Earth

It's in Iowa. 2m video at the link.

170 year old Cottonwood tree growing in the middle of a four way intersection. I drove out in the middle of nowhere to see this beautiful old tree/roadside oddity.

https://www.facebook.com/OtisGibbsMusic/videos/treen-in-the-middle-of-the-road/288342257357439/

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/58881

The crisis on the Colorado River is simple: The seven Western states that border the essential waterway use more water than it contains. Chronic overuse has drained its two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and a two-decade drought cycle has pushed them to the point of collapse.

The dream solution to this crisis is an agreement among all involved to use less water. Such a deal would decide who must reduce consumption, which means asking which cities would ban irrigating lawns and washing cars and which farmers would rip up their fields.

This has proven impossible. The states have been trying to work this out since the last dry spell, in 2022, but talks have ended in frustration and name-calling. The main sticking point is between the “Upper Basin” states led by Colorado and Utah (along with Wyoming and New Mexico) and the “Lower Basin” states of Arizona, California, and Nevada. Each side believes the other has a legal and a moral responsibility to cut usage during dry years. The stalemate means the Trump administration must design a schedule of restrictions ahead of a crucial deadline in September. So far, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has balked at resolving the quarrel.

Instead, the administration is turning to a far less controversial plan: Throw money at the problem. The Interior Department and Congress are pondering a slew on projects that could increase supply, a reversal of Trump’s zeal for cutting federal grants. The seven state governors have sent Washington a “wish list” of over $50 billion, and several startups have their hands out as well.

Federal investment makes sense given the scale of the problem and the intractable impasse, said Jennifer Pitt, the Colorado River program director at the National Audubon Society and an expert on the governance of the river

“It is something easier for people to agree on,” she said. “This is a slow moving crisis, but it is a crisis, and we do see the federal funding come in to address crises in other parts of the country. Just because this is a slow moving one doesn’t make it any less worthy.”

During a Senate committee hearing last week, the Interior Department’s top water official, Andrea Travnicek, said the agency has yet to vet the wish list. She didn’t offer a specific funding request, and urged lawmakers to be “thoughtful” about how they spend taxpayer money. But senators of both parties seemed to encourage new investments. “The basin should not be forced to choose between stabilizing the present and negotiating the future,” said Senator Martin Heinrich, a Democrat from New Mexico.

The possibility of new funding marks a return to the policy of the Biden administration. During the last extreme drought in 2022, the Interior Department paid farmers billions to leave their fields fallow, but that money, from the Inflation Reduction Act, has almost run dry.

The difference now is that the roster of proposals is far more ambitious, and some far less certain to bolster the basin’s water supply. They range from desalination plants to desert groundwater pipelines to forest ecosystem restoration.

Here are a few of the major solutions state officials and companies are proposing.

Spending $6 billion to build another facility like the Carlsbad Desalination Plant is among the proposed solutions to the water crisis. Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune via Getty Images

Desalination

As the Colorado River crisis has deepened, some cities in the Southwest have eyed desalination, which extracts salt from sea water. A company called Poseidon Water opened such a plant in San Diego in 2015, and tried for decades to open another in Los Angeles. The wish list to Interior requests as much as $6 billion to build one in Baja California to supplement Arizona’s vanishing Colorado River supplies.

The Interior Department also signed an agreement in early June with San Diego’s water agency that explains how that plant would help. Rather than sending treated seawater inland, states would pay the city to take less from the Colorado River. Arizona stands to lose the most water during drought years, and it would be the most likely to participate in that exchange.

But desalination is expensive, requires enormous amounts of electricity, and state-of-the-art industrial technology. The Poseidon facility cost $1 billion, but San Diego has diversified its water portfolio so much that it no longer needs all the water it must purchase from the plant. Trading water could help it offset some of that cost.

Taming tech and power

Nevada uses less water than any state on the river, and has cut usage in Las Vegas by replacing grass with artificial turf. It is now seeking money to slake some of its last thirsty industries — power plants and data centers. These facilities need a fraction of what agriculture requires, but dominate usage in The Silver State.

The state’s wish list includes $300 million to retrofit its largest natural gas plant and reduce water consumption by an amount equivalent to more than 3,000 average homes. It also seeks $650 million to install zero-water cooling systems in its airports, schools, and industrial facilities. These closed-loop systems, which recirculate the same cooled water or, in the case of data centers, blast hot servers with cold air, have become more popular in Western states amid concerns about the tech boom’s growing thirst.

