Researchers investigating the long-term effects of the 2025 firestorms on L.A.’s beaches have found that rarest of things: good news.

In the year following the Palisades and Eaton fires, levels of harmful metals like lead in coastal sand and seawater have remained far below California’s limits for safe drinking water and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s safety thresholds for aquatic life.

“We’re not seeing any evidence for harm in the ecosystem or harm for human health,” said Noelle Held, a University of Southern California marine biogeochemist and principal investigator for the CLEAN Waters project, which is measuring post-fire water quality.

The Palisades and Eaton fires burned more than 40,000 acres and destroyed at least 12,000 buildings, blanketing the ocean in ash for up to 100 miles offshore. Heavy rains a few weeks later washed the charred remnants of plastics, batteries, cars, chemicals and other potentially toxic material into the sea and up onto beaches via the region’s massive network of storm drains and concrete-lined rivers.

Initial testing by the nonprofit environmental group Heal the Bay in the weeks after the fires documented a spike in lead, mercury and other heavy metals in coastal waters. Concentrations of beryllium, copper, chromium, nickel and lead in particular were significantly above established safety thresholds for marine life, prompting fears for the long-term health of fish, marine mammals and the marine food chain.

For their most recent study, Held’s team analyzed seawater samples collected along multiple locations on five different dates between Feb. 10 and Oct. 17 in 2025, along with sand collected in August.

Seawater lead concentrations were highest in the month after the fire and in October, when the season’s first major rain had just washed months’ worth of urban pollution into the ocean.

Even at their peak, lead levels barely surpassed 1 microgram per liter — well below the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s aquatic life safety threshold of 8.1 micrograms per liter.

While levels of iron, manganese and cobalt were higher in sampling locations near the Palisades burn scar than they were in other areas, even there they remain well below concentrations that could pose harm to human or marine life.

For beach sand collected in August, lead levels never topped 14 parts per million at any location, significantly below both the current California residential soil standard of 80 parts per million and the stricter 55 parts per million standard proposed by environmental health researchers.

“This isn’t something we would flag if we were testing your soil in your yard,” Held said.

The recent findings are consistent with water quality tests the State Water Resources Control Board conducted earlier in 2025. A board spokesperson said those found both higher relative concentrations of metals closest to the burn scars and no overall evidence that post-fire pollution poses an ongoing threat to human health.

Yet the need for continued testing remains. Officials struggled to answer questions about post-fire beach safety in part because of a lack of historical data on pollution levels, a pitfall researchers would like to forestall before another disaster arrives.

Future rainstorms could also continue to wash metals into Will Rogers Beach and the Rustic Creek outfall, both of which are near the Palisades burn scar, CLEAN Waters warned.

“Post-fire impacts can change over time, depending on rainfalls, runoffs and sediment movements,” said Eugenia Ermacora, manager of the nonprofit Surfrider Foundation’s L.A. chapter, which has partnered with Held’s team to collect samples. “It’s not just about the fires, but it’s about urbanization and how much our city needs to continue the work of doing testing in the water.”

War in Iran. Sleeper cells. Soaring gas prices. A new virus. ICE arrests. The acceleration of AI. And a rogue food delivery robot. Is your heart racing yet?

Amid one of the highest-stakes, most chaotic news cycles in recent memory, it’s hard to keep calm while scrolling through the day’s doom-saturated headlines.

Fear not. A team of British scientists, two authors and a group of thought leaders once deemed societal outcasts are here to help. Sam Conniff and Katherine Templar-Lewis’ new book, “The Uncertainty Toolkit: Worry Less and Do More by Learning to Cope With the Unknown,” presents evidence-based strategies to help you not only tolerate uncertainty, but thrive in the face of it.

Conniff, a self-described author and “social entrepreneur,” and Templar-Lewis, a neuroscientist, partnered with the University College London’s Centre for the Study of Decision-Making Uncertainty as well as real world “uncertainty experts” — former prisoners, drug addicts, hostages, refugees and others — to execute the most extensive study to date on “Uncertainty Tolerance,” which published in 2022. Their web project, “Uncertainty Experts,” is an interactive “self development experience” that includes workshops and an online Netflix-produced documentary, through which viewers can test their own uncertainty tolerance.

