Oceans Reach Record Heat as Marine Heat Waves Spread Across Europe

The average surface temperature of the world’s oceans outside the polar regions reached 70.0°F (21.1°C) on Aug. 22, the highest daily level in reliable records dating to 1979.

The new mark barely surpassed the previous record of 70.0°F (21.09°C), set in March 2024. But its timing was especially unusual. Global ocean temperatures normally peak in March or April, near the end of the Southern Hemisphere summer, rather than in August.

A strengthening El Niño is adding warmth across the tropical Pacific, but scientists say the natural weather cycle is operating on top of decades of human-caused ocean heating. The number of marine heat-wave days worldwide has more than tripled since the early 1990s.

Around Europe, researchers found that carbon pollution from burning coal, oil and gas had fueled a “massive expansion” of marine heat waves during the summer.

World Weather Attribution examined the hottest two-week periods across the Mediterranean, the Bay of Biscay, the Iberian coast and waters surrounding Britain and Ireland. In three of the four regions, temperatures of the intensity observed this year would have been virtually impossible before the burning of oil, gas and coal created a greenhouse effect that has warmed the planet.

Human-caused warming added about 3.6°F (2°C) to the extreme heat in the Mediterranean, 2.5°F (1.4°C) around the Bay of Biscay and Iberian Peninsula, and 2.3°F (1.3°C) around Ireland and the English Channel.

Climate change has also dramatically enlarged the area affected. About 80% of the western Mediterranean experienced marine heat-wave conditions, compared with an estimated 40% in a climate without modern warming. In the eastern Mediterranean, the affected area expanded from an estimated 9% to nearly 70%.

The North Sea provided another warning. Water temperatures off the Dutch coast reached a record 70.7°F (21.5°) in August, narrowly exceeding the previous mark of 70.5°F (21.4°C) set in 2018. Measurements there show the sea has been warming by about 0.7°F (0.4°C) per decade since 1984. The latest marine heat wave had persisted for about 80 days by mid-August.

Warm water may initially seem inviting to swimmers, but prolonged marine heat can kill corals, sponges, seaweed and other species that form the foundation of marine ecosystems. Fish may move toward cooler waters, disrupting food webs, fisheries and coastal economies, while species unable to escape can suffer massive deaths.

Hotter oceans also expand and raise sea levels, release more heat and moisture into the atmosphere and can contribute to heavier rainfall. As seawater warms, it may also become less effective at absorbing carbon dioxide, weakening one of the planet’s most important natural buffers against climate change.

The European study is a rapid analysis that has not yet undergone peer review. But its findings are consistent with longer-term observations showing that marine heat waves are becoming more frequent, extensive and intense as greenhouse gases continue accumulating in the atmosphere.

Europe Warms to Air Conditioning

Air conditioning has long been caricatured across Europe as an American affliction — a wasteful, energy-hungry indulgence.

Air conditioning is widespread in Japan, China and many of the world’s hotter regions, but much of Europe traditionally relied on shutters, fans and open windows—and regarded air conditioning with suspicion.

Two consecutive summers of punishing heat appear to be changing that attitude.

A YouGov survey in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain found that 61% to 73% of respondents favored installing air conditioning as standard in new homes. Between 65% and 75% wanted it to be easier for residents to install systems without permission from landlords or local authorities, while majorities in every country supported government subsidies.

When forced to choose, more respondents in every country except Italy said protecting people with additional air conditioning should take priority over reducing carbon emissions. Between 41% and 48% chose cooling, compared with 20% to 33% who placed emissions cuts first.

The shift follows repeated heatwaves that brought temperatures near or above 104°F (40°C). France alone recorded about 5,700 excess deaths during a historic heatwave in June, while thousands more were reported elsewhere in Europe.

Air conditioning is already common in Italy and Spain but remains comparatively rare farther north. The survey estimated that only 16% of Germans and 11% of Britons had it. Cost, rather than concern about the climate, was the most frequently cited obstacle.

Cooling carries its own environmental price through electricity demand and refrigerants. But efficient systems powered by cleaner electricity can reduce that burden, while shutters, shade, insulation and reflective roofs can keep buildings cooler without continuously consuming power. The emerging challenge is therefore not simply choosing air conditioning or emissions cuts, but protecting people from heat without intensifying the warming that makes such protection necessary.

Fat Marmot Week Celebrates Colorado’s Plumpest Hibernators

Move over, Fat Bear Week. Colorado’s yellow-bellied marmots are holding their own competition to determine which rotund rodent appears best prepared for winter.

The first Fat Marmot Week invited the public to vote online from Aug. 24–29 in a tournament featuring animals living near the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado. The contest is modeled on Alaska’s popular celebration of brown bears fattening themselves before winter.

Marmots are cat-sized ground squirrels found in North America, Europe and Asia. The yellow-bellied marmots of the Rocky Mountains spend summer grazing almost continuously on grasses and wildflowers, roughly doubling their body size and reaching as much as 13 pounds (6 kilograms) in weight.

All that extra padding is essential. Unlike bears, which enter a lighter state called torpor and can awaken during winter, marmots are true hibernators. After sealing themselves inside their burrows, their body temperature can fall to about 41°F (5°C), their hearts slow to only a few beats per minute and they may breathe just once every minute or two.

They remain in that state for about five months, surviving entirely on the fat accumulated during summer. By spring, the impressively round animals that entered their burrows emerge dramatically slimmer.

Scientists know many of the contestants individually. Stonehenge is known for chirping at passing mountain bikers, while Citroen is paired with a female that leads a matriarchal colony. Researchers say marmots also display distinct personalities. Some are sociable and live in colonies of as many as 30 animals, while others prefer solitude.

Their attitudes toward scientists vary as well. Researchers capture the animals in harmless wire traps baited with oats and peanut butter so they can be weighed, measured and examined. Wary marmots resist the temptation, while others cheerfully enter the same traps several times in one morning.

The marmot project began in 1962 and is among the world’s longest-running studies of individually identified wild mammals. Its decades of observations have helped scientists understand marmot personalities, family relationships, reproduction, hibernation and survival.

Fat Marmot Week was created to introduce that research to a wider audience and attract financial support. The researchers have even posted marmot videos on the adult-content platform OnlyFans, prompting one enthusiast to create a marmot-themed cryptocurrency that donates transaction fees to the project.

Despite such unorthodox fundraising, the contest itself is simple: admire the contestants and vote for the marmot that looks most gloriously prepared for a long winter underground. For these alpine rodents, being plump is not an indulgence—it is a survival strategy.

Hotter Forecast: How models may be underestimating how much the planet is warming.

For people already enduring deadlier heat, drought and flooding, every additional fraction of a degree brings greater danger. New research suggests the world could become about 25% hotter than previously projected, even if greenhouse-gas emissions follow the expected course.

Models differ widely in the amount of warming they project from rising carbon dioxide. Those producing the highest temperatures have often been given less weight because they simulated more warming during recent decades than was actually observed.

Researchers at ETH Zurich now say that comparison was distorted by natural climate variations that temporarily held down surface temperatures between 1981 and 2014. That period included the so-called global warming hiatus of the early 2000s, when heat continued accumulating in the climate system even though the rise in surface temperatures briefly slowed.

The team tried to filter out cooling influences such as La Niña and then compared the models with satellite measurements of Earth’s energy imbalance — the difference between the solar energy entering the atmosphere and the heat escaping into space. Those observations suggest that models forecasting greater warming may more accurately reflect how much heat the planet is actually retaining.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body that assesses climate science, and the new study both use the same yardstick: how much the planet would warm as atmospheric carbon dioxide rose from its preindustrial level of about 280 parts per million to twice that amount, or 560 parts per million. Carbon dioxide has already reached about 429 parts per million, slightly more than halfway to that doubling. Because its warming influence does not increase in a straight line, today’s level represents roughly three-fifths of the effect expected from such a doubling.

Using this measure, the IPCC estimates warming of 1.2°C to 2.4°C (2.2°F to 4.3°F). The new study raises the range to 1.9°C to 2.6°C (3.4°F to 4.7°F), with a central estimate of 2.25°C (4.1°F).

If confirmed, the findings would mean that rising carbon dioxide could produce more warming than many current climate models estimate.

The researchers caution that their findings rely partly on a relatively short satellite record and need confirmation from other evidence. Even so, the study suggests that past temperature trends may have provided false reassurance about the pace of future warming. If the planet is more sensitive to carbon dioxide than previously believed, the remaining time to cut carbon emissions and avoid the most dangerous consequences of global heating is even shorter.

Australia Vaccinates Penguins as Bird Flu Spreads Into Mainland Mammals

Australia’s attempt to protect thousands of little penguins from H5N1 bird flu has gained new urgency after the virus caused its first confirmed mammal death on the country’s mainland.

The Australian mainland was the last continent where the globally spreading H5N1 strain had not been detected until a migratory seabird tested positive in June.

A long-nosed fur seal found dead at Beachport in South Australia tested positive for the highly pathogenic virus. The animal showed no signs of injury, and officials believe it was probably infected through contact with sick seabirds or a contaminated coastal environment.

By late August, authorities had recorded nearly 300 confirmed or presumed infection events around the country, including mass die-offs involving more than 1,000 greater crested terns on islands off South Australia.

Although this was the first confirmed mammal case on the mainland, H5N1 had already reached mammals in Australian territory. On remote Heard Island in the Southern Ocean, scientists estimated that about 13,000 southern elephant seal pups died during an outbreak that also affected penguins and fur seals.

Seals and sea lions are particularly vulnerable because they breed, rest and feed near seabird colonies where large amounts of the virus may accumulate. Australian authorities have classified long-nosed fur seals and endangered Australian sea lions as facing very high risk. Conservationists warn that a major outbreak among the country’s already declining sea lions could threaten the species’ survival.

Teams on Victoria State’s Phillip Island are carrying out what is believed to be the world’s largest vaccination campaign involving wild birds.

Each evening, workers wait for little penguins—the world’s smallest penguin species—to emerge from the ocean. The birds are guided into temporary pens, weighed, measured, microchipped and given a first dose of H5N1 vaccine before being released to their burrows. Workers must catch the same birds again several weeks later to provide a second dose.

More than 1,000 penguins have received their first injection. The program aims to vaccinate 5,000 birds at Phillip Island and St Kilda, using about 10,000 doses.

Phillip Island supports a colony of roughly 40,000 little penguins. Their habit of returning to the same beach paths and burrows makes vaccination possible, but their close-packed colonies also create ideal conditions for rapid transmission. Worst-case modeling suggests a severe outbreak could kill between 8,000 and 16,000 birds there.

Officials stress that the vaccine is not a shield against infection. It is intended to strengthen the birds’ immune response, reduce deaths and improve their chances of recovery. Vaccination also cannot be used practically for most of the hundreds of other wild species potentially exposed to H5N1.

The risk to the general public remains low, according to Australian and international health authorities, and there have been no mainland detections in poultry or livestock. People are nevertheless being warned not to touch sick or dead birds or marine mammals because those with frequent exposure to infected animals face a higher risk.

For Australia’s wildlife, however, the danger is immediate. The simultaneous race to vaccinate penguins and the virus’s arrival in a mainland seal show how quickly an outbreak that began with a few migratory seabirds is spreading between native species.

Two Earthquakes Rattle Northern and Eastern Japan

A magnitude 5.8 earthquake jolted Tokyo and surrounding prefectures early Sunday, injuring 37 people and disrupting rail service across eastern Japan. No tsunami occurred, and authorities reported no major structural damage.

The earthquake struck at 2 a.m. while many residents were asleep. Its center was approximately 43 miles (70 kilometers) beneath southern Ibaraki Prefecture, northeast of Tokyo.

Shaking reached “lower 5” on Japan’s seven-level seismic-intensity scale in parts of Tokyo, Ibaraki, Saitama and Chiba. At that level, many people have difficulty walking without holding onto something, while unsecured objects and dishes may fall.

Authorities reported 15 injuries in Tokyo, nine in Saitama, eight in Kanagawa, four in Chiba and one in Ibaraki. Most were minor and occurred when people fell or struck furniture and doors after being startled from sleep.

The earthquake delayed trains serving Tokyo, Narita Airport and northeastern Japan, while some services operated at reduced speeds. Officials were investigating whether the shaking ruptured a water pipe in Tokyo’s Koto Ward. Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority reported no abnormalities at nuclear power plants or other facilities handling radioactive material.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi established a government task force to assess the damage, while the Japan Meteorological Agency warned that similarly strong shaking could occur in the following days.

Nearly 21 hours later, a separate magnitude 6.0 earthquake struck beneath the seabed off southern Hokkaido near Urakawa. Although stronger by magnitude, it produced less intense shaking on land, caused no reported injuries or significant damage and triggered no tsunami warning.

Tropical Storm Narra’s Slow Path Triggers Deadly Flooding

Tropical Storm Narra never reached typhoon strength, but its slow, erratic movement over the Gulf of Tonkin produced days of torrential rain, deadly landslides and widespread flooding across northern Vietnam and southern China.

Narra’s sustained winds peaked at about 46 mph (74 km/h), well below the 74 mph (119 km/h) threshold for a typhoon. Rather than sweeping quickly ashore, the storm lingered offshore and repeatedly changed direction, allowing rain to fall over the same areas for several days.

In northern Vietnam, two people were killed in the mountainous province of Lang Son, where a landslide struck at least one home. Three others were injured in Hanoi and the provinces of Son La and Quang Ninh.

Rainfall since Aug. 20 reached 28 inches (712 millimeters) at Mau Son in Lang Son and nearly as much at Bai Chay near Ha Long Bay. Floodwaters and landslides destroyed two houses, damaged more than 1,000 others and inundated 3,746 homes. More than 2,800 households remained isolated by flooded roads and were being supplied by boat.

Authorities evacuated 7,751 households as rivers rose and slopes became unstable. By late on Tuesday, Aug. 25, about 3,200 households remained in shelters while others began returning home as water levels slowly receded.

The storm also flooded or damaged more than 80,000 acres (33,000 hectares) of rice fields and other crops, killed thousands of poultry and livestock and disrupted roads at more than 400 landslide or inundation sites. Nearly 192,400 electricity customers lost service at some point during the storm, although power had been restored to more than 92% by Tuesday evening.

Across the border in China’s Guangxi region, authorities relocated about 54,000 people. More than 15,000 were evacuated around Chongzuo after rivers surpassed a record level set in 2008. Television footage showed muddy water covering roads and reaching the roofs of some low-rise buildings.

Narra eventually weakened into a tropical depression as it moved toward southern China. Its modest winds underscored a familiar tropical-cyclone danger: A storm does not need to become a typhoon to cause catastrophic flooding when it stalls near densely populated coasts and saturated mountain terrain.

Global Temperature Extremes

• The hottest temperature recorded this week by the World Meteorological Organization’s 7,600 land-based synoptic weather stations was 122°F (50°C) at Kairouan, Tunisia.

• The coldest temperature in an inhabited location was -100°F (-73°C) at the U.S.-operated Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station.

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service

When Heat Overwhelms the Human Body

As continued greenhouse gas emissions push extreme temperatures ever closer to the limits of what the human body can survive, research shows that people can lose the ability to stay cool at lower temperatures than scientists once believed. The danger depends not only on air temperature but also on humidity, age, health, physical activity and access to relief.

The body cools itself mainly through the evaporation of sweat. As humidity rises, however, the air becomes less able to absorb moisture, eventually preventing the body from shedding heat fast enough to keep its core temperature stable. Scientists measure this combination of heat and humidity using “wet-bulb” temperature, which indicates how effectively water — and therefore sweat — can evaporate.

A wet-bulb temperature of 95°F (35°C) was long considered the theoretical upper limit for human survival. Beyond that point, scientists believed that even a healthy person resting in the shade with water could maintain a safe body temperature for only a few hours.

Laboratory experiments suggest the practical limit is lower. Penn State researchers found that the core temperatures of 25 healthy young adults began rising continuously at wet-bulb readings near 88°F (31°C) in warm, humid conditions and at even lower readings in hotter, drier air.

A separate study of 36 healthy adults age 35 or younger found that participants performing light office work could maintain stable temperatures for eight hours at wet-bulb readings of 90°F and 91°F (32°C and 33°C), but not at 93°F or 95°F (34°C or 35°C). At 95°F (35°C), researchers projected that life-threatening hyperthermia would develop after roughly seven to nine hours.

The results are not necessarily contradictory because the studies used different methods. The Penn State experiments gradually increased heat or humidity to identify when the body first began struggling, while the longer study held participants at fixed temperatures to see whether they eventually stabilized.

Nor is there one temperature at which everyone suddenly becomes unable to survive. Sunlight, wind, clothing, hydration, exertion and acclimation all influence heat tolerance. The prolonged-exposure study involved young, healthy adults working indoors in the shade with unlimited water, so its findings cannot be applied directly to outdoor laborers, children, pregnant women or people with chronic illnesses.

The physiological limits are substantially lower for older adults. A Stanford-led study published in The Lancet Planetary Health combined laboratory-tested heat limits for different age groups with climate and population projections. It found that people 60 and older would experience more frequent and widespread heat beyond their bodies’ ability to compensate at 2.7°F (1.5°C) of global warming above pre-industrial levels than young adults would at 7.2°F (4°C).

At 2.7°F (1.5°C) of warming, about 290 million older adults could face at least 180 hours of such heat each year. Each additional 1.8°F (1°C) of global heating would expose about 1 billion more people to that level of danger, with the greatest burden across South and Southeast Asia, eastern China, West Africa and the Persian Gulf. At 5.4°F (3°C) of global warming, older residents of cities including Delhi, Lahore and Dubai could experience about 1,000 hours or more each year when their bodies cannot shed heat fast enough to maintain a safe internal temperature.

Most heat-related illness and death already occur below these physiological limits. Heat can worsen heart, kidney and respiratory disease long before a person develops heatstroke, especially among people who work outdoors, live alone or lack air conditioning.

Cooling centers, heat warnings, shade, reflective roofs and reliable electricity can reduce the toll, but adaptation cannot eliminate every danger as temperatures rise. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions remains the only way to limit how much more of the planet becomes exposed to extreme heat.

The research shows that the boundary between an uncomfortable climate and an intolerable one is different for each person — and for hundreds of millions of older adults, it is closer than previously understood.

Extreme Heat Brings Champagne’s Earliest Harvest

Workers entered some vineyards in northeastern France on Aug. 12 to begin the earliest Champagne harvest since records started in the early 20th century.

Most picking was expected between Aug. 20 and 25, about two weeks earlier than has been typical in recent years. Before 2000, Champagne grapes were almost always harvested in September or October.

The accelerated schedule followed an extraordinary sequence of warm weather. Météo-France says spring 2026 was the hottest France has recorded, averaging 3.1°F (1.7°C) above normal. June was also the country’s hottest on record, followed by a 16-day July heat wave that ranked among the longest France has experienced.

Heat speeds the accumulation of sugar in grapes while reducing acidity and shortening the time available for flavors and other compounds to mature. That leaves winemakers with a difficult choice: pick early to retain acidity or wait for fuller flavor development while risking grapes that are too sweet.

The balance is especially important for Champagne. Its identity depends on freshness, acidity, finesse and relatively low alcohol, qualities that can be harder to preserve when grapes ripen rapidly.

Growers are experimenting with new grape varieties, protective structures and other techniques. The Comité Champagne has also established a research and development center to explore how the industry can adapt. But the rules protecting the Champagne appellation restrict where the grapes can be grown, which varieties may be used and practices such as irrigating mature vines.

The changing conditions arrive as producers face weaker demand, higher labor and fuel costs and tariffs in the United States, Champagne’s largest export market. The industry reduced the amount of the 2026 harvest that growers may sell, partly to bring inventories into balance.

Farther north, the same warming trend is creating opportunities. England produced about 16.5 million bottles of wine last year, while its exports rose 55%. Its chalky soils resemble those of northern France, and French Champagne house Taittinger has already established an English sparkling-wine operation in Kent.

English growers say their harvests have shifted from October or November toward late summer and early fall. Their French counterparts remain confident that centuries of winemaking knowledge and new research will preserve Champagne’s quality.

The record-early harvest offers another measure of how a warming climate is altering familiar seasons. Climate change may not bring an end to Champagne, but it is already changing when and how its grapes must be grown.

El Niño sends seabirds northward in search for food

Hundreds of blue-footed boobies and other seabirds are gathering near the entrance to the Panama Canal after a strengthening El Niño disrupted marine food supplies across the eastern Pacific.

The birds live and feed in the nutrient-rich waters along the Pacific coast of the Americas. Blue-footed boobies sometimes appear in the Gulf of Panama, but researchers say the number now being recorded near Panama City is highly unusual.

The Panama Audubon Society said data submitted to the eBird citizen-science platform showed groups of 60 to 400 blue-footed boobies around Peñón de San José and nearby areas beginning in June. Counts during the 2014-16 El Niño ranged from 21 to 200, while those during the 2023-24 event ranged from three to 62.

