Flux continu

The process of relocating people from New Orleans should start immediately, as the city has reached a “point of no return” that will see it surrounded by the ocean within decades due to the climate crisis, a stark new study has concluded. Ongoing sea-level rise and the rampant erosion of wetlands in southern Louisiana will swallow up the New Orleans area within a few generations, with the new paper estimating the city “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century”.

The world's oceans absorbed a record amount of heat in 2025, an international team of scientists said Friday, further priming conditions for sea level rise, violent storms, and coral death.

If atmospheric CO2 levels exceed 1,200 parts per million (ppm), it could push the Earth’s climate over a “tipping point”, finds a new study. This would see clouds that shade large part of the oceans start to break up.

Despite working on polar science for the British Antarctic Survey for 20 years, Louise Sime finds the magnitude of potential sea-level rise hard to comprehend

In a rapidly changing climate, evidence-based decision-making benefits from up-to-date and timely information. Here we compile monitoring datasets (published at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15639576; Smith et al., 2025a) to produce updated estimates for key indicators of the state of the climate system: net emissions of greenhouse gases and short-lived climate forcers, greenhouse gas concentrations, radiative forcing, the Earth's energy imbalance, surface temperature changes, warming attributed to human activities, the remaining carbon budget, and estimates of global temperature extremes. This year, we additionally include indicators for sea-level rise and land precipitation change. We follow methods as closely as possible to those used in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working Group One report.

A chemical that takes thousands of years to break down is found in England's freshwater fish at 1,000 times above safe levels – and could end up on our dinner tables

Ocean acidification has already crossed a crucial threshold for planetary health, scientists say in unexpected finding

For around 2,000 years, global sea levels varied little. That changed in the 20th century. They started rising and have not stopped since — and the pace is accelerating. Scientists are scrambling to understand what this means for the future just as President Trump strips back agencies tasked with monitoring the oceans.

Have you ever thought about what would happen if all life in the ocean disappeared? A recent study explores this extreme scenario to understand how ocean biology shapes the past, present, and future climate. The ocean plays a critical role in regulating Earth's climate. It is a massive carbon store that absorbs about 25% of human-caused emissions and thus helps maintain a relatively low CO2 level in the atmosphere. But what would happen if all marine life—from the tiniest plankton to the largest whales—disappeared? A recent study delves into this extreme scenario to uncover the crucial role that ocean biology plays in mitigating climate change.

The exponential rise in microplastic pollution over the past 50 years may be reflected in increasing contamination in human brains, according to a new study. It found a rising trend in micro- and nanoplastics in brain tissue from dozens of postmortems carried out between 1997 and 2024. The researchers also found the tiny particles in liver and kidney samples.