Groups cite detainee maltreatment and degradation of surrounding land as reasons to close facility permanently
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An alliance of environmental groups has welcomed reports that detainees have been moved from Florida’s notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail, but have promised to press ahead with legal action to ensure its permanent closure and the restoration of the fragile Everglades wetlands where it is located.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a statement late on Tuesday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and authorities in Florida “have moved illegal aliens from the soft sided facility [and] transferred them to other facilities” for their safety, citing this month’s beginning of the Atlantic hurricane season.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
Even as Florida moves detainees from ‘Alligator Alcatraz’, activists fight for its permanent closure
06/17/2026 - 15:28
06/17/2026 - 11:55
The southern US is seeing intense rain that is expected to cause dangerous flash flooding
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The first tropical storm of the Atlantic hurricane season formed on Wednesday near the Gulf coast, bringing intense rain and the threat of dangerous flash floods to states including Texas and Louisiana, meteorologists said.
Tropical Storm Arthur was a disorganized cluster of storms that brought rain for days over parts of eastern Mexico and the Gulf. The National Hurricane Center in Miami said conditions were conducive for a short-lived tropical storm to form.
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06/17/2026 - 10:00
Researchers also discover bees can adjust their diets when pollen sources do not provide healthy level of nutrients
Honeybees blend a special “baby food” to give their larvae a balanced diet, with adult bees also able to regulate their feeding to avoid overconsuming certain nutrients, according to a study.
Researchers have discovered that bees can adjust how much they eat when pollen sources do not provide them with the ideal balance of essential amino acids, the essential building blocks of protein that animals cannot make for themselves and must obtain from their diet.
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06/17/2026 - 09:00
Okra holds a special place in many African-descended communities, and a Canadian farmer with Jamaican roots is growing a very old variety
When Nicole Austin was growing up in Oshawa, Canada, her Jamaican family couldn’t find the foods they enjoyed back on the island. No callaloo, garden eggs or okra. Austin’s grandmother grew certain things in her backyard, but only if she had the necessary seeds.
“It’s often small-scale farmers, farmers of color, Black farmers that make sure that these foods that are culturally significant to us are available, that we grow them, that we share them,” Austin said. “It wasn’t until I’m in these spaces now that I realized how important the place is of farmers of color and Black farmers to make sure that these food histories are maintained and celebrated and shared.”
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06/17/2026 - 08:44
Drive to appeal to wealthy Americans is part of pivot away from previously announced all-electric strategy
Jaguar Land Rover has said it will make more hybrid cars as part of an effort to focus on growth in the US, as Britain’s largest carmaker further rowed back on the transition away from fossil fuels.
The manufacturer told investors on Wednesday it would offer petrol and hybrid versions of new models, including smaller SUVs that had previously been planned to shift to all-electric sales.
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06/17/2026 - 08:00
Sudden shifts from wet to dry weather, or vice versa, may foil typical drought- and flood-prevention measures
Rising temperatures may trigger a dangerous increase in “hydroclimatic whiplash” in rivers that would make traditional approaches to flood and drought planning insufficient, a study has found.
As temperatures rise owing to the worsening climate crisis, rivers will experience increasingly rapid transitions between heavy downpours and long dry spells – called hydroclimatic whiplash events – because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, intensifying rainfall extremes.
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06/17/2026 - 07:00
Two-thirds of Americans say they are worried about climate but level of media coverage does not reflect this
US political and media discourse has drifted away from the climate crisis amid a frontal assault by Donald Trump upon policies to limit global heating and the president’s pugnacious demands to “drill, baby, drill” for more oil and gas.
Yet while elite attention on climate has waned, even among some previously vocal Democrats who have wound back on criticism of the fossil fuels that are overheating our planet, the American public remains concerned about the climate crisis and continues to favour action to deal with it, according to experts and polling.
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06/17/2026 - 05:00
Nearly every indicator of climate change is flashing red. But we still hold the tools available to bring the planet back into balance
The ocean is running a fever. In 2025, the number of days of marine heatwaves – prolonged spells when the sea turns abnormally, dangerously warm – was more than triple what it was in the early 1990s.
These are not abstract statistics. A severe and persistent marine heatwave bleaches coral reefs, strips away the kelp forests that shelter young fish, empties fishing grounds and – if occurring frequently – can tip whole ecosystems past the point of recovery.
Karina Von Schuckmann is an IGCC author and senior adviser of Mercator Ocean International
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06/16/2026 - 23:00
npj Ocean Sustainability, Published online: 17 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s44183-026-00215-z
Global warming threatens to eradicate Earth’s tropical corals. As legal interventions addressing climate change expand, fossil fuel companies’ historical awareness of their products’ damaging effects is increasingly important. We searched historical documents using a large-language-model-based agent, finding that carbon majors were aware by the 1980s of prospective impacts of fossil fuels on corals from ocean acidification, marine heatwaves, sea-level rise, and intensified storms and later funded efforts downplaying such impacts.
06/16/2026 - 23:00
npj Ocean Sustainability, Published online: 17 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s44183-026-00219-9
The future of global ocean observations: five scenarios