The birds are not undertaking a normal seasonal migration. They appear to have been displaced by hunger.

El Niño is causing anchovies, sardines and other small fish eaten by seabirds to decline or leave their usual waters. The warming of the central and eastern tropical Pacific slows the rise of cold, nutrient-rich water near South America, reducing the plankton that supports these fish.

The World Meteorological Organization expects the developing El Niño to strengthen during the August-to-October period, increasing temperatures across much of the world and producing major shifts in rainfall. Panama is already experiencing exceptional heat and below-average rainfall in parts of the watershed supplying the canal.

For seabirds, the consequences can persist long after they find new feeding grounds. A study that followed 2,556 blue-footed boobies found that birds exposed to warm El Niño conditions early in life were underweight when they left the nest and bred less frequently. Other research has linked warm-water food shortages to delayed nesting, smaller broods and reproductive failure.

If cooler, nutrient-rich waters return, the visitors may disappear from Panama as quickly as they arrived. But their displacement shows how rapidly a change below the ocean surface can spread through the food chain.

El Niño is a recurring natural cycle, and scientists have not reached a consensus on how global warming will change its frequency or strength. But the current event is developing in oceans already made substantially warmer by continued greenhouse gas emissions, increasing the possibility that its effects will compound record global heat.

Trans-Atlantic Flights Will Be Rerouted to Avoid Heat-Trapping Contrails

Aircraft crossing part of the North Atlantic will be directed around atmospheric conditions that produce persistent, heat-trapping condensation trails in the first trial of contrail avoidance across an entire air-traffic region.

The familiar white lines behind aircraft are ice clouds that form when water vapor in jet exhaust freezes around soot particles in cold, humid air. Many disappear quickly, but others spread and remain for hours. Although contrails can reflect some sunlight back into space during the day, they also prevent heat from escaping the atmosphere. Their overall effect is atmospheric warming and is estimated to account for roughly one-third of aviation’s climate impact.

Operation Blue Skies will begin in November in Shanwick airspace, which covers the eastern portion of the heavily travelled North Atlantic aviation corridor. The area is responsible for an estimated 5% of global contrail warming, much of it during winter nights.

Artificial intelligence forecasts developed by Google will identify layers of the atmosphere where persistent warming contrails are likely to form. Air traffic controllers will then direct selected aircraft as much as 2,000 feet (600 m) higher or lower, using procedures similar to those already employed to avoid turbulence and severe weather.

The £5 million program will include two four-month trials during the winters of 2026-27 and 2027-28. About 10,000 flights are expected to cross the airspace during the trial periods each year, although only a small proportion will need to change altitude. Researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge will independently evaluate the results.

Changing altitude can increase fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. Organizers estimate that an affected flight might burn about 220 pounds (100 kg) of additional fuel, but they say avoiding a strongly warming contrail could prevent a much larger short-term climate impact.

Previous trials involving individual airlines found that targeted route changes reduced contrail formation by 50% to 60%. The new trial will determine whether the technique can be safely incorporated into routine air traffic control on a much larger scale.

Contrail avoidance cannot eliminate aviation’s carbon emissions, which remain in the atmosphere far longer. Research shows that most contrail warming comes from a small number of flights, so slightly changing the altitude of those flights could quickly and cheaply reduce aviation’s climate impact.

Ocean Giants Slowly Return to the Southeastern Atlantic

Blue and fin whales are appearing more frequently in southeastern Atlantic waters off Namibia and western South Africa, offering a rare sign of recovery from the devastation caused by 20th-century commercial whaling.

For a study published in the African Journal of Marine Science, researchers assembled confirmed sightings and strandings recorded between 1964 and March 2025. They found that 95% of the observations occurred from 2012 onward, suggesting the whales may be gradually returning to parts of their former range.

The researchers documented 12 blue whale sightings, one stranding and five additional published records. Fin whales were encountered more often, with 76 sightings and six strandings. Blue whales were seen primarily from late spring through autumn, while fin whales appeared throughout the year.

Historical whaling records indicate that the southeastern Atlantic may once have provided important feeding and nursery habitat for both species. Industrial whalers killed an estimated 350,000 blue whales and 725,000 fin whales between 1913 and 1978, leaving Antarctic blue whales especially depleted.

The findings are encouraging, but the researchers caution that the sightings do not demonstrate a complete recovery. Most were individual sightings rather than records from a regular, long-term survey. Part of the recent increase may simply reflect more reports from observers aboard ships far from shore.

The whales also continue to face ship strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, underwater noise, pollution and changes in marine food supplies. Researchers are calling for expanded underwater acoustic monitoring and more trained observers aboard commercial vessels. Even so, the return of these ocean giants suggests that decades of protection are allowing at least some whales to reclaim waters from which commercial hunting had nearly erased them.

Hurricane Lala Leaves Extensive Damage Across Hawaii

Hurricane Lala swept past Hawaii without making landfall, but torrential rain and powerful winds from its spiraling outer bands caused severe flooding, damaged homes and bridges and left more than 100,000 customers without electricity.

A 90-year-old woman reported missing from her neighborhood in Naalehu, near the southern tip of Hawaii Island, was found dead Monday. Officials said her death appeared to have resulted from the disaster, although police were continuing their investigation.

Lala strengthened into a Category 1 hurricane as it approached the Big Island of Hawaii on Saturday. Its center passed about 30 miles (48 kilometers) south of the island, but hurricane-force gusts and more than 30 inches (76 centimeters) of rain struck some areas.

Floodwaters swept homes from their foundations, uprooted trees and triggered landslides before the storm weakened to a tropical storm Sunday and moved westward.

At least 100 homes and six bridges were damaged or destroyed in the island’s southern Kau district. Sections of a major highway collapsed, temporarily isolating Pahala, where the region’s only hospital is located. Emergency teams used helicopters, drones and high-water vehicles to reach stranded residents and inspect remote communities.

The storm also caused widespread destruction elsewhere in the state. Trees and power lines fell from Honolulu to Hawaii Island, several hospitals relied on backup generators and utility officials warned that electricity might not be restored to some rural communities for weeks. Gov. Josh Green estimated that damage across the state could total hundreds of millions of dollars.

Although Lala had moved away, emergency officials warned residents to remain cautious around unstable buildings, floodwaters, downed power lines and debris.

Lala brought Hawaii some of its most severe tropical cyclone impacts since Category-4 Hurricane Iniki devastated Kauai in 1992.

Flores Earthquake Death Toll Rises as Thousands Await Aid

The death toll from the powerful earthquake that struck Indonesia’s Flores Island has risen to at least 73, with nearly 1,200 people injured and more than 40,000 driven from their homes. Rescue and relief teams were still struggling Thursday to reach remote communities cut off by landslides, damaged roads and disrupted communications.

The magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck shortly before 6 a.m. Saturday at a shallow depth of about 6 miles (10 kilometers). The shaking triggered landslides across six districts, destroyed or damaged thousands of buildings and sent residents fleeing after authorities issued a tsunami warning, which was later lifted.

Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency said at least 11,925 homes had been damaged. Local authorities also reported damage to 658 schools, 172 health facilities, 187 government offices and 172 places of worship. Thousands of survivors were sheltering in tents, evacuation centers and makeshift camps while awaiting food, clean water, medicine and other supplies.

Strong aftershocks have added to the fear. Many families have refused to sleep inside damaged homes, worried that further shaking could cause weakened buildings to collapse. Aid workers are also providing psychological support to children traumatized by the disaster.

Flores lies within the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” a belt of active faults and volcanoes that makes Indonesia especially vulnerable to earthquakes and eruptions. The island suffered an even deadlier disaster in 1992, when an earthquake and tsunami killed about 2,500 people.

Global Temperature Extremes

• The hottest temperature recorded this week by the World Meteorological Organization’s 7,600 land-based synoptic weather stations was 122°F (50°C) at Al Hofuf, Saudi Arabia.

• The coldest temperature in an inhabited location was -99°F (-73°C) at the Russia-operated Vostok Station, located in the middle of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The station normally hosts 30 scientists and engineers during the summer. The winter staff drops to 15.

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service

Humanity is spending billions to establish life on the moon and Mars while the technology needed to preserve a habitable climate at home remains far behind the need.

In 1972, delegates gathered in Stockholm for the first United Nations conference devoted to the human environment. Its slogan was simple: “Only One Earth.”

The phrase reflected the perspective of the early space age. Astronauts had recently photographed Earth as a small blue world suspended in darkness, its atmosphere appearing almost impossibly thin. For the first time, much of humanity could see the planet as a single, finite and isolated home.

Fifty-four years later, the message conveyed by that image has become harder to ignore.

The summer of 2026 has brought record heat on land and across the oceans, destructive fires, deadly downpours and disruptions affecting millions. Severe storms across the American Midwest over the past few days spawned tornadoes and unprecedented flash floods that killed residents and left hundreds of thousands without electricity.

No individual disaster can be explained by climate change alone. But a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, increasing the potential for extreme rainfall. Higher temperatures intensify heat waves and dry vegetation, while warmer oceans raise sea levels, damage marine ecosystems and provide more energy and moisture for storms.

The danger is no longer confined to projections of what might happen late in the century. It is unfolding in annual records, emergency declarations, insurance losses and communities repeatedly rebuilding after disasters.

Nearly every nation on the planet joined the Paris climate agreement, and governments have announced targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and to eventually reach net zero. But promises and policies are not the same thing.

The United Nations Environment Program estimates that even if countries fully carry out their current pledges, the planet is heading toward 2.3° to 2.5° Celsius (4.1°F to 4.5°F) of warming this century. Policies actually in place point toward about 2.8°C (5°F) of global heating—far beyond the level at which scientists expect increasingly severe and irreversible damage.

The failure to act is not new

On Nov. 24, 1995, Earthweek reported that scientists and government experts meeting in Madrid had formally agreed that global warming was already occurring and could not be explained by natural climatic variations alone.

The item also described opposition from what environmentalists were calling the “Carbon Club”—an alliance of oil companies and other fossil-fuel interests arguing that governments should not restrict emissions until there was absolute scientific certainty about their effects.

That certainty arrived long ago. The delay did not end.

The arguments changed as the evidence became harder to dispute. Warming was first said not to be happening. Then it was said not to be caused by humans. Later, its consequences were portrayed as distant, uncertain or less expensive than preventing them. Today, governments continue approving new fossil-fuel development while promising to reach net zero decades from now.

During these years of climate dithering and denial, carbon dioxide continued accumulating in the atmosphere.

Cutting emissions remains the essential first task, but reductions alone will no longer be enough.

Removing CO2 from the atmosphere is now necessary

Earthweek was reporting possible ways to draw carbon from the atmosphere as early as May 1990, when scientists proposed stimulating blooms of marine algae that would absorb carbon dioxide. In January 2004, Earthweek reported on research warning that switching to green energy would have to be combined with active removal of CO2 from the atmosphere.

Later items examined enhanced rock weathering, in which pulverized basalt is spread over farmland to absorb carbon dioxide, and direct-air-capture plants designed to extract the gas and store it underground.

The latest global assessment estimates that such CO2-capture efforts currently remove only about 2 billion metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year. Almost all of that comes from established methods such as reforestation, forest management and storing additional carbon in soils.

Newer methods—including direct-air capture, enhanced rock weathering, converting plant waste into a charcoal-like material that stores carbon and capturing carbon from biomass—remove only about 2 million metric tons annually. That is a minute fraction of the carbon dioxide humanity releases each year.

Removal is neither simple nor risk-free. Forests can burn, stored carbon can leak and direct-air-capture machines require large amounts of energy. Poorly designed projects could consume land and water needed for food production or natural ecosystems.

The lofty and unrealized goal of carbon capture should not become another reason to postpone emissions cuts. It is not a license to continue burning fossil fuels in the hope that machines will one day clean the atmosphere.

Yet developing safe and effective removal methods is now unavoidable. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says those new methods will be needed to counterbalance emissions from activities that are extremely difficult to eliminate and, eventually, to reduce the carbon dioxide already accumulated in the atmosphere.

The technological capacity remains nowhere near the required scale.

Space vs. Earth

At the same time, governments and some of the world’s wealthiest individuals are directing immense resources toward establishing a permanent human presence beyond Earth.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX says the first people sent to Mars will lay the foundation for a permanent settlement. Musk has described making humanity a multiplanetary species as protection against a catastrophe that could destroy civilization on Earth.

NASA is planning for an enduring base near the lunar south pole, with habitats, vehicles, power systems and equipment to extract usable resources from the moon. Its proposed 2027 budget assigns about $8.5 billion to exploration systems encompassing Moon-and-Mars transportation, systems development and mission architecture.

China and its international partners plan to also build a basic lunar research station near the moon’s south pole by 2035, followed by a more extensive installation by 2045.

There are sound reasons to explore space. Robotic missions expand scientific knowledge without exposing humans to extraordinary danger. Planetary-defense programs search for asteroids that could threaten Earth.

But neither the moon nor Mars is a plausible refuge from climate change.

Mars has an atmosphere too thin to breathe, is extremely cold and is exposed to intense radiation with no known ecosystem capable of supporting human life. A settlement would therefore depend on supplies transported across millions of miles or on producing its own air, water, food, fuel, shelter and radiation protection.

The moon is closer but no more inviting. Keeping even a small number of people alive there for extended periods would be an immense engineering undertaking.

The ability to sustain a few people on either world would do nothing for the billions facing heat, food insecurity, rising seas and climate-driven displacement on Earth.

It would be unfair to say that those pursuing space exploration have ignored the climate crisis entirely. Musk financed a $100 million competition for carbon-removal technology, and Jeff Bezos has committed $10 billion to the Bezos Earth Fund. Space companies also earn money from commercial services and government contracts, so their resources cannot simply be transferred into a global climate program.

Nor does spending on space directly cause the shortage of resources to battle climate change.

But money, scientific talent, political attention and society’s willingness to accept risk are limited. How those scarce resources are allocated therefore reveals which goals receive priority. Public budgets reveal governments’ priorities, while private investment flows toward ventures expected to generate profits.

Humanity will mobilize billions of dollars and extraordinary engineering talent to keep a handful of people alive in places naturally hostile to life. It has not shown the same urgency in developing systems to remove accumulated carbon dioxide from the only atmosphere that already sustains us.

That is the real contrast—not Earth vs. space, but rescue vs. escape.

The planet itself is not dying. Earth will continue orbiting the sun, and life in some form will almost certainly persist. What is being destabilized is the relatively mild climate, living systems and social infrastructure upon which human civilization depends.

Mars may one day support an outpost. The moon may eventually hold a permanent base. Exploring both may rank among humanity’s greatest adventures.

But a civilization unable to protect its only habitable planet must ask whether settlement of far more hostile worlds should be one of its grandest and best-funded ambitions.

More than half a century after Stockholm, the truth remains unchanged.

There is still only one Earth.

Steve Newman

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service

Record Ocean Heat

The world’s oceans just experienced their hottest July on record.

Outside the polar regions, the average sea-surface temperature reached 69.7°F (20.96°C), surpassing the previous July high set in 2023. Along Europe’s Atlantic coast and in the western Mediterranean, the water was hot enough to produce widespread marine heatwaves, disrupting marine life and adding to the record heat on adjacent land areas.

It is tempting to see a temperature record at sea as remote—another statistic from a part of the world most of us rarely encounter. But the ocean absorbs most of the extra heat trapped by the greenhouse gases people put into the atmosphere. When that heat accumulates, it doesn’t simply disappear beneath the waves.

Warmer oceans can bleach corals, disrupt fisheries and cause seawater to expand as it warms, raising sea levels. They can also feed more moisture and energy into the atmosphere, helping create conditions for heavier rainfall and stronger storms.

The atmosphere is already reflecting the same broader pattern. Global average air temperature in July tied for the second-warmest July on record, at 2.6°F (1.47°C) above the preindustrial average. Western Europe experienced its hottest June–July period, with average air temperatures 5.0°F (2.79°C) above the 1991–2020 average. July was also the hottest month ever recorded across the contiguous United States, where observations go back to 1895.

A developing El Niño is contributing to this year’s heat. But it is arriving on a planet already warmed by the continued burning of coal, oil and gas, and the subsequent greenhouse gas emissions.

The record in the ocean and the records in the air are not separate events. They are merely different readings from the same overheating world.

A Reindeer Mystery in the Arctic

On Svalbard, summer is the season when reindeer are supposed to be doing well.

After the long Arctic winter, the animals use the brief growing season to feed, rebuild energy reserves and raise young. It is not normally a time of widespread death among healthy adults.

That is why Norwegian authorities are closely watching an unsettling discovery: 13 recently dead Svalbard reindeer found in two valleys during annual population counts. Eleven were females of breeding age. Two were adult males.

Researchers say those are precisely the animals least expected to die in summer. In winter, mortality is more often seen among the youngest and oldest reindeer, when deep snow, ice and scarce food can test the limits of survival. These animals were in what officials described as the most vigorous and productive period of their lives.

So far, there is no answer.

Veterinarians examined three recently dead reindeer in July and collected samples, but the cause of death remains unknown. Researchers at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research say they have no clear indication and no specific hypothesis. The local governor’s office has asked the public to report any additional carcasses.

That uncertainty is the most important part of the story. It would be easy to turn an unusual death event in the Arctic into a quick climate-change parable. But no evidence has yet established why these animals died. The responsible response is to watch, test and wait for the results.

Still, the mystery carries weight because Svalbard is a place where environmental change is never merely theoretical. Its reindeer are a distinct subspecies found nowhere else on Earth. They live in an Arctic landscape shaped by shifting snow, ice, vegetation and weather—conditions that scientists are studying closely as the region warms.

Recent research has found that winter rain and summer warming can alter the tundra plants that form an important part of Svalbard reindeer habitat. That is background, not an explanation for these deaths. The two should not be confused.

For now, the facts are simple: healthy adult reindeer are dying in an unusual season, the number may grow, and scientists do not yet know why.

In the Arctic, where change can arrive gradually and then suddenly, even a small unanswered question deserves close attention.

Too Smart to Farm?

An octopus is not an easy animal to overlook.

It can solve puzzles. It can learn. It can explore unfamiliar places with a curiosity that is hard not to recognize. It has a nervous system unlike our own, spread through a body whose arms can sense and respond to the world with extraordinary independence.

And, according to a major scientific review published this year, there is strong evidence that octopuses are sentient: capable of having experiences that are positive or negative, such as comfort, distress, pleasure and pain.

That is why a plan to raise them by the thousands in industrial tanks provoked such an unusually powerful reaction.

Now, the world’s first proposed commercial octopus farm has been abandoned. Spanish seafood company Nueva Pescanova withdrew its application to build the facility at the port of Las Palmas in Gran Canaria, where it had planned to produce about 3,000 tons of octopus meat each year.

The company says the decision was business-related and regulatory. Environmental authorities required a full impact assessment, altering the project’s scope, timeline and conditions. Nueva Pescanova has not ruled out pursuing other approaches elsewhere.

But the project had become a test case for a larger question: Is there a point at which an animal’s intelligence and capacity to feel make industrial farming ethically indefensible?

Octopuses are generally solitary animals. They need environments that allow exploration, shelter and control over their surroundings. Researchers studying octopus aquaculture have identified serious welfare challenges, including high-density confinement, injury, disease, aggression and the difficulty of providing suitable enrichment.

There are environmental questions, too. Octopuses are carnivores, so farming them at scale would require feed derived largely from other marine animals. Critics ask whether turning wild fish into feed for a luxury seafood product is a sustainable answer to pressure on wild fisheries.

The farm’s supporters argued that aquaculture could provide a reliable supply and reduce pressure on wild octopus populations. That argument deserves to be part of the conversation. But it cannot stand alone.

Britain has formally recognized octopuses and other cephalopods as sentient beings in animal-welfare law. The new scientific review reinforces the reason for that recognition: intelligence is not the only issue. Sentience means the animal’s experience matters morally, whether or not that experience resembles our own.

The abandoned project in Spain’s Canary Islands does not settle the debate over eating octopus. It does, however, slow the rush to industrialize another form of life before society has decided what responsibility comes with understanding it better.

For now, the question is not whether humans can learn to farm octopuses. It’s whether we should.

The Puma’s Quiet Safety Benefit

We usually think of roads as a human space and predators as a danger just beyond their edges.

A new study from Washington’s Olympic Peninsula suggests the relationship may be more complicated—and more hopeful. Pumas, also known as mountain lions or cougars, may help make roads safer for drivers.

The animals are not keeping deer off highways by standing guard at the shoulder. Their effect is more subtle. Deer appear to change their behavior when pumas are present: they spend less time near road-dense areas and become more active during daylight rather than at night.

Those changes can matter enormously.

Using camera-trap data and records of vehicle collisions with wildlife, researchers found that deer were 15% less likely to use areas with many roads where pumas were established. They estimated that the likelihood of a deer-vehicle collision was 67% lower in areas of high puma occupancy. Over five years, the expected number of such collisions fell by 76%.

