El Niño strengthens its grip on our climate.

El Niño is the warm phase of a multiyear natural climate cycle that is often marked by rising global temperatures and disruptive weather. This time, scientists monitoring the event are warning that climate change has helped supercharge it to likely the strongest ever recorded.

As temperature records are breached and the risk of a humanitarian crisis looms, already stressed natural systems are coming under unprecedented strain. The Amazon is one such system. Having suffered severe degradation in recent decades, some fear that a historic El Niño could launch a devastating drought that may help force the Amazon beyond a tipping point — transforming the verdant rainforest and vital store of the planet's carbon into savannah.

To get to grips with this looming catastrophe, Live Science spoke to Bernardo Flores, a Brazilian ecologist who studies the Amazon and has been sounding the alarm about its fate.

Patrick Pester: How could a strengthening El Niño impact the Amazon?

Bernardo Flores: We have a very high confidence that it is already a strong El Niño and that it will be very strong, possibly the strongest one on record. This is very concerning because during past decades we saw a few very strong El Niños — not as strong as this one, probably — and the consequences were very dramatic, and they became increasingly dramatic.

The Amazon becomes drier during El Niño, and then you have conditions for forest fires. You can have different types of fires, but forest fires are those that penetrate and spread through the moist forest, which is rarely flammable. And during these years, you can have thousands of kilometers of burnt forest that were not disturbed before.

We expect that these burnt areas will increase, possibly exponentially. There will be an acceleration, and that's a sign of a tipping point.

PP: Could a historic El Niño push the Amazon beyond a tipping point this year or next year?

BR: One of the things that makes the Amazon resilient is the existence of Indigenous people and local communities protecting the forest and managing the forest. But there is an increasing territorial expansion of organized crime syndicates involved in illegal activities that destroy the ecosystem. They're spreading ignition sources through these remote forests and competing for these territories with the local and Indigenous peoples. They bring violence, and then through violence, people die, people lose livelihoods, and become increasingly less capable of living in that area.

If you add to that these droughts, fires and water and food insecurity caused by these El Niños, then you increase the risk that these regions will be abandoned and become easier for organized crime groups to occupy through methods that involve destruction and fires. So, the tipping point of the Amazon has these mechanisms. You have climate change and El Niño that are disturbances in the climate, but you also have shifts from local and Indigenous management and governance to low governance and destructive organized crime activities, and the spread of wildfires that become increasingly large and recurrent.

Through a model, we pinpointed that with 1.5 degrees [Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit] of global warming, which is what we have now basically, and 22% of deforestation accumulated across the Amazon, there could be a tipping point. Then you have lost so much forest that you lose so much rain that the system becomes trapped in the self-degrading drought-fire loop. But this is not considering all the forest degradation that has occurred over the past decades, which is accumulating. At least 40% of the Amazon has been estimated to be degraded.

I have been saying that we could cross a tipping point. So, the message is we have to be very careful and take precautions to avoid wildfires. This is a very concerning and critical moment to focus on wildfires.

PP: In your recent paper, you and your colleagues wrote that the Amazon could undergo a "near systemwide transition" with global warming of 1.5 C to 1.9 C and deforestation of 22% to 28%. Most people now think the Paris Agreement's goal of keeping warming below 1.5 C is dead, so if the degradation is now at 40%, do you think this transition can be avoided, realistically?

BR: Yes. The tipping point is not a collapse. It is just a point beyond which the feedbacks change. The feedbacks that were previously keeping the Amazon resilient, they weaken, and other feedbacks that make the system self degrade gain strength. So, it means that when you cross the tipping point, it becomes more difficult to avoid, but it's not impossible.

The Amazon is a huge system. Forests, trees, they have long lives, so the dynamics are relatively slow. The collapse of the Amazon, if we did nothing, could take 100 years, centuries; we don't know. But this means that we have a few decades to act. In the next 10 years, we [need to] invest heavily in large-scale reforestation where rainforests have been cleared and degraded; restore the capacity of these forests to pump moisture into the atmosphere; and also shift the economic activities in the region to legal ones and strengthen the local people's capacity to persist and govern the landscape. Also, shift the economies of the region into more sustainable ones — not based on clearing for cattle and soy; but based on forest products, agroforestry, medicine, lots of industries that can be developed through forest products.

