This eye-catching astronaut photo shows a towering, highly active Russian volcano poking its head above a thick bank of swirling clouds over the Kuril Islands.

The lofty peak is located on Atlasov Island, the northernmost of the Kuril Islands — a chain of roughly 50 largely uninhabited volcanic landmasses stretching along a fault line that runs between Russia and Japan in the Sea of Okhotsk. Altasov lies 40 miles (65 kilometers) off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, which is also renowned for its volcanic activity.

The island consists mainly of a single, massive volcano, called Alaid, which is known for its near-perfect cone shape. Alaid reaches up to 7,497 feet (2,285 meters) above sea level, making it the tallest peak in the Kuril Islands.

Alaid has erupted at least nine times in the past 50 years, including a major outburst in April 1981 that ejected a 1,250-mile-long (2,000 km) plume of thick smoke and ash into the atmosphere, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program.

Its most recent eruption occurred between September and November 2022, when a river of lava flowed down its flank (see below). During this outburst, the volcano also spit out smoke and ash that was spotted from space alongside another eruption plume coming from the nearby island Paramushir.

In the astronaut's photo, roughly half of Atlasov Island rises above a deep, low-lying bank of swirling clouds. The summit of Alaid, crowned by a roughly mile-wide (1.6 km) caldera, is also obscured by clouds. (The volcano was not erupting when the photo was taken.)

Farther down the volcano's flanks are a series of snow-filled gullies carved out by lava flows from previous eruptions. Eagle-eyed viewers may also be able to spot some parasitic cones — small openings where lava burst through in the past — around the edge of the cloud layer, according to NASA's Earth Observatory.

The area surrounding a cluster of parasitic cones on the volcano's northwest flank (top right in the photo) is devoid of vegetation ‪—‬ a result of another major eruption in 1972, which scoured the surrounding landscape with hot ash. A 2009 study revealed fresh signs of recovery in the affected area, but noted that it could take hundreds of years for vegetation to return to pre-eruption levels.

The clouds are not the only thing the island rises above. Alaid is essentially the summit of a much larger underwater volcano that lies beneath the Sea of Okhotsk. The rest of the island has grown around the exposed cone as lava flows have reached sea level and solidified. Millions of years ago, this larger volcano was likely connected to the Kamchatka Peninsula via a land bridge that has since been submerged.

Astronauts and satellites have snapped several other stunning shots of intriguing landmasses nearby, including a quartet of end-to-end volcanoes on Simushir Island and a set of volcanic "nesting dolls" on Onekotan Island.

And in 2022, the Landsat 8 satellite also spotted the iconic summit of Mount Vesuvius peeking through a gap in the clouds over Italy, just like Alaid.

See more Earth from space

World's highest frozen lake shatters

A 2024 astronaut photo shows the icy surface of Pangong Lake breaking apart in the lofty Tibetan Plateau. The point where the ice meets the water almost perfectly matches a disputed border between China and India.

Explosive 'Mountain of God' looms

A 2020 astronaut photo shows the unique structure of Ol Doinyo Lengai, an active stratovolcano in Tanzania that was recently adorned with a bright white "ash cone." The explosive peak produces a rare type of lava that is unusually cool but travels remarkably quickly.

Mini lake meets ancient ice mass

A 2010 satellite photo shows the point where a small lake bisects the snowy rim of an ancient glacier on Canada's Baffin Island. The rippling, snow-rimmed structure is the last remaining fragment of a colossal ice sheet that once covered large parts of North America.

'> Highly active Russian volcano plays peek-a-boo with an astronaut

The 2026 Global Carbon Budget report was published in the journal Earth System Science Data Nov. 10 and is due to be presented at the U.N. Climate Change Conference's COP31 meeting in Antalya, Turkey, this week.

It is the first time annual carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from fossil fuels have fallen since the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. But the overall emissions picture suggests the world is still likely to miss key climate goals.

"It is an encouraging sign that the growth of emissions is slowing and decarbonisation efforts are starting to make a difference," said Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London who wasn't involved in the research. "However, at 0.4%, the projected decline is very small," Rogelj told Live Science in an email.

The report projects 38.2 billion metric tons (42.1 billion U.S. tons) of emissions of the climate-warming greenhouse gas CO₂ from fossil fuel sources this year. Greenhouse gases trap heat by absorbing the sun's radiation, and as their concentrations in the atmosphere increase, so do global average temperatures, leading to altered weather patterns and higher sea levels, as well as other major impacts.

Part of the 0.4% reduction in CO₂ emissions is attributable to 40 countries that have cut emissions over the past decade while growing their economies. These include the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Japan and about 30 countries in the European Union, the researchers reported.

When it comes to some of the biggest emitters, annual CO₂ emissions are projected to decrease by 0.9% in China, 1.3% in the U.S., 1.5% in the European Union and 1% in Japan, but India's annual CO₂ emissions are projected to grow by 4.4%.

Fossil-fuel-linked CO₂ emissions from the rest of the world are projected to decrease by 0.7%, driven mainly by a 1.9% drop in oil emissions. The report authors suggested that this is a short-term response to the global supply constraints and increased prices triggered by the Iran conflict.

