Blog Archives

A remote island in the southern Atlantic Ocean has helped reveal the scale of the problem of plastic waste facing our seas. Some 75% of bottles washed ashore on Inaccessible Island, in the South Atlantic, were found to be from Asia – with most made in China. Researchers said most of the bottles had been made recently, suggesting they had been discarded by ships.

An estimated 12.7 million tonnes of plastic end up in our oceans each year. But this figure just covers land-based sources.

The team from South Africa and Canada, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), said that it had been assumed that most of the debris found at sea was coming from the land.

However, the scientists said the evidence suggested otherwise.

“When we were [on the island, called Inace...

There are 1.85 billion, billion tonnes of carbon on Earth, with more than 99% of it resident beneath our feet. Scientists from the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) project have spent 10 years assessing the “reservoirs and fluxes” of the chemical element. In other words, they worked out where carbon is held and in what form, and how it moves through the Earth system.

The findings will help understand the limits of life on our planet and in the forecasting of volcanic eruptions.

“This work really came out of the realisation that much of the carbon that we are concerned about for climate change is only a tiny fraction of our planet’s carbon...

How do you weigh the largest animals on the planet? Until now it has only been possible to weigh whales once they have washed up dead on beaches. Now scientists have solved the conundrum, with the help of aerial photographs taken by drones.

Their model accurately calculated the body volume and mass of wild southern right whales. Already being used to assess the survival of calves, it has many potential uses in conservation.

Body mass is a key factor in the success of whales as a group, determining their energy uses, food requirements and growth rates.

Yet most of what we know about the body size of whales comes from old whaling literature or from animals that end up stranded on the beach or caught in fishing gear.

“It is very difficult to measure a whale on a scale – I mean you have to k...

Scientists have conducted the longest coral reef survey to date at Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef, confirming fears that large parts of this natural wonder are too damaged to recover within the foreseeable future. In the journal Nature Communications, researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and the University of Queensland in Australia provide an in-depth look at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef over the past 91 years.

The work used data from an aerial photography survey carried out in 1928 by the Great Barrier Reef Committee and the Royal Society of London and compared the findings from expeditions taken in 2004, 2015, and 2019.

Their work suggests that parts of the coral reef have been subjected to major environmental change, on both a local and global level, over the past c...

The Amery Ice Shelf in Antarctica has just produced its biggest iceberg in more than 50 years. The calved block covers 1,636 sq km in area – a little smaller than Scotland’s Isle of Skye – and is called D28. The scale of the berg means it will have to be monitored and tracked because it could in future pose a hazard to shipping.

Not since the early 1960s has Amery calved a bigger iceberg. That was a whopping 9,000 sq km in area.

Amery is the third largest ice shelf in Antarctica, and is a key drainage channel for the east of the continent.

The shelf is essentially the floating extension of a number of glaciers that flow off the land into the sea. Losing bergs to the ocean is how these ice streams maintain equilibrium, balancing the input of snow upstream.

So, scientists knew this calving...

Europe’s largest marine protected area (MPA) has been proposed for an area of deep sea off the Western Isles. The Scottish government has started a public consultation on the plan, which involves an area of 41,611 sq miles (107,773 sq km). Coral reefs are among the wildlife found at depths of 2,400m (7,874ft).

The proposed West of Scotland Deep Sea Marine Reserve would also offer protection to habitats on seamounts, which are extinct volcanoes.

The Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC), whose scientists have been among those to survey the habitats, said it would be Europe’s largest MPA.

The designation would aim to protect the habitats involved from marine industry projects and some types of fishing.

Three telecommunications cables cross the site and under MPA rules, the operators w...

Climate change is devastating our seas and frozen regions as never before, a major new United Nations report warns. According to a UN panel of scientists, waters are rising, the ice is melting, and species are moving habitat due to human activities. And the loss of permanently frozen lands threatens to unleash even more carbon, hastening the decline.

There is some guarded hope that the worst impacts can be avoided, with deep and immediate cuts to carbon emissions.

This is the third in a series of special reports that have been produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) over the past 12 months.

The scientists previously looked at how the world would cope if temperatures rose by 1.5C by the end of this century...

When it comes to saving the planet, one whale is worth thousands of trees. Scientific research now indicates more clearly than ever that our carbon footprint – the release of carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the atmosphere where it contributes to global warming through the so-called greenhouse effect – now threatens our ecosystems and our way of life.  But efforts to mitigate climate change face two significant challenges.  The first is to find effective ways to reduce the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere or its impact on average global temperature.  The second is to raise sufficient funds to put these technologies into practice.

Many proposed solutions to global warming, such as capturing carbon directly from the air and burying it deep in the earth, are complex, untested, and expensive...

It will be the clearest declaration yet on how an overheating world is hammering our oceans and frozen regions. Scientists have been meeting in Monaco to finalise a report on the seas and the cryosphere. Released on Wednesday, it will show how the oceans have been a friend, helping us cope with rising temperatures.

But it will warn that warming is turning the seas into a huge potential threat to humanity.

Researchers from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were encouraged by Prince Albert II and the Monaco government in 2015 to produce a special report on the oceans and cryosphere – the Earth’s surface where water is frozen solid.

For the past three years, the scientists have been reviewing hundreds of published papers on how climate change affects the seas, the poles a...

The world’s leading climate science organizations have joined forces to produce a landmark new report for the United Nations Climate Action Summit, underlining the glaring – and growing gaps – between agreed targets to tackle global warming and the actual reality.

The report, United in Science, includes details on the state of the climate and presents trends in the emissions and atmospheric concentrations of main greenhouse gases. It highlights the urgency of fundamental socio-economic transformation in key sectors such as land use and energy in order to avert dangerous global temperature increase with potentially irreversible impacts. It also examines tools to support both mitigation and adaptation.

“The Report provides a unified assessment of the state of our Earth system under the...