There are several issues being debated, but there is huge potential to shift. Even within a capitalist economic system, we could do that. Forest restoration will take 20, 30 years, but the time for that is now. And also to control organized crime. That's probably the most difficult thing; more difficult than shifting the whole economy.

PP: What's the difference between how the organized crime groups are approaching the landscape and how the local people are managing it?

BR: The local people and Indigenous peoples have been there for thousands of years. They know the forest in so much detail. They have empirical experience of hundreds of El Niños. Of course, the climate is changing, so they are dealing with conditions that are new to everyone, including them, but they have more capacity to adapt because they identify the changes. They have huge potential to help us deal with climate change. They manage the ecosystem in ways that the forest becomes more abundant in food; the forest becomes more resilient.

Organized crime comes from outside with the intention just to extract and destroy, and the methods are based on violence. They involve people working in illegal mining, for instance, and illegal logging and land grabbing. And then there's laundering of ecological assets. So, there's timber laundering. They do this with minerals also. When they occupy a region, a territory, the lives of people in the rural areas and Indigenous territory become much more violent and much more degrading. These regions are remote, so it's difficult. We can have control of these territories, but it depends on lots of international cooperation because they involve politicians. There are very powerful people who are involved with the organized crime system, and they also have a lot of economic power because they have this very diverse economic approach through different activities, legal and illegal, in the urban and rural areas. They accumulate all this wealth and capacity to invest in machines, for instance, in guns.

Ten years ago, we would work in remote parts of the Amazon, and it was fine. These weren't dangerous places. Now I have a colleague who goes to work, and they are in a river in a canoe with local people, and suddenly a fast boat approaches with very powerful engines, and there are five or six men with machine guns wanting to know what they are doing there. This is something that is increasingly more common, and it didn't exist before. To me, that's the most challenging problem to address.

PP: I mean, it sounds challenging. What gives you hope this can be overturned?

BR: I tend to be optimistic, and I have hope because I know how it can be done. It depends on results from elections; it depends on people becoming more aware, but because I work with tipping points, I know how tipping points occur in social systems and behavior. Suddenly, people can understand the importance of something, and then they support ideas. I believe that we are moving towards such tipping points. I don't know how late [we'll be], or what will be lost, but at some point we're going to have to react.

Editor's note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

'> 'At some point we're going to have to react': How El Niño, climate change, and crime are pushing the Amazon rainforest over the brink

The researcher, Mark de Kreij, a Greek literature expert and professor at Radboud University in the Netherlands, found the parchment while studying early Christian manuscripts that the Utrecht University library purchased in the mid-20th century, according to a Sept. 14 statement from Utrecht University. Among a collection of Egyptian and Greek texts, de Kreij found a tiny piece of parchment with words he recognized from Homer's epic.

"There are so many boring parts in the Odyssey," de Kreij told RTV Utrecht. "This happens to be a really fun passage."

The newfound "Odyssey" fragment, which is only about 2.6 by 3 inches (6.6 by 7.7 centimeters), includes verses from Book 12 of the epic. Specifically, the verses describe what happened when the sun god Helios discovered that Odysseus' men had killed and eaten his "immortal" cattle.

Odysseus had been warned by the goddess Circe to avoid Thrinacia, the island of Helios. But he and his men arrive at the island after surviving Scylla and Charybdis — a six-headed monster and a monstrous whirlpool. When Eurylochus, Odysseus' right-hand man, begs him to let them land and find food, Odysseus agrees, as long as they don't harm any cattle. But after a month of storms, with food supplies running low, Eurylochus and the men kill and eat Helios' sacred cattle. Helios asks the gods to take vengeance on the crew, and Zeus destroys their ship, killing everyone but Odysseus.

