The Blue Mountains in eastern Jamaica could be a region where landslides occur with heavy rain due to steep hill slopes, said Karl Lang, an assistant professor of geology at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Lang said regions that have been clearcut for agriculture could be susceptible to landslides because the plants that previously grew there helped bind the soil together by the strength of their roots.

Some roads built on steep hills in Puerto Rico were affected by landslides when Hurricane Fiona (2022) and Hurricane Maria (2017) hit, said Lang. “Every time you cut into a steep slope, you make a steeper slope above the road,” he said.

“The real problem there is that you create the road that’s your conduit in and out of the location … and then the landslide dams the road. You create your own problem both by creating the increased probability of a landslide, but also by having those landslides occur where you need to go,” said Lang.

Scientists have long thought that a lizard losing a leg should be a death sentence. New evidence seems to overturn this assumption, showing that some lizards can not only survive, but even thrive after losing one or more limbs.

James Stroud, an evolutionary biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has spent years catching lizards in the wild to study how they evolve. He and his colleagues long thought that even the smallest difference in the length of a lizard’s leg could affect its ability to run from predators and chase their prey. Losing an entire limb seemed much more severe.

However, every now and then he and his colleagues would observe something odd. “We’ll find a lizard completely missing its leg, and it seems fine,” Dr. Stroud said. He casually calls them “three-legged pirate lizards.”

As Hurricane Melissa barrels toward Jamaica as a Category 5 storm, some in the meteorological community are questioning if the traditional way of measuring hurricane strength still tells the full story.

Zachary Handlos, director of the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Undergraduate Degree Program at Georgia Tech, believes it might be time to rethink how we classify hurricanes. While the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which rates storms from Category 1 through 5 based solely on maximum wind speed, has been used for decades, Handlos says it doesn’t always capture a storm’s true impact.

“You don’t have to be a tropical cyclone expert to know that the scale has some limitations,” Handlos said. “It doesn’t necessarily portray how strong or impactful a hurricane can be beyond its wind speed.”