The Sun's abrupt switch-off and a forecast for the next cycle, a shipping ruling on who keeps a rising market, and the first fine-grained map of Europe's wetlands

The finding was presented on 20 July 2026 at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Birmingham, in a talk on a new precursor for predicting the next solar maximum.[1] It was led by Sandra Chapman, professor of physics and director of the Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics at Warwick.[1] "The Sun doesn't gently go to sleep and then gently wake up again," Chapman said. "Instead, we've discovered that the most extreme space weather switches off quite suddenly at a specific point in every solar cycle."[1]

That switch-off coincides with the belts of active sunspots migrating to below roughly 15 degrees of solar latitude.[1][6] Near the equator the Sun's differential rotation, the uneven spin that winds up the magnetic field and drives the eruptions known as coronal mass ejections, weakens into a more uniform co-rotating band.[6] The largest eruptions that reach Earth taper off from that point.[1]

The predictive step follows from a clock Chapman built for the cycle. Applying a Hilbert transform to the 13-month smoothed sunspot record kept since 1749, the method imposes a uniform timeline on cycles that vary in both height and length.[2][3] The sunspot count at one cycle's switch-off correlates with the peak of the next.[2] Tested against every recorded cycle from 1 to 25, the approach reproduced their maxima about seven years ahead, with a coefficient of determination above 0.7.[2][3]

Run forward, the method points to a moderate Cycle 26. Press materials put the projected peak at about 100 to 120 sunspots, similar to or weaker than the current Cycle 25.[6][7] The peer-reviewed paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal in June 2026, is more guarded, describing a weak-to-moderate maximum of intensity less than, or of order, Cycle 25.[2][3] Chapman cautions that a firmer figure must wait until Cycle 25 reaches its own switch-off, expected in roughly three years.[1][3]

The idea rests on earlier peer-reviewed work. In 2020 and 2021 Chapman and colleagues, among them Scott McIntosh and Robert Leamon, described "terminator" events that mark the abrupt end of one magnetic cycle and the start of the next.[5][4] That group's terminator timing forecast a stronger Cycle 25 than the official consensus of about 115 sunspots, a call broadly borne out by the storms of 2024.[5] On 10 to 13 May that year the strongest geomagnetic storms in more than two decades pushed the aurora as far south as Devon and Cornwall.[1][6]

Earlier warning carries practical weight. Space weather can disturb satellites, communications, navigation systems and power grids, and operators plan around the rise and fall of each cycle.[1] A forecast six to seven years before a maximum, rather than one that waits for solar minimum, would widen that planning window.[1][2]

The dispute arose from the sale of the Lila Lisbon. Great Asia Maritime agreed to buy the vessel from Orion Shipping and Trading for US$15m on the 2012 Norwegian Saleform, the standard contract used across much of the world's second-hand tonnage trade.[5] The sellers, through proven negligence, failed to be ready to complete by the cancelling date, and the buyers cancelled. By then the market had risen, and the ship was worth about US$16.85m, leaving the buyers roughly US$1.85m worse off than had the sale gone through.[2][8]

The default position at common law pulled the other way. Under the rule associated with Financings Ltd v Baldock, a party that terminates in reaction to a breach cannot recover loss-of-bargain damages, the value of the lost contract itself, unless the breach was repudiatory, meaning serious enough to let the innocent party treat the contract as at an end.[5][7] A negligent delay in delivery is not, without more, such a breach. The question was whether the sale form's own compensation wording displaced that limit.

It did. Clause 14 provides that a defaulting seller shall pay the buyers for their loss in the following terms.

"they shall make due compensation to the Buyers for their loss and for all expenses together with interest if their failure is due to proven negligence and whether or not the Buyers cancel this Agreement."[7]

The Court, in a unanimous judgment given jointly by Lord Hamblen and Lord Burrows, held that the word "loss" here is general and unqualified.[1][2] Read naturally, it extends to the buyers' loss of bargain, and there was no other plausible reading of what the clause was meant to compensate on cancellation.[5]

The mechanism lies in the distinction between excluding a right and conferring one. Clear words are needed to strip a party of a common law entitlement, but not to grant an additional contractual remedy. There was, the Court reasoned, no good reason to read an express compensation clause as excluding damages for loss of bargain absent words to that effect.[2][6] The Financings v Baldock limit had no application once the parties had gone beyond a bare cancellation right and agreed an express compensation provision.[5]

The route through the courts was not straight. An arbitration tribunal awarded the buyers their loss of bargain; the Commercial Court reversed that, confining clause 14 to accrued losses and wasted expenses.[3] The Court of Appeal restored the award, and the Supreme Court has now dismissed the sellers' appeal and affirmed that outcome.[4]

The reach of the ruling follows from the ubiquity of the form. Because the Norwegian Saleform sits behind a large share of second-hand ship sales, sellers who delay through negligence now face clear exposure to market movements when values rise, and drafters may look to cap or narrow the compensation wording where they wish to limit that risk.[8]

The map, published in Nature in July, is the first harmonised picture of six wetland types across 38 European countries.[1][2] It was built from satellite imagery and machine learning by a team at the University of Copenhagen's Global Wetland Center, led by Gyula Máté Kovács. The classification covers inland marshes, peatbogs, salt marshes, salines, intertidal flats, and moors and heathlands. Peatbogs are waterlogged ground where dead plants pile up as peat instead of rotting, locking carbon into the soil. In total the map traces roughly 413,500 square kilometres of wetland, with an overall accuracy the authors put at about 96 percent.[1]

The headline finding is fragmentation. Between 27 and 33 percent of the mapped wetland area lies in patches smaller than 25 hectares, and 7 to 11 percent sits in patches under a single hectare.[1] Many of these fragments fell below the resolution of coarser datasets and so went unrecorded. They still function as refuges, feeding grounds and stepping stones for wildlife moving through intensively farmed land.[5]

Condition, not just extent, is written into the map. About a fifth of the wetland area, roughly 20 percent, is heavily affected by human activity, with inland marshes the most disturbed type.[1] More than a fifth of Europe's peatbogs are already degraded.[2] Because the satellite record captures signs of drainage and conversion, the analysis can point to where a wetland has been damaged rather than merely where one exists.[5]

The carbon estimate is a projection layered on top of that measurement, and the authors hedge it. Their modelling suggests disturbed wetlands may have shed as much as roughly 4.9 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent from their soils, measured against an undisturbed baseline, with a lower bound closer to 0.8 billion tonnes.[1] The university's summary rounds the upper figure to about 5 billion tonnes and likens it to roughly a year and a half of the European Union's total carbon dioxide emissions.[2] The map itself is a measurement; this number is an inference about what damage may already have cost.

Peatlands emerge as the single type the study flags for priority restoration. They store carbon efficiently while intact, yet they leak greenhouse gases once drained, which makes a degraded peatbog both a lost sink and an active source.[2][1] Definitions complicate the picture, as Kovács notes that what counts as peatland in Denmark may not be classified the same way in Scotland, which is part of why a common map matters.[2]

The timing is deliberate. Under the Nature Restoration Law, Regulation (EU) 2024/1991, member states must plan to restore at least 30 percent of their degraded wetlands by 2030.[6] That mandate has until now lacked a shared, high-resolution basis for deciding which sites to target. By pairing extent with condition, the open dataset turns a continental obligation into specific coordinates that governments can act on.[2]