A Chinese worker fires rockets for cloud seeding effort in Huangpi, China in 2011. There are similar calls to do so in the United States to help restore the Colorado River. CN-STR / AFP via Getty Images

Squeezing rain from the clouds

Whereas Lower Basin states like Arizona and California can draw from the Colorado River’s big reservoirs on demand, northern states at its headwaters only receive the rain and snow that feed it.

These Upper Basin states have been trying for decades to engineer more precipitation, with support from Washington. It sounds futuristic, but cloud seeding — spraying salt or silver iodide into clouds, forcing them to release water they might otherwise retain — has proven fairly effective on a small scale. Utah spends a few million dollars each year doing this, and officials say it could boost annual snowpack by as much as 10 percent.

In addition, a few startups are pitching cheaper and more scalable versions of this technology. Rain Enhancement, a Florida-based outfit, says it has brought about 15,000 homes’ worth of rain to a river tributary in Utah this year; another, Rainmaker, says it can produce 1,000 times that much by 2031. That’s enough to close the supply gap on the river. That promise is fanciful, but these companies could secure federal funding from an administration that loves the tech industry.

Mining a hoard of desert groundwater

The West teems with companies that have promised miracles, from building a 300-mile pipeline to tapping a hoard of groundwater in Nevada. But perhaps no project has had a longer and more turbulent history than Cadiz, a proposal, almost 30 years old, to export groundwater from an aquifer in the Mojave Desert.

This has drawn vicious opposition from environmentalists and the late California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who called it a “grave threat” to the desert. Cadiz experienced several setbacks during the Biden administration: It lost a federal permit, California ended its pipeline lease, Arizona declined to support it, and its stock price fell to almost zero. But Susan Kennedy, its CEO, says Cadiz is flowing again with a funding agreement from the Interior Department to study exchanges between Cadiz and the Colorado River.

The company still needs to finish two pipelines, one to the Central Valley and another to the aqueduct that carries Colorado River water to California. It also must build a plant to remove contaminants in the water, but Kennedy believes she can have the tap running by 2028.

“This isn’t a competition, it’s an all-of-the-above situation,” she said of the situation on the river. That may be so, but the seven states did not include Cadiz on the “wish list” sent the Interior Department.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Colorado River is vanishing — and the fixes are getting weird on Jun 23, 2026.

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/59012

Coral reef ecosystems, widely seen as a climate change bellwether, are more complex than previously understood. A new international study by the universities of Bristol, Wuhan in China, and Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany reveals that the evolutionary advantage of coral-algae symbiosis is not fixed; it depends entirely on environmental context.

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Four wild turkey females on the prowl for bugs, likely. These four aren't tame, but they are pleasant as can be compared to the posse of males that roams the property. Those fellas are downright mean. I'll try to get a photo of the posse chasing some of the ranch hands if I can. It's quite funny when it's happening to someone else, less so when it's me.

You can tell these are females due to the lack of a wattle, small snoods, and their smaller (compared to a gobbler) head which is a blueish gray compared to a Tom's big ass red, white, and blue head. Their overall size is a giveaway, along with their comparatively drab coloration which is used as camouflage when nesting. These ladies probably top out right around 8-10lbs while the boys get around 20-25lbs.

There's a lot here- emu, cattle (both Brahman and Santa Gertrudis breeds), peafowl, turkeys, deer, nilgai, birds birds birds, and a whole heap more. Even snagged an invite to join a couple of very enthusiastic birders for a weekend bird watching trip. I am excited to go look at some birds with some folks who've been at it a while. This is my first time doing anything other than solo.

Anyway, turkeys.

Edit - just realized the one bringing up the rear is giving me the side eye.

Yucca plant. Related to asparagus. Fairly salt tolerant and extremely sun tolerant. The leaves dont shed when they die, they just just turn brown, and droop around the trunk as a protection from the sun and water loss as seen on the two yucca in the background. The dead leaves are pretty tough even when they are pretty old. The living leaves have a vee shaped cross-section, and tilt back towards the trunk to funnel rainwater and dew back to the roots since they are native to places that dont recieve much rain. The leaves have a waxy coating to keep evaporation to a minimum. Some species in the asparagus family like Joshua Tree can live for 300 years. This type here is the literal garden variety and even these can go for 150 years in the right conditions. I have two of these in a pretty large clay pot I got from my uncle when I was about 30. Ive had it for almost 20 years, and if I dont kill it, Ill probably have it until Im too old to take care of plants.

