Glaciers to reach peak rate of extinction in the Alps in eight years

Alpinists train on the Mer de Glace in France. Like nearly all of Europe's glaciers, it is melting fast. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

by  Damian Carrington Environment editor

 Climate crisis forecast to wipe out thousands of glaciers a year globally, threatening water supplies and cultural heritage

 Glaciers in the European Alps are likely to reach their peak rate of extinction in only eight years, according to a study, with more than 100 due to melt away permanently by 2033. Glaciers in the western US and Canada are forecast to reach their peak year of loss less than a decade later, with more than 800 disappearing each year by then.

 

The melting of glaciers driven by human-caused global heating is one of the clearest signs of the climate crisis. Communities around the world have already held funeral ceremonies for lost glaciers, and a Global Glacier Casualty List records the names and histories of those that have vanished.

About 200,000 glaciers remain worldwide, with about 750 disappearing each year. However, the research indicates this pace will accelerate rapidly as emissions from burning fossil fuels continue to be released into the atmosphere.

Current climate action plans from governments are forecast to push global temperatures to about 2.7C above preindustrial levels, supercharging extreme weather. Under this scenario, glacier losses would peak at about 3,000 a year in 2040 and plateau at that rate until 2060. By the end of the century, 80% of today’s glaciers will have gone.

By contrast, rapid cuts to carbon emissions to keep global temperature rise to 1.5C would cap annual losses at about 2,000 a year in 2040, after which the rate would decline.

 

Glacier collapses, burying evacuated Swiss village in mud and rocks – video

 Previous studies have focused on the volume of ice lost, given its contribution to rising sea levels that threaten coastal towns and cities. Individual glaciers, however, are also important as water sources and tourist attractions for many communities, and often have spiritual significance for local people. This prompted the researchers to analyse the number of glaciers disappearing.

 

Matthias Huss, a senior scientist at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and a member of the study team, said: “As glaciologists, we do not only model the disappearance of glaciers globally, but we are very directly concerned with this loss of glaciers in our daily work.”

As the director of the Swiss glacier monitoring network, Huss recently declared four extinct, the latest in an estimated 1,000 lost in the country over the past three decades.

Huss also spoke at a funeral ceremony for the Pizol glacier in 2019. “More than 250 people climbed up to this glacier to say goodbye. It was very impressive.”

Such funerals have also taken place in Iceland, Nepal and elsewhere. “People climb up to these vanishing glaciers to say goodbye for themselves, but also to send out a strong signal to the public to tell them it matters to us.”

The Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere in New Zealand is experiencing substantial ice loss. Photograph: Jon Bower New Zealand/Alamy

Many glaciers hold spiritual significance, for example Māori culture regard them as ancestors. The Māori political leader Nā Lisa Tumahai visited the melting Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere in 2022 and told the Global Glacier Casualty List: “This mighty glacier, a presence once so physically commanding, is shrinking into oblivion. [It] has been subdued, humiliated by the actions of humans.

“To see this retreating giant is to understand impermanence, to understand the real and terrible results of industrialisation, of climate change.”

The new study, published in Nature Climate Change, analysed more than 200,000 glaciers from a database of outlines derived from satellite images. The researchers used three global glacier models to assess their fate under different heating scenarios.

Arctic endured year of record heat as climate scientists warn of ‘winter being redefined’. Region known as ‘world’s refrigerator’ is heating up as much as four times as quickly as global average, Noaa experts say

 

This aerial view shows icebergs and ice sheets floating in the water off Nuuk, Greenland, on 07 March 2025. Photograph: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images

by Oliver Milman

The Arctic endured a year of record heat and shrunken sea ice as the world’s northern latitudes continue a rapid shift to becoming rainier and less ice-bound due to the climate crisis, scientists have reported.

From October 2024 to September 2025, temperatures across the entire Arctic region were the hottest in 125 years of modern record keeping, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) said, with the last 10 years being the 10 warmest on record in the Arctic.