The study does not mean that every place with pumas will see the same result. It is an observational study from one region, and landscapes, roads, deer populations and predator behavior vary widely. But it offers a valuable reminder that predators shape ecosystems in ways that are not always visible.

A deer that senses danger from a puma may choose more remote habitat. It may move at a different time of day. Those decisions are about survival, yet they can ripple outward to affect drivers, insurance claims, emergency responders and the wildlife killed on roadsides.

That does not erase the real challenges of living with large carnivores. Coexistence requires careful planning, safe livestock practices and respect for animals that deserve both distance and protection. But it does complicate the simple idea that predators are only a problem to solve.

Large carnivores can help keep prey populations and behavior in balance. In this case, that balance may extend onto the road.

Wildlife-vehicle collisions remain a significant safety issue in the United States, and federal transportation guidance recognizes deer and other large animals as a major hazard for drivers. The puma study suggests that protecting functioning predator-prey relationships may be one more tool—alongside crossings, fencing and safer road design—for reducing that risk.

The benefit is easy to miss because it happens quietly. A deer changes course. It stays farther from pavement. It moves in daylight instead of darkness. A car passes without incident.

Etna’s Ashy Reminder

Mount Etna has once again interrupted the rhythms of Sicily.

A renewed eruption sent ash over eastern Sicily, forcing Catania’s Vincenzo Bellini Airport to suspend flight operations and leaving thousands of travelers scrambling during the height of the holiday season. Flights were canceled or diverted, hotel rooms filled, and some passengers reportedly spent the night at the airport.

The disruption came only weeks after another Etna eruption temporarily halted air traffic at Catania. This time, the volcano produced lava fountains, explosions and heavy ash emissions, dusting nearby communities including Ragalna and Adrano.

Etna is Europe’s most active volcano, and its eruptions are part of life on Sicily. Lava flows and ash clouds can be spectacular from a distance, but volcanic ash is a serious aviation hazard: it can reduce visibility, damage aircraft engines and force airports to close with little warning.

For residents, travelers and workers, the lesson is less dramatic than the images suggest. A living volcano does not follow the calendar. Even in the busiest weeks of summer, Sicily’s most famous mountain can suddenly redraw the day’s plans.

Dolphin’s Long Reach

Typhoon Dolphin spent nearly two weeks crossing the Pacific before reaching China’s east coast. By the time it made landfall in Zhejiang province, south of Shanghai, the storm had traveled more than 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers)—a remarkable journey for a tropical cyclone.

Its winds weakened after landfall, but the danger did not end at the coast.

Dolphin’s broad circulation sent heavy rain across Zhejiang and toward Shanghai, disrupting flights, trains and daily life. Authorities evacuated large numbers of people from vulnerable coastal areas, while Shanghai’s airports canceled hundreds of flights as streets flooded and transportation services were suspended.

Then the storm moved inland.

In Hubei province, more than 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from the coast, officials closed tourist areas and halted high-risk construction projects as forecasters warned of flooding and landslides. The storm’s moisture was expected to be forced upward by the region’s mountains, increasing the risk of intense rainfall. Neighboring Henan also issued flash-flood alerts.

That is one of the difficult truths about a large tropical system: landfall is not necessarily its final act. A storm can lose its strongest winds yet continue to carry enormous amounts of water, spreading risk far from the shore where it first arrives.

Climate change raises that risk. As the atmosphere warms, it can hold more water vapor—roughly 4% more for every 1°F (0.6°C) of warming. That does not mean climate change caused Typhoon Dolphin. But it does mean that storms moving through a warmer atmosphere have greater potential to deliver heavier rainfall, worsening inland flooding and landslides.

Dolphin’s path—from the far Pacific to the mountains of central China—was a reminder that a typhoon’s reach is measured not only by wind speed, but also by how long it lasts, how far it travels and how much water it leaves behind.

Colombia Catastrophe

A magnitude 7.4 earthquake devastated a broad swath of western Colombia, killing at least 281 people and injuring more than 3,900.

Another 379 people remained missing four days after the temblor struck near San José del Palmar in Chocó department. Nearly 10,600 homes were destroyed and more than 65,800 damaged. Buildings collapsed, roads buckled and vehicles were crushed in Cali, Pereira, Manizales, Quibdó and surrounding communities. Thousands of displaced residents sought shelter in schools, sports arenas and public parks.

At least 348 people had been rescued, although officials warned Thursday night that the chances of finding more survivors were dwindling. Search crews called for silence as they listened for signs of life beneath flattened buildings.

The quake originated about 64 miles (103 kilometers) beneath the surface within the Nazca tectonic plate. It was felt in the Colombian capital of Bogotá and in neighboring Ecuador and Panama. More than 160 aftershocks followed, including a magnitude 4.2 temblor near the epicenter.

Global Temperature Extremes

• The hottest temperature recorded this week by the World Meteorological Organization’s 7,600 land-based synoptic weather stations was 122° Fahrenheit (50° Celsius) at Al Hofuf, Saudi Arabia.

• The coldest temperature in an inhabited location was -104° Fahrenheit (-74° Celsius) at Russia’s Vostok Station, located in the middle of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The station normally hosts 30 scientists and engineers during the summer. In winter, their number drops to 15.

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service

Global Warming Shifts Into a Higher Gear

The planet is no longer warming at the relatively steady pace observed during the closing decades of the 20th century, according to new scientific analyses. The rate of heating has accelerated sharply, and the change remains visible even after temporary natural influences are removed from the analysis.

Researchers Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and statistician Grant Foster examined five leading global temperature records. They adjusted the data for the effects of El Niño, volcanic eruptions and changes in solar activity, all of which can temporarily raise or lower global temperatures.

Their peer-reviewed study found that warming accelerated from just under 0.36°F (0.2°C) per decade between 1970 and 2015 to about 0.63°F (0.35°C) per decade during the past 10 years. The shift emerged across all five datasets and was statistically significant at greater than 98% confidence.

The study was designed to detect the acceleration, not establish its precise cause. But the continued accumulation of greenhouse gases due to unbridled carbon emissions remains the dominant driver of rising temperatures.

Declining emissions of health-damaging sulfur pollution have also reduced the cooling effect of atmospheric aerosols that previously masked part of the greenhouse warming.

A separate international assessment by more than 60 scientists, published in June, estimated that human-caused warming is occurring at 0.49°F (0.27°C) per decade—the highest rate ever measured. It also found that Earth’s energy imbalance, the excess heat accumulating in the climate system, has more than doubled since the 1976–1995 period.

The two estimates differ because they measure warming in different ways, but both point in the same direction: Earth is heating faster.

If the unusually rapid rate of the past decade continues, Rahmstorf says the planet could move beyond the Paris Agreement’s long-term limit of 2.7°F (1.5°C) above preindustrial levels before 2030. How much faster temperatures rise after that will depend largely on how quickly humanity reduces carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels to net zero.

Do Monkeys Have Pets?

Macaques groom dogs in Thailand. Young snub-nosed monkeys play with domestic pigs in China. Langurs gently stroke giant squirrels in Sri Lanka. In Brazil, a group of wild capuchins adopted an infant marmoset and cared for it for months.

Such encounters may offer clues to why humans form powerful emotional bonds with animals, according to an international study led by Oxford University.

Researchers compiled 427 reported interactions involving 88 primate species and a wide variety of other animals. The evidence came from scientific studies, reports submitted by primatologists and documented accounts in the media.

Play and grooming were the most common behaviors. Young primates were especially likely to play with animals from other species, while adult females more often groomed them. Adult males were considerably less inclined to engage in friendly encounters.

Many cross-species associations in nature provide practical advantages, such as improved access to food or greater protection from predators. But the primates in this study frequently appeared to receive no obvious reward. They played, groomed, carried and curled up beside other animals, usually after initiating the contact themselves.

Researchers caution that this does not amount to pet-keeping in the human sense. Nor was every encounter affectionate. Rough handling sometimes followed apparent curiosity or caregiving, and the researchers recorded 13 cases in which the partner animal died. In Saudi Arabia, a male baboon appeared to kidnap a domestic puppy and carried it around for extended periods.

But the more peaceful encounters suggest that curiosity, tolerance and caregiving across species did not begin with humans. Those qualities may have been present deep within primate evolution, eventually helping our ancestors form the relationships with animals that produced domestication—and, much later, the household pet.

The findings could also help zoos and sanctuaries decide which species may live safely together. More broadly, they suggest that the impulse to befriend a creature unlike ourselves may be part of a much older primate inheritance.

Butterflies Carry a Climate Warning on Their Wings

Butterflies are moving across the planet as rising temperatures, extreme weather and disappearing habitats redraw the boundaries of where they can survive.

A global study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution compiled documented changes involving 1,758 butterfly species in 105 countries. It is the broadest attempt yet to examine butterfly movements across every inhabited continent.

Among the species with recorded changes, about 80% had expanded into new territory. Twenty-seven percent had disappeared from parts of their former range, while 22% shifted to higher or lower elevations. The percentages overlap because some butterflies underwent more than one change—expanding in one place while retreating in another.

Range expansion was especially common in tropical regions. Contractions occurred more frequently in Europe and North America, while changes in elevation were recorded almost entirely in the Northern Hemisphere.

Some butterflies moved with remarkable speed. The tawny coster, native to India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, arrived in Australia in 2012 and has since spread at an average of about 84 miles (135 kilometers) per year.

But occupying a larger area does not necessarily mean a butterfly is flourishing. A species may colonize newly suitable territory while losing populations elsewhere, and fragmented landscapes can prevent it from reaching the habitat it needs.

Climate change and severe weather were the most commonly identified drivers, although drainage, agriculture and other habitat alterations also played important roles. Germany’s cranberry fritillary has declined as its bog habitat disappeared, while intensive farming reduced the range of the Danube clouded yellow in Romania.

Butterflies are highly sensitive to temperature, moisture and seasonal changes, making them useful early-warning indicators of ecological disruption. Their movements can also reveal changes affecting flowering plants, insect-eating birds and the many other species connected to them.

The study does not show that every butterfly is moving, and large parts of Central Africa, Southeast Asia, New Guinea and the Amazon remain poorly monitored. It does show that changes once documented mainly in Europe and North America are occurring worldwide.

Thousands Flee Guatemala’s Volcano of Fire

About 1,700 people sought refuge in shelters after Guatemala’s Fuego volcano erupted, sending clouds of ash and gas into the sky and dangerous volcanic material racing down its slopes.

The eruption intensified after beginning Monday, producing lava fountains rising as high as 980 feet (300 metres) above the crater while pyroclastic currents, fast-moving avalanches of extremely hot gas, ash and rock, cascaded down the mountain’s slopes.

Guatemala declared an orange alert nationwide and elevated the warning to red in the departments of Sacatepéquez, Escuintla and Chimaltenango. Authorities said about 29,000 people had been affected by ashfall, which can contaminate water supplies and cause respiratory problems. Residents were advised to wear masks and cover stored water.

Rain added another danger. Water mixing with ash and loose debris on the volcano’s slopes produced lahars, or volcanic mudflows, extending as far as 4 miles (7 km). Officials warned that additional rainfall could generate more of the destructive flows.

No deaths or structural damage had been reported in the latest updates. But the evacuations carry painful memories of Fuego’s catastrophic eruption in June 2018, when pyroclastic currents overwhelmed nearby communities, killing more than 200 people and leaving hundreds missing.

On Thursday, the volcano showed a significant decline in activity after 50 hours of nearly continuous eruptions. The country’s disaster reduction agency, CONRED, said the decrease had allowed evacuated families to return home.

Strongest Quake in Decades Shakes Naples Volcanic Zone

A magnitude-4.5 earthquake struck the volcanic area west of Naples, injuring 21 people and sending frightened residents into the streets.

The shallow quake occurred Friday evening beneath the Campi Flegrei, or Phlegraean Fields, at a depth of about 2 miles (3 kilometers). It was followed by numerous aftershocks, including one measuring magnitude 3.8.

Pozzuoli, a coastal city near the epicenter, suffered falling masonry, damaged building facades and rockslides. Power failures were reported, and rail and metro services were temporarily suspended for safety inspections. The port of Pozzuoli was closed after damage made its quay unusable.

Two people were reportedly seriously injured, and 18 families were evacuated from damaged buildings. Many residents spent the night outdoors as aftershocks continued.

Campi Flegrei is a vast volcanic caldera extending beneath western Naples and the Gulf of Pozzuoli. It has experienced increasingly frequent earthquake swarms as the ground slowly rises—a process called bradyseism, caused by changing pressure and movement of fluids beneath the surface.

The region endured a similar period of intense unrest during the early 1980s, when thousands of residents were evacuated from Pozzuoli. Renewed activity during recent years has prompted Italian authorities to strengthen monitoring, inspect vulnerable buildings and revise emergency plans for the densely populated area.

Scientists caution that increased earthquakes and ground uplift do not necessarily mean an eruption is imminent. They can indicate movement of volcanic gases and heated underground fluids rather than magma rising toward the surface. It remains impossible to predict whether the current unrest will culminate in an eruption, a stronger earthquake or another gradual decline in activity.

But even a moderate, shallow earthquake can cause significant damage beneath communities crowded with older buildings. Friday’s quake—the region’s strongest in roughly four decades—provided another reminder of the hazards facing hundreds of thousands of people living within one of Europe’s most closely watched volcanic systems.

Early-Morning Earthquake Shakes Suez and Cairo

An earthquake struck near Egypt’s Suez region early Monday, shaking buildings across a broad area and prompting authorities to activate emergency plans nationwide.

Egypt’s National Seismic Network measured the quake at magnitude 5.6, while the U.S. Geological Survey calculated a magnitude of 5.0. Such differences can occur because monitoring agencies use different seismic stations and methods to estimate an earthquake’s size.

The shallow tremor struck at about 3 a.m. local time, with its epicenter approximately 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of Suez. Shaking was felt in Cairo and as far northeast as El-Arish, near Egypt’s border with the Gaza Strip. Five aftershocks were recorded.

Egypt’s Health Ministry reported one injury. The person was treated and later released.

Parts of three aging buildings reportedly collapsed in Cairo and Beheira Governorate. Three families were evacuated from a deteriorating building in Cairo’s Rod al-Farag district after sections of its walls fell, while part of a balcony collapsed from an unoccupied house in Beheira. No deaths were reported.

Health Minister Khaled Abdel Ghaffar placed ambulance and emergency services on maximum preparedness. The Egyptian Red Crescent advised residents to remain clear of old or damaged buildings in case aftershocks caused additional collapses.

The earthquake originated in the Gulf of Suez region, where active faults are associated with the slow pulling apart of the African and Arabian tectonic plates. Although small tremors occur there, earthquakes strong enough to cause widespread alarm are relatively uncommon in Egypt.

Monday’s shaking revived memories of Egypt’s devastating 1992 earthquake. That magnitude-5.8 event struck near Cairo, killing more than 500 people, damaging thousands of buildings and leaving many residents homeless.

Other earthquakes were felt in:

• Spain’s Murcia region (4.1)

• Far southern Philippines (6.3)

• New Zealand’s North Island (5.7)

• Central Peru (5.3)

Tropical Cyclones

Former Category-5 Typhoon Dolphin passed directly over remote and uninhabited North Iwo Jima, the first time an eye of a typhoon was ever observed making landfall there.

The storm later raked Okinawa and other southern Japanese islands, and was taking aim at China’s Zhejiang coast on Friday.

• Slowly moving Tropical Storm Kujira drenched the northern Philippines during three stormy days over northern Luzon Island.

Global Temperature Extremes

• The hottest temperature recorded this week by the World Meteorological Organization’s 7,600 land-based synoptic weather stations was 120° Fahrenheit (49° Celsius) at Al Hofuf, Saudi Arabia.

• The coldest temperature in an inhabited location was -107° Fahrenheit (-77° Celsius) at Russia’s Vostok Station, located in the middle of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The station normally hosts 30 scientists and engineers during the summer. In winter, their number drops to 15.

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service

Imagine spending your entire annual income by last Thursday, July 30. For the remaining five months, every meal, utility bill and tank of gasoline would have to be paid for by borrowing, selling assets or leaving the debt to someone else.

That is the idea behind Earth Overshoot Day. It marks the point in the year when humanity’s demand on nature exceeds what the planet can regenerate during the entire year.

The consequences do not arrive as an invoice. They appear in forests cut faster than they can regrow, fisheries depleted faster than they can recover, soils losing their fertility and carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere. The debt is passed along through a hotter climate, damaged ecosystems and fewer natural resources for future generations.

This year’s Earth Overshoot Day fell on July 30. The Global Footprint Network estimates that humanity is using nature about 73 percent faster than Earth can replenish it—the equivalent of requiring 1.73 planets to sustain our present level of consumption.

Who keeps the books?

The Global Footprint Network is an international nonprofit research organization founded in 2003. It promotes and calculates the “ecological footprint,” a measurement comparing human consumption with the ability of forests, croplands, fisheries and other ecosystems to regenerate resources and absorb waste.

The organization is not part of the United Nations or a government agency. Its annual Overshoot Day is intended as an easily understandable warning rather than a literal date when the world suddenly runs out of resources.

This year’s date arrived six days later than the one announced for 2025, seemingly suggesting that the planet’s ecological finances had improved. But the difference was largely caused by revised estimates of how much carbon dioxide the oceans absorb.

Those revisions moved the date eight days later. Meanwhile, rising human demand moved it two days earlier. Without the accounting change, Overshoot Day would have arrived sooner than last year.

Borrowing from people we will never meet

That debt is not abstract. It is passed to people in other countries, other generations, other circumstances — people who had no say in today's decisions.

Earth Overshoot Day combines many kinds of environmental pressure into a single estimate, and its calculations inevitably contain uncertainties. But its central message is difficult to dismiss: a society cannot indefinitely consume natural wealth faster than the planet can restore it.

Carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels account for an estimated 61% of humanity’s ecological footprint. The Global Footprint Network calculates that cutting those emissions in half could move Overshoot Day nearly three months later.

Reducing food waste, conserving energy, designing less resource-intensive cities and restoring forests and other ecosystems would also help.

Those changes would mean more than adjusting a date on the calendar. They would leave cleaner air, healthier landscapes and a more stable climate to people who had no voice in creating today’s debt.

Living within the planet’s means is not merely an exercise in environmental accounting. It is a question of what kind of world we choose to pass on to our children, and how much of the bill we expect future generations to pay.

Steve Newman

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service

The Sun Is Still Stormy

The Sun appears to have passed the most active portion of its current cycle, but it has not gone quiet.

An eruption directed toward Earth produced a G3 strong geomagnetic storm in early July. On July 4, the Sun released an X1.3 flare, placing it within the most powerful class of solar flares.

Such events are reminders that solar maximum is not an on-off switch. Solar activity rises and falls over a cycle lasting approximately 11 years, but large eruptions can continue for several years after the peak.

The current activity also forms part of a longer and unexpected revival.

Beginning around 1990, measurements showed the solar wind—the continuous stream of charged particles flowing outward from the Sun—steadily weakening. Sunspot numbers declined, and by 2008 the Sun had reached its quietest measured state since spacecraft began monitoring it.

Solar Cycle 24, which followed, was the weakest of the space age. Some scientists wondered whether the Sun might be entering an extended period of low activity resembling the historic Maunder or Dalton minimums. It wasn’t.

A study by researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, found that the weakening trend reversed after 2008.

Using measurements collected by spacecraft between 2008 and 2025, the researchers documented increases in nearly every major solar-wind measurement. Proton density rose by about 26%, temperature by 29% and thermal pressure by 45%. The strength of the interplanetary magnetic field increased by approximately 31%.

The Sun has not fully recovered to the strength measured late in the 20th century, but the steady increase suggests that the exceptionally weak Solar Cycle 24 was an outlier rather than the beginning of a centuries-long solar lull.

For most people on Earth, the most visible result of increased solar activity is the aurora. When charged particles and magnetic fields from the Sun strike Earth’s magnetic environment, displays of northern and southern lights can spread far beyond their usual polar regions.

But the same space weather can also disrupt technology.

Solar flares can interfere with high-frequency radio communications. Coronal mass ejections—vast clouds of magnetized plasma thrown into space—can trigger geomagnetic storms that disturb satellites, degrade GPS accuracy and induce electrical currents in power systems. Increased atmospheric drag can also alter the orbits of satellites.

The risks are greater for astronauts beyond the protection of Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field. Monitoring solar eruptions will be particularly important as missions carry crews back to the Moon and eventually toward Mars.

A separate NASA-led study published this month raised the stakes further. Scientists had long believed that Earth’s upper atmosphere reached a saturation point beyond which stronger solar wind produced little additional response. The new analysis suggests that this apparent limit may not exist, meaning exceptionally powerful storms could have greater consequences for our modern technological life than previously assumed.

No one knows whether the Sun’s longer-term strengthening will continue into future cycles. But even as Solar Cycle 25 declines, strong storms remain possible.

