Independent: The coldest night of winter so far left the majority of Britain blanketed in snow as temperatures dropped to -12C. Drivers were warned to take extra care and planes were grounded, including at London Heathrow where one-in-three flights scheduled for today are expected to be cancelled. A host of sporting fixtures were also postponed. The evening match at Manchester City had to pause temporarily so the pitch markings could be made clear. In Beeston, Nottinghamshire, there were more serious...

Independent: The bitterly cold weather sweeping Britain and the rest of Europe has been linked by scientists with the ice-free seas of the Arctic, where global warming is exerting its greatest influence. A dramatic loss of sea ice covering the Barents and Kara Seas above northern Russia could explain why a chill Arctic wind has engulfed much of Europe and killed 221 people over the past week. The death toll from Arctic blast has been particularly severe in the Ukraine, where many of the dead have been people...

Santa Barbar Independent: Blooms, or proliferation, of jellyfish have shown a substantial, visible impact on coastal populations - clogged nets for fishermen, stinging waters for tourists, even choked intake lines for power plants - and recent media reports have created a perception that the world`s oceans are experiencing increases in jellyfish due to human activities such as global warming and overharvesting of fish. Now, a new global and collaborative study conducted at UC Santa Barbara`s National Center for Ecological...

Daily Press: With its low-lying military bases and waterfront houses, Hampton Roads is more vulnerable to sea-level rise than most of the United States. Yet there is no coordinated plan to adapt to waters that, combined with slow-sinking land around the Chesapeake Bay, threaten to submerge entire neighborhoods by 2100. One Republican and six Democratic state lawmakers hope to change that with a first-of-its-kind study that would inventory what's been done and what can be done to mitigate the effects of...

National Public Radio: Sturgeon have been swimming around for more than 200 million years, but their eggs are sought after for caviar. This week, the National Marine Fisheries Service placed the Atlantic sturgeon on its endangered species list. Guest host David Greene speaks with Dr. Ellen Pikitch, executive director of the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook University.

BBC: There are reasons for optimism about the future of the world's fish stocks despite their currently dire state, said the Prince of Wales at the launch of a report from his green think-tank. Fisheries in Transition details 50 case studies of successful management in various parts of the world. The prince said the issue was dogged by a "debilitating fatalism". His International Sustainability Unit (ISU) is aiming to build constructive dialogue between industry and ecology. The report is...

Associated Press: Small island nations, whose very existence is threatened by the rising sea levels brought about by global warming, are seeking to take the issue of climate change before the International Court of Justice. Johnson Toribiong, president of Palau, said Friday his country and other island nations had formed an expert advisory committee to bring the issue before the U.N. General Assembly. That would allow the world court in the Hague to determine the legal ramifications of climate change under international...

National Geographic: Some mammals need roughly 24 million generations to go from mouse-size to elephant-size, a new study says. Using both fossil and living specimens, scientists calculated growth rates for 28 different mammalian groups during the past 65 million years-and found that, for mammals, getting big takes longer than shrinking. It takes a minimum of 1.6 million generations for mammals to achieve a hundredfold increase in body size, about 5 million generations for a thousandfold increase, and about 10...

National Public Radio: For snow fans in the contiguous US, this winter has left much to be desired. The warm and mild season in the lower 48 and the wild snow dumps and cold weather up north in Alaska can be blamed largely on a weather pattern called "arctic oscillation." Audie Cornish gets an explanation of the weather phenomenon from meteorologist Jeffrey Masters.

New York Times: Sand dunes rise above a windy, desolate stretch of beach, miles beyond where most tourists venture. Occasional flocks of brown pelicans are visible, arcing through the sky above the water. “I love watching them fly,” said Sonny Perez, manager of the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, which includes some of the remote northern reaches of South Padre. “They’re like little bombardiers going across.” In the coming years, the 97,000-acre refuge could add more land on the island to its holdings....