The Arctic is heating up as much as four times as quickly as the global average, due to the burning of fossil fuels, and this extra heat is warping the world’s refrigerator – a region that acts as a key climate regulator for the rest of the planet.

 

The maximum extent of sea ice in 2025 was the lowest in the 47-year satellite record, Noaa reported on in its annual Arctic report card. This is the latest landmark in a longer trend, with the region’s oldest, thickest ice declining by more than 95% since the 1980s as the Arctic becomes hotter and rainier.

This year was a record for precipitation in the Arctic. Much of this is not settling as snow – the June snow cover extent over the Arctic today is half of what it was six decades ago.

 “This year was the warmest on record and had the most precipitation on record – to see both of those things happen in one year is remarkable,” said Matthew Langdon Druckenmiller, an Arctic scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado and an editor of the Arctic report card. “This year has really underscored what is to come.”

 

Scientists have been struck by how exceptional warmth in other seasons, particularly summer, is now becoming evident in winter too, affecting the annual growth of sea ice across the Arctic in its coldest months. In the past month or so, sea ice extent has been the lowest on record, potentially heralding another reduced maximum for sea ice next year.

“There’s been a steady decline in sea ice and unfortunately we are seeing rain now even in winter,” said Druckenmiller. “We are seeing changes in the heart of winter, when we expect the Arctic to be cold. The whole concept of winter is being redefined in the Arctic.”

These changes are acutely felt by people and wildlife in the Arctic – rain falling on to snow can freeze into a barrier that makes it harder for animals to forage for food, while also making for more slippery, hazardous conditions for people traveling by road. The retreat of glaciers can also cause potentially dangerous flooding, as seen in Juneau, Alaska, this year.

The loss of sea ice is opening up vast areas of dark ocean, which is absorbing, rather than reflecting, more of the heat that is raising global temperatures. While the melting sea ice isn’t itself causing the seas to rise, the loss of land-based glaciers is, with Noaa reporting that the huge Greenland ice sheet lost 129bn tons of ice in 2025. This will add to sea level rise that will menace coastal cities for generations to come.

“We are seeing cascading impacts from a warming Arctic,” said Zack Labe, a climate scientist at Climate Central. “Coastal cities aren’t ready for the rising sea levels, we have completely changed the fisheries in the Arctic which leads to rising food bills for sea food. We can point to the Arctic as a far away place but the changes there affect the rest of the world.”

‘Not normal’: Climate crisis supercharged deadly monsoon floods in Asia. Cyclones like those in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Malaysia that killed 1,750 are ‘alarming new reality’

 

A man walks down a mud-covered street in Aceh Tamiang in Indonesia after flood waters receded. Photograph: Yt Hariono/AFP/Getty Images

 by Damian Carrington Environment editor

The climate crisis supercharged the deadly storms that killed more than 1,750 people in Asia by making downpours more intense and flooding worse, scientists have reported. Monsoon rains often bring some flooding but the scientists were clear: this was “not normal”.

In Sri Lanka, some floods reached the second floor of buildings, while in Sumatra, in Indonesia, the floods were worsened by the destruction of forests, which in the past slowed rainwater running off hillsides.

Millions of people were affected when Cyclone Ditwah struck Sri Lanka and Cyclone Senyar hit Sumatra and peninsular Malaysia in late November, and the events became some of the deadliest weather-related disasters in recent history.

The analysis by World Weather Attribution, a consortium of climate scientists, found the intensity of five-day episodes of heavy rain had increased by 28-160% in the region affected by Cyclone Senyar owing to human-caused global heating. In Sri Lanka, the periods of heavy rain are now between 9% and 50% more intense.

 

While at least 1,750 people died in the floods and hundreds more remain missing, cyclones also have a wide and enduring impact on health. Recent studies have found deaths from, for example, diabetes and kidney disease increase after such storms. Many people have also lost their homes and their livelihoods, with the poorest affected most.

“The combination of heavy monsoon rains and climate change is a deadly mix,” said Dr Sarah Kew, an academic at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and the lead author of the study. “Monsoon rains are normal in this part of the world. What is not normal is the growing intensity of these storms.”

