Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Commissioner says two women were attacked by female elephant that was with a calf Two female tourists from the UK and New Zealand have been killed by an elephant while on a walking safari in a national park in Zambia, police in the southern African country have said. The Eastern Province police commissioner, Robertson Mweemba, said the victims, who he named as 68-year-old Easton Janet Taylor from the UK and 67-year-old Alison Jean Taylor from New Zealand, were attacked by a female elephant that was with a calf. 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...