Welcome to 2026! One of my year-end and new-year reflections has been how important science (and its sister, technology) is to our life and civilization. As a scientist, I am biased toward science, but with good intentions, because science also contributes to our personal and collective thinking.
Let’s review some scientific and technological achievements of the past year.
Rasoul Sorkhabi
Editor, Core Elements
Discover Magazine’s Science Discoveries of 2025
Triff/Shutterstock.com with some elements furnished by NASA
Discover usually devotes its first issue of each year to reviewing the major scientific discoveries of the previous year. We covered this last January. We will do it again now at the outset of 2026.
This year, Discover has selected 27 major scientific stories in space science, planet Earth, medicine and health, origins, psychology and neuroscience, and technology.
Earth Science tops the list: Interestingly, many of the stories covered in Discover are related to earth science. This shows—once again—the significance and popularity of Earth-related stories.
Here are three of the topics covered:
Secrets of Mars:
NASA’s Perseverance Rover came across a series of irregular marks in layers of fine-grained mudstone (named the Bright Angel formation) that may indicate biosignatures in Jezero Crater. The study is published in Nature.
The Chinese Mars Rover Zhurong (“fire planet”) has detected evidence of an underground beach in an area that may have been an ocean some 4 billion years ago. This study is published in PNAS.
A volatile year for volcanoes: In 2025 several volcanoes roared and erupted.
Iceland’s Sundhnukur volcano erupted twice: Once in April and once in July.
Indonesia’s Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki erupted in five different months, sending ashes more than five miles into the sky.
Russia’s Klyuchevskoy and Krasheninnikov volcanoes erupted after an 8.8-magnitude earthquake in the Kamchatka Peninsula.
Alaska’s Mount Spurr spewed gases from December 2025 through March 2025, but no explosive eruption occurred.
Human origins:
A study published in Nature Genetics suggests that our species arose from the combination of two intermingling hominin populations, probably Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis, about 300,000 years ago.
An almost complete skull of Denisovan was found in Harbin, China and dates about 146,000 years ago gives a face to this hominin group. The study is published in Science and Cell.
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In its November–December 2025 issue, Offshore Magazinehas selected the top five discoveries in offshore oil and gas in 2025.
They are briefly described in alphabetical order:
Bumerangue (Brazil):
BP discovered this block in August 2025 in the pre-salt Santos Basin, located 404 kilometers offshore Brazil. It is hailed as BP’s “largest in 25 years.”
Discovery well 1-BP-13-SPS was drilled into carbonate reservoirs in a water depth of 2,373 meters to a total depth of 5,855 meters.
Initial estimates are about 100 meters of oil column and 900 meters of condensate.
Gajajeira-01 (Angola):
Azule Energy discovered Angola’s first dedicated offshore gas field in July 2025.
Reserves are estimated to be more than 1 trillion cubic feet of gas and up to 100 million barrels of condensate.
Discovery well Gajajeira-01 was drilled in Block 1/14 at a water depth of 95 meters in the Lower Congo Basin, about 60 kilometers off the coast of Angola.
The reservoir is the Lower Oligocene LO100 sandstone.
Huizhou 19-6 (China):
CNOOC discovered this field as the largest oil field in clastic sediments in the eastern South China Sea.
In-place reserves are more than 100 million tons of oil equivalent.
Located at water depths of 100 meters, the discovery well HZ19-6-3 drilled into a total depth of 5,415 meters into Paleogene sediments.
Reserves estimates are 127 meters of oil and gas with initial well flow rates of 413 barrels per day of light crude and 2.41 million cubic feet per day of natural gas.
Julaiah (Kuwait):
Kuwait Oil Co. discovered this field in January in offshore Kuwait.
The Julaiah 2 exploration field holds 800 million barrels of medium-density oil and 600 billion cubic feet of associated gas.
Julaiah is Kuwait’s second major offshore discovery, following the Al-Nokhatha field in 2024.
The reservoir is the Cretaceous age deltaic sediments of the Zubair Formation.
Wolin East (Poland):
Hailed as Poland’s largest oil and gas discovery ever, the Wolin East 1 well was drilled in the Baltic Sea, about six kilometers off the coast of Świnoujście.
Water depths are at only 9.5 meters, and its total vertical depth is 2,715 meters.
The discovery well tested 62 meters of hydrocarbon column in the Main Dolomite formation (Zechstein Group) of Late Permian age.
Central European Petroleum, a Canadian-funded company, made the discovery last July.
The reserves include shale gas and liquids totaling 200 million barrels of oil equivalent.
Go deeper:Offshore magazine has also created a video clip on these five offshore discoveries.
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