 

Prof Lalith Rajapakse, at the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka, who was part of the study, said: “Cyclones like Ditwah have become an alarming new reality for Sri Lanka and the wider south and south-east Asian region, bringing unprecedented rainfall, widespread loss of life and massive disruption to economic activities.”

“Flooding is quite common to us every year during the monsoon season: we expect flooding, but up to about 1ft to maximum 2ft level,” he said. “But this time what happened was in some areas it was exceeding 14 to 15ft. So even not reaching the second floor could sometimes save the affected people.”

The aftermath of a landslide in Gampola, Sri Lanka. Academics said the severity of the floods meant that getting to the second-floor of a building was not enough to guarantee safety. Photograph: Ishara S Kodikara/AFP/Getty Images

Scientists agree that the climate crisis, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, is making rainfall heavier and more intense in many regions around the world. Warmer air can hold more moisture, making rain heavier.

For the study, the researchers examined weather records to assess how periods of heavy rain have changed as the planet has heated by the 1.3C seen today, and found significant increases in intensity. The range in estimates, from 28-160% in the region affected by Cyclone Senyar, for example, is due to a range of meteorological data series being used.

Climate models are used in these studies to estimate how much more likely extreme weather events have been made by global heating. In this case, the models did not replicate the events well, with natural fluctuations in ocean temperatures – La Niña and the Indian Ocean Dipole – being complicating factors.

However, analysis of the weather data and measurements of increased ocean temperatures meant the scientists concluded that global heating had supercharged the downpours from the cyclones.

 

Dr Mariam Zachariah, at Imperial College London, said: “These events illustrate how climate change and natural variability can align to produce exceptional heavy rainfall. While natural variability is inherent to the climate system, reducing reliance on fossil fuels is within our power and necessary for reducing the intensity of future extreme events.”

Maja Vahlberg, at the Red Cross Red Climate Centre, said: “Large parts of Sri Lanka and Indonesia have experienced devastation on a scale that very few people living there have seen in their lifetimes. Unfortunately, it is the most vulnerable people who experience the worst impacts, and have the longest road to recovery.”

 

She pointed to two factors that had worsened the impacts: people migrating to towns and cities and the razing of forests: “Over decades growth has increasingly taken place in low-lying floodplains, deltas and river corridors. These areas are economic hubs, with roads, power lines, hospitals, markets. But they’re also the natural pathways for flood waters.”

“Deforestation and the loss of wetlands also reduce the land’s ability to absorb the water on hillsides,” Vahlberg said. “This increases the risk of landslides, and downstream it raises flood peaks and carried debris into settled areas in Sumatra.”

Early estimates of the damage in Sri Lanka were $6-7 bn, or 3-5% of national GDP, Rajapakse said: “This should be an unequivocal eye-opener to the scale of future climate-driven extremes the country and the region must prepare for.”

Dodging Icebergs and Storms on the Hunt for an Ocean Tipping Point. Scientists fear warming is driving a collapse in the ocean currents that shape climate far and wide. The ice-choked waters off Greenland might hold the key.

 

By Raymond Zhong

Photographs and Video by Esther Horvath

Arctic
 

Greenland

Raymond Zhong and Esther Horvath spent two weeks aboard the research ship Thorunn Thordardottir, off eastern Greenland.

From the deck of a ship off eastern Greenland, the most majestic presence isn’t the whales, the icebergs or even the towering, glacier-wrapped mountains.

It’s the parade of frigid, midnight-blue water, 75 miles wide, that streams down the coast from the Arctic Ocean. Farther south, these currents mingle with tropical water swinging up through the Gulf Stream, and together they set ocean temperatures throughout the North Atlantic, like hot and cold taps on a giant bath.

Now, though, mankind is fiddling with the taps. Rapid warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions is making the Arctic rainier and melting its ice, both on land and at sea.

If too much of this excess water makes its way into the North Atlantic, scientists fear it could disrupt the processes that draw warm water up from the tropics. The consequences for the climate would be far-reaching: frostier winters in Britain, stronger hurricanes in the Eastern United States and, perhaps most troublingly, shifts in the rain belts that feed people across Africa, South America and Asia.

