A Seabird Chick With 778 Pieces of Plastic in Its Body Shows How Bad Marine Pollution Has Gotten. A new analysis found that ingesting plastic can disrupt proteins that facilitate key functions in seabirds—the latest in a series of unsettling discoveries about marine plastic pollution.Inside Climate News Kiley Price May 27, 2025 For a seabird, it can be tough to tell the difference between a squid snack and a piece of plastic debris. This mix-up can have devastating impacts for the birds and their young, according to a recent study published in Science Advances. 

Scientists analyzed the changes in more than 700 proteins found in plastic-ridden sable shearwater seabirds found on the remote Lord Howe Island between Australia and New Zealand. They discovered that the plastic ingested by the birds has left its mark; the contaminated birds showed signs of chronic disease and neurodegenerative issues that could harm their ability to find mates. This adds to a wide body of research on the detrimental effects of plastic pollution on marine species. The ocean plastic problem goes deeper than we thought—literally—with microplastic fibers lingering more than 3 miles below the surface, according to a separate new study. Even marine protected areas that are untouched by most human activity are contaminated. As plastic production continues to rise, current recycling processes aren’t keeping pace and traditional conservation measures are proving ineffective. Instead, experts say, we must tackle plastic pollution and its trickle-down health impacts at the source. 

An Unnerving Crunch: A small volcanic landform in the Tasman Sea, Lord Howe Island boasts pristine beaches, lush green mountains and a wealth of wildlife. With a residential population of just around 300 and strict limits on tourism, human activity is limited. But that doesn’t mean our footprint on the island isn’t large. An international research group known as the Adrift Lab has long documented the impacts of marine plastic pollution on Lord Howe Island’s seabird populations. During this year’s assessment, one of the sable shearwater chicks that the scientists tested broke an unsettling record: It had 778 pieces of plastic lodged in its body. Since the chick was just around 80 days old, this roughly equates to its parents feeding it 10 pieces of plastic each day of the bird’s life. A number of birds across the island had enough plastic to literally make a crunching noise when researchers gently pressed their stomachs. (The Washington Post recently published the audio of this noise if you want to hear it for yourself.) 

For their study published in March, the scientists wanted to focus on the impact of plastic ingestion on protein composition, which can drive a number of functions throughout the body. They found that seabird chicks with high levels of plastic exposure had protein markers indicative of liver and kidney diseases and neurodegeneration. For example, birds with high levels of plastic in their bodies had lower levels of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which facilitates the growth and survival of certain neurons, including those that help birds recognize each other’s song. This has implications for the long-term survival of the species, the study’s authors say. 

Pervasive Plastic: In recent decades, plastic has been detected in some of the furthest corners of the world, from the top of the French Pyrenees mountains to completely uninhabited islands. In the ocean, debris tends to congregate in rotating currents called gyres, which have formed startling mounds of floating trash, such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. More recently, scientists have used new tools to investigate deep below the surface—and uncovered an abundance of microplastic fibers littering the seafloor, Nature reports. Some estimates suggest that there are up to 11 million tons of plastic in the seabed, which is 100 times more than what is on the surface. In many cases, tiny fish and crustaceans that live deeper are ingesting more microplastics than those closer to the surface, a 2023 study found.......and yet humanity continues to use the fragile planet as a dump site!.https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27052025/todays-climate-plastic-pollution-seabird-health-ocean/   

Fish flee for their lives in rare, chilling video of bottom trawling, The never-before-seen footage of sea creatures struggling in fishing nets is featured in National Geographic’s new documentary Ocean with David Attenborough.National Geographic Melissa Hobson May 8, 2025 As a cloud of destruction approaches, all the creatures in its path scramble desperately to get out of the way—fleeing for their lives.

However fast they go, they can't outpace it. It looms closer and closer until it swallows them up. Although it may sound like a disaster movie, this is a scene from newly released rare footage of bottom trawling—a particularly destructive method of fishing in which a ship drags a heavy iron net across the seabed, blindly catching anything in its path. These vessels usually fish for just one species—cod, haddock, and halibut, among other animals. Anything else is dumped overboard. “It’s hard to imagine a more wasteful way to catch fish,” says David Attenborough in the new documentary Ocean with David Attenborough, which premieres on National Geographic on Saturday, June 7, at 9/8c and can be streamed globally the next day, World Oceans Day, on Disney+ and Hulu. “Over three quarters of a trawler’s catch may be thrown away.” The filmmakers knew they wanted to shine a light on the harm caused by bottom trawling in the documentary—Attenborough’s statement piece on the health of our oceans. The number of animals killed unnecessarily by trawling was “the thing we found most distressing,” says Keith Scholey, the documentary’s co-director and executive producer at Silverback Films. “We didn't really want to film it,” Scholey says, because that meant engaging with the destructive process. But the team decided that people need to see what really happens. They also filmed scallop dredging with scientists from the Marine Biological Association who were studying its impacts—and they agreed to make their footage of both trawling and dredging available to scientists “so that no one ever has to [film] it again,” Scholey says. “It's one of the most important things I've ever done in my career.”

