Greenland: new shipping routes, hidden minerals – and a frontline between the US and Russia? Key maps show the growing strategic importance of Greenland as Arctic ice melts under global heating Guardian  Ashley Kirk, Lucy Swan, Tural Ahmedzade, Harvey Symons and Oliver Holmes 15 Jan 2026 Lying between the US and Russia, Greenland has become a critical frontline as the Arctic opens up because of global heating. Its importance has been underscored by Donald Trump openly considering the US taking the island from its Nato partner Denmark, either by buying it, or by force. The climate crisis is shrinking Greenland’s ice sheet, along with the wider Arctic sea ice, opening new sea routes and exposing valuable resources.Trump’s threats, previously dismissed as bluster, are now being seen as an early signal of how melting ice is turning Greenland into a valuable geopolitical flashpoint. The maps below show how this is developing.

Ocean Acidification..... No part of the ocean is untouched by the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, according to a report by the European Union-funded Copernicus program. Over 10% of marine biodiversity hotspots are acidifying faster than the global average. Sea levels have risen with record-high values in 2024 and are rising at an accelerating rate. Globally, oceans are reaching record high temperatures. Arctic sea ice has reached four all-time record lows between last December and March. The warming ocean is causing the boundaries of marine biophysical provinces to shift toward the poles.  The ocean’s surface pH has fallen by around 0.1 units since the start of the industrial era, a 30-40% increase in acidity. This has pushed countless marine ecosystems beyond safe limits and degraded the oceans’ ability to act as Earth stabilizer. The ocean absorbs a large amount of CO2 that humans emit into the atmosphere – between a third and a half of all of the CO2 humans have released since about 1850.......read on     https://earth.org/ocean-acidification-7th-planetary-boundary-now-breached-scientists-warn/                 More on the topic: Toward a New Global Approach to Safeguard Planet Earth: An Interview With Johan Rockström

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c043edkn942o

Mad fishing’: the super-size fleet of squid catchers plundering the high seas. Guardian Harriet Barber 6 Jan 2025 In  a monitoring room in Buenos Aires, a dozen members of the Argentinian coast guard watch giant industrial-fishing ships moving in real time across a set of screens. “Every year, for five or six months, the foreign fleet comes from across the Indian Ocean, from Asian countries, and from the North Atlantic,” says Cdr Mauricio López, of the monitoring department. “It’s creating a serious environmental problem.” Just beyond Argentina’s maritime frontier, hundreds of foreign vessels – known as the distant-water fishing fleet – are descending on Mile 201, a largely ungoverned strip of the high seas in the South Atlantic, to plunder its rich marine life. The fleet regularly becomes so big it can be seen from space, looking like a city floating on the sea. The charity Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) has described it as one of the largest unregulated squid fisheries in the world, warning that the scale of activities could destabilise an entire ecosystem. “With so many ships constantly fishing without any form of oversight, the squid’s short, one-year life cycle simply is not being respected,” says Lt Magalí Bobinac, a marine biologist with the Argentinian coast guard.

There are no internationally agreed catch limits in the region covering squid, and distant-water fleets take advantage of this regulatory vacuum. Steve Trent, founder of the EJF, describes the fishery as a “free for all” and says squid could eventually disappear from the area as a result of “this mad fishing effort”.The consequences extend far beyond squid. Whales, dolphins, seals, sea birds and commercially important fish species such as hake and tuna depend on the cephalopod. A collapse in the squid population could trigger a cascade of ecological disruption, with profound social and economic costs for coastal communities and key markets such as Spain, experts warn. “If this species is affected, the whole ecosystem is affected,” Bobinac says. “It is the food for other species. It has a huge impact on the ecosystem and biodiversity.”She says the “vulnerable marine ecosystems” beneath the fleet, such as deep-sea corals, are also at risk of physical damage and pollution.Three-quarters of squid jigging vessels (which jerk barbless lures up and down to imitate prey) that are operating on the high seas are from China, according to the EJF, with fleets from Taiwan and South Korea also accounting for a significant share......read on   https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/06/squid-argentina-coast-guard-overfishing-ecosystems-animal-cruelty-human-rights-china

Profound impacts’: record ocean heat is intensifying climate disasters, data shows. Oceans absorb 90% of global heating, making them a stark indicator of the relentless march of the climate crisis. GUARDIAN Damian Carrington 9 Feb 2026 The world’s oceans absorbed colossal amounts of heat in 2025, setting yet another new record and fuelling more extreme weather, scientists have reported. More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity’s carbon pollution is taken up by the oceans. This makes ocean heat one of the starkest indicators of the relentless march of the climate crisis, which will only end when emissions fall to zero. Almost every year since the start of the millennium has set a new ocean heat record. This extra heat makes the hurricanes and typhoons hitting coastal communities more intense, causes heavier downpours of rain and greater flooding, and results in longer marine heatwaves, which decimate life in the seas. The rising heat is also a major driver of sea level rise via the thermal expansion of seawater, threatening billions of people. Reliable ocean temperature measurements stretch back to the mid-20th century, but it is likely the oceans are at their hottest for at least 1,000 years and heating faster than at any time in the past 2,000 years.

The atmosphere is a smaller store of heat and more affected by natural climate variations such as the El Niño-La Niña cycle. The average surface air temperature in 2025 is expected to approximately tie with 2023 as the second-hottest year since records began in 1850, with 2024 being the hottest. Last year the planet moved into the cooler La Niña phase of the Pacific Ocean cycle. “Each year the planet is warming – setting a new record has become a broken record,” said Prof John Abraham at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota, US, and part of the team that produced the new data. “Global warming is ocean warming,” he said. “If you want to know how much the Earth has warmed or how fast we will warm into the future, the answer is in the oceans.” The analysis, published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, used temperature data collected by a range of instruments across the oceans and collated by three independent teams. They used this data to determine the heat content of the top 2,000 metres of the oceans, where most of the heat is absorbed. V+The amount of heat taken up by the ocean is colossal, equivalent to more than 200 times the total amount of electricity used by humans across the world.......read on  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound-impacts-record-ocean-heat-intensifying-climate-disasters