To better understand this threat, a team of researchers sailed from Iceland to Greenland’s east coast this summer with a shipload of data-gathering equipment. These waters are unforgiving to delicate instruments: Run-ins with icebergs are a constant risk. Sea ice makes the area impassable for much of the year.

“There’s just very little data here,” said Nick Foukal, an oceanographer at the University of Georgia, who led the two-week expedition. “So any data is going to be really, really important.”

Observing ocean currents as they change is critical to fleshing out scientists’ understanding of how and when they might reach critical tipping points. The problem, as humans alter Earth’s climate, is that sweeping change might not wait for researchers to feel certain in their understanding before it gets underway.

Scoresby Sound, a fjord in eastern Greenland, as seen from the research ship.

 

The ship is named for an eminent female marine biologist who was a pioneer in phytoplankton research.

Nick Foukal, an oceanographer at the University of Georgia, is a primary investigator on the research trip. 

A Remarkable Loop

What makes the seas around Greenland so important for the planet? The answer has to do with an immense loop of water that winds through the world’s oceans, linking changes in the climate far and wide.

 

You might start following this loop in the tropical Atlantic, where strong sunshine warms the sea and makes it extra-salty through evaporation. This water travels up past the East Coast of North America until, in the vicinity of Iceland and Greenland, it starts to transform.

The warm water meets cold air and surrenders some of its heat, becoming colder and denser. This causes it to sink into the depths. It flows through the abyss past South America and all around Antarctica before resurfacing centuries later, ready to begin the journey once more.

Scientists have given the Atlantic portion of this oceanic conveyor belt an unlovely name: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC (pronounced “AY-mock”). And they fear it will someday grind to a halt.

What worries them are those growing quantities of fresh water sloshing around the North Atlantic. They dilute the warm, salty currents that travel up from the tropics, causing them to sink less. But this sinking is what propels that warm water north in the first place. When one end of the conveyor belt grows sluggish, the other does, too. Little by little, the whole belt slows until, at a certain point, it stops.

If that happens, less tropical heat would make its way into the northern reaches of the Atlantic, making Britain and the Nordic countries colder. More of that heat might stay near the Caribbean instead, providing extra fuel for hurricanes and warping the atmospheric patterns that distribute rainfall on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.

A view of Greenland’s east coast from the bridge of the Thorunn Thordardottir.

Andreas Macrander, working with samples in the ship's lab. 

Victoria Grisson and Dan Torres passed some time playing cards during the expedition.

The shoreline of Eastern Greenland.

 

Geological evidence tells us all this has occurred several times before, most recently around 12,800 years ago. Today there are signs a slowdown is underway, and scientists’ models predict it will continue for decades. The tricky part is anticipating when it might lead to another shutdown: Next century? Next decade? Next year?

“In the real world, the tipping point looks much closer than models are suggesting,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of ocean physics at the University of Potsdam in Germany. That means the risk it could be upon us before the century’s end is too significant to ignore, Dr. Rahmstorf said.

What would help narrow the uncertainties are more sustained, long-term measurements of how water all across the Atlantic is changing, said Thomas Haine, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Johns Hopkins University.

For the past two decades, scientists have been measuring the AMOC along two key cross-sections in the Northern Hemisphere, one from Labrador to Greenland to Scotland, the other between the Bahamas and the Canary Islands. But they have much less visibility into the fresh water flowing out of the Arctic, Dr. Haine said.

“We think the system is going to have this big shift, and we know ahead of time,” he said. “We should go out and try and watch that happen.”

 

Where It Happens

After leaving port in Iceland and steaming past Snaefellsjokull, the volcano where Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth” begins, Dr. Foukal and his colleagues were greeted on Greenland’s coast by glorious sunshine and glass-flat seas. It would be days before they saw either of those things again.

