devices that work together. If one fails, the rest of the system keeps working until the affected bit can be replaced, which doesn’t require shutting the whole thing down.

Heron Power is currently building a $100 million factory in California to make advanced transformers. The facility should begin production in 2027 and reach its full production rate of 40 gigawatts’ worth of transformers per year in 2029.  

The future of the grid

In recent years, companies that make grid equipment have put $1.7 billion into the US supply chain for power transformers, which are used in high-voltage transmission, says Benjamin Boucher, a supply chain analyst at Wood Mackenzie. There’s been an additional $1.3 billion invested for distribution transformers, the smaller devices that help transform power for homes and businesses, he adds. 

But even this investment isn’t keeping pace with the rapid growth of the grid. Wait times for large conventional transformers—the kind needed to connect new power plants, long-distance transmission, and high-demand sites like data centers—are stretching as long as five years.

“Transformers have become one of the biggest bottlenecks for utilities, generation developers, and even data centers,” Boucher says. The big challenge is that it’s difficult to get new transformer manufacturing up and running, because it’s a quite technical process that requires a lot of specialized labor. So even facilities announced years ago are still years from opening, Boucher says.

Solid-state transformers could help ease some of that pressure. But high-voltage devices needed for power plant connections and transmission lines are the holy grail for solid-state transformers, Lukic says. Existing solid-state technology can’t be used for those applications yet, so the industry will need to develop new materials and designs to support high voltages and handle electricity safely in a compact device.

“We’re facing a big risk related to grid infrastructure,” Boucher says. “Without the transformers, you don’t really have an electrical grid.”  

L3Harris Technologies says it supplies the power distribution systems and universal modular masts on every Virginia-class submarine in the U.S. Navy fleet, and the company is now carrying that work into the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine program while preparing for the heavier electrical loads expected from directed energy weapons and other new naval systems. The […]

Helion Energy, the Everett, Wash., startup racing to build the world’s first fusion plant, is expanding its semiconductor development and manufacturing efforts. The company today announced a letter of intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce for up to $175 million in funding for a three-year program to support R&D tied to semiconductor technology for commercial fusion energy.

The funds are available through the CHIPS Research and Development Office. Under the deal, which remains to be finalized, Commerce would receive a $175 million non-voting equity interest in Helion.

Helion is also putting $50 million of private investment toward the semiconductor effort.

The semiconductor initiative has two focal areas:

• More than $100 million will support R&D and manufacturing in Everett, focused on next-generation, high-voltage semiconductors and advanced packaging, which integrates multiple semiconductor devices into modules for use in its systems.
• About $80 million will support R&D for next-generation semiconductor development in partnership with GlobalFoundries, a chip manufacturer with operations in Vermont, New York and overseas.

Helion is working to build a power plant that produces energy from fusion — smashing together small atoms in reactions akin to those that create the sun’s energy. Dozens of companies globally are chasing fusion, but none so far have shown that their technology can make more energy than is required to produce fusion in the first place.

Helion’s system uses powerful electrical pulses to form and compress plasma — an electrically charged gas — to create fusion conditions. As the plasma expands against the machine’s magnetic field, it induces an electrical current in surrounding coils. The system is designed to recover electricity directly rather than using heat to drive a steam turbine.

High-voltage semiconductors — which are designed to control electricity at high voltages without breaking down — play an essential role in the system and need to operate at optimal efficiency to capture as much energy from the system as possible.

“The CHIPS Act goal, but also specifically our component in it, builds out the high-voltage semiconductor supply chain here in the United States, both on the R&D as well as the manufacturing,” said David Kirtley, Helion’s CEO, in a GeekWire interview.

The work in Everett is expected to create more than 100 jobs. Helion’s workforce already includes a small team of semiconductor experts, and the company will be hiring for roles including materials scientists, semiconductor engineers, technicians and assemblers.

“This investment expands domestic research, secures critical supply chains, and creates high-paying American jobs,” Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said in a statement.

Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act with leadership from Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell, and President Joe Biden signed it into law in August 2022. The law included $52.7 billion for semiconductor manufacturing, research and related activities.

Helion has raised more than $1.5 billion from investors. The $50 million for semiconductor work includes private funds already committed to the company and new cash; Kirtley did not specify how much additional funding it’s receiving, but said it includes new investors.

Helion’s expansion into semiconductor work comes as it continues fine-tuning its fusion technology at its Everett facility. At the same time, Helion is building Orion, its commercial-scale fusion plant in Malaga, Wash., near the Columbia River. It has an agreement to supply Microsoft with electricity from the facility and is targeting initial operations in 2028.

“So that’s still the plan,” Kirtley said. “We’re building Orion components and operating our other systems internally, and the work continues in parallel with all of this.”

The company has semiconductors available for use in Orion, primarily sourced from overseas vendors, he said. Kirtley expects some chips developed through the initiative to be used in Orion, potentially late in its construction.

The semiconductor effort adds another development track as Helion pursues the daunting goal of commercializing fusion energy.

“As soon as the award kicks off, we can build out the manufacturing capacity and the testing capacity, and in a parallel, do the research and development into the next generation of semiconductors as well,” Kirtley said.

How much do you know about permafrost?

Maybe, like me, you’ve been aware that this layer of frozen soil is thawing, that it’s important in the global puzzle of climate change … and that’s about the extent of it.  

The great news for both of us is that my colleague James Temple just published two in-depth stories about permafrost. His reporting took him to the boreal forests of Alaska, where he helicoptered into the wilderness to learn more about how this material could affect our climate both now and in the future.

I’d recommend you give both of James’s stories a read. There’s this feature about efforts to tackle the intensifying fires that are threatening permafrost, as well as this look at how researchers are trying to understand the complicated tangle of potential climate effects. Here are three things I took away.

Permafrost is a massive blind spot for climate change

Permafrost is the frozen layer of soil that’s under about 15% of land around the Northern Hemisphere. While technically material needs to be frozen for only two consecutive years to count as permafrost, most of our current permafrost formed during the last ice age.

That means there’s organic material that’s been frozen, and essentially locked away, for thousands of years. But as global temperatures tick up and this layer thaws, microbes are able to break down that organic matter, releasing carbon dioxide and methane—powerful greenhouse gases that drive climate change. Those emissions form a feedback loop, accelerating warming further.

The steady rise in global temperatures has already shrunk the footprint of the Arctic permafrost by about 12% since 1850, and the pace has been picking up in the last 50 years.

The wild thing is, only a minority of the models that have been used in UN climate reports actually take into account the gradual loss of permafrost. And none of them include the abrupt thaw and collapse that can happen after events like heat waves and fires (more on those fires in a moment). There are efforts to make sure future UN reports reflect the growing science, but for now, all this means that we’re probably underestimating how much and how fast the planet is going to warm.

Wildfires can speed up permafrost loss

Fire is a natural part of boreal forests’ life cycle, but they’re getting more intense because of climate change. And crucially, fires can accelerate the thawing of permafrost. By the end of the century, this effect could release the equivalent of 80 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide.

Today, the policy across remote parts of Canada and Alaska is generally to let wildfires burn as long as they’re not threatening human habitats. But some researchers say we should explore fighting these fires to save the carbon trapped in the forests and the permafrost beneath them.  

Researchers at the Woodwell Climate Research Center are developing a map of burn risk and carbon vulnerability across Alaska, essentially highlighting areas where fires are most likely to spread and which areas are home to certain types of permafrost that would release the most emissions. (Yes, apparently there are different types of permafrost. Yedoma is a particularly deep, carbon-dense form from the late Pleistocene era.)

That’s all just the beginning—once we figure out potential targets, the question is what to do about it. Some suggest setting more prescribed fires, something Indigenous groups have done for thousands of years, partly to reduce the danger of massive blazes. Or resources could go to early detection and efforts to put out fires before they grow.

The carbon cycle of permafrost is incredibly complicated

There’s about 1.5 trillion tons of carbon locked away in permafrost, about twice the amount in the atmosphere. We know that permafrost thawing can release greenhouse-gas emissions and drive climate change. But there are complications.  

One particularly big wrinkle: Other effects from permafrost thawing and fire recovery might counteract the carbon lost from those events. For example, as temperatures warm, plants can gradually move north and take hold where they couldn’t have before. Those plants soak up carbon from the atmosphere as they grow, at least partly locking away what was emitted.

Researchers are working to better understand this ecosystem. And the more we learn, the more complicated the picture looks. How much carbon is lost from permafrost, and how much a given area will recover its carbon, depend on a huge array of factors. How severe are the fires that have accelerated local thawing? What’s the local climate and environment? And what kind of permafrost is at stake?

The higher we push the planet’s temperature, the more we mess with complicated natural phenomena that we’re only beginning to understand. 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

Endurance Energy says its prototype marine geothermal power system generated more electricity than it consumed during a recent deployment 300 miles off the Oregon coast — though the milestone lasted just 8.7 seconds.

The Seattle-based startup landed its 3-ton power plant on the seafloor near a natural vent releasing water at about 538 degrees Fahrenheit. The team operated the system remotely through a fiber-optic network running along the seabed.

