Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Richard Tice says voters will turn on government unless energy bills fall A useful enemy? Why Tories and Reform are calling net zero policy into question Labour will back down on its policies aimed at achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions, the deputy leader of the Reform has predicted. Richard Tice, the energy spokesperson for Reform and MP for Boston and Skegness, told the Guardian his party would withdraw from the 2015 Paris agreement that tries to limit global heating to 1.5C. Continue reading...

Among the dead in the internationally significant wetland are estuarine snails, shore crabs, baby flounder and ‘a thick stew of polychaete worms’ Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast When South Australia’s algal bloom arrived in the Coorong, it stained the water like strong tea before turning it into a slurry of dead worms. Many had hoped the storm in late May would break up the bloom of Karenia mikimotoi algae, which has killed more than 200 different marine species. Instead, high tides swept the algae into the Coorong, an internationally significant Ramsar wetland at the mouth of the Murray River. Continue reading...

Ten thousand years after mastodons disappeared, scientists have unearthed powerful fossil evidence proving these elephant cousins were vital seed spreaders for large-fruited trees in South America. Using dental wear, isotope analysis, and fossilized plant residue, researchers confirmed that mastodons regularly consumed fruit supporting a decades-old theory that many tropical plants evolved alongside giant animals. The extinction of these megafauna left a permanent ecological void, with some plants now teetering on the edge of extinction. Their story isn t just prehistoric it s a warning for today s conservation efforts.

A slew of global leaders met in the south of France to discuss the future of the oceans. There was ‘momentum’ and ‘enthusiasm’, but there were critical voices too The sea, the great unifier, is man’s only hope … and we are all in the same boat.” So said Jacques Cousteau, the French explorer, oceanographer and pioneering film-maker, who notably pivoted from merely sharing his underwater world to sounding the alarm over its destruction. Half a century later, David Attenborough, a year shy of his 100th birthday, followed Cousteau’s trajectory. In the naturalist’s acclaimed new film, Ocean, which highlights the destructive fishing practice of bottom trawling, he says he has come to the realisation that the “most important place on Earth is not on land but at sea”. Continue reading...