The key cargo on their expedition was an arsenal of moorings, each one fitted with sonar-like instruments to measure ocean currents. Each mooring was also connected to a series of floats, buoys and smaller instruments measuring water temperature and salinity, like a daisy chain hundreds of feet long.

Five of the moorings resembled yellow lunar landers. Another looked like a squat, orange torpedo, and it was connected to a barrel-shaped buoy designed to dodge icebergs. The buoy would lurk deep underwater, scan the waters above it for passing ice, then ascend to a safe depth to take measurements before plunging once again.

The scientists planned to place the moorings along a 35-mile-long stretch of the seafloor, at 71 degrees north latitude. They would leave them there until next year, allowing them to gather months of measurements of the water coursing past Greenland’s eastern shore.

Deployment of the new type of mooring from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, called a variable ballast buoy.

The moorings that the scientists deployed carried sonar-like instruments that will measure ocean currents, hopefully until next July.

Instruments will also gather water samples and data on seawater temperature and salinity. 

Collecting data this way reminds Dr. Foukal of the lobster fishing he did growing up in Massachusetts: You don’t know what you’ve got until you pull up the cages. “It’s rolling the dice,” he said.

First, though, the scientists and crew had to get the heavy moorings safely off the moving ship and into the sea at precisely the right spots — a highly choreographed production of winches, pulleys and ropes that James Dunn, a senior engineering assistant on the expedition, compared to a ballet. “It has to all fall into place all at once,” said Mr. Dunn, who works for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

 

Below deck, Manuel Colombo, a chemical oceanographer at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, was conducting a more delicate type of field work. Every drop of water on the planet carries chemical traces of where it’s been, whether that’s a river, a melting glacier or a cloud. By analyzing those traces, Dr. Colombo hopes to better understand the complex paths that water takes between the Arctic Ocean and the North Atlantic.

Collecting samples of the seawater without contaminating them required Dr. Colombo and a graduate student, Victoria Grisson, to work obsessively to keep their lab on the ship spotless. “You can imagine how clean my house is,” he said.

In the early days of the voyage, clear skies and calm seas helped the scientists and crew to install the moorings smoothly. Soon, though, the wind picked up and things got harder.

Dr. Foukal watched the recovery of a malfunctioning underwater robot from the ship's bridge. 

 

Ms. Grisson and Manuel Colombo overseeing samples in their lab on the vessel, which must be kept spotless to avoid contamination. 

 

Greenlandic flags welcomed a helicopter delivering passengers and supplies to the remote town of Ittoqqortoormiit.

 

The team’s cigar-shaped underwater robot stopped working and had to be fished out. An important piece of scientific equipment on deck blew a fuse, and a replacement was flown from Iceland to the seal-hunting hamlet of Ittoqqortoormiit and brought aboard. To shelter from storms offshore, the scientists took a multiday detour in Scoresby Sound, one of the world’s largest fjords, where they gathered measurements of the waters swirling in and out of the deep inlet.

Then the iceberg-dodging buoy started acting up. The scientists hatched a risky plan: They would sail back, pull the mooring out of the water, try to fix the buoy and redeploy it.

The plan was the researchers’ best hope for gathering all the data they wanted before next July, when they plan to recover their instruments and begin drawing conclusions about how the coastal currents are moving and changing.

On a crisp gray morning, the torpedo-like mooring drifted into view. Andrew Davies, a Woods Hole engineering assistant, leaned out over the starboard railing and grabbed it with a hook on a pole. Nikiforos Delatolas, an engineer, spent the afternoon and evening hunched over a laptop, troubleshooting the misbehaving buoy.

It was midnight, cold and drizzly, by the time all the gear was back beneath the waves. For the first time in hours, the scientists smiled. “That was fun,” Mr. Dunn said. “Let’s do it again.”  

‘Food and fossil fuel production causing $5bn of environmental damage an hour’. UN GEO report says ending this harm key to global transformation required ‘before collapse becomes inevitable’

A farm worker ploughs fields overlooking Grangemouth petrochemical and refining plant in Scotland. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

 
 by Damian Carrington

 

The unsustainable production of food and fossil fuels causes $5bn (£3.8bn) of environmental damage per hour, according to a major UN report.

