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With summer approaching, there’s a flurry of activity to ensure reliable energy generation under peak loads.

Hundreds of Japanese species have been found on US coasts, swept there by the deadly 2011 tsunami.

Florida and Japan show clean energy is fastest, cheapest way to restore power. Too bad Trump's administration hates it.

EasyJet believes it could operate electric flights under two hours in duration within the decade.

The Coalition Government is continuing its longstanding commitment to natural resource management, investing more than $1 billion for phase two of the National Landcare Program.

London mayor cites figures showing that the home stoves, used in 16% of households, produce up to a third of all the capital’s fine-particle pollution

Wood-burning stoves could be banned in some areas to combat air pollution under proposals by the London mayor, Sadiq Khan.

Khan has written to Michael Gove, the environment secretary, to request extra powers to improve air quality in the capital, including measures to tackle solid-fuel burning and construction pollution. The proposed measures include minimum emissions standards for vessels on London’s waterways and heavy construction machinery like diggers and bulldozers.

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Japanese vessel washed ashore on Long Beach, Washington being inspected by John Chapman. Russ Lewis

When a foreign species arrives in a new environment and spreads to cause some form of economic, health, or ecological harm, it’s called a biological invasion. Often stowing away among the cargo of ships and aircraft, such invaders cause billions of dollars of economic loss annually across the globe and have devastating impacts on the environment.

While the number of introductions which eventually lead to such invasions is rising across the globe, most accidental introduction events involve small numbers of individuals and species showing up in a new area.

But new research published today in Science has found that hundreds of marine species travelled from Japan to North America in the wake of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami (which struck the east coast of Japan with devastating consequences).

Read more: Widespread invasive species control is a risky business

Marine introductions result from biofouling, the process by which organisms start growing on virtually any submerged surface. Within days a slimy bacterial film develops. After months to a few years (depending on the water temperature) fully formed communities may be found, including algae, molluscs such as mussels, bryozoans, crustaceans, and other animals.

Current biosecurity measures, such as antifouling on ships and border surveillance, are designed to deal with a steady stream of potential invaders. But they are ill-equipped to deal with an introduction event of the scale recorded along most of the North American coast. This would be just as true for Australia, with its extensive coastlines, as it is for North America.

Mass marine migration Marine animals were transported vast distances on tsunami debris. Carla Schaffer / AAAS

This research, led by James Carlton of Williams College, shows that over a few years after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, many marine organisms arrived along the west coast of North America on debris derived from human activity. The debris ranged from small pieces of plastic to buoys, to floating docks and damaged marine vessels. All of these items harboured organisms. Across the full range of debris surveyed, scores of individuals from roughly 300 species of marine creatures arrived alive. Most of them were new to North America.

The tsunami swept coastal infrastructure and many human artefacts out to sea. Items that had already been in the water before the tsunami carried their marine communities along with them. The North Pacific Current then transported these living communities across the Pacific to Alaska, British Columbia, Oregon, Washington and California.

Japanese tsunami buoy with Japanese oyster Crassostrea gigas, found floating offshore of Alsea Bay, Oregon in 2012. James T. Carlton

What makes this process unusual is the way a natural extreme event – the earthquake and associated tsunami – gave rise to an extraordinarily large introduction event because of its impact on coastal infrastructure. The researchers argue that this event is of unprecedented magnitude, constituting what they call “tsunami-driven megarafting”: rafting being the process by which organisms may travel across oceans on debris – natural or otherwise.

It’s not known how many of these new species will establish themselves and spread in their new environment. But, given what we know about the invasion process, it’s certain at least some will. Often, establishment and initial population growth is hidden, especially in marine species. Only once it is either costly or impossible to do something about a new species, is it detected.

Biosecurity surveillance systems are designed to overcome this problem, but surveillance of an entire coast for multiple species is a significant challenge.

Perhaps one of the largest questions the study raises is whether this was a once off event. Might similar future occurrences be expected? Given the rapid rate of coastal infrastructure development, the answer is clear: this adds a new dimension to coastal biosecurity that will have to be considered.

