By one estimate, peat fires produce three times more fine particulate matter than other tropical forest fires, along with five times more sulfur dioxide, three times more organic carbon, and twice as much methane and carbon monoxide.

Satellite Images Reveal Indonesia’s Fire Season

Indonesia’s 2026 fire season was already underway when the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instrument aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite captured an image of the region on September 1, 2026.

On the annotated map, each red dot represents a “fire detection.” This means the satellite sensor and an algorithm identified a pixel containing thermal anomalies associated with fire. A single fire can produce multiple detections.

Peat fires are a persistent problem in Indonesia, which contains about 36 percent of the world’s tropical peatlands. During severe droughts, these normally wet landscapes can dry enough to ignite. Over the past three decades, such conditions have repeatedly produced long-lasting fires that blanket large areas in smoke for weeks and disrupt the lives of millions of people.

El Niño Is Intensifying the Dry Season

Wildfires occur in Indonesia every year, but some of the most destructive seasons in recent decades came during El Niño, particularly in 1997 and 2015.

NOAA assessed El Niño as present and strengthening in August 2026. The climate pattern commonly reduces rainfall across Indonesia. The drying can become even more pronounced when El Niño occurs alongside a positive phase of the Indian Ocean Dipole, which was also underway.

“Indonesia is only about three weeks into its fire season, but we’re seeing fire activity track sharply upward, similar to 2015,” said Robert Field, a Columbia University researcher who developed a tool called the Global Fire Weather Database that produces experimental, real-time fire weather forecasts.

“The strong El Niño is making the dry season drier over the fire-prone parts of the country and exacerbating burning — just as we anticipated it would,” he said.

The comparison with 2015 is significant. After more than three months of burning that year, Indonesia’s fires had emitted 1.75 billion tons of greenhouse gas equivalents — more than Japan emits in an entire year. By September 2, the 2026 fires had been burning for about a month and had already released roughly 10 percent of the amount produced during the 2015 crisis.

Underground Peat Fires Can Burn for Months

Indonesia was also experiencing severe, widespread drought during the summer of 2026, much as it did in 2015. Data from the Indonesian meteorological agency showed that about 90 percent of the country received little or no rainfall in early August.

Under normal conditions, peat deposits in Kalimantan, Sumatra, and Papua are too wet for fire to move underground. Drought changes that dramatically, allowing flames to enter the peat itself and continue smoldering below the surface.

“Surface fires are less of a concern, but when fires get underground, they just won’t stop,” Field said. “They’ll keep burning until the rains come in October or November.”

Indonesia relies on observations from NASA and NOAA satellites to follow active fires in near-real-time. MODIS and VIIRS are among the main instruments used. Indonesia’s Ministry of Forestry operates the SiPongi fire-monitoring platform using MODIS and VIIRS data, and the system counted 946 hotspots on August 31, 2026.

The Worst Fires Can Be Hardest to See From Space

Satellite monitoring has important limitations, however. MODIS and VIIRS can struggle to detect fires hidden by thick smoke or clouds, burning beneath the forest canopy, or smoldering underground inside peat deposits.

In fact, when Indonesian fires become especially intense, the number of fires detected by MODIS or VIIRS can sometimes decline because the smoke itself blocks the satellites’ view.

“The worst smoke events, paradoxically, can be the hardest to observe from space with MODIS and VIIRS,” said Mark Cochrane, an ecologist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science who has conducted field research on peat fires in Indonesia for nearly a decade.

Some of Indonesia’s modern fire vulnerability can be traced back decades. According to Cochrane, extensive construction of irrigation canals and drainage of peat swamps during the 1990s, undertaken in part to create massive rice farms, lowered water tables across wetland areas and made the landscape more combustible. Oil palm plantations and other plantation forestry are also widespread in the region.

Following the unusually grim fire season of 2015, governments and other organizations attempted to reverse some of that damage. Projects have included blocking irrigation canals to help restore wetlands, strengthening firefighting capabilities, and stepping up efforts to prevent accidental human ignitions.

2026 Could Be a Major Test of Fire Protections

“This year will be a real stress test of the measures that were put in place after 2015,” said Shi Jun Wee, a University of Maryland graduate student.

Wee is part of a team working with NASA and MapBiomas to develop improved methods for spotting understory fires that MODIS and VIIRS may miss. Their approach uses shortwave infrared observations from Landsat and Sentinel-2 satellites.

As the 2026 fire season continues, Wee plans to follow conditions using NASA’s Worldview data browser, FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management System), HLS (Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2) observations, and GFED (Global Fire Emissions Database).

Hazardous Smoke Is Already Disrupting Daily Life

For people living in Indonesia and neighboring countries, the effects are already being felt. Indonesian officials have warned that large portions of the population have been exposed to hazardous smoke.

According to news reports, some schools have begun switching to remote learning, nine national parks have closed, and several flights have been delayed because of heavy smoke.

Cochrane cautioned that attention to the problem often rises during major El Niño fire seasons and fades once conditions improve.

“People tend to focus on these fires during an El Niño and then forget about them,” Cochrane said. “We need sustained focus, even during the years when they aren’t as bad, to solve this,” he said. “These fires create a tremendous amount of emissions.”