Ending this harm was a key part of the global transformation of governance, economics and finance required “before collapse becomes inevitable”, the experts said.

The Global Environment Outlook (GEO) report, which is produced by 200 researchers for the UN Environment Programme, said the climate crisis, destruction of nature and pollution could no longer be seen as simply environmental crises.

“They are all undermining our economy, food security, water security, human health and they are also [national] security issues, leading to conflict in many parts of the world,” said Prof Robert Watson, the co-chair of the assessment.

 

All the environmental crises were worsening as the global population grows and required more food and energy, most of which was produced in ways that pollute the planet and destroy the natural world, the experts said. A sustainable world was possible, they said, but required political courage.

“This is an urgent call to transform our human systems now before collapse becomes inevitable,” said Prof Edgar Gutiérrez-Espeleta, another co-chair and the former environment minister in Costa Rica.

“The science is good. The solutions are known. What is required is the courage to act at the scale and speed that history demands,” he said, adding that the window for action was “rapidly narrowing”.

The experts acknowledged that the geopolitical situation today was difficult, with the US under Donald Trump, some other countries and corporate vested interests working to block or reverse environmental action. Watson, a former chair of leading international climate and biodiversity science groups, said: “The public have got to demand that they want a sustainable future for their children and their grandchildren. Most governments do try and respond.”

The GEO report is comprehensive – 1,100 pages this year – and is usually accompanied by a summary for policymakers, which is agreed by all the world’s countries. However, strong objections by countries including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, Turkey and Argentina to references to fossil fuels, plastics, reduced meat in diets and other issues meant no agreement was reached this time.

A statement made by the UK on behalf of 28 countries said: “We witnessed diversion attempts to question the scientific nature of this process. Our delegations fully respect every state’s right to safeguard their country’s national interests and rights, but science is not negotiable.”

The GEO report emphasised that the costs of action were much less than the costs of inaction in the long term, and estimated the benefits from climate action alone would be worth $20tn a year by 2070 and $100bn by 2100. “We need visionary countries and private sector [companies] to recognise they will make more profit by addressing these issues rather than ignoring them,” Watson said.

The report contained several “critical truths”, Gutiérrez-Espeleta said: environmental crises were political and security emergencies, threatening the social ties that held societies together. Today’s governments and economic systems were failing humanity and financial reform was the cornerstone of transformation, he said: “Environmental policy must become the backbone of national security, social justice, and economic strategy.”

One of the biggest issues was the $45tn a year in environmental damage caused by the burning of coal, oil and gas, and the pollution and destruction of nature caused by industrial agriculture, the report said. The food system carried the largest costs, at $20tn, with transport at $13tn and fossil-fuel powered electricity at $12tn.

These costs – called externalities by economists – must be priced into energy and food to reflect their real price and shift consumers towards greener choices, Watson said: “So we need social safety nets. We need to make sure that the poorest in society are not harmed by an increase in costs.”

The report suggests measures such as a universal basic income, taxes on meat and subsidies for healthy, plant-based foods.

There were also about $1.5tn in environmentally harmful subsidies to fossil fuels, food and mining, the report said. These needed to be removed or repurposed, it added. Watson noted that wind and solar energy was cheaper in many places but held back by vested interests in fossil fuel.

The climate crisis may be even worse than thought, he said: “We are likely to be underestimating the magnitude of climate change”, with global heating probably at the high end of the projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Removing fossil fuel subsidies could cut emissions by a third, the report said.

Shifting Climate Alters Pattern of Atlantic’s Giant Seaweed Blobs. Blooms of yellowish-brown seaweed along the Equator are breaking records and defiling beaches, while a centuries-old patch farther north is disappearing.

Mexican National Guard members during a sargassum seaweed cleanup event in Cancun, Mexico, in June.Credit...Paola Chiomante/Reuters

 

By Eric Niiler

 

A 5,500-mile blob of seaweed in the Atlantic Ocean that has menaced beaches across the Caribbean and Florida in recent years is exploding in size, while a second patch farther north is declining rapidly, driven by rapid changes in the region’s climate.