This blue-green mat to the right in the photo is mostly cyanobacteria, with some diatoms and some other bacteria I dont know about anymore. I learned about this 20 years ago so I might be a bit rusty.. They use a mucus to stick to everything/everyone else and make these thick, slick mats. This one is probably a mm thick, but they get much thicker and sort of rubbery. Like when you leave the ketchup open too long and it skins over. Ive seen a few about 1-1/2 cm thick or so. The top drys out a bit, and cracks, but the underneath is still gooey and disgusting.

Notice how there are human footprints in or around it, along with what I assume are dog tracks. My knowledge of bacteria is pretty rusty but I do know that quite a bit of cyanobacteria is extremely toxic. It attacks the liver, and can kill dogs as well. Flesh eating Vibrio also thrives in the back waters that feed this exact estuary. A man fished nearby here and ended up in the hospital and later died. And some dumbass was walking through it, with their dog i suppose.

I think very small crabs and snails that can tolerate this stuff end up inside it or under it depending on how thick it is, and can live off of it. Then birds go after the crabs and snails. When the bacteria dry up and die off they fix carbon, nitrogen and other nutrients into the soil, which allows stuff like pickleweed, and saltwort, and a whole mess of other salt tolerant plants to grow.

I included another photo just because. The sun was setting, and it was setting in the direction I was taking photos, so it reflected pretty heavily off the water so its hard to see exactly how green and gooey it was. Sorry. Im standing on a walkway here and there are signs asking not to go walking off into the grasses so this was the best shot I could work up in the time I was there.

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Another salt tolerant plant. During its growing season all the salt from the water it takes in is stored in the plant. Right before the weather cools they will take all the salt, push it to the ends of the stems. The stem end stop photosynthesizing because of the salt, turn red and sort of rot or fall off. Visible in the photo arent leaves, like most succulents. These are the stems, the leaves are microscopic.

Native to Hispaniola and Cuba. Extremely heat tolerant. So heat tolerant in fact that it dies back from cold in USDA zone 9! It prefers zones 10-11. Drought tolerant once established. Loves full sun.

Member of the spurge family so it is toxic in all the same ways a poinsettia is. Leaves, roots, stems, flowers, especially seeds. Introduced to my area of the Gulf coast but not considered invasive.

Working at a ranch underneath this fig tree today. It is just lousy with figs. Look at this photo. They're unripe and green but this tree is just bursting with them. Maybe a hundred of them? Maybe more? There are three more fig trees next to this one, with just as many figs. I'll be working here for the next two months so I'll be able to get more than my share of them. Ranch foreman says they usually just let the peafowl have them. I'll be over there kneecapping peafowl if they get near my figs. I'm REALLY looking forward to some homegrown figs, even if they aren't from my home. Bonus, Indian peahen sighting. There's probably 20 of these things here and are they noisy. Good grief.

We got a massive rain storm every other day for almost two months now. In the pic you can see remnants of the one from two days ago over Maine, the one we are getting hit with rn and another one over Rockies projected to hit on Tuesday. A lot of older homes in the midwest are getting flooded basements and mold issues. Really wish it would just stop for a while. Grain belt farmers had drought conditions for the last few years and now they are getting flooded and waterlogged fields.

For Scott Burger, this growing season feels like a race he can’t win. Each time his fields get dry enough to sidedress nitrogen or spray with herbicides, another band of rain rolls through. Overnight, on Tuesday, it happened again.

Burger, who farms in northeast Iowa, says his fields caught between 2” and 2.5” of rain in just a few hours — dumped on top of already saturated soils. The storms “rolled in again about 5 o’clock and are kind of sputtering,” he notes, adding that he figures his area has already logged rainfall in “that four- to five-inch range” for this month alone. The frequent rains are turning his usual mid-June workload into a logistical grind.

Scott Burger - most usa name possible

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8824904

"Everything is well-preserved. That's real ecological tourism and responsible tourism," said a Tunisian official on his first visit to SW China's Xizang. He added the integration of local population and economic development in Xizang is a success story worth sharing.

