Feed aggregator

How a celebrated milestone for the spoon-billed sandpiper turned to sadness.

A flurry of new contracts from state and territory governments has brought the Australian wind industry back to life. Fast growing French developer Neoen says it is a "great place" to invest, and today switched on the 100MW Hornsdale wind farm.

Witton-Le-Wear, Durham Vegetation towers above my head and I hear reed warblers delivering their incessant songs like gossips

With the easy grace of a circus trapeze artist the reed bunting delivers his five-note scratchy song with gusto from the top of his swaying reed stem, issuing a confident challenge to any who doubt that this is his territory.

Related: Country diary: A regional dialect may be the way to a reed warbler's heart

Continue reading...

Dong Energy announces major breakthrough in costs of offshore wind energy, winning a tender for 700MW of capacity at a record low price.

Soaring gas prices will clip $100 million from the profits of Australia's biggest electricity supplier, and are causing big jumps in electricity costs.

Breakthroughs in solar panel technology and solar thermal are starting to be considered and used to save money and emissions in the mining industry.

Australia’s biggest utilities are passing on the surging cost of the country’s predominantly coal-fired grid to consumers at the start of the new financial year, but it seems pretty clear that many solar households are missing out.

NZ energy retail start-up Flick Electric says Australia an ideal market for its digital platform that strips electricity pricing bare and gives customers access to the wholesale spot market

Promoting fear and scare campaigns has been the stock in trade of conservatives in Australia for decades. Remember the yellow peril? The carbon tax?

The UK could adopt solar, electric vehicles and batteries much faster than expected just a year ago, according to the National Grid.

One result in the country’s upper house has sparked a wave of discontent, reflection and rage.

New uses for Australia's plant-based oils appear set to give it some new tricks, potentially jolting the local eucalyptus oil industry into high-tech limelight.

Fossils of a sea worm that lived on the ocean floor about 500 million years ago are giving new insights into how early creatures evolved.

Friends of the Earth and local group fight council’s decision to approve UK’s first fracking operation for five years

Anti-fracking campaigners have applied for judicial review of a council’s decision to allow use of the gas extraction technique in North Yorkshire.

Councillors on North Yorkshire county council’s planning committee voted by seven to four in May to give the green light to the first fracking operation in the UK for five years on a site just outside the village of Kirby Misperton, near Pickering.

Continue reading...

Australia (whose flag is pictured on the right) is one of several countries with a big stake in the South Pole. Josh Landis/US NSF/Wikimedia

Earth’s geographic poles have been making a lot of news lately. Canada is looking to make a claim on the North Pole within the next couple of years, arguing that the pole (along with a large slab of the Arctic seabed) falls within the limits of its continental shelf, despite similar existing claims by Denmark and Russia.

The pole, however, seems to have its own view on this. Scientists recently reported that, having drifted towards Canada’s Hudson Bay for many decades, it has abruptly changed direction and is now headed for London.

It comes as a surprise to many people that Earth’s geographic poles move at all. We tend to think of them as stationary, the points where all the lines of longitude meet. Ninety degrees north and south, however, are defined as averages of the poles’ actual positions over a particular period.

If defined as the places where the Earth’s rotational axis meets its surface, the geographic poles are constantly on the move, with a periodic, spiral motion as well as a linear one. This happens because our planet is not, as we might like to imagine, a perfect sphere, but in fact is rather lumpy. Seasonal displacement of air and water on its surface, as well as changes within its mantle, contribute to the shifting of its axis, and hence the movement of the poles.

The distances involved are not large – the linear drift can be measured in centimetres per year – but they are revealing. The North Pole’s lurch towards London, scientists suggest, is a result of recent melting of glacial ice and the emptying of underground aquifers for water supplies.

A century ago humans had barely managed to reach either pole; now, it seems, we have inadvertently managed to move them. Our decisions and actions are more closely connected with these symbolically most remote of places than we might imagine.

Windswept and remote, but still claimed by six countries. Bill McAfee/US NSF/Wikimedia Commons The ‘other’ pole

In humanity’s thinking about the Arctic and Antarctic regions, the South Pole has long been the underdog. Due to the cartographical convention that defines north as “up”, we think of it lying under us, hidden away at the very bottom of the planet.

As I discuss in my book South Pole: Nature and Culture, the place conjures ideas of remoteness, isolation, hostile weather, tragic explorers, altruistic scientists and even extreme tourists. But we rarely consider it in political terms.