The expedition marked Endurance’s fifth deployment to the ocean floor where it tested Adélie — a 100-kilowatt geothermal generator named for a penguin.

The company is part of a broader race to harness geothermal energy, using heat from water or steam under the Earth’s crust, converted into electricity. But while companies such as Fervo and Sage Geosystems focus on terrestrial sites, Endurance is the first commercial venture pursuing undersea sources.

“The main question we had is can the system generate more power than it uses,” Andrew Redd, Endurance’s founder and CEO, said in a statement about the expedition, which began last month.

“Adélie did,” he added. “Goddard’s first liquid-fueled rocket flew for two and a half seconds. Our first net-positive run lasted about nine. Our approach is to make it exist, then make it good.”

The test produced only a brief burst of surplus electricity, reaching a peak net output of 16.5 kilowatts. Challenges with the technology and a failure of a power cable cut the dive short.

The team also drilled what it called the world’s first geothermal well. At a site about 5,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, its machinery created two bore holes that tapped into hydrothermal fluid. It capped one hole and drilled a roughly 2-inch wide, 52-foot deep geothermal well at the other. While the well delivered hot fluid, it wasn’t suited for testing the energy system, sending the team to the natural vent.

Endurance said the expedition included voluntary environmental monitoring. The team mapped the seafloor to select the least disruptive test site, sampled water before and after operations, surveyed marine life and monitored sound.

While the startup has made rapid progress, its approach faces significant challenges: high pressure and corrosive conditions, mineral buildup inside equipment and the risk of costly repairs to seafloor machinery. And although many population centers sit near coastlines, the systems would still need expensive subsea cables to carry electricity over potentially long distances.

The company has raised $63 million from investors and has roughly three-dozen employees.

This winter, Endurance plans to deploy Gentoo, a refurbished and upgraded version of Adélie designed to generate more power for longer periods.

The company is also developing its first commercial project in Tonga, with the goal of delivering its first electricity in 2027.

Scrubbing Earth of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—a.k.a. PFAS or forever chemicals—could eliminate a list of woes for people and planet. Used for decades in everything from nonstick pans to firefighting foams, PFAS have been linked to increased risks of fertility challenges, developmental delays, cancer, and reduced immune response. They are known for a strong bond between carbon and fluorine, which the environment struggles to break down. 

The sticking points

PFAS are everywhere: They spew from factories and slough off products and into water with normal use. Scientists have found them in everything from human blood to Antarctic snow. One 2022 report found that 89% of the US population had PFAS in excess of two nanograms per milliliter of blood plasma, a common threshold for potential adverse health effects, and 9% of the population had passed the riskier level of 20 nanograms per milliliter.

The PFAS monster is also a moving target. New compounds are still being created and used. There are more than 12,000 of them, and much of the cleanup research focuses on only a small handful. 

The progress

Cleansing PFAS-contaminated soil is a project in its infancy, but it is possible to prevent more buildup by pulling the chemicals out of water systems. There are two ways to handle this: trap or destroy. Some scientists have found reverse osmosis—a process that pushes water through supertight filters—useful in point-of-use cases, like water filters at kitchen sinks. 

Other techniques in the pipeline might be more suitable for large-scale removal—for example, at water treatment facilities. One, called foam fractionation, generates bubbles that capture PFAS. More approaches, like ensnaring the chemicals in nanothin layers of charged metal, are also under investigation. 

Trapping, though, is imperfect. You’re left with PFAS-filled brine, which if not properly destroyed (an expensive and energy-sucking endeavor) can still end up in the environment. 

Jack Huang, a professor of crop and soil sciences at the University of Georgia, is working on destruction. He’s testing a method called electrochemical degradation, which uses electrodes to break down the bonds that hold PFAS together. The product destroyed more than 90% of PFAS mass in tests and has already been licensed by the engineering consulting firm AECOM. 

Ridding life of PFAS is also a policy challenge. There are alternatives; we just need the push to use them. And we’ve had success before: The EPA’s 2010/2015 PFOA Stewardship Program has helped slash the release of water-repellent perfluorooctanoic acid by 95%. More recently, Minnesota, Maine, and New Mexico have passed bans on PFAS in products like cookware and dental floss. 

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Progress meter ………… 6

Scientists are making strides toward removing and destroying PFAS—but it’ll be all for naught if we don’t turn off the tap. 

The rise of the lithium-ion battery, which powers everything from the smallest personal electronics to gargantuan energy storage systems, has been nothing short of revolutionary. But as anyone who’s boarded a plane in the last decade could tell you, storing and pumping out energy by moving charged lithium ions through a liquid electrolyte soup has its drawbacks, not least that the batteries have a troubling tendency to catch fire. Enter the solid-state battery, which swaps liquid for a solid ceramic or polymer, creating power packs that charge faster, last longer, cram more energy into smaller spaces, and (crucially) run cooler. A new generation of companies aim to bring such batteries to market, and if their bets pan out, the tech could substantially ease the shift away from fossil fuels. 

The sticking points

Solid-state batteries have been “just a few years away” for more than a decade now. In laboratories, the technology works. But there have been challenges. In designs that pair the solid electrolyte with a lithium-metal anode (the side of the battery that releases electrons into an electrical circuit), needlelike filaments called dendrites tend to grow during charging, and they eventually push through the electrolyte and short the cell. Solid electrolytes are supposed to physically block the formation of dendrites, but many of them crack as the treelike projections break through like roots in a concrete foundation. 

Then there’s the problem of manufacturing at scale. Mass production requires large quantities of defect-free sheets of ceramic-like material to make the electrolytes as well as dry rooms for assembly, since those electrolytes have a tendency to react with water. Would-be manufacturers quote a range of potential prices for solid-state batteries, but most expect them to fall in line with lithium-ion packs sometime in the mid-2030s. 

The progress

Nascent as the technology is, solid-state batteries have already seen high-­profile missteps. But one of America’s most advanced solid-state-battery companies says it’s closing in on being able to bring its product to market. The Bill Gates–backed QuantumScape launched in Silicon Valley in 2010 and built its battery around a class of ceramic materials that it says is compatible with lithium—meaning no dendrite formation. “We spent, then, like 10 years learning how to process it to satisfy all of the other requirements,” says Tim Holme, QuantumScape’s cofounder and chief technology officer. In 2025, the startup announced a proprietary, large-scale manufacturing method for quickly producing and heat-treating the ceramic electrolytes used in its batteries. “Nobody has ever done this in the field of ceramics before,” Holme claims. For 10,000 years, producing ceramics has involved slowly cooking the starting materials in an oven over the course of days. “We figured out a way to shorten that down to several minutes,” he says. 

Plenty of other companies are pushing the tech forward as well. Toyota, the world’s biggest automaker, launched a research program on solid-state batteries way back in 2010. It’s now partnering with the global energy and petroleum company Idemitsu Kosan on a pilot plant, promising cars that can travel up to 745 miles after charging 10 minutes or less—a huge leap, if it works out. In China, CATL, the giant behind roughly 40% of the global battery market, is aggressively pursuing solid-state batteries too, pumping nearly $2.6 billion into a research program in 2024 alone. Mercedes, meanwhile, equipped one of its EQS sedans with solid-state batteries last fall; after driving nonstop for 750 miles, the car still had some range to spare. 

Will the tech gain traction? Investing in vehicle batteries makes sense given the size of the potential market. But any little uptick in cost typically gets passed on to buyers, so the first solid-state EV batteries will inevitably be more expensive. 

Grid storage buyers, who are working to meet the increasing demands posed by data centers, may also hesitate to purchase new technologies that still haven’t come down the cost curve. Then again, the promise of energy storage that lasts longer than lithium-­ion’s typical eight hours could make them easier to persuade. 

Some companies are taking a page from a playbook employed by outfits pursuing fusion: Focus on near-term markets with better margins to help fund development and bring down costs. Solid-state firms including California-based Solid Energies and Arizona-headquartered Sion Power are looking at selling batteries to the aviation industry or the military. “Those are sectors that are less sensitive to cost, and they typically require lower volumes as well,” says Evelina Stoikou, head analyst for battery technologies and supply chains at the consultancy BloombergNEF. “It’s a good way to prove your concept, then go through and fund the pilot plant where you can make that and eventually scale up.”

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Progress meter ………… 7

The technology works, the capital is there, and demand is not far behind. But as with anything in manufacturing, unknown unknowns remain. 

Andrew Haverdink, a tall grad student in a rain bib and rubber boots, wrenched a double-handed drill from the frozen soil that underlies much of Alaska’s Denali National Park and then unclipped the hollow barrel from the end of the bit. 

He knelt in front of a blue tarp, lined the barrel up with a plastic tray, and pushed a rod through the opposite end. A perfect solid, cylindrical core of ancient soil emerged—dark, rich permafrost at least a foot long.

On that late morning in early July, Haverdink was among a team of Northern Arizona University students and staff gathering samples and data from a research plot, divided by surveyor’s tape unspooled atop tussocks, alders, and fireweed. 