Planted them last year, so this should mean they are established now!

A major update has arrived regarding the developing El Niño event, and the latest oceanic and atmospheric data suggest that conditions across the Pacific continue to strengthen. In this video, we break down the newest sea surface temperature anomalies, subsurface heat content, trade wind trends, and what the latest global forecast models are showing for the months ahead.

Could this El Niño continue to intensify and become one of the strongest events in recent years? We'll examine the evidence, compare the latest model guidance, and discuss potential impacts on weather patterns across North America heading into late summer, fall, and winter.

Video Chapters:

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/57608

This story was originally published by The Texas Tribune.

Berenice Garcia
The Texas Tribune

McALLEN, Tex. — Conservation groups are trying to stop the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from exchanging hundreds of acres of land with SpaceX.

This month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife allowed a land swap deal with SpaceX to move forward that would give SpaceX 715 acres of land in the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge in exchange for 683 acres of private land that is adjacent to another refuge, the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge.

The conservation groups suing include the Center for Biological Diversity, Save RGV, and the South Texas Environmental Justice Network. They are joined by the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas, a nonprofit indigenous group that considers the land that SpaceX is now occupying and seeks to develop as sacred. However, the tribe is not officially recognized by the federal government.

The groups said they hope to preserve the land to protect the diverse wildlife there, including the endangered ocelot. They argue SpaceX’s presence in the area has also begun degrading the land, particularly through rocket test launches that send debris onto refuge lands.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to questions about the land exchange.

“Our protected public lands are being gifted for the benefit of the world’s richest man, who could trash them while playing with his exploding rockets,” said Laiken Jordahl, national public lands advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge was built by decades of conservation work and funded by millions of taxpayer dollars to protect our vulnerable wildlife like ocelots and piping plovers.”

Jordahl added: “We’re not letting Trump and his political cronies lock the American people out of Texas’ cherished public lands just to give Elon Musk another payday.”

In the lawsuit, filed on Wednesday, the groups argued that the land swap is inconsistent with the National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act, a law that lays out the mission and management of refuge lands, and that by approving the exchange, the Fish and Wildlife Service violated the National Historic Preservation Act, a statute enacted to protect historical sites from development.

They also argued that the environmental analysis of the land exchange did not meet the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act, and accused the agency of working with SpaceX to come up with “unfounded” scores to rate the land they would be giving up against the land the agency would be obtaining.

As part of an environmental assessment published in May, the agency evaluated habitat quality using “Biological Importance Scores.” A score was assigned to each parcel of land based on three equally weighted criteria: habitat quality, refuge connectivity, and critical habitat. The refuge land proposed to be given to SpaceX scored lower than the land the Fish and Wildlife Service would obtain.

Additionally, the conservation groups argued that the agency’s analysis of the swap didn’t meet the requirement of the National Environmental Policy Act, alleging that they did not consider reasonable alternatives and did not take a hard look at the impacts the deal would have due to SpaceX’s expansion.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, declined to comment on active or pending litigation.

Environmental assessment

In June, the Fish and Wildlife Service determined that the land exchange would not have significant adverse effects on public health or safety, historic or cultural resources, tribal sacred sites for federally recognized Tribes, ecologically critical areas, wetlands or floodplains, or on designated wilderness or research and natural areas.

The agency began holding talks with SpaceX over a potential land exchange in 2023. The goal, the agency said in their May environmental assessment, was to reduce the fragmented ownership of the land and consolidate them.

The assessment looked at whether the land exchange furthered the purpose of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge, whether it fulfills the conservation mission of the National Wildlife Refuge System, and whether it provides a net conservation benefit to the refuge.

Most of the land being offered up by the agency was acquired in the 1990s through condemnation for the protection of natural resources located on them, including endangered species habitat, coastal wetlands and barrier islands.

Industrial development

Since then, the surrounding area has experienced significant industrialization and development, especially because of SpaceX’s presence and expansion there. The industrial activity and the fragmented pattern of private land ownership led to increased disturbance from noise and lights and elevated levels of habitat fragmentation. The agency said those factors diminished the value of the land for purposes of conservation.

“The resulting changes in land use and landscape context have impacted the ability of these parcels to function as effective components of the regional conservation network,” the agency said.