The impact of bottom trawling........Enric Sala—a National Geographic Explorer and co-producer of Ocean with David Attenborough—has long studied the impacts of these fishing techniques. But even he was shocked by the footage, which shows not only the sea creatures’ desperate attempts to escape the trawler but close-up images of their wriggling bodies after they’re dumped onto the deck of the fishing vessel.Yet they couldn’t find any clear footage of bottom trawling—so they had to find a way of filming it themselves. To capture the footage seen here, they got permission to mount cameras on the nets of a commercial trawler. “I was outraged,” says Sala, who is also the founder of Pristine Seas, a National Geographic Society conservation program that has established 29 of the largest marine protected areas in the world. “I hope that people will understand the truth about industrial fishing.” Some elements were too brutal to make the final cut. “There's some terrible shots of all these spider crabs being crunched up because the dredge has these teeth,” Scholey says of the scallop dredging scene.

It could have been even worse. When the videographers dropped cameras to check if an area was suitable to film dredging, they happened upon a piece of seafloor that trawlers avoid— perhaps because of the shape of the landscape.They were gobsmacked to see a total contrast from the trawled areas nearby. The seafloor was covered with a carpet of pink sea fans. It can take these delicate corals a year to grow just one centimeter. If dredged, this habitat would take decades to recover. Trawling “is like using a lawnmower to chop down everything in sight,” writes Max Valentine, a senior scientist and campaign director of illegal fishing and transparency at Oceana, in an email. (Valentine wasn't involved in the film.) “It also bulldozes the homes of other marine life.” “I was outraged,” says Sala, who is also the founder of Pristine Seas, .

“I hope that people will understand the truth about industrial fishing.” Some elements were too brutal to make the final cut. “There's some terrible shots of all these spider crabs being crunched up because the dredge has these teeth,” Scholey says of the scallop dredging scene. It could have been even worse.......all of this just for corporate profit!....read on  https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/bottom-trawling-effects-seabed-ocean?rid=284ACDF0EA1B080A3966B6C47B8C38C0&cmpid=org%3Dngp%3A%3Amc%3Dcrm-email%3A%3Asrc%3Dngp%3A%3Acmp%3Deditorial%3A%3Aadd%3DDaily_NL_Friday_TopStories_20250509&loggedin=true&rnd=1746906300698  

Twigs, other plant matter, and Ice Age animal parts—bison jaws, horse femurs, mammoth bones—spilled onto a beach that sucked at Zimov’s boots. “I love Duvanny Yar,” he said as he yanked fossils from the muck. “It is like a book. Each page is a story about the history of nature.” Few understand this threat better than Zimov. From a ramshackle research station in the gold-mining outpost of Cherskiy, about three hours by speedboat from Duvanny Yar, he has spent decades unearthing the mysteries of a warming Arctic. Along the way, he has helped upend conventional wisdom—especially the notion that the far north, back in the Pleistocene ice ages, had been an unbroken desert of ice and thin soils dotted with sage.Instead, the abundant fossils of mammoths and other large grazers at Duvanny Yar and other sites told Zimov that Siberia, Alaska, and western Canada had been fertile grasslands, rich with herbs and willows. As these plants and animals died, the cold slowed their decomposition. Over time, windblown silt buried them deep, locking them in permafrost. The upshot is that Arctic permafrost is much richer in carbon than scientists once thought.

Now new discoveries suggest that the carbon will escape faster as the planet warms. From the unexpected speed of Arctic warming and the troubling ways that meltwater moves through polar landscapes, researchers now suspect that for every one degree Celsius rise in Earth’s average temperature, permafrost may release the equivalent of four to six years’ worth of coal, oil, and natural gas emissions—double to triple what scientists thought a few years ago. Within a few decades, if we don’t curb fossil fuel use, permafrost could be as big a source of greenhouse gases as China, the world’s largest emitter, is today. We aren’t accounting for that. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has only recently started incorporating permafrost into its projections. It still underestimates just how wide Pandora’s freezer could swing open—and how much havoc that could unleash. Permafrost’s potential to warm the planet is dwarfed by our own. But if we hope to limit warming to two degrees Celsius, as 195 nations agreed to during the 2015 Paris talks, new research suggests we may have to cut emissions eight years sooner than IPCC models project, just to account for the thawing that will be going on.