In late June of 2013, a lightning strike sparked a fire in this stretch of mostly treeless tundra, in the northern backcountry of the park. Whipped by the Chinooks, intense downslope winds created as moist ocean air surmounts and then descends the Alaska Range, the fire ripped across nearly 35,000 acres. It burned through much of the vegetation and deep into the topsoil, stripping away the insulating layer that preserves the frozen permafrost, a massive storehouse of carbon that underlies 85% of Alaska. 

During their first survey, in 2016, the researchers found that in places where the fire burned hottest and deepest, the thawed soil above the permafrost (known as the active layer) extended between a foot and nearly two feet deeper than in plots outside the burn scar—an indication of deep thawing.

Crucially, the fire also crossed two sets of survey grids that the National Park Service established in 2001, including the one where the researchers stood that morning. That pre-fire snapshot offered the Northern Arizona group a rare opportunity to study how the blaze has altered the vegetation, carbon, and permafrost across time, says Xanthe Walker, one of the principal investigators on the project, who was watching over Haverdink’s work that morning.

These direct observations from high-latitude fires are helping scientists to better understand the impacts of wildfire and permafrost loss on climate change, she says.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” Walker says. “These are huge biomes with massive fires that no one’s ever been to or ever looked at.”

They’re among a growing group of researchers striving to untangle what happens in the aftermath of fires in the Arctic-boreal region as they occur more often, burn hotter than before, and expose the landscape and frozen permafrost to a warming climate. 

The work is providing critical clues into the complex mechanisms driving cascading climate feedback effects: As warming temperatures fuel more frequent and severe fires, more permafrost thaws, releasing greenhouse-gas emissions that threaten to fuel more warming, fires, and permafrost loss. 

Understanding just how powerful these effects are, how they compound, and to what degree other transformations of the landscape may mitigate them is essential to gain a clearer picture of our climate future.

Notably, past modeling suggested that the carbon dioxide uptake from expanding trees and plants may largely offset the release of carbon from warming soils and melting permafrost, at least over long periods and under moderate levels of warming. But the improving observations and analyses have revealed worrisome signs about the impacts of rising Arctic-boreal emissions in the immediate decades ahead, as the world struggles to keep global warming within relatively safe boundaries.
   

The permafrost problem 

Permafrost makes up 15% of the land surface of the Northern Hemisphere and holds about 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, roughly twice the amount in the atmosphere. Most of it formed during the last ice age, but it’s been thawing at an accelerating rate during the last half-century, amid rising temperatures and worsening fires. As it melts, microbes begin to break down that organic matter, releasing it into the air in the form of carbon dioxide and methane. Both are powerful greenhouse gases that fuel climate change.

The impacts of permafrost loss, however, aren’t as straightforward as they may initially seem. Notably, there has been a long-running scientific debate over what would have the strongest effect on the exchange of greenhouse gases over the next few centuries: the loss of carbon in soil and permafrost or the carbon uptake from so-called “Arctic greening,” which describes the spread of carbon-absorbing plants across the landscape as temperatures rise. 

Thawing permafrost itself can contribute to the latter phenomenon as the unfrozen soil layer deepens and makes more nitrogen, phosphorus, and other nutrients accessible to plants. Carbon-sucking trees and shrubs with deeper root systems can take hold and thrive in places where they wouldn’t have been able to in the past.

But as more Arctic-boreal fires ignite and more permafrost melts, researchers have been able to closely study what exactly happens in the aftermath, using on-site surveys like those conducted by the Northern Arizona University team, satellite observations, lidar flights, a widening network of greenhouse-gas-measuring towers, and other tools. 

The findings have alarmed many researchers. 

In particular, permafrost seems particularly prone to abrupt thawing rather than the gradual version that major climate models have simulated. A 2020 paper found that this could release far more carbon than previously understood, doubling the emissions from thawing permafrost and offsetting the carbon uptake from future plant growth. 

In addition, even if carbon levels eventually net out through Arctic greening, the emissions from high-latitude fires and permafrost loss appear to be accelerating warming right now.  

Susan Natali, an Arctic climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, and her colleagues have published several papers in recent years concluding that the combined emissions from these feedback effects will push the planet past 2 °C faster than currently predicted. She and other researchers  also found that about 40% of the Arctic-boreal zone has already flipped from a carbon sink into a carbon source, when the emissions from permafrost melting, fires and other forces are taken into account. 

“The more we learn about processes like abrupt thaw, deeper-burning fires, and cold-season emissions, and the more we see disturbances increasing, the more likely it is that the sink will weaken and source areas will expand,” Natali said in an email.

But there’s still considerable uncertainty about the differences between the ways fires and thawing permafrost might alter landscapes, under different circumstances in different biomes. 

“This is just a challenge of the science, because it’s really hard to measure such a huge area, which is not one system,” she says. “It’s many, many, many, many different types of ecosystems.”

Results may vary

The Northern Arizona University researchers have been at the forefront of efforts to study the aftermath of intensifying fires across different parts of Alaska. Over the last two decades, Michelle Mack, a professor of ecosystem ecology who was previously Walker’s postdoctoral advisor, has overseen repeat survey work on fire sites across forests and tundras, from the relatively warm southern interior to the frigid North Slope. 

Her husband and frequent collaborator, Ted Schuur, is also a professor at the university and oversees several permafrost monitoring and experimental research sites at the Eight Mile Lake study area, just north of Denali National Park.

If there’s a single takeaway from the body of science that the Northern Arizona scientists have produced, it’s this: It’s complicated. The local climate and ecosystem, the severity of the fires that have occurred, the type of permafrost, and numerous other factors can substantially shift the uptake or loss of carbon, the amount of permafrost that’s thawed, the extent to which it may recover, and the future flammability of the landscape.

In one early study, the researchers and their collaborators surveyed dozens of stands dominated by black spruce trees in the aftermath of a series of large boreal fires in 2004, between the Brooks Range and the Alaska Range. One of the notable findings: Severe burns that left little behind of the decaying organic matter in the topsoil induced a shift toward faster-growing and less flammable deciduous trees. The sites where deciduous trees dominated stored about five times as much soil carbon as stands that returned to black spruce, Mack, Walker, and their coauthors noted in a 2021 Science paper.

That means the subsequent uptake of carbon on those stands “more than compensated” for the amount released in the initial fire, Walker says. 

But the 2007 Anaktuvuk River tundra fire, which remains the largest fire on record in Alaska’s North Slope, offers a starkly different case study. In the initial analysis there, Mack, Schuur, and their coauthors found that the fire released more than 2 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere, basically negating the amount that tundra ecosystems around the world removed from the air that year.

Subsequent studies found that more than a third of the scorched landscape sank, slid, and crumpled as the ice wedges below collapsed, the telltale signs of abrupt permafrost melting. Nearly two decades later, much of that thawed, decaying organic matter continues to release carbon dioxide and methane in the most severely burned patches of the fire scar, says Adrian Rocha, an associate professor at the University of Notre Dame. 

It will take decades to centuries to recover all the carbon lost there, if ever happens at all, according to Rocha, who continues to monitor the site using Eddy covariance flux towers, which measure the exchange of greenhouse gases between Earth and atmosphere. 

Mack says these on-the-ground measurements are critical to understanding what sorts of ecosystems recover, which shift into new states, whether they release a lot of carbon or a little, and when and where plant growth can offset that.

That said, the stakes of thawing permafrost are clear.

“If we step back as ecosystem ecologists, we know that there’s a lot more carbon stored below ground in permafrost than there is above ground in vegetation,” she says. “If permafrost carbon is released, it could swamp all of these other interesting details.”

In the lab

The Northern Arizona University research team shipped a pallet of soil samples back from Denali. The material included plugs of moss and decaying plant matter known as “brownies,” as well as permafrost cores and samples of the unfrozen soil layer. In the months since, they’ve cut, dried, weighed, combusted and analyzed various samples and inputted their field and lab findings into databases.

Walker says they’re exploring a variety of research questions, including how much that top organic layer has recovered since the initial post-fire survey and how much carbon has been lost and recovered since the fire. 

The analysis is still underway, but in the most severely burned sites, it appears that the thawed layer of soil above the permafrost remain deeper some 13 years. 

“Thaw still reaches further into the soil each summer than it probably did before the fire, which exposes more soil to decomposition,” Walker explained in an email. 

They’re now hoping to use lab analyses to determine how much of that carbon is being lost.

Stepping into the climate future

On my last afternoon in Healy, Alaska, I followed Schuur along a narrow walkway of wooden boards suspended above a tundra field just north of Denali, hoping to get a glimpse into our climate future.

In 2008, he and his research team devised a way to subject permafrost to the temperature levels expected two or three decades from now by setting up snow fences around dozens of designated research plots. That allowed extra snow to build up—which, counterintuitively, acts like a blanket, adding thermal insulation during the winter that kept the test plots warmer than the controls. 

Over the course of the 13-year experiment, the soil carbon levels in those 10-by-10-meter plots declined by 23%, Schuur and his coauthors found. The land collapsed in many of the sites, forming craters several feet deep.

