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A 200MW solar fram near Balranald in western NSW will be largest, and one of 27 large scale solar projects planned or under construction in the state.

On the roof of a waste incinerator outside Zurich, the Swiss firm Climeworks has built world’s first commercial plant to suck CO2 directly from the air.

Populations of the endangered black cockatoo have halved in five years, as pine plantations are cleared on the Northern Swan Coastal Plain.

Originally published in the Guardian on 1 July 1967

MACHYNLLETH: When a friend wrote recently and added a PS, “How’s that plant?” I knew that he meant the giant hogweed I described in this diary a year ago and which brought in more letters than anything I have ever mentioned. Last year’s plants duly disappeared but this year one has come up in a different place. It sowed itself at a path edge and for several weeks looked harmless enough. But suddenly it stretched out huge arms all round and now the path is quite blocked. Meanwhile its main stem is shooting up with equal speed and will soon be expanding massive umbels. I see it through the window as I write.

Related: Giant hogweed; digging deeper into the history of a 'killer weed'

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The famous "faceless fish", which garnered worldwide headlines when it was collected by the expedition. Rob Zugaro, Author provided

Over the past five weeks I led a “voyage of discovery”. That sounds rather pretentious in the 21st century, but it’s still true. My team, aboard the CSIRO managed research vessel, the Investigator, has mapped and sampled an area of the planet that has never been surveyed before.

The RV Investigator in port. Jerome Mallefet/FNRS

Bizarrely, our ship was only 100km off Australia’s east coast, in the middle of a busy shipping lane. But our focus was not on the sea surface, or on the migrating whales or skimming albatross. We were surveying The Abyss – the very bottom of the ocean some 4,000m below the waves.

To put that into perspective, the tallest mountain on the Australian mainland is only 2,228m. Scuba divers are lucky to reach depths of 40m, while nuclear submarines dive to about 500m. We were aiming to put our cameras and sleds much, much deeper. Only since 2014, when the RV Investigator was commissioned, has Australia had the capacity to survey the deepest depths.

The months before the trip were frantic, with so much to organise: permits, freight, equipment, flights, medicals, legal agreements, safety procedures, visas, finance approvals, communication ideas, sampling strategies – all the tendrils of modern life (the thought “why am I doing this?” surfaced more than once). But remarkably, on May 15, we had 27 scientists from 14 institutions and seven countries, 11 technical specialists, and 22 crew converging on Launceston, and we were off.

Rough seas

Life at sea takes some adjustment. You work 12-hour shifts every day, from 2 o’clock to 2 o’clock, so it’s like suffering from jetlag. The ship was very stable, but even so the motion causes seasickness for the first few days. You sway down corridors, you have one-handed showers, and you feel as though you will be tipped out of bed. Many people go off coffee. The ship is “dry”, so there’s no well-earned beer at the end of a hard day. You wait days for bad weather to clear and then suddenly you are shovelling tonnes of mud through sieves in the middle of the night as you process samples dredged from the deep.

Shifting through the mud of the abyss on the back deck. Jerome Mallefet/FNRS

Surveying the abyss turns out to be far from easy. On our very first deployment off the eastern Tasmanian coast, our net was shredded on a rock at 2,500m, the positional beacon was lost, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of gear gone. It was no one’s fault; the offending rock was too small to pick up on our multibeam sonar. Only day 1 and a new plan was required. Talented people fixed what they could, and we moved on.

I was truly surprised by the ruggedness of the seafloor. From the existing maps, I was expecting a gentle slope and muddy abyssal plain. Instead, our sonar revealed canyons, ridges, cliffs and massive rock slides – amazing, but a bit of a hindrance to my naive sampling plan.

But soon the marine animals began to emerge from our videos and samples, which made it all worthwhile. Life started to buzz on the ship.

Secrets of the deep

Like many people, scientists spend most of their working lives in front of a computer screen. It is really great to get out and actually experience the real thing, to see animals we have only read about in old books. The tripod fish, the faceless fish, the shortarse feeler fish (yes, really), red spiny crabs, worms and sea stars of all shapes and sizes, as well as animals that emit light to ward off predators.

