World’s biggest iceberg runs aground after long journey from Antarctica

 

The A23a iceberg, on 25 November, 2024, off the coast of Antarctica. Photograph: Cpl Tom Cann RAF/AP

 Scientists are studying whether the grounded A23a iceberg might help stir nutrients and make food more available for penguins and seals

 

The world’s biggest iceberg appears to have run aground roughly 70km (43 miles) from a remote Antarctic island, potentially sparing the crucial wildlife haven from being hit, a research organisation said Tuesday.

The colossal iceberg A23a – which measures roughly 3,300 sq km and weighs nearly 1tn tonnes – has been drifting north from Antarctica towards South Georgia island since 2020.

This had raised fears it could collide with the island or run aground in shallower water near it, potentially disrupting the ability of penguins and seals to feed their young.

It remains unclear whether the iceberg is stuck for good. “It will be interesting to see what will happen now,” said Andrew Meijers, an oceanographer with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).

The A23A iceberg as it approached South Georgia island in the Weddell Sea on 24 February 2025. Photograph: COPERNICUS SENTINEL DATA 2025/AFP/Getty Images

 

 

The gigantic wall of ice has been stuck 73km from the island since 1 March, according to a statement from the BAS. “If the iceberg stays grounded, we don’t expect it to significantly affect the local wildlife,” Meijers said.

 

“In the last few decades, the many icebergs that end up taking this route through the Southern Ocean soon break up, disperse and melt,” added Meijers, who encountered A23a in late 2023 and has tracked its fate via satellite ever since.

The world’s biggest and oldest iceberg calved from the Antarctic shelf in 1986.

 

It remained stuck for more than 30 years before finally breaking free in 2020, its lumbering journey north sometimes delayed by ocean forces that kept it spinning in place.

Satellite imagery had previously suggested it was not crumbling into smaller chunks along the familiar path that such icebergs take. However, a 19km-long chunk broke off in January.

There had been concerns for wildlife on the crucial breeding ground of South Georgia if the iceberg came too close. This would have forced animals such as penguins and seals to travel much farther to get around the colossal block of ice.

“This could reduce the amount of food coming back to pups and chicks on the island, and so increase mortality,” Meijers said.

However in its current location, the iceberg could offer benefits to wildlife.

“Nutrients stirred up by the grounding [of the iceberg] and from its melt may boost food availability for the whole regional ecosystem, including for charismatic penguins and seals, Meijers said.

Along with the nearby South Sandwich islands, South Georgia is home to around 5m seals and 65m breeding birds from 30 different species.

The island’s seals and penguins have already had a “bad season” due to a bird flu outbreak, Meijers told AFP in January.

The iceberg poses no threat to shipping. It is so huge that vessels can easily avoid it.

 

However, as it breaks up into smaller pieces, certain areas could become off limits to commercial fishing ships “due to the number of smaller – yet often more dangerous – bergy bits”, Meijers said.

There is no permanent human population on South Georgia, which the UK administers as a British overseas territory.

Argentina also claims the island – along with the Falklands to the west which it calls Las Malvinas.

Icebergs of this size are rare but not unheard of. There have been two of similar sizes in the same area over the last five years, Meijers said.

Such huge icebergs are a “completely normal part of the lifecycle” of the Antarctic ice sheets, Meijers said.

But ice shelves have lost 6,000bn tonnes of mass since 2000, which is matched by accelerating ice loss attributed to climate change, he added.

Researchers warned last month that a rise in the planet’s average temperature to between 1.5 and 2.0 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels could melt enough frozen water to lift oceans by a dozen metres – and beyond the point of no return.

Last year – which smashed previous heat records as the world was battered by fires, floods and storms – was the first calendar year above 1.5C.

Butterflies Populations are falling in the United States, a new study has found.

 

 

By Catrin Einhorn and Harry Stevens

 

 

It’s hard to count insects.

Even as scientists have found that many populations are in decline, they’ve struggled to understand the scale of what’s happening. Now, a groundbreaking new study offers the most comprehensive answers to date about the status of butterflies in the contiguous United States.

In 20 years, the fleeting time it takes for a human baby to grow into a young adult, the country has lost 22 percent of its butterflies, researchers found. 

 In New York, N.Y., 128 species included in the study are known to occur.