As I stepped heel-to-toe along the planks into the middle of one plot, I descended about four feet, experiencing subsidence in three dimensions. Looking up at the edge from the walkway, I felt as if I were diaphragm deep in an empty pool. 

Schuur, though, had another thing to show me. As we crested a ridge between plots, he pointed down to a shallower—though no less obvious—pool on the other side. It was a control site that had melted and collapsed on its own, without any assistance from simulated warming or fires. 

“Every plot is just going off in its own trajectory,” he said. “This stuff is happening because the whole place is warming … and all these changes just go faster if you first burn the surface.”

Schuur expects that the permafrost underlying the whole field will thaw deeply by the end of 2040. 

“There won’t be any surface permafrost based on our current warming,” he says.

Unless the world radically cuts emissions and gets fires under control, this same phenomenon will creep up the state, decade by decade, until even the permafrost under Alaska’s North Slope sinks to similar depths and gives up the carbon it has held for millennia.

Read more about the push to protect permafrost from wildfires in our previous story here.

In the fall of 2025, Jeff Dodge set up a six-foot folding table in the cafeteria of Cane Bay High School in Summerville, South Carolina, to conduct a taste test. When the first rush of about 150 hungry students hit, he was waiting with slow cookers filled with steaming marinara sauce and meatballs. 

Kids love a taste test, but they’re also discerning, and Dodge wasn’t sure what they would make of his product, a blend featuring both meat and mushrooms. As students swarmed the table and tapped out their opinions on an iPad or scanned a QR code to use their phones, Dodge asked those who lingered to guess what kind of vegetable might have been mixed into the meat. Few of them could—the meatballs had tasted like moist, flavorful beef. 

The school enrolls a few thousand students, and Dodge estimates that the majority of them came by. In the end, the survey showed that 92% of those who tried the meatballs wanted them on the menu; they easily cleared the bar to be added for the 2026–2027 school year. Comments described their flavor as “bussin’.” 

Through his consulting company, K–12 Food Solutions, Dodge was testing a new product called 50/Cut from the company Joyn. The proprietary blend of seemingly simple ingredients—available as meatballs, burgers, and ground meat—could help solve one of the most intractable challenges of the climate crisis, at least on the individual level: getting people to eat less meat, particularly beef.

Livestock production accounts for somewhere between 10% and 20% of all greenhouse-gas emissions related to human activity, and nearly two-thirds of that comes from ruminants like cows raised for meat and dairy products. Beef herds create four times the emissions of dairy herds per kilo of food produced. And for US households, food makes up as much as 30% of emissions. 

Unlike other polluting sectors, such as electricity and transportation, cattle farming has little potential for a big fix. Ruminants produce about 30% of the methane associated with human activity, and this gas has 28 times more global-­warming potential than carbon dioxide. What’s more, it would be virtually impossible to raise them in a perfectly climate-­neutral manner. “We don’t have a technical solution to change the stomach of a ruminant,” says Fredrik Hedenus, a professor in sustainability and systems analysis at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. Technologies to dampen the impact of their burps have been in the works for a while but have yet to scale. They also fix only part of the problem with red meat: Cows need a lot of land for pasture and for feed, which has made livestock a top driver of deforestation in the Amazon and elsewhere around the world.

Even if the world stopped burning all fossil fuels tomorrow, emissions from agriculture would push the planet past 2 °C over preindustrial temperatures by 2070, Hedenus says. According to his research, more efficient livestock farming methods would still leave agriculture eating up over half of humanity’s carbon budget by that time. Only with the addition of dietary changes does his model show a winning scenario. 

He’s far from alone in his conclusions: A 2024 survey of more than 200 climate scientists, conducted at Harvard, found that the vast majority believe reducing emissions from livestock is important to meeting climate goals. People have to eat less beef. “Essentially, you need a culture shift,” Hedenus says.

Yet the culture has proved intractable. Not only do people like the taste of meat, but across most of the world, meat-eating tends to be associated with status. As societies have grown wealthier, it has increased. A United Nations report showed that global meat production quadrupled between 1961 and 2022, while vegetarianism has held steady at about 4% of the population in the US since 1999. 

What could move the needle is a carbon-light and delicious meat replacement. But from a food-tech standpoint, all we have to show is a menu of mostly failed solutions. Lab-grown meat has generated endless headlines since the 2000s but has yet to become commercially available (and affordable) at scale. And while breakthroughs in taste and texture inched plant-based meats from companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat toward mass adoption, the hype—and the appetite—has somewhat fizzled. 

So instead of asking people to change their preferences, startups like Joyn are trying a different tack. They’re creating what are broadly referred to as blended meat products, which combine plant proteins with the real deal. The logic: The best meat replacement is … better meat.

Paul Shapiro, cofounder of the startup BMC Ingredients, which markets a plant protein related to mushrooms, says the math is easy to understand: If we imagine that Impossible Whoppers at Burger King account for about 2% of sales, that’s only a 2% reduction in meat. But if a conventional Whopper were 20% plants, that would be a 20% cut right off the bat. 

Those aren’t quite the numbers climate models are calling for, but some estimates say they could lead to outsized gains relative to the status quo: A 2022 study in Nature found that replacing 20% of beef globally could halve the annual rate of deforestation. And unlike the other solutions tried thus far, this particular Hail Mary is one a lot of omnivores seem open to giving a try. 

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The idea of blending meat and vegetables together is, of course, nothing new. Food cultures from around the world boast an array of dishes that combine small amounts of meat with plants. Today, home cooks still add veggies and legumes to dishes to stretch tight grocery budgets or to sneak extra greenery into their children’s supper. 

But in the mid to late 2010s, however, the focus was largely on companies that appeared to have cracked the code for ditching meat entirely. When Impossible debuted its namesake burger in 2016, it impressed with an ingredient called heme, an iron-rich molecule in the protein soy leghemoglobin that allowed all-plant burgers to “bleed” like beef. 

Impossible and its biggest competitor, Beyond, swaggered through the media and the markets. In 2019, Impossible’s founder told the New Yorker he intended to wipe out all animal agriculture by 2035. Beyond’s 2019 IPO was the most successful since the 2008 financial crisis. A flood of imitators followed.

But within a few years, tastes shifted. In 2023, Impossible employees’ stock values tumbled 89% from a 2021 high. That same year, Beyond laid off 20% of its staff, and a bruising Businessweek feature labeled the entire sector a fad. Sales have been slipping for years, with a 10% year-over-year drop in 2025, according to the Good Food Institute, a think tank focused on alternative proteins.  

Any quest to wipe out animal agriculture could now seem farcical. In 2025, Americans downed $45 billion worth of beef.

Several factors were likely at play. Megan Krogius, a spokesperson for Impossible Foods, says the dip is a “correction not a crisis” after “an outsized pop in demand” between 2020 and 2022. She also says that a flurry of plant-based products muddied the category’s reputation. Indeed, some disruptors (and their imitators) have struggled to compete on the sensory level. Nectar, an organization that conducts research on meat alternatives, has found that taste and texture are among the major factors that keep people from adopting plant-based meats. “Our consumers identify products as having bad aftertaste and off flavors five to six times more than in animal counterparts,” says Caroline Cotto, the group’s director. 

At the same time, discourse around processed foods tarnished plant-based meat’s halo. In 2019, the Center for Consumer Freedom, a since-dissolved lobbying group backed by the meat industry, launched an ad campaign against plant-based alternatives, demonizing them as “ultra-­processed imitations.” 

While Impossible’s Krogius warns against conflating processed food with junk food (she points, for example, to a study in The Lancet finding mock meat to be nutritionally preferable to red meat), some of the bad press stuck. Now, the term “ultra-­processed” has become something of a political cudgel—one wielded by the meat-loving MAHA movement and the US secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In 2025, he flipped the food pyramid and stacked a steak on top.

Any quest to wipe out animal agriculture could now seem farcical. In 2025, Americans downed $45 billion worth of beef, and consumption rose by 4.3% over the previous year, according to an industry report. Rising prices could be slowing this down a bit, but cost can dampen only so much demand. 

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Blended meat, which has meat’s own juiciness and texture, rose alongside the plant-based superstars, but it did not get New Yorker profiles or headlining IPOs. At the height of mock-meat hype, companies like Tyson and Perdue launched blended products, and firms working on lab-grown meat explored cutting their products with plants.

The big advantage of blended meat is that large numbers of consumers—what some call “flexitarians”—are curious about it, and when they try it, they like it. A blind taste test co-funded by the USDA in 2022 showed that diners preferred blended burgers to fully plant-based ones. And a report from the major food processor ADM found that large proportions of every generation of Americans were interested in trying blended meats, including 75% of millennials. “This is a solution that we can do today, that consumers will accept today,” says Tim Dale, a director at Food Systems Innovations, the nonprofit group that oversees Nectar. 

At this point, even Impossible has acknowledged the potential. In a wide-ranging interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2025, the company’s former CEO Peter McGuinness admitted the brand’s struggle to win over consumers, and suggested a hybrid burger could bridge the divide.