Investment in coastal planning and early warning systems will help, as will reductions in plastic pollution. But such investment may be of little value if action is not taken to adhere to, and then exceed, nationally determined contributions to the Paris Agreement. Without doing so, a climate change-driven sea level rise of more than 1 m by the end of the century may be expected. This will add significantly to the risks posed by the interactions between natural extreme events and the continued development of coastal infrastructure. In other words, this research has uncovered what might be an increasingly common new ecological process in the Anthropocene – the era of human-driven global change.

Steven Chown is the President of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.

Forests globally are so degraded that instead of absorbing emissions they now release more carbon annually than all the traffic in the US, say researchers

The world’s tropical forests are so degraded they have become a source rather than a sink of carbon emissions, according to a new study that highlights the urgent need to protect and restore the Amazon and similar regions.

Researchers found that forest areas in South America, Africa and Asia – which have until recently played a key role in absorbing greenhouse gases – are now releasing 425 teragrams of carbon annually, which is more than all the traffic in the United States.

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The process begins of scoping new spacecraft for the Sentinel Earth observation network.

A team in Bangalore has entered the Google Lunar X Prize to land a rover on the Moon.

Concern grows that cause of toxic plume last month, which left 150 people seeking hospital treatment, may never be known

MPs have criticised a decision to wind down an investigation into the mysterious chemical haze that caused Sussex beaches to be evacuated and left dozens of people reporting sore eyes and breathing problems.

Victims of the incident, after which 150 people sought hospital treatment, expressed alarm that they may never know the cause of the toxic plume that gave them sore throats for weeks after it drifted on to Birling Gap and other beaches on 27 August.

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MEPs withdraw parliamentary access after the firm shunned a hearing into allegations that it unduly influenced studies into the safety of glyphosate used in its RoundUp weedkiller

Monsanto lobbyists have been banned from entering the European parliament after the multinational refused to attend a parliamentary hearing into allegations of regulatory interference.

It is the first time MEPs have used new rules to withdraw parliamentary access for firms that ignore a summons to attend parliamentary inquiries or hearings.

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Sir Paul Nurse says this kind of technique could be done in the UK.

To sleep tight and dodge the bedbug’s bite, pack away worn clothes to avoid spreading the insects, which are attracted to human scent, travellers advised

After a long day of sightseeing in a foreign city, you might be tempted to kick off your socks, sling your sweaty T-shirt across your hotel room room and flop down on the bed. Think again.

Dirty laundry acts as a powerful magnet for bedbugs, a study published in the journal Scientific Reports has found. Its authors have warned that a failure to securely pack away clothes while travelling may explain why populations of biting parasites have soared during the past decade.

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A major citizen science project will spread virtual flu with the aim of understanding how to stop the real thing.

Four times larger than regular rodents, a large, tree-dwelling rat has been found in the Pacific.

Greenland wildfires, deforestation and tropical storm Harvey are among the images captured by Nasa and the ESA last month

Tropical storm Harvey in the Gulf of Mexico on 24 August. This geocolor image appears differently depending on whether it is day (right of the image) or night (left).

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The latest example, Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Rebecca Otto has a strong clean energy proposal

As soon as Donald Trump won the presidential election, people in the US and around the world knew it was terrible news for the environment. Not wanting to believe that he would try to follow through on our worst fears, we held out hope.

Those hopes for a sane US federal government were misplaced. But they are replaced by a new hope – an emerging climate leadership at the state level and a continuation of economic forces that favor clean/renewable energy over dirty fossil fuels. In fact, it appears that some states are relishing the national and international leadership roles that they have undertaken. Support for sensible climate and energy policies is now a topic to run on in elections.

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The Leuser ecosystem spans 2.6m hectares into the Indonesian provinces of Aceh and North Sumatra. It’s the only place in the world where tigers, orangutans, rhinos and elephants coexist in the wild. But it’s under threat from agricultural industries, including palm oil

• ‘The last place on Earth’: how Sumatra’s rainforest is being cleared for palm oil

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What kind of migration patterns did ancient wombats have?