Swiss Glaciers Lose Their Protective Snow Weeks Early

Switzerland’s glaciers have reached a dangerous point in the summer melt season far earlier than normal.

Researchers designated June 29 as this year’s “Glacier Loss Day”—the date when the protective snow accumulated during winter is effectively exhausted and further melting begins reducing the glaciers’ underlying ice.

The date was the second-earliest date on record in Switzerland. Only 2022, the country’s worst year for glacier loss, reached the threshold sooner, on June 26.

Glaciers depend on winter snow for more than replenishment. The bright surface reflects much of the Sun’s energy and insulates the darker ice below. Once that snow disappears, exposed ice absorbs more heat and melts rapidly.

This year’s glaciers entered spring with unusually limited protection. Snow cover was at record-low levels in some locations following a dry winter. Saharan dust deposited across the Alps darkened parts of the remaining snow, allowing it to absorb additional sunlight. Two early heat waves then accelerated the melting.

During the two weeks of extreme heat, Swiss glaciers released enough water to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every six seconds, according to Matthias Huss, director of Glacier Monitoring Switzerland.

At one monitoring site on the Rhone Glacier, about 5 feet (1.5 meters) of ice disappeared during the same period.

The early loss of snow means that the glaciers face months of direct ice melting before colder autumn weather arrives. Measurements taken near the end of June showed that Swiss glaciers were already melting at roughly twice the average rate recorded between 2010 and 2020 and were approaching the losses observed at the same point in 2022.

The cumulative decline is enormous. Swiss glaciers lost about half their volume between 1931 and 2016. Glacier Monitoring Switzerland reported that another quarter of the remaining ice disappeared between 2015 and 2025, while more than 1,000 small glaciers have already vanished.

For the moment, increased melting can add water to rivers during hot and dry periods. But that contribution cannot continue indefinitely. As glaciers shrink, they eventually reach a point where even rapid melting produces less runoff because too little ice remains.

That will have consequences for Alpine ecosystems, agriculture, hydropower and communities that depend on glacier-fed waterways during summer.

Glaciers store ice built up over decades or centuries. Once their winter snow protection disappears, a few weeks of extreme heat can remove layers that will not return within a human lifetime.

Stranded Ships Could Become Marine “Super-Spreaders”

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has stranded more than 1,500 commercial vessels in and around the Persian Gulf. When those ships finally depart, scientists warn that they may carry an unexpected cargo around the world.

Months spent motionless at anchor have allowed marine organisms to colonize the submerged surfaces of the vessels. Microbes and algae settle first, followed by barnacles, mussels and other invertebrates that form increasingly dense communities across hulls, rudders, pipes and water intakes.

Cargo ships normally remain in port for only a few days. That limits the time available for extensive growth, while movement through the water helps antifouling coatings keep hulls relatively clean. Many ships trapped by the closure have now remained stationary for months.

An international team of marine scientists describes the situation as a potential bio-invasion “super-spreader event”—one unprecedented in both its scale and duration.

When shipping resumes, organisms attached to the vessels could be carried into ports across the Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, Atlantic and Pacific. Some may establish new populations, displace native wildlife or introduce parasites and diseases into marine ecosystems with few natural defenses against them.

The Gulf is already considered a center for marine invasions introduced through commercial shipping. Its unusually hot and salty water adds another concern: organisms capable of surviving those extreme conditions may also be especially hardy travelers.

Ports with environmental conditions similar to the Gulf could face the greatest danger. Researchers highlighted destinations including Mumbai, Colombo, Singapore, Alexandria, Piraeus, Algeciras and Rotterdam as locations where authorities should be particularly alert.

The ecological consequences could be severe. Invasive species can reduce biodiversity, damage coral reefs, seagrass meadows and shellfish beds, disrupt fisheries and clog the cooling systems of coastal power plants. Once established, marine invaders are extremely difficult—and sometimes impossible—to eradicate.

Individual ships may also have released millions of larvae into Gulf waters while sitting at anchor. Those larvae can settle on nearby vessels, further mixing species among ships that will eventually travel along different global trade routes.

Researchers say the best defense would be to inspect and clean hulls before ships leave the region. But the urgency of restoring trade, limited cleaning capacity and the need to protect stranded crews may make that impossible for many vessels.

Ports expecting arrivals from the Gulf should therefore monitor for unfamiliar species, track vessel movements and prepare rapid-response plans. Early detection could make the difference between containing an isolated introduction and confronting a permanent invasion.

The comparison with infectious disease is deliberate. Biofouled ships act as carriers, ports become points of transmission and global shipping routes provide the network through which organisms spread.

The ships trapped near the Strait of Hormuz are likely already accumulating substantial marine growth. Whether they trigger a worldwide biological invasion may now depend on what happens before, and immediately after, they begin moving again.

Japan’s Latest Heat Defense Looks Like a Vending Machine

Japan’s long history of vending-machine innovation has produced something new for a dangerously warming world: a refrigerator large enough to hold a person.

The Do Hiemon Box, developed by refrigeration and vending-machine manufacturer SDRS, allows an overheated person to sit inside a chamber cooled to 59°F (15°C). Colder air is directed toward the head, neck, shoulders and back, providing noticeable relief within about five minutes. Sessions automatically end after 20 minutes to prevent excessive cooling.

The $9,300 movable booth is intended for construction sites, factories, warehouses and outdoor events. One of the first units has been installed at a city hall where members of the public can use it free of charge.

What resembles a novelty today could become increasingly useful in a hotter world. Human-sized cooling booths may eventually appear at transit stations, parks and other public places, offering valuable refuge during extreme heat—although they cannot replace the greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed to slow global warming.

Typhoon Noul lashes southern China

Typhoon Noul struck China’s Guangdong Province early Sunday with sustained winds of about 101 mph (162 km/h), making it the country’s strongest typhoon so far this year.

Authorities evacuated more than 340,000 people and suspended rail service and other work as powerful winds and heavy rain battered the southern coast. At least 350 flights serving Hong Kong were canceled, while nine people were injured and more than 100 fallen trees were reported across the territory.

Before reaching China, Noul passed near the northern Philippines, where three people were killed, one remained missing and more than 9,300 were evacuated.

The storm was weakening as it moved inland, but heavy rainfall was forecast to spread across several Chinese provinces through Tuesday. Beijing allocated about $14.8 million for emergency repairs and reconstruction in Guangdong.

Japan Earthquake Toll Rises as Rescuers Search Rubble

The death toll from the powerful earthquake that struck southwestern Japan has risen to 34 as rescue crews continue searching damaged buildings in Kumamoto Prefecture. The total includes nine deaths whose connection to the disaster is still being investigated.

The magnitude 6.8 quake struck Kyushu on Tuesday afternoon, collapsing homes, damaging roads and derailing a freight train. At least 86 people were injured, five seriously, while the number still missing remained uncertain.

Some of the worst destruction occurred at a shopping center, where an apparent gas explosion followed the earthquake despite the evacuation of customers and employees. A chimney also collapsed at a paper factory, and part of the historic Kumamoto Castle’s stone wall was damaged.

Thousands of residents spent another night in shelters or vehicles as aftershocks continued and utility outages affected parts of the region. Rescue teams were racing against the critical 72-hour window in which people trapped beneath rubble are most likely to be found alive.

The same region was devastated by a series of earthquakes in 2016, including a magnitude-7.3 shock that killed dozens of people and forced tens of thousands from their homes.

Other earthquakes were felt in:

• Northern Taiwan (5.6)
• New Zealand’s North Island (5.8)
• Southwestern Iceland (4.1)
• The Texas Panhandle (5.0—the area’s strongest in 100 years)

Mount Tokachi erupts for first time since 2004

A small eruption occurred Wednesday at Mount Tokachi on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido—the volcano’s first eruption in more than two decades.

The eruption sent a plume of ash about 650 feet (200 meters) above a crater northwest of the summit. Volcanic tremors lasted approximately 45 seconds, but authorities reported no large rocks or other major projectiles around the volcano.

Japan’s Meteorological Agency maintained its Level 2 alert, which prohibits approaching the crater. The alert was raised in June following increased seismic activity, ground deformation and volcanic-gas emissions. Officials warned that further minor eruptions are possible and advised people to remain at least 1.5 kilometers from the crater.

Global Temperature Extremes

• The hottest temperature recorded this week by the World Meteorological Organization’s 7,600 land-based synoptic weather stations was 123° Fahrenheit (50° Celsius) at Touggourt, Algeria.

• The coldest temperature in an inhabited location was -112° Fahrenheit (-80° Celsius) at Russia’s Vostok Station, located in the middle of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The station normally hosts 30 scientists and engineers during the summer. In winter, their number drops to 15.

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service

The enormous wildfires sweeping through Spain and France since Earthweek’s deadline early Friday have produced the images that now accompany almost every major fire disaster: towering flames, orange skies, water-dropping aircraft and residents fleeing with whatever they can carry.

But the story being told alongside those images varies greatly depending on where it is being reported.

In Spain, much of the coverage has placed the fires within the larger climate crisis. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has repeatedly called them part of a worsening “climate emergency” and urged political parties to support a national agreement covering climate action, fire prevention and disaster preparedness.

Spanish public broadcaster RTVE has also connected the fires with rising temperatures and the need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Its reporting treats the flames not merely as isolated emergencies, but as warnings of what a hotter climate is bringing.

Much breaking-news coverage elsewhere—particularly on television in the United States—often concentrates on the immediate drama.

Reports show firefighters struggling against advancing flames, families being evacuated and vast areas of forest turning to ash. They explain where the fire is moving and how many people are threatened, but generally devote no time to explaining why such fires are becoming more extreme or what could reduce the danger in years to come.

There are important exceptions. Some American and international news organizations routinely connect extreme fires with climate change. But even reports that mention the connection often stop one step short of explaining it.

A BBC story on Monday about the European fires said climate change is driving temperatures higher and producing more intense wildfires. But it did not explain that the warming is primarily being caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases, particularly from burning fossil fuels. Nor did it mention the actions that could slow the warming.

Disaster reporting has a structural bias toward what is happening now. Flames, rescues and evacuations provide compelling pictures and rapidly changing developments. Rising average temperatures, declining soil moisture and decades of energy policy do not.

Climate change therefore appears as a mysterious background condition—something happening to the world rather than something being caused by identifiable activities and influenced by public choices. The audience is told that the climate is becoming more extreme, but not why it is happening or what could be done about it.

As a result, audiences may receive only half the story.

Climate change does not usually provide the spark that starts a wildfire. Fires can begin through lightning, accidents, damaged electrical equipment, agricultural burning or arson. Poor forest management and the growth of communities near flammable landscapes can also increase the threat.

But the cause of ignition is not the same as the conditions that determine what happens next.

Sánchez acknowledged that fires have always occurred. What has changed, he said, is their magnitude and behavior, along with the extreme conditions surrounding them. Spain had already lost more than 370,500 acres (150,000 hectares) to fire by Sunday, while another heat wave threatens to worsen the crisis in the next few days.

News coverage that ignores this background can make every fire appear to be an unpredictable act of nature. The disaster arrives, firefighters respond, the flames eventually subside and cameras move elsewhere. When the next fire erupts, the same story begins again.

Explanatory reporting could add the missing pieces of the story.

Why was the vegetation so dry? How unusual were the temperatures? Has the fire season become longer? And what is being done to slow the global warming that is making extreme fire weather more likely?

Mentioning climate change does not mean ignoring other causes. Nor does it mean attributing every fire solely to global warming. It means describing the full environment in which modern fires burn.

Communities need better evacuation plans, more resilient infrastructure, carefully managed forests and stronger firefighting resources.

Those measures can save lives now. But without sharp reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, temperatures will continue to rise and the conditions favoring extreme fires will become increasingly difficult to manage.

A television camera can show where the flames are.

But journalism should also explain why they are becoming so difficult to stop—and what might prevent the next disaster from becoming even worse.

Steve Newman

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service

Climate Change Is Stealing Our Sleep

Some climate-change deniers figuratively say they are “not losing any sleep” over global warming. But rising nighttime temperatures are literally robbing many millions of people around the world of the overnight rest they need.

An analysis of 1,338 cities found that the average person lost nearly 56 hours of sleep each year between 2020 and 2025 because nights remained too warm. That is equivalent to almost seven full nights of lost sleep annually.

More than six of those hours—nearly one additional sleepless night—were directly attributable to warming caused by greenhouse-gas emissions and deforestation.

The climate-linked portion of sleep loss has at least doubled since the early 1970s in 1,335 of the 1,338 cities studied. It has at least tripled in 840 of them.

People in Saudi Arabia, Oman and the United Arab Emirates lost between 55 and 87 hours of sleep annually because of hot nights, including 12 to 16 hours directly linked to climate change. Residents of southern India and parts of Southeast Asia lost as much as 91 hours, while several West African cities recorded losses of 65 hours or more.

Spain was not spared. Valencia residents lost an estimated 42 hours of sleep annually because of nighttime heat, followed by Malaga with 41 hours, Seville with 40 and Barcelona with 39. About 12% of Barcelona’s heat-related sleep loss was attributed directly to climate change.

The effects are not evenly distributed. Warmer nights have more than twice the impact on people older than 65 as on middle-aged adults, and nearly three times the effect on people in lower-middle-income countries as on those in wealthier nations. Women and people already living in hot climates also tend to lose more sleep.

Air conditioning can reduce the disruption, but access remains highly unequal. Only about 35% of households worldwide had air conditioning in 2021, and many of the populations facing the hottest nights have the fewest resources to cool their homes.

Repeated sleep loss can impair mood, memory, concentration and productivity while increasing risks to cardiovascular and immune health. Hot nights are especially dangerous because they prevent the body from cooling and recovering from daytime heat.

Climate Central said the findings show that fossil-fuel-driven warming is affecting far more than extreme weather.

It is also reaching into bedrooms and taking away one of the most basic requirements of human health: a good night’s sleep.

Earth’s Waters Are Quietly Losing Their Oxygen

Oxygen is quietly disappearing from oceans, lakes, rivers and coastal waters around the world, threatening aquatic life and weakening natural systems that help regulate Earth’s climate.

A new scientific review concludes that aquatic deoxygenation has become so widespread—and is interacting so strongly with other environmental crises—that declining oxygen should be considered alongside climate change, biodiversity loss and ocean acidification as a threat to the stability of the planet.

“The health and stability of our planet depends on the health and stability of aquatic ecosystems, which need oxygen to function normally,” said lead author Erica Ferrer, who conducted the research at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Water naturally absorbs oxygen from the atmosphere and from photosynthesis by aquatic plants and microscopic algae. But warmer water cannot retain as much dissolved oxygen as colder water. Climate-driven warming also strengthens the layering of the ocean, making it harder for oxygen-rich surface water to mix downward into deeper regions.

Pollution compounds the problem.

Nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers, animal waste and sewage act as nutrients that stimulate enormous algal blooms. When the algae die, bacteria consume oxygen while decomposing them. The process can create hypoxic “dead zones” where most fish and other mobile animals must flee, while less mobile organisms suffocate.

The global ocean has lost about 2% of its oxygen content since the 1960s. The area of low-oxygen open-ocean water has expanded by roughly 1.7 million square miles (4.5 million square km), while more than 500 oxygen-depleted coastal sites have been identified around the world. The volume of ocean water entirely lacking oxygen has quadrupled since the 1960s.

Even relatively small percentage declines can have far-reaching consequences because oxygen is not distributed evenly. Many marine animals already live close to the minimum oxygen levels they can tolerate.

Low-oxygen water can compress the habitat available to tuna, marlin, sharks and other large fish, forcing them toward the surface or into smaller areas. It can also favor jellyfish, microbes and other organisms that tolerate depleted conditions while displacing species that need more oxygen.

The consequences reach beyond individual species.

Oxygen levels influence the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and other elements within aquatic ecosystems. As oxygen disappears, chemical processes can release additional greenhouse gases or alter the ability of waters and sediments to store carbon, potentially reinforcing climate change.

The new review examined how deoxygenation interacts with all nine processes in the Planetary Boundaries framework, which defines environmental conditions necessary for maintaining a stable and resilient Earth. Researchers found particularly strong links with climate change, excessive nutrient flows, biodiversity loss and atmospheric pollution.

Some changes in deep waters could persist for centuries because the ocean circulates so slowly. But coastal waters, lakes and rivers can sometimes respond far more quickly when pollution is reduced.

Improved sewage treatment, more efficient fertilizer use, restored wetlands and limits on agricultural runoff can reduce the nutrients feeding algal blooms. Cutting the fossil-fuel emissions warming the planet would address the larger force reducing oxygen throughout the open ocean.

Scientists therefore say aquatic oxygen loss should not be treated as an isolated environmental problem. It is both a result of the other pressures humanity has placed on the planet and a force capable of worsening them.

The waters covering and nourishing Earth are not simply becoming warmer or more acidic.

They are also finding it harder to breathe.

Thousands of Milkweed Plants Are Turning Florida Roadsides into Potential Lifelines for Monarch Butterflies

Researchers from the Florida Museum of Natural History and the Florida Department of Transportation are planting 15,000 native milkweeds along two-lane highways in the northern part of the state. The goal is to create scattered breeding and feeding sites where monarchs and other pollinators can rest, reproduce and move between larger patches of habitat.

The transportation department awarded researchers $150,000 in 2023 to grow, plant and monitor an initial 9,000 milkweeds over three years. The project has since been extended through 2029, with another 6,000 plants scheduled to go into the ground.

Florida also joined a national voluntary conservation program in 2024 and committed to managing about 10,200 acres (4,128 hectares) of roadside land to benefit monarchs and other wildlife. Rather than forming one continuous corridor, the managed roadsides could function as a network of habitat patches across the state. Early results are encouraging.

“We’ve had good success with plant establishment, and we’ve seen monarchs using the plants already in the field,” said Jaret Daniels, curator of butterflies and moths at the Florida Museum.

Milkweed is indispensable to monarch survival. Adult females lay their eggs on the plants, and newly hatched caterpillars eat no other kind of foliage. Milkweed flowers also provide nectar for adult monarchs, bees, moths, wasps and other insects.

Researchers initially tested six native species but are concentrating on pinewoods milkweed and butterfly weed, which naturally grow in the dry, sandy soils common along northern Florida highways. Seeds are collected from wild plants and raised at the University of Florida Native Plant Nursery before crews plant them during the cooler winter months.

The project deliberately avoids tropical milkweed, a nonnative species that can remain green through winter and encourage monarchs to breed when they would normally migrate. Extended breeding can also increase their exposure to a debilitating parasite. Florida conservation specialists recommend planting native milkweeds instead.

The monarch has declined steadily since the mid-1990s because of habitat loss, insecticide exposure and climate change. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed listing it as a threatened species, although it has not yet received final federal protection. The agency estimates that eastern monarchs face a 56% to 74% probability of extinction by 2080 without sufficient conservation, while the risk for the western population exceeds 95%.

Florida researchers say roadside land cannot replace large natural reserves. But roadsides are already maintained, making them an overlooked opportunity for conservation.

“We don’t have enough conservation lands to maintain pollinator populations through time in many areas,” Daniels said. “Roadsides are managed regardless, so why not do so in a way that confers greater benefits?”

The milkweed patches may also help nearby farms by supporting wild pollinators that visit blueberry and watermelon crops.

For monarchs capable of flying more than 100 miles (161 km) in a day, even small islands of flowers can make a long journey more survivable.

Dust Storms Intensify Across a Drying World

Enormous clouds of sand and dust swept across parts of China and the southern United States during 2025, producing some of the most intense storms recorded in decades.

El Paso, Texas, experienced 50 days of dusty weather—more than double its annual average—and the greatest number of dust storms there since 1935, during the Dust Bowl. At the height of a March outbreak, particulate pollution reached the highest hourly level measured in Texas since monitoring began about 27 years ago. Schools, highways and airports temporarily closed, public events were canceled and several fatal traffic accidents were reported.

A month later, dust blowing south from Mongolia engulfed northern China in the country’s worst sand and dust storm in a decade. Concentrations of inhalable particles exceeded 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter across wide areas, reaching 3,000 to 4,000 micrograms in some locations—many times above health guidelines, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

Around 2.2 billion tons (2 billion metric tons) of dust rise into Earth’s atmosphere each year. Most comes from arid regions such as the Sahara, the Gobi and the Arabian Desert, and some plumes travel thousands of miles across continents and oceans.

Dust storms are natural, but the World Meteorological Organization says drought, environmental degradation and poor management of land and water are increasingly worsening the hazard. The storms reduce agricultural productivity, disrupt aviation and ground transportation, strain water and energy systems and expose populations to dangerous levels of airborne particles.

The WMO is expanding international forecasting and early-warning networks, while researchers are testing artificial intelligence and improved satellite observations to identify dust sources and predict how storms will develop. No single AI method yet performs best in every situation: some are more effective with sudden local storms, while others better track large dust plumes traveling across regions for several days.