A study published Thursday in the journal Nature Geoscience finds a big shift in the growth patterns of sargassum, a type of floating macroalgae that provides food and shelter for fish, turtles, seabirds and other marine life.

The southern patch, known as the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, has now reached 38 million metric tons, a 40 percent increase from its record year of 2022.

“Usually we have a 10 percent to 20 percent fluctuation year to year,” said Chuanmin Hu, a professor of physical oceanography at the University of South Florida and an author of the paper. “But this year was crazy, and we do not have an answer of why.”

 

Scientists hadn’t detected sargassum in this equatorial region before 2011.

Since then, winds and ocean currents have pushed blobs of sargassum west toward coastal waters in the springtime. Beaches along Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula have suffered from smelly piles of seaweed, while the president of the Dominican Republic said in June that his nation faced a “regional emergency” from sargassum and called for action by the United Nations.

In 2023, about 13 million metric tons of sargassum covered some Florida beaches and decomposed into smelly piles before disappearing in the summer. A study that year in The Journal of Global Health by doctors on the island of Martinique reported respiratory ailments from decomposing seaweed that produces hydrogen sulfide gas.

While experts have not pinpointed the cause of the massive sargassum bloom, Saharan dust storms and smoke from African wildfires blowing west across the Atlantic are playing a role, scientists say. These tiny particles drift into the ocean and act as a kind of fertilizer for the sargassum, according to Brian Lapointe, principal investigator at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University and an author of the new paper.

Sully Sullivan, a graduate student at the University of South Florida College of Marine Science, collected sea samples in the Atlantic in July 2024.Credit...Sully Sullivan

 

 Runoff from the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers in South America and the Congo River in Africa also provide pulses of nutrient-laden water that feed the growth along the equatorial seaweed belt. After a two-year drought in the Amazon, Dr. Lapointe noted that big floods in the spring caused a corresponding boost in sargassum.

 

 

“The climate is having a very significant effect on this bloom, but there are many underlying drivers of climate change,” Dr. Lapointe said. “Everything from high temperature, extreme rainfall, droughts and rainfall events, and winds. ”

Dr. Hu and his colleagues used satellite imagery of the ocean surface as well as shipboard observations to document 25 years of sargassum movement. The rapid decline of the northern patch, known as the Northern Sargasso Sea, started in 2015. The Gulf Stream current system has carried seaweed from its nursery in the western Gulf of Mexico into the Northern Sargasso Sea for centuries. However, rising ocean temperatures and a series of marine heat waves have begun making the gulf too warm for Sargassum, Dr. Hu said.

In the past 20 years, the gulf on average has warmed 0.4 degrees Celsius, or 0.72 degrees Fahrenheit, he added.

“In the summer, the water is already warm, adding another 0.7 degrees is very bad,” Dr. Hu said. “Plus we have more frequent marine heat waves in the past 10 years, so that will add to more stress to native sargassum.”

Dani Cox, an independent marine microbiologist based in Miami, said rising ocean temperatures was just one of many causes for the decline of one patch and the explosion of the other, noting that some lab experiments found that sargassum thrive in warm water while others have found the opposite.

 

“There’s so much going on which is why everyone is not sold on one answer,” Dr. Cox said. “All of us can only look at one or two things at a time. I absolutely think the inundations will stay the same or get worse.”

As for next year’s seaweed invasion, Dr. Lapointe said beach-lovers should stay vigilant before booking a spring break vacation, noting that the Bahamas might be a safer bet than the Yucatán.

“I would be very careful in choosing a destination,” he said.

Higher prices, less coverage. Home insurance prices have risen drastically in areas most exposed to climate-related risk

Home insurance prices have risen drastically in areas most exposed to climate-related risk, like California and Florida. And research shows the effects of the higher rates are also spilling over into the broader real estate market. Mario Tama/Getty Images

 
 By Claire Brown

 

Last month, we reported on new research that found home insurance prices have increased drastically, particularly in areas most exposed to climate-related risk.