Plenty of newcomers are entering the fray. “Shiitake-infused beef burgers” from Australia-based Fable Foods are in restaurants and moving “incredibly well” at the high-end grocery store Central Market in Austin, Texas, says CEO Michael Fox. The Both Burger from Los Angeles–based 50/50 Foods is available in a smattering of California stores and eateries. And Spare Food in New York signed a deal with Premier, one of the nation’s biggest spenders in the health-care sector, for its blend of surplus produce and ground beef. 

One major insight for all these upstarts is that consumers react best when marketing focuses on pleasure, not environmental virtues or health benefits. Though many companies actually create a burger or meatball with a better nutritional profile (fiber!) and fewer of meat’s downsides, like saturated fat, that doesn’t get people to buy it. They like that it tastes good. Beef and mushrooms, for example, contain complementary flavor compounds, including the glutamates that yield deep umami, which is why they’re so often paired in dishes like beef Wellington and stroganoff. 

Food-production companies are a big target. BMC Ingredients, which collaborated with Perdue on a line of blended nuggets, markets a plant-based protein that can be mixed with meat to up its nutrition and flavor. BMC grows mycelium—the root-like structures of fungi. It underpins popular meat alternatives like Quorn and also features alongside mushrooms in Joyn’s 50/Cut. Shapiro likens his factory to a brewery, but instead of yeast fermenting barley, a fungus called Neurospora crassa digests starch to produce a protein with a dense network of fibers that makes for a meat-like chew. “We grow four hours before we get a harvest,” Shapiro says. “It’s among the most efficient ways to produce protein on Earth.”

Joyn also sees its path forward outside the grocery store. Food eaten away from home accounts for more than half of what US consumers spend on grub, according to the USDA. Padraic Doherty, who joined Joyn from the meat distributor D’Artagnan and holds the title of chief growth officer, says its main areas of focus are K–12 and college cafeterias and other major food service providers, like stadiums. These organizations, he says, often have sustainability goals and also are pressured to find both nutritious and affordable options. The 50/Cut Joyn sells to cafeterias is between 5% and 15% cheaper than beef. 

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But can cafeteria mushroom burgers prompt a larger cultural shift? 

The folks touting the idea of going halfway see it as a bridge. BMC’s Shapiro thinks the movement toward meat-light eating reflects the reality of how these changes happen. Nectar’s Cotto compares blended meat to a hybrid car. “Moving people toward blended products [is] a way to drive demand for some of the fully plant-based ingredients that don’t scale right now to bring the price down,” she says. “So it’s both a short- and a long-term approach.”

Not everyone is so sure market forces will be enough, though. Nil Zacharias, a longtime entrepreneur in food sustainability who offers plant-based options to New York City delis through his company Plantega, isn’t sold on the notion. “Too many people in the space believe that as long as we create meat that is not from an animal but tastes like meat and costs the same, people will eat it,” he says. “I think the plant-based backlash to ultraprocessed foods shows you that’s not necessarily how things are going to go.” He believes blended meat’s main impact will be on institutional dining, in places like schools and health-care facilities.

“People in this space believe that as long as we create meat that is not from an animal but tastes like meat, people will eat it.”

Nil Zacharias, founder and CEO, Plantega

Meat hybrids could, however, taste just familiar enough to open consumers’ minds to alternatives. Some research has found that thinking about mock meats prompts people to reconsider the whole system. In the 2010s, Clemens Driessen, a cultural geographer who teaches at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, worked on a project that asked people in pubs, supermarkets, and other public spaces what they thought of lab-grown meat. “There’s a first response, which is ‘Oh, that sounds horrible,’” Driessen says. Then people tended to reflect that the meat they consume is also heavily industrialized. “A whole train of thought emerges out of proposing something very new,” he says.

If the category succeeds, climate advocates will need to make peace with imperfection. A life-cycle analy­sis Joyn commissioned on the 50/Cut burger confirms that the product has half the greenhouse-gas footprint of a beef patty, which—if you go by company claims—means it has about five times the impact of a burger from Impossible or Beyond. Hedenus, the climate scientist, says that even if blended products don’t reduce impact as much as plant-based ones, he’s all for trying any solution that works. “It is very difficult to change how we eat, so I think most good suggestions should be explored,” he says.

Meanwhile, the products are finding their way to more plates. They’re in cafeterias, high-end grocery stores, and small burger chains. They’re in the catalogues of major distributors like Sysco. The Both Burger has even been at Disneyland. 

The 50/Cut meatball is on the menu this school year in seven states. At Cane Bay High it’ll take the form of a sub. The school is buying 200 cases at a time, with 150 meatballs in a case. Jason Ciaccia, the systems specialist for child nutrition in the school district, says he won’t be using the word “mushroom” to describe it. “If they hear ‘mushroom,’ they’re going to skip over it,” he says. 

He is, however, considering his branding. He’s asked AI to help him come up with something fun. He thinks “Marvelous Meatball Sub” has a nice ring.

Meghan McCarron is a food and culture journalist based in Los Angeles.

The world’s first demonstration of a subsea geothermal power plant has taken place near an active underwater volcano almost a mile below the ocean surface. It generated less than 10 seconds of net-positive electricity but showed the technical feasibility of tapping another form of renewable energy underwater.

The three-week test deployment of the 3-ton prototype power plant took place at the Axial Seamount in the northeast Pacific Ocean in September. Endurance Energy, the Seattle-based startup behind the effort, aims to eventually commercialize subsea geothermal power for Pacific island nations and other customers looking for alternatives to importing expensive fossil fuels.

“The deep ocean gives us unlimited cold seawater for cooling, and its weight keeps the system and the well pressurized, so our plants can be compact,” said Andrew Redd, founder and CEO of Endurance Energy, in an email to Ars.

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Amazon and X-energy have inked another deal to deploy nuclear power to the grid. This one will generate nearly 1 gigawatt of electricity.

In the middle of an especially warm July in 2021, a wildfire ignited in a thick forest of black spruce and peeling paper birch trees on the northern campus of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. 

The blaze, possibly sparked by lightning, burned across the dry carpet of feather mosses and lichen before climbing into the crowns. By the time fire agencies responded, flames had reached 12 feet in length and sent up a 500-foot column of smoke. 

A few days shy of the five-year anniversary of the Yankovich Road Fire, I followed three members of the Alaska Fire Science Consortium into the boreal forest, walking along cross-country ski trails lined by feathery field horsetail.

In 2024, the organization, which hosts presentations to keep wildfire managers abreast of new developments in fire science, helped turn the area into an educational walking trail, with interpretive signs posted along the route. About a half-mile in, the horizon opened up as we reached a sparse stand of naked, blackened tree trunks, stripped of needles and neighbors. 

Hilary Shook, the coordinator of the consortium, stepped off the trail with her thaw probe, a T-shaped pointed metal rod used to detect the upper boundary of the permafrost, the ancient layer of frozen soil that underlies 15% of the land around the Northern Hemisphere and stores roughly twice as much carbon as the atmosphere.

A test of the ground just outside the burn scar hit the concrete-like layer about a foot below the surface. But as Shook applied pressure here, where the fire had burned away the moss and organic-rich topsoil that insulates the permafrost, the probe plunged at least three times deeper into the ground.

“That was an immediate effect of the fire,” said Alison York, the outgoing coordinator of the organization, who was standing nearby. “When we monitored right after, it had already thawed quite a bit.”

This rudimentary tool, offering a measure of depth from a single point in the earth, reveals an escalating problem across the far north. As climate change fuels increasingly frequent and severe fires in the planet’s northern latitudes, they’re accelerating the thawing of more and more permafrost. This allows the organic matter to break down and release powerful greenhouse gases that contribute to a spiraling climate feedback effect, propelling more warming, more fires, and the loss of still more permafrost. 

Most dramatically, intensifying wildfires in Canada released more carbon than the nation’s combined fossil fuel emissions in 2023. As in Alaska, many of these megafires occur in vast remote areas where the policy is to let them burn so long as they don’t threaten human habitats. Yet if intensifying fires and warming are left unchecked, the world’s boreal forests and permafrost could increasingly transition from giant carbon sinks into massive sources of atmospheric carbon. 

Now, international teams of researchers across the US, Canada, and elsewhere are scrambling to understand what’s at stake, financially as well as ecologically. They’re looking at preventive measures, like controlled burns, and studying the potential to rapidly detect and extinguish wildfires before they grow out of control. They’re even exploring what was once unthinkable: sending in human firefighters not to save lives or structures, but to protect one of our planet’s great stores of carbon.

“We need to figure out a better way to live with wildfire,” says Brendan Rogers, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, one of the main organizations driving the loosely collaborative research effort. “I do think that it can make a meaningful difference.”

Woodwell, the University of Victoria’s Polis Institute for Ecological Governance, and the nonprofit Alaska Venture Fund are now partnering on a multimillion-dollar initiative known as North Fire to study and raise public awareness about the potential benefits of these interventions, MIT Technology Review can report. 