"The war with Iran has resulted in restricted fuel availability and high prices, with a corresponding reduction in demand," Rogelj said.

While fossil fuel emissions and demand for oil are declining globally, overall demand for energy is actually increasing.

"Based only on the demand for energy, which has grown, we would have expected an increase in fossil CO₂ emissions by about 0.8 gigatonnes," said study co-author Judith Hauck, a biogeoscientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany.

About two-thirds of that increase in demand is being met by solar and wind power and electric vehicles, showing that clean technologies are making a real difference in reducing global emissions, Hauck said. However, the hike in energy prices that resulted from the Iran conflict also decreased demand by 0.4%, she said.

"So only together with the energy crisis did we bring the change in emissions down to negative," Hauck told Live Science, adding that she expects CO₂ emissions to rebound if the conflict ends, as they did after the temporary emissions drop caused by the lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nearing the peak?

The exceptional circumstances that energy markets experienced this year make it clear that the small projected emissions decline is no reason to declare that emissions are now reducing, but there are hopeful signs, Rogelj said.

"Despite my muted enthusiasm about whether these lower emissions for 2026 represent the start of a long-term decline, the analysis shows encouraging signs of deeper long-term structural changes," he said. "But this shift must accelerate to ensure it is not outpaced by energy demand growth."

The report found that clean energy growth isn't yet fast enough to drive a steady decline in global CO₂ emissions attributable to fossil fuels. The study authors expect that to happen in the next few years, Hauck said, as long as there is a continued push to deploy solar and wind power, batteries and electric vehicles.

CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels are just part of the picture, though. Because of increases in human-caused peat fires, deforestation and forest fires linked to dry El Niño conditions, total global CO₂ emissions from all sources this year are projected to increase slightly from 42.8 billion metric tons (47.2 billion U.S. tons) last year to reach a record 43.3 billion metric tons (47.7 billion U.S. tons) this year, according to the report.

This means that the total budget of CO₂ that can be emitted before global warming reaches 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels is now just 150 billion metric tons (165 billion U.S. tons) ‪—‬ equivalent to less than four years of emissions at the current rate.

Hauck, like many climate scientists, thinks we have already missed our chance to hit the 1.5 C target and could only get back to that level through extensive removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere.

"I'm still hopeful for something between 1.5 and 2 C [3.6 F]," Hauck said. "But for 1.5 degrees, we would need to see such a drastic strong drop in emissions. Based on what we've seen in the past years, even with this strong increase in avoided emissions, I don't think we can make that."

To halt global warming from increasing ever further, the world needs to be more ambitious in its planned emissions cuts, said Rogeli. We need to bring annual emissions down to zero to protect future generations from a double whammy of “having to try to transform economies so that they produce less climate pollution, while dealing with the impacts and damages of an increasingly adverse climate system," he said.

'> Iran war helps fuel global drop in fossil fuel emissions — but there’s a catch

"We cannot really say how long this individual survived," study co-author Lars Fehren-Schmitz, an anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Live Science in an email. But "the burial of this infant suggests that the Nasca treated this individual in death like most other infants."

The skeleton of this female infant was discovered alongside a second one inside a ceramic urn at the archaeological site of Jauranga in Peru's Palpa Valley, where numerous geoglyphs known as the Nazca Lines have been found. Archaeologists uncovered several dozen other burials dated to the Middle Nazca (also spelled Nasca) period (A.D. 325 to 440) at the site, but one of the co-buried infants had an extremely rare condition, researchers wrote in a study published Monday (Nov. 9) in the journal PNAS.

The infant had a very small skull and a single eye socket in the middle of her face, along with other developmental issues of the cranial bones. These traits match modern clinical descriptions of cyclopia, a lethal condition that occurs when the front part of a fetus's brain fails to divide into left and right hemispheres.

This condition can also cause alterations in the nasal structures, resulting in a missing nose or a tube-like nose above the single eye.

"The cause of the malformation was present at fertilization, but manifestation occurs around the fourth to fifth week in utero [in the womb], when the frontal lobe of the brain has to divide," study first author Elsa Tomasto-Cagigao, an archaeologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, told Live Science in an email.

Cyclopia is a rare condition, occurring in about 1 out of every 100,000 births. To learn more about the infant's short life, the researchers sequenced her genome. (DNA suggested the infant carried two X chromosomes, typical of a female.)

The team detected an extra copy of chromosome 13, meaning the infant had a genetic condition called trisomy 13, or Patau syndrome. It's known to be a major chromosomal cause of cyclopia; that said, only a small percentage of trisomy 13 cases involve cyclopia.

While trisomy 13 is associated with advanced maternal age, it is not clear whether that was the case for this infant, Fehren-Schmitz said.

"This condition has been documented in historic and modern anatomical collections, but to my knowledge this is the first archaeological example of this developmental abnormality," Siân Halcrow, a bioarchaeologist at Durham University in the U.K. who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email.

