pygmt: GEOS 3.10.0 breaks GMT on macOS

Description of the problem

On macOS, it seems like GMT is broken with GEOS 3.10 (release 22 Oct to conda-forge https://github.com/conda-forge/geos-feedstock/pull/61). See recent failure on cache_data.yml at https://github.com/GenericMappingTools/pygmt/runs/4059892997?check_suite_focus=true#step:6:8.

Full code that generated the error

from pygmt.helpers.testing import download_test_data
download_test_data()

Full error message

dyld: Library not loaded: @rpath/libgeos_c.1.dylib
  Referenced from: /Users/runner/miniconda3/envs/test/lib/libgmt.6.2.0.dylib
  Reason: Incompatible library version: libgmt.6.dylib requires version 16.0.0 or later, but libgeos_c.1.dylib provides version 1.0.0
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/Users/runner/work/pygmt/pygmt/pygmt/__init__.py", line 70, in <module>
    _begin()
  File "/Users/runner/work/pygmt/pygmt/pygmt/session_management.py", line 16, in begin
    with Session() as lib:
  File "/Users/runner/work/pygmt/pygmt/pygmt/clib/session.py", line 183, in __enter__
    self.create("pygmt-session")
  File "/Users/runner/work/pygmt/pygmt/pygmt/clib/session.py", line 329, in create
    c_create_session = self.get_libgmt_func(
  File "/Users/runner/work/pygmt/pygmt/pygmt/clib/session.py", line 281, in get_libgmt_func
    self._libgmt = load_libgmt()
  File "/Users/runner/work/pygmt/pygmt/pygmt/clib/loading.py", line 59, in load_libgmt
    raise GMTCLibNotFoundError("\n".join(error_msg))
pygmt.exceptions.GMTCLibNotFoundError: Error loading GMT shared library at 'libgmt.dylib'.
dlopen(libgmt.dylib, 6): Library not loaded: @rpath/libgeos_c.1.dylib
  Referenced from: /Users/runner/miniconda3/envs/test/lib/libgmt.6.2.0.dylib
  Reason: Incompatible library version: libgmt.dylib requires version 16.0.0 or later, but libgeos_c.1.dylib provides version 1.0.0
Error: Process completed with exit code 1.

System information

Please paste the output of python -c "import pygmt; pygmt.show_versions()":

pygmt v0.5.0

I don’t have a macOS computer to test or debug, but workaround may be to downgrade to geos=5.9 for now using conda install -c conda-forge geos=3.9. Feel free to move this issue to upstream GMT if it’s better.

Edit: Or maybe it’s an issue on the GEOS side 🙂 There is an ongoing migration for GEOS 3.10 on conda-forge, see https://github.com/conda-forge/conda-forge-pinning-feedstock/pull/2051 and https://conda-forge.org/status/#geos3100

Edit2: A user has reported similar problem on the forum at https://forum.generic-mapping-tools.org/t/import-pygmt-error-after-jupyterlab-installation/2117/4. Might be quite serious…