The idea is complicated and controversial for a number of reasons. Wildfire is a natural and necessary component of healthy forest ecosystems. Preventing or suppressing fires across huge stretches of largely unmanaged Arctic-boreal forests and tundra would take vast resources. And it’s not yet clear how much of a difference such interventions would make in emissions.

Ultimately, the mere fact that researchers are considering such extreme interventions into natural systems is a grim reflection of the dangers we’ve placed ourselves in by continuing to generate more and more greenhouse-gas emissions each year. Those threats are forcing us to grapple with increasingly difficult questions that involve ever steeper trade-offs: What’s the best way to spend our finite resources and dwindling time to avoid the worst dangers of climate change? And when, if ever, is it okay to put people in possible danger to reduce broader risks to the world?

‘A massive blind spot’

Emissions from forest fires have risen 60% around the world since 2001—but they’ve nearly tripled across the boreal forests in the far north.  

This stretch of the globe is warming as much as four times faster than the rest of the planet, drying out the landscape. In addition, lightning strikes that set off fires have ticked up sharply as warmer air increases the convective energy in the atmosphere, driving the updrafts that trigger thunderstorms.

In that sense, humans have already interceded in these otherwise natural ecosystems by producing the greenhouse-gas emissions that are increasing temperatures, subjecting forests to fire patterns well outside healthy historic norms.

“To me, that outweighs the existential dread of ‘Should we or should we not intervene?” says Kate Hayes, an assistant professor at Western Washington University, who is working with Woodwell to study the emissions benefits of fire interventions. “We’ve already intervened, arguably. And so from here, it’s a little bit of a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.”

The permafrost that encircles the northern latitudes, underlying large stretches of Canada, Greenland, Siberia, Scandinavia, and other Arctic nations, stores around 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, much of which froze in place millennia ago. The steady global rise in temperature, however, has already shrunk the footprint of Arctic permafrost by about 12 % since 1850, with that loss rapidly accelerating during the last 50 years.

By 2100, fire-driven thawing of permafrost could release about the equivalent of nearly 80 billion tons of carbon dioxide, under high warming scenarios. That’s more than half the emissions that fires will release from the direct combustion of vegetation, according to a January study. And it would be on top of more than 400 billion additional tons that could be released through thawing from general warming over that period.

Despite its growing contributions to climate change, only a minority of the models that have informed the UN’s major climate reports to date include the gradual loss of permafrost through warming temperatures, and none incorporate the abrupt collapse and accelerated thaw that can often occur after fires and heat waves. In light of those phenomena and other powerful and undercounted climate feedback effects, we’re almost certainly underestimating how rapidly the planet will warm up, as scientists warned in a paper earlier this year.

These warming-driven emissions are a “massive blind spot,” says Brian Buma, a senior climate scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund and a coauthor of the paper, who is working to develop tools that could help fire agencies decide which fires to prioritize.   

As escalating fire and permafrost emissions become significant additional contributors to climate change, some researchers have begun to explore what it might cost to take on the responsibility of preventing them, in much the way we’ve sought to cut the pollution from power plants, vehicles, and factories.

A 2022 paper in Science Advances, led by researchers at Woodwell and the Union of Concerned Scientists, found that making greater efforts to put out boreal fires could be a cost-effective climate solution—comparable to, or even cheaper than, addressing emissions by building wind turbines, solar farms, or carbon-sucking factories.

The Yukon Flats pilot

Those economic findings were instrumental in getting more researchers to take the idea of tackling fire emissions seriously, says Peter Frumhoff, a coauthor of the 2022 paper and now a senior science policy advisor at Woodwell.

For several years now, Woodwell researchers have been in discussions with forest managers, fire agencies, Indigenous communities, and other groups across Alaska to communicate the potential of this approach. 

It hasn’t been an easy sell, given the constrained resources and tightly defined mission of the federal and state agencies responsible for combating fires in Alaska. The general policy there is to allow fires in remote territories to burn unless they present a direct danger to communities. 

“Those agencies are tasked with protecting life and property now, and to a lesser extent natural resources,” says Randi Jandt, a fire ecologist at the Alaska Fire Science Consortium. “But they’re not tasked to save the world.”

There was one notable early success, however. 

The Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge is an 11-million-acre patchwork of wetlands, forests, and bogs. The foothills sit above a particular type of frozen soil known as yedoma. It’s an especially deep, ice-rich, and carbon-dense form of permafrost, composed of massive wedges of silty, wind-blown sediments frozen during the late Pleistocene, which ended about 11,700 years ago. (It also presented ideal conditions for preserving mummified remains of woolly mammoths.)

“It took kind of the last ice age to accumulate,” Hayes says. “So there’s no rapid way to re-accumulate it. We can’t really put it back.”

Members of the Alaska Fire Science Consortium hike into areas affected by fire to measure the layers of ash left in the soil on the forest floor.

In 2019, the region suffered a series of devastating fires that burned some 750,000 acres. After an Alaska Fire Science Consortium meeting at which Woodwell scientists highlighted the possible climate benefits of more aggressive fire suppression, the refuge’s then manager, Jimmy Fox, began exploring the possibility of putting out blazes when they threatened that permafrost, whether or not they threatened human habitations.

The early reaction was not encouraging. 

“You’re going to have people jumping out of airplanes with parachutes to save frozen woolly mammoths—and maybe dying from that?” he recalls being asked.

But eventually, he persuaded managers at the US Bureau of Land Management’s Alaska Fire Service to carry out a pilot project on a 1.6-million-acre section of the Yukon Flats. They agreed to try to put out fires there if they had the resources available and believed they could contain a blaze within 72 hours.

Woodwell and its partners agreed to study how that change affected permafrost loss and fire emissions, in the hope of making the case for similar programs elsewhere. 

It wasn’t clear the pilot program would survive after Donald Trump was reelected, particularly once the DOGE initiative retroactively cut the public funding for that research collaboration.  

But in February, the federal government formally preserved the program and broadened its rationale to include goals like protecting habitat diversity, water quality, and air quality.

Mapping and modeling

One of Woodwell’s main tasks now is determining when and where fire agencies should step in. Crucially, excessive efforts to stamp out fires in the past have allowed the buildup of dry plant material that fuels more severe fires later.

“We’re not going after all fires all the time,” says Rogers over lunch in a sunny courtyard on the Stanford University campus, where Woodwell and EDF hosted a workshop on potential fire interventions in January. “We can’t do that. We don’t want to do that. We shouldn’t do that. So how do we prioritize our resources?” 

Woodwell and its collaborators are working to answer that question by developing a map of burn risk and carbon vulnerability across interior Alaska. The plan is to eventually expand it across much of Canada as well.

These maps will highlight the locations of rich reserves of yedoma and other forms of permafrost, forecast where fires are most likely to break out in the next 10 to 15 years, and predict how they’re likely to behave and spread. 

“Our ultimate goal is to get a layer that can tell us, if a fire were to occur, what areas are most vulnerable to high carbon emissions, permafrost thaw, permafrost degradation,” Rogers says.

In response to a question about potentially putting firefighters at risk, Rogers stressed in an email that it’s “a very serious issue that needs careful consideration.”

He added that early fire detection technologies, preventative fire stewardship practices, improved fire suppression planning and other measures can all help to reduce dangers to firefighters as well as communities.

‘Mild fire’

Once areas of particular risk are identified, the first option is to take measures to prevent fires there, or at least to reduce the odds that they’ll become major ones. That generally entails using heavy equipment or intentional, controlled fires to clear away vegetation that could fuel new fires, or to create fire breaks that might check their spread.

Indigenous tribes carried out what’s known as cultural burning for thousands of years to reduce fire dangers, clear land for crops, and more. The practice was widely outlawed across North America beginning in the 1800s, though those rules have loosened in recent years.

Both cultural and prescribed fires, however, remain controversial because they can burn out of control. And even if they remain contained, the fires can still produce smoke that wafts into towns. 

But rushing around to put out blazes after they’ve started will never get Alaska ahead of its surging wildfire problem, says Edward Alexander, cochair of the Gwich’in Council International, which represents the Indigenous Gwich’in peoples of the Northwest Territories, the Yukon, and Alaska. 

“There’s not enough money in the world for this to be a chainsaw-and-ax problem,” he says. “This country is too big up here.” 

Alexander, who also serves as senior Arctic lead at Woodwell, argues that Alaska should encourage much greater use of cultural burning to reduce the risk of conflagrations and the emissions that come with them.

“We need mild fire, not wildfire,” he says.

New pilot projects

The North Fire initiative will include several additional pilot research projects, including an effort to study the potential for cultural burning to reduce climate and fire dangers near Fort Yukon, Alaska. 

The plan is for a wildland firefighting crew operated by the Council of Athabascan Tribal Governments, a consortium in the Yukon Flats region, to carry out cultural burns there next spring, Rogers says. 

Researchers at Woodwell and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, will then collect and analyze data flammability, carbon levels, and permafrost over several years, in the hopes of learning more about what such interventions do. 

