WASHINGTON: This year’s Arctic Sea ice peak is the lowest in the 47-year satellite record, according to data released by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) on Thursday, as the planet continues to swelter under the mounting effects of human-driven climate change.
Arctic sea ice forms and expands during the dark, frigid northern winter, reaching its seasonal high point in March. But in recent years, less new ice has formed, and the accumulation of multi-year ice has steadily declined.
The maximum sea ice level for 2025 was likely reached on March 22, measuring 14.33 million square kilometers (5.53 million square miles) — below the previous low of 14.41 million square kilometers set in 2017.
“This new record low is yet another indicator of how Arctic sea ice has fundamentally changed from earlier decades,” said NSIDC senior research scientist Walt Meier in a statement.
“But even more importantly than the record low is that this year adds yet another data point to the continuing long-term loss of Arctic sea ice in all seasons.”
The Arctic record follows a near-record-low summer minimum in the Antarctic, where seasons are reversed.
The 2025 Antarctic sea ice minimum, reached on March 1, was just 1.98 million square kilometers, tying for the second-lowest annual minimum in the satellite record, alongside 2022 and 2024.
Combined Arctic and Antarctic sea ice cover — frozen ocean water that floats on the surface — plunged to a record low in mid-February, more than a million square miles below the pre-2010 average. That is an area larger than the entire country of Algeria.
“We’re going to come into this next summer season with less ice to begin with,” said Linette Boisvert, an ice scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It doesn’t bode well for the future.”
US scientists primarily monitor sea ice using satellites from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), which detect Earth’s microwave radiation.
Because open water and sea ice emit microwave energy differently, the contrast allows sea ice to stand out clearly in satellite imagery — even through cloud cover, which obscures traditional optical sensors.
DMSP data is supplemented with historical records, including early observations from the Nimbus-7 satellite, which operated from 1978 to 1985.
While floating sea ice does not directly raise sea levels, its disappearance sets off a cascade of climate consequences, altering weather patterns, disrupting ocean currents, and threatening ecosystems and human communities.
As reflective ice gives way to the darker ocean, more solar energy is absorbed rather than reflected back into space, accelerating both ice melt and global warming.
Shrinking Arctic ice is also reshaping geopolitics, opening new shipping lanes and drawing geopolitical interest. Since taking office this year, US President Donald Trump has said his country must control Greenland, a Danish autonomous territory rich in mineral resources.
The loss of polar ice spells disaster for numerous species, robbing polar bears, seals, and penguins of crucial habitat used for shelter, hunting, and breeding.
Last year was the hottest on record, and the trend continues: 2025 began with the warmest January ever recorded, followed by the third-warmest February.
NOAA predicts that La Nina weather conditions, which tend to cool global temperatures, are likely to give way to neutral conditions that would persist over the Northern Hemisphere summer.
Polar regions are especially vulnerable to global warming, heating several times faster than the global average.
Since mid-2023, only July 2024 fell below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, raising concerns that the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting long-term warming to 1.5C may be slipping out of reach.
Arctic sea ice hits lowest peak in satellite record, says US agency
https://arab.news/8v73x
Arctic sea ice hits lowest peak in satellite record, says US agency
- Arctic sea ice forms and expands during the dark, frigid northern winter, reaching its seasonal high point in March
- In recent years, less new ice has formed, and the accumulation of multi-year ice has steadily declined
Emperor penguin populations falling ‘faster than we thought’: researchers
- Emperor penguin populations in Antarctica have shrunk by almost a quarter as global warming transforms their icy habitat
PARIS: Emperor penguin populations in Antarctica have shrunk by almost a quarter as global warming transforms their icy habitat, according to new research Tuesday that warned the losses were far worse than previously imagined.
“We’ve got this really depressing picture of climate change and falling populations even faster than we thought, but it’s not too late,” said Peter Fretwell, of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), who led the study monitoring sixteen colonies, representing nearly a third of the global emperor penguin population.
In London, the fox has its own ambulance service when it needs help
- The critters that have admirers and adversaries are well adapted to city life but living on the streets, alleys and back gardens of a dense urban environment can be rough
- When they are ill, injured or abandoned as cubs in south London and its leafy suburbs, The Fox Project is often there to help
PADDOCK WOOD: The injured fox is cornered in a cage, teeth bared and snarling at the woman trying to help it.
Nicki Townsend is unfazed. Wearing only rubber gloves and an outfit suitable for a yoga class, she approaches with soothing words. “All right, baby,” she coos as she deftly drapes a towel over his head, grabs him by the scruff of his neck, scoops up his wounded legs and moves him to a clean cage.