The find marks the second time this year that a fragment from a Homeric epic has been found unexpectedly. This past spring, archaeologists in Egypt discovered papyrus fragments of the "Iliad," which details the legendary Trojan War, inside a Roman-era mummy.

Both the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" were composed in the late eighth or early seventh century B.C. and detail the 10-year Trojan War and the Greek hero Odysseus' 10-year journey from Troy back to Ithaca, respectively.

The newfound fragment likely originated as part of a parchment codex dating to the third or fourth century A.D. from the Fayum (also spelled Faiyum or Fayoum) oasis in Egypt. According to the statement, only about 30 similar fragments have ever been discovered. In an interview with Dutch News, de Kreij said the fragment may have survived because it came from the middle of the pocket-size "Odyssey" and was protected by other pages.

It's unknown how the fragment ended up in the larger collection of old Egyptian texts.

Although de Kreij first discovered the fragment in 2024, his full study of the university library's collection of Greco-Roman texts from Egypt will be published soon as a book titled "Hieratic, Demotic, Greek, and Coptic Texts in the Utrecht University Collection."

Editor's note: This story's headline was updated at 9:35 a.m. ET on Sept. 17 to clarify that the parchment was found among other texts in a collection of ancient manuscript fragments rather than in the middle of a book.

'> 1,700-year-old fragment of the 'Odyssey' discovered in Dutch library Douglas Seiler, a research affiliate of the University of California, Berkeley and a co-author of the study, said in a statement about the new method.

Over the past few years, other researchers have digitally opened and decoded some of the scrolls from the Herculaneum villa, which was likely owned by Julius Caesar's father-in-law. These results have helped reveal the writings of ancient philosophers, largely Epicureans and Stoics, with one section even describing Plato's final burial place.

But scientists still wrestled with using X-rays to read the scrolls, since, in many cases, both the papyri and the ink written on them are carbon-based. However, some of these papyri, scientists have learned, contained leaded ink. The new study, published Wednesday (Sept. 16) in the journal PLOS One, suggests that researchers should first scan the scrolls for leaded ink and then use their new technique to read more of these long-lost texts.

This method could help improve text-detection algorithms to identify writing on ancient papyrus pages, they noted. And, in the long run, it may help to protect the scrolls.

"This provides a low-risk method to develop algorithms without endangering the priceless artifacts," the team wrote in the study.

Virtually unrolling a scroll

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, it buried Herculaneum under 70 feet (20 meters) of volcanic rock and ash.

Along with the 2,000 people who died at Pompeii and Herculaneum from this natural disaster, many of the scrolls housed at the Herculaneum villa were carbonized, or essentially turned into charcoal, trapping their writings in brittle rolls of papyrus that are nearly impossible to read without destroying the scroll itself.

But, given that some of the ink used in the scrolls contained lead, Seiler and his colleagues decided to do a little experiment. They created a fake papyrus scroll with lead-based ink and "carbonized" it to try matching the conditions of the scrolls found at Herculaneum.

Next, the researchers used X-ray fluorescence, which determines the elements in a material by how they interact with X-rays, to determine that these scrolls did, in fact, contain ink with varying levels of lead. Following that, they used X-ray tomography, a way to make a 3D image using X-rays, with custom-made software to re-read some of the text they had produced on their scroll.

Thanks to their technique, the researchers found that they could read the lead-based ink writings in the scrolls, even with minuscule levels of lead. While not all the writings could be deciphered, the method was able to detect differences between the text and the papyrus it was written on.

This technique, if used on other Herculaneum scrolls, could give these ancient writings a "higher probability of being successfully read," they wrote in the study.

How much do you know about the Roman town destroyed by Mount Vesuvius? Find out by taking our Pompeii quiz.

'> New trick could reveal text on 2,000-year-old scrolls charred by eruption of Mount Vesuvius T. rex teeth from specimens found in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana.

