Background Articles

The islands were first noticed by a student engineer who had observed the unidentified land masses in satellite images

Around the world, rising temperatures pose a threat to the species.

Toxic algal blooms which can be fatal to humans, are increasing across the world as temperatures rise, according to the first global survey of dozens of freshwater lakes based on 30 years of NASA data. 

Waters off the coast of Maine are warming faster than 99 percent of the world's oceans. That's forcing whales northward in pursuit of prey, threatening some of their already dwindling populations.

Under extreme heat stress, corals expel their symbiotic algae and colour (that is, ‘bleaching’), which often leads to widespread mortality. Predicting the large-scale environmental conditions that reinforce or mitigate coral bleaching remains unresolved and limits strategic conservation actions1,2. Here we assessed coral bleaching at 226 sites and 26 environmental variables that represent different mechanisms of stress responses from East Africa to Fiji through a coordinated effort to evaluate the coral response to the 2014–2016 El Niño/Southern Oscillation thermal anomaly. We applied common time-series methods to study the temporal patterning of acute thermal stress and evaluated the effectiveness of conventional and new sea surface temperature metrics and mechanisms in predicting bleaching severity. The best models indicated the importance of peak hot temperatures, the duration of cool temperatures and temperature bimodality, which explained ~50% of the variance, compared to the common degree-heating week temperature index that explained only 9%. Our findings suggest that the threshold concept as a mechanism to explain bleaching alone was not as powerful as the multidimensional interactions of stresses, which include the duration and temporal patterning of hot and cold temperature extremes relative to average local conditions.

It already has caused coral bleaching in Hawaii and may be tied to strandings of marine mammals along the California coast.

Short-tailed shearwaters breed in the areas off Australia. They come to Alaska to gorge on krill, tiny copepods, fish and a variety of other marine food. Shearwaters that were not dead were found to be extremely weakened, some of them trying to eat scraps from Bering Sea fishermen’s nets.

Following Hurricane Dorian, large parts of the Bahamas have been left in a state of ruin, made unlivable to the hundreds of thousands of people who have called the islands their home.

South winds and warm water are hitting sea ice on Arctic waters with a double whammy.

From unseasonal rainfall to early flooding and record heat, this summer has seen a lot of strange and concerning weather events across the Northwest Arctic and North Slope. That's not changing as summer comes to an end.

The top of the world saw record-beating average temperatures flashing through all three summer months.

Newspaper of record for Nunavut, and the Nunavik territory of Quebec

The monthly temperature for the entire country was 1.7 degrees above normal.

This summer saw two unbearable heat waves blanket Europe. The second set new records for high temperature when the mercury hit 114.8 degrees Fahrenheit in Southern France. As the climate crisis worsens, Europe can expect extreme heat more frequently and with increased intensity, the researchers said in a press release put out by the American Geophysical Union.

Dead salmon have shown up in river systems throughout Alaska, and the mortalities are probably connected to warm water or low river water levels, said a Fish and Game official.

The land around Höfn in Hornafjörður is rising rapidly due to the melting of the glaciers in the surrounding area. There, the land is rising one centimetre per year,

Usually by August, peak fire season has passed. But fire and climate experts say conditions in Southcentral Alaska were nearly perfect for fire this weekend, from the sky to the dry forest floor.

Halifax-based scuba diver Lloyd Bond says in the last three years he's seen increasing numbers of butterfly fish, seahorses, cornet fish, trigger fish, puffer fish, and many other species not native to Canadian waters.

From the Koyukuk River, to the Kuskokwim, to Norton Sound, to Bristol Bay’s Igushik River, unusually warm temperatures across Alaska this summer led to die-offs of unspawned chum, sockeye and pink salmon. Warm waters also sometimes this summer acted as a “thermal block” — essentially a wall of heat salmon don’t swim past, delaying upriver migration.

For example, when looking at water in some areas around St. Lawrence Island, from 2010 to 2017, the bottom temperature went up by eight degrees Celsius (about 14° Fahrenheit).