It’s not the way her day typically begins, but there’s nothing routine about rescuing foxes.
“You can never predict what you’re going to arrive at,” Townsend said.
While not as visible as phone boxes or double-decker buses, the red fox is a fixture in London, a city not known for its wildlife. But living on the streets, alleys and back gardens of a dense urban environment can be rough and when foxes need help, they have their own ambulance service — and Townsend may be on her way.
The foxes didn’t invade London so much as adapt and expand their range inward as the city spread to their habitat in the 1930s and suburbs grew.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em
But people and the bushy-tailed member of the canine family have not always lived in harmony, and the species has admirers and adversaries.
For everyone enchanted seeing a fox trotting nonchalantly down their street at dusk or basking in a sunny backyard, there are plenty who see them as pests. They poop where they like, tear into garbage and the vixens in heat let out terrifying shrieks in the dead of winter when attracting a mate.
“It’s like Marmite with foxes,” Townsend said, referring to the food spread that is an acquired and divisive taste. “You either love them or hate them.”
The divide between the two camps led Trevor Williams to found what became The Fox Project nearly 35 years ago.
Once a bass player in the rock group Audience that opened for Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, Williams had been active in the campaign to stop fox hunting when he redirected his protection efforts to the city, where foxes were once routinely killed.
“Because of the myths that have occurred over the years, there’s still a lot of suspicion about what foxes might be,” Williams said. “You know, they’re going to bite the baby, they’re going to eat the cat, they’re going to run away with your husband.”
The project has since grown from providing information on deterring foxes to rescuing 1,400 a year, including 400 cubs, though only about half survive to be released.
City offers cheap eats and unique hazards
There are estimated to be 15,000 foxes in London. The project covers a swath of south London and its leafy suburbs while other organizations not devoted solely to foxes handle other parts of the city.
While the omnivores survive on small animals, bugs and berries in the wild, they favor easily scavenged leftovers in the city and handouts that make them more dependent on humans.
Their main urban menaces are cars, getting snagged in soccer nets or getting stuck in tight spaces. In their effort to get free, they often get nasty abrasions that can become infected. Many also suffer from mange, a parasitic infestation that leads to all kinds of problems.
Townsend pilots her VW Caddy on city streets, highways and narrow lanes that roll through lush hills, responding to calls about injured or ill foxes or cubs that have lost their mothers.
She’s seen a bit of everything since her first humbling call 2 1/2 years ago when the supposedly injured fox bolted.
“In my inexperience, I chased after him, which is comical because you’re never going to outrun a fox,” she said. “I just remember he ran very fast and I looked silly running after him.”
Despite many challenging situations — she once managed to rescue a fox that lost its footing atop a fence and ended upside down at eye level with its paw lodged between boards — she’s only been bitten once.
Heartbreak with hard cases
Her van carries the distinctly musky scent of foxes. The odor becomes unpleasant when an anxious passenger in a litter of cubs relieves itself enroute to being delivered to a foster care pen where they will stay until being released in the wild.
“Feel free to open the window,” said Townsend, who is accustomed to the stench. “This is a stinky job.”
On a recent day, she was dispatched to meet a heartbroken couple who found a cub with a puncture wound collapsed on their back lawn.
“We thought he was asleep at first, so we went to go and have a close look because we love them,” Charlotte English said. “Then he just didn’t move, so we knew something was wrong.”
That cub had to be put to sleep, as did the adult Townsend transferred at the start of her shift.
Cubs that recover are socialized in packs of five until they mature and are then released in a rural location while the adults are freed in the neighborhoods where they were found.
The fox does not say ‘Thank you’
Given a second chance, it’s not clear how well the foxes fare, because they are rarely tracked. A 2016 study in the journal Applied Animal Behavior Science found that rehabilitated foxes were more likely to behave as if they had been displaced when returned to their original territory. They were tracked wandering farther away, potentially exposing them to more traffic and greater stress.
“It is a gap in the knowledge and there’s an assumption that when you release them, they thrive and I think that that assumption needs to be challenged more,” said Bryony Tolhurst, a University of Brighton honorary research fellow and lead author of the study.
For Townsend, fox deaths are offset by the joy of seeing little ones venture into the unknown or an adult darting into a neighborhood it instantly recognizes.
“Sometimes they look back and people like to romanticize that they’re saying ‘thank you,’” she said. “They’re just making sure we’re not chasing after them.”
Chinese man defies demolition orders to build madcap rural home
- Nail houses sometimes make headlines for delaying money-spinning construction projects or forcing developers to divert roads or build around shabby older homes
XINGYI, China: Surrounded by the rubble of demolished homes, Chen Tianming’s ramshackle tower of faded plyboards and contorted beams juts into the sky in southwestern China, a teetering monument to one man’s stubbornness.