 

“The loss that we’re seeing over such a short time is really alarming,” said Elise Zipkin, a quantitative ecologist at Michigan State University and one of the authors of the study, which was published on Thursday in the journal Science. “Unless we change things, we’re in for trouble.”

Little-understood and vastly underappreciated, insects play an outsize role in supporting life on earth. They pollinate plants. They break down dead matter, nourishing the soil. They feed birds and myriad other creatures in the food web.

“Nature collapses without them,” said David Wagner, an entomologist at the University of Connecticut.

Dr. Wagner, who was not involved with the new research, called it a “much-needed, herculean assessment.” He praised the study’s rigor and noted that the declines in butterflies, amounting to 1.3 percent per year, were in line with other recent efforts to analyze global trends in terrestrial insect populations.

Still, researchers didn’t have enough data to include some of the most imperiled butterfly species, which probably experienced some of the steepest declines. And the data was quite likely biased toward places where butterflies tend to show up. “Unfortunately for nature,” Dr. Wagner said, the findings are “undoubtedly a conservative assessment.”

The analysis was based on 12.6 million individual butterflies counted in almost 77,000 surveys across 35 monitoring programs from 2000 to 2020. 

 

That data came largely from volunteers who, working with various programs, showed up in a certain location on certain days over the years to document every butterfly they saw.

The researchers — some who specialize in math, others who are experts in butterfly species and behavior — took that raw data and harmonized it, creating a model that estimated the changes in abundance.

Of the 342 species for which they were able to draw conclusions, 33 percent showed statistically significant declines and less than 3 percent displayed statistically significant increases. Thirteen times as many species decreased as increased.

The American lady, an orange-and-black butterfly that ranges from coast to coast, was down 58 percent.

The Hermes copper, a rare butterfly found in San Diego County, plummeted by 99.9 percent.

Even the cabbage white, originally from Europe and so commonly found munching on vegetables as a caterpillar that it’s considered an invasive pest, dropped by half.

“That shocked me,” said Nick Haddad, an insect ecologist at Michigan State and an author on the study. “If even the cabbage white is declining, then, oh my God.” 

 

The research could not shed much light on how monarch butterflies are doing, the authors said. Monarchs, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in December recommended for federal protection, have shown staggering declines in their overwintering sites in Mexico and California. But separate new data offered a dose of good news on that front: After hitting an almost record low last year, overwintering monarchs in Mexico rebounded significantly in this year’s count, made public by the Mexican government and the World Wildlife Fund on Thursday.

Scientists attributed much of the increase to an easing of drought conditions along the migration route of eastern monarchs, which travel between the United States, Canada and Mexico. But monarchs west of the Rocky Mountains, which overwinter in California, were at near record lows in this year’s count.

Why are butterflies crashing? Experts blame a combination of factors: habitat loss as land is converted for agriculture or development, climate change and pesticide use. What’s less clear is the extent to which each factor is driving the declines.

The study doesn’t try to answer that question, but it points to other findings, from the Midwest and California, that insecticides have played a particularly lethal role. A class called neonicotinoids, which Europe largely banned in 2018, was found to be especially deadly.

Members of the public are often called upon to plant native milkweed to help monarch caterpillars, but a study in the Central Valley of California found that every single collected sample was contaminated with pesticides. That was true even when landowners said they did not use pesticides, suggesting that the chemicals had drifted or had been applied to plants before purchase.

The new findings do show potential fingerprints from climate change. As the world warms, North American species are moving northward in search of more hospitable conditions. When researchers compared the same species in neighboring regions, they found that the northern populations were faring better than southern ones in three-quarters of cases. Moreover, two-thirds of the species that showed overall increases in the United States have ranges with more area in Mexico than in the United States and Canada, suggesting that perhaps they are growing in the northern parts of their range. Without data from Mexico, researchers can’t tell what’s happening there.

The researchers emphasized that solutions are at hand. Some, like tackling climate change and regulating pesticides, need to happen at the policy level. But in the meantime, they encouraged people to create habitat refuges for butterflies and other insects by planting native flowers, shrubs and trees. One butterfly, the Gulf fritillary, appears to have increased its range as homeowners planted passionvine, which its caterpillars eat.