New York Times: As many readers know, considerable fear surrounds the future of the world`s coral reefs. Catastrophic declines have already occurred in some places, usually as a result of climate change combined with human activity like the dumping of sewage. Australian Institute of Marine ScienceTimothy Cooper, a researcher, examining a Porites coral in the Rowley Shoals in western Australia. Now, however, comes a bit of good news. In research conducted off western Australia, scientists found that coral growth...

Inter Press Service: An accident at an ultra-deepwater drilling platform spilled 160 barrels of crude off the coast of Brazil this week, deepening fears about safety in this new frontier of oil and gas production. According to the state oil company Petrobras, the oil spill is small in volume, and was caused by a rupture in the production column on the Dynamic Producer, a floating production, storage and offloading vessel conducting tests in the Carioca oil field. The spill occurred 300 km off the coast of the southern...

National Geographic: That's because the "Luxembourg" iceberg came from a glacial ice tongue that had just been "sitting there," said oceanographer Doug Martinson of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. By contrast, "West Antarctica has ice streams, of which Pine Island is one. Those are fast-flowing streams of ice," said Martinson, who specializes in polar oceans. When ice breaks off the Pine Island Glacier, he said, more ice can flow in faster from the mountains above-ice that will eventually...

New York Times: The codfish catch is declining, and nets are coming up empty. What to do? For some, the answer is to kill the marine mammals that compete with humans for fish. In Canada, where a resurgent population of Atlantic gray seals is being held responsible by fishermen for the failure of cod stocks to bounce back, the fisheries department`s Science Advisory Secretariat last year proposed an experimental cull of 73,000 of the 350,000 gray seals estimated to live on the country`s east coast. Once valued...

Yale Environment 360: On the afternoon of January 10, at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, whale researchers Robert L. Pitman and John W. Durban stood on the bridge of a cruise ship, peering through binoculars for signs of killer whales. The Weddell Sea, where English explorer Ernest Shackleton and his men were locked in the sea ice nearly a century ago, was calm and studded with icebergs. It was raining, an increasingly common occurrence in summer in this rapidly warming part of Antarctica. Around 3 p.m., Pitman...

Guardian: The environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, has refused to deny that the Cabinet Office is proposing to rip up of thousands of pages of environmental regulations and guidance as part of the government's "red tape challenge". The proposal, revealed by the Guardian, is understood to be led by Oliver Letwin and is causing deep concern among green MPs and campaigners. It follows the cutting of planning regulation guidance from 1,000 pages to just 50 pages, which sparked a national outcry last year....

Times of India: "Oceans and climate are linked to each other. Far from the static, Atlantic Ocean contributes a lot to climate change," shared Prof A D Singh, department of geology, Banaras Hindu University (BHU). He has returned recently from an ocean expedition to Atlantic Ocean. Singh, who was invited by the Unites States Implementing Organisation (USIO) through the Ministry of Earth Sciences India (IODP-India) to participate as one of the shipboard scientists in the International Ocean Drilling Programme...

Vancouver Sun: Canada is failing badly at protecting its rich marine biodiversity from the looming threat of climate change, an expert-panel report for the Royal Society of Canada concluded Thursday. "Canada has made little substantive progress in fulfilling national and international commitments to sustain marine biodiversity," the panel report found. A promised national marine protected areas network "remains unfilled," the report noted, and the application of a "precautionary" management approach, including...

Reuters: China is shielding its loss-making shipping industry by blocking from its ports giant vessels such as those mining giant Vale SA is building to cut the cost of sending iron ore to its largest market, analysts said on Wednesday. China, the world's top iron ore importer, on Tuesday said its ports could not accept vessels with a deadweight over 300,000 tonnes, which encompasses the Valemaxes, 400,000-deadweight-tonne freighters that are large enough to hold three soccer fields end-to-end on their...

AlertNet: Thousands of farmers in Tanzania's Rufiji Delta have been accused of destroying mangroves as they search for new land to grow their rice crops, which are being damaged by salt-water intrusion. The salt water, pushed inland by surging tides from the Indian Ocean, is damaging fields of rice seedlings. Farmers in several villages in the river basin, which sprawls across the east African nation's southern half, have seen yields fall as a result. With thousands of hectares affected by saline intrusion,...