Those parcels of land are also fragmented by private land owned by SpaceX, including the SpaceX Massey Test Site used for tests of space launch vehicles and land being developed by SpaceX for residential, commercial and possibly other uses.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it expects SpaceX will use the acquired land for residential, commercial, or institutional development in addition to infrastructure or other manufacturing activities.

The parcels that SpaceX would be giving the agency in return are adjacent to the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge and the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge.

One set of land parcels is known informally as “Las Palomas” and is surrounded by land belonging to the Lower Rio Grande Valley refuge. Another set of parcels lies between the communities of Laguna Heights and Laguna Vista. That set of land is contiguous with a portion of the Laguna Atascosa refuge.

The conservation groups pointed out that the refuge land that would be handed over to SpaceX include portions of the Palmito Ranch Battlefield National Historic Landmark, the site of the last Civil War battle, and warned that SpaceX could choose not to preserve its historic values.

However, the Fish and Wildlife Service said it signed a contract, known as a programmatic agreement, with SpaceX, the Texas Historic Commission and the National Park Service on May 11. A programmatic agreement allows federal agencies to continue managing historic properties.

In 2024, SpaceX was in talks with Texas Parks and Wildlife on a different land swap deal that would have given SpaceX 43 acres from Boca Chica State Park.

In exchange, SpaceX would have transferred 477 acres near the Laguna Atascosa refuge. The conservation groups sued to stop that land deal as well before SpaceX pulled out of the deal.

Reporting in the Rio Grande Valley is supported in part by the Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc.

The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

The post Conservation groups sue to stop SpaceX land deal appeared first on ICT.

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/57983

Despite being the world's most trafficked animal, the European eel receives surprisingly little sympathy. It lacks the mammalian charisma of the creatures whose plights dominate conservation campaigns; among them the shy, helpless pangolin and the stoically intelligent elephant. By contrast, the eel is viewed by many as a source of revulsion: a slimy, writhing reason to stay out of the water. Yet behind inscrutable eyes, it harbors many secrets. This is the story of how an elusive and often misunderstood fish found itself at the center of an international smuggling network.

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/57145

The oceanic phenomenon known as El Niño, which increases temperatures worldwide, has officially begun, according to U.S. weather forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.

Meteorologists have warned that this could be the strongest El Niño this century. It is expected to drive extreme weather events around the world, including both severe droughts and heavy rainfall, likely leading to major disruptions in agricultural production and food security.

El Niño is part of a cyclical, naturally-occurring weather pattern that redistributes warm air, surface water temperatures, and moisture across the tropical Pacific Ocean. During El Niño, trade winds that typically blow east-to-west from the Americas to southeast Asia slow down or sometimes reverse. Normally, these winds push warm water along the Equator — but during El Niño conditions, that warm water shifts back east. Although El Niño does not follow a specific timeline, it typically occurs every two to seven years.

Beginning in the summer, El Niño typically peaks around December or the following January. (The pattern was named El Niño — Spanish for little boy — by fishermen in South America who noticed warmer waters around Christmas time, and associated it with the birth of Jesus Christ.) That means the most significant impacts of the cyclical weather phenomenon may not be felt until months from now. NOAA’s most recent calculations show a high likelihood of a “very strong” El Niño, meaning average surface temperatures in the Pacific jump by more than 2 degrees Celsius. (Some experts are calling this year’s a “super” El Niño, although some agencies, like the World Meteorological Organization, reject this language.)

Because it impacts a “diverse set of geographies,” said Weston Anderson, a climate scientist at the University of Maryland, so “there is no one set of impacts.” El Niño can contribute to severe droughts in one part of the world and heavy rainfall in others — both of which can disrupt growing seasons in key breadbaskets of the world.

But the ways in which this year’s El Niño will interact the effects of global warming — and what that means for food security — is something scientists are still actively observing and untangling.

The typical impacts of El Niño to the continental U.S. and Canada during Northern Hemisphere winter. NOAA

“That question is still really important open science,” said Jennifer Burney, a professor at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability whose work focuses on climate and food security.

History can give us some examples. In 1877, one of the strongest El Niños ever recorded was associated with historic droughts across Asia, as well as in parts of Brazil and northern Africa. These droughts, “along with colonial policies contributed to famines in many regions which were really devastating,” said Deepti Singh, an associate professor at Washington State University who co-authored a study on this period of global famine.