And remember those caterpillars, said Collin Edwards, an ecological modeler for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and the lead author of the study.

“If you’re spraying something on your plants to keep things from eating them, caterpillars are eating plants,” he said. “Those are butterflies-to-be.”

Global sea ice hit ‘all-time minimum’ in February, scientists say. Scientists called the news ‘particularly worrying’ because ice reflects sunlight and cools the planet

February was the lowest monthly level for sea ice in the Arctic, and the fourth-lowest in the Antarctic. Photograph: Bernhard Staehli/Shutterstock
 

Ajit Niranjan Europe environment correspondent

 

 

Global sea ice fell to a record low in February, scientists have said, a symptom of an atmosphere fouled by planet-heating pollutants.

The combined area of ice around the north and south poles hit a new daily minimum in early February and stayed below the previous record for the rest of the month, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Thursday.

“One of the consequences of a warmer world is melting sea ice,” said the C3S deputy director, Samantha Burgess. “The record or near-record low sea ice cover at both poles has pushed global sea ice cover to an all-time minimum.”

The agency found the area of sea ice hit its lowest monthly level for February in the Arctic, at 8% below average, and its fourth-lowest monthly level for February in the Antarctic, at 26% below average. Its satellite observations stretch back to the late 1970s and its historical observations to the middle of the 20th century.

Scientists had already observed an extreme heat anomaly in the north pole at the start of February, which caused temperatures to soar more than 20C above average and cross the threshold for ice to melt. They described the latest broken record as “particularly worrying” because ice reflects sunlight and cools the planet.

“The lack of sea ice means darker ocean surfaces and the ability of the Earth to absorb more sunlight, which accelerates the warming,” said Mika Rantanen, a climate scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute.

The strong winter warming event in the Arctic in early February had prevented sea ice from growing normally, he added. “I believe that this meteorological event, combined with the long-term decline of sea ice due to anthropogenic climate change, was the primary cause of the lowest Arctic sea ice extent on record.”

Global sea ice extent varies throughout the year but typically reaches its annual minimum in February, when it is summer in the southern hemisphere

C3S said February 2025 was the third hottest February it had seen. Global temperatures were 1.59C hotter than preindustrial levels, making it the 19th month in the past 20 that was more than 1.5C above preindustrial levels.

Earth observation programmes such as C3S rely on the reanalysis of billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations to create snapshots of the state of the climate. The agency cautioned that the margins above 1.5C were small in several months, and could differ slightly in other datasets.

 

The broken sea ice record comes after last year was confirmed as the hottest year on record and a Guardian analysis of C3S data revealed that two-thirds of the world’s surface was seared by record-breaking monthly heat in 2024. The El Niño weather pattern in the first half of the year added to the background heating effect of fossil fuel pollution, which traps sunlight.

El Niño has since subsided and morphed into a weak form of its cooler counterpart, La Niña. The World Meteorological Organization said on Thursday they expected the La Niña that emerged in December to be short-lived.

Richard Allan, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, said the long-term prognosis for Arctic sea ice was grim.

“The region continues to rapidly heat up, and can only be saved with rapid and massive cuts to greenhouse gas emissions,” he said. “That will also limit the growing severity of weather extremes and long-term sea level rise across the world.”

 

Why Vermont farmers, USA, are using pasteurised urine on their crops

 

 In Vermont, pasteurised urine is sprayed on local farmland to fertilise crops (Credit: Rich Earth Institute)

 Becca Warner

 

Urine was used as fertiliser in ancient Rome and China. Now farmers in Vermont are bringing this practice back to boost harvests and grow crops in a more sustainable way.

When Betsy Williams goes to the loo, she likes to know her pee won't go to waste. For the last 12 years, she and her neighbours in rural Vermont, US, have diligently collected their urine and donated it to farmers for use as fertiliser for their crops.

"We're consuming all of these things that have nutrients in them, and then a lot of the nutrients that are passing through us can then get recycled back into helping create food for us and for animals. So to me, it's logical," Williams says.

Williams takes part in the Urine Nutrient Reclamation Program (UNRP), a programme run by the Rich Earth Institute (REI), a non-profit based in Vermont. She and 250 of her neighbours in Windham County donate a total of 12,000 gallons (45,400 litres) of urine to the programme each year to be recycled – or "peecycled". 