Their “Uncertainty Toolkit” book, out April 7, addresses the three emotional states that uncertainty puts us in — Fear, Fog and Stasis — while blending personal stories from the subjects they interviewed with the latest science on uncertainty, interactive exercises and guided reflections.

“We are scientifically in the most uncertain times,” Templar-Lewis says. “There’s something called the World Uncertainty Index, which charts uncertainty [globally]. And it’s spiking. People say life has always been uncertain, and of course it has; but because of the way we’re connected and on digital platforms and our lives are so busy, we’re interacting with more and more moments of uncertainty than ever before.”

We asked the authors to relay three strategies for staying calm in challenging times, as told to them by their uncertainty experts.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Advice from an ex-addict: Be grateful: Morgan Godvin is an ex-addict and human rights activist from Oregon who served four years of a five-year sentence in a federal prison, Conniff says.

“She developed a practice of ‘Radical Gratitude.’ Even in a world that feels so overwhelming, we can all find an object from which to derive a sense of gratitude,” he says. “As an emotion, gratitude provides a counterweight to anxiety that is almost as powerful as breath work or any of the other [anti-anxiety] well-known interventions.”

In prison, Godvin — who suffers from anxiety — created a daily practice to help her cope. “She began being grateful for the blankets, the only thing she had — and they were threadbare blankets,” Conniff says. “And by digging deep and really emphasizing the warm sensation we know of as gratitude, it became a biological hack. When the body starts to feel grateful, the hormones the body releases brings it back into what’s known as homeostasis or a sense of equilibrium; it activates the parasympathetic nervous system. It’s a very humbling and very healthy practice when the world’s just too much.”

Advice from a survivor of suicidal depression: Lean into the unknown. Vivienne Ming is a leading neuroscientist based in the Bay Area who faced a web of personal challenges in her early 20s. Ming, who was assigned male at birth, dropped out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became homeless and was “living out of their car with a gun on their dashboard,” Conniff says. “They faced homelessness and near suicidal depression before finding a path that took them through gender transition to a place of real identity, marriage, family and success as a scientist.”

How? They developed and cultivated an awareness of “negativity bias,” Conniff says. “We all have a predetermined negativity bias. And in times of uncertainty, that negativity bias goes off the charts and we start to limit ourselves and shut ourselves down. By understanding this, we begin to be able to make a choice: Am I shutting myself down to the opportunities of life? Am I not getting back to people? Am I not taking the chances that are presented to me?”

What’s more, uncertainty, Dr. Ming pointed out, is actually good for you. It unlocks parts of your brain.

“Uncertainty drives neuroplasticity, our ability to learn,” Conniff says. “So [it’s about] resisting negativity bias — that this is all dangerous and difficult and we’re told not to trust each other — and instead, Dr. Ming’s response is to lean into the unknown. She says ‘the best way forward is to all walk slowly into the deep end of our own lives.’”

Advice from an ex-refugee: Reflect on your gut. Rez Gardi grew up in a refugee camp in Pakistan, before her family relocated to New Zealand. She’s now a lawyer and human rights activist working in Iraq.

“Rez correctly identified the scientific explanation for what we all call ‘gut instinct,’” Conniff says. “It’s known as ‘embodied cognition.’ The idea is that we have two brains — the gut instinct is an incredibly complex system of data points and it literally is in our gut and it’s connected to our brains via the vagus nerve. What it does is it brings your intuition in line with your intellect.”

So how to tap into it? “Rez talked about reflecting on her gut instinct,” Conniff says. “So when you have a feeling that you are right or wrong, go back to that feeling: What color was it? What shape was it? Where was it in your body? What temperature was it? Rez honed her gut instinct to become incredibly accurate: Should she trust this person? Was she safe? And that gut instinct became a highly tuned instrument. When we are trying to solve problems, when we are trying to communicate, these signals are as accurate as the best of our cognitive problem-solving abilities.”