The researchers' estimate of the infant's age at death suggests she may have survived for several weeks or months after birth, Halcrow pointed out. "This raises important questions about how infants with profound congenital differences were cared for and treated in past societies," she said.

The infant was buried in a ceramic urn, the researchers noted in the study, which was a common burial method in the Nazca period, along with a second female infant who had no skeletal abnormalities. "The baby with cyclopia was at the bottom of the jar, while the other baby was on top. Nevertheless, it appears that they were interred in a single event," Tomasto-Cagigao said. The genetic analysis showed that the two infants did not have the same mother.

A burial of two infants in one urn is unusual for this culture, the researchers said, but there is not enough archaeological evidence to conclude that the infant with cyclopia was given a different type of burial.

"The fact that the individual was buried with a 'healthy' individual in a regular cemetery, without any special grave goods, suggests that, to some extent, the individual was not treated differently in death, even though it had such a rare condition," Fehren-Schmitz said. "It was neither 'excluded' because of it nor treated in a 'special' way."

In ancient Andean societies, some people with disabilities took on special societal roles, such as ones associated with religious practices. "If that reflects Nasca society as a whole, we can't say based on one case," Fehren-Schmitz said, "but it does reflect the community this infant was part of, even if only briefly."

'> Nazca infant had rare, fatal birth defect that left her with one central eye 1,600 years ago El Niño, a periodic weather phenomenon that can lead to intense rains and flooding in Peru and droughts in other parts of South and Central America.

"We have one example at the site of Sicán where around [A.D.] 1050/1100, around 200 individuals were killed and ritualistically buried during an intense El Niño event," study co-author Haagen Klaus, an anthropology professor at George Mason University in Virginia, told Live Science in an email.

Other human sacrifice findings include more than 200 children found near the modern-day town of Huanchaco who were sacrificed sometime between 600 and 800 years ago, possibly during an El Niño.

However, despite the occurrence of human sacrifice, levels of violence unrelated to sacrifice were actually quite low in the Lambayeque Valley. In the study, scientists analyzed the skeletal remains of 1,519 people from the Lambayeque Valley who lived between roughly 1500 B.C. and A.D. 1800, and whose remains were preserved enough to detect signs of violent trauma, including interpersonal violence.

Of these skeletons, "only 25 (1.6%) exhibited traumatic lesions consistent with interpersonal conflict, and 77 exhibited post-cranial traumatic lesions consistent with accidental trauma (5.1%)," Klaus and co-author Thomas Snyder, a bioarchaeologist at New York University, wrote in the paper, which was published Nov. 8 in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

The team didn't find any link between a person's sex and violence, they noted. The findings mean that despite the presence of human sacrifice, the amount of violence unrelated to sacrifice was low. This leaves a question: Why?

"Ritual violence may have alleviated non-ritual violence by creating spaces where social tensions could get worked out in a few different ways," Klaus said.

It's important to remember that other areas of Peru also practiced human sacrifice but didn't have the same low levels of interpersonal violence. Klaus noted that areas in the Peruvian highlands sometimes had higher rates of interpersonal violence. In their paper, Klaus and Snyder noted that societies that originated in the highlands, such as the Tiwanaku, Wari and Inca had to grapple with poorer soils and cold temperatures, and these challenges may have been a factor in increasing the levels of interpersonal violence.

The "evidence of sub-lethal and lethal violence forceful enough to break bone is significantly higher in some areas of Peru's highlands," Klaus said. He and Snyder noted in their paper that the inhabitants of the Lambayeque Valley may have had better access to marine and water resources, such as seafood and rivers that could be used for agricultural irrigation, than those who lived in highland areas. Access to these resources may have helped alleviate interpersonal violence in the valley by providing more food resources, they wrote.

Scholars react

Aside from practicing human sacrifice, people in the valley may have engaged in other practices that helped lower levels of interpersonal violence, researchers who were not involved in the new study told Live Science.

Environmental conditions may have helped reduce conflict or there could be "really unusual cultural practices in this region of avoiding or mediating conflict — both between and within groups," Elizabeth Arkush, an anthropology professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said in an email.

Constanza Ceruti, an anthropologist and explorer with the National Geographic Society, said in an email that she's glad that researchers are studying human sacrifices "after decades of being ignored as a taboo topic in academic discussion." She praised the study’s large sample size and noted that human sacrifice is a "phenomenon primarily associated [with] the manipulation and concentration of power by elites."

Jordi Rivera Prince, an anthropology professor at Tulane University, said that the findings dovetail with her excavations in the region, where she has "found little evidence of violent trauma during the Salinar (400-200 BCE), a period of great social change in the Andes."

Weston McCool, an archaeology professor at Cal Poly, said in an email that the newly published paper "is an interesting study that provides additional evidence for a sharp break in patterns of violence between the Andean coast and highlands." He noted that it "supports the hypothesis that coastal populations were buffered from terrestrial environmental downturns in ways that highland populations were not. The nature of that resilience, however, remains an important question for future research."

'> Did human sacrifice help lower violence? New research in Peru leaves intriguing question