Windham County's pee-donations are collected by a lorry and driven to a large tank where the urine is pasteurised by heating it to 80C (176F) for 90 seconds. It is then stored in a pasteurised tank, ready to be sprayed on local farmland when the time is right to fertilise crops.

 

Records suggest that urine was used to help grow crops back in ancient China and ancient Rome. Today, scientists are finding that it can more than double the yield of crops like kale and spinach compared to no fertiliser, and improve yields even in low fertility soils.

Urine's power as a fertiliser is due to the nitrogen and phosphorus that it contains – the same nutrients that are added to the synthetic fertilisers used on many conventional farms. But these synthetic fertilisers come at an environmental cost. Nitrogen is produced using the fossil fuel-intensive Haber-Bosch process, and the mining of phosphorus creates harmful amounts of toxic waste. Urine, meanwhile, is freely available – as Williams puts it, "everybody pees. [It's an] untapped resource".

Urine's power as a fertiliser is due to the nitrogen and phosphorus that it contains (Credit: Rich Earth Institute)

Nancy Love, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan who has collaborated with the team at REI over the last decade, has found that using urine instead of standard synthetic fertiliser reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and requires around half the amount of water. Indeed, since 2012, UNRP estimates that it has conserved over 2.7 million gallons (10.2 million litres) of water through preventing toilet flushes.

"I've always been a systems thinker, and our [water] system has inefficiencies in it," Love says. "What we do today is dilute the hell out of our urine, we put it in a pipe, we send it to a treatment plant, and then we pump a bunch more energy into it, just to send it back into the environment in a reactive form."

 

In the case of urine's nutrients, its typical destination is waterways. The nitrogen and phosphorus in urine are not fully removed from wastewater when it is treated. When these nutrients find their way into rivers and lakes, they are taken up by algae. The result can be algal blooms that choke up waterways, unbalancing the ecosystem and killing other species that live there.

"Our bodies create a lot of nutrients, and right now those nutrients are not only wasted, but they’re actually causing a lot of problems and harm downstream," says Jamina Shupack, REI's executive director.

These nutrients are food for algae – but also for crops. "Wherever you put nitrogen, it's going to help plants grow. So if it's in the water, it's helping the algae grow. But if it's on the land, it's going to help plants grow,” Shupack explains. Because of this, diverting nutrient-rich urine away from waterways and onto the land can prevent harmful algal blooms while helping farmers grow food.

 Everybody pees. It's an untapped resource – Betsy Williams

 Importantly, the REI team and the farmers they work with take steps to minimise how much of the urine runs off the land and into waterways. Application is carefully timed, so that it happens when the plant is most able to take up the nutrients – typically during the plant's more active growth stage, when it's bigger than a seedling but not yet fruiting. The soil moisture is also measured, to make sure the liquid urine will be absorbed. Despite these efforts, "that doesn't mean that there isn't going to be runoff", Shupack says.

 

Even so, she adds, peecycling reduces the overall amount of nutrients entering waterways because it ensures that runoff from the land is the only way excess nutrients enter rivers and lakes. In the current system, synthetic fertilisers run off into waterways, as well as urine entering rivers directly via wastewater.

The UNRP in Vermont is pioneering peecycling in the US, but projects in other countries are also underway. In Paris, volunteers are collecting urine to help save the River Seine and fertilise wheat for baguettes and biscuits. Swedish entrepreneurs saw the harm caused by algal blooms around the island of Gotland and came up with a product that collects urine and turns it into fertiliser. Peecycling pilots have also run in South Africa, Nepal and Niger Republic.

 

Research shows that urine can more than double the yield of certain crops (Credit: Rich Earth Institute)

But expanding this work comes with challenges. Shupack says that in Vermont, farmers' demand for urine outstrips supply – but scaling up collection is tricky. Regulation can create a barrier, she says. "A lot of times you go to a regulator and they say: 'We don't have a form for urine – the only place I know where to put urine is with biosolids, or within wastewater treatment.' So it's not really categorised in a way that would make sense to do what we're doing," she says.

To overcome this, Shupack says that REI have got to grips with the detailed language of regulations so they could spot possible paths and partnered with organisations with existing permits – such as septic haulers – to tackle the different parts of the process, and the permits needed, in a piecemeal way.