Rare, heavy isotopes of carbon and oxygen bond together differently in growing tooth enamel depending on the temperature. The number of bonds formed between these rare isotopes is greater at cooler temperatures than it is at warmer temperatures, which means warm-blooded, or endothermic animals, that can regulate their own body temperature, have fewer of these chemical bonds in their teeth than cold-blooded, or ectothermic, animals, which rely on their environment for warmth.

By measuring the bonds in carbon dioxide (CO₂) given off when dissolving small samples from the T. rex teeth, Randon Flores, a geologist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and his colleagues could estimate where on the scale of animal body temperatures T. rex sat.

They put the T. rex body temperature at 97.3 degrees Fahrenheit (36.3 degrees Celsius), comparable to that of a human or an elephant. Modern, cold-blooded reptiles tend to have lower body temperatures of about 82-86 F (28-30 C), while most birds — descendants from T. rex's branch of dinosaurs — tend to be much warmer at 104-109 F (40-43 C). Therefore, these findings, published Wednesday (Sept. 16) in the journal Science Advances, show how much this relative of modern birds had already diverged from cold-blooded dinosaurs like Triceratops and Stegosaurus.

"The temperature is about what I would have guessed — higher than a reptile or a slow mammal like a sloth, but lower than an avian," study co-author Robert Eagle, a geobiologist at UCLA, said in a statement.

These findings have implications for how and where the T. rex might have lived. A warm-blooded T. rex would have been an energetic, active animal, chasing or scavenging food to fuel its fast metabolism rather than basking in the sun to gain energy, wrote the authors.

It also means that during the Cretaceous period, one of the warmest periods in Earth’s history, about 11-25 F (6-14 C) warmer than today, T. rex would have been able to survive in most of the North American continent, from what is now Mexico up to chilly climates where cold-blooded reptiles wouldn’t have survived. This helps explain why a tyrannosaur fossil has been found in the Kikak-Tegoseak Quarry in Alaska, although there is no trace of other reptiles like lizards, turtles or crocodiles from that period in the region.

The ability for T. rex to inhabit cooler, high latitudes also aligns with recent evidence that tyrannosaurs crossed the Bering Land Bridge between Asia and North America, write the authors.

How much do you know about the king of the dinosaurs? Test your knowledge with our T. rex quiz!

'> Scientists finally figured out the temperature of T. rex's blood ‪— and it was as hot as ours .

In physics, time gets even more complicated, incorporated into theories of relativity — the experience of the clock's ticking being relative to the observer and their place in space — and entropy, which gives time its unidirectional flow. Meanwhile quantum mechanics indicates time can move both forwards and backwards, at least inside quantum systems.

In this excerpt from "On Time: The Physics That Makes the Universe Tick" (Princeton University Press, 2026), author and theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili looks at the possibility that time did not begin with the Big Bang — but if this outburst was just another moment, what was there before?

There is an alternative cosmological theory to the one that says the Big Bang marked the beginning of time itself, which was then followed by a brief period of rapid inflation of space. The alternative is known as eternal inflation. In this scenario, our universe was born as a small bubble in an infinite space that has been undergoing inflation forever.

So, rather than time beginning with our Big Bang, we should regard the Big Bang as an event that took place at some moment in time, in which our region of this infinite space suddenly stopped inflating and began instead to expand at a more sedate pace.

So instead of a brief period of inflation happening just after the Big Bang, in the eternal inflation theory it is the other way around, with the Big Bang marking the end of inflation in our part of space, creating our bubble universe outside of which inflation continues. The theory predicts there will be other big bangs happening elsewhere that give rise to other universes — possibly an infinite number of them — all forever separated from each other, and all being driven apart by the ever-expanding, rapidly inflating space outside of them. The totality of this infinite space is referred to as the multiverse, to distinguish it from the individual bubble universes.

Some physicists argue that such an idea falls outside of proper science, since we do not have a way of testing it. There are two other ideas worth mentioning on the matter of whether the Big Bang marked the beginning of time or not, both of which are alternatives to inflation theory. The first is that our universe is part of a repeating process called conformal cyclic cosmology'.