Across nine million square miles at the top of the planet, climate change is writing a new chapter. Arctic permafrost isn’t thawing gradually, as scientists once predicted. Geologically speaking, it’s thawing almost overnight. As soils like the ones at Duvanny Yar soften and slump, they’re releasing vestiges of ancient life—and masses of carbon—that have been locked in frozen dirt for millennia. Entering the atmosphere as methane or carbon dioxide, the carbon promises to accelerate climate change, even as humans struggle to curb our fossil fuel emissions. It is perhaps our least appreciated reason to hasten a transition to cleaner energy: To reach whatever goal we set to combat warming, we’ll need to move even faster than we think. Permafrost—ground that remains frozen year-round—is capped by a few feet of dirt and plant detritus. Called the active layer, this soil normally thaws each summer and refreezes in winter, protecting permafrost from rising heat above. But in the spring of 2018, a crew working for Nikita found that dirt near the surface around Cherskiy had not iced up at all during the long dark polar night. That was unheard of: January in Siberia is so brutally cold that human breath can freeze with a tinkling sound that the indigenous Yakuts call “the whisper of stars.” The Soviets used to land heavy planes on the Kolyma. Soil 30 inches down should have been frozen. Instead it was mush.

“Three years ago, the temperature in the ground above our permafrost was minus 3 degrees Celsius [27 degrees Fahrenheit],” Sergey Zimov said. “Then it was minus 2. Then it was minus one. This year, the temperature was plus 2 degrees.” On one level that’s not surprising. Earth’s five warmest years since the late 19th century have come since 2014, and the Arctic is warming more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet, as it loses the sea ice that helps chill it. In 2017 tundra in Greenland faced its worst known wildfire. Days before we landed in Siberia, thermometers in Lakselv, Norway, 240 miles above the Arctic Circle, recorded a blistering 32 degrees Celsius, or 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Arctic reindeer hid in road tunnels for relief.Permafrost temperatures globally have been rising for half a century. On Alaska’s North Slope, they spiked 11 degrees Fahrenheit in 30 years. Localized thawing of permafrost, especially in villages where development disturbs the surface and allows heat to penetrate, has eroded shorelines, undermined roads and schools, cracked pipelines, and collapsed ice cellars where Arctic hunters store walrus meat and bowhead whale blubber. Warm summers are already warping life for Arctic residents.

What the Zimovs were documenting in 2018, though, was something different, with implications beyond the Arctic: a wintertime thaw. The culprit, paradoxically, was heavy snow. Siberia is dry, but for several winters before 2018, thick snow had smothered the region. The snow acted like a blanket, trapping summer heat in the soil. At a research site 11 miles from Cherskiy, Mathias Goeckede of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry found that snow depth had doubled in five years. By April 2018 temperatures in the active layer had risen 10 degrees Fahrenheit.......stunning photos about a ominous planetary threat!....read on https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/arctic-permafrost-is-thawing-it-could-speed-up-climate-change-feature?loggedin=true&rnd=1744057762147

The Arctic’s glaciers are retreating, exposing new coastlines that could trigger tsunamis.EuroNews  Rebecca Ann Hughes  02/04/2025  The unstable new coastline poses safety risks for the tourists that flock to coastal glacial areas for their beauty and abundant wildlife. Shrinking glaciers exposed 2,500 kilometres of coastline and 35 ‘new’ islands in the Arctic between 2000 and 2020, new research has found.  Scientists examined satellite images of more than 1,700 ice caps in Greenland, Alaska, the Canadian Arctic, the Russian Arctic, Iceland and Svalbard over this 20-year period. Their analysis shows that 85 per cent of these glaciers retreated, uncovering an average of 123 kilometres of new coastline per year. This is “fundamentally altering the nature of Arctic landscapes”, according to Dr Simon Cook, a senior lecturer in environmental sciences at the University of Dundee. The research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, links the acceleration in glacier melt to rising ocean and air temperatures. 

Most of the new coastlines appear in Greenland........As global temperatures rise, glaciers are experiencing increasingly rapid retreat. The base of the glacier, known as the ‘terminus’, begins to melt, shrinking the overall length of the ice cap.  Marine-terminating glaciers - which flow into the ocean - often reveal new areas of coastline when they meltFrom satellite imagery of 1,704 marine-terminating glaciers in the northern hemisphere, the researchers mapped the 2,466 kilometres of coastline that were exposed between 2000 and 2020. The study shows that the rate of freshly revealed coastline varies significantly between regions. Just 101 glaciers were responsible for more than half of the total additional coastline length, the authors found.,,,,,read on          https://www.euronews.com/green/2025/04/02/the-arctics-glaciers-are-retreating-exposing-new-coastlines-that-could-trigger-tsunamis?utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=green_newsletter&utm_medium=referral&insEmail=1&insNltCmpId=257&insNltSldt=10080&insPnName=euronewsfr&isIns=1&isInsNltCmp=1

CHECkOUT......Swiss glaciers shrank during Europe’s record-hot summer despite high snowfall in June