 

Eamon Twohig, programme manager at Vermont's Department of Environmental Conservation (VTDEC), tells the BBC that when REI initially approached them "it was clear there was no 'regulatory box' for urine treatment/recycling… REI has certainly blazed a trail here in Vermont, and I think we've managed to find a workable, regulatory pathway."

REI has a good relationship with regulators in Vermont, Shupack says, and has all the permits needed to operate – including one for innovative on-site wastewater management, and a waste-hauling permit for transporting urine. Now the organisation is working with partners in Massachusetts and Michigan to move regulation on. "We're really trying to push that forward. But it's not always easy to get new environmental regulations updated," Shupack says. One of the biggest challenges, she adds, is that there is no legal distinction between human waste that has been separated at source, and combined wastewater flows that often come with greater safety concerns. 

There are other limitations too. Urine is heavy and cumbersome to transport, and the lorries collecting and moving it create emissions. Currently the urine in Vermont is transported locally, no more than around 10 miles (16km). But expanding peecycling programmes could involve moving urine across bigger distances, so REI's spinoff company has developed a freeze concentration system that concentrates urine by six times, and is currently being used at the University of Michigan.

 

Plumbing, too, is a particular challenge. Love says that urine separation systems don't rely on flushing in the same way standard toilets do – which is great for reducing water use, but is problematic for the plumbing. When water doesn't flow through the system as usual, there is a risk of diseases such as Legionnaires.

"There are solutions," Love says, "like looped systems in a building. But what it means is the entire plumbing process in a building is different." This is something Love and her colleagues and partners are working on, so that new buildings in the US can have urine separation systems installed from the start. "If we want any hope of sustainable water systems by the end of this century, we have to start getting the early adopters to look at these innovative solutions now," she says.

The Rich Earth Institute collects a total of 12,000 gallons (45,400 litres) of urine each year (Credit: Rich Earth Institute)

These new systems will have the important goal of making urine donation effortless. Williams began her peecycling efforts using large laundry detergent bottles that travelled in the boot of her car to a central collection tank once a month. Once she was in the habit of collecting urine, Williams didn't like to let it go to waste. "I didn't even like to go anywhere where I might have to pee and not have a jug with me. It kind of became part of my routine, sort of like wearing a seat belt," she says.

Even so, she has enjoyed the recent installation of a toilet in her home that separates urine (at the front) from other waste (at the back). The urine travels to a tank in her basement, which is pumped out a couple of times each year by a lorry that visits Williams and others in her area that take part in the project. "It's a nice change not dealing with the messy business of it. Making it easy for people is a biggie," Williams says.

Avoiding mess is also likely to help tackle the "ick factor" when it comes to peecycling, says Williams. "It's icky and it's smelly and it's something we don't talk about," she says. But while some may be put off by the idea of dealing with their own waste, REI's research suggests that the ick factor doesn't dominate people's reactions to peecycling. People tend to be open to the idea, Shupack says, but to think that others wouldn't be. "It's this assumption that everyone else is going to think it's really gross. That initial ick factor is not as big of a deal as people assume it's going to be," says Shupack.

Many people are, however, concerned about pharmaceutical content in the urine. "It's the biggest question we get," Shupack says. REI has conducted research to find out just how much of common drugs like caffeine and the painkiller acetaminophen are evident in vegetables grown using urine fertiliser. The final results are yet to be released, but the preliminary findings suggest the amount of pharmaceuticals in vegetables fertilised with urine to be "extremely small". "You'd have to eat a pretty obscene amount of lettuce, every day, for way longer than you can live" to get a cup of coffee's worth of caffeine, Shupack says.

Health worries and messiness aside, Williams points out that it is our Western attitude to waste that most urgently needs to change. "Particularly in [the US], people don't really think about where their waste goes. They think about it in terms of recycling and trash to some degree, but not so much in terms of human waste. It's a new frontier for people."

Climate change and water pollution can feel like impossibly big issues, but Williams doesn't let them overwhelm her. Instead, she focuses on what she can do in a small way, in her own home. "We can just do our part," she says. "We aren't perfect, but we try to at least be responsible in terms of what happens to our bodily waste."