This idea, proposed by Roger Penrose, suggests that our universe is going through an infinite series of lives, or epochs, each of which starts with a big bang and ends with a universe in thermal equilibrium, filled only with evenly spread-out thermal radiation. The idea here is not, as you might expect, that the universe reaches some maximum expansion before collapsing down to a 'Big Crunch' that then marks the Big Bang of the next epoch, but rather because of a subtle geometrical idea called 'conformal mapping' that connects up the very dif­ferent end of one universe (cold and spread-out) with the birth of the next (hot and dense).

I will not say any more about this theory, in particular since it has been argued that it suffers from several flaws, such as the problem of conservation of information (similar to the so-called black hole information paradox) and the difficulty of reconciling the high entropy at the end of the old epoch with the low entropy of the new epoch.

A related hypothesis, which I admit I find aesthetically rather appealing, is known as the ekpyrotic universe model. The name is based on the Greek word ekpyrosis (ἐκπύρωσι), meaning 'conflagration', which refers to a cosmological model proposed by the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece in which the universe cycles endlessly through fiery birth, expansion, and cooling, followed by contraction, reheating, and rebirth.

The name 'ekpyrotic universe' was devised by one of the modern theory's originators, Paul Steinhardt. The idea comes out of the highly mathematical world of string theory. Basically, the whole of our three-dimensional space (which as we know is really a part of 4D spacetime) forms what is called a 3D brane (a higher-dimensional generalisation of a 2D membrane, or sheet). This 3D brane of ours is floating in a higher-dimensional (4D) space, and the Big Bang is when it collided with a neighbouring brane (in a sense this would be another universe). This collision creates tremendous heat and radiation (the Big Bang) and sets off the expansion of our space.

At the same time, it is drifting away from the other brane that it collided with, but will eventually reach maximum separation from it before they are pulled back together, colliding again in a new Big Bang. Here I simply wish to stress that if this theory is right then there may not have been a beginning of time, and certainly not at the Big Bang.

Another cosmological model, which also does away with the need for inflation, as well as suggesting that the Big Bang was not the beginning of time, has been proposed by another of the originators of the ekpyrotic universe idea, Neil Turok. But this idea, known as the 'mirror universe' theory, is rather dif­ferent. It's a nice idea, and it certainly solves Loschmidt's paradox regarding the conflict between time symmetry and the second law of thermodynamics. Due to the time-symmetric underlying fundamental equations of physics, starting a system off at any arbitrary moment means that its entropy should increase equally into the past as it does into the future.

But this just doesn't make sense. If the system at all times before our chosen arbitrary moment has higher entropy, then starting from any of those earlier times should see the system decrease in entropy in order to reach its state at the original arbitrary moment. Therefore, it cannot be arbitrary; the system had to have been in a specially prepared state at that moment, the moment of the Big Bang. There would be no increase in entropy going backwards in time if that is when time started.

But what if there were a mirror universe on the other temporal side of the Big Bang, evolving in a direction we would consider to be towards the past? This is precisely what Turok is suggesting. What is neat (or convenient, depending on how much you like this theory) is that both sides of the Big Bang are completely separated from each other, with each seeing time pointing in the direction of increasing entropy. If such a mirror universe exists and contains intelligent life that has also hit upon the mirror universe idea, then they would think that our side was the one before the Big Bang in the same way we think that theirs is. As well as doing away with inflation, this idea also conveniently explains why there is more matter than antimatter in our universe because, guess what, the mirror universe would have it the other way round: What they call normal matter is our antimatter.

How seriously should we take these cosmological theories? Are they even proper science? Their proponents know they require some sort of empirical evidence to support their hypotheses, such as some imprint of a reality before the Big Bang frozen in our cosmic microwave background. For without observational evidence, these ideas will remain just theoretical curiosities.

Excerpted from On Time: The Physics That Makes the Universe Tick © 2026 by Jim Al-Khalili. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

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'> Was there a 'before' the Big Bang? Jim Al-Khalili on the mind-bogglingness of time