Seventy beaches across New South Wales are part of the $34m dawn-to-dusk drone monitoring program, which one expert has called ‘the best technology we have at the moment’
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“Hey Taha, what’s the visibility like?” shouts a man with a towel slung over his shoulder.
“Uh, nice,” says Surf Life Saving New South Wales drone operator Taha Kafil-Hussain.
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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
09/01/2026 - 11:00
09/01/2026 - 09:19
Nearly 80 people have been rescued, and two people confirmed dead, after flood hit national park
A US border patrol technical search team is expected to deploy in the Grand Canyon, as authorities continue the search for at least one missing person after a fatal flash flood washed through the national park over the weekend.
Authorities are rushing to scour the area as more heavy rain and thunderstorms in weather forecasts threaten additional debris flows, flash floods or rock falls.
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09/01/2026 - 09:00
Head of tree collections at Kew ‘very worried about this autumn’ as hot, dry summer has caused brittleness
High winds associated with El Niño could cause widespread mortality among tree species already weakened by a prolonged period of extreme heat and drought, experts have warned.
This summer much of Europe has been scorched by a series of record-breaking climate crisis-induced heatwaves. The impact is notable across much of England’s countryside, where once green land has turned brown, and many trees are undergoing “early autumn” – wilting and losing their leaves early – to cope with extreme heat.
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09/01/2026 - 06:00
Rollback of ‘roadless rule’ expected to benefit companies US Forest Service chief, Tom Schultz, previously lobbied for
Donald Trump this month announced plans to rescind a landmark rule that has protected old-growth forests in the US for 25 years. If finalized, the rollback is expected to benefit the companies that Tom Schultz, chief of the US Forest Service, represented in his previous roles as a timber industry lobbyist and executive, according to research by consumer advocacy non-profit Public Citizen.
The Roadless Area Conservation Rule, more commonly known as the “roadless rule”, was adopted in 2001 to limit development in roughly 45m acres of national forest. Industry interests and Republican representatives have long lobbied for the rule’s rescission, which would open up those swaths of untouched land to road construction, drilling and logging.
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09/01/2026 - 04:00
The deluge capped a summer of extreme climate events, from deadly heatwaves to wildfires. We must take action now
For millennia, the high peaks of the Himalayas were held together by an invisible, frozen cement – permafrost and glacial ice that bound ancient rock into seemingly unshakable fortresses. But as the planet continues to warm, this alpine glue is liquefying.
The glacial collapse and deluge in Nepal and Tibet was not a freak weather event; it was the structural failure of a mountain itself, nature’s latest commentary on the deadly consequences of human-caused planetary warming. And it was the exclamation point on a summer of extremes, illustrating with a sole unnatural disaster the apocalyptic future that lies in store if we fail to take dramatic climate action.
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09/01/2026 - 03:00
The chicken liver sponge has sailed through a test of its ability to filter pollutants in a harbour in Spain’s Costa Brava
In the polluted waters of Marina Palamós on Spain’s Costa Brava, Manuel Maldonado, a sponge biologist, noticed something unusual last month: red starfish had started settling in the area.
Nearly two years earlier, the Spanish National Research Council scientist and his colleagues had begun transplanting sea sponges into the port to study whether they could survive in its polluted waters.
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09/01/2026 - 01:30
As families await news of missing loved ones, the disaster is a stark reminder of how the climate crisis is creating a fast-growing threat. Plus, the town considered India’s ‘Jurassic Park’
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It has been hard not to despair while watching the ruinous floods swallow parts of Nepal, and harder, still knowing that the agony compounds each passing day for dozens of Indian families whose members remain unaccounted for.
Social media is awash with desperate pleas, photos and details of the young and old, men and women, from Mumbai to Kolkata, posted by families searching for traces of life. The disaster unfolded when a melting glacier slammed into the valley below, unleashing a deadly cascade of rock and ice down the Bhote Kashi River, which flows from Tibet into Nepal.
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09/01/2026 - 00:03
Who dreams of having a Euro summer now when staying in an ancient, uncooled building in the Old Town is like trying to sleep in a wood-fired pizza oven?
This week the Euro summer comes to an end – and so does a certain type of posting on Instagram.
Waiting at the bus stop in the grey winter dawn, a slanting rain soaking your trouser leg, you can warm yourself by scrolling your feed and seeing pictures of Australians enjoying a Euro summer. There it is again – azure Greek coves, plates of barbecued sardines, the yachts rented by the hour, and selfies on the balcony of some Paris Airbnb, drinking wine in the long, blue night.
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09/01/2026 - 00:00
Exclusive: 7,280 suspected illegal spills in rivers and sea recorded in first five months of 2026
The number of suspected illegal discharges of raw sewage into rivers and seas by water companies during dry weather increased significantly during the first five months of 2026.
Dumping raw sewage into waterways during dry spells via overflows amounts to pollution. It is considered a breach of the permits given to water companies and is illegal. Discharging during dry weather increases the toxicity of the sewage pollution entering waterways. Rivers have less flow and volume, and there is no rainwater to dilute the sewage pollution entering the waterway.
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09/01/2026 - 00:00
In Alaska, the Himalayas, the Andes, Greenland, and perhaps also the Alps, deadly chain reactions are just waiting to be triggered
You may not have felt it, but the earth beneath our feet is getting twitchier, and global heating is to blame. As temperatures surge and climate breakdown accelerates, interactions between climate and geology are becoming ever more apparent – as marked by last week’s horrific events in Nepal and Tibet. We still have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to the idea that a changing climate can impact what scientists call the geosphere, but the evidence has long been incontestable.
In 2021, a similar deluge ripped through a series of mountain valleys in the Indian Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, severely damaging two hydroelectric power plants and taking about 200 lives. In August 2025, a colossal landslide in an Alaskan fjord created a 500-metre-high wave in an area frequented by cruise ships. A few months earlier, the collapse of part of a glacier in Switzerland’s Valais canton caused a debris-laden torrent that destroyed and buried most of the already evacuated village of Blatten.
Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL. His latest book is The Fate of the World – a History and Future of the Climate Crisis
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