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Alluvial fans form along a braided river channel on Severny Island in the Russian Arctic in an image acquired on August 1, 2025, by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 .

NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin

Editor’s Note: Today’s story is the answer to the July Puzzler .

Call it an alluvial face-off. On the southern end of Severny Island in the Russian Arctic, rivers rush down from rugged terrain flanking a broad valley. Upon reaching flatter ground, the waters slow and distribute sediment into cone-shaped features called alluvial fans . Several appear in opposing orientations alongside a braided river in this Landsat 9 image.

Severny Island (Ostrov Severnyy) is a mountainous, uninhabited landmass in the frigid high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. Part of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, the island is largely covered in glacial ice. Some glaciers, especially in the north, terminate in the sea, while others end on land, feeding meltwater into glacial streams.

Sediment-laden streams, along with the island’s topography, create favorable conditions for the formation of alluvial fans. The features typically appear at the base of steep mountain ranges, where narrow river channels open onto flatter terrain. There, rivers can slow, divide into smaller channels, and deposit sediment . Over time, the channels migrate back and forth to build up fan-shaped deposits. Dueling fans line several northwest-southeast-trending valleys in the wider view below.

A wide view of southern Severny Island in the Russian Arctic shows ice-capped mountains interrupted by broad valleys lined with alluvial fans. The image was acquired on August 1, 2025, by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 .

NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin

Seasonal snowmelt and glacial runoff likely keep Severny’s rivers supplied with ample fan-building material. Hydrologists note that higher river flows during the warmer months, driven by snowmelt, can carry more sediment out of the mountains. Glaciers also produce large volumes of eroded material as they grind downslope, some of which flushes out in meltwater.

Smaller, land-terminating mountain glaciers, like those on southern Severny Island, are particularly prone to melting as the atmosphere warms . Severny’s ice is relatively understudied due to its remoteness, but satellite observations give scientists an understanding of its health. Recent analyses incorporating digital elevation models found that land-terminating glaciers across the Novaya Zemlya archipelago thinned during the 2000s and 2010s , especially at lower elevations.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey . Story by Lindsey Doermann.

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August 1, 2025

JPEG (19.56 MB)

References & Resources

Małecki, J. (2022) Recent contrasting behaviour of mountain glaciers across the European High Arctic revealed by ArcticDEM data . The Cryosphere , 16, 2067–2082.

Melkonian, A.K., et al. (2016) Recent changes in glacier velocities and thinning at Novaya Zemlya . Remote Sensing of Environment , 174, 244-257.

NASA Earth Observatory (2009, July 30) Novaya Zemlya . Accessed July 13, 2026.

National Geographic Society (2023, October 19) Alluvial Fan . Accessed July 13, 2026.

Science Education Resource Center, Carleton College (2026, June 9) Cold climate conditions as a driver of alluvial fan deposition in the Lost River Range, Idaho, USA . Accessed July 13, 2026.

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Following the news of Microsoft's plan to cut 3,200 employees at Xbox , analysts predict that the company's next-generation console won't do as well as PlayStation's – yet again.

The new predictions come straight from S&P Global Market Intelligence Kagan (as per GamesIndustry.biz ), with its analysis first looking back at the past – and current – market.

"For now, the market faces a compounding problem: hardware that is either too old or too expensive for the median consumer, a software slate that is thin outside a handful of tentpole releases, and a macro environment that keeps any meaningful price relief off the table."

That checks out. Between the RAM shortages and Sony's announcement regarding its plan to axe physical discs for all new PlayStation games starting in 2028, it's not looking great for consoles. All of this, coupled with an "unhealthy Xbox," as the Microsoft gaming brand's CEO Asha Sharma dubs it, proves as much.

Nonetheless, S&P's console forecast works out what sales Sony and Xbox might see in the future – even if they're not as impressive.

Starting with Sony, the analysis notes that the PlayStation 5's own sales have dipped, and "S&P expects shipments to decline further" this year. The recent PlayStation 5 price increase , which saw the base console rise to $650 and Pro to a whopping $900, isn't helping.

We are talking about a "six-year-old device," as S&P puts it – and the analysts aren't sure big launches like GTA 6 are enough to make up for this price gap.

"That framing does not inspire confidence for 2027 or beyond."

Still, S&P's "forecast models a potential PlayStation 6 launch in 2028, contributing four million units in its first year and scaling to 17.2 million by 2030." Those figures might not look like all that much, especially when taking the Nintendo Switch 2 and its 17 million sales into account, but they're a whole lot better than what S&P thinks Xbox might see around the same time.

The firm predicts the next Xbox console – codenamed Project Helix – will sell about two million units in its first year post-launch, rising to just 7.3 million by 2030. That's… a lot smaller a figure than the 17.2 million S&P thinks the PlayStation 6 might hit.

But, as the analysis notes, "The actual outcome could look very different. A fully open PC platform with Xbox branding would not really resemble a console and likely not be counted in this model."

It concludes: "Our forecast is functionally splitting the difference between a proper Xbox successor and an Xbox-certification program with PC OEMs, and readers should treat the post-2027 Microsoft trajectory as a range of outcomes contingent on decisions yet to be made or revealed."

That makes sense, I suppose. After all, we don't know too much about Project Helix, and Xbox has been hard on its journey to bridge the gap between console and PC.

Should the new Xbox, whatever it may look like, sell that much less than its PlayStation counterpart, though… I'm not sure how things will play out on either end.

After "incomprehensible" Xbox layoffs, id Software producer says worker-owned studios are "the only path forward."

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