The 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which declared the continent a place of peace and science and put national claims on hold, seemed to leave behind the imperial ambitions that produced the “race to the pole” in the early 20th century. And while Antarctica’s potential mineral resources are an ongoing source of concern, the South Pole, sitting atop almost 3km of ice, is not an obvious place to drill.

Now occupied by a large scientific research station, where (among other activities) astronomers use giant telescopes to study cosmological events, the South Pole is often assumed to be a politically neutral place, immune to the clamour going on in the north.

Polar positions

Why, then, should Australians care about the South Pole? Surprisingly, the pole featured in the celebrations that marked the nation’s federation in 1901. A spectacular pantomime entitled Australis, performed in Sydney over the summer of 1900-01, imagined a future in which Australia annexes Antarctica and takes as its capital the “City of Zero” sitting exactly at the pole – a satirical wink to the rivalry at the time between Sydney and Melbourne for the honour.

Although this unlikely future did not come to pass, Australia does indeed have a claim on the pole – or rather, a fraction of it. Although the pole is not the geographical centre of the continent by any means, the various wedge-shaped territorial claims – including Australia’s – meet there, like pieces of a meringue pie with the pole in the middle. The only exception is Norway’s claim, which has an undefined southern limit – ironically enough, given that Norwegians were the first to set foot at the pole.

The scientific base at 90ºS – the United States' Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station – thus sits across six territorial claims. This is a highly strategic position for a nation that recognises none of the existing claims but reserves the right to make its own in the future.

Antarctic territorial claims. CIA World Factbook Connecting Australia to the pole

Australia’s claim to 42% of Antarctica is also, then, a claim (indeed, the largest of any nation) on the South Pole – if it makes any sense to claim a percentage of what is, after all, technically a dot.

Our domestic politics, such as the recently announced Australian Antarctic Strategy, which confirms our continued interest in the region and includes plans for greater access to the continent’s interior, are thus inextricably connected to the site sometimes described as the last place on Earth.

While the South Pole may not be subject to the contemporary claim-making that besets its northern cousin, this symbolic heart of Antarctica remains a deeply political place and one that Australians – both those keen to maintain our claim and those who believe that all territorial claims there are misplaced – should know and care about.

This is the first in a series of articles on Australian science and diplomacy in Antarctica. Look out for more in the coming days.

Elizabeth Leane receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

European commissions’ opposition to a proposed global ban will spell the beginning of a mass extinction of African elephants, warn officials from 29 African states

Wildlife officials in nearly 30 African states say they are appalled by an EU decision to oppose a comprehensive global ban on the ivory trade.

In a position paper released on 1 July, the European commission said that rather than an all-encompassing ban it would be better to encourage countries with growing elephant numbers to “sustainably manage” their populations.

Continue reading...

Council grants planning permission to controversial Druridge Bay coal mine, as campaigners vow to fight on, reports BusinessGreen

Green groups have responded with outrage to the decision yesterday by Northumberland County Council to approve controversial plans for a new opencast coal mine near the Northumberland coast.

The council voted in support of plans from developer Banks Group, which would see 3m tonnes of coal, sandstone and fireclay extracted from a surface mine at Highthorn, near the village of Widdrington.

Continue reading...

The Lixão do Jóquei is one of the largest open landfills in Latin America. Under a 2010 federal law, all solid waste in Brazil should be put in modern landfills that have been lined to stop toxins soaking into the soil. Jóquei, which does not meet those requirements, is scheduled to be closed this year, but hundreds of people still make a dangerous living from scavenging amid its mounds of trash

Continue reading...

Volcanic ash threatens world’s largest colony of chinstrap penguins that are currently trapped on a small island in the sub Antarctic, say scientists

One of the world’s biggest colonies of penguins is at risk from a volcano that has erupted on their small sub-Antarctic island in a British overseas territory.

British scientists fear that Mt Curry’s eruption could have a serious impact on the 1.2m chinstrap penguins and nearly 200,000 macaroni penguins based on Zavodovski, one of the South Sandwich islands.

Continue reading...

Conservationists are devastated after the first two chicks born in captivity to one of the world’s rarest birds die at a wildfowl centre in Gloucestershire

An attempt to breed one of the world’s rarest birds in captivity has failed after the only two chicks which hatched died, conservationists said.

Efforts to breed critically endangered spoon-billed sandpipers, named after their unusual beak, from the world’s only captive population seemed to have yielded results, with seven eggs laid and two chicks hatching.

Continue reading...