Similarly, the Polis researchers at the University of Victoria plan to study how adding fuel breaks, by logging or switching to less flammable trees, alters fire risks in British Columbia. 

The broad aim of the North Fire initiative is to accelerate research and expand community involvement “in a way that helps us scale this as a meaningful global natural climate solution on a rapid timeline,” says Erin Harrington, a partner at the Alaska Venture Fund, a philanthropy focused on environmental, economic development, and Indigenous issues. 

Detecting fires from space

Other observers, including Jandt, believe the bigger opportunity to reduce fire emissions and preserve permafrost may lie in the “initial attack.” That means marshalling planes, tankers, and firefighters to stamp fires out at the first sign of them, before they’ve had the chance to turn into conflagrations.

Once fires reach a certain size, it takes much more time to contain them—and the job becomes far more dangerous.

Accelerating response times is one of the chief promises of the FireSat satellite constellation, which is expected to begin delivering fire data at least twice daily from around the world to Woodwell, a handful of fire agencies, and other early adopters by the end of this year. The system will eventually include more than 50 satellites circling the globe, equipped with high-resolution cameras and thermal sensors that can detect smaller, lower-temperature fires than existing satellite systems, down to as little as five by five meters (16 by 16 feet).

Currently, it can take days to spot fires. But once the full constellation is in place, likely in the early 2030s, FireSat should be capable of detecting and providing updated images of fires anywhere in the world every 20 minutes or less. 

The first prototype satellite launched in 2025, and three operational ones went into orbit in July. The Earth Fire Alliance, the nonprofit that manages the constellation, expects to launch four more by the end of next year. 

A number of similar systems are also coming online. German-based OroraTech has launched 18 of its fire-detecting satellites in the last year and a half. Similarly, Canadian agencies are planning to launch their own satellite constellation, dubbed WildFireSat, beginning in 2029. 

But as these systems produce more and more detections across the globe, it’ll become increasingly essential to build tools that can filter through that information. 

EDF is supporting and collaborating on several projects that could potentially help with that, and it ultimately intends to develop an AI-powered triage tool that could help fire agencies prioritize responses as FireSat and other fire-spotting tools come online.

“All of this is kind of like building the data ecosystem around FireSat, so that when they start popping out “fire start here, there, fire start here, fire start there,” we won’t be like, ‘Oh shit, there’s fires everywhere,’” Buma says. “We’ll have a framework. It won’t be perfect, obviously. We’ll have to improve it, but we’ll have the machinery to incorporate those data.”

Rapid response

But faster detections and decisions do only so much. Regions would still need to get firefighting personnel and resources to those fires fast enough to prevent them from burning out of control.

“Say we have the full FireSat constellation up and running, and it spots a fire that just broke out in one of these sort of high-priority, highly vulnerable areas,” I said to Rogers and Frumhoff during our conversation in that Stanford courtyard. “How might we deploy firefighting resources to a remote area fast enough for it to matter in that scenario?”

“I think the answer, unfortunately, is that it depends,” Rogers responded. 

Ideally, he said, we would have fire management policies in place that allow for putting out fires with a high risk of producing climate-warming emissions. In addition, regions could install more firefighting personnel and resources across more operational centers, strategically placed in locations that allow them to get to those blazes fast.

Frumhoff stresses that Woodwell isn’t promoting any particular companies but says there are additional technologies “in the mix of conversations” that might help to prevent or rapidly put out fires as well.

Those possible approaches include seeding clouds to suppress lightning strikes and pre-positioning autonomous firefighting helicopters to respond rapidly to high-emissions-risk fires.

Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin company, is developing and testing autonomous versions of the Black Hawk helicopter, equipped with thermal sensors and water tanks. It is collaborating with Rain Industries, a startup based in Alameda, California, that has developed software to track shifting conditions and steer unpiloted aircraft through the process of putting out wildfires. 

The company says it has talked to fire agencies and the “broader Alaska fire community” about the potential use of its technology but declined to name any specific entities it has interacted with.

“The twin climate tipping points of the yedoma permafrost and the boreal forest, and the fact that it’s completely underresourced at the moment, from my perspective does make it an ideal use case for autonomous aircraft,” says Max Brodie, chief executive officer of Rain.  

Defending carbon

Advancing technologies can only do so much if governments’ fire prevention and suppression policies don’t prioritize preserving carbon. 

And that will remain a hard sell given the costs of managing extensive areas of land that nations have historically left largely alone.

The 2022 Science Advances paper estimated that additional fire suppression efforts would cost about $12.63 per metric ton of prevented carbon dioxide emissions—a number that drops when the carbon in permafrost is taken into account, according to upcoming research.

But that would still add up to about $7 billion in additional spending this decade to keep Alaska’s fire emissions at their historical levels, and another $7 billion to $50 billion over the subsequent 30 years as fire severity continues to rise.

Frumoff stresses that those figures just reflect what the researchers found it would cost to preserve the status quo, which is not necessarily what the policy goal would be. 

But widening the scope of where we put out fires will inevitably create a big added cost for fire agencies that are already notoriously underfunded in the US. While Alaska produces about half the nation’s wildfire emissions, it receives around 4% of federal firefighting funds. 

The US Wildland Fire Service provided a prepared statement in response to an MIT Technology Review inquiry asking whether preserving carbon could or should become a priority in certain fire management decisions. The roundabout reply suggests that this isn’t the agency’s prime concern: “Firefighter and public safety are the top priorities for the U.S. Wildland Fire Service.”

Frumhoff says it’s possible that landowners or government agencies could eventually use carbon markets to defray some of the additional costs. Woodwell has also had multiple conversations with Alaska’s federal legislators about the value of preventing catastrophic wildfires and the need to increase the “total pot” of public funding, he says.

Kicking the fire can

A few days after walking through the fire scar in Fairbanks, I drove slowly along a crumpled stretch of Stampede Road, just north of Denali National Park, where the underlying permafrost had melted without the aid of fire.

I arrived at a cramped wooden cabin to meet with Michelle Mack, a regents professor of ecosystem ecology at Northern Arizona University. 

Mack studies how fire is altering ecosystems in the high northern latitudes as the region grows warmer and drier, and she sometimes collaborates with Rogers and other scientists working on the push to protect permafrost in other areas of research. But she’s unsure how much these interventions will accomplish as climate change continues.

“I’m an empiricist, and at this point, it’s not clear to me that the empirical evidence suggests that we can actually have any impact on these fires,” she says. 

She expects there will be clear cases where we could and should act fast to put out fires and “keep carbon in the ground.” She points to the example of the 2007 Anaktuvuk River Fire, a massive tundra fire on Alaska’s North Slope that might have been extinguished with relative ease in its early days but was instead allowed to burn until the winter snows put it out nearly three months later. Over that time, it ripped across 400 square miles and, Mack’s research showed, released more than 2 million tons of carbon into the air.

“I feel like that’s the low-hanging fruit, something that doesn’t cost much—and that’s where the technology for detection I think is really important,” she says.

But she adds that fires in boreal forests can rapidly spread in unpredictable ways, frustrating efforts to quickly extinguish them even when they are spotted right away.

In addition, rapidly putting out a fire one season doesn’t necessarily reduce the fire risk for a given forest, so suppression may simply kick the “fire can” down the road—delaying but not preventing an inevitable loss of carbon, Mack says.

Her thinking more recently shifted “a little” after she came across an earlier modeling paper that showed some encouraging findings on the potential of early suppression to reduce the footprint of boreal fires. But she says that prevention through forest thinning, prescribed burns, and the introduction of less flammable deciduous trees to create “living fire breaks” is probably a more promising path than technology-augmented suppression.

“If we could solve this with a techno fix, that’d be great,” she says. “But what if we solved it with nature?”

‘A real difference’

Rogers, in an emailed response to Mack’s concern, said that the interventions they’re exploring, which do include both prevention and suppression, “can make a real difference.”

“I certainly agree that some fires are much easier to suppress via initial attack than others,” he wrote. “That said, until I see data showing me otherwise, I believe there is strong potential to bend the curve with management.”

EDF’s Buma acknowledges there are a number of unknowns, including how quickly agencies could act on faster detections from satellites—and how big the political obstacles will be to making necessary changes to fire management policies.

“We can’t overpromise what’s possible. We don’t know what’s possible,” he says. “It’s all new. But we’re in a new climate and have to consider trying new things.”

Read more about the ongoing scientific efforts to discern the connections between fires and permafrost in our next story here.

In this age of rising electricity demand, people are trying to squeeze every last bit of power out of every power plant possible.

Over the past few weeks, there’s been big news about nuclear power plants trying to do just that. Constellation, the largest nuclear operator in the US, announced plans to add nearly a gigawatt of new capacity across 11 existing nuclear reactors at six plants. And on October 5, the Department of Energy awarded a $4.2 billion loan to Vistra for previously announced upgrades at three plants.

Pushing existing reactors to produce more could help provide more clean power for data centers, quickly. But just how much additional power can we count on?  

