Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Plans announced by environment secretary mean many upland farmers may be incentivised to stop farming Some farms in England could be taken entirely out of food production under plans to make more space for nature, the environment secretary has said. Speaking at the Groundswell farming festival in Hertfordshire, Steve Reed said a revamp of post-Brexit farming subsidies and a new land use plan would be aimed at increasing food production in the most productive areas and decreasing or completely removing it in the least productive. In reality, this means many upland farmers may be incentivised to stop farming. Continue reading...

When Siberian volcanoes kicked off the Great Dying, the real climate villain turned out to be the rainforests themselves: once they collapsed, Earth’s biggest carbon sponge vanished, CO₂ rocketed, and a five-million-year heatwave followed. Fossils from China and clever climate models now link that botanical wipe-out to runaway warming, hinting that losing today’s tropical forests could lock us in a furnace we can’t easily cool.

Document detailing the new program says zebrafish and rats from a North Carolina lab will be up for adoption The US Environmental Protection Agency is launching a new program to adopt some of its 20,000 lab animals in the wake of Trump administration plans to dramatically cut the regulator’s research arm. The Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer) non-profit obtained and revealed an EPA document announcing the adoption program. The document announced adoptions for zebrafish and rats from an EPA lab in North Carolina. Continue reading...

Holloman Lake was a haven for wildlife and seemed an ideal campsite. But strange foam around the shoreline turned out to be more than just an oddity – and reveals the alarming way forever chemicals move through ecosystems For years, Christopher Witt took birdwatchers to Holloman Lake in the Chihuahuan desert off the route 70 highway in New Mexico. By mid-morning the sun would beat down as they huddled in the scant shade of the van. There were no trees other than a collection of salt cedars on the lake’s north shore. But the discomfort didn’t matter when the peregrine falcons appeared, slicing through the sky. “It was hard to leave that place,” says Witt. The lake – created in 1965 as part of a system of wastewater catchment ponds for Holloman air force base – is an unlikely oasis. Other than small ponds created for livestock it is the only body of water for thousands of square kilometres in an otherwise stark landscape. However, Witt says there was always something slightly weird about the foam that would form around the edge. “But I only saw that stuff once I knew.” Continue reading...