Why scars never disappear - Popular Science

Scenes of destruction left behind by Southern California's Norte FireSouthern California was hit with wildfires this past week, and now rain forecast for the burn scars could mean danger ahead. We're watching two spots in particular: the burn scars left by the Bryson Fire in Malibu and the Norte Fire in San Clemente and San Juan Capistrano. Rain is expected to arrive Wednesday afternoon, with the heaviest falling Wednesday night into Thursday morning. On fresh burn scars, it doesn't take much to turn rain into a debris flow. Homeowner Steve Taylor uses a garden hose to put out hot spots behind homes on Calle Miramar during the Norte fire in San Juan Capistrano on Friday, Oct. 16, 2026.(Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images)How a debris flow could happen this weekHere's the number that matters: As little as 0.3 inch of rainfall in 30 minutes has triggered debris flows in Southern California, research from the U. S. Geological Survey has found. Any storm with intensities greater than about 0.4 inch an hour is at risk of producing debris flows.

Progressive transition from reversible to irreversible decoherence. Credit: Physical Review Letters (2026). DOI: 10.1103/t2yx-9bqh Quantum systems can occupy superpositions, quantum states that combine different possibilities. For instance, a microwave field can be prepared in a superposition of an empty state and a state that contains microwave light.

Across the US west, rising temperatures are causing glaciers to retreat to the point of vanishing. About 300 glaciers have disappeared since the 1960s, with almost all of the rest set to drastically shrink as the climate crisis continues to escalate, a new study has found. At the midpoint of the last century more than 1,450 glaciers – large tongues of ice, snow and rock that move under their own weight and gravity – were threaded throughout the mountains of the American west, providing cool water for ecosystems and agriculture as they gradually melted. Some, in the Sierra Nevada of California, were formed a few thousand years ago while others, such as those in the Pacific north-west, are remnants from even further back in the last ice age, which ended about 11,700 years ago. The long stories of these perennial masses of ice are coming to a rapid end, however, due to global heating caused by the burning of fossil fuels. The total area of glaciers in the US west has shrunk by a third since the 1960s, the new research found, with evidence this loss is speeding up as temperatures continue to rise.