Some believe global anomalies are in line with predictions but others are more concerned by speed of change

Record temperatures in 2024 on land and at sea have prompted scientists to question whether these anomalies are in line with predicted global heating patterns or if they represent a concerning acceleration of climate breakdown.

Heat above the oceans remains persistently, freakishly high, despite a weakening of El Niño , which has been one of the major drivers of record global temperatures over the past year.

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Discovery was made after First Nations tipped off ecologists about groups of fish gathering in a fjord off British Columbia

Deep in the hostile waters off Canada’s west coast, in a narrow channel surrounded by fjords, lies a coral reef that scientists believe “shouldn’t exist”. The reef is the northernmost ever discovered in the Pacific Ocean and offers researchers a new glimpse into the resilience – and unpredictability – of the deep-sea ecosystems.

For generations, members of the Kitasoo Xai’xais and Heiltsuk First Nations, two communities off the Central Coast region of British Columbia, had noticed large groups of rockfish congregating in a fjord system.

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Impact on ecosystems must be predicted before technology is used, US atmospheric science agency chief says

Scientists must work urgently on predicting the effects of climate geoengineering , the chief of the US atmospheric science agency has said, as the technology is likely to be needed, at least in part.

Richard Spinrad, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said the government-backed body was estimating the effects of some of the likely techniques for geoengineering , including those involving the oceans.

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Property owners dumped 15,000 tons of sand in a Massachusetts town to fend off dangerous tides, but it was swept away in 72 hours

A sand dune that cost homeowners on a Massachusetts beach more than half a million dollars to construct has washed away after just three days.

An affluent group of beachfront property owners in Salisbury, Massachusetts – a coastal town 35 miles north of Boston – are mourning the loss of their investment after a safety measure they took to protect their homes failed.

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Coral larvae more likely to settle on degraded reefs bathed in marine soundscapes, Caribbean study shows

Underwater speakers that broadcast the hustle and bustle of thriving coral could bring life back to more damaged and degraded reefs that are in danger of becoming ocean graveyards, researchers say.

Scientists working off the US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean found that coral larvae were up to seven times more likely to settle at a struggling reef where they played recordings of the snaps, groans, grunts and scratches that form the symphony of a healthy ecosystem.

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The ocean’s depths are not some remote alien realm, but are in fact intimately entangled with every other part of the planet. We should treat them that way

The deep has long been treated as somehow separate from the surface world, a shadowy non-place populated by alien creatures. While this is partly a response to the difficulty of studying it, it also reflects an ingrained tendency. As the writer Robert Macfarlane has observed, humans are creatures of the air and light, and we have often regarded the spaces beneath our feet with abhorrence, associating them with death, entombment and the unseen and unnameable. And while what Macfarlane calls the underland might be a place of ritual power as well as a place of burial, the ocean’s depths are more frequently equated with loss and forgetting.

Although those versed in traditional wayfinding techniques often understood the ocean in more complex ways, the idea of the deep as an unknowable non-place was also embedded in navigational practices. For European sailors plying the waters of the Mediterranean sea and the Atlantic and Indian oceans, all that really mattered was knowing where potential obstacles and risks such as reefs and sandbars lay – a way of thinking that transformed the ocean’s depths into a blank irrelevance.

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As the sea inundates Odisha’s coastline, livelihoods have withered with the harvest and weddings are a rarity as young women refuse to move to areas where they see no future

• Photographs by Aishwarya Mohanty

In Udaykani, a coastal village in the east Indian state of Odisha, the walls of houses were once adorned with the marriage motifs of conches and shehnais , an oboe-like instrument played at weddings, considered auspicious for bride and groom. Today, the designs have faded. The village, once a hub of joyous celebrations, has not welcomed a bride in more than a decade.

With the sea on one side and fields on the other, Udaykani, along with neighbouring Tandahar village, was hit hard by a super-cyclone , the most intense ever recorded in the northern Indian Ocean, that lashed the state 25 years ago. Along with the growing environmental volatility of the Bay of Bengal over the years, it has meant a rise in soil and water salinity and subsequent loss of agricultural land, livelihoods and marriage prospects.

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The two species of pygmy squid the size of a fingernail live on Japanese coral reefs. Spotting them is a sign of a healthy ecosystem, say scientists

In Japan, stories have been told of forest-dwelling magical spirits called kodama since ancient times. Over the centuries, they’ve adopted many guises: sometimes they’re invisible, sometimes they look like trees. The Studio Ghibli animated movie Princess Mononoke portrayed kodama as rotund little humanoids with rotating bobble heads. Now, a genus of miniature squid has been named in honour of the kodama and their role as nature’s guardians.

“If you see them, it’s a sign that the ecosystem is healthy,” says Jeff Jolly from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, referring to Kodama jujutsu , the pygmy squid that he and a team of scientists and underwater photographers found on coral reefs in Japan and described in a 2023 paper .

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Submersibles allow us to witness the wonders of the depths of our planet like nothing else. But after the OceanGate disaster, how safe are they? Cal Flyn goes aboard…

When we climb on board the ship, the submersible is waiting for us on deck. It is sleek and gleaming and slightly comic, like a tiny spaceship. It has a banana-yellow deck and a huge, Jetsons -style cockpit contained within a transparent bubble: an acrylic globe that is perfectly clear and spherical, temporarily shrouded in a thick grey cover to protect the interior from super-heating in the Bahamian sun.

It is at once impossibly futuristic and yet intriguingly solid – like no vehicle I have ever seen before. And it feels oddly in keeping with my present surroundings, which are, admittedly, perplexing. I don’t spend much of my time on superyachts, so this all seems strange to me. There’s a bridge full of glittering equipment and flatscreens of data. There’s a gleaming white kitchen filled with food. Capable, suntanned young staff buzz around, busy with ropes and fenders, knives strapped to their ankles, offering to whip us up margaritas at a moment’s notice.

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