A spiny red lithodid crab. Rob Zugaro/Museums Victoria The tripod fish uses its long spines to sit on the seafloor waiting for the next meal. Rob Zugaro/Museums Victoria

The level of public interest has been phenomenal. You may already have seen some of the coverage, which ranged from the fascinated to the amused – for some reason our discovery of priapulid worms was a big hit on US late-night television. In many ways all the publicity mirrored our first reactions to animals on the ship. “What is this thing?” “How amazing!”

The important scientific insights will come later. It will take a year or so to process all the data and accurately identify the samples. Describing all the new species will take even longer. All of the material has been carefully preserved and will be stored in museums and CSIRO collections around Australia for centuries.

Scientists identifying microscopic animals onboard. Asher Flatt

On a voyage of discovery, video footage is not sufficient, because we don’t know the animals. The modern biologist uses high-resolution microscopes and DNA evidence to describe the new species and understand their place in the ecosystem, and that requires actual samples.

So why bother studying the deep sea? First, it is important to understand that humanity is already having an impact down there. The oceans are changing. There wasn’t a day at sea when we didn’t bring up some rubbish from the seafloor – cans, bottles, plastic, rope, fishing line. There is also old debris from steamships, such as unburned coal and bits of clinker, which looks like melted rock, formed in the boilers. Elsewhere in the oceans there are plans to mine precious metals from the deep sea.

Rubbish found on the seafloor. Rob Zugaro/Museums Victoria

Second, Australia is the custodian of a vast amount of abyss. Our marine exclusive economic zone (EEZ) is larger than the Australian landmass. The Commonwealth recently established a network of marine reserves around Australia. Just like National Parks on land, these have been established to protect biodiversity in the long term. Australia’s Marine Biodiversity Hub, which provided funds for this voyage, as been established by the Commonwealth Government to conduct research in the EEZ.

The newly mapped East Gippsland Commonwealth Marine Reserve, showing the rugged end of the Australian continental margin as it dips to the abyssal plain. The scale shows the depth in metres. Amy Lau/CSIRO

Our voyage mapped some of the marine reserves for the first time. Unlike parks on land, the reserves are not easy to visit. It was our aim to bring the animals of the Australian Abyss into public view.

We discovered that life in the deep sea is diverse and fascinating. Would I do it again? Sure I would. After a beer.

Tim O'Hara receives research funding from the National Environmental Science Programme's Marine Biodiversity Hub.

Animal was first spotted near Cala Major and Can Pastilla, with lifeguards ordering swimmers out of the water

Experts have captured a blue shark whose presence in shallow waters off the coast of Mallorca caused panic over the weekend and led to the evacuation of beaches on the Balearic island.

Related: Mysterious ghost shark caught on film for the first time

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Some are concerned that the proposed privatization of some public park services would drive up costs for visitors and fail to raise enough for repairs

America’s national parks need a staggering $11.5bn worth of overdue road and infrastructure repairs. But with the proposed National Park Service budget slashed by almost $400m, the Trump administration says it will turn to privatizing public park services to address those deferred maintenance costs.

“I don’t want to be in the business of running campgrounds,” Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said at a meeting of the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association in Washington this month. This came after Donald Trump proposed cutting the Interior budget by 13%.

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You’d expect mountain climbers to be great champions of the environment, but their high-performance clothing is a chemical nightmare

There’s a long-standing rivalry between surfers and climbers as to who is the greenest. For my money, surfers have the edge. They’ve influenced environmentalism at large, making their issues – sewage and plastic – ours.

Greenpeace has found noxious chemicals in the air around outdoor clothing shops

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As tourists pour in, global forces push local fishermen out

It is hard to think of a more faithful depiction of the English fishing village than the scene that greets the visitor to Porthleven in Cornwall: the early summer sun glints off the water, holidaymakers throng the quayside restaurants, enjoying the fresh fish unloaded by the fishermen toiling in their boats.

Yet some argue that things are not what they seem. They say that none of the fish sold at the restaurants or cafés offering “fresh local fish” is caught by the town’s fishermen. Instead it is brought in by van from wholesalers in Newlyn, 15 miles away. And of the boats bobbing in the water, only three are commercial fishing boats. Of those, one fisherman is retiring this year and the other two are ready to call it a day.

