Winner · Earth & Planetary Sciences Subject Award 2026
Piers Forster
The finalists
Ten universities. Ten projects. Ten academics.
Mark Maslin
Paleo-ENSO influence on African environments and early modern humans
Professor of Earth System Science at UCL, Mark Maslin studies the Anthropocene, climate change and human evolution. In a fourteen-author PNAS study spanning institutions across Europe, Africa and North America, he helped show how palaeo ENSO variability shaped African environments and the habitats of early modern humans, linking orbital scale climate dynamics to human origins.
John R. Taylor
Submesoscale Dynamics in the Upper Ocean
Between large ocean currents and small-scale turbulence lie submesoscale motions, flows of 200 metres to 20 kilometres that are ubiquitous in the upper ocean. Introducing their fluid dynamics, the work explains how these motions arise through instabilities, modify density stratification, and redistribute energy between scales in complex transfers with both up-scale and down-scale components.
Piers Forster
Professor of Physical Climate Change and founding Director of the Priestley Centre at the University of Leeds, Piers Forster leads the Indicators of Global Climate Change collaboration. His 2023 Earth System Science Data paper, with co-authors from dozens of institutions worldwide, delivers annual updates of human induced warming, emissions and energy imbalance to track the evolving climate system.
R. G. Grainger
When the Raikoke volcano erupted in June 2019, it sent around 1.5 teragrams of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, the largest such volcanic emission since 2011. Comparing dispersion model simulations against high-resolution satellite measurements, the study assessed how skilfully the Met Office's atmospheric model tracked the volcanic cloud across the Northern Hemisphere, work that matters for forecasting disruption from future eruptions.
Sonia I. Seneviratne
Globally observed trends in mean and extreme river flow attributed to climate change
Professor for Land-Climate Dynamics at ETH Zurich and an IPCC lead author, Sonia Seneviratne studies droughts, heatwaves and land climate interactions. In a seventeen-author Science paper with partners across Europe, Asia, North America and Australia, she helped attribute globally observed changes in mean and extreme river flow to human induced climate change.
Chris J. Hawkesworth
Secular Evolution of Continents and the Earth System
Reading the rock and mineral archive preserved in the continental lithosphere, the work divides Earth's long history into seven phases, from the Proto-Earth of some 4.57 billion years ago to the Contemporary Earth of today. Integrating this record with knowledge of mantle cooling and lithospheric rheology, it constrains how the planet's tectonic modes have changed through time.
M. R. van den Broeke
Greenland ice sheet climate disequilibrium and committed sea-level rise
Ice loss from Greenland is one of the largest sources of contemporary sea-level rise, yet models struggle to say how much is already locked in. Using satellite-derived observations of ice extent, flow and surface mass balance, the study finds Greenland's imbalance with the recent climate commits at least 274 millimetres of sea-level rise regardless of twenty-first-century climate pathways.
Sverre Planke
Impacts of seismic resolution on fault interpretation: Insights from seismic modelling
Twenty interpreters from different geoscientific backgrounds were asked to map the same faults in conventional and high-resolution 3D seismic data from the Barents Sea. Comparing their interpretations through seismic modelling, the study reveals considerable variability between interpreters and shows how seismic resolution shapes the fault architectures that can actually be imaged, insights with clear value for subsurface mapping.
Chris R. Stokes
Response of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet to past and future climate change
Antarctica's eastern ice sheet is a vast store of frozen water whose behaviour matters far beyond the polar regions. The work examines the response of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet to past climate change and its possible behaviour under future change, drawing on the record of earlier epochs to inform what may lie ahead.
Deliang Chen
The imbalance of the Asian water tower
Glaciers, snow and lakes in High Mountain Asia are often described as a water tower for the surrounding regions. The work addresses the imbalance of the Asian water tower, examining how this great natural store of fresh water is changing and what that shift means for the region it supplies.
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The 2026 Subject Awards have been decided.
Partners verify their data and feature their academics. Finalists were identified from open data; winners were decided by our editorial team and announced on 15 September 2026.
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The wider slate: more candidate partnerships behind the finalists.
Projected land ice contributions to twenty-first-century sea level rise
High Mountain Asia hydropower systems threatened by climate-driven landscape instability
Experimental warming differentially affects vegetative and reproductive phenology of tundra plants
Permafrost and Climate Change: Carbon Cycle Feedbacks From the Warming Arctic
Projected land ice contributions to twenty-first-century sea level rise
Mass balance of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets from 1992 to 2020
Carbon Fluxes in the Coastal Ocean: Synthesis, Boundary Processes, and Future Trends
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