Authorities razed most of Chen’s village in Guizhou province in 2018 to build a lucrative tourist resort in a region known for its spectacular rice paddies and otherworldly mountain landscapes.
Chen, 42, refused to leave, and after the project faltered, defied a flurry of demolition notices to build his family’s humble stone bungalow higher and higher.
He now presides over a bewildering 10-storey, pyramid-shaped warren of rickety staircases, balconies and other add-ons, drawing comparisons in Chinese media to the fantastical creations of legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki.
“I started building out of practicality, trying to renovate and expand our home,” Chen said on a sweltering May afternoon as he climbed ladders and ducked wooden beams in his labyrinthine construction.
“But then it became more of an interest and hobby that I enjoyed,” he said.
Chen’s obsessive tinkering and lack of building permits continue to draw ire from the local government.
The higher floors where he sleeps sway in the wind, and dozens of ropes and cables tether the house to the ground as if the whole thing might one day float away.
“When I’m up here... I get the sense of being a nomad,” Chen said, gazing out at apartment blocks, an airport and distant mountains.
“People often say it’s unsafe and should be demolished... but I’ll definitely never let anyone tear it down.”
Local authorities once had big plans to build an 800-acre tourist resort — including a theater and artificial lake — on Chen’s native soil.
They promised to compensate villagers, but Chen’s parents refused, and he vowed to help them protect the home his grandfather had built in the 1980s.
Even as neighbors moved out and their houses were bulldozed, Chen stayed put, even sleeping alone in the house for two months “in case (developers) came to knock it down in the night.”
Six months later, like many ill-considered development projects in highly indebted Guizhou, the resort was canceled.
Virtually alone among the ruined village, Chen was now master of a “nail house” — a Chinese term for those whose owners dig in and refuse to relocate despite official compensation offers.
A quirk of China’s rampant development and partial private property laws, nail houses sometimes make headlines for delaying money-spinning construction projects or forcing developers to divert roads or build around shabby older homes.
Even as Chen forged ahead, completing the fifth floor in 2019, the sixth in 2022 and the seventh in 2023, he continued to receive threats of demolition.
Last August, his home was designated an illegal construction, and he was ordered to destroy everything except the original bungalow within five days.
He says he has spent tens of thousands of yuan fighting the notices in court, despite losing several preliminary hearings.
But he continues to appeal, and the next hearing has been delayed.
“I’m not worried. Now that there’s no one developing the land, there’s no need for them to knock the place down,” he said.
In recent years, ironically, Chen’s house has begun to lure a steady trickle of tourists itself.
On Chinese social media, users describe it as China’s strangest nail house, likening it to the madcap buildings in Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli masterpieces “Howl’s Moving Castle” and “Spirited Away.”
As dusk falls, Chen illuminates his home with decorative lanterns, and people gather on the nearby dirt road to admire the scene.
“It’s beautiful,” local resident He Diezhen said as she snapped photos.
“If there are no safety issues, it could become an (official) local landmark,” she said.
Chen said the house makes many visitors remember their whimsical childhood fantasies.
“(People) dream of building a house for themselves with their own hands... but most can’t make it happen,” he said.
“I not only thought of it, I made it a reality.”
Man who let snakes bite him 200 times spurs new antivenom hope
- “I know what it feels like to die from snakebite”
PARIS: Tim Friede was feeling particularly down on the day after the September 11 attacks, so he went to his basement and let two of the world’s deadliest snakes bite him.
Four days later, he woke up from a coma.
“I know what it feels like to die from snakebite,” Friede told AFP via video call from his home in the small US town of Two Rivers, Wisconsin.
This experience might put most people off snakes entirely, but Friede simply vowed to be more careful next time.
From 2000 to 2018, he allowed himself to be bitten by snakes more than 200 times. He also injected himself with their venom over 650 times.
Friede endured this pain because he wanted to achieve total immunity to venom, a practice called mithridatism which should not be tried at home.
After a couple of years, Friede started to believe he could be the basis for a better kind of antivenom. The former truck mechanic, who does not have a university degree, long struggled to be taken seriously by scientists.
But last month, a study published in the prestigious Cell journal showed that antibodies from his blood protect against a range of snake venom.
The researchers now hope Friede’s hyper-immunity could even lead to the development of a universal antivenom.
This would fill a major need, because currently most antivenoms only cover one or a few of the world’s 600 venomous snakes.