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Even in vast natural ecosystems, the fate and condition of nature lies in the hands of the people who live on, know, respect and manage that land

Only a small number of vast natural landscapes remain on Earth – wild regions where ecological processes function normally and movements of wildlife remain largely unfettered by the fragmentation of habitats. These few places include the Amazon basin, the boreal forests of Canada, tundra of Siberia, the Sahara Desert, and the Australian Outback.

It has become increasingly apparent to modern science what Indigenous people have understood for centuries: that even in these large, natural ecosystems, the fate and condition of nature lies in the hands of the people who live on, know, respect and manage that land.

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A WWF appeal aims to highlight the threat of habitat destruction and climate change on wild populations

In February, Pavel Fomenko was told that the body of a young female tiger had been discovered underneath a car parked outside the town of Luchegorsk, in eastern Russia. Fomenko – head of rare species conservation for WWF Russia – took the corpse for examination where he uncovered the grim details of the animal’s death.

Related: The Siberian tiger protector - in pictures

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Photographer Antonio Olmos travelled to the Russian far east to document the work of Pavel Fomenko, a man of the wilderness and tiger protector with the World Wildlife Fund

You can become a tiger protector with the WWF here

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Meng Meng and Jiao Qing arrive in Germany from China ahead of a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

• Mitch Landrieu says cities will lead as federal government is ‘paralysed’
• NYC’s de Blasio backs push as Miami Beach shows anti-sea rise work

US cities will lead national policy on climate change after the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, working to reduce emissions and become more resilient to rising sea levels, Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans said at an annual meeting in Florida.

Related: The fight against climate change: four cities leading the way in the Trump era

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Freedom-of-information data reveals threat of drought that would devastate wildlife, with government slow to act on water management

A quarter of England’s rivers are at risk of running dry, with devastating consequences for wildlife, according to data obtained by WWF under freedom of information rules.

Fish are most obviously affected when rivers slow to a trickle, particularly those that migrate upstream such as salmon, trout, eels and lampreys. But animals such as water voles are also harmed, as they are unable to escape predators by fleeing into rivers to reach underwater entrances to their burrows. Birds such as kingfishers, sandpipers and dippers also suffer, as the insects and small fish they feed on die out.

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The science is 150 years old and growing each day, yet it is still being rejected by politicians and some academics. We shall talk to some of those who remain unconvinced by climate research and its conclusions. Have they ever changed their minds? Do they perceive any risk at all? How can critics remain unmoved as the evidence mounts?

Shy Susan could be forgiven for feeling unloved. Her delicate pink flowers are easy to miss and her range is limited to the Beaconsfield area in northern Tasmania. This episode is selected from the Off Track archive.

First global assessment of climate change impact on world heritage-listed reefs says local efforts are ‘no longer sufficient’

Greater emissions reductions and delivering on the Paris climate agreement are now “the only opportunity” to save coral reefs the world over from decline, with local responses no longer sufficient, a report by Unesco has found.

The first global scientific assessment of the impacts of climate change on the 29 world heritage-listed coral reefs, published on Saturday, found that the frequency, intensity and duration of heat-stress events had worsened with increasing global warming, with massive consequences for the 29 world heritage sites.

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Mick Tsikas/AAP

Despite the government still considering his proposal for a Clean Energy Target (CET) - after endorsing his other 49 recommendations - Chief Scientist Alan Finkel is optimistic that the CET remains firmly on the agenda.

Finkel’s challenging task has been to put forward a scheme to bring Australia’s energy market into the future, providing certainty for investment and supply. His plan has required a balance between appeasing consumers on prices, and meeting Australia’s commitments on climate change.

This is made harder by the desire of many in the government to push on with developing new ‘clean coal’ fired power stations, a term Finkel describes as “a murky concept”. “There is no prohibitions in any of our recommendations. The government has to decide whether to licence new technologies.” he says.

Asked about the concept of ‘reverse auctions’ - better called competitive tenders - he says this is “widely recognised to be the most cost-effective means of bringing the lowest cost solution into the market.” But that’s dependent on the wisdom of the entity running the auction rather than the wisdom of investors.

Overall, Finkel acknowledges there’s a hard road ahead for policy-making on energy: “transitions are always painful”.

Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.