Rather than replacing current treatments, the strategy is designed to help them work better. In preclinical experiments, suppressing SET prevented tumors from developing.

A Potential Weakness in Glioblastoma

Among the proteins examined, SET stood out because blocking it had such a strong effect on tumor formation. The researchers also found that interfering with related proteins increased the sensitivity of glioblastoma cells to radiation.

Together, the findings point to a biological pathway that may eventually be targeted with drugs to weaken the cancer’s defenses.

The OSUCCC – James team focused on PP2A, an enzyme involved in regulating signals that cancer cells use to grow, survive, and recover from treatment-related damage. Glioblastoma cells appear to interfere with PP2A using three proteins called ANP32A, CIP2A and SET. When the researchers blocked those proteins in laboratory and animal models, fewer cancer cells survived, and the remaining cells became more vulnerable to radiation.

“Glioblastoma is hard to treat because it can adapt and survive,” said Arnab Chakravarti, MD, chair of radiation oncology at the OSUCCC – James. “Our findings suggest that restoring PP2A activity may make glioblastoma cells less able to survive treatment. That gives us a clear path to test whether this approach can make radiation and chemotherapy more effective for patients with GBM.”

Testing Ways to Restore PP2A Activity

The results remain preliminary and have not yet been evaluated in patients. Researchers are now investigating whether SET or other proteins that suppress PP2A can be targeted safely and whether doing so improves the effectiveness of standard glioblastoma therapies.

The team also examined an FDA-approved antipsychotic drug that is capable of increasing PP2A activity. According to the researchers, the results provide additional reason to study medications that influence this pathway.

However, the drug is not ready to be used as a glioblastoma treatment and should not be taken for this purpose outside a clinical trial.

“This is an important first step,” said Chakravarti. “By understanding how SET and related PP2A blockers help GBM survive treatment, we can test ways to block that protection and make current therapies more effective.”

A First Step Toward New Treatment Strategies

The study was published in the May 2026 issue of Cancer Letters, and was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute and The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Two leading possibilities are hypothetical particles known as ultralight axions and dark photons. In the mass range examined by the researchers, these particles would be extraordinarily light, roughly 19 to 21 orders of magnitude lighter than an electron.

Turning Earth Into a Giant Dark Matter Detector

Many traditional axion experiments try to convert axions into photons by exposing them to extremely strong magnetic fields inside laboratories. The challenge is scale. Even powerful lab magnets can only cover a relatively small region.

Researchers from Kyoto University, Hiroshima University, and Nihon University saw a way around that limitation. Instead of relying only on laboratory equipment, they asked whether Earth’s own magnetic environment could be used as part of the experiment.

“We asked ourselves whether we could use the Earth itself as a giant detector in the search,” says corresponding author Atsushi Taruya. “The Earth-ionosphere cavity acts as a natural resonator that amplifies electromagnetic waves right around the mass range we wanted to probe.”

The region between Earth’s surface and the ionosphere can naturally resonate with electromagnetic waves, much like a large cavity. That made it especially useful for searching for signals associated with the ultralight particles the team wanted to investigate.

Expanding the Search to Higher Frequencies

One obstacle was that previous theory could only reliably describe frequencies below 1 Hz. That left much of the potentially useful frequency range unexplored.

To solve this problem, the researchers developed a new theoretical framework that includes the electrical conductivity of the atmosphere. Their calculations showed that the Earth-ionosphere cavity can amplify signals near 8 Hz and allowed them to make reliable predictions up to about 30 Hz.

The model also predicted an important difference between the two dark matter candidates. Signals produced by axions should vary depending on location, with the strongest expected in Southeast Asia. Dark photon signals, by contrast, should appear at nearly the same strength around the world.

A Decade of Magnetic Data Put to the Test

Using this framework, the team examined roughly 10 years of geomagnetic measurements collected between 2012 and 2022 by the British Geological Survey’s Eskdalemuir Observatory.

The researchers first removed artificial sources of noise from the data. They then looked for the kind of steady signal concentrated within a very narrow frequency range that dark matter is expected to produce over long periods of time. The results were then subjected to statistical analysis.

The same theoretical approach was also applied to dark photons. Unlike axions, dark photons can produce electromagnetic waves even when no magnetic field is present, so the researchers searched the dataset for the different signature those particles would be expected to create.

Stronger Limits and Mysterious Signal Candidates

By effectively using the entire Earth as a detector for a particular range of axion masses, the researchers placed new limits on how strongly axions could interact with light.

Those limits were about 100 times tighter than the previous best result from a ground-based experiment. They were also competitive with constraints inferred from astrophysical X-ray observations made by observatories such as Chandra and NuSTAR, although those astrophysical limits depend on certain theoretical assumptions.

The dark photon search produced an especially intriguing result. Researchers identified several signal candidates that could potentially have a dark matter origin. However, the source of those signals remains unknown, and they have not been confirmed as evidence of dark matter.

Dark matter’s true identity therefore remains unresolved. Still, the new theoretical framework could give researchers a powerful way to expand future searches and use Earth’s natural electromagnetic environment as a tool for probing some of the lightest possible forms of dark matter.