Conniff and Templar-Lewis spoke to nearly 40 uncertainty experts in all. And with all of them, Conniff adds, “they kind of learned these techniques themselves, but the scientific evidence really backs it up.”

Scientists spent the first weeks of the year on an expedition to Antarctica to study Thwaites Glacier, which is melting at an alarming rate. If it breaks apart entirely, it could push up global sea levels by two feet over the course of several decades, affecting tens of millions worldwide, according to a New York Times analysis.

The maps below show some of the coastal cities at risk and populated, low-lying areas that could be threatened if the glacier were to collapse today.

These are just the minimum effects that Thwaites’s disintegration would be likely to have on the world’s coastlines. As the glacier breaks apart, global warming will raise sea levels even higher by melting the ice from Greenland and causing oceans to expand in volume. And Thwaites acts as a plug, holding back many of the Antarctic glaciers on land around it. If it collapses, they could break apart and spill into the sea as well.

“Eventually it would take out all of the West Antarctic,” said Richard Alley, a professor of geosciences at Penn State.

Seaside cities all over the world are at risk, but the threat is especially acute in Asia, and includes some of the world’s fastest-growing urban areas, as the map below shows:

The costs of guarding against higher storm surges and more frequent flooding would be huge. One proposal from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to protect parts of New York City would cost more than $52 billion, a price tag that would be out of reach for much of the world.

“We’ll defend the highest-value places that are defensible, but there will be other places that we don’t,” said Benjamin Strauss, Chief Scientist at Climate Central, a nonprofit science organization that produced the elevation models used in this article.

In city after city, the Times’s analysis found that heavily populated areas tend to be near the coasts, as opposed to higher, safer areas.

Shanghai, one of the major cities under threat, already has more than 600,000 residents living below sea level. If average sea levels rose two feet, an additional 4.7 million people would be affected.

Like many of the most vulnerable places, Shanghai is situated on a soft, marshy delta, a landscape naturally prone to sinking, although humans often speed up the process by building structures and draining the groundwater below. The city has also been adding and reinforcing seawalls, and replacing concrete with wetland parks to absorb stormwater.

For places like Shanghai, the cost of defending the city is relatively modest compared with its value, said Jochen Hinkel, director of the Global Climate Forum, an international research organization based in Germany. “There’s so much capital concentrated on a small piece of land,” he said.

But not all places have the resources to protect themselves. Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is expected to swell to over 50 million people by 2050, and will rely extensively on borrowed money to prepare for the worst.

Bangladesh, a low-lying delta nation, is experiencing more volatile monsoons and stronger cyclones as the planet warms. Villages have already been erased as the tides rise and rivers in the region change shape. Saltwater tides have ruined farmland, driving rural residents to the already-crowded capital.

The limits to adaptation

In the United States, a two-foot increase in sea levels wouldn’t affect as many people as in parts of Asia, but the price of adaptation would be astronomical. And even in the wealthiest country in the world, flood defenses aren’t bulletproof.

When the network of pumps and levees failed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the catastrophe killed 1,400 people and displaced more than a million. Recovery in New Orleans has cost about $140 billion. Dozens of smaller communities along the Gulf Coast may not be so lucky.

Coastal cities elsewhere are bracing for higher sea levels. It would cost $13.6 billion to shield part of the San Francisco waterfront. Farther inland in California, it would take $2 billion to improve protections in Stockton. Across the country, a giant barrier at New York City’s harbor could cost $119 billion.

Yet people and buildings continue to accumulate in harm’s way. Miami’s population and real estate values have exploded in recent years, despite the fact that the city is notoriously difficult to protect.

Clearer answers about if, and when, Thwaites could collapse may make all the difference in how well coastal areas are able to adapt. “The value of the information is grotesquely higher than what we’ve invested in it,” Dr. Alley said.

Under President Trump, the United States has abandoned research that could better forecast the effects of Antarctica’s melting ice. It has also promoted the use and burning of fossil fuels, adding to the greenhouse gas emissions that are dangerously heating the planet. That could speed up the glacier’s collapse.

The fallout from decisions made today may not be felt immediately, Dr. Strauss said, but “this is what we’re signing up the future for.”