Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Human-caused Hawk fire covers more than 15,000 acres as blaze approaches University of Nevada campus in Reno A fast-moving Nevada wildfire exploded to more than 15,000 acres (6,000 hectares) on Sunday, pushing from the Sierra foothills toward the center of Reno and urging nearly 90,000 residents to evacuate as flames threatened neighborhoods and reached the edge of the University of Nevada campus. The Hawk fire’s “GO NOW” evacuation zone had expanded to the edge of the university campus as strong, gusty winds, low humidity and dry vegetation fueled the blaze, according to Truckee Meadows Fire and Rescue in Reno. Of those urged to evacuate, 42,000 were under strict orders. An additional 45,000 people were in the evacuation warning zone, and encouraged to leave now and be prepared to stay away for several days to clear the roads for first-responders. Continue reading...

An abandoned farm field became a flourishing wildflower meadow within little more than a decade, with plant diversity doubling and thousands of orchids appearing naturally. The discovery suggests that simply giving nature time to recover could be a powerful and inexpensive tool for restoring biodiversity.

Once the economic lifeblood of the region, Latrobe Valley’s coal industry is in terminal decline. Jesse Thompson’s photographic project aims to document this period of rapid change and examine its legacy ‘Extremely effective’ organised campaigns against wind and solar undermining support for renewable energy Continue reading...

An 1857 decree to drain swamps and plant a monoculture, detritus from the trees and global heating combined to produce the conditions for the Gironde inferno The ruinous fires that overran parts of France this summer have burned more land than ever recorded, forced more people from their homes than at any point since the second world war and caused what scientists suspect is the country’s first firestorm thundercloud. The smoke from France’s biggest inferno in nearly 80 years choked Limoges, a city 125 miles (200km) from the flames, with more toxic dust than Delhi residents inhaled on the city’s worst day of smog last year. The blaze that tore through forests outside Bordeaux in late July took just a few weeks to reforge France’s relationship with fire, but the conditions behind it were centuries in the making. Continue reading...