Because the storms cross borders, WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said countries must share observations, forecasting data and warnings. More than 150 countries are already affected by airborne dust, making what rises from one damaged or drought-stricken landscape a threat far beyond the horizon.

Tropical Storm Bertha heads into Texas after Louisiana landfalls

Tropical Storm Bertha moved into the Texas-Louisiana border region Thursday after first making landfall near Louisiana’s St. Bernard Parish on Wednesday. The storm carried sustained winds of about 45 mph and was expected to weaken after moving farther inland.

The greatest threats were heavy rainfall, coastal flooding and dangerous surf. Forecasters warned that parts of the Texas Gulf Coast and South Texas could receive 2 to 4 inches of rain, with isolated totals reaching 6 inches—enough to cause localized flash flooding, particularly in urban areas.

Storm surge had already pushed water into coastal Louisiana communities, while dangerous waves and life-threatening rip currents were affecting a wider stretch of the northern Gulf Coast. Gusty winds, beach erosion and possible travel and power disruptions were expected as Bertha crossed Texas and weakened inland.

In the eastern Pacific, Hurricane Fausto formed off the coast of Mexico and was predicted to remain far from land as it moved toward Hawaii over the weekend.

Deadly earthquake strikes Peru’s Andes region

A magnitude 5.5 earthquake struck Peru’s central Andes on Saturday night, killing at least six people and injuring more than 30. Authorities said roughly 300 residents were displaced, while the number of people still missing remained unclear.

The shallow earthquake was centered near Sicaya in Huancayo province. Homes and other buildings—including a church and convent—collapsed or suffered structural damage. Officials said the widespread use of adobe construction contributed to the destruction.

Residents in some of the hardest-hit agricultural communities spent the night outdoors as authorities assessed the damage and searched the rubble. Peru experiences frequent earthquakes because it lies along the seismically active Pacific Ring of Fire.

Earth movements were also felt in:

• The far southern Mexico-Guatemala border area (7.3)
• Turkey’s Malatya province (5.0)
• Western Iran (5.2)
• Western Nepal (4.5)

Global Temperature Extremes

• The hottest temperature recorded this week by the World Meteorological Organization’s 7,600 land-based synoptic weather stations was 124° Fahrenheit (51° Celsius) at Yanbu, Saudi Arabia, on the country’s Red Sea coast.

• The coldest temperature in an inhabited location was -110° Fahrenheit (-79° Celsius) at Russia’s Vostok Station, located in the middle of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The station normally hosts 30 scientists and engineers during the summer. In winter, their number drops to 15.

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service

Earthweek’s deadline passed early Friday just as the biggest environmental story of the weekend, and its political repercussions, were beginning to intensify.

Thick smoke from hundreds of Canadian wildfires spread across a vast swath of the United States, darkening skies, reducing visibility and exposing tens of millions of people from the Midwest to the East Coast to unhealthy air.

President Donald Trump blamed Canada for failing to manage its forests and threatened to add the economic cost of the pollution to tariffs on Canadian imports. Republican lawmakers demanded that Canadian authorities do more to prevent smoke from crossing the border.

The haze even intruded on preparations for Sunday’s World Cup final between Spain and Argentina in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Smoke had pushed air quality in the region to unhealthy levels before thunderstorms began clearing the skies ahead of the match.

But neither the smoke nor its journey across the border was unprecedented.

Earthweek described an eerily similar event nearly a quarter-century ago.

In the issue for the week ending July 12, 2002, advancing wildfires across northern Quebec had burned more than 500,000 acres (202,000 hectares) and sent “a huge plume of smoke” into the northeastern United States.

Health officials in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania advised people with heart and respiratory conditions to remain indoors as smoke obscured the sky. Environment Canada issued similar warnings for Toronto and other Canadian cities.

Lightning and dry conditions had ignited the fires in remote forests around James Bay, between 200 and 400 miles (320 and 640 km) north of the U.S. border.

Seven years earlier, Earthweek reported that Quebec’s worst forest fires in four decades had forced about 500 people from their homes and sent smoke as far south as Maine.

Canadian wildfire smoke crossing into the United States is therefore not new.

What is changing is the enormous scale, persistence and frequency of the fires—and what scientists now understand about the danger carried within their smoke.

A Continental Smoke Emergency

Nearly 900 wildfires were burning across Canada by the weekend, with many of the most destructive blazes concentrated in Ontario. Additional fires were burning across northern Minnesota.

Smoke traveled more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km), triggering air-quality alerts across roughly 20 states and exposing an estimated 115 million people to unhealthy conditions.

Detroit experienced some of the worst air quality among major cities worldwide. Chicago’s skyscrapers disappeared behind a pungent gray haze, while parts of Minnesota were placed under hazardous-air warnings.

In New York City, smoke tinted the morning sky orange and yellow and partly obscured Manhattan’s skyline. Schools, parks and other agencies moved activities indoors, while tens of thousands of protective masks were distributed at transit hubs and other public locations.

Many of the blazes may burn until autumn rains or winter snow finally extinguish them. That is because Canada’s vast boreal forests cannot be managed like a suburban park or a small woodland near a populated community.

Many fires burn hundreds of miles from roads, towns or firefighting bases. Some erupt as towering crown fires that race through treetops with such intensity that aircraft and ground crews cannot safely approach them.

Smoke Inside the Body

The smoke may travel much farther than the flames, and the particles that travel farthest are also among the most dangerous.

Larger pieces of ash usually fall near a fire. But microscopic particles known as PM2.5 can remain airborne for days or weeks, crossing states, countries and even oceans.

Those particles are small enough to evade many of the body’s natural defenses, penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream.

Wildfire smoke is not composed only of burned trees. It can contain the combustion products of houses, vehicles, plastics, fuel tanks and industrial materials. Researchers have identified at least 1,000 toxins in the smoke, including formaldehyde and volatile organic compounds.

The particles trigger inflammation as the immune system responds to the intrusion. Within hours, ambulance calls and emergency-room visits can rise for asthma, coughing, chest tightness and breathing difficulties.

Within a day or two, hospitals may see more heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular emergencies.

Research increasingly connects wildfire smoke with damage throughout the body, including the brain and skin. Prolonged exposure has been associated with some cancers, dementia and other neurological diseases.

Pregnant women exposed to smoke face higher risks of premature birth and low birth-weight babies. People older than 60 are more vulnerable to stroke, while children, people with asthma and those with existing heart or lung disease face some of the greatest immediate risks.

A recent study estimated that long-term exposure to wildfire particles contributed to an average of about 24,100 deaths each year in the continental United States between 2006 and 2020.

Earthweek warned in May that wildfire smoke, worsening heat, longer pollen seasons and mold are combining to reverse decades of progress against respiratory illness.

An Earthweek report in January also described how gases released by fires can chemically transform in the atmosphere into additional fine particles, allowing the health threat to linger long after the flames have passed.

Blaming Canada

Trump portrayed the smoke as the result of Canadian negligence.

He accused Canada of refusing to conduct “basic forest management and debris removal” and said the United States was being “invaded” by unhealthy air.

He threatened to incorporate the financial cost of the smoke into tariffs already imposed on Canadian imports, although he offered no explanation of how such a penalty would be calculated or administered.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford called the accusation “absolutely unacceptable.” Canadian officials noted that their country has expanded firefighting operations and regularly assists the United States when American communities face fires, hurricanes and other disasters.

Fire is part of the natural cycle of the northern forest. The harder reality is that rising temperatures under human-caused climate change are drying vegetation more rapidly, extending fire seasons and making flames more intense and difficult to control.

Canada is warming about twice as quickly as the global average, while the Canadian Arctic is warming at nearly four times the global rate.

Even modest increases in temperature can produce far larger changes in the number and intensity of fires. Hotter air draws more moisture from soils and vegetation, leaving forests increasingly primed to burn when lightning arrives.

The United States is experiencing the same trend. The average area burned across the country annually during the 2020s is now more than twice what it was 30 years ago.

Canada has experienced several record or near-record fire seasons during this decade. Europe set a record for burned land last year, while Arctic fires have released unprecedented amounts of smoke and carbon into the atmosphere.

The Only Lasting Fix

The political demand that Canada simply remove more brush or extinguish every fire obscures the central reason so many forests are becoming dangerously combustible.

Humanity is continuing to burn the coal, oil and natural gas that heat the atmosphere, dry the land and load the climate system in favor of increasingly destructive fires.

A landmark 2023 study traced a substantial portion of the increased wildfire danger in western North America to emissions produced by 88 of the world’s largest fossil-fuel companies.

Yet the American politicians threatening Canada with tariffs made no mention of fossil fuels or climate change.

That omission transforms a planetary crisis into a foreign grievance. Smoke does not recognize national borders, and neither does the warming that helps create it.

The fires burning in Canada are Canadian emergencies. The smoke drifting into Chicago, Detroit, New York and New Jersey is an American emergency.

But the forces driving both are global.

Asked what would ultimately stop the worsening cycle, University of Michigan climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck offered a prescription far more direct than tariffs or political blame.

“Just stop burning fossil fuels.”

Steve Newman

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service

U.S. OKs Test of an Orbital Mirror Promising “Sunlight on Demand”

A U.S. company has received federal authorization to test an enormous orbital mirror intended to deliver “sunlight on demand” to selected locations on Earth after dark.

Reflect Orbital’s experimental Eärendil-1 satellite would deploy a steerable, thin-film reflector measuring about 59 feet by 59 feet (18 by 18 meters) in low-Earth orbit. By changing the mirror’s angle, operators hope to redirect sunlight onto a moving area approximately 3 miles (5 kilometers) wide for several minutes at a time.

The company says the technology could extend the generating hours of solar farms, illuminate disaster zones during rescue operations and provide temporary lighting in remote industrial or agricultural areas. Its early test would produce illumination comparable to moonlight, although Reflect Orbital eventually hopes to deploy increasingly powerful systems capable of producing much brighter light.

The proposal drew more than 1,800 public comments and strong opposition from astronomers and environmental groups. Critics warn that unexpected flashes could distract aircraft pilots and motorists, overwhelm sensitive telescope equipment and interfere with the natural light-and-dark cycles that regulate human sleep as well as wildlife migration, feeding, reproduction and plant growth.

The Federal Communications Commission authorized only the radio communications required to operate one demonstration satellite—not the vast constellation envisioned by the company. The agency also said that many objections concerning the mirror’s environmental and optical effects fell outside its principal responsibility for regulating radio frequencies.

That regulatory divide may become increasingly important. Reflect Orbital says it hopes to expand from its initial satellites to more than 50,000 orbital mirrors by 2035, with some future systems theoretically capable of producing light approaching daytime brightness for hours.

The experiment therefore involves far more than one unusual new satellite. It could become an early test of who controls darkness, how much artificial alteration of the night sky society is willing to accept and whether existing laws are equipped to regulate commercial projects that affect the shared environment above the entire planet.

Climate Models Grow More Precise as Political Attacks on the Science Intensify

For much of modern history, scientists could say that greenhouse gases were warming the planet but had greater difficulty determining how much climate change influenced a particular flood, wildfire or deadly heat wave.

That is rapidly changing.

More powerful computers, improved observations and a deeper understanding of the climate system now allow researchers to compare the world people actually inhabit with a simulated world in which fossil-fuel emissions had never altered the atmosphere. In some cases, scientists can calculate the human contribution to an extreme event before it has ended.

Those findings are becoming valuable to emergency planners, governments and insurance companies trying to prepare for risks that can no longer be estimated from the climate of the past. They could also help courts decide whether corporations or governments should bear some responsibility for climate-related losses.

Yet the clearer the science becomes, the more fiercely some political leaders attack it. President Donald Trump has repeatedly dismissed climate change as a “hoax” or “con job” and has declared climate models unreliable, while his administration has weakened federal climate research and placed outspoken skeptics in influential positions.

But a report released on Thursday by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine outlines how climate models are becoming more precise in identifying climate change’s fingerprints on individual disasters. The report finds that improved climate models, satellite measurements and decades of additional observations have substantially strengthened the science of extreme-event attribution.

Researchers have the greatest confidence when assessing heat waves and cold extremes, followed by heavy rainfall and drought. Progress has also been made with tropical cyclones and wildfires, although their complex causes make attributing individual storms or fires more difficult.

Scientific models will never reproduce every cloud, storm or drought perfectly. That is not their purpose. They calculate probabilities, test explanations and reveal how the odds are changing. Their improving accuracy is making the consequences of continued fossil-fuel use harder to dismiss — which may be precisely why the attacks against them are growing louder.

Midwest Heat Dome Bounces a Radio Signal 300 Miles to Trigger an Indiana Emergency Siren

During a Northern California heat wave in the summer of 1977, I switched on the television in the early evening and unexpectedly found myself watching The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson” from an NBC affiliate in Texas.

The distant broadcast remained clear for a couple of hours before disappearing as mysteriously as it had arrived. At the time, it seemed like little more than an atmospheric curiosity—a faraway signal briefly reaching across hundreds of miles of mountains and desert.

A similar phenomenon had more serious consequences this month in northeastern Indiana.

At about 3 a.m. on July 1, an outdoor emergency siren sounded across part of Huntington County. There was no tornado, severe thunderstorm or other threat anywhere nearby. County officials later determined that the siren had apparently received a radio signal from approximately 300 miles (480 kilometers) away in Iowa that happened to match its activation code.

The signal had likely traveled through what meteorologists and radio operators call tropospheric ducting. Under certain conditions, layers of sharply differing temperature, pressure and humidity can form invisible channels in the lower atmosphere. Radio waves become trapped inside them, bouncing far beyond the distance they would normally travel before emerging hundreds of miles away.

The effect can cause distant radio stations to replace local broadcasts and television signals from other regions to appear without warning. Amateur radio operators sometimes welcome the phenomenon because it enables them to contact people far beyond their usual range. But stray signals can also disrupt radar, maritime communications, emergency networks and other systems that depend upon carefully separated radio transmissions.

The Indiana incident occurred as a sprawling heat dome settled over much of the Midwest and eastern United States. Persistent high pressure and strong temperature inversions can create conditions favorable for ducting.

Scientists expect human-caused climate change to make many extreme heat events more frequent and intense. That does not mean every wandering radio signal can be blamed on global warming, but increasingly persistent heat domes could create more opportunities for unusual atmospheric conditions to interfere with communications.

Huntington County officials say its sirens can also be shut down manually. Their greater concern is that repeated unexplained alarms could create “alert fatigue,” causing residents to hesitate or ignore a warning when a genuine tornado or other disaster is approaching.

For most listeners, a distant station suddenly breaking through the static is a fleeting novelty. But when an invisible tunnel in the sky can carry the wrong command hundreds of miles and awaken an entire community, the atmosphere is reminding us that even the signals surrounding us are less securely contained than they appear.

Could Brightening Pacific Clouds Weaken a Super El Niño?

As a potentially record El Niño develops across the tropical Pacific, scientists are examining whether an extraordinary form of geoengineering could someday be used to weaken such events before they reach full strength.

The proposed technique, known as marine cloud brightening, would use ships to spray microscopic sea-salt particles into low clouds over the ocean. The added particles would make the clouds brighter and more reflective, sending additional sunlight back into space and cooling the sea surface below.

Researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and collaborating institutions used a seasonal forecasting model to test how the intervention might have affected the powerful El Niños of 1997–98 and 2015–16. In their most aggressive simulations, cloud brightening began early in the development of each event and continued for several months. The resulting cooling was strong enough to nearly eliminate both super El Niños.

The study was inspired by an unintended natural experiment created by Australia’s catastrophic “Black Summer” bushfires of 2019 and 2020. Vast quantities of smoke drifted across the southeastern Pacific, where the particles interacted with clouds and made them more reflective. Earlier research found that this cooling effect helped strengthen the unusually persistent La Niña that began in 2020.

That discovery raised an intriguing question: If smoke from wildfires could influence the Pacific climate cycle, could a carefully targeted human intervention do the same thing deliberately?

The simulations suggest that it might. Weakening El Niño could potentially reduce destructive floods, droughts, crop failures and extreme heat that can cause thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses. But the findings remain a computer-model proof of concept, not evidence that the technique is ready for use.

The engineering requirements alone would be enormous. Researchers estimate that thousands of specially equipped ships might be needed to spray enough sea salt into the atmosphere, and the technology has not been demonstrated at anything close to that scale.

The environmental and political risks could be even greater. El Niño does not affect every region in the same way, and weakening it could benefit some countries while harming others. The simulations indicated possible unintended warming over parts of Europe and Asia, while an intervention might also accelerate the transition into La Niña and shift rainfall patterns elsewhere.

Marine cloud brightening would therefore involve more than manipulating clouds. It would require international decisions about who controls a planetary weather system, which risks are acceptable and who would be responsible when the consequences cross national borders.

Researchers emphasize that the method would not address the underlying accumulation of greenhouse gases. At most, it might temporarily blunt one natural climate cycle whose effects are being intensified by human-caused warming. Reducing emissions would still be essential, even in a future where society gains the ability to influence El Niño itself.

Java Eruption

Indonesia’s Mount Merapi sent glowing lava avalanches tumbling down its western flank during the early hours of Saturday, the latest dangerous pulse in the volcano’s long-running eruption.

Volcanologists recorded five lava collapses from Merapi’s active summit dome, with incandescent material traveling as far as 1.2 miles (1.9 kilometers) along the Krasak River channel. No casualties or damage were immediately reported.

Merapi remains at Alert Level III, the second-highest level on Indonesia’s four-tier warning system. Residents, tourists and climbers have been told to remain outside exclusion zones extending between 1.9 and 4.3 miles (3 and 7 kilometers) from the summit, depending on the direction of the hazard.

The activity does not mark the beginning of a new eruption. Merapi has remained persistently active since 2020 as lava continues to accumulate in unstable summit domes. Their repeated collapse can generate glowing rockfalls and, at times, far more dangerous pyroclastic flows of superheated gas, ash and debris.

Communities along river valleys draining the volcano also face the threat of lahars when heavy rain remobilizes loose volcanic material. With large populations living on and around its slopes, Merapi remains one of the world’s most closely monitored volcanoes.

Massive Typhoon Bavi storms into China

After devastating the Northern Mariana Islands as a Category 5-equivalent super typhoon, Bavi crossed the western Pacific and slammed into China’s eastern Zhejiang province as the country’s strongest landfalling storm of the year. More than 2.8 million people were evacuated, including 2.2 million in Zhejiang, while airports and railway stations in Shanghai, Hangzhou and other cities canceled hundreds of flights and train services.

Violent winds uprooted more than 700 trees in Yueqing, flooded coastal communities and triggered landslides in mountainous areas. No deaths were immediately reported in China, although at least 134 people were injured as the storm passed northern Taiwan.

Earlier, rainfall enhanced by Bavi and the southwest monsoon caused landslides and flooding that killed at least 18 people in the Philippines and affected more than half a million residents.

Although Bavi weakened after moving inland, its circulation—about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) wide—was forecast to bring several more days of torrential rain and heightened flood risks across eastern and northern China.

Sharp Quake Jolts Wide Area of Southern New Zealand

A strong earthquake jolted New Zealand’s South Island on Thursday night local time, prompting authorities to briefly order coastal evacuations along part of the Fiordland coast.

The country’s GeoNet agency initially estimated the quake at magnitude 6.3 before revising it downward to 5.9. It struck about 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of Te Anau at a depth of roughly 33 miles (53 kilometers), producing strong shaking that residents described as long, loud and severe.

New Zealand’s National Emergency Management Agency initially warned that a damaging tsunami and coastal flooding were possible between Milford Sound and Puysegur Point. People near the coast were told to move immediately to higher ground and, where possible, evacuate on foot to avoid traffic congestion.

The warning was later downgraded and then canceled after monitoring detected no tsunami. Authorities nevertheless cautioned that strong currents and unpredictable surges could persist near beaches, harbors, marinas and river mouths.

No casualties or significant damage were immediately reported. The quake struck near Fiordland, a mountainous and glacier-carved tourist region on the boundary between the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates, where earthquakes are frequent.

Earth movements were also felt during the week in:
India’s central Bay of Bengal coast (4.5)
The central Philippines (4.8)
Southern Peru (5.6)
Far southern Mexico (5.0)

Global Temperature Extremes

• The hottest temperature recorded this week by the World Meteorological Organization’s 7,600 land-based synoptic weather stations was 122° Fahrenheit (50° Celsius) at Al Hofuf, Saudi Arabia.

• The coldest temperature in an inhabited location was -103° Fahrenheit (-72° Celsius) at Russia’s Vostok Station, located in the middle of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The station normally hosts 30 scientists and engineers during the summer. In winter, their number drops to 15.

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service

When I watched smoke rising across San Francisco Bay during the Oakland Hills fire on October 19, 1991, I thought I was witnessing an extraordinary California disaster.

I did not realize in the moment that I might also be seeing an early chapter in a much larger story that was only beginning to unfold.