And the research showed something new and equally worrisome: The effects of the higher rates are spilling over into the broader real estate market, suppressing home prices in the ZIP codes most vulnerable to hurricanes and wildfires.

We asked you to send us your own stories of rising insurance costs. (You can still send along your story here and see what’s happening in your area.)

Hundreds of you responded. Some homeowners who wrote in have opted to pack up and move elsewhere. Others are dropping coverage and hoping for the best. Those who maintain their policies have seen deductibles creep upward in tandem with rising rates.

The data we analyzed captured only part of the picture. Under the surface, home insurance coverage is changing in big ways that are harder to see. Here’s what we learned from your stories.

Big increases with little explanation

We heard many horror stories about rate increases in places like Florida and California, where insurance markets have been turbulent for years. But we also heard similar anecdotes out of states like Ohio, Maryland and Massachusetts, where disasters are less frequent but homeowners say they’re seeing rates climb by 30 percent or more year after year.

A condo owner in Texas, a Dallas senior on a fixed income, said that her annual premium jumped to $1,239 in 2024, a 63 percent rise from the year prior, with no increase in coverage. In Minnesota, a homeowner’s rates are set to jump up to between $6,000 and $8,000 after their insurer stopped offering coverage. They previously paid $3,300. In the Colorado mountains, one reader saw their premiums climb to $8,600 last year, a more than a threefold increase over the past 15 years. They switched insurers. A homeowner in New Orleans said their total home insurance costs, including flood protection, had jumped to about $21,100 a year, up from $3,800 in 2015.

One clear theme: Readers say insurance companies are not providing clear or detailed explanations for rising rates, and a lot of people feel as if they’re paying for someone else’s risk.

“It is as though we are being held up by the mafia,” wrote one Minnesota reader who saw rates for a small homeowners’ association more than triple since 2021. “We have to have insurance, but the coverage we have is abysmal.”

Dropping insurance, selling homes and returning to renting

Many of you told us that problems with home insurance — like lack of coverage, high rates or few local options — have been a driving force behind major life decisions.

We heard from an architect who abandoned plans to purchase a home in California after checking out insurance prices, and moved with his family to New England instead.

A pair of teachers in Colorado wrote in to say the burdens of rising insurance and property taxes have pushed them to consider relocating. “It is a strain,” they said.

And a few of you have decided insurance is not worth the hassle, opting to sell your homes and rent instead.

Quite a large number of people wrote in to say they’re keeping insurance only because their mortgage lender requires it. Several readers without mortgages have decided to drop their plans, reasoning that if disaster strikes they will pay out of pocket to rebuild or relocate.

“I surveyed all our friends who own outright, and NONE of them pay for wind insurance. It’s scary,” one Floridian wrote.

Avoiding making claims for fear of getting dropped

Many of you described a fear that making a claim — that is, using insurance for its intended purpose — could prompt an insurer to stop offering coverage.

Several readers wrote in with stories about sticking with an insurance company for decades only to be dropped after making a single claim. Often, this meant switching to a new provider with much higher premiums.

Others are paying for home repairs out of pocket, in some cases spending thousands of dollars just to avoid insurance headaches.

“I honestly doubt that insurance will cover anything without a fight, but I still feel it is better to have insurance than not,” one Floridian wrote. “We do not ever put in any claims for anything that we can reasonably cover ourselves in order to reduce the risk of being dropped.”

Deductibles are creeping upward, especially for wind damage

When we mapped rising insurance premiums across the country, the numbers captured the total rates homeowners are paying. But they didn’t tell us anything about the plans these premiums are actually buying.

Readers wrote in to tell us that even as their premiums rise, the underlying plans are offering less coverage. Think of it as shrinkflation for the insurance market.

“Make a claim and you are penalized. There is a ‘windstorm deductible’ of 5 percent,” wrote one reader from New Rochelle, N.Y. “You know who believes in climate change? Insurance companies!”

Mira Rojanasakul contributed reporting.