Upgrading equipment at existing nuclear power plants can allow them to reach a higher capacity; the process is called a power uprate. Operators have been doing this since the 1970s in the US, but it’s been less common in recent years as demand for electricity plateaued and cheap natural gas put financial pressure on nuclear power plants. Some plants closed, and putting in more money to produce more electricity didn’t make much sense at others. Between 2001 and 2010, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved over 80 uprates. Between 2011 and 2020, the number was 33.

But with the rise of AI and the related boom in electricity demand, there’s been a shift. We’re seeing shuttered plants like Palisades and Three Mile Island race to reopen. And existing plants are looking to uprate again.

Some uprates are minor, involving changes to instrument setpoints or calculations at the plant. But more major overhauls, which can boost reactor power by as much as 20%, require replacing plant equipment.

Generally, uprates involve using fuel that’s more highly enriched, or a higher volume of fresh fuel, in the nuclear reactor. That helps produce more steam, which is used to turn a turbine and generate electricity. To handle that additional energy, the main turbines and equipment such as pumps, motors, generators, and transformers are upgraded.

The most recent major uprate approved in the US was for three reactors at the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant in Alabama. A $475 million project saw that plant expand its power capacity by 14% between 2018 and 2019.

Things could pick up soon, though. Constellation announced plans this week to spend more than $4.3 billion on uprates to 11 reactors. The additional electricity will be enough to power roughly 700,000 US homes.

Behind it all? Big Tech money. Google agreed to buy electricity from these plants, and the 20-year agreement was a major factor in making the uprates happen. As Joe Dominguez, Constellation’s CEO, told the New York Times: “These are capital intensive, labor intensive projects that require a different price point than the market trades at, frankly.”

Also in the last few weeks, the US Department of Energy shared that it will commit over $4 billion to help finance upgrades and modernization for Vistra nuclear power plants across Pennsylvania and Ohio. Those projects will add 433 megawatts of power capacity, and Meta has already signed on to buy electricity from the plants in a long-term deal.

A note about cost: On a per-kilowatt basis, that Constellation project is less expensive than building a new reactor, but it’s still more expensive than building a new utility-scale solar farm with energy storage or a combined-cycle natural-gas plant.

Even at this high cost, uprates are in high demand. Today, the US nuclear fleet has roughly 98 gigawatts of total power capacity. Depending on who you ask, there’s somewhere between three and eight additional gigawatts on the table from uprates. A pretty significant chunk of the potential uprates in the US are already accounted for—the NRC already expects applications to add 2.4 gigawatts of power to reactors through 2032.

It’s crucial to put these plans (and the total potential for uprates in the US) in perspective, though. PJM, the grid operator that covers much of the East Coast, expects about 30 gigawatts of additional peak demand because of AI by 2030. All the possible nationwide nuclear uprates would cover just a fraction of that.

Making the most of existing nuclear reactors is a relatively easy win at a time when we need all the zero-emissions power we can get. But there’s still a lot of demand, and if we want more nuclear power to meet it, eventually that will require actually building new reactors.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

Personal information such as names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and driver’s license numbers was compromised.

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Replicating the power of the sun to generate clean energy is hard enough, but Helion Energy just achieved another rare feat: making it onto the iconic “Jeopardy!” clue board.

During Tuesday evening’s episode, the $800 clue was featured in a category titled “Y Combinator” and read: “Helion says it’ll build the 1st power plant using this process, fission’s opposite with no uncontrolled chain reactions.”

Three-day champion Greg Monson, a videographer from Portland, Ore., buzzed in first with the correct response: “What is fusion?”

The shoutout didn’t go unnoticed in Everett, Wash., where Helion is based. CEO David Kirtley shared a video of the moment on LinkedIn, writing that it was “surreal to see Helion featured on Jeopardy! last night. And in great company with Y Combinator!”

Kirtley added, “Clean, safe, reliable power is getting a little more mainstream.”

Helion is a Y Combinator alum, having gone through the famed Silicon Valley accelerator’s Summer 2014 batch. Other correct responses in the category included Airbnb, The Athletic, Coinbase, and Twitch.

The game-show spotlight comes as Helion races to master fusion, which produces energy by smashing together light atoms. No one has been able to create a commercially viable amount of energy from fusion here on Earth, though notable progress is being made by research institutions and private companies.

Helion has generated plenty of momentum of its own in the process. In June, the startup announced $465 million in new funding, bringing its total capital raised to more than $1.5 billion and its valuation to 10 times that figure.

The company also recently expanded into a new 15,000-square-foot office in downtown Seattle and pushed its total headcount past 800 employees. Helion currently holds the No. 2 spot on the GeekWire 200 ranking of top Pacific Northwest startups.

— Brinc Drones, the Seattle-based maker of 911 response drones, has named Joe Levy chief revenue officer. Levy joins from Peregrine, a public safety data platform, and early in his career was a drill sergeant and combat engineer for the U.S. Army Reserve.

Levy praised the Brinc team, saying, “They’re passionate about what they do with a vision that will change the public safety landscape. I’m grateful to join them and help scale what they’ve built.”

Brinc announced a $125 million funding round in July, bringing its total raised to more than $280 million. The startup is hiring for numerous roles and is No. 6 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Seattle-based Fred Hutch Cancer Center has appointed Jessie Minton vice president and chief digital and information officer, a new position that brings the roles together.

Former Chief Data Officer Jeff Leek stepped down and is now a professor in the Fred Hutch Public Health Sciences Division and CEO of Synthesize Bio, a startup he co-founded in 2023. Last month, Fred Hutch announced Shawn Stapleton as VP and chief AI and innovation officer, another new role.

Minton joins from Washington University in St. Louis where she has been vice chancellor for technology and chief information officer since 2022. She was previously VP and CIO at the University of Oregon.

Fred Hutch praised Minton’s track record “of modernizing complex technology organizations, strengthening cybersecurity, governing large-scale Epic environments and aligning technology strategy with clinical, research and academic priorities.” The new role is effective Dec. 7.

— Jason (JJ) James has been named chief information officer of Acumatica, the Bellevue, Wash.-based enterprise software giant that was acquired last year by Vista Equity Partners. James has more than 25 years in technology leadership and was previously CIO at companies including Aptos Retail, Net Health and Optima Healthcare Solutions.

“My focus is putting AI to work across Acumatica while keeping security at the core, so we can move fast without compromising the trust our expanding community of customers, partners and developers places in us,” James said in a statement.

— Seattle tech leader Andrew Bennett has joined San Francisco-based Motive as chief marketing officer. Bennett was with Smartsheet for a decade, leaving as CMO in 2024. He is also a limited partner with the investment firm Stage 2 Capital.

Motive provides software, hardware and AI-powered tools to help businesses manage physical fleets of vehicles and heavy equipment.

— Steven Chen has left LinkedIn, where he served as director and head of corporate legal and sustainability, to become a senior director at Rubrik.

— Seattle-based LevelTen Energy, a startup facilitating the deployment of clean energy projects, has appointed John Barrow as director of a new initiative enabling the purchase and sale of data center projects under development.

Barrow joins from CyrusOne, a global data center developer and operator, and was with CPS Energy for more than 15 years.

“In my career, I’ve had a front-row seat to the data center boom,” Barrow said. Participants are struggling to quickly secure locations and energy, he said, adding that LevelTen “can solve those problems for industry participants at scale.”

— Certivo, a Seattle startup building technology to automate supply chain compliance, has named Jeffrey Bornstein to its board. Bornstein was with GE for nearly three decades and served in roles including vice chairman and chief financial officer.

“He has run the numbers for some of the most complex industrial supply chains in the world while regulators checked every one of them,” said Certivo CEO Kunal Chopra. Certivo is No. 194 on the GeekWire 200.

— Convera, a Seattle-based fintech company helping businesses transfer money across borders, has added to its leadership team. All four will work out of Convera’s other offices.

• Mike Cahill has been appointed EVP and chief operating officer after joining in June as interim chief product and technology officer. Past employers include Early Warning Services, the company behind Zelle, as well as PayPal, Boku and American Express.
• Jon Southall has been named SVP and chief technology officer. He joins from PayPal and has also worked for Boku and Braintree.
• Tui Allen has joined as SVP and chief product officer. She previously worked for employers including Ticketmaster, Shopify and Blackbaud.
• Chris Steinig has been named CIO after leading Convera’s technology operations for four years.

— Portable Consultants a Redmond, Wash., enterprise telecommunications and data connectivity provider, has named two leaders.

• Carrie Ferrero has joined as VP of product and marketing development. She previously served as VP of sales engineering at Connectbase.
• Troy Brockway has been named director of client development, joining from SpikeUp Media.

— Reperio Health, a Portland, Ore., startup bringing preventive health check-ups into the home, has named Brad Nations to its board of directors. Nations is CEO and founder of JB Advisory.

— iQmetrix, a Vancouver, B.C.-based company building point-of-sale and retail management software for cell phone and wireless stores, has appointed Beniamin Longodor as VP of global growth. Longodor, who is based in Austria, was previously with NTS Retail.