The fatalities associated with these famines, upwards of 50 million people, said Singh, “are humbling to think about.”

The last El Niño occurred in 2023 and 2024. It was one of the five strongest El Niños ever recorded, according to the World Meteorological Organization, or WMO, and is considered to have contributed to the historic temperatures in 2024, making it the hottest year on record.

That year came with devastating consequences for growers, especially in arid regions where agricultural producers primarily rely on rainfall to irrigate their crops. Droughts driven by El Niño across southern Africa contributed to increased food insecurity and malnutrition in several countries.

Burney noted that in some vulnerable regions, local governments may have adaptive strategies in place to grow key crops earlier in the growing season or to increase imports during El Niño years, which can help offset food insecurity. But even in those cases, local farmers who depend on growing and selling crops to support themselves and their families may still experience economic setbacks. In other words, certain policies may ensure there’s “enough food,” but “that’s not going to take care of the people whose livelihoods depend on” agriculture, Burney said.

This year, El Niño conditions are expected to impact a number of growing areas — another setback for agricultural producers who have faced higher input costs stemming from the Iran War. Although the United States and Iran are potentially set to unveil an agreement to reopen the all-important Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil flows, farmers worldwide have already been impacted by fertilizer shortages and price hikes since the passage closed this spring.

Weather variability fueled by El Niño will add to growers’ woes. India, where the majority of the world’s rice comes from, is projected to have a weaker monsoon season, which could reduce yields. Drier, hotter conditions could lead to diminished maize production in southern Africa. The southern U.S. states, from California all the way to the eastern seaboard, will experience a wetter year than normal, which could lead to flooding and upend crop production.

But the exact way that this El Niño will unfurl is yet unknown. As El Niño interacts with the additional warming and moisture currently in our atmosphere caused by climate change, “there is likely to be a change in which regions are likely to be affected” by extreme weather, said Singh. Still, she added, we can expect “the severity, extent, and likelihood” of extreme weather events like droughts “to be higher” in today’s warmer climate.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The ‘super El Niño’ is here. What happens next could upend food systems worldwide. on Jun 16, 2026.

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cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/57000

Climate scientists are sounding the alarm after an unprecedented heatwave hit Antarctica this month and delivered temperatures 20°C higher than normal.

According to a Friday report in The Guardian, temperatures at Antarctica's Trinity Peninsula this month hit peaks of over 15°C, even though it is the start of winter when ice typically expands on the continent. The prior record June temperature at the peninsula, 13.3°C, was set in 1998.

After weeks of above-average temperatures, scientists noticed that an area of sea ice that typically forms in the region—one roughly the size of France—was missing.

"It’s depressing,” Will Hobbs, an Antarctic sea ice expert at the University of Tasmania, told The Guardian. "It is remarkable that we are in June and there is no sea ice there."

Hobbs also predicted that the loss of sea ice is likely permanent at this point given the trajectory of global temperature changes.

Peter Fretwell, a scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, explained to the newspaper that the loss of sea ice poses a serious threat to penguin populations.

"Sea ice is forming too late and breaking up too early," Fretwell explained. "It leads to reduced breeding success and longer trips to moulting grounds."

In a separate interview with The Guardian last week, Raúl Cordero, a climate professor at the University of Groningen, expressed astonishment at the record-breaking Antarctic heat.

“This is absolutely crazy,” Cordero said. "That is a huge anomaly.”

Luis Muñoz, a Chilean glaciologist, told the newspaper he was shocked to step outside at King George's Island, located just north of Trinity Peninsula, and seeing the ground uncovered by snow.

"The temperatures here went very high so everything outside melted,” Muñoz explained. “Usually there is 20 centimeters of snow and a lot of ice on the ground at this time.”

Taking stock of the bigger picture, the newspaper reported that scientists are now fearful that some of the biggest glaciers in the region of the peninsula have now "past a tipping point" that could "push up global sea levels by four meters."

Such a rise in global sea levels would be unprecedented. Scientists estimate that global sea levels have risen by between 21 and 24 centimeters since 1880.

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Gulf Coast Toad(let). Gulf coast toads live to be about 3-5 years old in the wild. This one will reach his full grown adult size in about 8-10 months. A whopping 2"-4". Found while I was walking in to work this morning.