Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Warning for other Arctic communities as residents told not to use water in Longyearbyen in Svalbard, one of the fastest-warming places in the world Residents of a remote town in Norway that is in one of the fastest-warming places in the world have been told they must no longer drink tap water due to heavy metal contamination that scientists have linked to the thawing permafrost. Longyearbyen, in the archipelago of Svalbard, gets its main drinking water supply from a 1.5 mile-long (2.5km) dammed lake called Isdammen, or “ice pond”. Higher temperatures as a result of the climate crisis have thawed permafrost, leading to newly exposed bedrock leaching metals into the pond. Continue reading...

This month’s biodiversity summit in Yerevan, Armenia, aims to push governments to meet the 23 targets agreed at Cop15 in 2022 This month, nearly every country on Earth will return to the question of how to stem the rapid destruction of the natural world. Humans are driving it, but so far we have not found a way to stop it. In late 2022, governments reached an ambitious once-in-a-decade deal to better protect nature amid scientific warnings that the planet is going through the largest loss of life since the extinction of the dinosaurs. Now, they are assessing their progress on the targets for the first time. Continue reading...

Agency changes wording on website as Texas-based firm continues manufacture of plastic container barriers The Environmental Protection Agency has quietly backtracked on a claim that the US has phased out two of the most dangerous Pfas compounds – Pfoa and Pfos. The EPA has found that virtually no level of exposure to either in drinking water is safe, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies Pfoa as “carcinogenic to humans” and Pfos as “possibly carcinogenic”. Still, the EPA is allowing Houston-based Inhance to produce containers from which Pfoa has been found to leach at high levels into the containers’ contents. The company makes up to 200m barriers annually for plastic containers used across the US economy. This article was amended on 18 October 2026 to correct Patricia van Ee’s title, and the story previously stated that Inhance manufactures plastic containers. They make the containers’ barriers. Continue reading...

Rapid coastal erosion threatens coastal homes and economies, and as Super El Niño rounds the corner, a town is reckoning with the reality of climate crisis San Clemente is one of southern California’s most picture-perfect beach towns – a capital of American surf culture since the 1950s. In two years, 2028 Olympic surfers will compete at Lower Trestles, a world-class surfing beach. But the town’s longtime cultural and economic driver, its beaches, are now under threat. As pounding waves driven by late-summer storms in the Pacific devour chunks of the California coastline, some of San Clemente’s beaches are growing narrower, the sand increasingly eaten away. Continue reading...