At the time, I was a journalist and meteorologist at KRON-TV in San Francisco while Earthweek was only in its third year of publication. From a high-rise apartment on Cathedral Hill, I could see the smoke plume building across the Bay before heading into the station to report live on the disaster as it was still unfolding.

The Oakland Hills fire would become the most destructive wildfire California had ever seen and the deadliest urban wildfire in modern American history at that time. Twenty-five people were killed and more than 3,000 homes and apartments were destroyed as entire neighborhoods were consumed by flames.

It seemed like an extraordinary but distinctly Californian catastrophe, driven by drought, dry vegetation and powerful winds.

Three and a half decades later, it looks different.

Earthweek’s deadline passed on Friday with Europe already enduring another summer of extreme heat and wildfires. Then the news from southern Spain suddenly became much worse.

A wind-driven blaze in the Almería region trapped people trying to escape through dry hills and narrow roads on Friday. At least 12 people were killed in what has become the deadliest wildfire in modern Andalusian history, while more than 15,000 acres (6,000 hectares) were burned and more than 1,400 residents evacuated.

Some victims were found inside burned vehicles. Others apparently abandoned their cars and tried to flee on foot, only to be overtaken by flames advancing through the rugged terrain faster than a person could run. Authorities also received numerous missing-person reports in the chaotic aftermath of the fire.

At almost the same moment, the heat dome that had smothered Europe for weeks — and was estimated to have caused at least 10,000 deaths during late June alone — shifted southward across the Mediterranean. Algeria reported battling 119 separate fires in forests, agricultural lands and palm groves over the weekend as temperatures climbed toward 115°F (46°C).

Read through nearly four decades of Earthweek archives and a disturbing pattern emerges.

In 1994, Earthweek reported on devastating fires from Barcelona to Málaga, while blazes on Ibiza and Mallorca burned as much land in less than a week as had been lost during the entire previous year.

By 2005, Portugal, Spain and southern France were enduring record fire seasons requiring international firefighting assistance.

By the summer in 2007, unprecedented heat had transformed much of the Mediterranean into a tinderbox.

By the 2020s, Earthweek was increasingly reporting on fires in places once considered outside the traditional fire zones — from Britain’s moorlands and Germany’s forests to Canada’s boreal wilderness and even parts of the Arctic.

The map of global wildfire risk is being redrawn.

Years after the Oakland Hills disaster, wildfire became personal to me.

A small ranch I once owned in Sonoma County was burned to the ground during one of California’s Wine Country firestorms. The blaze also consumed the homes of many of my former neighbors as it blackened hundreds of acres of landscape along the Napa-Sonoma border.

What once seemed like exceptional disasters separated by years are increasingly becoming part of a larger pattern.

The world that Earthweek began documenting in 1988 is clearly not the same world we inhabit today.

This does not mean that every fire is caused solely by climate change. Fires still begin with lightning strikes, accidents, power lines or human carelessness. Forest management, land-use changes and development in fire-prone regions all play important roles.

But climate change is loading the dice.

Scientists have warned for decades that rising greenhouse gas concentrations would bring hotter temperatures, more intense droughts, earlier snowmelt, longer fire seasons and increasingly dangerous fire weather.

Scientists did not fail to foresee this future. The world failed to act on the warnings, which appeared repeatedly in scientific reports and, increasingly, in the pages of Earthweek itself.

Yet global greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise.

The result is a planet becoming progressively more flammable.

More heat dries vegetation faster. Drought lasts longer. Wet years produce abundant growth that later becomes fuel. Extreme winds can then transform an ordinary ignition into a catastrophe that outruns evacuation.

The fire belts of the world are not merely shifting northward in Europe and North America, they are expanding.

California, Australia and the Mediterranean remain among the world’s great fire regions, but the conditions that once made them exceptional are increasingly appearing elsewhere. Regions that rarely experienced major wildfires are becoming vulnerable, while traditional fire zones are enduring larger and more destructive events.

The deadly fires in southern Spain and Algeria this past weekend are not isolated tragedies.

They are part of a story that Earthweek has been documenting for nearly four decades.

A story of a warming planet.

A story of repeated scientific warnings.

And a story of humanity’s continuing failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly enough to prevent the expansion of the world’s fire frontier.

Steve Newman

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service

Solar Storms May Alter Earth’s Weather Within Hours

Powerful solar flares may influence weather on Earth far more quickly than previously recognized, according to new research that found shifts in precipitation, temperature and atmospheric pressure within hours to days of the major geomagnetic disturbances.

The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, combined 67 years of hourly space-weather records with detailed atmospheric data across North America. Researcher Joachim Raeder of the University of New Hampshire found that stronger geomagnetic storms were generally associated with larger weather anomalies, although the effects varied considerably by region and season.

Among the clearest patterns were declines in rainfall and snowfall around Canada’s Hudson Bay and parts of the western Rocky Mountains after geomagnetic storms. Large events occurring in summer or winter appeared more likely to suppress precipitation than storms in spring or fall, while wintertime events were associated with warmer conditions along parts of the U.S. West Coast and cooler temperatures over much of the rest of the continent.

The findings do not prove that solar storms directly cause these changes. But they challenge scientists to explain how disturbances beginning in Earth’s magnetosphere and upper atmosphere might propagate downward into the troposphere, where most weather occurs.

Raeder argues that the results fit better with so-called “top-down” atmospheric mechanisms than with the controversial idea that changes in cosmic rays strongly alter cloud formation. One possibility is that solar energy affects circulation through high-latitude atmospheric systems such as the polar vortex, eventually influencing conditions nearer the surface.

The work could ultimately help improve weather and climate models, which do not yet adequately reproduce possible short-term effects from geomagnetic storms.

Amazon deforestation at lowest level since 2014

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has fallen to its lowest 12-month level since the current monitoring record began in 2014, offering some of the strongest evidence yet that the decline in forest clearing is continuing.

Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, known as INPE, recorded around 1,229 square miles (3,182 square km), of deforestation alerts during the latest 12-month period. That was down from 4,633 square kilometers during the comparable period a year earlier.

The decline was particularly sharp in May, when INPE’s DETER rapid-alert system detected 370 square kilometers of clearing, compared with 960 square kilometers in May 2025 — a drop of about 61%. The result matters because May often marks the transition toward the Amazon’s drier season, when clearing and burning typically begin to increase.

The alert system is not Brazil’s final annual deforestation count. It is a rapid-response system designed to identify new clearings quickly enough for enforcement agencies to investigate and intervene. But its figures are closely watched as an early indication of the direction forest loss is taking, and the latest trend is broadly consistent with independent monitoring by the Brazilian nonprofit Imazon.

The decline extends a wider improvement under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose government has pledged to end illegal deforestation by 2030. Brazil’s official annual figures had already shown Amazon deforestation falling to an 11-year low in the 12 months ending July 2025.

Yet the encouraging numbers come with an important warning. Clear-cutting is only one measure of the Amazon’s health. Drought, wildfire, selective logging and damage along forest edges can kill trees and reduce the forest’s ability to store carbon and recycle moisture even when enough canopy remains to avoid immediate classification as deforestation.

That danger may become especially important during the coming dry season. Hotter and drier conditions can make disturbed forests more flammable, allowing fires set for agriculture or land clearing to escape into standing forest and cause damage that may not immediately appear in deforestation totals.

The latest satellite data therefore mark a significant environmental gain, but not an end to the Amazon crisis. Brazil is clearing less forest. The harder challenge is keeping what remains intact, connected and resilient in a warming world.

Europe’s June Heatwave May Have Killed 20,000 as Emissions Keep Driving Temperatures Higher

Europe’s most severe June heatwave on record may have killed around 20,000 people in a single week, according to an early estimate that seeks to capture deaths often missed by official counts.

Christopher Callahan of Indiana University estimated approximately 20,390 heat-related deaths between June 22 and 28 by applying historical relationships between temperature and excess mortality across Europe. The figure remains preliminary, and some researchers believe it may be too high because populations have adapted somewhat through greater access to cooling and improved heat preparedness.

Even so, experts agree that early official counts almost certainly understate the toll. Heat rarely appears by itself on a death certificate. Instead, extreme temperatures can push vulnerable people into fatal heart, respiratory and kidney crises, and complete mortality records often take months to assemble.

The late June heatwave developed under a persistent atmospheric pattern that drew hot air across much of Europe. But the severity of the event cannot be understood without the larger force steadily reshaping such weather: decades of greenhouse-gas emissions from burning coal, oil and gas.

A separate analysis by World Weather Attribution found that comparable circulation patterns now produce much higher temperatures because the underlying climate has warmed. Researchers estimated that a similar June heatwave would have been about 6.3°F (3.5°C) cooler during the day in 1976.

That is the central warning. Climate change does not need to create a particular high-pressure system to make it deadly. By raising the background temperature of the planet, greenhouse-gas emissions load ordinary weather patterns with additional heat.

And the world is still failing to curb those emissions quickly enough.

The U.N. Environment Programme’s latest assessment says policies currently in place put the planet on course for roughly 5.0°F (2.8°C) of warming above preindustrial levels this century. Existing national promises improve that outlook somewhat, but governments collectively remain far from the emissions cuts needed to hold warming near the Paris Agreement goals.

The consequences of that failure will not be measured only in global temperature averages. They will arrive as increasingly severe heatwaves, higher mortality, crop losses, wildfire conditions, water stress and growing pressure on electrical grids and health systems.

Avoiding far worse outcomes requires policy changes large enough to alter the emissions trajectory itself. Governments can speed the replacement of coal, oil and gas with renewable power, expand and modernize electricity grids, electrify vehicles and building heating, impose stronger efficiency standards and sharply reduce methane leaks from fossil-fuel operations.

They can also stop approving long-lived infrastructure that locks in future emissions. The International Energy Agency has concluded that pathways consistent with net-zero emissions do not require new long-lead-time oil and gas developments, new coal mines or new unabated coal-fired power plants.

None of this eliminates the need for adaptation. Europe still needs heat-warning systems, safer working conditions, cooling for vulnerable residents and cities designed with more shade and less trapped heat.

But adaptation alone has limits. A society can prepare for hotter summers, yet every additional fraction of a degree raises the level of danger and makes protection harder and more expensive.

The preliminary estimate of 20,000 deaths in late June may eventually be revised, and another intense heat dome is currently roasting the continent. The larger conclusion is harder to escape: Europe is already paying in human lives for continued greenhouse-gas emissions, and the toll will rise further unless governments move much faster to stop adding heat to the atmosphere.

Sino Twisters

Rare tornadoes and violent storms swept across China’s central Hubei province, killing at least 11 people, injuring more than 330 and damaging thousands of homes. The storms struck several cities Monday evening, with an EF2 tornado tearing through Huanggang and winds powerful enough to lift and displace heavy trucks.

Among the most extraordinary accounts, local Chinese media reported that a 30-year-old man was sucked from his 12th-floor apartment after windows shattered, with furniture also swept from the building. He reportedly survived and was being treated in intensive care, although the remarkable account was not included in reports from several major international and state news agencies covering the disaster.

Tornadoes are uncommon in Hubei, and meteorologists said the outbreak developed as colder northern air collided with warm, moisture-laden air associated with the remnants of Tropical Storm Maysak. The storms damaged more than 4,800 buildings across the province and marked one of China’s deadliest tornado episodes in recent years.

Mount Etna Eruption Sends Ash Across Sicily and Disrupts Flights

Renewed eruptive activity at Sicily’s Mount Etna sent dense clouds of ash above the volcano and forced a temporary shutdown of Catania Airport, disrupting travel for thousands of passengers. Nearly all flights were cancelled or diverted as volcanic ash fell across a wide area and aviation authorities raised the alert level to red.

Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology reported strong ash emissions from Etna as activity intensified, with an ash cloud rising about a mile (1.5 km) above the summit. The eruption developed after days of renewed unrest at the volcano, while winds carried ash toward populated areas and one of the Mediterranean’s busiest island airports.

Flights resumed Tuesday after the aviation alert was lowered, although airlines warned that schedules could change again depending on Etna’s activity and the movement of volcanic ash.

Super Typhoon Bavi Devastates Rota and Knocks Out Power Across U.S. Pacific Islands

Super Typhoon Bavi tore through the Mariana Islands with winds reaching 180 mph (290 km/h), inflicting catastrophic damage on Rota and cutting power to tens of thousands of people across the Northern Marianas and Guam. No deaths were reported, although at least two people were injured and officials said more than half of Rota may have been damaged.

The storm’s eye passed directly over Rota, an island of roughly 1,500 residents, ripping roofs from homes, toppling trees and utility poles, and severing water and communications networks. Residents queued for rationed drinking water in hot, humid conditions as officials warned that fully restoring electricity could take two to three months.

Saipan, Tinian and parts of Guam also lost power, while fallen trees and debris littered roads across the region. Before landfall, the U.S. National Weather Service had warned that a direct hit could leave much of Rota uninhabitable for weeks, with catastrophic structural damage and prolonged outages.

Typhoon Maysak Brings Deadly Floods and Rare Tornadoes to China

Typhoon Maysak brought days of destructive weather to China, unleashing flash floods that swallowed homes and villages across Guangxi before helping trigger rare tornadoes hundreds of miles away in Hubei. At least 17 people were reported dead, hundreds injured and tens of thousands evacuated as President Xi Jinping ordered an all-out rescue and relief effort.

In and around Nanning, muddy water rose with extraordinary speed, in some places submerging villages within minutes and forcing residents onto rooftops and higher ground. About 60,000 people were officially reported evacuated and roughly 90,000 affected, while residents told the BBC that some remote communities remained cut off with dwindling food, no electricity and little or no communication.

The storm’s reach extended far beyond the flooded south. Meteorologists said cold air from northern China collided with warm, moisture-laden air associated with Maysak, helping produce tornadoes in Hubei, where flying debris shattered windows and injured residents. Other parts of northern China also reported deadly flash floods and record rainfall.

Global Temperature Extremes

• The hottest temperature recorded this week by the World Meteorological Organization’s 7,600 land-based synoptic weather stations was 118° Fahrenheit (48° Celsius) at Sibi, Pakistan.

• The coldest temperature in an inhabited location was -108° Fahrenheit (-76° Celsius) at Russia’s Vostok Station, located in the middle of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The station normally hosts 30 scientists and engineers during the summer. In winter, their number drops to 15.

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service

News is supposed to be temporary.

Before the Internet, the week’s news arrived folded on your doorstep. A disaster unfolded, scientists issued a warning, the Earth shook and a volcano erupted. Then you read the paper over breakfast, and a day or two later it was replaced by another edition. By the following week, most of those stories had quietly faded from memory.

Except the events revealed in those “dead tree” paper editions of the newspaper didn’t stop influencing the world.

Read enough old Earthweeks and the stories begin talking to one another across the decades. The warnings echo. The patterns emerge. And events that once seemed isolated reveal themselves as chapters in a much longer story — one that is still unfolding today.

After the recent reconstruction of Earthweek’s archive stretching back to 1988, it is now possible to stop the clock and return to a single week on the planet. This time, we are going back to 1991.

One Week on Earth

In the Earthweek edition published on May 31, 1991, readers encountered a planet already displaying the mixture of danger, mystery and sheer strangeness that would become the feature’s hallmark.

Hemispheric Pollution

Scientists at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union said that satellite analysis shows that people as far away as India and Ethiopia are breathing smoke and soot from the hundreds of oil fires burning in Kuwait (In the wake of the First Gulf War - Operation Desert Storm.)

Killer Bees

A swarm of Africanized bees were accidentally carried on board a ship going from Trinidad to Barbados, where they escaped, attacked and killed a 58-year-old man in the south of the island. The man was stung as he was playing a game of cards with a friend on the roadside near the Kingland residential district of Barbados.

Late Ice

In contrast to the heat wave in other parts of North America, the most dangerous late-season maritime ice in more than 20 years halted fishing off much of the eastern coast of Canada. The government announced that it will compensate fishermen who cannot navigate safely or cast their gear off Quebec and Newfoundland.

Nuclear Testing

France exploded one of the most powerful nuclear bombs ever detonated in the South Pacific in its third nuclear test within three weeks. New Zealand’s seismological station at Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, estimated that the blast Wednesday had a force of 110 kilotons.

And then, as so often happened in the early Earthweek years, the week took a turn toward the unexpected.

Treed Swede

An angry elk chased a Swedish man up a tree and forced him to perch there for seven hours until help arrived, according to a report in the newspaper Norra Yesterbotten. The unnamed man was out for a stroll with his dog in the northern village of Norsjovallen when an elk cow and her calf confronted him.

Before the World Was Online

What makes an old Earthweek page fascinating is not simply that the events happened long ago. It’s that they arrived from another information age.

In 1991, there was no Google, no social media and no smartphone vibrating with breaking-news alerts. Most readers encountered the wider planet through newspapers, radio and television. A distant earthquake, an unusual migration or a scientific warning could appear briefly and then largely disappear from public view.

But Earthweek tried to hold those scattered events together.

Seen separately, they were news briefs.

Seen together, they became a diary of a restless planet.

Thirty-Five Years Later

Reading the latest issue of Earthweek today, some stories feel firmly anchored in the past. Others do not.

The names and places change, but the patterns are familiar: communities surprised by extreme weather, people living with geological hazards, ecosystems under pressure and scientists trying to understand changes before the rest of us fully notice them.

And then there are the oddities — the improbable animal encounters, strange migrations and small mysteries of nature that remind us that Earthweek was never intended to be only a catalog of catastrophe.

That mixture was there from the beginning.

The planet could be frightening.

It could be fragile.

And it could be wonderfully weird.

Steve Newman

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service

U.N. warns roads, railways, airports and ports must be redesigned for a hotter climate as extreme weather threatens global transportation.

The world’s transportation networks were largely built for the climate of the twentieth century. According to a new United Nations report, they may not be ready for the climate of the twenty-first.

The UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) warns that roads, railways, inland waterways, ports and airports across Europe, North America and Central Asia will face increasingly frequent disruptions from flooding, extreme heat, rising seas and thawing Arctic permafrost unless governments accelerate climate adaptation.

The report projects that many regions could experience 10 to 50 additional days each year with temperatures above 77°F (25°C), while some of the hottest areas may endure as many as 200 such days annually. Prolonged heat can soften asphalt, buckle railroad tracks, expand bridge joints and increase wildfire risks around transportation corridors.

Flooding remains the greatest threat. UNECE estimates that floods account for roughly 73 percent of expected annual climate damage to transport infrastructure worldwide, while stronger coastal storms and rising sea levels threaten ports that are essential to global trade. By mid-century, about 70 percent of Arctic transportation infrastructure could also lie in areas affected by thawing permafrost, jeopardizing roads, rail lines and airports built on once-stable frozen ground.

The report highlights examples from countries including France, Germany, Denmark and Portugal, where engineers are already testing heat-resistant road surfaces, monitoring rail networks for thermal deformation and incorporating climate projections into long-term infrastructure planning. UNECE concludes that adapting transportation systems now could significantly reduce future repair costs, economic losses and disruptions as extreme weather becomes more common.

Birds on Ukraine’s front lines are building nests from abandoned drone fiber-optic cables, revealing nature’s ability to adapt.

Few images capture the environmental footprint of modern warfare more vividly than a bird’s nest woven from the discarded control cable of a military drone.

Researchers in Ukraine have documented several nests built from ultra-thin fiber-optic cables left behind by drones used on both sides of the war. Mixed with dry grass and twigs, the synthetic strands have become a new nesting material in landscapes transformed by more than four years of conflict.

Unlike radio-controlled drones, fiber-optic drones remain connected to their operators by miles of hair-thin cable, making them largely immune to electronic jamming. As the drones fly, the cables unspool across forests, fields and shattered towns, creating shimmering webs that now cover parts of the 750-mile (1,200-km) front line.

Scientists say the nests offer an extraordinary glimpse of wildlife adapting to an environment reshaped by war. Researchers in Ukraine and the Netherlands plan to analyze DNA left behind in the nests to identify the bird species responsible and determine whether the behavior is becoming more widespread.

The synthetic fibers may make nests stronger, but they could also pose risks if birds become entangled or if the materials prove harmful over time. For now, researchers say it is too early to know whether the adaptation is ultimately beneficial or dangerous.

One of the nests has been preserved by Ukraine’s National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War as a reminder that armed conflict leaves lasting marks not only on people and cities, but also on the wildlife that must find ways to survive in the altered landscapes left behind.

Global oceans reach their hottest June ever recorded as scientists warn El Niño could push the climate into ‘uncharted territory.’

The world’s oceans reached another troubling milestone in June, recording the highest sea-surface temperatures ever observed for the month and reinforcing scientists’ warnings that the planet is entering another period of exceptional global warmth.

According to the European Union’s Copernicus Marine Service, average global sea-surface temperatures climbed to a record 69.8°F (21.0°C) during June, surpassing the previous June records set in 2023 and 2024. Marine heatwaves spread across roughly 82 percent of the global ocean, with especially intense warming in the Mediterranean, the central North Atlantic and the tropical Pacific.