Up to 138,000 people are killed by snakebites a year, while 400,000 suffer amputations or other disabilities, according to the World Health Organization.
These figures are believed to be vastly underestimated because snakebite victims typically live in poorer, remote areas.
Friede’s first bite was from a harmless garter snake when he was five years old.
“I was afraid, I cried, I ran away,” said Friede, now 57.
Then he started bringing snakes home and hiding them in pickle jars. His mother sought counselling, but his interest in snakes persisted.
Things escalated after Friede attended a class that taught him how to “milk” snakes for their venom.
How antivenom is made has changed little over the last 125 years.
Small doses of snake venom are injected into animals such as horses, which produce antibodies that can be extracted and used as antivenom.
However this antivenom usually only works for bites from that particular species of snake — and it includes other antibodies from horse that can cause serious side-effects including anaphylactic shock.
“I thought, well, if they make antivenom in horses, why can’t I just use myself as a primate?” Friede said.
He started working through the venom from all the deadly species he could get his hands on, such as cobras, taipans, black mambas and rattlesnakes.
“There is pain every time,” he said.
For years, the scientists he contacted to take advantage of his immunity refused to bite.
Then in 2017, immunologist Jacob Glanville, who previously worked on universal vaccines, turned his attention toward antivenom.
Glanville told AFP he had been looking for “a clumsy snake researcher who’d been bit accidentally a couple times,” when he came across a video of Friede taking brutal back-to-back snake bites.
When they first spoke, Glanville said he told Friede: “I know this is awkward, but I would love to get my hands on some of your blood.”
“I’ve been waiting for this call for a long time,” came the response, Glanville said.
The antivenom described in the Cell paper includes two antibodies from Friede’s blood, as well as a drug called varespladib.
It offered mice full protection against 13 of the 19 snake species tested, and partial protection for the remaining six.
The researchers hope a future cocktail will cover far more snakes — particularly vipers — with further trials planned on dogs in Australia.
Timothy Jackson of the Australian Venom Research Unit praised the immunological research, but questioned whether a human needed to be involved, pointing to synthetically developed antibodies.
Glanville said the ultimate goal of his US-based firm Centivax was to develop a universal antivenom administered by something like an EpiPen, potentially produced in India to keep the costs down.
Friede said he was “proud” to have made a “small difference” in medical history.
Now working for Centivax, Friede stopped self-inflicting himself with venom in 2018 to save the firm from liability issues.
But he hopes to get bitten by snakes again in the future.
“I do miss it,” he said.
Video shows dolphin calf birth and first breath at Chicago zoo. Mom’s friend helped
- Calf was born at Brookfield Zoo Chicago from 38-year-old bottlenose dolphin named Allie
- Experienced mother dolphin stayed close to Allie through her more than one hour of labor
CHICAGO: A bottlenose dolphin at a Chicago zoo gave birth to a calf early Saturday morning with the help of a fellow mom, in a successful birth recorded on video by zoo staff.
The dolphin calf was born at Brookfield Zoo Chicago early Saturday morning as a team of veterinarians monitored and cheered on the mom, a 38-year-old bottlenose dolphin named Allie.
“Push, push, push,” one observer can be heard shouting in video released by the zoo Saturday, as Allie swims around the tank, the calf’s little tail fins poking out below her own.
Then the calf wriggles free and instinctively darts to the surface of the pool for its first breath. Also in the tank was an experienced mother dolphin named Tapeko, 43, who stayed close to Allie through her more than one hour of labor. In the video, she can be seen following the calf as it heads to the surface, and staying with it as it takes that first breath.
It is natural for dolphins to look out for each other during a birth, zoo staff said.
“That’s very common both in free-ranging settings but also in aquaria,” said Brookfield Zoo Chicago Senior Veterinarian Dr. Jennifer Langan in a video statement. “It provides the mom extra protection and a little bit of extra help to help get the calf to the surface to help it breath in those couple minutes where she’s still having really strong contractions.”
In a written statement, zoo officials said early signs indicate that the calf is in good health. They estimate it weighs around 35 pounds (16 kilograms) and stretches nearly four feet in length (115-120 centimeters). That is about the weight and length of an adult golden retriever dog.
The zoo’s Seven Seas exhibit will be closed as the calf bonds with its mother and acclimates with other dolphins in its group.
As part of that bonding, the calf has already learned to slipstream, or draft alongside its mother so that it doesn’t have to work as hard to move. Veterinarians will monitor progress in nursing, swimming and other milestones particularly closely over the next 30 days.
The calf will eventually take a paternity test to see which of the male dolphins at the zoo is its father.
Zoo officials say they will name the calf later this summer.