Scientists say the record heat reflects the combined influence of long-term greenhouse gas warming and the emergence of a new El Niño, which naturally transfers additional heat from the Pacific Ocean into the atmosphere. Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo warned that current conditions may signal “the beginning of a new phase,” with more temperature records likely to fall in the months ahead.

The consequences extend far beyond the oceans. Because the seas absorb about 90 percent of the excess heat generated by greenhouse gas emissions, warmer waters intensify hurricanes and tropical storms, increase atmospheric moisture that fuels extreme rainfall, accelerate sea-level rise through thermal expansion and trigger widespread coral bleaching during prolonged marine heatwaves.

For climate scientists, the latest record is another indication that the oceans — the planet’s largest reservoir of heat — continue to absorb the growing energy imbalance created by human activities, even as El Niño threatens to amplify global temperatures into 2027.

Tiny diving suits turn cockroaches into underwater explorers.

Cockroaches are already famous for surviving almost anything. Now scientists have taught them a new trick: diving underwater while wearing custom-made miniature “scuba gear.”

Researchers fitted Madagascar hissing cockroaches with lightweight, air-filled backpacks that allow the insects to remain submerged for far longer than they could naturally. The tiny devices trap a bubble of air around the cockroach’s breathing openings, supplying oxygen while preventing water from entering its respiratory system.

In laboratory tests, the insect “divers” were able to walk across submerged surfaces, squeeze through narrow underwater spaces and remain active well beyond their normal limits. The research was inspired by aquatic insects that naturally carry bubbles of air beneath the water’s surface.

The scientists emphasize that the goal is not to create underwater cockroach armies. Instead, the work could lead to biohybrid robots capable of exploring flooded buildings, collapsed tunnels, underground pipes or other hazardous environments where conventional robots struggle to operate. Because cockroaches are remarkably agile and energy-efficient, they can traverse complex terrain that often defeats wheeled machines.

While the thought of an underwater cockroach may unsettle some people, the study highlights a growing field that combines living organisms with miniature engineering. By borrowing nature’s extraordinary mobility, researchers hope to develop new tools for search-and-rescue missions, environmental monitoring and disaster response.

Steam-driven eruption sends ash 4,000 feet above Taal Volcano as Philippine authorities warn more explosions could follow.

One of the Philippines’ most closely watched volcanoes produced another dramatic reminder of its unpredictable nature Tuesday when a steam-driven eruption sent a gray column of ash and volcanic gases nearly 4,000 feet (1,200 metres) above Taal’s main crater.

The explosion occurred when hot volcanic material came into contact with water in the crater lake, triggering what volcanologists call a phreatomagmatic eruption — a violent interaction that can generate powerful blasts even when little fresh magma reaches the surface.

Although the eruption appeared spectacular, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology kept the volcano at Alert Level 1, indicating low-level unrest rather than an impending major eruption. Scientists cautioned that additional steam-driven explosions, volcanic earthquakes, ash emissions and gas releases remain possible without warning.

Located about 40 miles (65 km) south of Manila, Taal Volcano sits within a lake-filled caldera surrounded by densely populated communities. Because of its history of sudden, deadly eruptions, Volcano Island remains a permanent danger zone where permanent settlement is prohibited.

Twin typhoons bring floods and landslides to Japan after soaking Taiwan.

Two tropical cyclones swept northward along Japan in an unusually active late-June weather pattern, leaving at least one person dead after a landslide and causing widespread transportation disruptions. The remnants of Tropical Storm Higos and Typhoon Mekkhala, combined with a seasonal rain front, unleashed torrential rain across southwestern, western and eastern Japan, triggering landslides, damaging roads and forcing the cancellation of flights and train services.

Before reaching Japan, Mekkhala’s expansive rainbands drenched southern Taiwan without making landfall, producing severe flash flooding in Kaohsiung and Pingtung counties. Floodwaters submerged streets, stranded vehicles and prompted local authorities to suspend work and school in some of the hardest-hit communities.

In Japan, a man in his 70s was killed when a rain-soaked hillside collapsed onto a home in Yamaguchi Prefecture, while three other people were injured. High waves and flooding also disrupted major rail corridors, including parts of the Tokaido and Sobu lines, as both storms weakened into tropical depressions after passing offshore.

Mekkhala also made meteorological history. As the seventh named storm of the 2026 western Pacific season, it ensured that at least one tropical cyclone had formed in every month from January through June—a remarkably rare occurrence recorded only twice before, in 1965 and 2015. While the storms were relatively short-lived, they underscored how multiple tropical systems interacting with seasonal weather fronts can dramatically amplify rainfall and flooding hazards across East Asia.

Powerful earthquake jolts northeastern Japan, injuring more than 10 and disrupting bullet trains.

A strong magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck off Japan’s northeastern Pacific coast during Thursday morning’s rush hour, injuring more than 10 people, temporarily halting bullet train service and closing dozens of schools across Aomori and Iwate prefectures.

The quake struck at a depth of about 27 miles (44 km) off Iwate Prefecture and generated violent shaking, but Japan’s Meteorological Agency said there was no risk of a tsunami.

Most injuries were caused by falls or falling objects, including a woman who suffered serious head injuries while working in her garden. High-speed rail service on the Tohoku Shinkansen was suspended for safety inspections before resuming later in the day, while local authorities closed more than 70 schools as a precaution.

Officials also confirmed there were no abnormalities at nuclear facilities, including the Fukushima Daiichi and Onagawa power plants.

The earthquake occurred along the Japan Trench, where the Pacific Plate dives beneath northeastern Japan, one of the world’s most active seismic zones. The same region produced the catastrophic magnitude 9.0 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011, and has experienced a series of significant earthquakes in recent months.

Deep Afghanistan earthquake shakes northern India and Pakistan, injuring dozens.

A powerful magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck deep beneath Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains on Saturday, sending strong tremors across a vast region that included Kabul, northern Pakistan and much of northern India. The quake, centered about 134 miles (215 km) below the surface, was widely felt in Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir, and Islamabad, prompting thousands of people to rush outdoors.

Although the earthquake’s great depth helped reduce the severity of ground shaking near the epicenter, at least 20 people were reported injured in Pakistan, where panic led to falls and other accidents, and dozens of homes were damaged. Authorities in India and Afghanistan reported no immediate casualties or significant structural damage.

The Hindu Kush is one of the world’s most seismically active regions, where the Indian tectonic plate is being forced beneath Eurasia. Deep-focus earthquakes are common there and can be felt over exceptionally large distances because seismic waves travel efficiently through the Earth’s interior. While such quakes are often less destructive than shallow earthquakes of similar magnitude, they serve as a reminder of the persistent seismic hazard across South and Central Asia.

Earth movements were also felt in:

• Southern Portugal (4.3)
• Northwestern Mexico (6.0)
• The Venezuela quake disaster zone (aftershock 4.6)

Global Temperature Extremes

• The hottest temperature recorded this week by the World Meteorological Organization’s 7,600 land-based synoptic weather stations was 119° Fahrenheit (48° Celsius) at Adrar, Algeria.

• The coldest temperature in an inhabited location was -105° Fahrenheit (-76° Celsius) at Russia’s Vostok Station, located in the middle of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The station normally hosts 30 scientists and engineers during the summer. In winter, their number drops to 15.

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service

There was a time when a week of 100-degree temperatures across Europe sounded like science fiction. Today it is reality. As this summer’s extraordinary heat grips much of the continent, the Earthweek archives reveal that scientists had warned this day was coming decades ago — and that those warnings were reported long before the world was ready to listen.

Across Europe this week, records have fallen from Spain to Britain, France, Germany and beyond. Hundreds of millions of people have endured dangerous heat, with tropical nights offering little relief as temperatures remained near or above 86°F (30°C) after sunset. Scientists say the combination of extreme heat and unprecedented humidity makes this one of the most dangerous heat waves Europe has ever experienced. A separate and powerful heat dome is now expanding across parts of the central and eastern United States.

The remarkable story isn’t simply the deadly heat, it’s how quickly humanity has begun accepting it.

Much of today’s news coverage understandably focuses on shattered records, exhausted tourists, wildfires, failing infrastructure and rising death tolls. Those are important stories. But surprisingly, almost no attention is devoted to the underlying cause that climate scientists have identified with increasing confidence for decades — or to the urgent question of what must still be done to prevent far worse conditions from becoming commonplace.

The atmosphere produced the past week’s European heat dome. Global warming due to unbridled greenhouse gas emissions made it more intense.

According to the World Weather Attribution project, the temperatures experienced across western and central Europe during the past week would have been virtually impossible without human-caused climate change. Researchers estimate that a similar June heat wave fifty years ago would have been about 6°F (3.5°C) cooler. What once would have been considered a once-in-many-thousands-of-years event has become possible because the entire climate system has warmed.

But perhaps the most disturbing change is not physical, it’s psychological.

The public appears to be adapting emotionally to a world that is becoming progressively more dangerous. Each record is surpassed by another. Each “unprecedented” event is soon replaced by the next one. Heat has become another headline. Climate change has become background noise.

That normalization may be one of the greatest risks we face.

For nearly 40 years, Earthweek has reported on climate change not because it claimed special insight, but because scientists repeatedly warned that this was the direction the planet was heading. Long before “heat dome” became part of the public vocabulary, Earthweek regularly reported on rising greenhouse gases, record global temperatures, melting glaciers, changing rainfall patterns, stronger heat waves, expanding droughts, rising seas and increasingly urgent assessments from the United Nations and the world’s leading climate researchers.

Looking back through the Earthweek archives today, the progression was unmistakable.

Whether unprecedented downpours, severe storms or deadly heat waves, what once seemed exceptional have gradually become common, then expected and now routine. This is what scientists predicted and Earthweek reported.

Our role has simply been to continue deliver their findings — week after week, year after year — even when climate stories faded from newspaper front pages and public attention shifted elsewhere.

During much of that time, powerful fossil fuel interests — the “Carbon Club” we examined in an earlier Earthweek Vault feature — and many of their political allies worked to cast doubt on the scientific consensus, portraying global warming as uncertain, exaggerated or even a hoax.

Journalists, scientists and others who reported the mounting evidence often became targets themselves. Earthweek received its share of angry letters, accusations and even occasional threats simply for reporting what climate researchers were finding. Yet the scientific evidence continued to grow stronger with each passing year. Those warnings are no longer projections. They are today’s headlines.

Yet despite decades of increasingly confident scientific evidence, global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. Governments meet, negotiate and pledge action, while the atmosphere continues accumulating heat-trapping gases. Progress has been made in renewable energy and cleaner technologies, but not nearly fast enough to match the scale of the problem.

The consequences are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Climate researchers warn that unless carbon emissions decline rapidly, heat waves will become more frequent, longer-lasting and more intense. Many cities will face weeks rather than days of dangerous heat. Some regions could periodically experience combinations of temperature and humidity approaching the limits of human survivability outdoors. Agricultural production will become more difficult. Water shortages will intensify. Wildfire seasons will lengthen. Infrastructure designed for the climate of the twentieth century will struggle to function in the climate of the twenty-first.

None of this is speculative. Much of it is already happening.

The purpose of Earthweek has always been to place today’s events into the broader story of our changing planet. Its archives are a reminder that today’s crises did not appear suddenly. They emerged gradually, just as climate scientists warned they would.

That history also offers a lesson. Problems ignored do not disappear. They grow.

Earthweek cannot solve climate change. Neither can journalists. But journalism has a responsibility to report not only what is happening, but why it is happening. Reporting the spectacle of another record-breaking heat wave without explaining its underlying cause just isn’t enough.

Extreme weather is no longer simply weather. It is one of the clearest signals that the future described by climate scientists decades ago has arrived.

As these events become more frequent, Earthweek will devote even greater attention to explaining not only what is happening to our planet, but why it is happening—and what scientists say can still be done to limit the damage.

The question is no longer whether the warnings were correct.

The question is how much more global heating humanity is willing to endure before finally responding with the urgency that science has demanded all along.

Steve Newman

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service

Deadly heat wave pushes Europe toward record temperatures as scientists warn this is the new normal.

Europe is enduring one of its most intense early-summer heat waves on record, with temperatures climbing above 100° Fahrenheit (38°C) across much of the continent and approaching 110° (43°C) in parts of Spain and southwestern France.

The extreme heat has forced hundreds of school closures, disrupted rail service, canceled outdoor events and prompted governments to urge older adults and other vulnerable people to remain indoors.

France has reported dozens of heat-related deaths, including several people who drowned while trying to cool off in rivers and lakes, while emergency services across western Europe have responded to a surge in heat-related incidents.

Britain has issued its highest-level heat warning, with forecasters predicting temperatures that could shatter June records.

Meteorologists say the heat is being intensified by an “Omega block,” a stubborn atmospheric pattern that traps hot air beneath a dome of high pressure for days at a time.

But scientists stress that climate change is loading the dice, making these prolonged heat waves more frequent, more intense and more widespread.

Europe is now warming at more than twice the global average, leading the World Health Organization to call for cities to redesign public spaces, strengthen health systems and expand protections for vulnerable populations as extreme heat becomes an increasingly deadly public health threat.

Rare pink grasshoppers thrive in an English garden — and survive thanks to four cats.

At first glance, they look almost artificial—tiny grasshoppers the color of bubblegum hopping through an ordinary English garden.

But these insects are very real. Their striking pink bodies are the result of erythrism, a rare genetic mutation that increases red pigmentation. While the mutation itself occurs naturally, pink grasshoppers are seldom seen because their lack of camouflage makes them easy prey for birds.

What makes this discovery especially unusual is that homeowner Natasha Welch, of Somerset, first spotted a single pink grasshopper last year and has now found several pink youngsters in the same garden. Their survival suggests the mutation has been passed to a new generation, perhaps helped by a backyard where birds rarely venture because of the family’s cats and where long grass provides shelter.

The discovery in southwestern England is also a reminder that small changes in the way we manage our gardens can benefit wildlife. By leaving areas of tall grass, shrubs and wildflowers, even modest urban gardens can become havens for insects—and occasionally reveal one of nature’s rarest splashes of color.

Artificial light is rewiring coral reefs, keeping fish awake and disrupting an entire nighttime ecosystem.

Artificial light has become one of the least discussed forms of environmental pollution, yet scientists are increasingly finding that it transforms ecosystems after the sun goes down. A new study published in Current Biology reports that the glow from cities, ports, roads and beachfront development can keep coral reef fish awake at night.

Blue-green damselfish exposed to prevalent levels of nighttime lighting slept less, became more aggressive, fed at unusual hours and ventured away from the shelter of their corals. The fish also developed elevated markers associated with DNA damage in brain cells after prolonged exposure, suggesting that disrupted sleep may interfere with normal nighttime repair processes.

The new findings builds on a growing body of research showing that artificial light already disrupts the synchronized spawning of corals, attracts nighttime predators and even affects the early development of reef fish embryos.

Scientists estimate that more than one-fifth of the world’s coastlines and over one-third of marine protected areas are now exposed to artificial light at night, meaning many reefs no longer experience true darkness.

For decades, people have heard a mysterious hum. Scientists now think it may come from within.

For decades, “The Hum” has ranked among the world’s most enduring scientific mysteries. People from Bristol, England, to communities across North America, Australia and New Zealand have described hearing a faint but persistent low-frequency drone that others nearby cannot detect. Numerous investigations have searched for industrial machinery, electrical systems or other environmental sources, often without success.

Interest in the mysterious phenomenon dates back decades. One of the earliest investigations, reported in Britain in 1973, examined 50 people who complained of hearing a persistent low-frequency throbbing sound that others could not detect. Researchers found the noise was typically between 30 and 40 hertz, was most often reported during cool, calm mornings and appeared to be confined to localized areas. For some sufferers, the unexplained noise has caused severe distress and has been linked to at least three suicides in the United Kingdom.

Now, researchers writing in PLOS One say they believe many of these mysterious reports may have a simple explanation. After testing volunteers who experience The Hum, they found little evidence that they possess unusually sensitive hearing or are detecting tiny sounds naturally produced within the inner ear. Instead, the researchers conclude that many cases are probably a little-recognized form of low-frequency tinnitus, in which the brain itself generates the sensation of sound.

The finding does not explain every reported case, and the researchers acknowledge that genuine external low-frequency noises undoubtedly exist. But recognizing that many experiences may originate within the auditory system could open the door to treatments that have rarely been considered.

Longtime Earthweek readers may remember that the column covered a different “hum” in 2004, when scientists discovered that the Earth itself continuously vibrates at frequencies far below human hearing as powerful ocean waves transfer energy into the seafloor. Unlike that planetary seismic hum, the mysterious Hum reported by people may, in many cases, may be generated not by the Earth beneath our feet but by the complexity of the human brain.

Tourists flee as Guatemala’s Volcán de Fuego erupts.

The stunning videos of tourists sprinting down the slopes of Guatemala’s Volcán de Fuego have captivated millions, but they also reveal how quickly adventure can turn into survival.

As the volcano erupted, glowing volcanic bombs crashed onto hiking trails, ash filled the air and stunned visitors abandoned their cameras to run. One hiker later described seeing rocks suddenly raining from above, while another tourist grabbed a frightened dog and carried it to safety. A burning rock even melted through part of one woman’s coat, narrowly missing her head.

In 2018, one of Fuego’s largest eruptions unleashed deadly pyroclastic flows that buried entire villages and claimed more than 100 lives.

Rare Double Earthquake Devastates Venezuela as Rescuers Race Against Time

Venezuela is confronting what may become one of the deadliest natural disasters in its modern history after two powerful earthquakes struck just 39 seconds apart, collapsing buildings across Caracas and the country’s northern coast. The unusual sequence began with a magnitude 7.2 earthquake, immediately followed by a stronger magnitude 7.5 rupture that sent a second, even more destructive wave of shaking through cities already reeling from the first shock. Hundreds of buildings were damaged or destroyed, including apartment blocks, hotels and public buildings, while the country’s main international airport sustained heavy damage and was forced to close.

The official death toll continued to rise as rescue crews searched through mountains of shattered concrete for survivors believed trapped beneath the rubble. Authorities declared a state of emergency as international urban search-and-rescue teams mobilized from across the Americas and beyond. The US Geological Survey warned that the disaster could ultimately claim thousands of lives, with its rapid loss assessment indicating a significant probability that fatalities could exceed 10,000 if the worst-hit communities suffered the extensive structural failures seen in the first hours after the disaster.

Scientists say the catastrophe was made even more destructive by an exceptionally rare phenomenon known as a seismic doublet. Rather than producing one major earthquake followed by ordinary aftershocks, the fault ruptured twice within less than a minute. Seismologists believe the first earthquake triggered a second, larger rupture closer to the surface, generating another pulse of powerful seismic waves before damaged buildings had any chance to stabilize. The second rupture likely caused structures weakened by the initial shaking to collapse, greatly increasing the destruction.

The earthquakes occurred along the complex boundary where the Caribbean Plate slides past the South American Plate, one of northern South America’s most active seismic zones. More than 20 aftershocks rattled the region through the night, forcing frightened residents to sleep outdoors while engineers assessed buildings at risk of collapse. With communications disrupted and several of the hardest-hit communities still difficult to reach, officials cautioned that the full scale of the disaster may not be known for days.

Twin typhoons threaten Japan as torrential rains raise flood and landslide risks.

Japan braced for a rare one-two punch from two tropical cyclones that could produce days of dangerous weather across much of the country.

Typhoon Mekkhala swept past Okinawa before tracking northeast along Japan’s Pacific coast, bringing powerful winds, high surf and torrential rain. At the same time, Tropical Storm Higos is expected to move on a more easterly path that could take it near the Izu Islands and eastern Japan. While the storms are too far apart to interact through the unusual Fujiwhara effect, meteorologists warn they will combine in another way by pumping warm, moisture-laden air into Japan’s stationary rainy-season front.

That interaction could produce widespread, long-lasting rainfall well before either storm arrives. Some forecasts called for more than 20 inches of rain across parts of western and eastern Japan through the weekend, greatly increasing the risk of landslides, flash flooding and overflowing rivers. Several landslides have already been reported in southern Japan as the rain begins to intensify.

Another Earthquake Rattles Bangladesh as a Series of Tremors Raises Public Concern

Another moderate earthquake has rattled Bangladesh, shaking the capital of Dhaka and surrounding communities as the country experiences an unusual run of seismic activity.

The tremor struck shortly after 9:28 p.m. Monday, with Bangladesh’s seismic observatory measuring it at magnitude 4.0 and the U.S. Geological Survey estimating it at 4.4. Its epicenter was near Rupganj, just east of the capital, and there were no immediate reports of injuries or significant damage.

While the earthquake itself was relatively modest, it follows three other noticeable tremors during June, including a magnitude 5.6 event earlier this month. Clusters of earthquakes are not uncommon in tectonically active regions and do not necessarily indicate that a larger earthquake is imminent. Nevertheless, each new tremor reminds residents of Bangladesh’s exposure to seismic hazards, particularly around the densely populated Dhaka metropolitan area.

Earth movements were also felt in:
• Russian-controlled Crimea (4.3)
• Central China’s Qinghai province (5.2)
• Northeastern Japan (6.9)
• Russia’s southern Kamchatka Peninsula (6.6)
• The Greek island of Crete (5.2)
• Northwestern California (5.6)

Global Temperature Extremes

• The hottest temperature recorded this week by the World Meteorological Organization’s 7,600 land-based synoptic weather stations was 121° Fahrenheit (49° Celsius) at Al Hofuf, Saudi Arabia.

• The coldest temperature in an inhabited location was -103° Fahrenheit (-74° Celsius) at Russia’s Vostok Station, located in the middle of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The station normally hosts 30 scientists and engineers during the summer. In winter, their number drops to 15.

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service

For nearly four decades, Earthweek has chronicled global warming, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, disappearing wildlife and the many other challenges facing our planet. But nature also has an irrepressible sense of humor.

Over the years, some of the column’s most memorable and widely shared items have involved animals that consumed a little too much naturally fermented fruit—or, in some cases, human-made alcoholic products. This week’s Earthweek Vault looks back at four of those unforgettable encounters.

Steve Newman

Potted Pigs

September 1, 1989

Thirteen stray pigs went on a wild rampage in western Kenya’s Rift Valley after imbibing a supply of a hidden and potent local brew, according to a report in the country’s Daily Nation.

The swine emptied several drums of the illegal brew, known locally as kangara, which they stumbled upon at a farm near the town of Eldoret. After they later awakened from their drunken slumbers, the pigs ran amok through town, chasing schoolchildren and damaging several home.

Donkey Rehab

November 10, 1995

A unique animal retreat has been established in England to treat “alcoholic” donkeys. Dr. Elisabeth Svendsen rehabilitates the usually calm beasts that have become aggressive drunks after their masters taught them to imbibe.

“We had a group of three donkeys who came in from a pub that was closed down. They had been fed on Guiness and potato crisps,” Svendsen said.

One donkey was trained at a pub to pick up a half-pint of beer with its lips and drink it in one gulp. It ended up attacking the pub owner’s wife.

Svendsen treats the donkeys by weaning them with watered-down versions of their favorite tipple.

Drunken Marauders

June 7, 2002

Tea plantation workers in eastern India’s Assam state are being terrorized by herds of rampaging wild Asiatic elephants that storm into villages to guzzle homemade beer, then destroy mud-and-thatch huts in drunken rampages.

The Indo-Asian News Service reported that the elephant raids are occurring in many parts of northern Assam, where people traditionally brew rice beer at home. The smell of the fermentation is said to attract the animals from the forests into populated areas.

“Most villagers, apprehending trouble from the elephant herds, stay huddled together at night and hence no casualties,” one official said.

Assam is home to at least 5,500 of India’s total elephant population of around 10,000 (2002 figures).

Deadly Indulgence

July 25, 2008

A drunken ell fell victim to an annual abundance of fermenting fruit when Swedish hunters were forced to shoot it.

Eating too many rotting apples is believed to have caused the animal to charge and bite a young girl who was playing in a backyard sandbox in the cit of Kungalv, according to the Swedish news agency TT.

“I suddenly heard a loud scream. Then I threw myself over the hedge, grabbed Nova and ran back into the house,” said the girl’s mother, Maria Schelin. The drunken beast disappeared, but was later tracked down and killed by a group of hunters.

Scandinavian elk often become intoxicated after eating fermenting apples, but it usually occurs late in the fall.

In 2002, a drunken bull elk was shot after it attacked an 8-year-old boy. Another intemperate elk laid siege to a Swedish schoolhouse in November 2006.

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service

UNICEF: More Than 1 Billion Children Now Face Multiple Climate Hazards as Global Warming Intensifies

Climate change is no longer an occasional disaster for many of the world’s children. According to UNICEF’s 2026 Children’s Climate Risk Report, more than 1.1 billion children now live with at least three overlapping climate hazards, creating a constant cycle of risks that threaten their health, education and future opportunities.

The report paints a stark picture of a warming world where extreme heat, drought, floods, tropical storms and wildfires increasingly occur together rather than in isolation. Nearly every child on Earth now experiences at least one major climate hazard, while billions face multiple threats that strain families, overwhelm schools and hospitals, damage roads and water systems, and leave communities less able to recover before the next disaster strikes.

The greatest burdens fall on children in Africa’s Sahel and across parts of South Asia, where combinations of extreme heat, prolonged drought and severe storms have become increasingly common. But UNICEF stresses that wealthier nations are also seeing growing risks as heat waves, drought and flooding become more frequent.

The agency says protecting children will require far more than disaster response. It is urging governments to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels while investing in climate-resilient schools, health care, water systems and other essential services that can help shield the next generation from the mounting consequences of a warming planet.

Vast Floating Rafts of Volcanic Rock Cut Off Papua New Guinea Communities and Threaten Food Supplies

An undersea volcano erupting southeast of Manus Island has produced enormous rafts of floating pumice that are transforming coastal waters across parts of Papua New Guinea.

Carried by currents and tides, the lightweight volcanic rock has piled up along shorelines and clogged key waterways, in some places forming layers several yards deep. Residents say outboard motors cannot operate in the thick pumice and some villages have effectively been cut off from nearby towns and markets.

The eruption, which began in early May near the Titan Ridge submarine volcano, has also raised concerns about the marine environment. Local leaders report that coral reefs, seagrass beds and fishing grounds are being buried beneath the floating debris, threatening a critical source of food and income.

While volcanologists say the pumice itself poses no direct danger and will eventually disperse or sink, communities worry that prolonged disruptions could lead to shortages of food, fresh water and essential supplies.

New Wolf-Dog Hybrids Emerging in the Himalayas Raise Concerns for Wildlife and Communities

High in Ladakh, a sparsely populated Himalayan region of northern India, wildlife biologists are tracking the emergence of an unusual new predator: a hybrid created when feral dogs breed with endangered Himalayan wolves.

Known locally as khipshang, the animals are reportedly becoming more common as dog populations expand across the region’s remote settlements and military outposts. Researchers say the hybrids may compete with wolves, foxes and other native carnivores while also accelerating the loss of the wolves’ unique genetic heritage.

The concern extends beyond Ladakh. Conservation organizations have identified wolf-dog hybridization as an emerging threat to wolf populations in several parts of India, particularly where wild wolf numbers are declining and free-ranging dogs are abundant. Feral dogs also spread diseases such as rabies and canine distemper that can affect wild carnivores.

East Africa’s Virunga Park Battles Ebola on Two Fronts as Rangers Protect Both People and Endangered Gorillas

A growing Ebola outbreak in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo is placing both human communities and endangered gorillas at risk, prompting an intensive response inside Virunga National Park. Park rangers are constructing screening checkpoints along major travel corridors to help contain the spread of the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, which currently has no approved vaccine or treatment. At the same time, authorities have closed gorilla tourism and expanded patrols around mountain gorilla habitat to prevent any contact between infected people and the animals.

The concern is well founded. Previous Ebola outbreaks in Central Africa killed thousands of western lowland gorillas, with some populations suffering losses of more than 90%.

Scientists warn that mountain gorillas, already numbering only about 1,200 across the region, could face catastrophic consequences if the virus reaches them. Conservation groups say reduced international funding, armed conflict and limited health infrastructure are hampering efforts to contain the outbreak.

Hundreds of humans have already been infected in the current outbreak.

Antarctica’s Winter Turns Unseasonably Warm as Temperatures Soar More Than 35°F (20°C) Above Normal

A remarkable winter heat wave swept across the Antarctic Peninsula this month, shattering temperature records and producing scenes that scientists say would have been almost unimaginable a few decades ago.

At Argentina’s Esperanza research station, temperatures reached 59.7°F (15.4°C) on June 6, the highest June temperature ever recorded there and roughly 36°F (20°C) above average for the winter season. Nearby stations also reported record warmth as mild air surged southward from lower latitudes.

The consequences were immediately visible. Snow melted from large areas of normally white landscape, rain fell on glaciers and some locations remained above freezing for weeks. Researchers working in the region reported seeing bare ground where snow should have been accumulating during winter.

Scientists caution that the heat wave was influenced by unusual weather patterns, but they also note that the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed far faster than the global average over the past several decades.

Scientists Unveil the First Global Map of Vast Underground Fungal Networks That Help Feed Plants and Store Carbon

Researchers have completed the first global map of one of Earth’s most important and least visible ecosystems — the vast underground fungal networks that support plant life and help regulate the climate. Known as mycorrhizal fungi, these microscopic threads attach to plant roots and act as an extension of their underground plumbing system, delivering water and nutrients while helping move carbon from the atmosphere into the soil.

The researchers from the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) estimate that these fungal filaments collectively stretch about 68 quadrillion miles, forming a planetary network far larger than anything visible above ground.

Their maps reveal that natural grasslands contain some of the densest concentrations of fungal activity on Earth, underscoring the importance of protecting these often-overlooked landscapes. The study also found that croplands tend to support far fewer fungal networks than wild ecosystems.

For the average person, the finding is simple: healthy soils depend on an enormous hidden ecosystem beneath our feet, one that helps grow food, support wildlife and store carbon that would otherwise contribute to global warming.

Deadly Earthquake Shakes China’s High Tibetan Plateau

A powerful magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck the remote highlands of Qinghai province in northwestern China late Tuesday, killing at least one person and injuring four others as rescue teams raced to search for survivors amid a series of strong aftershocks.

The shallow quake struck at a depth of about 6 miles beneath the Haixi Mongolian and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, an isolated region averaging more than 14,000 feet above sea level. Within minutes, authorities launched a national emergency response, dispatching more than 320 rescuers, nearly 80 emergency vehicles and 10 search-and-rescue dogs. Thousands of tents, blankets, folding beds and other emergency supplies were also sent to affected communities.

The main temblor was followed by more than a dozen aftershocks, the strongest measuring magnitude 4.9, adding to fears of additional damage. Officials evacuated workers from nearby coal mines as a precaution, although initial inspections found transportation, communications, water and electrical systems near the epicenter remained largely operational.

Strong Aftershock Strikes the Southern Philippines as Scientists Discover the Main Earthquake Lifted Seabed by 6 Feet

A magnitude-6.2 aftershock struck offshore from southern Mindanao on Monday, extending a week of seismic upheaval that began with a devastating magnitude-7.8 earthquake. The earlier quake killed at least 68 people, left dozens missing and damaged thousands of homes, roads and public buildings across the region.

While no major damage was immediately reported from the latest tremor, authorities remain on alert as thousands of aftershocks continue to rattle the area.

Scientists have also documented one of the initial quake’s most dramatic effects on June 8: parts of the seabed along the southern coast were thrust upward by as much as 6.5 feet (2 metres). The uplift extended some shorelines by up to 650 feet (200 metres), exposing coral reefs, seagrass beds and other marine ecosystems that had been underwater for centuries.

The environment department said a team dispatched to the area found that long stretches of shoreline, coral reef and seagrass beds have been exposed, with dead fish and other aquatic life lying on top. These exposed corals and seagrass beds had begun dying off alongside reef fish, eels, clams and other bivalves.

Strong 6.7-Magnitude Earthquake Damages Buildings Indonesia’s Sulawesi Island

A powerful magnitude 6.7 earthquake rattled Indonesia’s Central Sulawesi province on Tuesday, damaging buildings, disrupting services and triggering widespread alarm in the city of Palu. The quake struck at a shallow depth of about 6 miles (10 km), intensifying ground shaking across the region and producing several aftershocks.

While authorities reported no immediate fatalities, the earthquake damaged government offices, hotels, a university auditorium and a key bridge. Hospitals evacuated patients as a precaution and residents rushed into streets and open spaces. Many people also moved away from coastal areas despite the absence of a tsunami warning.

The reaction reflected the enduring trauma of the magnitude 7.5 earthquake and tsunami that devastated Palu in 2018. That catastrophe unleashed destructive liquefaction and towering ocean waves that killed more than 4,000 people, making it one of Indonesia’s deadliest recent natural disasters.

Earth movements were also felt in:

• Azerbaijan and neighboring Armenia (4.9)
• Western Cuba (4.9)
• Central New Mexico (3.9)

Global Temperature Extremes

• The hottest temperature recorded this week by the World Meteorological Organization’s 7,600 land-based synoptic weather stations was 119° Fahrenheit (48° Celsius) at Death Valley, California.

• The coldest temperature in an inhabited location was -105° Fahrenheit (-76° Celsius) at Russia’s Vostok Station, located in the middle of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The station normally hosts 30 scientists and engineers during the summer. In winter, their number drops to 15.

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service

Few wildlife seizures generate quite the same reaction as finding more than 100,000 live cockroaches

Australian authorities announced that they had dismantled what appears to be the country’s largest illegal exotic insect-breeding operation, confiscating more than 100,000 cockroaches from a commercial breeder in the rural city of Bathurst, west of Sydney. The haul included giant Madagascar hissing cockroaches—among the largest cockroach species on Earth—as well as dubia cockroaches, which are commonly used as food for pet reptiles around the world.

The insects carried an estimated black-market value of about $140,000. The species cannot legally be imported into Australia, possessed, bred or sold. Officials believe many of the insects were destined for the country’s growing exotic pet trade.

While the sheer number of cockroaches attracted headlines, biosecurity experts say the larger concern is ecological. Australia has evolved in relative isolation and already faces immense pressure from invasive species that have damaged native wildlife and agriculture. Scientists warn that exotic insects could introduce new diseases or compete with native species if they become established in the wild.

The seizure also highlights a little-noticed trend: the increasing popularity of keeping unusual insects as pets. Around the world, collectors trade everything from giant beetles and stick insects to exotic ants and cockroaches. Conservation groups say that growing demand can create new pathways for invasive species to spread across borders.

Bright nights, more sneezes: How artificial lighting may be extending allergy season in cities

The glow of city lights may be doing more than obscuring the stars. New research published in the journal PNAS Nexus suggests that artificial nighttime lighting can significantly lengthen allergy seasons and increase pollen exposure in urban areas.

Researchers from Cornell University analyzed more than a decade of pollen measurements and satellite observations across the northeastern United States. They found that trees in brightly lit cities such as New York and Philadelphia begin releasing pollen earlier in the spring and continue later into the fall than similar plants in darker surrounding areas. In some locations, the result was an allergy season extended by as much as 130 days.

The study found that severe pollen conditions occurred substantially more often in light-polluted areas, even after accounting for other urban influences such as higher temperatures and rainfall patterns. Scientists say artificial lighting can disrupt the biological cues that plants use to determine when to flower, effectively tricking them into behaving as though days are longer than they really are.

The consequences may extend beyond plants. Other research suggests that exposure to bright nighttime environments can alter human circadian rhythms and increase susceptibility to allergic reactions, potentially compounding the effects of longer pollen seasons.

The findings add another environmental cost to the ever-expanding glow of modern cities. While artificial lighting improves safety and convenience, the study suggests that smarter lighting design and the selection of lower-allergen tree species could help reduce one of the less obvious side effects of urban life: a longer season of sneezing, congestion and watery eyes.

Freak ocean warmth sends Peruvians to the beach as winter sets in

One of the clearest signs of the newly declared El Niño is unusual warmth along the coast of Peru, where ocean temperatures have surged to extraordinary levels. Waters near Lima have climbed nearly 10°F (5.5°C) above average, while some locations farther north are running more than 14°F (8°C) warmer than normal. Instead of the cool, damp conditions that usually mark the start of winter in the Southern Hemisphere, Peruvian coastal residents are finding themselves in summer-like warmth and heading to the beach.

The unusual conditions are being driven by the eastward migration of warm Pacific waters that characterizes El Niño. Climate models indicate this event could become exceptionally strong, raising concerns about potential flooding, impacts on fisheries and disruptions to weather patterns across the globe.

Scientists draw attention to another kind of weather shortage that can have far-reaching consequences — a shortage of wind

Researchers at Spain’s Center for Research on Desertification have created the first global index designed to identify and compare “wind droughts,” prolonged periods when winds remain significantly weaker than normal. Writing in the journal Atmospheric Research, the scientist say they used data from more than 2,200 weather stations spanning five decades, allowing the team to develop a standardized scale to compare wind conditions anywhere in the world, regardless of local climate.

The new index confirmed the severity of major wind droughts that reduced wind energy production in the United States and Britain, and it revealed evidence of a broader decline in global wind speeds stretching from the mid-1990s into the early 2010s. Although some recovery has occurred since then, average wind speeds remain below levels observed decades ago.

The implications extend far beyond renewable energy. Weak winds can trap air pollution over cities, intensify urban heat, influence agricultural water use and affect the erosion of soils. As climate change alters atmospheric circulation patterns, researchers believe monitoring wind droughts may become an increasingly important tool for understanding how environmental changes affect both natural systems and daily life.

Indonesia’s Lewotobi Volcano erupts again, sending ash skyward and disrupting life on Flores Island

A series of eruptions from Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki on Indonesia’s Flores Island forced the temporary closure of Maumere Airport and disrupted domestic air travel across the region.

The volcano sent ash and volcanic material about 8,500 feet (2.6 km) above its summit, prompting authorities to maintain a 3.1-mile (5-km) exclusion zone around the crater and warn of possible lahars (hazardous slides of volcanic debris) if heavy rain falls on fresh ash deposits.

The eruption follows a pattern of heightened activity at Lewotobi, which generated a much larger ash plume in 2025 that disrupted flights to and from Bali.

Indonesia sits atop the Pacific Ring of Fire, where the collision of tectonic plates fuels frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

Death toll passes 50 after powerful Mindanao earthquake devastates southern Philippines

Rescue crews continued searching damaged villages across the southern Philippines as the death toll from this week’s magnitude 7.8 earthquake rose to at least 55 with more than a thousand injured. The powerful quake struck just offshore near Sarangani Province on the island of Mindanao, toppling buildings, triggering landslides and briefly generating tsunami warnings across much of the western Pacific. Entire communities were cut off by damaged roads and communications failures, leaving some survivors dependent on airlifts of food and water.

The earthquake was one of the strongest to hit the Philippines in decades. More than 45,000 people have been displaced and thousands of homes damaged or destroyed, with the hardest-hit areas concentrated near the coast of Sarangani and around General Santos City. Landslides accounted for many of the fatalities, while aftershocks continued to rattle the region and complicate recovery efforts.

As emergency aid reaches isolated communities, officials warn that casualty figures may continue to climb as search teams gain access to remote areas.

Strongest Earthquake near western Cuba in nearly 150 years sends tremors across Florida

A rare magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off Cuba’s northwest coast on June 8, shaking parts of Cuba, Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and much of Florida in one of the most widely felt Caribbean earthquakes in memory. The shallow quake occurred about 65 miles west-northwest of Mantua, Cuba, and was strong enough to rattle buildings hundreds of miles away in cities including Miami, Tampa and Orlando. No fatalities or major damage were immediately reported, and authorities said there was no tsunami threat. But passengers aboard a cruise ship near the epicenter reported terrifying shaking with items being tossed off shelfs.

What made the event especially noteworthy was its rarity. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, it was the strongest earthquake recorded within about 200 miles of the epicenter since 1880. Seismologists noted that the quake occurred within a tectonic plate rather than along a plate boundary, making such a powerful event unusual for the region.

Residents across Florida reported swaying buildings, rattling windows and vibrations that lasted several seconds. The tremors were felt as far north as Jacksonville, while some attractions at Walt Disney World were temporarily suspended for safety inspections. In Cuba, where many buildings have suffered from decades of economic hardship and limited maintenance, the earthquake raised concerns about structural vulnerability even though no major damage was initially reported.

For many Floridians, it was likely the first time they had ever felt the ground move beneath them, turning an ordinary afternoon into an unsettling glimpse of the powerful geological forces at work beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

Earth movements were also felt during the week in:
• Bhutan and neighboring countries (5.6)
• Far northern India/Kashmir (4.9)
• Greece’s Evia Island (5.2)
• Northeastern Morocco (3.0)
• Hawaii’s Big Island (4.7)
• Eastern parts of the San Francisco Bay Area (3.6)

Two early-season tropical storms drench Mexico/Central America

Some areas of Mexico’s Guerrero state were soaked by short-lived Tropical Storm Boris, which quickly dissipated as it moved ashore.

• Tropical Storm Christina brought locally heavy rain and strong winds to parts of Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador.

Global Temperature Extremes

• The hottest temperature recorded this week by the World Meteorological Organization’s 7,600 land-based synoptic weather stations was 123° Fahrenheit (50° Celsius) at Sibi, Pakistan.

• The coldest temperature in an inhabited location was -101° Fahrenheit (-74° Celsius) at Russia’s Vostok Station, located in the middle of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The station normally hosts 30 scientists and engineers during the summer. In winter, their number drops to 15.

©MMXXVI Earth Environment Service